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Rating: 
Summary: The Myths of Vietnam are finally broken
Review: After years of hearing about the 'unjust war' in Southeast Asia, finally, all of the facts of Vietnam are presented. While Baby boomers proclaim that the war protesters and the Daniel Ellsbergs were the heroes, the facts depict the truth about Vietnam. The JFK and the LBJ administration prolonged the war by hoping for a stalemate with negotiators from the North and then assasinated their "ally" Ngo Dien Diem and left the South in utter chaos. Despite domestic upheaveal, anarchy, a bitterly divided nation, and an unfriendly press, Nixon and Kissinger somehow were able to make Vietnamization work, which forced Giap to fight conventionally as proved in the Easter Offensive, and allowed an imperfect agreement to take place because the Democratic controlled Congress was about to cut off all aid from South Vietnam. The facts are this: Nixon claimed that if the U.S. stopped supporting South Vietnam the North would slaughter the inhabitants and leave Vietnam in a totalitarian regime and a blood bath. Meanwhile, the supposed war protestor 'heroes' were claiming that Ho Chi Minh was an agricultural reformer representing the will of the people and were assasinating innocent civilians and bombing schools in the name of Uncle Ho. Well, after Congress cut off all aid, guess what, Vietnam fell and thousands of innocent people were slaughtered by the North Vietnamese. Of course, the destructive generation blames Nixon and Kissinger and cannot face up to the fact that the death of all those in Vietnam rests on THEIR hands. It is not Richard Nixon's fault. It is not Henry Kissinger's fault. It is time that the baby boomers who fought the 'establishment' take a long look in the mirror and admit to themselves that VIETNAM was a just cause and that their actions led to the deaths of thousands. The real heroes of Vietnam are Nixon, Kissinger, and the soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the name of freedom while an ungrateful counterculture pretended to have the answers and supported a murderer.
Rating:
Summary: An eye opening read on the Vietnam War
Review: Anyone familiar with Henry Kissinger's fabled rise to preeminence as a Harvard professor to National Security maven to Secretary of State to international security mogul will find this overblown and egocentric effort at reconstructive twentieth century history amusing, frustrating, and absolutely self-serving. While Kissinger's personal biography is in fact a real-life Horatio Alger tale, ripped from the conditions, circumstances, and contradictions of this uproarious span of time, his own attempts herein to steer the reader toward a selective understanding of what happened and why profoundly misuses and abuses his insider's status in an all-too apparent attempt to reconstruct the historically verifiable facts of the situation pertaining to the sixties, the war in Vietnam, and his own efforts at establishing (along with his unindicted cohort in crime, Richard M. Nixon) a contemporary American realpolitick in world affairs. Yet Kissinger is hardly what he purports to be. Far from flying with the angels, Kissinger attempted to simultaneously court the liberal press and the academics into believing he was a solitary voice of reason and moderation within the Nixon White House, while at the same time pandering to the President's worst impulses, insecurities, and vulnerabilities by exploiting Nixon's paranoia about his public image and his need for pseudo-macho persona with his colleagues. As Daniel Ellsberg described so well in his recent book, Kissinger adroitly attempts to consistently play all sides against the middle in an attempt to elevate his own position and allow himself the latitude to swagger into public prominence and the political stratosphere at the same time. Thus, while the book is well written and quite entertaining to read, it suffers from the meglo-maniacal effort Kissinger has made to consistently portray himself in a positive light, and so slants the nature of the interchanges, anecdotes, and occurrences I personally found quite frustrating. In so doing he ultimately squanders any opportunity he had to help illuminate the nature of the many events he actively participated in and contributed toward, such that what other's refer to as a cogently written insider's take on the process of shutting down America's involvement in the long Southeast Asia conflict I find to be a cleverly attempted effort to marshal the facts in a way that dissembles more than it illuminates. The truth is that Kissinger, like Robert McNamara and others, was a superb politician, tactician, and game player, and one who enjoyed playing multiple political games on multiple levels with contradictory simultaneous outcomes all at the same time. Thus in the morning he could whine to his liberal staffers how the Neanderthals in the White House were misbehaving, and then engage in pseudo-macho asides with the same White House staffers he had just bad-mouthed to his associates. Kissinger played everyone, from the President to the Congress to Academia to the public. In this fundamentally dishonest and dissembling reinterpretation of the public record of what happened during those years and why, he continues to play us all. My advice is not to buy books like this, unless you want to see how cleverly and brilliantly someone as intellectually gifted as Kissinger is can engage in a campaign of boldface lies. Boycott this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Analysis of the End of the War From Kissinger's Perspective
Review: Aristotle once wrote that man is a political animal. Indeed, history has proved his sentiments correct, and there are few greater examples of a more voracious political animal than that of Dr. Henry Kissinger.
Regardless of one's opinions of Dr. Kissinger, his contribution to the field of political science: diplomacy, foreign policy and international relations, is unquestionable. During his long and often tumultuous career, Dr. K has met with the most notable global powers and has been at the fore of many of the most pressing political issues of the last forty years. Perhaps the most important and certainly most noted were his negotiations to end the Vietnam War.
In this one volume, taken from his memoirs and supplemented with new information, Kissinger examines not only the Nixon administrations attempts at finding a resolution to the conflict, but also discusses the long history of American entanglement in the conflict.
Once the historical basis is firmly in place, Kissinger delves into the negotiations between himself and high-level North Vietnamese cadre, namly Le Duc Tho.
Dr. K's discussion and analysis of the negotiations not only well illustrates the steps of American foreign policy (interesting in their own right) but allows the reader to see deeper into the Vietnam Conflict and why it took so long to conclude.
Kissinger also discusses his controversial role in the bombing of Cambodia and Laos. Much has been written to condemn Dr. K, and although his analysis of the bombing is enlightening, the work does little in the way of vindication.
All in all, Kissinger provides a very good source documenting his participation in the Vietnam War and the subsequent de-escalation, as well as illustrating the process of high-level negotiations in global diplomacy.
Rating:
Summary: The truth hurts?
Review: I'm only about 1/3 through this book and I wanted to see what others think/thought of it so I visited here to read the reviews. I share the analysis of the one positive review from a reader from New York. This book is worth a read and should not be boycotted as the other reviewer, Labradorman, recommends. Labradorman's vituperative appraisail of the book is just and simply that: vituperative...playing the Ad Hominem (sp?) card alone. Where and what exactly are the lies, Mr. Labradorman. I picked up this book thinking I knew quite a bit about this period as well only to find that Kissinger's insider perspective allows a completely new light to reflect. This book is a must read. You may not like it if your from the generation that took part in it (as I am) but Kissinger's rememberance and depiction (and documentation) of the US public to the announcements by both the admistration and the North Vietnamise about and from the Paris Peace talks will light up memories. And, mine pretty much coincide with the way Kissinger depicts them. It was a surreal time. We, the public, pretty much dictated right through the media and our elected officials how the "war" should be settled based on how we felt it should be without having much good information except for the body counts of GI's and our morally superior position that it was simply "wrong." Nothing is simple.
The long and short of it is that Nixon/Kissinger inherited a mess from two prior administrations (Kennedy and Johnson) and were "forced" to negotiate with Leninist North Vietamese communists who considered themselves morally superior to the running dog imperialists because of their doctrinaire Marxist's beliefs. If Kissinger aggrandizes himself (it would be surprising if he doesn't and probably he deserves some) , he also admits to having participated in a diplomatic record of sorts: being connected to some 170 meetings out of which nothing was accomplished. That's a real notch on the gun for a negotiator, eh?
If you can take it, read this book. If for no other reason than the one that Kissinger asks: we should not forget what happened to a country that did not deserve it, Cambodia.
As an aside: for me, this book adds credibility to the thesis that the 60's was "one of the most remarkable religious fevers ever recorded" to quote from Tom Wolfe's book, "Hooking Up". We, maybe it was just me, were just morally superior to those Kissinger and "his own efforts at establishing (along with his unindicted cohort in crime, Richard M. Nixon) a contemporary American realpolitick in world affairs." Whatever that last phrase means!
Rating:
Summary: The truth hurts?
Review: I'm only about 1/3 through this book and I wanted to see what others think/thought of it so I visited here to read the reviews. I share the analysis of the one positive review from a reader from New York. This book is worth a read and should not be boycotted as the other reviewer, Labradorman, recommends. Labradorman's vituperative appraisail of the book is just and simply that: vituperative...playing the Ad Hominem (sp?) card alone. Where and what exactly are the lies, Mr. Labradorman. I picked up this book thinking I knew quite a bit about this period as well only to find that Kissinger's insider perspective allows a completely new light to reflect. This book is a must read. You may not like it if your from the generation that took part in it (as I am) but Kissinger's rememberance and depiction (and documentation) of the US public to the announcements by both the admistration and the North Vietnamise about and from the Paris Peace talks will light up memories. And, mine pretty much coincide with the way Kissinger depicts them. It was a surreal time. We, the public, pretty much dictated right through the media and our elected officials how the "war" should be settled based on how we felt it should be without having much good information except for the body counts of GI's and our morally superior position that it was simply "wrong." Nothing is simple.
The long and short of it is that Nixon/Kissinger inherited a mess from two prior administrations (Kennedy and Johnson) and were "forced" to negotiate with Leninist North Vietamese communists who considered themselves morally superior to the running dog imperialists because of their doctrinaire Marxist's beliefs. If Kissinger aggrandizes himself (it would be surprising if he doesn't and probably he deserves some) , he also admits to having participated in a diplomatic record of sorts: being connected to some 170 meetings out of which nothing was accomplished. That's a real notch on the gun for a negotiator, eh?
If you can take it, read this book. If for no other reason than the one that Kissinger asks: we should not forget what happened to a country that did not deserve it, Cambodia.
As an aside: for me, this book adds credibility to the thesis that the 60's was "one of the most remarkable religious fevers ever recorded" to quote from Tom Wolfe's book, "Hooking Up". We, maybe it was just me, were just morally superior to those Kissinger and "his own efforts at establishing (along with his unindicted cohort in crime, Richard M. Nixon) a contemporary American realpolitick in world affairs." Whatever that last phrase means!
Rating:
Summary: The Myths of Vietnam are finally broken
Review: It took me weeks to read this, due to the level of detail, but I almost couldn't put it down. A lot of things that didn't quite make sense before have now become clear.
Rating:
Summary: I thought I knew what happened in Vietnam until I read this
Review: It took me weeks to read this, due to the level of detail, but I almost couldn't put it down. A lot of things that didn't quite make sense before have now become clear.
Rating:
Summary: KNOW-IT-ALLS SHOULD READ HISTORY FOR PERSPECTIVE!!
Review: Wow, this book lays everything out and then some and gives a basis for understanding what happened there since the 1950's!! I wish more people would read this and really know something about what happens in these encounters between countries before they go running around the world yelling "peace,peace" thinking that will solve everything!! You come to realize that at least the democrats had some idea of our ideals and vision in those earlier days!! Now I wonder, when all you hear are "we are dirty capitalist pigs"; Please read this book, or at least read some of it, for a perspective way beyond party politics!!
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