They died for Henry Kissinger’s “credibility”: The real history of our Vietnam immorality

There was no good answer when John Kerry asked how you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake. Here's why

David Milne

Détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China were significant breakthroughs in their own right. Indeed, a positive appraisal of the Nixon administration’s foreign policies is predicated on our viewing them this way. But Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did not view them in isolation at the time. Instead, both men believed that Moscow and Beijing, keen to extract economic and strategic benefits from an improved relationship with Washington, would apply pressure on Hanoi to agree to peace terms permitting a full American withdrawal. On this topic their reasoning was misguided. It did not accord sufficient respect to North Vietnam’s fiercely guarded status as an independent actor, or indeed to the ideological solidarity that existed on at least a bilateral basis between Hanoi and its two Marxist-Leninist patrons.

So when the United States withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, when “peace” was finally achieved, it came at a horrendous cost. Cambodia was dragged directly into the fray, leading ultimately to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and a genocide that killed approximately 1.7 million people— 20.1 percent of Cambodia’s population. Hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers and noncombatants lost their lives. Of the fifty-seven thousand American soldiers who died on or above Vietnamese soil, twenty thousand perished during Nixon’s presidency. During the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon had stated his intention to achieve “peace with honor.” In 1971, a returning veteran named John Kerry testified powerfully before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He indicted the war as “the biggest nothing in history” and posed a powerful question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”