reiterate is something about the book. those of you who are not professional historians may not understand or it may not have been clear, this is a big of historiography. historiography is a historian's word for the history of history writing about particular 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. and my topic, as ken suggested, mentioned, was richard nixon and the vietnam war, which is a big topic. and i'll add a complicated and complex topic. perhaps more complex and complicated than some 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 collapse phase, if you remember. this is a war that began in you might say 1946 in the united states beginning with its early involvement during the french conflict. so one point i want to make at the outset is that it is complica complicated, it is a big topic and the story should not only include nixon's and kissinger's management of the conflict, but the story of the entire war on both sides. in all its complexity from 1969 to 1974. from 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 them and secret purposes.

secrets to some extent kept from certain advisers and known only to the very kind of small inner 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 tapes, look at documents, especially those between nixon and kissinger, and you got a pretty good understanding of what they intended because they were the ones who are making policy. more than, of course, bureaucrats and advisers. considering time constraints, i think the best thing for me to do is -- in the opening statement is to outline the major his tor graphic issues concerning nixon's and kissinger's management of the war 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 to ask a question, read my chapter, although i don't think you'll be buying the book. it's $175. it's intended mostly for libraries. or send me an e-mail. so let's take one of the most important issues chronologically. one was nixon's role, vice president nixon's role in the 1950s and during his out of office years in the 1960s regarding vietnam. relatively little has been written about these topics, but what we know is that nixon was one of those advisers in the eisenhower administration who advocated u.s. intervention during the dnb and flu crisis in the french phase of the war. then in 1954 and '55 he supported the partitioning of vietnam and the presidency of -- in saigon. he subsequently advocated u.s.

escalation in vietnam during the presidencies of john kennedy and lyndon johnson. in other words, kennedy and johnson inherited a war from eisenhower and nixon before nixon inherited it from these two democratic presidents. but 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-ca so-called caper. there's wide agreement supported by evidence that nixon and his campaign organization engaged in a clandestine effort via intermediary to encourage the president of south vietnam into shunning the johnson-initiated negotiations and thereby influenced the u.s. presidential election vote in nixon's favor.

and there is now new evidence, convincing evidence, that kissinger passed information on to the nixon campaign about president johnson and diplomatic negotiations. the unanswerable question, of course, is whether these efforts influenced the electoral vote in the '68 election between nixon and humphrey. a third question, issue, is sort of a con textual one. that is did nixon and kissinger have a so-called grand design for global diplomacy? and if so, how did this question influence vietnam policy? some writers have suggested that nixon and kissinger did have a grand global design in mind. at least at the start of the administration. triangular diplomacy, the nixon doctrine and other elements. yet other authors including me have doubted or downplayed the

reality of a grand design. instead, i've argued, others have argued, the nixon/kissinger so-called design was composed mostly of a bmodis operandi. a related question to this question of the grand design is did triangular diplomacy bring about the satisfactory solution to nixon's vietnam problem? was that the reason? some say yes. my short answer is no. of course, it's complicated. a fourth issue, set of issues, has to do with the nixon doctrine and the mad man theory.

the conventional historical wisdom has been that vietnamization was the central strategy of the administration in vietnam. and that it was the prime example of the nixon doctrine at work. but the documentary evidence reveals, it seems to me, that although vietnamization was a key option, it was not the only option. it was one of many interrelated, important alternative strategies or policies in the nixon/kissinger approach to their vietnam problem. one of these was nixon's mad man theory which i won't talk much about here. as time passed and circumstances dictated or warranted, nixon and kissinger modified particular options 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 or master

plan guiding the administration's policies 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 kissinger -- did nixon and diss kissinger include a decent interval policy. decent interval, for those of you who don't know, refers to the length of time between the final moment of departure of u.s. forces in south vietnam and the collapse of the saigon regime. the desirable thing would be to have an interval sufficiently long enough to mask the administration's role, if any, in saigon's defeat. those few authors, daniel e

elsberg, david landau, could only rely on memoirs, interviews and bits of bureaucratic information and surmise to inform their discussions. remember, i mentioned nixon and kissinger making the key decisions often in secret. the key evidence for these authors i mentioned unavoidably restricted -- highly secret exit option. i don't have time to discuss the misunderstandings. working with an abundant cache of declassified tapes, i've 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 as the administration continued to withdraw troops unilaterally, nixon and kissinger prioritized the decent interval option. it had evolved, in other words, from one designed in 1969 for the purpose of provide iing a decent chance of enduring for an indeterminant period after a u.s. exit to one designed after 1970 to provide him with sufficient -- to provide with efficient 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 die lulute the perception of

nixon and kissinger's responsibility or roll into possibly and likely defeat in south vietnam's collapse. they had geared, by the way, their negotiating strategy, their tactical strategy, toward achieves a settlement on or around the time of the u.s. presidential election in 1972. ken has done work, too, not only on the decent interval but on this question. and they had prolonged this period, prolonged this -- the development of this strategy not only to give time for vietnamization to strengthen the two regimes so it could survive for a while, at least, after an american departure, but to prevent a possible communist victory over the saigon government from jeopardizing nixon's re-election in 1972. or painting it -- this all happened right after the election. this strategy which has those

two purposes contributed to the prolongation of the american war in vietnam till late january 1973. now, if you want to discuss the other side's role in all of this, but i'm just telling you about nixon and his role. one point i want to make is that i -- i think now the decent interval thesis, i think ken and i remain proponents of this. has been widely accepted i think in the scholarly community. but i don't think it's been fully incorporated into writing about nixon foreign policy. that's true also for the so-called nixon doctrine. that is, my 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, of course, were the negotiations. i wrote about it. there's some other authors who have written about the

negotiations based on documentation. but since we have written about the negotiations, many declassified documents to come out. i think this is a period, if any here is looking for a topic to write about, if you're interested in diplomacy this is the one. to look at all these documents more than we have. let me just say when the two sides reached an agreement in 1972, they had both made compromises that would lead to the reunification of vietnam under communist rule in 1975. washington's and hanoi's reasons for agreeing to a settlement conformed to an age-old pattern for ending deadline wars. decision makers finally decide that a compromise armistice will better serve their reduced aims, offer more hope of achieving their goals in the long run or at least lessen the heavy human

material or political costs of a continued war. to help ensure the perception of success over failure, nixon, kissinger and their allies launched a public relations campaign that praised the 1973 agreement and later accused congress with responsibility for saigon's defeat in april 1975. i hope those who talk about the legacy in another session will discuss this issue, which i've written about and others have written about. another issue is the -- the nature of the nixon/kissinger relationship. histories of the '68 through '74 period ask whether one or the other was the architect of the administration's policy. some say nixon. some say kissinger. others including myself view their partnership as both a troubled relationship, that word

again, complex relationship, in which nixon was more the policy strategist and decider, even though sometimes an erratic decider, while kissinger was more the adviser. indispensable tactician and policy implementer. but it's still a debated question, and i don't know that it can ever be solved. then to -- i said the war was a complicated thing. i can't talk about many other issues. about the military events. all of those strategies. the year to year campaigns. what each side was up to. what about the other side? this is an important part of any war, of course. what was the other side thinking and doing? of course, for that, we don't have as much documentation. very little, indeed. then there are issues about specific events. i'm working on a book with phil burn now in which we have

discovered a great deal about operation duck hook which you may have heard about. many other issues including the domestic side of the war, the political pressures on nixon, both from the left and the right, congress's role, the press, public opinion around, of course, the consequences. [ applause ] >> those were hints about what questions you should ask. the only reason that stephen king has published more books than john prados is that king gets to make stuff up. prad doze has written 17 nonfiction books including "the hidden history of vietnam," "the blood trail" about the ho chi minh trail.

"vietnam: the history of an unwinnable war." prados heads the iraq documentation project and the vietnam project. it is in his contract that i should mention his most recent book "the normandy crucible," which is not about vietnam. john prados. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. that was very gracious. let me also add my voice to those of 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 just talking about his tor i don't gofy. let me open on a his tor graphical note. it shows you kind of how the process goes and a time to read the tea leaves. the phrase decent interval actually comes from an article that henry kissinger wrote, which he published in the journal foreign affairs in the month before the 1968 election. people, especially foreign affairs experts, positioned themselves for potential appointments in dual administrations by putting out views and opinions that potential presidents can take a look at and decide if they like these people. kissinger did this very thing in this article in foreign affairs. well, lo and behold, the phrase "decent interval" becomes very

controversial because of what happens in the vietnam war. in 1979 when kissinger is first appointed national security adviser to richard nixon, he publishes a collection of his articles in a little book called "american foreign policy" in which he includes this paper "decent intervals." in 1977 after kissinger has been burned by a whole series of different controversies. the vietnam war has rounded the corner. kissinger publishes a new edition of the book "american foreign policy" during the time that mr. carter was president. and lo and behold, the article "decent interval" does not appear in that republished edition of kissinger's book. so a historian must ask himself,

why is that? what happened what happened there and what does that mean about what henry kissinger did or did not mean to be doing in 1969. and that's a standard problem for historians trying to interpret the world as it goes along. people, whether they be national security advisers or presidents, have typical responses to events. you know, if you take a look at richard nixon in the context of our subject here, the vietnam war, you can see some of his standard responses. mr. nixon hardly ever met a force option that he did not like, you know? in 1969 my colleague, jeff, briefly mentioned the duck hook plan.

that was a plan to pressure 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 sufficiently powerful or potent plan. in 1971 when we invaded southern laos, mr. nixon wished to fire the united states commander in vietnam, general creighton abrams, because he was not acting forcefully enough. in 1972 in the beginning of the year when the north vietnamese launched their easter offensive, mr. nixon immediately criticized the air force for not developing sufficiently potent plans for hitting north vietnam. in fact, the christmas bombing that occurred in december 1972

in which we sent 100 b-52 bombers against hanoi was prefigured as early as 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. mr. nixon was constantly pushing and pushing for the most forceful option imaginable. this is the kind of thing you have to explain. it's not limited to vietnam for that matter. early in the nixon administration there was an american reconnaissance plane that was shot down off the north korean coast, an aircraft of the type called the ec-121. the immediate response that nixon ordered was an armed attack similar to what we did after the gulf of tonkeyan

against north korea. i actually with a colleague here from the nixon library did the oral history interview with former secretary of defense melvin laird a couple years ago, and in that interview mr. laird 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. thus, i was struck this morning by the notion that was expressed on one of the panels that it was not proper to apply psycho history or it was somehow wrong to do psychological analysis of the activities of a president. presidents, of course, being the most important officials in the united states government. okay. let's not even talk about warfare, 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 news a lot of late. the first thing that happened when "the new york times" leaked and published 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 tapes of mr. nixon's conversations that day, and we transcribed them, and actually the transcripts, you can read them, they're published in that book "inside the pentagon papers," and the transcripts show pretty clearly that 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 lambasted and implicated the concerns of democrats, lyndon johnson, hubert humphrey, john kennedy. it was fine as far as he was concerned. alexander haig calling up mr. nixon and then henry kissinger who at first was also not determined to pursue this were the ones who finally raised the issue to something of importance for mr. nixon. and then the question is so how did he respond? the first thing he did was to seek prior injunction against "the new york times" to suppress the public press from reporting the immediate story. not simply what american

presidents typically do in a leak case which is order an investigation for the leaker, but to actually enjoin the american society from discussing the subject. it was the same kind of an approach to an issue that mr. nixon displayed when he ordered air attacks on north korea when a reconnaissance plane was shot 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 counsel 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 the meeting by saying probably logically from the

standpoint of a number of u.s. presidents that if you wanted to get something into "the new york times," 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 have been talking about, and he closed the meeting by saying, and i quote, the president said that we have to win and not only a conviction of those guilty but also the public relations dispute. you know, it was richard nixon, not the material itself, that made the pentagon papers an american political document. it was the administration's response that changed what was 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 attitudes and typical responses of officials, including presidents. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you, john. in 2009 katherine scott earned a ph.d. from temple university after writing a dissertation on reining in the state, civil society, congress, and the movement to democratize the national security state, 1970-1978." scott is an adjunct professor with cornell and an assistant historian with the u.s. senate historical office. she has spoken on dissent in

national security at many scholarly conferences, so she was a natural to write the chapter on nixon and dissent in a richard in accordanceon companion, the excellent volume edited by mel small. ladies and gentlemen, katherine scott. [ applause ] >> thank you for that kind introduction. and thank you all for attending our panel today. thanks to everyone who has helped organize the conference. i feel very fortunate to be here and to have been invited to be a part of this companion volume but also to be up here with these three top notch scholars on the vietnam war. my talk actually departs a little bit from the topics that they've discussed today in that my piece, the chapter that i wrote for this volume, examined the literature that was related to the nixon administration's response to dissent abohe