Spinning Failure...

Does Not Age Well

“We believe that peace is at hand.”

— National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, signaling the end of a U.S. role in the Vietnam war, October 26, 1972

“We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.”

— President Richard Nixon, announcing what he called the end of the war in Vietnam, January 23, 1973

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In the Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973, the United States recovered all of its prisoners of war from North Vietnam and from the Viet Cong in the South, and agreed to withdraw the remaining American forces from the country. Significantly, the agreement allowed North Vietnam’s troops to remain in the South, and the United States pledged continuing aid to its allies in Indochina to offset the North’s military presence.

On August 22, 1973, President Richard Nixon nominated Henry Kissinger to be secretary of state, in addition to retaining his post as national security adviser. He was confirmed by the Senate a month later. In August 1974, Nixon resigned under pressure from the Watergate scandal.

In a succession of votes over the following months, Congress blocked assistance to the Indochina countries. There was no interest in supporting them anymore. Entreaties from Kissinger and from the new president, Gerald Ford, were unsuccessful.

On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and unified the country under communist rule. By then Cambodia had fallen to the communist Khmer Rouge, and in December the communist Pathet Lao seized power in Laos.

That is how America’s Vietnam war came to an end. Fifty years later, Vietnam is an authoritarian one-party state and economically strong. Cambodia and Laos are stable but essentially irrelevant in the global balance of power.

Tom Wells, a historian, has just published The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations, six hundred pages of transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls with President Nixon and others, starting in 1969 and ending with Nixon’s resignation.

Kissinger had the original tape recordings destroyed (recognizing what they had done to Nixon) and resisted releasing the transcripts until he was compelled to do so.

I read (savored, to be honest) the book, to understand how Kissinger (who died on November 29, 2023, at the age of one hundred) maintained his stature as one of the most consequential diplomats — if not the most consequential — of his very lengthy tenure on the world stage.

What enabled Kissinger to sustain his aura for so long, and against a record of abject failure in Indochina? How did he pull off this reputational endurance?

Kissinger was brilliant at many things. But his greatest genius was at spinning, shaping every conversation, with the president and everyone else, to meet his always self-referential requirements.

What that meant was a masterful skill at dissembling, misrepresentation, flattering, gossiping, and what seemed to be self-deprecating humorous asides, but was actually a tactical device to engage a critical interlocutor.

I was especially interested in the Kissinger-Nixon conversations about Vietnam from 1970 to 1973, the years when I was a correspondent in Indochina for the Washington Post. I could see the real-world implications of what they were saying about the war, the U.S. military, the bombing of North Vietnam, civilian casualties, and the South Vietnamese leadership as the pressure for a deal increased, whether they liked it or not.

In their conversations, Kissinger’s cynicism was a clever cudgel encouraging Nixon’s brooding, with sneering references to, among others, Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and the “pansies” in the State Department.

With war raging and hundreds of thousands American soldiers on the ground, I was especially struck by the way Nixon and Kissinger talked about the military, including the top U.S. commanders.

Kissinger characterized General William Westmoreland, the Army chief of staff and previously the commander of American forces in Vietnam, this way: “Completely played out. All he remembers is what happened in Vietnam and how nearly he won the war at Tet” in 1968.

General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s successor as U.S. commander and the man responsible for implementing the Nixon administration’s policy of “Vietnamization,” turning over military responsibility to the South Vietnamese and overseeing the withdrawal of U.S. forces, fared little better. Kissinger said he was “finished,” to which Nixon agreed.

Nixon and Kissinger’s complaints about Abrams tended to focus on his reluctance to use all-out air power to pummel North Vietnam into an agreement. Along the way, Nixon said that Abrams was “drinking too much,” and contemplated sending another general to outrank him.

(In 1980, the Army named its new main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, to honor him.)

As early as 1969, only months after his inauguration, Nixon told Kissinger that the Saigon government’s belief in eventual victory “won’t happen . . . it is impossible.”

And after the 1973 peace treaty, it was widely known that Kissinger had said that there would now be a “decent interval” for the South to survive before the ultimate triumph of the North Vietnamese.

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The full panoply of the transcripts include, for comic relief as much as anything else, discussions of Kissinger’s dating of actresses and flirting with other notable women, including his efforts to inveigh the television journalist Barbara Walters to join him privately in various venues.

My favorite of these concerned a story that was about to appear in the Washington Post that one of Kissinger’s starlets had made her name in soft-core porn. Kissinger pleaded with the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, not to run the story.

There is no indication that the story ever appeared.

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I learned of The Kissinger Tapes through an interview with Tom Wells on Brian Lamb’s weekly podcast, Booknotes+.