Sixty Days To Peace

Historical events are never identical, but the study of them does provide a context within which to formulate meaningful questions to order and guide decision making. And that is the purpose of our Military History Series -- not to provide blueprints for future action, but, rather, historical benchmarks to assist in forming creative responses to the ever-changing global challenges to US interests and security. An especially informative historical period took place during the last days of the US military withdrawal from Vietnam. On 23 January 1973, the President announced to the Nation that the United States and North Vietnam had reached agreement in Paris on "ending the war and restoring peace" in Vietnam. The accord provided for a Four-Party Joint Military Commission, composed of military representatives from North Vietnam, South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and the United States, to implement certain provisions of the accord. This National Defense University military history records the experiences of the US soldiers on the US Delegation during the 60-day life of the Commission. The author, Lieutenant Colonel Walter S. Dillard, USA, was the official historian of the US Delegation and is thus uniquely qualified to write of the events marking the last days of our military presence in Vietnam. The author's analyses of these events should be instructive for those who would better understand the enigmas of US relations with the developing world; for our military who would better understand the functions of and constraints on such delegations; and for students of statecraft who would better understand the interplay between treaty-making and desired outcomes. John S. Pustay Lieutenant General,United States Army President, National Defense University

In 1973, Henry Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize for the secret negotiations that led to the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam. Nixon famously declared the 1973 agreement to be "peace with honor"; America was disengaging, yet South Vietnam still stood to fight its own war. Kissinger promptly moved to seal up his personal records of the negotiations, arguing that they are private, not government, records, and that he will only allow them to be unsealed after his death. No Peace, No Honor deploys extraordinary documentary bombshells, including a complete North Vietnamese account of the secret talks, to blow the lid off the true story of the peace process. Neither Nixon and Kissinger's critics, nor their defenders, have guessed at the full truth: the entire peace negotiation was a sham. Nixon did not plan to exit Vietnam, but he knew that in order to continue bombing without a congressional cutoff, he would need a fig leaf. Kissinger negotiated a deal that he and Nixon expected the North to violate. Ironically, their long-maintained spin on what happened next is partially true: only Watergate stopped America from sending the bombers back in. This revelatory book has many other surprises. Berman produces new evidence that finally proves a long-suspected connection between candidate Nixon in 1968 and the South Vietnamese government. He tells the full story of Operation Duck Hook, a large-scale offensive planned by Nixon as early as 1969 that would have widened the war even to the point of bombing civilian food supplies. He reveals transcripts of candidate George McGovern's attempts to negotiate his own October surprise for 1972, and a seriocomic plan by the CIA to overthrow South Vietnam's President Thieu even as late as 1975. Throughout, with page-turning dialogue provided by official transcriptions and notes, Berman reveals the step-by-step betrayal of South Vietnam that started with a short-circuited negotiations loop, and ended with double-talk, false promises, and outright abandonment. Berman draws on hundreds of declassified documents, including the notes of Kissinger's aides, phone taps of the Nixon campaign in 1968, and McGovern's own transcripts of his negotiations with North Vietnam. He has been able to double- and triple-check North Vietnamese accounts against American notes of meetings, as well as previously released bits of the record. He has interviewed many key players, including high-level South Vietnamese officials. This definitive account forever and completely rewrites the final chapter of the Vietnam war. Henry Kissinger's Nobel Prize was won at the cost of America's honor.

By the time Phil Chase is elected president, the world’s climate is far on its way to irreversible change. Food scarcity, housing shortages, diminishing medical care, and vanishing species are just some of the consequences. The erratic winter the Washington, D.C., area is experiencing is another grim reminder of a global weather pattern gone haywire: bone-chilling cold one day, balmy weather the next. But the president-elect remains optimistic and doesn’t intend to give up without a fight. A maverick in every sense of the word, Chase starts organizing the most ambitious plan to save the world from disaster since FDR–and assembling a team of top scientists and advisers to implement it. For Charlie Quibler, this means reentering the political fray full-time and giving up full-time care of his young son, Joe. For Frank Vanderwal, hampered by a brain injury, it means trying to protect the woman he loves from a vengeful ex and a rogue “black ops” agency not even the president can control–a task for which neither Frank’s work at the National Science Foundation nor his study of Tibetan Buddhism can prepare him. In a world where time is running out as quickly as its natural resources, where surveillance is almost total and freedom nearly nonexistent, the forecast for the Chase administration looks darker each passing day. For as the last–and most terrible–of natural disasters looms on the horizon, it will take a miracle to stop the clock . . . the kind of miracle that only dedicated men and women can bring about.

The Long Road Home is a companion work to the recently published book on the prisoner of war experience in Southeast Asia-Honor Bound by Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley. The two books were prepared at the request of former Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements, Jr. Some of the early research and drafts of a few chapters are the contribution of Wilber W Hoare, Jr., and Ernest H. Giusti, former JCS historians who helped initiate the project. Davis carried forward the research and writing to completion over a period of many years and is entitled to the fullest credit for production of the final text and documentation. This history of Washington's role in shaping prisoner of war policy during the Vietnam War reveals the difficult, often emotional, and vexing nature of a problem that engaged the attention of the highest officials of the U.S. government, including the president. It examines frictions and disagreements between the State and Defense Departments and within Defense itself as a sometimes conflicted organization struggled to cope with an imposing array of policy issues: efforts to ameliorate the brutal conditions to which the American captives were subjected; relations with families of prisoners in captivity; the proper mix of quiet diplomacy and aggressive publicity; and planning for the prisoners' return. At a pivotal juncture the Department of Defense exerted a major influence on overall policy through its insistence in 1969 that the government "Go Public" with information about the plight of prisoners held by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. There is evidence that this powerful campaign contributed to the gradual improvement in the treatment of the prisoners and to their safe return in 1973. The detailed account of negotiations with the North Vietnamese for the withdrawal of American forces from South Vietnam makes clear how important in all U.S. calculations was securing the release of the prisoners.