Jeffrey Kimball

Exchange on the Nixon Administration and the Vietnam War

I am grateful for the generally favorable review given my book The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004) in the Winter 2007 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies. Unfortunately, the reviewer, James J. Wirtz, grossly misrepresented the nature of the book and my theses, while also failing to place these theses in historiographic context. Wirtz asserts, for example, that “Kimball seems most interested in using the documentary evidence to demonstrate that [President Richard] Nixon was in fact ‘mad’ in seeking to create the impression that he was becoming increasingly irrational.” To the contrary, I do not claim that either Nixon or Henry Kissinger was necessarily mad or certiaably crazy in pursuing “madman theory” stratagems. I do demonstrate, however, that they were naive and unsuccessful in using this stratagem. The reviewer implies that I claim that Nixon and Kissinger “realized that Chinese and Soviet ofacials were willing to aght in Vietnam to the last North Vietnamese soldier.” Nixon and Kissinger thought no such thing. Indeed, their “triangular” and “linkage” diplomacy was based on quite different assumptions. Wirtz claims that “Nixon and Kissinger were masterful practitioners of realpolitik” and that “Kissinger also emerges as a consummate diplomat,” thus implying that I drew these conclusions or that the documentary evidence I present in the book supported them. Instead, I argue that all parties—including Vietnamese, Soviet, and Chinese—engaged in realpolitik, but that of all the players Nixon and Kissinger were the least successful. Concerning Kissinger’s diplomatic skills, he was tactically very clever and a good debater, but he was also, as Nixon himself often commented, a poor negotiator. Wirtz refers to the documentary excerpts in the book as “fragments.” In fact, most of the documents are substantial excerpts, and some are whole documents—all properly referenced to the originals. The book, as I explain in the preface, is not intended to be a comprehensive compendium or, in the re-

Nixon's nuclear ploy

Richard Nixon thought a secret, worldwide nuclear alert would remain unknown to the American public, and he was right. But his strategy–to threaten the Soviets into helping bring an end to the Vietnam war–was unsuccessful. They may not even have noticed.