In analyzing Nixon and Kissinger’s failed Vietnam policy, Carolyn Eisenberg emphasizes the competing pressures of the national security bureaucracies on the one hand and the role of the antiwar movement and Congress on the other. Her narrative reveals how a systemic indifference to suffering on the ground led to faulty decision-making. By closely examining Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China, she reveals the falsity of the “credibility” justification of their decision-making.

Carolyn Eisenberg is a professor of US history and American Foreign Policy at Hofstra University. Her book Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger and the Wars in Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press ) was published this month.. Her previous book Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany,1944-49 (Cambridge University Press, 1986) won the Stuart Bernath Book Prize, the Herbert Hoover Library Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Award.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.