Overview

This gripping account interweaves Nixon and Kissinger's pursuit of the war in Southeast Asia and their diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China with on-the-ground military events and US domestic reactions to the war conducted in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. While recognizing the distinctive personalities and ideas of these two men, this study more broadly conveys the competing roles and impact of the professional military, the Congress, and a mobilized peace movement. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration's relations with the Soviet Union and China vis a vis the war in Southeast Asia. She argues that in their desperate effort to overcome, or at least overshadow, their failure in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger made major concessions to both nations in the field of arms control, their response to the India-Pakistan war, and the diplomacy surrounding Taiwan--much of this secret. Despite policymakers' claims that the Vietnam War was a ""national security"" necessity that would demonstrate American strength to the communist superpowers and ""credibility"" to friendly governments, the historical record suggests a different reality. A half-century after the Paris Peace Conference marking the withdrawal of US troops and advisors from Vietnam and foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, Fire and Rain is a dramatic account of geopolitical decision making, civil society, and the human toll of the war on the people of Southeast Asia.

Full Product Details

9780197850602

Table of Contents

Reviews

""With over 30,000 books published on the Vietnam War, does it make sense to write another book about the conflict waged by the United States in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam between 1957 and 1973? Reading Fire and Rain, the answer is affirmative for several reasons."" -- Mariano Aguirre, International Affairs ""Eisenberg's account reads as easily as a novel....In detailing Nixon and Kissinger's (often secret) overtures to and negotiations with the Communist superpowers of China and the Soviet Union...Eisenberg stresses that the pair often circumvented their own State Department....This is...a recurring theme: the increasing number of concessions made, in secret, to Communist powers while ostensibly fighting Communism in South Vietnam."" -- Sarah Cords, The Progressive ""A gripping narrative of America's war in Vietnam during its fateful, concluding years, replete with intrigue, manipulation, self-deception, and mindless brutality. Fire and Rain is a vividly written, even harrowing book. Carolyn Eisenberg has produced a masterpiece."" -- Andrew Bacevich, author of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century ""Even experts on Vietnam will be surprised at the revelations in Carolyn Eisenberg's Fire and Rain. Deploying a wealth of declassified documents, archival finds, and eyewitness accounts, Fire and Rain paints a sweeping, panoramic, and devastating portrait of the war that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger waged, a fatal fraud on America and Southeast Asia."" -- Ken Hughes, author of Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection ""An impressive work of diplomatic history, Carolyn Eisenberg's Fire and Rain convincingly reveals how Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's catastrophic war in Southeast Asia set the course of subsequent US diplomacy with Russia and China. This book should be widely read."" -- Greg Grandin, Yale University ""A formidable achievement. Carolyn Eisenberg's Fire and Rain is a brilliant and deeply shocking biography of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Relying on Kissinger's own telephone transcripts and newly declassified presidential papers, Eisenberg's measured narrative strips away all the lies and myths to document how these deeply flawed men single-handedly prolonged the Vietnam war. It is an all too human tale of deception and incompetence. Kissinger's vaunted reputation will never recover from a book destined to become a classic history of the Vietnam tragedy."" -- Kai Bird, Leon Levy Center for Biography ""Accessibly written and meticulously researched, Fire and Rain is a thought-provoking and important book on the American war in Vietnam."" -- Daniel R. Hart, VVA Veteran ""Eisenberg recounts the last phase of the U.S. war in Vietnam with new details and caustic moral clarity, based on declassified papers and transcripts of taped conversations between President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger... They engineered diplomatic breakthroughs with Beijing and Moscow that produced important results but no substantial help in pressuring Hanoi to negotiate. Nixon ordered the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos to force concessions from Hanoi, but the resulting tweaks to the peace deal reached in Paris in 1973 did not change the situation on the ground. It was a fig-leaf agreement that foreseeably led to the fall of the feckless South Vietnamese regime just two years later. Peace was achieved, but not, as the administration claimed, 'with honor.'"" -- Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs ""A meticulous and engaging reconstruction of U.S. decision-making in the final years of the Vietnam War... Eisenberg offers fresh evidence and argumentation that, along with the passion of her prose, make Fire and Rain imperative reading... Particularly damning is Eisenberg's contention that Nixon and Kissinger continued the war not because of worry that defeat would damage the credibility of U.S. power-the key reason they invoked in their memoirs-but because of selfish electoral considerations and overweening confidence in their ability to use violence to achieve their goals... Eisenberg contextualizes U.S. decision-making by relentlessly describing the horrific consequences of U.S. decisions for the ordinary men and women caught up in the war either as belligerents or innocent bystanders."" -- Mark Atwood Lawrence, Diplomatic History ""Carolyn Eisenberg's urgent Fire and Rain ... helps us understand the real stakes of forgetting in our perilous times how and why Americans made war in Vietnam."" -- Mark Philip Bradley, H-Diplo Roundtable ""With impressive fluidity... [Eisenberg] weaves together a fine-grained analysis of Nixon and Kissinger's policymaking processes with a multi-layered perspective of the domestic contexts in which they operated. The result is a book that highlights the significant roles of other US policymakers...and the US peace movement in influencing the course of US involvement in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This is a history that deftly brings together US foreign policy with domestic policy... Eisenberg's book speaks directly to the present in its scathing and impassioned critique of the militarization of US foreign policymaking that has blinded its practitioners from genuine alternatives to violence."" -- Elizabeth O'Brien Ingleson, H-Diplo Roundtable ""Fire and Rain deftly and compellingly puts the Nixon administration's involvement in the Vietnam conflict into a broader context than much of the current scholarship, forcing the reader to consider not just what happened with Nixon and Kissinger, but also how their unique and often problematic approach to prosecuting the conflict in Southeast Asia would alter the trajectory of US politics, diplomacy, and society for decades. This is a study that should help to frame the debate and strongly influence the discussion on the war for years to come."" -- Andrew L. Johns, Global Sixties ""Eisenberg manages to surpass all previous scholarly efforts with this empirically rich, crisply written, and analytically astute monograph. Rooted in exhaustive research and brimming with fresh insights, this book is a triumph of traditional diplomatic-military history."" -- Robert J. McMahon, Journal of Interdisciplinary History ""Eisenberg provides a day-by-day account of the Nixon administration at work on the war in Vietnam. The result is an impressive description of a deceptive White House struggling to find its footing. At every turn, Nixon and Kissinger are thwarted in their effort to gain peace with honor because neither of them understood that each new military escalation limited their future options."" -- Robert K. Brigham, Journal of Military History

Author Information

Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is a Professor of US History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49, winner of the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Herbert Hoover Book Prize and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Prize. She has written op-eds and done media appearances for numerous outlets, including the New York Times, National Public Radio, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has been a consultant to several members of Congress and is legislative coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.

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