Word: szulc
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RUSSIANS TO THE RESCUE. As Szulc tells it, the Soviets played a much bigger role in salvaging the stalled Viet Nam negotiations than they have been credited with. The essential breakthrough came in the Soviet Union after the North Vietnamese launched their Easter offensive in 1972. The Communist onslaught created "a sense of panic in the White House" that the Saigon regime might collapse. Kissinger, who went to Moscow in April to set up Richard Nixon's May summit with Soviet Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev, tried to enlist Russian aid in containing the North Vietnamese drive. During his visit...
...HURRY. When the North Vietnamese finally responded to the U.S. concessions and produced a draft agreement in Paris on Oct. 8, Szulc claims, Kissinger fairly grabbed at it. He instructed three staffers to write a counterproposal, then went out to a dinner date. The aides finished at 3 a.m. and went off to sleep, leaving the document for Kissinger. He awakened them at 8 a.m., raging that the draft was much too tough. "You don't understand," he said. "I want to meet their position." All through that critical week Kissinger kept up a furious pace. Said one American...
USING (AND MISUSING) SECRECY. Szulc says that Kissinger made an obsession of secrecy as he shuttled between Washington, Paris, Moscow, Peking and Saigon largely because he wanted to "keep everybody off balance," the better to increase his own room for maneuvering. Says Szulc: "It is possible that even Nixon did not fully understand at all times" what Kissinger was doing...
...Szulc stops short of concluding that Kissinger deliberately misled Thieu, but does insist that he "grossly overestimated his ability to bring Thieu around." When Kissinger showed him the draft of the peace agreement for the first time in October, Thieu "reacted with undisguised fury." It was the outraged opposition of Thieu (for whom Kissinger developed an active hatred, says Szulc) that led to delays in the signing of the agreement, to Hanoi's second thoughts about U.S. intentions, and to the "Christmas bombings" that finally ended the agony of Viet...
Though Kissinger has publicly denied it, Szulc finds that "the critical factor" in the timing of the negotiations was the approach of the 1972 presidential election, just as Lyndon Johnson's overtures to Hanoi on ending the bombing of the North were prompted by the 1968 election. Szulc says that Kissinger traveled to Moscow and Peking in May and June 1972 with hopes of "resuming secret meetings with the North Vietnamese before the Democratic National Convention-'for the theater,' as the White House saying went." As early as July, Kissinger told his staff that Viet...