No Peace, No Honor
Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam
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- ¥300
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- ¥300
発行者による作品情報
In this shocking exposé on the betrayal of South Vietnam, premier historian Larry Berman uses never-before-seen North Vietnamese documents to create a sweeping indictment against President Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
On April 30, 1975, when U.S. helicopters pulled the last soldiers out of Saigon, the question lingered: Had American and Vietnamese lives been lost in vain? When the city fell shortly thereafter, the answer was clearly yes. The Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam—signed by Henry Kissinger in 1973, and hailed as "peace with honor" by President Nixon—was a travesty.
In No Peace, No Honor, Larry Berman reveals the long-hidden truth in secret documents concerning U.S. negotiations that Kissinger had sealed—negotiations that led to his sharing the Nobel Peace Prize. Based on newly declassified information and a complete North Vietnamese transcription of the talks, Berman offers the real story for the first time, proving that there is only one word for Nixon and Kissinger's actions toward the United States' former ally, and the tens of thousands of soldiers who fought and died: betrayal.
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Henry Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for brokering the peace treaty that ended American participation in the Vietnam War in January of that year. Le Duc Tho declined the prize. Berman's eye-opening book makes a strong case although he does not say so that Kissinger should have turned down the prize as well. Making perceptive use of a large cache of recently declassified American and Vietnamese documents, Berman (of the University of California's Washington, D.C., Center) paints a decidedly negative picture of Kissinger's motives and machinations during the four years he negotiated with the North Vietnamese. Kissinger, Berman writes, "was willing to tell one side one thing and the other the opposite, leaving them to sort things out later." Berman's pioneering research indicates also that President Richard Nixon claimed he achieved "peace with honor" while knowing full well that the terms he agreed to would lead eventually to a North Vietnamese military victory following America's withdrawal. Berman also shows that the North Vietnamese were far from blameless during the negotiating. Their leaders regularly deceived the American negotiators and never planned to live up to the peace terms they signed. Surprisingly, the one group of leaders that comes out relatively unscathed is the notoriously corrupt South Vietnamese regime headed by Nguyen Van Thieu, which wound up agreeing to peace terms dictated by North Vietnam and the United States terms that all but ordained South Vietnam's eventual fall to the Communists in April 1975.
