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Reckless
Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam
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Read by Jeff Bottoms
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The American war in Vietnam was concluded in 1973 after eight years of fighting, bloodshed, and loss. Yet the terms of the truce that ended the war were effectively identical to what had been offered to the Nixon administration four years earlier. Those four years cost America and Vietnam thousands of lives and billions of dollars, and they were the direct result of the supposed master plan of the most important voice in American foreign policy: Henry Kissinger.
Using newly available archival material from the Nixon Presidential Library, Kissinger’s personal papers, and material from the archives in Vietnam, Robert K. Brigham punctures the myth of Kissinger as an infallible mastermind. Instead, he constructs a portrait of a rash, opportunistic, and suggestible politician. It was personal political rivalries, the domestic political climate, and strategic confusion that drove Kissinger’s actions. There was no great master plan or Bismarckian theory that supported how the US continued the war or conducted peace negotiations. Its length was doubled for nothing but the ego and poor judgment of a single figure.
This distant tragedy, perpetuated by Kissinger’s actions, forever changed both countries. Now, perhaps for the first time, we can see the full scale of that tragedy and the machinations that fed it.
Excerpt
PREFACE
THIS BOOK CHRONICLES Henry Kissinger’s management of the Vietnam War. It focuses on his efforts to combine military strategy with diplomacy to extricate the United States from Vietnam with honor. Kissinger inherited a weak bargaining position on Vietnam, but he still believed that he, and he alone, could deliver a favorable peace agreement.
When Henry Kissinger entered the White House in 1969 as President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, there were over 500,000 US troops in Vietnam. American combat deaths were about two hundred each week, a number that was likely to grow as Communist forces increased their assault on South Vietnam. The cost of the war to US taxpayers was $30 billion per year. Kissinger believed that these conditions demanded a negotiated settlement to the war. There were simply too many explicit constraints on US power to make a military victory likely. “However we got into Vietnam,” he observed, “whatever the judgment of our actions, ending the war honorably is essential for the peace of the world.”1
An honorable peace, according to Kissinger, had to meet several essential conditions. First, there had to be a lasting cease-fire between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. This cease-fire had to include the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, both of which had been caught up in the conflict. Second, there must be a mutual US–North Vietnamese troop withdrawal from South Vietnam. North Vietnamese forces operating in Laos and Cambodia also had to be redeployed to North Vietnam. Third, North Vietnam had to recognize the Demilitarized Zone as an international boundary. Fourth, with the signing of a peace agreement, all prisoners of war had to be released. Finally, Kissinger argued that any negotiated settlement had to leave the Saigon government in full political control in South Vietnam. He initially rejected North Vietnam’s proposals for a coalition government in South Vietnam, which he feared would “destroy the existing political structure and thus lead to a Communist takeover.” His goal, therefore, was to negotiate a final peace agreement in Paris that traded an American exit from Vietnam for political guarantees for Saigon. “We were determined,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, “to do our utmost to enable Saigon to grow in security and prosperity so that it could prevail in any political struggle. We sought not an interval before collapse, but lasting peace with honor.”2
To accomplish his strategic “peace with honor” goals, Kissinger promoted a tactical “war for peace” in Vietnam. But where has there ever been a successful “war for peace”? It’s a theorist’s concept, possible only if one is very distantly removed from the actual business of killing and dying and the aftereffects that produces. Still, with the arrogance and hubris of someone new to power, he confidently assured Nixon that he could pressure Hanoi to accept concessions it had routinely rejected during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency by combining great power diplomacy with savage military blows against North Vietnam. He also advocated attacks against North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Laos and Cambodia and the mining of North Vietnamese ports. “I can’t believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” Kissinger told his aides during his first weeks at the White House. “Hit them,” he told Nixon, and Hanoi would beg “for private talks.”3
Finding that delicate balance between military strikes and skillful negotiations was exactly what Kissinger believed was his specialty. In over five decades of telling and retelling his role in the Vietnam War, Kissinger has carefully constructed a narrative that is detailed, somewhat self-effacing, and on the surface, balanced. He has skillfully mixed criticism of the Nixon administration’s policies with disdain for its critics. He has both downplayed the war’s expansion on his watch and celebrated it. He blamed Kennedy-style idealism for the US entry into the war and championed his own realism for ending it. Kissinger gave the United States an honorable withdrawal from Vietnam, he claims, by linking Hanoi’s geopolitical desires to security guarantees for the United States’ South Vietnamese allies. In the end, Kissinger argues that Watergate and a weak-kneed Congress had made it impossible to defend South Vietnam, not his failures as a negotiator or strategist.
The Vietnam War remains Kissinger’s most enduring foreign policy legacy. No war since the American Civil War has seared the US national consciousness like Vietnam. The controversies surrounding it tore the nation apart, and its legacies continue to shape US foreign relations today. Kissinger’s role in this war has been studied in detail, but this book is the first to hold his record to a scrupulous account based on his own definitions of success and the evidence provided by recently released material in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Kissinger’s papers at Yale University, and South Vietnamese sources contained in the National Archives in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. On the strength of that it is clear that the national security adviser’s war for peace was more than oxymoronic: it was a total failure. Kissinger failed in each of his stated goals to achieve “peace with honor.” He failed to end the diplomatic deadlock in Paris or to negotiate a political settlement in South Vietnam that left the Saigon government a reasonable chance to survive following the American withdrawal. He failed to use great power diplomacy or military force to compel Hanoi to make compromises in the Paris negotiations. He failed to force a mutual North Vietnamese troop withdrawal from South Vietnam. He failed to neutralize Laos and Cambodia. He failed to secure a lasting cease-fire. He failed to obtain an international border at the Demilitarized Zone. He failed to link the release of all political prisoners to a lasting cease-fire. He failed to consult the Saigon government about its future until it was too late to change course in Paris.
At home, Kissinger also did much more harm than good. He failed to build a coalition of supportive allies for his “war for peace” within the Nixon administration or in Congress. He failed to contain US domestic opposition to his policies. He failed the president by overstating progress in Paris and the likelihood of success following US military escalation. Each of these disappointments narrowed his future options and shortened the time he had to achieve “peace with honor.”
Kissinger’s voluminous writings on the subject have obscured his failures in Vietnam, and perhaps that is the point of them. Like the Internet, Kissinger provides huge amounts of apparent information, not all of it reliable. He’s a conspiratorially minded theorist, and he often wanders far from the facts. But facts are stubborn things, and it is possible, I think, to examine the historical record in detail to offer a more complete picture of Kissinger and his failed “war for peace.” This research has been made easier now that his monopoly on the actual historical documents has ended. Scholars now have access to hundreds of thousands of pages of National Security Council files, the verbatim transcripts of the secret meetings in Paris, and over twenty thousand pages of Kissinger’s taped telephone conversations. Utilizing this new material, this book is the first to analyze the cumulative effect of Kissinger’s strategic and diplomatic failures on the final peace agreement. It demonstrates how Kissinger’s misplaced faith in his own abilities to secure an honorable peace prolonged the war unnecessarily and sealed South Vietnam’s fate. For all his faults, Kissinger (no matter what) could not change reality on the ground. He made a bad situation worse, however, with his reckless assumptions about the use of force and diplomacy.
ACRONYMS
| ARVN | Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnamese Army) |
| COSVN | Central Office Southern Vietnam, Communist Party’s headquarters for South Vietnam |
| DMZ | Demilitarized zone separating North Vietnam and South Vietnam |
| DRV | Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) |
| GVN | Government of Vietnam, also known as RVN (South Vietnam) |
| JCS | US Joint Chiefs of Staff |
| MACV | US Military Assistance Command Vietnam |
| NLF | National Liberation Front, Communist front organization in South Vietnam |
| NSC | National Security Council |
| NVA | North Vietnamese Army, also known as PAVN |
| PAVN | People’s Army of Vietnam (North Vietnamese Army) |
| PLAF | People’s Liberation Armed Forces, military arm of the NLF, derogatorily called Viet Cong |
| POW | prisoner(s) of war |
| PRG | Provisional Revolutionary Government, NLF’s government-in-waiting |
| RVN | Republic of Vietnam, also known as GVN (South Vietnam) |
| RVNAF | Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (South Vietnam’s armed forces) |
KEY PLAYERS
Creighton Abrams MACV commander, 1968–1972, US Army chief of staff, 1972–74
Nguyen Thi Binh PRG/NLF foreign minister
Mai Van Bo Head of DRV’s commercial legation in Paris
Leonid Brezhnev General secretary of the Communist Party, Soviet Union, 1964–1982
David Bruce Special ambassador to Paris negotiations
McGeorge Bundy National security adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, 1961–1966
William Bundy Assistant secretary of state for the Far East, 1964–1969
Ellsworth Bunker US ambassador to South Vietnam, 1967–1973
Anna Chennault Member of the “China lobby,” vice president of Flying Tiger Line and secret contact to the Saigon government
Frank Church US senator (D-ID), cosponsor of the Cooper-Church Amendment
Charles Colson Special counsel, Nixon administration
John Sherman Cooper US senator (R-KY), cosponsor of the Cooper-Church Amendment
Bui Diem South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, 1965–1972
Ngo Dinh Diem President of the RVN, 1955–1963
Anatoly Dobrynin Soviet ambassador to the United States
Pham Van Dong DRV prime minister
Le Duan Secretary-general of the Vietnamese Communist Party, 1960–1986
John Ehrlichman Counsel and assistant to the president for domestic affairs under Nixon
Daniel Ellsberg RAND analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers
Zhou Enlai Premier of the People’s Republic of China
Vo Nguyen Giap General and minister of defense, PAVN
Barry Goldwater US senator (R-AZ) and 1964 Republican nominee for US president
Alexander Haig Deputy national security adviser, Nixon administration
H. R. Haldeman White House chief of staff for President Richard Nixon
Mark Hatfield US senator (R-OR), cosponsor of the Hatfield-McGovern Amendment
Hubert Humphrey Vice president of the United States under President Johnson
Lyndon Johnson President of the United States, 1963–1969
Nikita Khrushchev Premier of the Soviet Union, 1958–1964
Henry Kissinger National security adviser, Nixon administration, 1969–1973
Alexei Kosygin Premier of the Soviet Union, 1964–1980
Nguyen Cao Ky Vice president of South Vietnam, 1967–1971
Melvin Laird Secretary of defense in the Nixon administration, 1969–1974
Anthony Lake National Security Council staff member under Kissinger
General Hoang Xuan Lam South Vietnamese general who led 1971 invasion of Laos
Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. US ambassador to South Vietnam, 1963–1964, 1965–1967
Winston Lord National Security Council staff member; accompanied Kissinger to Paris
George McGovern US senator (D-SD) and Democratic Party US presidential nominee, 1972, cosponsor of the Hatfield-McGovern Amendment
Robert S. McNamara Secretary of defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, 1961–1967
John McNaughton Assistant secretary of defense, 1961–1967
Mike Mansfield US senator (D-MT)
Duong Van Minh Former South Vietnamese general and politician
Ho Chi Minh President of the DRV, 1945–1969
John Mitchell US attorney general in Nixon administration and chair of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP)
Thomas Moorer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1970–1974
Edmund Muskie US senator (D-ME) and US presidential candidate, 1972
John Negroponte US Foreign Service officer; participated in Paris peace talks
Richard Nixon President of the United States, 1969–1974
General Lon Nol Led coup against Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia
William Porter US delegate to the avenue Kléber/Paris Peace Talks
Nelson Rockefeller Governor of New York, US Republican presidential candidate, 1964
Peter Rodman National Security Council staff member; accompanied Kissinger to Paris
William Rogers Secretary of state in the Nixon administration, 1969–1973
Jean Sainteny French politician; served as messenger for Nixon with Ho Chi Minh
Norodom Sihanouk Head of state of Cambodia, 1960–1970
Ray Sitton US Air Force colonel who gave Kissinger bombing targets for secret attacks on Cambodia
William Sullivan Coordinated avenue Kléber/Paris peace talks for Nixon
Nguyen Van Thieu President of the GVN
Le Duc Tho DRV Politburo member; negotiated with Kissinger in Paris
Xuan Thuy DRV diplomat; negotiated with Kissinger in Paris
General Co Van Vien South Vietnam’s defense minister
General Vernon Walters US military attaché at the embassy in Paris
General Earle Wheeler Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1964–1970
Mao Zedong Chairman of China’s Communist Party
Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin
CHAPTER ONE
THE APPRENTICE, 1965–1969
IN THE EARLY MORNING of November 25, 1968, Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and longtime foreign policy adviser to perennial Republican presidential hopeful Nelson Rockefeller, walked into the Pierre Hotel at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Sixty-First Street in Manhattan, and took the elevator to the thirty-ninth floor to Richard Nixon’s transition headquarters. Nixon had just narrowly defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 US presidential election and was wasting no time putting his new administration together. The Pierre was an unlikely place for the president-elect to have his transition headquarters, given its ties to the East Coast establishment that Nixon so despised. Kissinger, however, had spent much of his adult life trying to gain entry into that world, courting Rockefeller and others who saw democratic collapse as one of the century’s most pressing concerns. Yet Kissinger and the president-elect held many views in common. Both were classical realists who believed the world needed strong leaders that acted without passion to restore order and stability to the international system. They placed great emphasis on what Kissinger called “consequential diplomacy”—the role of great men in advancing the interest of the nation and in shaping political outcomes.1 They thought that the United States alone was strong enough to defeat fascism, communism, and other forms of tyranny. They also considered themselves self-made men. Neither was born to the upper class. Each had achieved great heights because of talent, not patronage.
Kissinger later claimed that he was surprised by the invitation to the Pierre. He had spent much of the 1960s supporting other Republicans at Nixon’s expense. He had declared that Nixon was “unfit to be the president” and thought the president-elect was “a hollow man” who had a dangerous “misunderstanding of foreign policy.”2 He recognized Nixon’s personal insecurities, and they worried him. Haunted by the inconsequential life his father had led, Nixon was a striver and a loner, someone who demanded loyalty and wanted to be admired. Kissinger saw these characteristics as potentially damaging in the nuanced world of foreign affairs. But Nixon had power, something Kissinger had been seeking without much luck for over a decade.
Nixon was well aware of Kissinger’s “disparaging comments.” He knew that Kissinger had challenged his “competence” in foreign policy, but he expected this “from a Rockefeller associate” and “chalked it up to politics.”3 Others saw something more sinister behind Nixon’s willingness to overlook Kissinger’s comments and contact him. Journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that Nixon ignored Kissinger’s remarks because the Harvard professor had given the presidential campaign team secret information about the Johnson administration’s negotiating position during the Vietnam peace talks in Paris.4 “There is a better than even chance that Johnson will order a bombing halt at approximately mid-October,” Kissinger wrote to the Nixon campaign shortly after his September 1968 trip to Paris.5 With this information, Hersh claimed, the campaign could move behind the scenes to block progress in any negotiations that might surface.
As Kissinger predicted, on October 31, just five days before the 1968 presidential election, a desperate Lyndon Johnson publicly pledged to stop all US bombing and shelling of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam) for the first time since Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam, had begun in February 1965. Johnson also announced that he would expand the peace talks to include the South Vietnamese government and its sworn enemy, the National Liberation Front (NLF, derogatorily called the Viet Cong). He hoped that his October surprise would allow the Democratic nominee, his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, to close the narrow gap in the race with Nixon. On the eve of the election, Johnson’s plan seemed to have worked. There were only a few percentage points separating the two candidates, and momentum was in Humphrey’s favor—until the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, announced that he would not send a representative to Paris and that his government would never negotiate with the NLF without political guarantees.6
There was much speculation in the press at the time that Kissinger had not only told the Nixon campaign secret information about Johnson’s negotiating position in Paris, but had also used Anna Chennault, a longtime friend to Republicans and anti-Communists in Asia, to deliver a message to the South Vietnamese government telling it not to agree to negotiate in Paris. The implication was that Saigon would get a much better deal from the Nixon administration.7 In his 1987 memoir, In the Jaws of History, Bui Diem, who at that time was South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, has confirmed contact between Chennault, the Nixon campaign, and the Saigon government, but he has downplayed its influence, claiming that Thieu had already decided that he would not negotiate with the Communists.8
Newly released documents from Trung tam luu tru quoc gia II (National Archives II) in Ho Chi Minh City support Diem’s claim.9 The Saigon government was incensed by rumors that Anna Chennault influenced the decision not to negotiate. It was true that she had hosted many dinners at her Watergate apartment along the banks of the Potomac River in Washington that had included several top South Vietnamese officials, but Saigon’s leaders claimed that these events were seen as a way to convince the Americans to continue to support South Vietnam, not opportunities to listen to advice from Chennault. Having lost over 100,000 troops and an equally high number of civilians, and facing increased military pressure from Hanoi’s People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), Saigon government officials claimed that they did not need a dilettante to tell them how to deal with the Communists, no matter how many friends she had in Washington.10
But Anna Chennault was no dilettante. She was the widow of Lt. General Claire Chennault, the American leader of the Flying Tigers, who defended China against Japanese invaders during WWII. Born Chen Xiangmei, Anna was a war correspondent in China when she met her future husband. After the war, the two founded the Civil Air Transport that operated on mainland China until Mao’s victory. Fleeing to Taiwan, the Chennaults became fixtures of the “China Lobby,” an alliance of conservative Americans and Chinese nationalists who blamed the Truman administration for “losing” China. In the late 1950s, after her husband’s death, Chennault moved to America and took over the running of the Flying Tiger Line, then the biggest freight airline in the world.11 She became a steadfast supporter of Republican politics and politicians, and as one Nixon official observed, she was a “very shrewd operator.”12 She would have been a very likely go-between had Saigon not so readily dismissed this claim.
The idea that Kissinger was somehow behind a secret plan to convince Thieu not to negotiate with the NLF because Saigon would get a better deal from Nixon was even more preposterous. “Kissinger was totally irrelevant to our [South Vietnamese] deliberations,” one former South Vietnamese official later claimed. “We had been uneasy with the Johnson administration’s discussion of negotiations at our July 18 meeting in Honolulu and had long planned to back out of any talks that the White House was using to score political points during the 1968 presidential election. We did not need a college professor from Harvard telling us how to solve our diplomatic problems.”13
Kissinger, too, has always downplayed his role in the 1968 presidential campaign. In the first volume of his massive memoirs, White House Years, he argues that he had only met Nixon once prior to November 1968, and he repeatedly denies having had any direct contact with the Nixon team during the campaign. “During the national campaign in 1968,” Kissinger writes, “several Nixon emissaries—some self-appointed—telephoned me for counsel. I took the position that I would answer specific questions on foreign policy, but that I would not offer general advice or volunteer suggestions.”14 Nixon certainly had other sources of information inside the Johnson White House who were close to negotiations. But much of the evidence suggests that Kissinger did intervene on Nixon’s behalf, even if his meddling did not influence decision making in Saigon as much as Hersh and others claim.
It was not access to information that made Kissinger so appealing to Nixon. It was in equal measures Kissinger’s understanding of power—Nixon believed that he needed Kissinger to shape and implement his broad foreign policy designs—and his willingness to make difficult decisions in the face of public pressure. Nixon liked what Kissinger thought about the exercise of power. He had read Kissinger’s early scholarly work on foreign policy in a nuclear world and was impressed. He also believed that Kissinger shared his belief that domestic politics (not elections) was merely fixing “outhouses in Peoria.”15 Both men relished the arena of foreign affairs, and Nixon thought that Kissinger would be useful in creating the stable world order that he envisioned. Furthermore, Kissinger seemed to understand that Nixon’s foreign policy background made bold moves possible. He confided to close friends that Nixon might just be able to make huge inroads in bringing Moscow and Beijing in from the cold.16 By reorienting American power and prestige following a necessary withdrawal from Vietnam, Kissinger thought a Nixon presidency could tackle larger and more important foreign policy problems. In short, Nixon liked Kissinger as a potential junior associate in foreign policy and Kissinger admired Nixon’s willingness to hire someone for his expertise rather than for patronage. Kissinger and Nixon were two self-made men who would take on the world together.
When Nixon and Kissinger finally met at the Pierre, the president-elect did not talk about grand strategy or the war in Vietnam; rather, he outlined the massive organizational problems he faced. He had very little confidence in the State Department. He also thought that the Johnson administration had ignored the Joint Chiefs of Staff on most issues dealing with Vietnam at its peril. He thought that the CIA was staffed by “Ivy League liberals who behind the facade of analytical objectivity” were usually pushing their own agenda.17 Nixon also believed that the Johnson White House was run too informally, with key foreign policy decisions made over lunch.18 All of these concerns, and his personal insecurities, left Nixon with the desire to run foreign policy from the White House. He needed a strong national security adviser to help him centralize power and to develop a robust and credible foreign policy.
Despite his concerns about Nixon’s character and capabilities, Kissinger agreed with the president-elect’s reorganization plan. He told Nixon that he should set up a strong National Security Council staff in the White House and then sideline the State Department. By cutting out the State Department completely, Nixon could control foreign policy discussions and limit the influence of career professionals who had snubbed him when he was vice president under Dwight Eisenhower. Like Nixon, Kissinger had a profound disdain for bureaucracy, going well beyond the usual carping that went on in Washington. He thought the seasoned experts at the State Department tended their own gardens but were incapable of broad strategic thought. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese prime minister, once told Kissinger, “You don’t like bureaucracy.” Kissinger replied, “Yes, and it’s mutual; the bureaucracy doesn’t like me.”19
Genre:
- "One of the most compelling elements of the book is Brigham's portrayal of Kissinger's manipulation of an emotionally insecure Nixon. The president often responded by expressing doubts about Kissinger's methods, but he did Kissinger's bidding more often than not out of desperation to win over the American electorate during the 1972 election cycle."—Kirkus Reviews
- "A welcome, much-needed reexamination of the secret negotiations that led to America's withdrawal from the Vietnam War. Using impressive new research, Robert K. Brigham skillfully analyzes the origins of the 1973 Paris Agreement and persuasively debunks the myth of Henry Kissinger as a diplomat of rare ability."—George C. Herring, author of America's Longest War: The United States andVietnam, 1950-1975
- "Robert K. Brigham, drawing on many previously unpublished official transcripts and records, makes a scholarly and convincing case that Henry Kissinger's policymaking on Vietnam during the Nixon Administration was 'reckless.' Both in the secret peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris and in ordering massive bombing raids on their forces in Cambodia and Laos, and on Hanoi itself, Kissinger was ignorant of their determination to reunite their country at all costs. Ultimately, with no consultation with the US-supported regime in Saigon, he negotiated a peace agreement that freed US prisoners of war and completed the American military withdrawal in 1973, but allowed North Vietnamese military forces to remain in territory they had occupied in South Vietnam-dooming it, as President Nguyen Van Thieu knew it would, to defeat, which came two years later."—Craig R. Whitney, Saigon correspondent andbureau chief of the New York Times,1971-1973
- "Brigham offers a persuasive argument that [Kissinger] lied, misled, and deceptively outmaneuvered other policy makers in setting Vietnam War policy from 1969 to 1975, with disastrous results.... This all-but-total condemnation...confirms what many Kissinger skeptics have believed for decades and may change the minds of some who have believe him to be a foreign policy guru."—Publishers Weekly
- "Vietnam-era scholars and informed audiences fascinated by Kissinger will welcome the author's insights."—Library Journal
- "Brigham makes a strong case that Kissinger's war policy-making was 'a total failure'....Making good use of new primary source material...he destroys Kissinger's carefully and deceptively cultivated image as a foreign policy guru....[Reckless] should change the minds of those who have believed Kissinger's deceptive, self-aggrandizing re-writing of Vietnam War history."—Vietnam Veterans of America Magazine
- "It's a clapback 15 years in the making, and offers insight into how Kissinger's machinations were less brilliance than guesswork and ego, with disastrous results....[Reckless] squarely assigns the blame."—Progressive Populist
- On Sale
- Sep 4, 2018
- Publisher
- Hachette Audio
- ISBN-13
- 9781549142123
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