“Show the thing you contend for to be reason,” Burke had said, “show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please.” Instead, what the United States was contending for was a “hopeless enterprise,” as Jean Sainteny, from his long French experience in Vietnam, told Henry Kissinger. If Kissinger had read more Burke than Talleyrand, the course of his policy might have been different.
