The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

While the American and South Vietnamese armed forces were trying to increase the military pressure on Hanoi, Nixon and Kissinger were also pursuing an ambitious agenda to secure a peace deal. Starting in early 1970, the national security adviser would steal away to Paris to conduct secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho, a member of North Vietnam’s Politburo, in the working-class neighborhood of Choisy-le-Roi.30 The talks were stalemated over American demands for a mutual pullout of North Vietnamese and U.S. forces until Nixon and Kissinger decided to make a major concession in May 1971. It was billed as a “cease-fire in place,” but, as Kissinger admitted to Nixon in an Oval Office conversation, “It’s a unilateral withdrawal. We’re not asking them to pull out.”31 Nixon and Kissinger continued to hope that South Vietnam could hold out on its own without any American military presence, even while North Vietnamese troops remained in the South, but they were realistic enough to know this might not be possible and cynical enough not to care.