Kissinger and Nixon

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Peter W. Rodman

Dramas based on history are as old as the theater, and a strict identity between historical fact and literary "truth" has not always been insisted on. Shakespeare never published an appendix or declassified documents. But as more recent events become the subject of dramatization, the greater accessibility of historical truth imposes rather more of a duty either to show some respect for facts or to disclaim the pretense and admit to a fictionalization.

My interest here is in the recent Turner Network Television drama, Kissinger and Nixon. Its subject is the climactic phase of the negotiation to end the war in Indochina, from June 1972 to January 1973. But its focus is the intrigue between White House aide Henry Kissinger and his President.

The film begins with a grand but ambiguous pronouncement that "all history is based on interpretation." But then it does assert a factual basis, relying largely on the Walter Isaacson biography of Kissinger. That is a bad sign, since Isaacson's treatment of Vietnam is the shallowest and most cliche-ridden portion of an extremely shallow and cliche-ridden book. (Full disclosure is in order here. I have been a longtime associate of Kissinger. I can't claim impartiality, but I can claim direct personal knowledge of the facts, having served on his Vietnam negotiating team.)

What we have here is a sloppy cartoon version of events. Ron Silver does a passable Kissinger imitation (though not as good as Ted Koppel's); Beau Bridges does an absurdly buffoonish Nixon (not as funny as Rich Little's). The whole treatment oozes cynicism.

The tone is set early on by a scene in which Nixon discovers only by an intelligence intercept that Kissinger is resuming his negotiations with Le Duc Tho, and confronts an abashed Kissinger with this discovery. The scene is a fabrication; its premise is a fabrication, perhaps even a libelous one; the secret negotiating "backchannel" operated from 1969 onward with Nixon's full authorization and knowledge.

A genuine tactical disagreement over how much to pressure the South Vietnamese did arise between Nixon and Kissinger in the fall of 1972, which provides the grist for Isaacson and the TNT broadcast. The problem is that they misunderstand the issue completely. The North Vietnamese feared that Nixon would be far more formidable after re-election; therefore they insisted on accelerating the schedule of negotiations and suggested the possibility of completing an agreement by October. Kissinger's eagerness to press the negotiation in that period was based on a strategy: to squeeze the North Vietnamese up against their own deadline, extract the maximum concessions from them, and nail them down. Nixon approved this strategy. He also approved the tentative agreement that Kissinger brought home in early October.

Most of this is omitted from the TNT version.

This "history" is a bizarre melange of both liberal and conservative cliches. The film implies a mass of civilian casualties from the 1972 Christmas bombing, though there were in fact few. It ascribes no motive for the bombing except an inebriated Nixon's itch to bomb Hanoi while Saigon was obstructing the negotiation. (In fact, Saigon was cooperating at that point and it was Hanoi that had thrown the negotiation into a stall.) Likewise, the canard is repeated that we could have obtained the same deal four years earlier and saved thousands of American lives -- this, in the face of the mountain of evidence that Hanoi rejected the same terms consistently for four years.

As for conservative cliches, they concern the South Vietnamese. Saigon was indeed shaken by the pace and tactics of the negotiation in the fall of 1972 -- but the core problem was not so much the terms (which were a version of what the U.S. and South Vietnam had been jointly proposing for years) but the stark fact that all this was about to shift from the realm of paper to the realm of reality. There were indeed risks -- in retrospect, Saigon's pessimism is obviously more vindicated than the Americans' optimism. But in fairness to the Nixon Administration, two essential props to the January 1973 Paris Agreement were knocked away subsequently by the Democratic Congress: the assurance to Saigon of renewed U.S. bombing if Hanoi violated the Agreement, and of a continuing and adequate flow of military and economic aid.

Hanoi was not as self-confident about its prospects under the Agreement as the film implies; the risks were in fact more evenly balanced, and the Communists were hurting badly by the end of 1972. A sensible American policy of enforcing the Agreement had a good chance of sustaining it. Needless to say, this is not in the film either. Nor is there anything about the near-hysterical pressures from the Left and from Congress over four years that left Nixon and Kissinger with not a lot of high cards to play in the first place. We didn't think the outcome was foreordained.

But then, we hadn't seen this brilliant docudrama.