Richard
Nixon admired no statesman more than Charles de Gaulle. Henry Kissinger
esteemed him nearly as much. Yet their admiration did not extend to
emulation. De Gaulle's greatest act as French president was to recognize
the futility of France's position in Algeria and end it.
Nixon and Kissinger, who by no means failed to
recognize the impossibility of the U.S. position in Vietnam, were
unwilling to do the same. The subtitle of Larry Berman's book isn't
really necessary for anyone much older than 40. "Peace with honor,"
which doubled as plea and policy statement, was the great mantra of
Nixon's first term. (the mantra of his second term was "Who, me?")
Thus a title like No Peace, No Honor all
but inevitably summons up the names Nixon, Kissinger and Vietnam. And
part of why the war remains such a wound for so many is because those
names in turn summon up "betrayal" for almost all parties involved:
Vietnamese and American, hawk and dove, victor and vanquished.
It's not as though the signing of the Paris Peace
Accords on Jan. 27, 1973, fooled anyone (other than the Norwegian Nobel
Committee, which later that year conferred the Nobel Peace Prize on the
agreement's two chief negotiators, Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc
Tho). Soon after the accords were signed, Nixon's
chief domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, asked Kissinger what
South Vietnam's chances for survival were. "I
think that if they're lucky they can hold out for a year and a half,"
Kissinger said. Ever conservative, he'd underestimated by eight months.
Shortly before the war really did end, with the
fall of Saigon in April 1975, President Gerald Ford was handed the text
of a speech he was to deliver to a joint session of Congress. It
included the sentence, "And after years of effort, we negotiated a
settlement which made it possible for us to remove our forces with honor
and bring home our prisoners." Ford deleted the words "with honor."
Berman, the director of the University of
California's Washington Center, has published two previous books on the
war, Planning a Tragedy and Lyndon Johnson's War. He
brings to No Peace, No Honor a sure command of his material, much
of which is newly declassified and drawn from archives in Hanoi as well
as Washington. He also brings to it a real, if measured, sense of
outrage.
Henry
Kissinger and Richard Nixon's approaches to peace during the
Vietnam War are examined in Larry Berman's book, "No Peace, No
Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in
Vietnam."
"Well rounded"
might be as good a description as "measured." Berman's loathing for
Nixon, Kissinger and the war is patent. But that makes him no admirer of
the North Vietnamese or National Liberation Front. (As he makes plain,
Hanoi treated the NLF with a high-handedness not unlike Washington's
toward Saigon; and the almost-theatrical intransigence of its
negotiating tactics can be seen as having served no end beyond
ideological self-congratulation.) What Berman
works to show is the inherent dishonesty of Nixon's Vietnam policy. This
is no great challenge. Even before he was elected president, Nixon
strove to undercut the possibility (admittedly slim) of the Johnson
administration achieving any breakthrough in the Paris peace talks. That
dishonesty continued, and to little purpose, in his and Kissinger's
shared mania for secrecy in their negotiations with the North. And,
finally as well as most important, there was his highly cynical view of
the accords. "Nixon," Berman writes, "recognized
that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve,
but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up
the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency. Just as
the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided a pretext for an American engagement
in South Vietnam, the Paris Accords were intended to fulfill a similar
role for remaining permanently engaged in Vietnam. Watergate derailed
the plan." Berman hasn't discovered a smoking gun.
Instead, he offers a deeper, more detailed description of what was
generally known or assumed about Nixon's handling of the war and planned
handling of the peace. Indeed, what's most impressive about No Peace,
No Honor is the comprehensiveness with which it examines what Berman
all too accurately terms "a massive historical shell game called 'peace
with honor.' "
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(A good read) 
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