A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement (review)

A Bitter Peace enjoys real strengths but suffers from serious shortcomings. Asselin's goal is to explain why the principals in the Vietnam War—the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (Hanoi)—negotiated an agreement that doomed the very peace it promised. They did so, he argues, because it "was the most expedient solution under the circumstances" (p. xi). He further argues that two essential "realities," heretofore ignored or neglected by scholars of the Vietnam War in his view, importantly inform the story: Hanoi was from beginning to end "as active a player in the war and throughout the negotiations as the United States was"; and "the outcome of the war . . . was not determined on the battlefield but at the negotiating table" (p. xiii).

On the plus side of the ledger, Asselin creates a usable, well-written narrative of a complex story. Despite many temptations, the author exercises commendable discipline and stays with his topic—the negotiations—and in the main gets the story straight. That's not been done before. The second major asset of the book is its tone. The author has maintained throughout a tone of reasonableness, objectivity, and scholarly distance. Because these qualities are not always present in Vietnam War historiography, we should applaud his accomplishment.

There are two serious liabilities. The first concerns documentation, the second Asselin's so-called "realities." When he researched his doctoral thesis, which he finished in 1997, only a small amount of the relevant Nixon Papers was available. While he made good use of what he could find to tell the American side of the story, he needed more than the few primary sources he actually used. Unfortunately, the first major release of Nixon National Security Council records to the public occurred in April 2001, probably too late for him to take advantage of what would have been crucial evidence as he transformed his thesis into this book. Concerning the enemy, it is unlikely that he found much in the four primary source collections in Hanoi he cites. Where he would have most likely discovered critical documents would have been in the archives of the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and the Party Central Committee, all off limits to foreigners.

The second liability revolves around his "realities"—he claims too much for them. All who study the war have known for years, if not decades, that North Vietnam was as active in the conflict and in the negotiations as the United States. After all, the main contention of the United States government from the start was that the Hanoi ran the war and negotiations had to be conducted with leaders there. On the military side, among other things, we have known for just as long that the North controlled the war from Hanoi, infiltrated political cadre and military command and control staff to the South as early as 1961, and infiltrated main force regiments and divisions from late 1964 on. Regarding the second "reality," historians of the war have not ignored it so much as rejected it, except in a very limited sense. Asselin may stumble here because he examines an atypical year in which diplomacy seemed undeniably significant. Another possibility is that he has not understood the role of diplomacy in Vietnamese Communist war doctrine. That doctrine involves a sophisticated intermingling of three types of conflict—military, political, and diplomatic—to achieve an objective. Generally, diplomacy remains the junior partner until certain political and military goals are accomplished, at which time it plays a more significant role. This happened in 1972, but not until South Vietnamese forces and American airpower had foiled the enemy's attempt to end-run the negotiations via the Easter Offensive. At this point...