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Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia
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.
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.
632 pages, Hardcover
First published February 17, 2023
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332 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 18, 2023
Carolyn Woods Eisenberg's Fire and Rain reassesses Richard Nixon's efforts to "wind down" the Vietnam War. To this day, Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger have their defenders claiming that their handling of Vietnam amounted to making the best of a bad hand; even their detractors often credit them with a more coherent, if cynical strategy for "ending the war" in order to allow for a "decent interval" between American withdrawal and South Vietnam's collapse. Eisenberg provides a different view: that Nixon and Kissinger had no coherent Vietnam policy to speak of, reacting to events more than they shaped them while often undercutting their own rationale and actions. Thus Nixon came to office touting his "madman theory" of bombing North Vietnam to the peace table, only to back off when antiwar demonstrators forced his hand; he embraced the notion of "Vietnamization" resulting in disastrous defeats by ARVN troops in Laos and the early phases of the Easter Offensive; he bombed and invaded Cambodia to destroy communist supply lines, only to destabilize that country and send it spiraling towards the horror of the Khmer Rouge without significantly affecting the overall war. Eisenberg also makes a strong argument that Nixon's detente initiatives rendered his posturing on Vietnam foolish; if Nixon could achieve accommodation with the communist superpowers backing North Vietnam, how could he credibly claim that the war was necessary for national security? The answer is, he couldn't; yet the war continued as a way of saving American face and "credibility" even as their own destructive actions eroded it. Eisenberg's arguments are forceful and genuinely persuasive; she perhaps tries too hard to paint Defense Secretary Melvin Laird as a voice of reason within the Nixon Administration, and she doesn't afford the Vietnamese perspective on the war more than a few passing glances. But overall, hers is a useful assessment: that Nixon and Kissinger's machinations owed less to Machiavelli than Lewis Carroll, a funhouse mirror of conflicting policies, impulsive decision-making and callous disregard for the "slop-over" of Vietnamese lives that resulted only in death and destruction, while ensuring a Communist victory in Vietnam.
April 28, 2024
I thoroughly enjoyed this book because it is so well-researched and written and also because I lived through these events beginning with my service as a Marine infantry Platoon Commander during the 1968 TET Offensive. I cry at the needless loss of life on both sides. I’ll share just one story here. After a firefight we had to go through the pockets of enemy dead looking for anything that might have intelligence value such as a diary. In the pocket of one North Vietnamese soldier I found a photo of him with his wife and his two cute children. I was stunned because I had been married just six months earlier and I also carried a photo of my new wife. It struck me that neither of us wanted to be here but today I had survived and he had died. Would his body ever be taken home for proper mourning and burial? No. I wished I could tell his wife and kids that he had fought bravely for his country. We Americans were the interlopers. I took his canteen metal canteen on which he had carved his initials, BXV. So I gave him a name, Bui Xinh Vinh and think of it every day as I walk by the lonely canteen sitting on a shelf in my bedroom.
The book shows much more than just the futility of war. As far as I am concerned Nixon and Kissinger are war criminals who caused millions of needless deaths, military and civilian, young and old, men and women, on both sides of an unwinnable war. I hope they rot in Hell.
The book shows much more than just the futility of war. As far as I am concerned Nixon and Kissinger are war criminals who caused millions of needless deaths, military and civilian, young and old, men and women, on both sides of an unwinnable war. I hope they rot in Hell.
September 23, 2025
What did Richard Nixon do in Vietnam? What did he do to Vietnam?
One (very) naive way to answer this is to look at US troop levels. This is certainly how Nixon and his administration preferred to have voters look at it. A chart of troop levels, per this collation, shows an exponential rise and decline: Less than 1,000 in 1961, to over 17,000 in 1964, to over 300,000 in 1966, to a peak of over 537,000 in 1968, and back down to a little over 35,000 by 1972, just before the Paris Peace Agreement and subsequent withdrawal, which brought the 1973 number to 265. (Of course these are just snapshots and there was tremendous movement within each year.)
That’s a spectacular drawdown: the US presence fell by over half a million over the course of Nixon’s first term. Eisenberg (I think correctly) credits this as a major factor behind Nixon’s crushing victory over McGovern. The war just wasn’t as big a deal to American voters anymore with so many fewer Americans over there, the same way it didn’t dominate the 1964 election. And the rest of McGovern’s platform (“a $1,000 federal stipend for the poor, affirmative action, and busing to achieve desegregation of schools”) was going to be “hard to swallow” for “centrist voters.”
She also presents a compelling case that the driving force behind the troop removals was not Nixon or Henry Kissinger but the oft-overlooked Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird. Nixon went along for the political benefits while Kissinger seethed that the weak-kneed Laird was removing one of America’s best bargaining chits in the Paris talks. If the main thing Washington could offer Hanoi was withdrawal, and we were withdrawing anyway, what’s the point?
But Laird understood that withdrawals, once started, would gather a momentum of their own and continue through Nixon and Kissinger’s many tantrums and mood swings of the next few years.
Eisenberg, in her prosecutorial zeal, sometimes does not make this point as cleanly and clearly as she could, but the transformation Nixon effected to the war was to swap American manpower for overwhelming airpower, and to displace as much suffering previously accruing to American service-members onto those foreigners in bombing range of US B-52s in Cambodia, Laos, and both the South and North. The ground war was traded for an air war. That, in brief, is what Nixon did to the war.
Nixon did not, he makes clear in many conversations Eisenberg quotes, care if the damage “slopped over” to civilians. He barely gave any thought at all to the domestic political havoc that expanding the air war to Cambodia in particular would unleash, havoc that culminated in the genocide of about one quarter of that country’s population.
It is important to dwell, as Eisenberg does, on what a humanitarian catastrophe this choice was for the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people. It’s a crime, an indefensible crime. She opens with John Conyers’ rejected attempt to include the bombing of Cambodia as one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon in 1974, and it’s hard to finish her narrative without agreeing with Conyers that the evil done there was greater, by far, than that of any shenanigans at the Watergate.
But I also found myself looking at Nixon the way that Jeffrey Donovan’s character in Sicario looks at the cartel thugs: shaking my head and thinking “it’s brilliant, what they do.” Nixon won the 1968 election promising he would end the war (he may never have said “I have a secret plan” but he clearly purported to have a plan and whatever it was, it wasn’t public). He did, for all purposes relevant to the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers of GIs, end the war by 1972 — for Americans. He did not end it for the Vietnamese or Cambodians or Laotians, but he ended it for his voters.
He did not do this out of the goodness of his heart. One of Eisenberg’s great contributions is her argument, made with considerable support from polling and internal administration conversations, that the antiwar movement had created mass public opinion pressure for a withdrawal and that this forced Nixon and his team’s hands.
One can imagine that when Laird’s Vietnamization plan started, and it became extremely obvious that the South Vietnamese troops couldn’t fight for shit and were even in many cases “ghost units” that literally did not exist, a president might listen to his commander Creighton Abrams and halt the US withdrawals, since the Vietnamese alternative was clearly not cutting it. Nixon did not do this, and Eisenberg is persuasive that the reason he did not do this is that antiwar agitation in Congress and from “respectable,” non-SDS activists like John Kerry made it impossible to maintain current troop levels, let alone increase them.
But whatever the reason, Nixon found a way to end the war that left him not only not vulnerable politically, but dominant, crushing his opponent in an election he was deathly afraid of losing. He found a way that enabled him to look tough, even cruel, rather than like a peacenik, even when his method required making jaw-dropping concessions to the very Communist superpowers that the war was supposedly fought to repel in the first place. He found a way to end his war without ending the killing.
That is a kind of sick brilliance. I certainly do not respect it, but I am somehow in awe that he pulled it off, at least until his character flaws found another way to undo him.
One (very) naive way to answer this is to look at US troop levels. This is certainly how Nixon and his administration preferred to have voters look at it. A chart of troop levels, per this collation, shows an exponential rise and decline: Less than 1,000 in 1961, to over 17,000 in 1964, to over 300,000 in 1966, to a peak of over 537,000 in 1968, and back down to a little over 35,000 by 1972, just before the Paris Peace Agreement and subsequent withdrawal, which brought the 1973 number to 265. (Of course these are just snapshots and there was tremendous movement within each year.)
That’s a spectacular drawdown: the US presence fell by over half a million over the course of Nixon’s first term. Eisenberg (I think correctly) credits this as a major factor behind Nixon’s crushing victory over McGovern. The war just wasn’t as big a deal to American voters anymore with so many fewer Americans over there, the same way it didn’t dominate the 1964 election. And the rest of McGovern’s platform (“a $1,000 federal stipend for the poor, affirmative action, and busing to achieve desegregation of schools”) was going to be “hard to swallow” for “centrist voters.”
She also presents a compelling case that the driving force behind the troop removals was not Nixon or Henry Kissinger but the oft-overlooked Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird. Nixon went along for the political benefits while Kissinger seethed that the weak-kneed Laird was removing one of America’s best bargaining chits in the Paris talks. If the main thing Washington could offer Hanoi was withdrawal, and we were withdrawing anyway, what’s the point?
But Laird understood that withdrawals, once started, would gather a momentum of their own and continue through Nixon and Kissinger’s many tantrums and mood swings of the next few years.
Eisenberg, in her prosecutorial zeal, sometimes does not make this point as cleanly and clearly as she could, but the transformation Nixon effected to the war was to swap American manpower for overwhelming airpower, and to displace as much suffering previously accruing to American service-members onto those foreigners in bombing range of US B-52s in Cambodia, Laos, and both the South and North. The ground war was traded for an air war. That, in brief, is what Nixon did to the war.
Nixon did not, he makes clear in many conversations Eisenberg quotes, care if the damage “slopped over” to civilians. He barely gave any thought at all to the domestic political havoc that expanding the air war to Cambodia in particular would unleash, havoc that culminated in the genocide of about one quarter of that country’s population.
It is important to dwell, as Eisenberg does, on what a humanitarian catastrophe this choice was for the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people. It’s a crime, an indefensible crime. She opens with John Conyers’ rejected attempt to include the bombing of Cambodia as one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon in 1974, and it’s hard to finish her narrative without agreeing with Conyers that the evil done there was greater, by far, than that of any shenanigans at the Watergate.
But I also found myself looking at Nixon the way that Jeffrey Donovan’s character in Sicario looks at the cartel thugs: shaking my head and thinking “it’s brilliant, what they do.” Nixon won the 1968 election promising he would end the war (he may never have said “I have a secret plan” but he clearly purported to have a plan and whatever it was, it wasn’t public). He did, for all purposes relevant to the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers of GIs, end the war by 1972 — for Americans. He did not end it for the Vietnamese or Cambodians or Laotians, but he ended it for his voters.
He did not do this out of the goodness of his heart. One of Eisenberg’s great contributions is her argument, made with considerable support from polling and internal administration conversations, that the antiwar movement had created mass public opinion pressure for a withdrawal and that this forced Nixon and his team’s hands.
One can imagine that when Laird’s Vietnamization plan started, and it became extremely obvious that the South Vietnamese troops couldn’t fight for shit and were even in many cases “ghost units” that literally did not exist, a president might listen to his commander Creighton Abrams and halt the US withdrawals, since the Vietnamese alternative was clearly not cutting it. Nixon did not do this, and Eisenberg is persuasive that the reason he did not do this is that antiwar agitation in Congress and from “respectable,” non-SDS activists like John Kerry made it impossible to maintain current troop levels, let alone increase them.
But whatever the reason, Nixon found a way to end the war that left him not only not vulnerable politically, but dominant, crushing his opponent in an election he was deathly afraid of losing. He found a way that enabled him to look tough, even cruel, rather than like a peacenik, even when his method required making jaw-dropping concessions to the very Communist superpowers that the war was supposedly fought to repel in the first place. He found a way to end his war without ending the killing.
That is a kind of sick brilliance. I certainly do not respect it, but I am somehow in awe that he pulled it off, at least until his character flaws found another way to undo him.
March 25, 2024
A compelling and well-researched work.
Much of the book deals with diplomacy. The book’s take on Nixon and Kissinger is, unsurprisingly, pretty hostile. The first half of the narrative deals with the conduct of America’s war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, while the second half deals with Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China. The impact of the antiwar movement is covered. The influence of Nixon, Kissinger, Laird and Rogers is presented, as are Nixon and Kissinger’s willingness to bypass the latter. Of all the Vietnam policymakers, Laird seems to have been the most consistent. Eisenberg also discusses the role of commanders like Moorer, McCain and Abrams. Much of the book deals with diplomacy. Eisenberg notes that Nixon and Kissinger cultivated closer ties with the Russians and the Chinese, and often made major concessions to them in the hopes that they could pressure the North Vietnamese into a settlement. However, since one of the rationales for intervention in Vietnam was to contain Soviet and Chinese influence, these diplomatic overtures only served to muddy the question of why the nation should wage a war where thousands of Americans were being killed.
Eisenberg attributes many policy choices to Nixon and Kissinger’s personalities, highlighting their interest in military solutions. In this telling they come off as opportunistic, with no coherent “grand strategy” in mind. She notes that Nixon often used the rhetoric of peace and diplomacy to distract from his escalatory gambits in southeast Asia. The discussion of Nixon and Kissinger’s personalities and relationship is also covered well; Eisenberg notes that Kissinger usually called Nixon to congratulate him whenever he finished a televised speech. Self-deception is a major theme in Eisenberg’s story.
The narrative moves along at a quick pace. Eisenberg does a good job presenting events as they unfolded and in portraying the uncertainty of the time. She also does a good job portraying the human cost of the war, shifting from discussions of policy decisions to the stories of soldiers and civilians affected by them.
The pictures of the North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Chinese, and Russian sides could have been more nuanced, and more comprehensive, perhaps. Thieu and his government are dismissed as corrupt dictators, while the communists are described as “patriots seeking the reunification of their country.” Eisenberg also seems sympathetic to the communist negotiating positions, while those of the Americans and South Vietnamese are usually called unrealistic or too demanding. She also highlights the repression of the South Vietnamese police state, but not the conditions in North Vietnam, or in North Vietnamese POW camps. There is also no mention of how people fared in postwar communist societies in southeast Asia. At one point Eisenberg refers to the “August 1967 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.” The Ninth Infantry Division is called the “Ninth Army” for some reason. She also writes that Camp Lejeune is in South Carolina.
A solid, accessible, and comprehensive work, though it might not have new revelations if you’ve read up on this before.
Much of the book deals with diplomacy. The book’s take on Nixon and Kissinger is, unsurprisingly, pretty hostile. The first half of the narrative deals with the conduct of America’s war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, while the second half deals with Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China. The impact of the antiwar movement is covered. The influence of Nixon, Kissinger, Laird and Rogers is presented, as are Nixon and Kissinger’s willingness to bypass the latter. Of all the Vietnam policymakers, Laird seems to have been the most consistent. Eisenberg also discusses the role of commanders like Moorer, McCain and Abrams. Much of the book deals with diplomacy. Eisenberg notes that Nixon and Kissinger cultivated closer ties with the Russians and the Chinese, and often made major concessions to them in the hopes that they could pressure the North Vietnamese into a settlement. However, since one of the rationales for intervention in Vietnam was to contain Soviet and Chinese influence, these diplomatic overtures only served to muddy the question of why the nation should wage a war where thousands of Americans were being killed.
Eisenberg attributes many policy choices to Nixon and Kissinger’s personalities, highlighting their interest in military solutions. In this telling they come off as opportunistic, with no coherent “grand strategy” in mind. She notes that Nixon often used the rhetoric of peace and diplomacy to distract from his escalatory gambits in southeast Asia. The discussion of Nixon and Kissinger’s personalities and relationship is also covered well; Eisenberg notes that Kissinger usually called Nixon to congratulate him whenever he finished a televised speech. Self-deception is a major theme in Eisenberg’s story.
The narrative moves along at a quick pace. Eisenberg does a good job presenting events as they unfolded and in portraying the uncertainty of the time. She also does a good job portraying the human cost of the war, shifting from discussions of policy decisions to the stories of soldiers and civilians affected by them.
The pictures of the North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Chinese, and Russian sides could have been more nuanced, and more comprehensive, perhaps. Thieu and his government are dismissed as corrupt dictators, while the communists are described as “patriots seeking the reunification of their country.” Eisenberg also seems sympathetic to the communist negotiating positions, while those of the Americans and South Vietnamese are usually called unrealistic or too demanding. She also highlights the repression of the South Vietnamese police state, but not the conditions in North Vietnam, or in North Vietnamese POW camps. There is also no mention of how people fared in postwar communist societies in southeast Asia. At one point Eisenberg refers to the “August 1967 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.” The Ninth Infantry Division is called the “Ninth Army” for some reason. She also writes that Camp Lejeune is in South Carolina.
A solid, accessible, and comprehensive work, though it might not have new revelations if you’ve read up on this before.
May 20, 2023
This more than excellent book shows to what extent the American war conducted against Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was not only a total failure ,but a humiliating one. It comes in two parts: the first one tells about the conduct of the war and the second part is about the diplomacy involved in trying to come to some settlement with the help of China and the Soviet Union.
There were two main characters involved in this American tragedy: a corrupt, inept and a chronic liar who became paranoiac about everyone almost, namely President Nixon, who was forced to resign after the discovery of the Watergate scandal.
The second one was Henry Kissinger, who, in my opinion, should have been declared a war criminal and should have been on trial in the International Court of War crimes in the Hague.
Both men took care to lie constantly to the American people, by giving them false information about the conduct of this colossal failure. They and their respective administration fellows lied to the Congress, and conducted a war which was not so much different in their policies from the Nazi one during WW2.
True, they did not erect extermination camps like the Nazis did. But, on the other hand, they did not hesitate to issues orders to bomb innocent civilians, spread Agent Orange from the air in order to destroy crops in Vietnam, organize activities led by the CIA in what was called Operation Phoenix, whose purpose was to weed out those elements in Vietnam who were against the war. They have also carriesd out a bombing campaign, which was supposed to be concealed from the public.This campaign happened in Cambodia and after that in Laos, but here it was the beginning of the swan song of the mughtiest army in the world. No one was spared:women and children were either killed, maimed, raped, arson was abundant and this couple of murderers also took care-unsuccessfully-of trying to fight so many groups in the USA which have opposed the war.
The famous and popular phrase used by Nixon who expressed his desire to end the war in "peace with honor" was a farcical statement, since the whole peace talks in Paris in 1973 only led the Americans to run away from the battle fiels as soon as they could.
The result of this horrible,full-of-atrocious crimes committed by the Americans in Southeastern Asia is still felt today. Laos, the most bombed contry in the world,has even these days children who are maimed by bombs or mines which did not explode, while 20000 American soldiers lost their lives and returned in coffins, due to a stupid concept called the "domino theory".
Professor Woods-Eisenberg has written this book for more than 20 years, using newly declassified dosuments and tens of thousands of phone transcript of Kissinger, declassified in 2004.
This war was due to the hubris displayed by the Nixon administration. Let this book be a warning against foreign involvement in other countries' affairs. This book is a masterpiece!
There were two main characters involved in this American tragedy: a corrupt, inept and a chronic liar who became paranoiac about everyone almost, namely President Nixon, who was forced to resign after the discovery of the Watergate scandal.
The second one was Henry Kissinger, who, in my opinion, should have been declared a war criminal and should have been on trial in the International Court of War crimes in the Hague.
Both men took care to lie constantly to the American people, by giving them false information about the conduct of this colossal failure. They and their respective administration fellows lied to the Congress, and conducted a war which was not so much different in their policies from the Nazi one during WW2.
True, they did not erect extermination camps like the Nazis did. But, on the other hand, they did not hesitate to issues orders to bomb innocent civilians, spread Agent Orange from the air in order to destroy crops in Vietnam, organize activities led by the CIA in what was called Operation Phoenix, whose purpose was to weed out those elements in Vietnam who were against the war. They have also carriesd out a bombing campaign, which was supposed to be concealed from the public.This campaign happened in Cambodia and after that in Laos, but here it was the beginning of the swan song of the mughtiest army in the world. No one was spared:women and children were either killed, maimed, raped, arson was abundant and this couple of murderers also took care-unsuccessfully-of trying to fight so many groups in the USA which have opposed the war.
The famous and popular phrase used by Nixon who expressed his desire to end the war in "peace with honor" was a farcical statement, since the whole peace talks in Paris in 1973 only led the Americans to run away from the battle fiels as soon as they could.
The result of this horrible,full-of-atrocious crimes committed by the Americans in Southeastern Asia is still felt today. Laos, the most bombed contry in the world,has even these days children who are maimed by bombs or mines which did not explode, while 20000 American soldiers lost their lives and returned in coffins, due to a stupid concept called the "domino theory".
Professor Woods-Eisenberg has written this book for more than 20 years, using newly declassified dosuments and tens of thousands of phone transcript of Kissinger, declassified in 2004.
This war was due to the hubris displayed by the Nixon administration. Let this book be a warning against foreign involvement in other countries' affairs. This book is a masterpiece!
March 20, 2024
Eisenberg’s book, “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia,” is a fascinating and gripping account of one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. Eisenberg delves deep into the Nixon administration’s handling of the Vietnam War and its impact on the region, shedding light on the complex and often controversial decisions made by Nixon and his advisor, Henry Kissinger. From the very first page, Eisenberg captivates readers with her vivid storytelling and meticulous research. She skillfully weaves together historical facts, personal anecdotes, and political analysis to create a comprehensive and engaging narrative that brings the era to life. Her writing is both informative and entertaining, making “Fire and Rain” a page-turner that is hard to put down. One of the standout features of the book is Eisenberg’s in-depth exploration of the relationship between Nixon and Kissinger. She paints a vivid portrait of the two men and their dynamic, revealing the inner workings of their partnership and the impact it had on American foreign policy. Eisenberg’s insights into their personalities, motivations, and decision-making processes provide valuable context for understanding the events that unfolded during their time in office. Another highlight of “Fire and Rain” is Eisenberg’s analysis of the broader geopolitical implications of the Vietnam War. She expertly navigates the complex web of alliances, conflicts, and power struggles that characterized the region during this period, offering valuable insights into the lasting legacy of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. I recently had the opportunity to hear Eisenberg discuss this book, though published last year, through a Council on Forwign Relations panel and it was excellent.
“Fire and Rain” is a must-read for anyone interested in history, politics, or the Vietnam War. Eisenberg’s engaging writing style, thorough research, and insightful analysis make the book both informative and entertaining. Whether you are a history buff or simply curious about this pivotal period in American history, “Fire and Rain” is sure to captivate and enlighten you from start to finish. So grab a copy, settle in, and prepare to be transported back in time to the tumultuous era of Nixon, Kissinger, and the wars in Southeast Asia.
“Fire and Rain” is a must-read for anyone interested in history, politics, or the Vietnam War. Eisenberg’s engaging writing style, thorough research, and insightful analysis make the book both informative and entertaining. Whether you are a history buff or simply curious about this pivotal period in American history, “Fire and Rain” is sure to captivate and enlighten you from start to finish. So grab a copy, settle in, and prepare to be transported back in time to the tumultuous era of Nixon, Kissinger, and the wars in Southeast Asia.
July 22, 2025
Of all the Vietnam histories I found this to be the best. The author focuses on the inherited war of the Nixon Administration. I found the overarching attitude of the Nixon Administration deeply cynical. It didn’t matter how many people Nixon got killed he was hell bent on America not losing a war even when the nexus between domino theory and South Vietnam came tumbling down with detente and Nixon’s trip to China. The moral catastrophe of America’s involvement in South East Asia is exacerbated by Nixon’s intensifying of the war with such actions as Hamburger Hill and Operation Linebacker, Nixon’s expansion of the war such as Cambodia Incursion, and the bombings of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, and Nixon’s cynicism of abandoning those who supported us and supporting those like Thieu who were frankly autocrats.
Nixon’s actions in South East Asia alone constituted an impeachable offense by violating constitutional principles of war power. Unfortunately, these norms have allowed Presidents to continue to use American force unilaterally in far off lands to this day. To say the American century died in Vietnam is an understatement. Vietnam is the quintessential American conflict where support a regime that supports our ideological ends but in no way is a supporter of things like democracy, freedom of expression or fundamental human rights. America needs to be judicious in the use of its power and make sure that power is being used in the fight for right. Needless to say Vietnam was not one of those fights and we are still reckoning with this history to this very day.
Nixon’s actions in South East Asia alone constituted an impeachable offense by violating constitutional principles of war power. Unfortunately, these norms have allowed Presidents to continue to use American force unilaterally in far off lands to this day. To say the American century died in Vietnam is an understatement. Vietnam is the quintessential American conflict where support a regime that supports our ideological ends but in no way is a supporter of things like democracy, freedom of expression or fundamental human rights. America needs to be judicious in the use of its power and make sure that power is being used in the fight for right. Needless to say Vietnam was not one of those fights and we are still reckoning with this history to this very day.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 3, 2023
History at its finest – read this not just for the history, but for learning how to craft historical narrative and interpretation. For me, this book was more than an empirical text – it was a work of art. This is -quite simply – a tale of three wars, and two weak and miserable men. Eisenberg expertly demolishes the claim that Nixon and Kissinger prolonged the wars in Southeast Asia on account of “credibility.” My sense – to further abstract from Eisenberg’s own account – is that a Clausewitzian explanation fits into Eisenberg’s narrative best. What Fire and Rain shows, without explicitly being aware of it, is that the true purpose of the war after Tet -whatever it may have been before 1968 – was to serve itself. Just a brief note on typographical errors – there was a time when an imprint like Oxford would have been free of these. There were quite a few in this text. Standards appear to be slipping at Oxford University Press.
September 5, 2024
Who remembers Pham-thi-Toi? She survived the My Lai massacre in 1968. Six of her relatives did not. She was compelled to move to a refugee camp despite the danger of landmines. One blew off her limbs. Nearly a year later, after being fitted with prostheses in an American Quaker-run rehab center for maimed Vietnamese civilians, Pham-thi-Toi returned and opened a small shop. In April 1972, South Vietnamese soldiers fired into the camp. Bullets tore into Pham-thi-Toi’s stomach. Having cheated death twice, this young woman was now among the millions of Southeast Asians killed in one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century.
One may not expect to read such stories in a diplomatic history, but the human face of war stares at you throughout Fire and Rain, Carolyn Eisenberg’s 2024 Bancroft Prize-winning study of the lies, deceptions, and earth-shattering violence that propelled President Richard Nixon’s prosecution of the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Read more here:
https://martindicaro.substack.com/p/r...
One may not expect to read such stories in a diplomatic history, but the human face of war stares at you throughout Fire and Rain, Carolyn Eisenberg’s 2024 Bancroft Prize-winning study of the lies, deceptions, and earth-shattering violence that propelled President Richard Nixon’s prosecution of the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
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September 16, 2024
This is a historical masterwork of breathtaking depth and should become the standard by which future histories are judged. With meticulous research and a writing style which eases the reader through its many pages like a novel, Eisenberg chronicles how Nixon and Kissinger conducted the war to suit their whims -- and she doesn't shy away from discussing the deadly consequences to American armed forces and southeast Asian civilians. The death and destruction were on such an overwhelming scale that it beggars the imagination. Eisenberg drives that point home, as well as the gut-wrenching truth that it was literally all for nothing, save for Nixon's and Kissinger's vanity. This book deserves every prize for which it is eligible. The audiobook, skillfully narrated by Susan Ericksen, is equally as impressive.
August 31, 2023
This is the kind of book which is nightmarish as one reads it. I am a Army Vet. 1969-1971. All I can think of is Cannon Fodder...Mendacity...Duplicity...Casualties .....Human costs....How Nixon and Kissinger escaped being held as War Criminals.......I have read multiple books on Vietnam and the surrounding effects. Yes...there are new nuggets even in this one. Johnson couldn't go public with Nixons' and Kissingers shenanigans prior Nixon taking office because the evidence he had was ill begotten by the unlawful wiretaps on Nixon and Kissingers phones. It is a horrifying tale that bites one intellectually. Is it a rabid bite. Judge it yourself.
December 2, 2023
Very serendipitous that I picked this one up at the library last week. Not terribly new ground if you've read any bios of Nixon or Kissinger but the SE Asia focus as opposed to yet another broad overview was welcome and really hammered home as the best of their bios do the ignorance combined with unearned arrogance of the two.
December 17, 2023
Reading this on occasion of Kissinger's departure from earth....he was a controversial figure throughout world history. I'm sure nobody other than the US appreciates him.
True representative of Realpolitik and Machiavellianism. The author has done a great job highlighting the facts and showing the other side of the so-called "great diplomat"
True representative of Realpolitik and Machiavellianism. The author has done a great job highlighting the facts and showing the other side of the so-called "great diplomat"
February 11, 2025
Very detailed and well researched, but the author had a unfortunate tendency to whitewash communist and specifically North Vietnamese motivations and actions, while painting A most likely unfairly negative picture of US actions and motivations in the war.
September 5, 2023
Amazing. If you want to learn about the dangers of hubris and self-deception, there are few books better than this.
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March 5, 2024read for thesis — good info on bombing campaigns in laos
September 30, 2025
Good. This book is a diplomatic history of the U.S. side of the Vietnam War, particularly focusing on Nixon and Kissinger. It was a disturbing read.
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