Henry Kissinger and the American Century by Suri Jeremi

Author:Suri, Jeremi [Suri, Jeremi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Vietnam

By the 1960s Henry Kissinger had become one of the most recognized, respected, and influential strategic experts in the world. His writings were ubiquitous, appearing in bestselling books, scholarly journals, and popular magazines throughout the United States and Europe. He was also a tireless traveler, meeting frequently with leading politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals across the globe. As in the Army and at Harvard, Kissinger distinguished himself by his energy, his powerful mind, and his iconoclasm. He offered establishment figures compelling and contrarian proposals for addressing contemporary challenges. He brought a fresh and useful outsider perspective to foreign-policy debates among insiders. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of the preeminent insider international affairs journal, Foreign Affairs, commented that “Kissinger has one of the most intelligent and original minds operating in the field.” Ernst Van der Beugel, one of the leading officials in western Europe, who worked with Kissinger for more than three decades, recounts: “from the time we first met, I have always been listening to his analyses with the greatest admiration. They reach a level that you hardly ever come across. Never, in fact. . . . He is one of the most brilliant ‘minds’ of our generation. It sparkles with astonishing brilliance.”112

For all his insights, Kissinger had little to say about the escalating war in Vietnam that consumed more American blood and treasure than any other conflict at the time. His prolific writings from the 1950s and 1960s largely avoided the topic. Like other strategic experts, he paid close attention to the fighting in Southeast Asia, including a number of trips to the region. He also followed the emerging domestic debate about the war with anguish and trepidation. As public controversy about Vietnam grew in the United States and among allies, it became a shadow presence in Kissinger’s writings. “In 1965 when I first visited Vietnam,” he explained to Hans Morgenthau, “I became convinced that what we were doing was hopeless. I then decided to work within the government to attempt to get the war ended. Whether this was the right decision we will never know.”113

Kissinger’s calls for a more federal, multipolar, and hierarchical world sought to escape the Cold War logic that embroiled the United States in a conflict it could afford neither to win nor to lose. He struggled in vain to find a mechanism for ending America’s disastrous intervention without damaging U.S. power irreparably. This was the predicament that confronted all the best strategic minds. When asked to write an article for Foreign Affairs that might point to a potential solution, Kissinger initially lamented: “I do not know what I could write about Vietnam that would not in the final analysis be highly critical and give aid and comfort to a point of view with which I do not agree.”114

The essay that Kissinger eventually published in early 1969 offered few options other than a recognition that the United States must disengage. Kissinger advocated a strengthening of South Vietnamese forces (later called “Vietnamization”) in place of American soldiers.

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