start off with jeffrey kimble, no one has done more to bring richard nixon's exit strategy to life than jeff kimble. has written two books on the subject. nixon's viet nam war in 1998 and 2003's viet nam war files. professor emeritus of miami university of ohio. jeff has had the great scholarly pleasure in the last decade with each new release of tapes and documents and seeing his work proved right. i have the pleasure of introducing him, ladies and gentlemen, jeffrey kimble. thank you, ken, i thank everyone who is responsible for the conference.

what i also want to say or reiterate something about the book that those of you who are not professional historians may not understand or may not have been clear, this is a book of his tory-ography, writing about issues and what different interpretations are. so this is what the book is about. we all approached it perhaps with a different style, but it is a book about the literature concerning certain issues of broader topics. my topic, as ken mentioned, was richard nixon and viet nam war, a big topic and i'll add, a complicate and complex topic. perhaps more complex and complicate than others. it's also a very contentious topic.

nixon himself in his words "it was problem number one." of course his phase of the war was the second to last phase, as you remember, the war began you might say in 1946 to the united states beginning with the early involvement. during the french conflict. so, one point i want to make at the outset it is complicated, it is a big topic, and the stories should not only include nixon and kissinger's management of the conflict but the story of the entire war on both sides and all the complexity from 1969 to 1974. from -- in the study of nixon and kissinger it was to a large extent a secret war, that is many of the decisions, key decisions they made were, had

secret strategies associated with then and secret purposes. secret -- some extent kept from certain advisors, known only to very small circle. the disadvantage of that is that for some of the issues it's difficult to figure them out, what did they intend? on the other hand it makes research easier because you can listen to tape, look at documents, especially those between nixon and kissinger and get a pretty good understanding of what they intended because they were the ones who were making the policy. more than of course bureaucrats and advisors. considering time constraints, i think the best thing for me to do in this opening statement is to outline the major historeographic issues and hope i'll have a chance to say more about them and other issues

during the discussion to follow. if i don't and if you're interested, ask a question, read my chapter, although i don't think you will be buying the book, it's $175, intended mostly for libraries, or send me an e-mail. so lets take one of the most important issue, what was nixon's role, vice president nixon's role in the 1950s during his out of office years, in the 1960s regarding viet nam? relatively little has pen written about these topics, what we know is that nixon was one of those advisors the eisenhower administration who advocated u.s. intervention during the crisis in the french phase of the war. then in 1954 and 55 he supported the partitioning of viet nam. he subsequently advocated the

u.s. escalation in viet nam during the presidency of kennedy and johnson. a lot of work needs to be done on this period. another big question has to do with nixon's position on the war in the 1968 presidential campaign and what was his role in the so-called the caper. there is wide agreement supported by abundant evidence that nixon and his campaign organization engaged in a clandestine effort via intermeadary to get the south viet nam to shun the negotiation

of the u.s. there is now new evidence, convincing evidence that kissinger passed information on to the nixon campaign about president johnson's diplomatic negotiations. the unansweredable question is whether the effort influenced the electoral vote in the 68 election between nixon and humphrey. a third question of issue is sort of a contextural one, did nixon and kissinger have so-called grand define for global diplomacy, if so, how did it influence viet nam policy. some writers suggested they had a grand design in mind at the start of the administration, consisting in detonte, diplomacy, the nixon doctrine and other elements. yet, other authors, including me, doubted or down played the

reality of a grand design. instead, i have argued, others have argued nixon-kissinger so-called design was composed of a mo dus operandi. many of their actions were improvised reaction to electoral politics, bureaucratic in-fighting and domestic and international crisis and circumstances. a related question, this question of the grand decide did triangular diplomacy bring about a satisfactory solution to nixon's viet nam problem? what was that to reason? some ayes, my short answer is no, and it's complicated. a fourth issue have to do with the nixon doctrine and madman

theory. conventional historical wisdom was it was the central strategy of the administration in viet nam and that it was the prime example of the nixon doctrine at work. but the document reveals that it was a key option it was not the only option. it was one of many inter-related important alternative strategies or policies in the nixon-kissinger approach to their viet nam problem. one of these was nixon's madman theory which i won't talk much about here. as time passed, nixon and kissinger modified particular option and prioritized one option or combination of options over others, as one would expect. and regarding the so-called nixon doctrine, it never became

a leading principle, grand strategy or master plan guiding the administration's policy decisions in southeast asia or the developing world. it was, in other words, not a policy doctrine. a fifth issue maybe is now the most contentious question in some circles. did nixon and kissinger pursue a decent interval policy. decent interval for those of you who don't know, refers to the length of time between the moment of the final departure of u.s. forces from south viet nam and the possible or likely collapse of the saigon ray je r.

a few authors who addressed the topic before the documentary declassification of the mid 1990's after, could rely on memoirs, interviews bureaucratic information and surmise, remember nixon and kissinger made the key decisions often in secret. this absent of the evidence for these authors i mentioned unavoidably restricted their understanding of this counter intuitive and highly secret exit option and i don't have time to discuss the misunderstanding. working with an abundant tapes, i argued from late 1970 to 1971 when the nixon-kissinger strategy had clearly failed to force the other side to make vital concessions, the ones

nixon and kissinger wanted and nixon and kissinger prioritized the decent interval option. it had evolved, in other words, from one designed in 1969, for the purpose of providing two with, in kissinger's words, a decent chance of enduring for an in determi period to provide with sufficient military assistance and equipment to survive for in kissinger's words, a reasonable or decent interval of at least one to three years after the american departure, long enough to dilute the perception of nixon and kissinger's responsibilities, such as it was, one way or the other, in

likely defeat. and south viet nam collapsed. they had geared their tactics toward achieving a settlement on or around the time of the u.s. presidential election in 1972. ken has done his work to, too, on the intervals and also this question. and they had prolonged this period, prolonged the development of the strategy, not only to give time for vietnamization to survive after an american departuremunist vicr the saigon government and jeopardizing nixon's reelection or tainting it if the fall happened after the election. this strategy, which had those

two purposes, contributed to the prlongation of the american war in viet nam to 1973. if you want we can discuss the other side role in all this i'm just talking about nixon here. one point i want to make is that i think now the decent interval thesis, i think ken and i are main proponents. i don't think it has been fully incorporated into writing about nixon's foreign policy. and that is true also for the nixon doctrine, that is by argument is that it wasn't a doctrine. how much time do i have? okay, let me just say that some of the other issues one are the negotiation and i wrote about it, there are other authors who

have written about negotiations based on documentation, but since we have written about the negotiation, in our publication, there have been many declassified documents that came out and i think this was an area in which anyone here looking for a topic to write about and if you're interested in diplomacy, this is the one, that is to look at all the documents more than we have, but let me just say when they reached an agreement in 1972, they had both made compromises that would lead to1975. the reasons in agreeing came to a reason, they decided an armistice will reduced their aims, offer more hope of achieving their goals in the

long run or lessen the heavy human material or political cause of war, to help insure the success over failure, they launched a public relation campaign that praised the january, 1973 and later cuaccus congress for saigon's defeat in 1975. i hope those who talk about the leg gag see will discuss this issue which i have written about. and others have written about. another issue is the nature of the nixon-kissinger relationship. history of the 68-74 period asked whether one or the other was the architect of the administration policy. some say nixon, some say kissinger. others include myself view their partnership as a troubled

relationship and that word again, complex relationship, in which nixon was more of policy strategist and decider, even though sometimes an erratic decider, while kissinger was more the advisor, indispense i believe tactician and implementary, still a debated question, i don't know it can ever be solved. then to, i said the war was a complicated thing and i can't talk about other issues, about the military event, all of those, strategies, year-to-year campaign, which each side was up to, this is an important part of any war. what is the other side thing and doing, we don't have as much documentation, very little indeed. then there are issues about specific events by working on a book on bill burn now we

discovered the great deal about the vance ploy. operation doug hook, i'm sure you've heard about that. many other issues, including the domestic side of the war, the political pressures on nixon both from the left and right. congress' role, the press, public opinion, and of course the consequences. [ applause ] >> those were hints about what questions you should ask him. the only reason that stephen king has publish mord books than john prados, king makes stuff up. prados has written 17 books, the blood trail, about the ho chi minh trail, inside the pentagon

papers and viet nam, the history of an unwinnable war. senior fellow with the national security archive and institution for historians and everyone interested in fighting needless government secrecy, prados heads the iraq doicumentation contrac. it's in his contract i should mention his book is the normandy crucible. ladies and gentlemen, a heavy weight historian, john prados. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, that was very gracious. also add my voice to all my colleagues, congratulating and thanking the people who brought us to this event here this weekend. we think it's a wonderful opportunity to bring these issues before the public eye.

actually, we were talking about historeography, it shows you how the process goes of trying to read the tea leaves and interpret issues in history. so the phrase "decent interval" comes from an article henry kissinger wrote, which he published in the journal of foreign affairs in the months before the 1968 election, when people, especially foreign affairs experts, positioned themselves for potential appointments in new administrations by putting out news and opinions that potential presidents can take a look at and decide they like these people and kissinger did this very thing in the article on foreign affairs. well, lo and with behold, the

phrase becomes controversial because of what happened in the vietnam war. in 1969-'70, when he's appointed to richard nixon, he publishes a little book called foreign policy in which he includes decent interval. in 1977, after kissinger has been burned by controversy and the vietnam war has rounded its course, kissinger publishes a new edition of the book "american foreign policy," during the time that mr. carter was president. and lo and behold, it does not appear in that republished edition of kissinger's work.

so the historian must ask himself, why is that? what happens there and what does that mean? and people, presidents have fiscal reform and in 1969 my colleague, jeff, recently

mentioned the plan, which was a plan to press north vietnam by creating a massive attack. in 1970, when we invaded cambodia, mr. nixon's angst was with the united states pentagon, not with the enemy, because they had not evolved a suspiciously powerful or potent plan. mr. nixon wished to fire the united states commander in vietnam, general craig abrams, because he was not acting forcefully enough. in 1972, in the beginning of the year, when the north vietnamese launched the eastern offenses, mr. nixon immediately criticized the air force for not developing sufficiently potent plans for hitting north vietnam. in fact, the christmas bombings

that occurred in december 1972, in which we sent 150 b-52 bombers, was prefigured the middle of april of that year when mr. nixon specifically wrote in memos that he sent to the pentagon, i want a plan thursday morning to hit hanoi with 100 b-52 bombers. he was constantly pushing and pushing. this is the kind of thing you have to explain. it's not limited. there was a plane shot down. the immediate response that knicks be son ordered was an armedbñ-v attack, similar to at

north korea. i actually with a colleague here from the nixon library, did the oral history interview with former secretary of defense melvin laird and he explained how he had to deconstruct this nixon order to go attack north korea. so the historian has to explain these kinds of purposes and actions and standard activities. i was struck this morning by the notion that was expressed on one of the panels that it was not proper to apply that, that it was somehow wrong to do psychological analysis of the activities of a president. the president, of course, being the most important officials in the united states government. okay. let's not even talk about war

fare but let's definitely talk about why people do things and the kinds of things that they do. and let's take the pentagon papers because they have been in the newspapers a lot of late. the first thing that happens when the new york times leaked the pentagon papers was that henry kissinger demanded to know whether he was on any of the distribution lists for any of these papers so that was by way of determining whether there was any proof that he could have had a role in this. a few years ago we got the telephone tape of mr. nixon's conversation's that day and we transcribed them and actually the transcripts, you can read them, they are publishedh book. and president nixon was prepared

to let the pentagon papers go by, that this was something that he could use to his political advantage because it land blasted and implicated the concerns of democrats, lyndon johnson, hubert humphrey, john kennedy. it was fine, as far as he was concerned. he called up mr. dixon and then henry kissinger, who at first was also not determined to pursue this or the ones who finally raised the issue to something of importance from mr. nixon and then the question is, so how did he respond? the first thing he did was to seek a prior injunction through

but they actually enjoin the american society from discussing the subject. it was the same kind of an approach to an issue when a reconnaissance plane was shut down. now, since i thought about this point earlier, i ran and looked for this little piece of paper, which happens to be the record of the national security council meeting. the first and only national security council meeting that mr. nixon held in the context of the pentagon papers leak. it was held at 3:30 p.m. on the 17th of june, 1971. mr. nixon both opened and closed

the meeting. he opened by saying that a number of u.s. presidents, if you wanted to get something into the new york sometimes, the thing that you needed to do was to declare it top secret. he went through a whole litany of things that should be done by the government along the lines of what i've been talking about. he closed the meeting by saying -- and i quote, the president said that we have to win and a conviction of the public relations dispute. you know, it was richard nixon, not the material itself, that made the pentagon papers of the american political document. it was the administration's response to change but more simply a historical report into something that became an important artifact in american political history, something which led mr. nixon in a

direction which ultimately destroyed his presidency and these are the kinds of issues that historians have to deal with and i submit to you there's no way that they can attempt even to deal with those things without analyzing the standard attitude and typical responses of officials, including presidents. thank you very much. [ applause ] in 2009, katherine scott earned a hpd of raining in the state, civil society and congress and the movement to democracyize 1970 to 1978. scott is anned a junt professor with cornell and histn