prize-winning author jack miles discussing the god of islam, the world's second largest religion. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. it's four days of nonfiction authors and books on this holiday weekend. television for serious readers. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, everyone. welcome to the carnegie council. i'm the dean of international studies at bard college, and i'm very pleased that bard and the bard globalization international affairs program ising able to continue its pickup with the carnegie council. we do an event every semester together and have had a very nice track record of wonderful events, and i'm glad we're going

to continue that this evening with this discussion. i just want to mention briefly what the bard globalization international affairs program is. it's a program that allows students to come to new york city for a semester or a summer, to take classes with great faculty members including the president of the carnegie council, joel rosenthal, who's one of our faculty members. also to do internships here in the city and to just revel in all of the things that new york city has to offer. and i'm very happy to also report that starting this semester we have a new partnership with central european university in budapest, so we have several of their students with us this semester, here with us this evening as well. so we have other events that we run throughout the semester. if you are interested to find us on facebook, on twitter, on various other places our web site, please do that. and if you're new to the

carnegie council, make sure you pay attention to what's going on here. they've always got great programs. i should also mention that this lecture series from the bgia perspective is named after james chase who was the founder of the bgia program. he was the former editor of the world policy journal with, of "foreign affairs" magazine which is also a sponsor of this event for us and a longtime bard faculty member. he left us too early and we miss him, but we carry these on in his memory, and i'm shower that he -- i'm sure that he would very much like this program tonight. so i don't want to take up too much time, i just want to introduce our speakers. we have as our interviewer and discussant suzanne nielsen, professor of political science at the u.s. military academy at west point and the head of the social sciences division there. she also happens to be a colonel in the u.s. army, and so

anything that she's talking about tonight does not necessarily reflect the position of the u.s. army, the department of defense or the u.s. government. [laughter] and we have also with us the author of the book, professor robert brigham, who is a professor of international relations and history at vassar college. they're going to talk for about 40 minutes or so, open it up to questions and answers, and then we will adjourn to a reception and a book signing, and there will be books for sale at the reception. so over to the two of you. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> so, bob, i wonder if i could just start asking about your motion vegas for the book. this is clearly not your first book about the vietnam war.

i'd like to just start by asking what made you want to go back to the vietnam war now and to do so new the lens of the role of national security adviser and then-secretary of state henry kissinger. >> i think vietnam is still casting a long shadow over american foreign policy, so i think my research agenda's pretty much settled for the rest of my career on vietnam. on kissinger, "the washington post" asked me to review his book all called "ending the vietnam war" which was, actually, just the parts of his memoir that dealt with vietnam. he pulled those out, put them together and edited them a little bit. and i actually gave the book a pretty favorable review in the post. but as i was going through it, i was making margin notes, this doesn't sound exactly right to me. i want to know more about this. so reading his book and reviewing his book, it set up a lot of questions for me that i wanted to answer. that was in 2003, and then the

iraq war happened, and my one deviation from vietnam was comparing iraq and vietnam, two books with public affairs press. so after i got those done, i returned to this project on kissinger and the negotiation. >> so it probably won't be a surprise to the audience given the title of your book that it is, actually, a very wide-ranging and multidimensional critique of the role of henry kissinger in the vietnam war. and what i'd like to do in my next few questions is really get at the various dimensions of that critique. one of them is really the fundamental strategic approach. so as you characterize it, his goal was really to bring the north vietnamese to the table through a combination of military explanation and course of diplomacy that would just change their incentives to get them to come to the table and be a little bit more likely to agree to terms that would achieve his goal, his stated goal which was peace with honor. so i wonder if i could just ask

you to reflect on what you saw as the fundamental challenges with that approach, that relicense on military -- reliance on mistail escalation and course of deproposal city. >> this was -- diplomacy. >> this was classic kisser. and for that -- kissinger. he came into the office totally believing the war would end in paris, not in saigon or that night he believed that negotiations had to end the conflict, but he also believed he could sniffize those -- incentivize those negotiations with military power and threats. and so very early on he developed a strategy with the president sometimes, without the president many times, in which he outlined what he called peace with honor, what peace with honor would look like. it would mean that south vietnam had a reasonable chance to survive after the united states

withdrew, it would mean the demilitarized zone at the 17th parallel would become a recognized international border, it would mean that north vietnamese troops would be out of south south vietnam, it would between that laos and cambodia would be neutralized and north vietnamese troops would leave there as well, and it meant that there would be some kind of political negotiation between the various parties in south vietnam that would still leave the saigon administration in power. he understood 580,000 troops didn't move hanoi very far. so that what he really thought was what i need to do is, through negotiations, end this conflict honorably with saigon having a reasonable chance to survive. that was the overall framework. to get those goals, he thought he had to apply military pressure. no one else in the administration except the president thought that.

everybody else actually had a different take on how to execute that overall strategy. so it's in the tactical level that kissinger and his associates differed greatly. and. >> and yet you have, time and again, these various escalations whether it be cambodia or laos or the responderring campaigns -- responding campaigns an incredible domestic and international backlash that actually ended up shaping the prospects for henry kissinger's strategy to succeed. >> it -- one of the many things i learned in doing this project, and authors always learn, you know, a lot. that's why they have questions. that's why they write books, i think, to get answers to those questions. one of the things i learned is kissinger had absolutely no political instincts. it's remarkable. he's a theorist, but he had no political instincts, and this isesome -- something that nixon really got angry with him about

several times. let me set this up for you. immediately, kissinger and nixon -- when they first met, to talk about kissinger joining the administration -- they agreed that the foreign policy establishment in washington was corroded, that it needed a dramatic overhaul, a really kind of a bold bureaucratic revolution. and kissinger and nixon agreed that that policy, foreign policy had to be centered in the white house. they both hated the state department. wanted to see it marginalized to the sidelines. that's why william rogers, a little-known lawyer, was chosen to be the secretary of state. kissinger thought the same thing about the pentagon and defense department. but very early -- and kissinger did execute this bureaucratic revolution on nixon's behalf. while nixon was doing the inaugural address, kissinger was sending out letters to all the embassies saying that all serious foreign policy would not have to go through his office. at the exact same time nixon's

giving his inaugural address. so there was a bureaucratic revolution they shared, but in his first political battle over strategy and tactics on vietnam, he lost. mel laird, from wisconsin was, i think, a wise choice to be secretary of defense. long-term member of the house, he knew how to count votes, he knew about procurement, he knew about what the american public's tolerance for pain was. he really understood the role of the press and congress in a democracy, and he thought the only way the united states could achieve these strategic objectives that nixon and kissinger had laid out was through the troops. and laird called this, unfortunately, vietnamization implying they had been doing the fighting and dying all the time. but the idea was you would slowly, in a very phased and methodical way, bring american

troops home from vietnam beginning in the summer of 1969. and this would quiet domestic critics, and it would take the pressure off of congress to pass resolutions to end the war and bring troops home and the budgets was accomplished. in laird's mind, it was a long-game strategy. if you brought these troops home and you kind of buoyed american public support and, therefore, congress could stay onboard, then congress would also be amenable, perhaps, to sending lots more money and technical material to saigon so they could stand on their own against the communists. and this strategy, there's some holes in it, but, i mean, nixon and kissinger were dealt a bad home. i think they played it worse, but they were dealt a bad home. this was laird's strategy. nixon loved it, kissinger hated it. but nixon went with it because he could see the political

upside to this. and so in april 1969, this plan was announced x. in the summer of '69, the withdrawal started. now, for kissinger who always thought that the war would end in secret negotiations in paris, those negotiations had actually started in the johnson years. after the tet offensive in april 1968, secret talks started in paris. what kissinger had in mind though was secret talks inside the secret talks. nobody but nixon knew the talks were going on. so kissinger eventually, later in 1969, met in a working class suburb in paris and had secret talks. and it's in those talks that kissinger taught he was handicapped by the withdrawal of american troops. he thought that was his biggest asset, the biggest lever he could push. and that's one of the reasons he thought he had to turn to the course of military measures. >> met me follow up on -- let me

follow up on that for a bit. so this basic strategic approach, i think, it comes through as flowered. but another -- as flawed. but another recurring scene is this desire to keep the policy centralized in the white house with regard to the president and hen kissinger, in some cases only henry kissinger as you just mentioned. i wondered if you could say more about, you know, some might argue that diplomacy needs to be conducted in secret because you need to make trade-offs that are politically untop -- unpopular, but there's significant costs due to the fact that it was pulled so much into the white house that the secretary of state, secretary of defense, deliberately excluded from important meetings, not really an interagency process to speak of. what would you say were the costs of that? >> i think the costs were south vietnam and american public support and the hangover of vietnam that we still all feel,

a distrust of government. everything that makes vietnam a tragedy came, i think, because of the failure to integrate a really successful and sustainable peace process. we know when we look at ending deadly conflict, we know from crunching all the various agreements we can get our hands on, there's a really good job of putting all peace agreements written down into a database. and when we crunch those databases, we can come up with a list of best practices, and at the top of the list is have a big tent approach. you're going to need lots of different people with many skill sets to make a sustainable peace. in that class which some of the students here have had, i hand out, about week six i hand out the vietnam peace agreement, and sophomores can figure out this

is not how you negotiate. there are no enforcement mechanisms built in, and by having it concentrated in the hands of one person, kissinger could not build a coalition of allies inside the national bureaucracy. he had nobody from the pentagon and nobody from the state department and nobody to go to congress. congress had no idea these secret meetings were going on. defense department didn't have anied idea, the state department didn't have any idea. that's not how you run a democracy or to peace negotiations. and i think the south vietnam -- and nobody in saigon knew this was going on either. their fate was being determined by kissinger in a small room in paris, and they had no idea this was going on until it was too late. >> i'd like to actually follow your lead on that point. is in a way that the policy's isolated and run by a very few -- primarily by henry kissinger and the president -- another very important stakeholder that you describe as really not being very much part

at all, no collaboration, minimal consultation, is the government of south vietnam. so on the one hand, henry kissinger had as sort of a solid tenet of his negotiation the current government of south vietnam would survive under the president, and yet on the other hand as you describe in your book, he didn't seem to invest in trying to understand exactly what political coalitions, what forces were in play in south vietnam. and i'm curious as to your thoughts, you seem to suggest that perhaps in that understanding may have led options that would have led to a better peace, a different peace, an earlier peace. i wonder if you might -- because so many of us are tempted to hook at that conflict and argue that it was sort of fundamentally unwinnable at a certain point. it's hard to imagine a different outcome. so i wonder if you could just speak to was there a possibility

in south vietnam that we didn't, that the united states did not pursue? >> yeah, that's a great question. i think one of the major discovers for me at least was looking at the documents and realizing that there was a civil society in south vietnam that existed that really wanted to be more an active agent in their own, in their own history. henry kissinger had contempt for almost anything vietnamese. he did have as a major tenet that the saigon government had to be intact. the hanoi negotiators kept insisting that the united states overthrow the government before a peace agreement could be signed in saigon. and kissinger, to his credit, said, no, we'll never do that. but he knew those three people who headed the government. he knew nothing else about south vietnam at all. he didn't care to learn anything else about south vietnam. if he did, he would have learned that there was a majority of the population that was probably, if they weren't already -- a

majority of south seat vietnameo weren't already in the national liberation front's camp were probably anti-communist and anti-saigon government. that was a sizable population there, lawyers, doctors, professionals. they could have been mobilized. any other negotiation situation you mobilize that force. the good friday agreement was built on the back of mobilizing that civil society that existed where there was, you know, nonpartisan relationships. and that's what good negotiators do. but that's not at all what happened here. saigon wasn't consulted about its future, its needs, their political dreams were not taken into consideration. and at the end of the day, the united states withdrew and threw saigon under the bus. so i think this is the tragedy of vietnam. you know, 58,000 americans, 3.2 million vietnamese died for the

preservation of south vietnam, and it really wasn't taken that seriously at the end. and that, to me, is tragic at the least. so let me turn to, again, a little bit recurring theme of henry kissinger's role in that tragedy. you describe a man of great ego and great ambition. and, in fact, i think that you argue the way that those traits manifested themselves in the conduct of policy often produced outcomes that simply were not, by many measures, in the overall national interests of the country. so as i read that, i sort of thought about how to think about the question of ambition. and on the one hand, if you don't have great ambition, you're very unlikely to have great accomplishment. on the other hand, there's a whole host of potential negative tendencies that come with great ambition. i wonder, you know, as you think about that particular account, that particular figure, how to you reflect on the role of

ambition in public service? >> i agree with you, i think ambition's a necessary quality in public service. it's when you cross the line to arrogance, i think, that you get into trouble. and i think that kissinger crossed that line early and often. let me give you some examples. very early on in 19699 kissinger went to the president and said if you're i withdrawing troops, you have to give me something to buy time for the saigon government to be able to stand on its own. kissinger advocated the secret bombing of cambodia. this was something that nixon had long thought was a good idea. the joint chiefs of staff thought it was a good idea. if in an abstract. mel laird did not think it was a good idea to do it secretly. he thought you should go to the american public, congress onboard, do anything about it. for a year, kissinger managed this campaign without the air

chief knowing it until the bombs hit the ground. to me, that crosses the line from ambition to arrogance. there's also in that episode some subchapters that i think are quite disturbing. one is how easy it was for kissinger to manipulate president nixon's weaknesses. kissinger knew that nixon desperately wanted to enact his large foreign policy mission but didn't know how to do it without a kissinger. and when kissinger, you know, when he cut rogers and laird out of the vietnam decision making in the white house, what he also did was get closer to the president by telling nixon only you would have the guts to do something as brave and as bold as bombing cambodia to save south vietnam. this played to nixon. and kissinger became quite good

at this at time until he started to rattle at the end of this, at the end of 1971 himself. this to, to me, is a classic example. was there strategic value? perhaps there was. but it was kissinger who was the one national security lieutenant who faved a policy that the president favored that everybody else thought was too rash and then tell the president, no, you're the one bold enough. same thing in laos, same thing with the mining of of the harbo, same thing with the b-52 bombings in hanoi in 1952. it was a familiar refrain, kissinger constantly using nixon's insecurities to get the policy he wants to see done. so that's a polemic, right? you can rant on that. but in the long run, i think it actually does the democracy a disservice, but it also, i

think, afocuses policy -- affects policy and strategy in vietnam. the well game in the nixon administration was to buy saigon enough time to stand on its own, to give saigon a reasonable chance to survive. and kissinger thought these different military escalations were actually doing that. he said invading cambodia in april 1970 bought saigon 18 months because it destroyed the north vietnamese sanctuaries and north vietnamese troop encampments along the border inside cambodia, that the bombing of cambodia in '69 and '70 had bought saigon time. i think the reality is he sped up the clock, he didn't slow the clock down. because congress immediately, immediately -- when things had quieted down, nixon's november 3rd silent majority speech did just what he wanted ited to do. november 3, 1969, nixon went on television and spoke to the great silent majority, i'm going to bring troops home, i'm going to increase pressure here and there, but we're going to

extract ourselves with honor from vietnam. the american public, voting public, was with him. and cambodia undid that. and that was on kissinger's watch. and so i think the time, the clock actually sped up. from april 1970 on congress tries to pass and comes close to passing, hadfield-mcgovern -- hatfield-mcgovern, all these efforts to limit american involvement in southeast asia. to me, it's just a classic example of kissinger talking tough, appearing tough, taking tough stances and actions and then producing the exact opposite desired result for the long-term health of south vietnam. the invasion of laos was even worse because that involved not american troops at this point because the congress said, no, you can't do that, through cooper-church, but it involved the south vietnamese army, and it was a disaster.

p the press was there to catch the retreat, and so it just undercut everything they were trying to do with this military escalation. and all the time knot seat -- north vietnamese troops are pouring down the ohio chi min -- ho chi minh trail. >> in the book and the account you just sort of shared, it is true that we don't often think of the national security adviser as having, first and foremost, a portfolio that is about domestic politics. and yet by your account, the extent to which henry kissinger wanted to not think about domestic politics as he thought about the u.s. strategy when in other places had argued the center for gravity of the united states in the vietnam war was the domestic political opinion comes across as a major strategic weakness. i don't know if that's -- >> yeah. yeah, i think that's perfectly stated. i think one of the themes of the book, i hope one of the themes

of the book that people pick up is that policy in vietnam was always about the united states and very rarely about south vietnam or any vietnamese or anybody from cambodia or laos, that it was all about domestic considerations and political credibility and even some international credibility. but there was always this domestic component to it. and that cut several different ways as well. kissinger, kissinger's timeline, he set the timeline for the secret negotiations. he wants to deliver a peace agreement to nixon before the 1972 election even after nixon says, no, i don't want it. kissinger still pushed it and would go into meetings in paris and say we've got to have this before october 15th so that i can give this to the president. he wants it very badly. and then you look in the notes and the dialogue back and forth between kissinger and nixon, and nixon saying i don't want it. that's the last thing i want. so there's really kind of a

disconnect through this all. there's another area that i want to make sure i get this in because it's the most important part, i think, of the book perhaps. and that is kissinger met secretly with his north vietnamese counterparts dozens of times. we have transcripts written by kissinger's associates, notes taken by kissinger's associates, verbatim. we also have, i have the vietnamese version of those meetings. i've translatedded that, i compare them. they're remarkable for how similar they are. so we now have a very good, solid record. john carlin, who works in the historian's office at the state department, has just published a volume in the foreign recommendations series that captures the negotiations. and and so we have that. it picks up on some of this and adds a little bit in other places. so the record of what was said in these secret meetings is

pretty clear. what's remarkable is after each one of these nixon received on his desk a summary from kissinger, and these summaries do not reflect at all what was said in the meetings. and nixon makes strategic decisions based on what kissinger is telling him. classic kissinger lines about these in the summaries are the north vietnamese are finally ready to negotiate. this is the best meeting we've ever had. they're getting really close to agreeing to withdrawing their troops. it's always very foggy. usually with kissinger it's that his counterparts left out an attack, and that ghei him the evidence -- that gave him the evidence he needed that they were softening their position. then you go to the transcript, and no such conversation ever took place. so i don't know how far down the line readers will want to go with that. but for me, deceiving the president of the united

states -- even if it's richard nixon -- deceiving the president, deceiving that office with summaries of negotiation when americans are fighting and dying and the president is going to make decisions based on those conversations, that gives me pause. now, the only thing that maybe squares that circle a little bit is that nixon never had much faith in kissinger or the secret talks. [laughter] so i don't know how much policy he was really making from that. but if i heard that the north vietnamese were interested in a mutual troop withdrawal, i might behave this way. but they never hinted -- the north vietnamese, the anti-communist party, would ever admit that their troops were in south vietnam to begin with because they didn't recognize the political legitimacy of south vietnam. so to them, their troops were on home soil. so they -- at no point, at no

point and say this with extreme confidence, at no point did they ever even remotely hint that troops would be removed from south vietnam. before an agreement, during the agreement or after an agreement. and in fact, in the end, kissinger conceded on that point and not only allowed the infiltration to stay where it was, but allowed ten main force infantry divisions of the knot vietnamese -- north vietnamese army to stay in vietnam after the easter offensive. so they poured tens of thousands of new troops in, and kissinger -- by agreement in a document -- allows those troops to stay there. that causes hanoi to say, well, look, the only sticking point we have now on an agreement was the south vietnamese government. we wanted them out, you insisted they stay. but now that you're letting our troops stay here, we'll take them out ourselves. you get out and then we'll run

over saigon. and that's the agreement kissinger signed. and that's what happened. >> let me follow up on that a little bit, maybe even push back on the title a little bit. >> yeah. >> so the title -- subtitle at least, reckless: henry kissinger and the tragedy in vietnam, really does, obviously, ascribe a lot of responsibility to the figure of henry kissinger. and i understand the argument about tragedy. so the argument really is that did we really get much of a better peace in '73 than we could have gotten in 1969. and in the meantime, tens of thousands of americans and vietnamese died, billions of dollars were spent. but i still would like your thoughts on so how much can we lay at the feet of henry kissinger when richard nixon was the president. >> yeah. i think, and the "reckless" is the title, i went around with public affairs for a while.

i kept coming back to fit because i think kissingier's behavior in the -- kissinger's behavior in the negotiation and in his insistence on escalation in laos and cambodia and his insistence on changing the coordinates of the bombing and changing the logbooks so it looked like they were hitting targets in south vietnam, it was part of the purposeful creation of dummy logbooks. and then the mining of the harbor and the bombing of hanoi after they had a workable peace agreement in october 1979 -- '72, i think all of that is definitely reckless. i do think henry kissinger was dealt a bad hand. i think he made a bad situation worse. i do think at the end of november 1969 after nixon really did, through the vietnamization policy which wasn't kissinger's, it was mel jared's and nixon's,

i think after the nixon silent majority speech, vietnamization had already had a few months under its belt, it had done everything they wanted it to do. if you look at the protests, watch. you know, after the moratorium, nixon times the november 3rd speech for the moratorium against the war in the fall '69. it comes after. and at that moment the voting public is with him. you could have gotten a deal right then if you're going to throw south vietnam under the bus at the end and allow 150,000 north vietnamese troops and you're not going to have the border be permanent, and you're not going to pressure that now in any way and your pressure on china and the soviet union to intervene isn't going to go anywhere as anybody would have told kissinger in 1969, that's not going to work, that given

all of that, i think he does deserve a lot of blame, and i think his behavior is reckless. >> let me ask you a couple of questions about his reputation. so in some ways dr. henry kissinger's known as being perhaps the master strategist. one of the interesting elements to that is, as you have recounted, really at the core of the nixon's first term was vietnamization. that was melvin laird's preferred approach, not that of henry kissinger. so it sort of looks like a fundamental bureaucratic battle that shaped the administration's approach. henry kissinger was not on the winning side of that argument. is that a fair -- >> that's more than fair, that's an accurate statement, that he lost that battle, and he carried the scars from that political battle with him. one of the things that he wanted to make sure was that laird was cut out of almost every

important decision on vietnam after that. and he's always saying things to the president -- i mean, we have this enormous treasure-trove of sources. we have over, i think it's 300,000 pages of telephone conversation. the nixon library has just released almost everything that's not a national security issue from this time period. and kissinger's own papers are now available at yale pre-government and post-government. and then i can use vietnamese sources as well. from those sources we had a or very clear understanding of the really dysfunctional relationships in this administration. and it's clear in conversation after conversation with the president, kissinger will say don't tell laird, he'll chicken out, he won't support that, he'll never get behind this policy. that's the way the administration was on vietnam. now, i don't know about other

areas. i do vietnam. there are other people who may say in the middle east he was right on target, he did this right, he did that right. outside of vietnam. detente with the soviets and chinese inside vietnam was a disaster in many ways. and it was about vietnam in many ways. there were political rivalries that drove a lot of this. that's not saying strategic considerations didn't come first, but these political rivalries were a factor. so much so that nixon formed what he called the henry hand-holding committee. because kissinger threatened to quit almost every day over this dysfunction and this rivalry with rogers and laird. and so nixon wanted to get kissinger away from him, keep him out of the office. so he set up a little committee that when henry got in one of those moods as nixon called it, they kept him out of the oval office. >> so that brings me sort of to my next question about reputation. i think that many of us in this room, if asked, or if we were to

guess among the americans that follow foreign affairs who are interested, if there was a question raised what is the foremost american foreign policy experts or wise man alive in the united states today, probably henry kissinger would come up more than others. so how do you explain that disconnect between the individual or character that's in your book and that sterling reputation? >> he would come up on my list too as a theorist. i think henry kissingier is very smart,, he's witty, he's charming, he understands grand strategy. he just didn't practice it well, in my view. especially in vietnam. i do think that much of his time out of office has been spent editing his time in office. no one has cared for his legacy more than henry kissinger.

and kissinger is brilliant, you know? and he's an absolutely beautiful writer. and so you combine those -- and he's charming. who doesn't want to sit next to him at dinner? and he's plugged himself into social scenes and the places he needs to be plugged in. i understand that completely. but when it came to being close to the people who were doing the actual fighting and dying, he was removed. he was a theorist who stuck to theorist dreams. and i think it cost the country in vietnam. it cost the country dearly. and that's something i take very, very seriously. if you're going to put men and women in harm's way, you have to give more than just your theoretical pest best. -- best. you have to look parents in the eye and say we are pursuing a policy in national interests, and we took this path, and this is the full debate we had about

that, and congress got onboard, and we came to you, remember, and you said yes. none of that took place. and in a functioning democracy, i think you have to have those full and frank discussions. and so i still assign kissinger to my students. he is a brilliant theorists. but in vietnam in practice, his practice was very, very different than his theories and statesmanship. >> so i would love to continue to go on, but i really think it's now time to turn to the audience. so i would love to start taking your questions. and i think we are using the microphones for reporting? please? >> yeah. and perhaps -- oh, please. would you mind using the microphone, please, so your question's recorded? perhaps you can identify yourself. >> yes. hi there. my name is mark duncan.

i'm a graduate student at the international school of economics in moscow, and thank you for a very interesting panel and a very controversial topic. this sort of follows on from one of suzanne's earlier comments, but it's particularly from my own experience when i first ready proposal city for the first time. i thought it was a very interesting book that nixon -- sorry, kissinger had a very irritating tendency of focusing on a great man and thinking that, you know, sort of foreign policy hinged on great policies like wilson versus roosevelt. i kind of feel, like, is there a similar strand in this discussion when we talk about, well, if it wasn't for kissinger, would there have been peace in vietnam in 1969 rather than 1973 or even earlier than that? are we not ascribing far too much responsibility for one man? thank you. >> thank you for your question. i think it's a great question.

and i'm, and i'm someone who's very concerned about this notion of great man history. i don't believe in it at all. my idea that there was a civil society in south vietnam no one's ever heard of which, actually, the negotiation should have come i through. but the reality for me is, yes, all that's true. every single administration before the nixon administration struggled with the vietnam dilemma, what to do about it. but it was always about the domestic political issue. johnson couldn't get out because he couldn't be the first president to lose a war. after the '64 election, my co-author bob mcnamara would say he was going to yet out. well, maybe -- to get out. in my view, to sit here in this

book, in the powerful role he had, because he's the one in the room. he is making decisions without the consideration of the national bureaucracy. i think that's a tragic command of history. he's not even employing the assets that he has available to him. so i think his own actions -- and he would love this, right? he described himself in a 1971 interview with an italian journalist, i love being that lone cowboy who's courageous number to act. it is, in a sense, that lone cowboy in that room given enormous power to negotiate in the name of the united states. enormous power. some of it he created and some of it he took. i think that what i would do with your question, which i think is an excellent question is agree with you completely on

one hand, try to suggest that kissinger created this world where he did have that kind of authority and then flip it back and say what was needed is the world you talking about, right? it's this big tent approach where you brought in all sorts of people to fashion out a negotiation that involved, you know, anthropologists and economists and all the the kind of things you're going to have to do if you're going to create a political process. because war's political. you have to start with some kind of political process that replaces the conflict. and to do that, you need a big tent approach. your agreement has to have enforcement mechanisms in it. it has to point to some kind of new political reality that all parties agree. to none of those things took place, and i don't think they are take place with a singular figure ever in the room. and i think american diplomacy in general is handicapped with that. i think the united states thinks that a richard holbrooke or a

henry kissinger or even a senate mitchell could come in. that's what the united states could be really good at, being an honest broker or timekeeper. but the actual negotiations have to involve a multitude of people and interests and specialties to work. so i think kissinger did create this world for himself with nixon's approval, and that's why he's in that room alone. and hanoi created a similar world, which is interesting. they invested an awful lot of authority in the people they sent to paris. and i think there's a narrative that we're just starting to hear from vietnamese voices that this war was maybe too long and too costly for what we got out of this. and so, or yeah, i agree with your, the tenor of your question completely, but the reality of the situation was that kissinger, with nixon's help, made this singular in a way.

>> don simmons. the relative charges against nixon and kissinger are different from what i believed for quite a long time. i wonder if you, if it really is true that kissinger both altered the logbooks with the military bombing and misrepresented the proceedings at conferences in paris, your statement that he's a great strategist but didn't implement policy or very well seems rather soft, letting him off. did you ever consider the

t-word? >> yeah. there's a wonderful exhibit at the met brewer right now that i would encourage you all to go see on art and conspiracy. and they have a whole room dedicated to henry kissinger. and that probably goes a little further than i would go. you know, there have been lots of polemics aimed at kissinger calling him a war criminal and a traitor. i do take lying to the president as a pretty serious charge. and the documentary evidence is overwhelming that he sent nixon summaries that were inaccurate statements. that's the softest language i can use. inaccurate statements of what was said. kissinger, the way -- this gets back to one of suzanne's questions and how has he maintained the reputation. because he takes partial responsibility for that. so in his memoir he'll say i committed the cardinal sin of a

negotiator. i became an advocate for my own negotiation. so what kissinger would say in this situation is if i wasn't telling the president that there was hope in paris for a peace agreement, a half-cocked nixon was going to go and bomb them back to the stone able. so i was actually the -- stone age. so i was actually the brakes. that's how he explained this. it's not how i see it. i think the president of the united states, no matter who it is, the office deserves -- if you're serving at the pleasure of the president as a national security adviser does, it's not a senate confirmation. the senate hires you and you are it. you have to give the president a full and frank description of what you -- how you discharge your duties. and there's no other way to see it that he misled the president. on the content of the discussions, secret discussions

in paste. on the bomb -- in paris. on the bombing in cambodia, this is not, this is something that's widely accepted now. we have colonel roy sitton who did the bombing coordinates, who has gone on record with the air war college in montgomery, alabama, saying that he was the officer charged with coming up with the coordinates, that he went to the basement of the white house, he handed kissinger envelopes with the coordinates, that kissinger actually changed the coordinates sometimes to strike even deeper into cambodia and that he and kissinger then created phony logbooks to make it look like the pilots were -- and at the last minute the relay stations in south vietnam would give them the right coordinates, but the logbooks were dummied before that. that's been accepted for quite a while. seymour hersh broke hart of that story -- part of that story a long time ago, and now we have

the sitton interview. so scholars who look at the bombing of cambodia have all used that in the last two years. >> following on from that question given what you know and other aspects of american foreign policy and the war in general, do you think that there should have been either a national or international accounting in terms of morality and justice for kissinger, for nixon and for others involved? and i'm, you know, i'm not necessarily exempting those on the other side, but i'm thinking specifically of our side. >> yeah, that's a great question. a war crimes tribunal like bertrand russell called for in 1967, and that hadn't even -- we didn't even know about some incidents, you know, by 967. you know, at that point given the state of international law,

richard falk's written a lot about this, there really wasn't much meat to international law. you had the nuremberg principles, but after that there was nothing like an r2p or an icc, international criminal court, or any place where this could have been adjudicated. finding commissioners just to oversee a just peace was impossible. given the cold war. so finding some kind of u.n.-mandated, you know, to do it, the mechanics, i think, are difficult. in a lot of ways, and i love your question. in a lot of ways i think that's what's happening now in the literature that's coming out of second generation, especially in vietnamese. if you look at who's winning prizes in literature, it's vietnamese children born in south vietnam in 1974 '75 and

who came as refugees to the united states. and they're writing what their parents' generation could not articulate as a civil society vision. that, in a sense, does what you're saying. it places the whole war on trial, all the sides on trial, and comes to -- through fiction, thinly-veiled fiction -- comes to some kind of agreement that humanity was lost. and if you haven't read the sympathizer, andrew lamb's work, the best we could do, i mean, you could spend your entire reading year reading vietnamese voices from saigon army officials' children that really placed the war in this kind of civil society context i'm talking about. so they do a little bit of that cultural work even though none of the legal work was ever done. >> thanks very much.

>> thank you. >> i'm sorry, go ahead. >> hello. i'm just wondering, if not as you say in the vietnam, vietnam rather reckless exit strategy executed by dr. kissinger, is there any good example we can examine for exit strategy in military intervention particularly after world war ii? >> well -- >> is there any, i'm sorry. >> yeah, that's a great question. is there any kind of model for how to do this correctly. you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. so i do think that we can draw lessons from the past. and especially when we're looking at what are the attributes that go into a peace agreement that we know work. and i'm seeing four students

here who have had this as their final exam. you know, give me the 14 best practices that must, that must exist. this vietnam peace agreement has none of that, by the way, that are recognizable. the u.s. institute for peace that does some of the work, i think, that you're talking about, it's a bipartisan organization funded by congress -- well, it was at least the last time i checked -- [laughter] funded by congress, and it brings practitioners from around the world together to come up with these negotiating ideas. and they always come back to the same model which is the good friday agreement. the good friday agreement, because it involved all the different aspects that we know must be present -- to decommission armies, to release political prisoners, to integrate economies -- at least until the brexit. we're seeing in the news now that that hard border at the north of ireland is going to be

the issue. i sit on a commission in dublin that we oversee. this this is what we're tackling right now, is looking at if brexit goes through in march, what happens to that border? do you have to build a wall? but the good friday agreement checked a lot of the boxes on best practices. so those of us who teach courses on ending deadly conflict, that's sort of the model that we look at on how to extrication someone -- extricate someone. nations and some national groups from intractable conflicts. this one, in the end, as senator george akin said from vermont, you went home. right? that's why when suzanne says could you have gotten this in 1969, well, if you're going to leave north vietnamese troops in the field of battle facing down saigon, you can do that whenever you want. that's what the north vietnamese kept saying. kissinger would come back and say, well, we've got a 23-month

withdrawal process. and kissinger says it took him, you know, it took you five months to get 'em here. surely you can get 'em out quicker than two years. and in the end, if that's what you're doing, if you're, in the end, going to trade american prisoners of war for a complete, unilateral u.s. withdrawal, do it. >> [inaudible] what do you think that's preventing -- [inaudible] many would say today northern ireland, there's basically no government. it's a failed state. what do you think of, hike, what's -- like, what's the problem? >> well, i wouldn't actually characterize it in that way. i would say that, actually, there is a huge civil society in the north of ireland. what made it, however, this is why -- this gets back to -- this

is not a plant. this gets back to my point exactly and to your question that started it off. most important people in the immediate post-good friday agreement period were the architects, literally architects who were going to take all that e.u. investment money and build a completely non-identity downtown in belfast. they were going to build a new riverfront and new buildings that were going to be non-sectarian. and that's -- nonsectarian, that's what they did. so belfast gets a complete makeover so there's not east of the river or west of the river anymore. there's the riverfront. that's exactly what i'm talking about here is that's ooh -- that's needed. none of that kind of vision is going on in the paris peace talks. none of it. it gets back to something else suzanne said. your very first question's about strategy. doesn't this seem like an odd mix? you're going to bro in negotiation, but you're going to

supervise and continue the heaviest bombing in the history of mankind, 8 million tons of bombs? how do you reconcile those two things? it's because they could never give up the ghost. nixon and kissinger always kind of secretly hope that hanoi would bend the knee. kissinger said to nixon, this is a quote, that raggedy ass country, fourth-rate country, has a breaking point. contempt. and wrong. and so that's in the macro. there are lots of things that we need to do in peace agreements. the united states needs to get much, much better at being an honest broker and architect in peace agreements. hopefully, the u.s. institute of peace helps. kissinger can be a theorist, but i don't think we want him constructing that kind of a word with. i think we need -- world. i think we need a lot of the young people who are here today. stay in your majors, whatever they are, and work on these kind of issues, right? and i do think at the end of the

day good friday is a good model forward, but vietnam continues to offer us incredibly important lessons on how to conduct our foreign affairs, how to conduct the united states', you know, food print in the world, how others see us, how small countries react to us. at the end of the day, you can always find out that there's no political corollary to your overwhelming political power. a great theorist said that. henry kissinger. >> so let me -- unfortunately, we only have about four minutes left. what i'd really like to do is give you a moment to offer just a couple final reflections that are along these lines which are, you know, it's really hard not to read a book and to think about what's going on in the world. and i'm wondering what, to you, and i know i should have left you more than three minutes, but what to you really resonates, what did it leave you thinking about that resembles something going on in the world today? >> yeah.

i'm very nervous anytime we concentrate power too closely and don't allow our national security bureaucracy to function in the way it has, it has to. we're going to get bad policy if we have bad fundamentals, and i think we have horrible fundamentals right now. you can't attack the intelligence community, you can't attack the state department, the press plays a vital role in the construction of american foreign policy because it's the link between the public and the policy makers. you need all those elements of a functioning democracy running at high gear. and i don't think we're this today. we were not there in vietnam. to me, the tragedy of vietnam and the lessons of vietnam really speak to the dangers of allowing power to be concentrated in the basement of the white house. you want all three branches -- which are rival branches on

purpose. i mean, the national security adviser position that kissinger held, until he became secretary of state, the only person to be the national security adviser and the secretary of state at the same time. that shouldn't happen. the state the department's job is to find diplomatic solutions to the world's toughest problems. the defense department's job is to listen to its civilian commanders and to come up with military solutions for the world's toughest problems. the national security adviser's job is to mediate that natural tension and provide advice to the president. when you cut those two elements out of the national security decision making and you just consult -- that's bad for democracy. and things that are bad for democracy, i think, are bad for the american people. and an awful lot of americans paid the price, and a lot more vietnamese paid the price and continue to pay the price.

if you think this war is over, go to vietnam or go to orange county. it's still alive and well. and even in washington it's casting long shadows. >> so, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanks professor bob brigham for his wonderful book and for his comments here tonight. >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some authors recently featured on booktv's "after words", our weekly author interview program that features best selling nonfiction books and guest interviewers. fox news host tucker carlson offered his thoughts on elitism in america. citizens united's david bossie

and former trump campaign manager corey lewandowski argued that washington bureaucrats are seeking to undermine the presidency of donald trump. and activist mckessen weighed in on how to advance social justice movements. in the coming weeks on "after words", louise shelley with the emergence of new technologies. and this week economist stephen moore discusses the economic policies of the trump administration. >> two things changed my mind about the viability of trump. one was just meeting him in person. the guy's a winner. you know, i remember walking out of that room after spending ab hour with -- an hour with him thinking he's got a good chance of winning. he's got a winning attitude. most politicians are wonderful people in public and jerks in private. trump is sort of the opposite. he can be a jerk in public, but he actually is a very wonderful person when you meet him personally. and that kind of can-do spirit

really resonated with me. >> "after words" airs saturdays at 10 p.m. and sundays at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific on booktv on c-span2. all previous "after words" are available to watch online at booktv.org. >> as part of our book festival coverage, booktv attended this year's national press club book fair where we spoke with steve usdin about the historical connections between espionage and journalism in washington. >> historian of cold war espionage, and he's the author of "bureau of spies: the secret connections between espionage and journalism in washington." mr. usdin, what did washington look like during the cold war? >> guest: so my book is specifically about this building, about the national press building, about espionage that happened here. the interesting thing was it was a place where both sides, all sides mixed. it w