BOOK REVIEW: ‘Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia’

OPINION:

Who remembers Pham-thi-Toi? She survived the My Lai massacre in 1968. Six of her relatives did not. She was compelled to move to a refugee camp despite the danger of land mines. One blew off her limbs. Nearly a year later, after being fitted with prostheses in an American Quaker-run rehab center for maimed Vietnamese civilians, she returned and opened a small shop. In April 1972, South Vietnamese soldiers fired into the camp. Bullets tore into her stomach. Having cheated death twice, this young woman was now among the millions of Southeast Asians killed in one of the most brutal wars of the 20th century.

One may not expect to read such stories in diplomatic history. Still, the human face of war stares at you throughout “Fire and Rain,” Carolyn Eisenberg’s 2024 Bancroft Prize-winning study of the lies, deception and earth-shattering violence that propelled President Richard Nixon’s prosecution of the wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The connection is critical because battlefield realities influenced decision-makers, who then tried to shape reality to their liking.

Ms. Eisenberg is a noted historian and critic of U.S. foreign policy who, all those decades ago, was a campus anti-war activist. Her moral compass continues to inform her scholarship. Brimming with insights from thousands of declassified documents and telephone transcripts, this book is a damning rendering of not only Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger but also the national security state that made possible their policy of prolonging a lost war. The deaths of countless Southeast Asians may have mattered little to a White House bent on deceiving the public. To Ms. Eisenberg, however, it would be impossible to convey the sheer criminality of their actions without reference to the discomfiting consequences.

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, “Fire and Rain” also evokes Nixon’s resignation half a century ago for the crimes of Watergate. The author links Watergate and Vietnam because “the creation of ‘the plumbers’ had largely been inspired by the desire to suppress antiwar criticism. Yet apart from the particulars, there was something deeper at work because the secretiveness and lies, which had been a feature of previous administrations, had assumed epic proportions … the ordinary processes of national security decision-making had been torn loose from any institutional moorings,” Ms. Eisenberg writes.

Nixon and Kissinger concealed from Congress the bombing of Cambodia for 14 months from March 1969. Then, they hid the plans for the invasion of Cambodia from the secretaries of the state and the defense. While insisting that the U.S. could not betray an ally in Saigon, Kissinger later promised Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that after the war, the administration would begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Taiwan — a supposed ally — without having run this idea past Congress, the Taiwanese or anyone else who might object to such a betrayal.

To secure “peace with honor,” the emotionally volatile Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly sought military escalation even as U.S. troop withdrawals accelerated. Their weapon of choice became the B-52 bomber, deployed with no regard for civilians. “Let’s brutalize them,” Kissinger said, referring to the Linebacker II raids in late 1972 when “peace” was in the offing. The year before, Nixon instructed his right-hand man to inform Hanoi that he would “finish off the g——— place. … Just knock the [expletive] out of them.”

The president and national security adviser portrayed in these pages are storms of contradictions. Angry and autocratic in private, Nixon remained a master political manipulator in public. His televised addresses about Vietnam and detente with China and Russia convinced most Americans he was a peacemaker. The 1972 election results confirmed it; Democrat George McGovern, a staunch opponent of the war, carried one state. And Kissinger, who endlessly emphasized the importance of U.S. “credibility” in the Cold War, pleaded with Soviet and Chinese communists to pressure the North Vietnamese to make concessions in the secret peace talks.

“Even without declassified transcripts, the contradiction existed in plain sight: If Nixon and Kissinger were exchanging toasts with communist leaders in Moscow and Beijing, why did the killing in Southeast Asia continue?” Ms. Eisenberg asks. Because they were desperate to secure a face-saving deal to extract the country from Vietnam.

Nixon and Kissinger got away with it. The governments they claimed to have supported in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos did not survive. In the summer of 1974, the House impeachers voted against Article IV, charging the president with the secret bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger’s reputation as a statesman soared. He remained unrepentant until his death last November at age 100. In this sobering account, Ms. Eisenberg reminds us of their calamitous failures.

“At the time, it was widely recognized that the Nixon administration’s policy in Southeast Asia had been disastrous. Lamentably, the self-serving belief that the freedom and security of people worldwide depended on U.S. military might somehow survive,” she concludes.

• Martin Di Caro hosts the “History as It Happens” podcast at The Washington Times.

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Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia

By Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

Oxford University Press

615 pages, $24.14