Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia

by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

Overview

This gripping account interweaves Nixon and Kissinger's pursuit of the war in Southeast Asia and their diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China with on-the-ground military events and US domestic reactions to the war conducted in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. While recognizing the distinctive personalities and ideas of these two men, this study more broadly conveys the competing roles and impact of the professional military, the Congress, and a mobilized peace movement.

Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration's relations with the Soviet Union and China vis a vis the war in Southeast Asia. She argues that in their desperate effort to overcome, or at least overshadow, their failure in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger made major concessions to both nations in the field of arms control, their response to the India-Pakistan war, and the diplomacy surrounding Taiwan—much of this secret. Despite policymakers' claims that the Vietnam War was a "national security" necessity that would demonstrate American strength to the communist superpowers and "credibility" to friendly governments, the historical record suggests a different reality.

A half-century after the Paris Peace Conference marking the withdrawal of US troops and advisors from Vietnam and foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, Fire and Rain is a dramatic account of geopolitical decision making, civil society, and the human toll of the war on the people of Southeast Asia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197639061
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/17/2023
Pages:	632
Sales rank:	168,697
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is a Professor of US History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49, winner of the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Herbert Hoover Book Prize and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Prize. She has written op-eds and done media appearances for numerous outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has been a consultant to several members of Congress and is legislative coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "This is Not Frivolous, Mr. Chairman!"

Part I: The War

Chapter 1:"Mired in Stalemate"
Chapter 2:"We Will Hit Them without Warning"
Chapter 3:"I See Death Coming Up the Hill"
Chapter 4:"It Makes Our Position Murder"
Chapter 5:"Blow Their Candles Out"
Chapter 6:"You Shouldn't Kill That Many"
Chapter 7:"The Idealists Are the Builders"
Chapter 8:"Hit 'Em in the Gut"
Chapter 9:"The Great Mystery of Life"
Chapter 10:"The Greatest Success"
Chapter 11:"Enjoy the Breeze"
Chapter 12:"We Might Have Burned Your House"
Chapter 13:"Something Like a Moron"
Chapter 14:"Take A Stinking Hill"
Chapter 15:"Everyone Was Crying"
Chapter 16:"Bring Our Brothers Home"

Part II: War and Diplomacy

Chapter 17:"You've Only Got One Card"
Chapter 18:"Man of Peace"
Chapter 19:"Knock the Shit Out of Them"
Chapter 20:"Seize the Hour! Seize the Day"
Chapter 21:"The Whole Ground Shakes"
Chapter 22:"Let Us Think of Tanya"
Chapter 23:"Four More Years"
Chapter 24:"You're Three for Three, Mr. President"
Chapter 25:"Miserable, Filthy People"
Chapter 26:"A Terrific Let-down"
Chapter 27:"Let the Americans See Me"
Epilogue:"We Were Serious People!"
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"With over 30,000 books published on the Vietnam War, does it make sense to write another book about the conflict waged by the United States in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam between 1957 and 1973? Reading Fire and Rain, the answer is affirmative for several reasons." — Mariano Aguirre , International Affairs

"Eisenberg's account reads as easily as a novel....In detailing Nixon and Kissinger's (often secret) overtures to and negotiations with the Communist superpowers of China and the Soviet Union...Eisenberg stresses that the pair often circumvented their own State Department....This is...a recurring theme: the increasing number of concessions made, in secret, to Communist powers while ostensibly fighting Communism in South Vietnam." — Sarah Cords, The Progressive

"A gripping narrative of America's war in Vietnam during its fateful, concluding years, replete with intrigue, manipulation, self-deception, and mindless brutality. Fire and Rain is a vividly written, even harrowing book. Carolyn Eisenberg has produced a masterpiece." — Andrew Bacevich, author of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century

"Even experts on Vietnam will be surprised at the revelations in Carolyn Eisenberg's Fire and Rain. Deploying a wealth of declassified documents, archival finds, and eyewitness accounts, Fire and Rain paints a sweeping, panoramic, and devastating portrait of the war that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger waged, a fatal fraud on America and Southeast Asia." — Ken Hughes, author of Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection

"An impressive work of diplomatic history, Carolyn Eisenberg's Fire and Rain convincingly reveals how Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's catastrophic war in Southeast Asia set the course of subsequent US diplomacy with Russia and China. This book should be widely read." — Greg Grandin, Yale University

"A formidable achievement. Carolyn Eisenberg's Fire and Rain is a brilliant and deeply shocking biography of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Relying on Kissinger's own telephone transcripts and newly declassified presidential papers, Eisenberg's measured narrative strips away all the lies and myths to document how these deeply flawed men single-handedly prolonged the Vietnam war. It is an all too human tale of deception and incompetence. Kissinger's vaunted reputation will never recover from a book destined to become a classic history of the Vietnam tragedy." — Kai Bird, Leon Levy Center for Biography

"Accessibly written and meticulously researched, Fire and Rain is a thought-provoking and important book on the American war in Vietnam." — Daniel R. Hart, VVA Veteran

"Eisenberg recounts the last phase of the U.S. war in Vietnam with new details and caustic moral clarity, based on declassified papers and transcripts of taped conversations between President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger... They engineered diplomatic breakthroughs with Beijing and Moscow that produced important results but no substantial help in pressuring Hanoi to negotiate. Nixon ordered the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos to force concessions from Hanoi, but the resulting tweaks to the peace deal reached in Paris in 1973 did not change the situation on the ground. It was a fig-leaf agreement that foreseeably led to the fall of the feckless South Vietnamese regime just two years later. Peace was achieved, but not, as the administration claimed, 'with honor.'" — Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs

From the Publisher

12/01/2022

An activist scholar of international relations, Eisenberg (history, Hofstra Univ.; Drawing the Line) provides students and practitioners a clearly written study of intertwined U.S. negotiations with the Soviet Union and China during the conflicts in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The book focuses on the effects of the military, Congress, and the peace movement on the policy choices Nixon and Kissinger made. She examines ostensible contradictions, such as the simultaneous pursuit of both détente and armed struggle, and she showcases this using archival materials from the Nixon and the Ford Libraries, as well as from the American Friends Service Committee and Kent State University. She argues that the antiwar movement shortened a conflict that many decision makers (as well as active citizens) recognized as destined for a U.S. defeat. She deplores the lack of sufficient concern by most of the electorate in 1972 and by the diplomats at the top for the human costs in Asia, despite abundant reporting by the mainstream media. VERDICT Successfully contextualizing war in a socially and politically polarized country, Eisenberg offers surprises, such as the beneficial role of insider and former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to reduce troop involvement in Vietnam.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

Library Journal

2022-10-12
A comprehensive history of the late stages of the Vietnam War.

Eisenberg, a professor of U.S. history and foreign relations, is nothing if not thorough in her coverage of the nasty politics, frustrating diplomacy, and stormy homefront. She makes regular detours to the battlefield but emphasizes the roles of two larger-than-life American leaders—Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger—who aimed to bring matters to a satisfactory conclusion and failed. The author draws on a vast amount of declassified documents, “an avalanche of material about [the Nixon] presidency that has appeared over the previous fif­teen years,” offering “more insights into the foreign policy operations of an administration than we are likely to see again.” Eisenberg, a veteran scholar of the era, delivers these insights in mostly lucid prose, creating a meticulously researched narrative about a deplorable episode in American history that, with more information, becomes even more deplorable. Nixon took office in 1969 with the promise of ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A few years later, the last American soldier had left, but even readers who experienced that period will squirm at Eisenberg’s expert account of how it happened. Although she cuts away regularly to the war, this is mostly a geopolitical history emphasizing the actions of Nixon and Kissinger, his pugnacious national security adviser. Both agreed with military leaders that North Vietnam would accept a satisfactory peace only in response to painful losses on the battlefield. At the same time, Nixon announced that troop withdrawals would begin immediately, infuriating the military but pleasing Congress, the media, and the widespread anti-war movement. This mixed message failed to discourage the North Vietnamese, and Eisenberg’s compelling yet painful text never fully explains why Nixon and Kissinger persisted for four years in a policy guaranteed to fail—at the cost of another 20,000 Americans and “between one and two million Asians,” mostly civilian and innocent.

An authoritative history showing the perils of “selective vision of people in power.

Kirkus Reviews