Word: viets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...side. -A near showdown with Moscow over a Soviet-backed invasion of Jordan by Syrian troops and tanks. -Tips on the statesman's craft ("The old adage that men grow in office has not proved true in my experience"). -An unsentimental philosophy of foreign policy: "One reason the Viet Nam debate grew so bitter was that both supporters and critics of the original involvement shared the same traditional sense of universal moral mission...
...Paris to deal secretly with North Vietnamese negotiators. Initially he dealt with Xuan Thuy, Hanoi's chief negotiator at the official plenary peace talks on Avenue Kleber. On one occasion, Xuan Thuy argued that hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were in South Viet Nam through the "free choice" of the local population. Kissinger found this so absurd that, he writes, "I jokingly invited him to Harvard to teach a seminar on Marxism and Leninism after the war. He declined, saying that Marxism-Leninism was not for export-which will come as remarkable news to all the inhabitants...
...should "discuss immediately concrete and specific measures to guarantee the neutrality of Cambodia, [either] bilaterally or in an international frame work. " But Tho abruptly dismissed any suggestion of neutralization or of a conference. He emphasized that "it was his people's destiny not merely to take over South Viet Nam but to dominate the whole of Indochina. The boasts were made in secret, but the military moves that expressed these ambitions were plain to see." The moves began in February 1970, when the North Vietnamese launched an offensive on the Plain of Jars in Laos. On March...
...given no military aid, no intelligence support, and had only formalistic contacts with the new government. The coup itself had come without warning; its consequences threatened not only the freedom of Cambodia but our entire position in Viet Nam. We would, if the Lon Nol government collapsed, confront all of Cambodia as a Communist base, stretching 600 miles along the border of South Viet Nam. Vietnamization and American withdrawal would then come unstuck. So we were being driven toward support of Lon Nol hesitantly, reluctantly, in response to circumstances in Cambodia that we could neither forecast nor control...
...painted a picture of a peaceful, neutral Cambodia wantonly assaulted by American forces and plunged into a civil war that could have been avoided but for the American obsession with military solutions. The facts are different. By April 21 we had a stark choice. We could permit North Viet Nam to overrun the whole of Cambodia. Or we could resist Cambodia's absorption, supporting the independence of a government recognized by the United Nations and most other nations, including the Soviet Union...