It is impossible to review a book about former President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Vietnam War without first addressing the elephant in the room: What can possibly be learned from yet another book about this era? The Nixon Administration is now fifty years in the past; should we still care about the foreign policy decisions he and his national security adviser (and later Secretary of State) made?
The answer, according to Carolyn Woods Eisenberg’s new history book Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia, is yes.
Eisenberg, a historian at Hofstra University, as well as the legislative coordinator for the group Historians for Peace and Democracy, states in her introduction that she first imagined the book as a “narrow, relatively brief study of Vietnam policy during the Nixon years.” That emphasis changed, as she noted in an email to The Progressive, at least in part because, as she worked on the book over the past twenty years, “there was a tremendous amount of previously declassified material that became available.” Such materials included recordings of President Nixon that were unrelated to Watergate, as well as more than 20,000 pages of Henry Kissinger’s telcons (transcripts of telephone conversations) that were released in 2004.
Relying heavily on those newly declassified materials, Eisenberg’s account reads as easily as a novel. She uses copious quotes from, and dialogue between, the major foreign policy players of the Administration to tell the story. The bulk of the narrative covers the years of Nixon’s first term, from 1969 through 1972; the latter part of the book focuses on Nixon’s increasingly desperate efforts both to end the Vietnam War “with honor,” and to draw attention away from Watergate and the calls for his impeachment in 1973 and 1974.
Oxford University Press
Eisenberg’s description of the costly Battle for Hill 937 (known as “Hamburger Hill”), early in the book, highlights how she melds military history with Nixon’s use of televised speeches to influence public opinion. She frames this section alongside the president’s refusal to change strategies in Vietnam, despite evidence that he and his closest advisors were failing. One such strategy was the Administration’s reliance on secret and devastating bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia, independent nations in which Nixon was unauthorized to use such force.
Another theme throughout the book is how the pressure to withdraw American ground troops from Vietnam, from both the vocal peace movement and the general American public, shaped war policy. In a lengthy description of President Nixon’s televised speech of May 14, 1969, Eisenberg shows how Nixon assured the nation that much of his time had been monopolized by “the search for a way to bring lasting peace to Vietnam.” He also assured his listeners that the time was fast approaching when “South Vietnamese forces will be able to take over some of the fighting fronts [in the war].”
As Eisenberg points out, however, that speech was a “work of obfuscation and in some respects outright dishonesty.” Although Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird was actively pushing for troop reductions and the transfer of responsibility for fighting to the South Vietnamese military (known as “Vietnamization”), Nixon often balked at announcing such reductions publicly. His speech was instead heavy on idealism and the rhetoric of peace; even his daughter lauded his speaking of field hospitals in Vietnam and his use of “the emotional thing.”
At the same time as Nixon was giving that well-received speech, the Battle of Hamburger Hill in the A Shau Valley, near the border with Laos, was descending into chaos. Originally meant to be “the largest air-mobile operation of the entire war,” undertaken by nine battalions (five American and four South Vietnamese), the engagement resulted in heavy American fatality and casualty numbers that helped further galvanize the peace movement.
Throughout the book, Eisenberg shows how this pattern was repeated, with Nixon and Kissinger constantly upping the stakes of military engagements, while simultaneously engaging in speech-making and foreign-relations gambits meant primarily to distract the public from the truth of how the war was proceeding.
In “War and Diplomacy,” the book’s second half, Eisenberg pays particular attention to Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts with China and the Soviet Union. In July 1971, a meeting was set between Kissinger and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, that Nixon hoped would lead to the foreign policy achievement of an invitation to China. After much negotiating, during which Kissinger assured the Chinese that American interest in Taiwan’s independence was flexible, the historic summit in China was scheduled for February 1972. It was a public relations success, and when Nixon returned home to Andrews Air Force Base, “15,000 people were there to welcome him home.” He immediately went on television to tout the summit as his Administration’s tireless work towards peace.
In detailing Nixon and Kissinger’s (often secret) overtures to and negotiations with the Communist superpowers of China and the Soviet Union, however, Eisenberg stresses that the pair often circumvented their own State Department, frequently failing to inform William Rogers, Kissinger’s immediate predecessor as Secretary of State, of many of their dealings with the representatives of foreign governments. This is also a recurring theme: the increasing number of concessions made, in secret, to Communist powers while ostensibly fighting Communism in South Vietnam. Eisenberg tells The Progressive that she herself was surprised by “the extent to which both Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomacy with the Soviets and Chinese was shaped by their need for help and cover, given the intractable situation in Vietnam.”
In her introduction, Eisenberg states that, during her decades spent writing the book, she “realized the importance of integrating the study of high-level policy with an examination of its impact on people’s lives.” Throughout Fire and Rain, she reminds readers how the Vietnam War affected American veterans and citizens, but also of the war’s overwhelming human and ecological cost to the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
When asked how her focus on these impacts was shaped, Eisenberg tells The Progressive that, when she taught students, she often found herself looking for books that did more than just describe policy or the human costs; she wanted to offer her students resources that did both. In time she came to see that individuals making policy decisions without looking at or understanding the real-world impact of those decisions “was an important explanation of how catastrophic policies were adopted. When you look at the policy discussions—the emotional distance of officials from the people who would be affected is stunning . . . the inability to imagine any other reality, beyond the narrowed vision of their colleagues, led them to misunderstand situations and the likely results.”
As we continue to mark the anniversaries of wars led or fueled by the United States—March 19, 2023, was the twentieth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—Eisenberg reminds us of the dangers of continuing to divorce foreign policy decisions from their repercussions. She concludes the book Fire and Rain with an opinion about Nixon-era policy makers that is still relevant to today’s leaders: rarely did they acknowledge “the ways in which the unrestrained use of American firepower had multiplied enemies and discredited friends.”