<i>Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia</i> by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

Eisenberg delivers a painstakingly detailed and devastating account of the Vietnam War policies of President Nixon. She joins a crowded field of study, to be sure. Historians, political scientists, journalists, memoirists, and others have probed nearly every aspect of the conflict in Indochina, much as they have scrutinized in granular detail the peculiar partnership between Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser and top foreign policy aide. Yet Eisenberg manages to surpass all previous scholarly efforts with this empirically rich, crisply written, and analytically astute monograph. Rooted in exhaustive research and brimming with fresh insights, this book is a triumph of traditional diplomatic-military history.Eisenberg covers the period from Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969 to the signing of the deeply flawed Paris peace accords four years later. The book’s first half examines the administration’s attempts to combine steady U.S. troop withdrawals—to placate a domestic audience eager to bring the war to a close—with tactical military escalations designed to pressure North Vietnam into accepting a settlement favorable to U.S. interests. The central contradiction of that strategy, the author makes clear, lay in the illusion that the administration “could somehow wrest a victory on the battlefield or at the negotiating table with ever-diminishing numbers of American troops” (333–334). It could not. Following the calamitous Laotian incursion of February 1971, which baldly exposed the limits of “Vietnamization,” Nixon and Kissinger fundamentally altered their strategy.From that point forward, a period covered in the second half of the book, they turned to their nominal communist adversaries, the Soviet Union and China, for help in extricating the United States from the morass of Vietnam. In so doing, the White House revealed to Moscow, Beijing, and the wider world another core contradiction of its Vietnam policy: that a war begun and rationalized as a valiant effort to halt the expansion of the communist monolith would wind up with U.S. leaders beseeching the two major communist powers for their assistance in its ending. Yet that gambit, too, fell short, producing tens of thousands of needless deaths, millions of refugees, and a peace settlement that amounted to little more than a fig leaf for the final exit of U.S. troops and the return of U.S. prisoners of war. Eisenberg’s empathetic focus on the victims of U.S. decision-making stands in welcome contrast to studies that confine themselves entirely to the perspective of the decision-makers. “The Nixon administration’s conduct of the war—in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—was a failure that yielded a tsunami of personal tragedies for both Americans and Asians,” Eisenberg concludes. “Yet nobody was ever held accountable” (14).This book draws from an extraordinary tranche of archival records, perhaps unique for any presidential administration before or since, supplemented by dozens of interviews with former Vietnamese officials. The notorious White House tape recordings, coupled with the verbatim transcripts of Kissinger’s telephone conversations, allow Eisenberg to give an unvarnished, fly-on-the wall account of the two principals’ deliberations, replete with example after example of amoral callousness, deceit, double-dealing, sycophancy, and self-delusion—punctuated with frequently crude, profane language. “I’d finish off the goddamn place,” Nixon stormed about the North Vietnamese at one point. “Just knock the shit out of them” (340). “We will keep our chins up and keep kicking them in the balls,” he exclaimed at another (380). In a typical rant, Kissinger chimed in: “They’re shits … they are tawdry, miserable, filthy people. They make the Russians look good” (473). Nor did the South Vietnamese fare much better in his assessment. President Nguyen Van Thieu was described as “an unmitigated, selfish, psychopathic person, son-of-a-bitch” (480).Eisenberg attributes some of the policy-making pathologies that she dissects with such withering precision to the personal psychological pathologies of her two main characters, referring throughout to their grandiosity, vanity, jealousy, insecurity, mood swings, and emotional instability. Yet she never engages with the one discipline—psychology—that might have helped her reach a deeper comprehension of those behavioral issues. That limitation aside, this remains an outstanding work of scholarship that deserves a wide readership.