Ending the Vietnam War

January 27, 2003
As a relatively unknown Harvard professor, Kissinger played an interesting—though entirely cloaked and somewhat serendipitous—role in one of Lyndon Johnson's muddled attempts to end the Vietnam War through diplomacy. Later on, he sat at the nexus of American power during his days as Nixon's foreign policy adviser, national security adviser and secretary of state. In addition to being a major player in the events he narrates here, Kissinger is also a scholar of the first rank and a gifted prose stylist. Thus readers interested in the Vietnam period but unfamiliar with Kissinger's previous books will find this new volume worthwhile. All others will find it redundant, nearly entirely derivative from chapters previously published in his three volumes of memoirs and his study Diplomacy.
"I have rearranged and occasionally rewritten the material to provide a consecutive narrative," Kissinger writes in his foreword, and "reshaped the narrative from the anecdotal tone of memoirs to a more general account of the period...." Like the previous works from which it is mined, this new book provides a cogently written insider's take on the process of shutting down America's involvement in the long Southeast Asia conflict. The sections documenting Kissinger's day-to-day, face-to-face skirmishes with the North Vietnamese over a negotiating table in Paris are particularly engaging. Overall, Kissinger's account of America's venture in Vietnam and his role in that shipwreck is factually accurate, eminently informed and masterfully crafted. But it is also an account that many of us have already read.

March 1, 2003
Kissinger, President Nixon's much-praised, much-criticized national security adviser, here culls his Vietnam diplomatic record from his three-volume memoirs and his best-selling book, Diplomacy. While also rebutting some books that fault his efforts, including William Shawcross's Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia and Christopher Hitchens's polemic, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger provides insightful accounts of the 1970 Cambodia incursion, the failed 1971 Laos campaign, and Hanoi's 1972 Spring Offensive. Throughout, Kissinger's frustrations with Lee Duc Tho, his North Vietnamese diplomatic counterpart, with whom he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, are notable. Despite President Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign promise to end the war soon, our involvement continued until 1975. The sticking points for Nixon/Kissinger diplomacy were the unwillingness to desert South Vietnam and the fear of a loss of international credibility if the world's most powerful democracy were to be driven out of Vietnam. For a more scholarly, less self-serving account, see Larry Berman's No Peace, No Honor and Jeffrey Kimball's Nixon's Vietnam War. Recommended for larger public libraries as demand warrants and for academic collections.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp., King of Prussia, PA

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2003
" how" to end it. The war on the home front brought into glaring light the "tension" between U.S. idealism and the need to be immersed in the pragmatic world of international power-play. To the author, the lesson of Vietnam--"the tragedy described in these pages"--is that "America must never again permit its promise to be overwhelmed by its divisions." The density of Kissinger's prose style will not keep most readers from realizing the important place of this book within the complete historiography of the Vietnam War.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)