National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger during peace talks on the Vietnam War, 1973. North Vietnamese Politburo Member Le Duc Tho with U.S. Kissinger Negotiates the Paris Peace Accords What Nixon didn’t anticipate was Kissinger’s ability to eclipse his boss: “He created his own Frankenstein monster in Kissinger,” says Schwartz. “Nixon wanted his own man doing his negotiations so the credit for ending the war would come to him, not the State or Defense Department,” says Thomas Alan Schwartz, director of Undergraduate History Studies at Vanderbilt University and author, Henry Kissinger and American Power. Nixon circumvented the state department and the foreign service by granting Kissinger permission to conduct secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar and author, Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam. “Kissinger, like Nixon, distrusted Cold War bureaucracy,” says Robert. But to pull out of the conflict meant abandoning American allies in South Vietnam and, Kissinger and Nixon feared, make America look weak. Two hundred out of the 500,000 Americans stationed in Vietnam were dying every week, fueling even more protest against the draft. The Vietnam War was a central issue in the 1968 presidential election, and Nixon campaigned on the promise to bring “peace with honor.” The unpopular war begun under Kennedy and Johnson as a way to stop communism from spreading in Southeast Asia was costing taxpayers an annual $30 billion. It was also the tie that led to his downfall. In his book, Ending the War in Vietnam, Kissinger depicts himself as being “drawn into the vortex” of the Vietnam War, going from someone “who had met the President-elect only once and then only for a few minutes” to becoming “the principal adviser to the president on the policy for the extraction from Vietnam and eventually the chief negotiator.” His closeness with Nixon was his initial source of power. President Nixon (center) meeting with Nguyen Phu Duc (left), South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu’ special emissary, to put his seal of approval on the Vietnam cease-fire agreement negotiated by Henry Kissinger (at right).
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