Reckless

The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 under the terms of a truce that were effectively identical to terms available to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America billions of dollars and over 35,000 war deaths and casualties. Over 300,000 Vietnamese died during those four years as well.
The most important voice in the Nixon White House on American foreign policy was that of Henry Kissinger. Using newly available archival material from the Nixon Presidential Library and Kissinger's personal papers, Robert K. Brigham shows how Kissinger's approach to Vietnam was driven by personal political rivalries and strategic confusion, both of which extended the war unnecessarily. Brigham also reveals how domestic politics had an outsized influence on Kissinger's so-called strategy; there was no great master plan or Bismarckian theory that supported how the US continued the war or conducted peace negotiations.

As a result, a distant...