As adviser to President John F. Kennedy, then National Security Advisor (1969-75) and Secretary of State (1973-77) to President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger was tasked with making major war-related decisions. from Vietnam. He kept the US bombing of Cambodia a secret from Congress, but won the Nobel Prize for brokering the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that led to a ceasefire. This peace failed two years later.
His flair for secret diplomacy won him both praise and detractors, but Vietnam’s legacy, which he called a “tragic national experience”, haunted him long after the war.
Kissinger and Nixon
President Nixon (center) meets with Nguyen Phu Duc (left), the special envoy of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, to put his stamp of approval on the Vietnam ceasefire agreement brokered by Henry Kissinger (right).
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In his book, End of the war in Vietnam, Kissinger describes himself as being “swept into the vortex” of the Vietnam War, going from someone “who only met the president-elect once and for only a few minutes” to becoming “the president’s top adviser on policy for Vietnam’s extraction and eventually the chief negotiator. His closeness to Nixon was his initial source of power. It is also the link that led to his downfall.
The Vietnam War was a central issue in the 1968 presidential election, and Nixon campaigned on the promise to bring “peace with honor”. The unpopular war started under Kennedy and Johnson to prevent communism from spreading in Southeast Asia was costing taxpayers $30 billion a year. Two hundred of the 500,000 Americans stationed in Vietnam were dying each week, fueling even more protests against the project. But withdrawing from the conflict meant abandoning American allies in South Vietnam and, Kissinger and Nixon feared, making America look weak.
“Kissinger, like Nixon, was suspicious of Cold War bureaucracy,” Robert says. K. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar and author, Carefree: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam. Nixon circumvented the State Department and Foreign Service by granting Kissinger permission to conduct secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
“Nixon wanted his own man to do his negotiations so that credit for ending the war would go to him, not the State Department or Defense,” says Thomas Alan Schwartz, director of undergraduate history studies at Vanderbilt University and author, Henry Kissinger and American Power. What Nixon did not foresee was Kissinger’s ability to outshine his boss: “He created his own Frankenstein monster in Kissinger,” says Schwartz.
Kissinger negotiates the Paris Peace Accords
North Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho with US national security adviser Henry Kissinger during Vietnam War peace talks, 1973. Both men were named co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize this year -the. Only Kissinger accepted the award.
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A small villa outside Paris was the unlikely setting where Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Le Duc Tho discussed peace terms. They met a total of 68 times, with Kissinger keeping some conversations secret even from the president, Brigham says. “Kissinger wanted to make sure the war ended in Paris and not in Saigon. He had very little confidence in the Vietnamese armed forces. He understood that the US Congress did not fancy the conflict and wanted the United States to walk away without looking like a crushing defeat,” Brigham said.
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The Paris Peace Accords leading to a ceasefire in Vietnam were signed on January 27, 1973. For critics, “peace in honor” was not so different from the options available when Nixon took over. power for the first time: “Kissinger and Nixon lost four years of negotiations. with the Vietnamese communists, agreeing to virtually the same peace terms in 1973 that were on the table in 1969,” Brigham explains. A total of 2.5–3 million Vietnamese and other Indochinese and 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. Hundreds more were missing.
Read more: Missing in action: How military families in torturous limbo galvanized a movement
In October, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were named co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. Only Kissinger agreed; Tho refused the award until “peace is truly established”.
Henry Kissinger and Cambodia
While Nixon publicly favored a policy of Vietnamization, or the withdrawal of American troops so the South Vietnamese could resume military operations, he secretly escalated the Vietnam War by bombing neighboring Laos and Cambodia. The North Vietnamese transported supplies and weapons across the borders of their officially neutral neighbors, and Kissinger saw bombing them as a way to pressure Hanoi.
Kissinger was deeply involved in the bombing of Cambodia – and in keeping it secret from Congress and the public. According to a Pentagon report published in 1973, “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 bombings in Cambodia in 1969 and 1970” along with “methods to keep them out of the newspapers”.
By the end of the bombing campaign, dubbed “Operation Menu”, the United States had dropped a total of 110,000 tons of bombs that had killed between 150,000 and 500,000 civilians. The Khmer Rouge galvanized anti-American sentiment in a destabilized Cambodia, seizing power and massacring 1.7–2.2 million Cambodians in the Cambodian Genocide.
Read more: How Nixon’s Cambodia Invasion Triggered Presidential Power Checks
Henry Kissinger’s Legacy
In 1973 and 1974, a Gallup poll declared Kissinger “America’s most admired man”. The cheer was short-lived. The Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation revealed that Kissinger ordered the FBI to tap the phones of members of the National Security Council to see who leaked information about the US bombing of Cambodia to the press. In 1975, the communist victory in Vietnam had tarnished the legacy of his 1973 peace efforts.
Although he continued to be a major player in world diplomacy, Vietnam cast a shadow over Kissinger’s career. “The irony is that Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the Vietnam War – not a war he ended – and not for the Middle East, the war he did “, says Schwartz. “The war he failed in was the war he was known for.”
