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that according to the accurate account on Radio Hanoi, the GVN (“the existing authorities”) would remain “in office” as the government of the South, and would somehow deal with the other “party,” whose status remained mysterious. But “what was pointed out by Radio Hanoi”—correctly, as Kissinger conceded—was something quite different, namely, that “the two present administrations in South Vietnam will remain in existence with their respective domestic and external functions,” these being the GVN and the PRG (based upon the NLF). Having reached agreement, these two parties were then to move toward reunification, to be “carried out step by step through peaceful means,” with no external—meaning U.S.—interference.

The differences are crucial. From its earliest days, the war was fought over the question of whether “the South Vietnamese people shall decide themselves the political future of South Vietnam,” as the October 9-Point Plan explicitly stipulated must be the case, or whether the United States would enforce the rule of its client regime, the GVN, as the sole legitimate government in the South, in accordance with Kissinger’s version of the terms to which he had theoretically agreed, a version that plainly departed radically from the text.138

Kissinger’s announcement that “peace is at hand,” designed with the upcoming U.S. presidential elections in mind, was also blatant deception. As his distortion of the essential terms of the agreement clearly revealed, the United States was backing away from the settlement and refusing to implement it. Nixon later explained that “We had to use [Kissinger’s press conference] to undercut the North Vietnamese propaganda maneuver [namely, making public the terms of the agreement] and to make sure that our version of the agreement was the one that had great public impact.”139 This result was substantially achieved; the media characteristically accepted Kissinger’s version with no recognition that it was diametrically opposed to the terms of the 9-Point Plan, though the facts were plain to anyone who troubled to look at the readily available public record.

The United States then proceeded with a vast shipment of arms to the GVN while demanding substantial changes in the October agreements. Hanoi, in contrast, publicly insisted that the October agreements be signed. The media adopted the version of events relayed regularly by Kissinger, depicting him as caught between two irrational adversaries, Hanoi and Saigon. The Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong followed, causing great damage and also the loss of several dozen B-52s (the exact numbers are contested, but the losses clearly shocked the Pentagon), as well as a highly adverse world reaction, although the media continued to relay the Washington interpretation of what had happened. Thus Stanley Karnow wrote that “evidently” the primary aim of “Nixon’s bombings of Hanoi” was “to compel the North Vietnamese to return to negotiations,” a curious version of the readily available facts.140 After the military and political failures of the Christmas bombings, the U.S. government then signed the January peace agreements, which were virtually identical to the terms it had rejected the preceding October—and, still more significant, were hardly different in essentials from the NLF proposals of the early 1960s, which caused such dismay in Washington and compelled the U.S. government to escalate the war so as to prevent a political settlement, thus virtually destroying Indochina, with millions of casualties and three countries utterly devastated—a fact considered of little moment in the West.

The charade that took place in October was reenacted in January. As the agreements were announced on January 24, the White House made an official statement, and Kissinger had a lengthy press conference in which he explained clearly that the United States was planning to reject every essential provision of the accords the administration had been compelled to sign, presenting a version that explicitly violated them at every crucial point. In yet another astonishing