The Kissinger Diaries: What He Really Thought About Vietnam

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By Niall Ferguson, October 10, 2015

It has long been assumed that Henry Kissinger “supported” the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s—and that this was one of the reasons Richard Nixon offered him the job of national security adviser. This view is incorrect. As his private papers and diaries make clear, Kissinger realized by 1966 at the latest that the U.S. intervention in defense of South Vietnam was a doomed enterprise and that only a diplomatic solution would end the conflict.

From a very early stage, Kissinger understood the nature of the problem the United States faced. “All history proves that there is no cheap and easy way to defeat guerrilla movements,” he wrote in February 1962. “South Vietnam has been plagued by Communist Viet Cong attacks ever since it became independent in 1954. Their defeat can only be accomplished by adequate military force. ... However, merely physical security will not solve the problem. The people of South Vietnam must develop a long-term commitment to their government if they wish to attain political and economic stability.”

But how could that happen if the United States undermined the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government, as happened in 1963, when the Kennedy administration approved a bloody coup against the government of Ngo Dinh Diem? When the news broke of Diem’s murder, Kissinger denounced U.S. policy as “shameful.” “Conditions in Vietnam will, in my judgment, get worse,” he warned.

In October 1965 Kissinger flew to Saigon at the invitation of the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. An expert on European history and nuclear strategy, Kissinger had never previously been to Vietnam. He knew little if anything about the country’s history and not a word of its language. But he already knew one thing: This was a war that could not be won by military means.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/henry-kissinger-vietnam-diaries-213236

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1. Book review: Kissinger — Revered and reviled

By Angelo Codevilla on October 15, 2015

“Surely no statesman in modern times … has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s commissioned biography. But reverence and revulsion for Kissinger have never been sequential. Instead, for sixty years, Henry Kissinger has been a paragon of of America’s bipartisan ruling class, whose evolving identity he has reflected. Ordinary people, however, sensed that he cared less for them than for his own career and ideas, and that he has served America badly. In 1976, as Democratic and Republican Party elites were celebrating Secretary of State Kissinger’s 1972 deals with the Soviet Union, his 1973 “Paris Peace Accords” after which America’s naval bases in Vietnam became Soviet bases, and were looking none too closely at the substance of the newly established relationship with China, the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party that nominated Jimmy Carter made rejection of Kissinger the winning issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing on behalf of the Republican rank and file, and continued to do it through his landslide victory in 1980.

Kissinger is the only person, ever, who both of America’s political parties reviled at the same time, and whose rejection helped elect two presidents in a row. For two generations, no one had greater influence on US foreign policy than Kissinger. America’s ins and outs have regarded him so differently because their views of America and of its role in the world are so different.

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By the time Kissinger wrote, rational-choice theory, sometimes otherwise known as game theory, had bolstered the elite’s visceral notion that nuclear war was just too, too much for anyone. Thomas Schelling, Kissinger’s colleague down the hall at Harvard, had drawn up a matrix that shows that compromise is the best way for nations to maximize their achievement of conflicting goals. This, of course assumes that the conflicting parties are interchangeable. Kissinger’s work on international affairs is based on this assumption. It is a priori, abstract. Hence, in the Kantian tradition, it is “idealistic.” By the same token, it is removed from reality.

Indeed, that is the attractiveness of the Schelling-Kissinger approach to international affairs: it allows folks in positions of responsibility to imagine that numbers and kinds, and above all that functions of weapons do not matter, and that neither do the differences between the characters, ideas, or religions of peoples. But, as Fritz Kraemer never ceased to teach, they count for everything. By the time Henry Kissinger had been in charge of US foreign policy for eight years, the rank and file of Republicans and Democrats had figured out that his character and his choices had brought America discredit, defeat and danger. Alas, today’s bipartisan ruling class considers him a fount of wisdom.

http://atimes.com/2015/10/book-review-kissinger-revered-and-reviled/