davenport, there's a da, davenport and it's stone china, this is made in england. but once this is mended what we can tell about this ceramic is the diameter of the plate, what form it took, and then get a better idea what the overall decoration is. this tray over here we've got a wine bottle seal that we recovered this summer from the slave quarter, and you can see the "j" there, you know, very nicely formed. this would have been one of the president's wine bottles that he used when entertaining the constant guests that were coming here to montpelier. it would have been attached to the side of a wine bottle. also madison's view of slavery which is incredibly port fimpor about who mr. madison was, we know about his role as a politician, the fourth president of the united states, his role as a political thinker was desighing the virginia plan and the constitution, his role as an

entertainer with dolley in the house but a very important role he had was as a slave owner, and how does this blend all these together, you know, the entertaining he was doing, how he had house slaves interacting with other slaves and with the guests. so, we're trying to but all this back together and the documents don't tell us everything we need, so we're trying to fill in the gaps with the archaeology. >> you can view more "american history tv" programs at our website cspan.org/history. you can also follow us on facebook, facebook.com/c-spanhistory. in understanding richard nixon and his era. over the next hour scholars focus on the vietnam war. they discussed the partnership between richard nixon and henry

kissinger, his role as commander in chief, the pentagon papers and the administration's response to dissent. >> welcome back to understanding richard nixon and his era, a symposium. i'm kenn hughes. i'm a researcher with the presidential recordings program of the university of virginia's miller center, co-sponsor of this, the first scholarly conference at the richard m. nixon library and museum. we're turning now to nixon and vietnam. a tragically timely subject when america finds herself embroiled in an inconclusive war or two and the editor of foreign affairs and the pages of "the new york times" has suggested that president obama model his

exit from afghanistan on president nixon's exit from vietnam. we have some amazing, amazingly good scholars to discuss the subject with you today. i'll introduce each one right before he or she speaks. we'll start off with jeffrey kimba kimball, no one has done more to bring richard nixon's exit strategy to life than jeff kimball. he has written two path finding books on the subject "nixon's vietnam war" in 1998 and 2003's "the vietnam war files." a professor emeritus of the miami university of ohio. jeff has had the great scholarly pleasure in the last decade with each new release of nixon tapes

and nixon documents of seeing his work proved right, and i have the great scholarly pleasure of introducing him. ladies and gentlemen, jeffrey kimball. >> thank you, ken, and i thank everyone who is responsible for the conference. what i also want to say or reiterate is something about book, that those of you who are not professional historians may not understand or it may not have been clear. this is a book of hof historiogy is a fancy word of writing about different issues and what different interptations are. 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 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. and, of course, his phase of the war was the second to last phase of the war that began, you might say, 1946 of the united states, during its early involvement in the french conflict. so, the point i want to make at the outset, it is 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 and

all its complexity from 1969 to 1974. 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, had secret strategies associated with them and secret purposes. secrets to some extent kept from certain advisers and known only to very 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 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 advisers. considering time constraints, i think the best thing for me to do in this opening statement is to outline the major historiographic issues considering nixon's and sissen jer's management of the war and hope to have to say more about them and other issues during the discussion to follow. if you are interested, ask a question, read my chapter, although i don't think you'll be buying the book. it's $175 which is intended mostly for libraries, or send me an e-mail. let's take one of the most important issues, chronologically, what was 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 to 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 vietnam and the presidency in saigon and he supported the escalation of the war in kennedy and johnson. kennedy johnson inherited the war from eisenhower before nixon inherited it from the 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-called anna chenault

cabal or caper. there was abundant evidence that nixon and his organization engaged in a clandestine effort vena anna chenault and influence the presidential vote in nixon's favor, and there's now new evidence, convincing evidence, that kissinger passed information on to the nixon campaign about president johnson's 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 contextual 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 the start of the administration, consisting in detente, rapprochement, trianglelar diplomacy and the nixon doctrine and others. i've argued and others have argued the nixon/kissinger so-called design was composed mostly of the modus operandi of military threat and force combined with diplomacy. moreover, many of their actions were improvised reaction to electoral politics, bureaucratic infighting and domestic and international crises and circumstances. a related question to this question of the grand design is did at thtriangular diplomacy b

about a satisfaction conclusion to the vietnam problem. the short answer is yes. my answer is no. it's a complicated matter. a fourth issue, set of issues, have to do with the nixon doctrine and the mad man theory. the conventional historical wisdom has been that vietn 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, alternate 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, 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 kissinger -- 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 vietnam and the possible or likely 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 elsburg, david landau, frank smith, who address the topic in the 1970s before the documentary declassifications of the mid-1990s and afterwards could only rely on memoirs, interviews and bits of bureaucratic information and surmise to inform their discussions. remember, i mentioned nixon and kissinger, you know, making the key decisions in secret intent. this absence of key evidence for these authors i mentioned unavoidably restricted their understanding of this byzantine

counterintuitive and highly secret exit option. and i don't have time to discuss the misunderstandings. working with an abundant cache of declassified documents and 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 c concessi 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 providing queue with in kissinger's words a decent chance of enduring for an indeterminate period after a u.s. exit to one designed after 1970 to provide him with sufficient -- to provide ku 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 ku's possible or likely defeat and south vietnam's collapse. they had geared, by the way, their negotiating strategy, their tactical strategy, toward achieving a settlement on or around the time of the u.s. presidential election in 1972, and 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 vietn vietnamization to strengthen the

ku regime so it could survive for a while after an american departure, but to prevent a possible communist victory over the saigon government from jeopardizing nixon's re-election in 1972, or tainting it if the fall happened right after the election. this strategy, which had those two purposes, contributed to the prolongation of the american war in vietnam until late january 1973. now, if you want, we can discuss the other side's role in all of this, but i'm just talking about nixon and kissinger here. one point i want to make is that i think now the decent interval thesis, i think ken and i are the main proponents of this, has been widely accepted i think in the scholarly community, but it i don't think has been fully incorporated into writing about

nixon foreign policy, and 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 -- let me just say that some of the other issues. one, of course, are the negotiations, and i wrote about it. there are some other authors who have written about the negotiations based on documentation. but since we have written about the negotiations in our publication, there have been many declassified documents to come out, and i think this is an area if anyone here is looking for a topic to write about and if you're interested in diplomacy, this is the one, that is, to look at all these documents more than we have. but 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 informed to an age-old pattern for ending deadlocked 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 continued war. to help ensure the perception of success over failure, nixon, kissinger, and their allies launched a public relations campaign that praised the january 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 nature of

the nixon/kissinger relationship. history in the '68 to '74 period ask the question whether one or the other was the architect of the administration's policy. some say nixon. some say kissinger. yet others, including myself, view their partnership as both a troubled relationship and 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 do tn't know ift can ever be solved. i said the war was a complicated thing and i can't talk about many other issues. how about the military events, all of those? the strategies, the year-to-year

campaigns, what about the other side? this is important in any war, what was the other side side. this is an important part of any war, what was the other side thinking and doing and for that we don't carry as much documentation. very little, indeed and then there are issues about specific events. i'm working on a book with bill burnow in which we have discovered a great deal now about what was called the vance ploy. has anyone heard about the vance ploy? or operation dark hook which you may, i'm sure have heard about. so many other issues incueding the domestic side of the war. the political pressures on nixon both from the left and the right, congress' role, the press, public opinion and of course, the consequences.

>> those were questions you should ask him. the only reason why stephen king has published more books than john prados is that king gets to make stuff up. prados has written 17 non-fiction books including the hidden history of vietnam. "the blood trail" which is about the ho chi minh trail, and the pentagon papers and vietnam, the history of an unwinnable war. a senior fellow with the national security archive and indispensable institution for historians and everyone interested in fighting needless government secrecy. prados heads the iraq documentation project or the vietnam project. it is in his contract that he mentioned the normandy crucible which is not about vietnam. ladies and gentlemen, a relentless researcher and heavy

weight historian john pradas. >> thank you very much. that was very gracious. we also add my troyes those of all my colleagues and 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, since we were just talking about historiography, let me open on a historical graphical note because it shows you how the process goes of trying to read the tea leaves and enter pretty issues in history. so the phrase decent interval actually dollars an article that henry kissinger wrote which he published in the journal foreign

affairs or in the months of the 1968 election especially when foreign affairs experts positioned themselves for potential appointments and new administrations by putting out views and opinions that potential precedents can take a look at and decide that they like these people and 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 1969-70 when kissinger is first appointed national security adviser to richard nixon, he publishes a collection of his articles in the little book called american foreign policy in which he includes this paper decent interval. in 1977 after kissinger has been burned by a whole series of

different controversies and the vietnam war has round 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 the article, decent interval does not appear in that new published edition of kissinger's work. so the historian must ask himself, why is that? what happened there and what does that mean about what henry kissinger did or did not need to be doing in 1969 and that's the 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 in the vietnam war, you can see some of his standing responses. mr. nixon hardly ever met a force option that he did not like. you know? in 1969 my colleague jeff briefly mentioned that doug hook planned and 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 and not with the enemy because they had not e viefld significantly powerful or potent plan in 1971 when we invaded southern laos, mr. nixon wished to fire the united states commander in vietnam general craig abrams

because he was not acting forcefully enough, in 1972 when the north vietnamese launched the easter offensive and they 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 april of that year when mr. nixon specifically wrote in memos that heen 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 tonkan 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 of 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. plus 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 een talk about warf e warfare, but let's talk about why people do things and the kinds of things that they do and let's take the pentagon papers because they had been in the news a lot of late. the first thing that happened where "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 stran scritranscripts are pn that book in 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 linden johnson, hubert humphrey, john kennedy. it was fine as far as he was concerned. alexander hague calling up mr. nixon and then henry kissinger who at first was also not determined to pursue this were the ones