Edwin E. Moïse

Vietnam War Bibliography:

Peace Negotiations and the Paris Agreement

The American Journal of International Law published the texts of four protocols to the Paris Agreements, and some documents relevant to implementation of the agreements. If you browse the Internet through an institution that has subscribed to JSTOR, you can access the text directly through the links below or go through the JSTOR American Journal of International Law browse page.

Ang Cheng Guan, Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists' Perspective. London and New York:RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. viii, 198 pp. Covers the period 1968-1975, with particular emphasis on the Paris negotiations.

Cheng Guan Ang, "The Vietnam War from Both Sides: Revisiting 'Marigold', 'Sunflower', and 'Pennsylvania'." War & Society 24 (November 2005), pp. 93-125.

(Harry S. Ashmore, ed.?), Vietnam: Matters for the Agenda. Center Occasional Papers, Volume 1, number 4. Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, June 1968. 64 pp. A lot of this is proposals for possible ways of negotiating an end to the war, including "The Third Solution: A Neutral Coalition: A Discussion with Thich Nhan Hanh" (pp. 6-11). The text has been placed online in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Pierre Asselin, A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xx, 272 pp. The best study I have seen on this subject. The full text is available online to paid subscribers of Questia.

Pierre Asselin, "The Quest for a Negotiated Settlement of the Indochinese Crisis: North Vietnamese - American Secret Diplomacy, 1968-1973." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of Hawaii, 1997. xxvii, 375 pp. DA9733596. Based on archives in the United States, Vietnam, and Canada. This is quite a valuable study. Aside from the narrative, note that it has as an appendix (pp. 317-33) the reconstructed text of the October 20, 1972 draft of the Paris Peace Agreement, a document I have not seen elsewhere. The full text is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."

Pierre Asselin, "'We Don't Want a Munich': Hanoi's Diplomatic Strategy, 1965-1968." Diplomatic History, 36:3 (June 2012), pp. 547-81.

Pierre Asselin, "Revisionism Triumphant: Hanoi's Diplomatic Strategy in the Nixon Era," Journal of Cold War Studies 13:4 (Fall 2011), pp. 101-137.

Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam. New York: The Free Press, 2001. xv, 334 pp.

George Brown, In My Way. London: Gollancz, 1971/New York: St. Martin's, 1971. 299 pp. Brown was British Foreign Secretary from August 1966 to March 1968. The book includes discussion of his efforts to serve as an intermediary for peace talks between Washington and Hanoi.

Bui Diem with David Chanoff, In the Jaws of History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. x, 367 pp. Bui Diem was RVN Ambassador to the US from 1967 to 1972.

Bui Diem, Gong kim lich su: hoi ky chinh tri. Paris: Pham Quang Khai, distributed by Editions Sudasie, 2000. v, V, 596, 13 pp. A significantly revised Vietnamese version of the previous item.

Chester L. Cooper, "The Complexities of Negotiation." Foreign Affairs (April 1968?), pp. 452-466. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Colonel Joseph F. H. Cutrona, USA, "Peace in Vietnam: An Acceptable Solution" Military Review, November 1966 (vol. XLVI, no. 11), pp. 60-68. Cutrona proposes a negotiated settlement under which all U.S. and North Vietnamese personnel would withdraw from South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong would be completely disarmed, leaving the ARVN in complete military control of South Vietnam, the only armed force. The Viet Cong would then be permitted to participate in elections in South Vietnam.

Documentation on Viet-Nam Agreement. News release, Bureau of Public Affairs, Department of State, January 24, 1973. 85 pp. The text been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University, in two parts: Cover sheet and pp. 1-49 (address by President Nixon, January 23, 1973; press conference of Henry A. Kissinger, January 24, 1973; text of the Paris Agreement; Articles 1-7 of the Protocol Concerning the Cease-fire in South Vietnam and the Joint Military Commission);   pp. 50-85 (remainder of that protocol, other protocols, "Fact Sheets" summarizing the agreements, and map showing headquarters and team locations of the 4-Party Joint Military Commission).

Theodore H. Draper, "A Special Supplement: Vietnam: How Not to Negotiate." New York Review of Books, 8:8 (May 4, 1967).

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) is a U.S. government agency that monitors the content of the public media (primarily the broadcast media, but despite its name it has sometimes covered the print media) of other nations. Its Daily Report has been published in two versions: one covering the whole world, and one made up of area editions providing much more detailed coverage of particular regions. The Daily Report: Far East is the one most useful for the Vietnam War. Both versions appear five days a week. They are made up mainly of radio broadcasts (some of which were originally in English and others of which have had to be translated). For links to FBIS coverage of the North Vietnamese media in the days immediately following the signing of the Paris Agreements, see Translation Series

Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, eds., The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. vi, 406 pp.

Allan E. Goodman, The Lost Peace: America's Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam War. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978. xviii, 298 pp. What appears to be a typescript copy of this work (taking up considerably more pages than the print version), including documentary appendices, has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University, in multiple parts: front matter and pp. 1-42, . . .

Allan E. Goodman, The Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam War. Indochina Research Monograph no. 2, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1986. x, 123 pp. Not very good.

M.T. Haggard, A Chronology of Efforts to Achieve a Negotiated Settlement in Vietnam. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service, 1968. F-287. 58 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

W. Averell Harriman, America and Russia in a Changing World. New York: Doubleday, 1971. By the man who headed the US negotiating team when the Paris peace talks began in 1968.

George C. Herring, ed., Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War: The Negotiating Volumes of the Pentagon Papers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983. xl, 873 pp. This contains the sections of the Defense Department study that dealt with efforts to negotiate a settlement of the war. This material was not included in any of the editions published during the war, because people were afraid publicity would interfere with the negotiations. The endnotes on pp. 827-856 of this volume are by Herring; they are not the endnotes that were part of the original classified text.

George C. Herring, Wallace Thies, Merle L. Pribbenow, Sophie Quinn-Judge, Jessica M. Chapman, Michael R. Adamson, and James G. Hershberg, "Peace Proposals, Diplomacy, and War: Was an Opportunity Lost for an Early Settlement in Vietnam?," Journal of Cold War Studies 17:1 (Winter 2015), pp. 153-180.

Hoi nghi Paris ve Viet nam nhin lai / Paris Conference on vietnam: Looking Back, 1968-1973. Hanoi: The Gioi, 2013. 175 pp. Bilingual in Vietnamese and English.

Pierre Journoud and Cécile Menétrey-Monchau, eds., Vietnam, 1968–1976: La sortie de guerre/Exiting a War. Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2011. Enjeux Internationaux/International Issues, no. 17. 378 pp. plus CD.

Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon's Vietnam War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. xvi, 495 pp. Best on Nixon, Kissinger, their relations with one another, and their handling of the Paris negotiations.

Jeffrey Kimball, "The Case of the 'Decent Interval': Do We Now Have a Smoking Gun?" SHAFR Newsletter, 32:3 (September 2001), pp. 35-39.

Jeffrey Kimball, "Decent Interval or Not? The Paris Agreement and the End of the Vietnam War." Passport 34:3 (December 2003), pp. 26-31.

Henry Kissinger, White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. xxiv, 1521 pp. Memoirs by Richard Nixon's top foreign policy official, the man who ran the Paris negotiations. Kissinger has a surprising ability to ignore the obvious.

Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication From the Vietnam War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. 640 pp.

Henry Kissinger, Vietnam: A Personal History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War. Touchstone, 2002. 400 pp. I have seen a listing for this, but I am not sure such a book was ever actually published. I think it is probably just an early planned title for the book listed above as Ending the Vietnam War.

David Kraslow and Stuart Loory, The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1968. viii, 247 pp.

Melvin R. Laird, "Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam". Foreign Affairs, November/December 2005. Laird presents a remarkably inaccurate version of the last stage of the Vietnam War, claiming that the Paris Agreement of 1973 set a limit on the level of Soviet military aid to Hanoi, that Saigon's forces were holding their own militarily until 1975, and that in 1975 the United States Congress voted to cut off U.S. aid. All of these statements are false. I am also very dubious about his claim that recently released documents indicate Soviet military aid to Hanoi from 1973 to 1975 was far higher than U.S. aid to Saigon.

Lorenz M. Lüthi, "Beyond Betrayal: Beijing, Moscow, and the Paris Negotiations, 1971-1973." Journal of Cold War Studies 11:1 (Winter 2009), pp. 57-107.

Luu Van Loi, The Le Duc Tho - Kissinger Negotiations in Paris. Hanoi: The Gioi, 1995.  559 pp. Hanoi: The Gioi, 1996. 571 pp.

Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Cac cuoc thuong luong Le Duc Tho - Kissinger tai Paris. Hanoi: Cong An Nhan Dan, 1996. 522 pp.

Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Tiep xuc bi mat Viet Nam - Hoa Ky truoc hoi nghi Pa-ri [Secret Vietnamese-American contacts before the Paris conference. Hanoi: Vien quan he quoc te, 1990. 269 pp.

Mai Van Bo, Tan cong ngoai giao va tiep xuc bi mat: hoi ky (Diplomatic offensive and secret contacts).  TP Ho Chi Minh: Nha Xuat Ban Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh, 1985.  201 pp.

Mai Van Bo, Ha Noi-Paris: hoi ky ngoai giao. Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh: Van Nghe, 1993. 366 pp.

Oriana Skylar Mastro, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. xiv, 197 pp. Chapter 5, "North Vietnamese Diplomatic Posture in the Vietnam War" (pp. 101-125), deals with shifting DRV views from 1965 to 1968 on the question of whether to attempt a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam War.

Robert Hopkins Miller, Vietnam and Beyond: A Diplomat's Cold War Education. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002. xix, 247 pp. Miller served in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon from 1962 to 1965, then became director of the Vietnam Working Group in the State Department. Late in 1968, he went to Paris as an adviser to the U.S. delegation at the peace negotiations. His accounts of his personal experience are interesting, but when he deals with events for which it is possible to check the historical record, he is often startlingly inaccurate.

Edwin E. Moise, "The Mirage of Negotiations," in Lloyd C. Gardner and Tet Gittinger, eds., The Search for Peace in Vietnam, 1964-1968 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), pp. 73-82. I argue that the major proposals made during the Johnson administration for a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam War were grossly unrealistic.

Nguyen Duy Trinh, Mat tran ngoai giao thoi ky chong My cuu nuoc, 1965-1975. Hanoi: Su That, 1979. 318 pp.

Nguyen Minh Vy, "Statement by Mr. Nguyen Minh Vy, on behalf of the Delegation of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam at the 170th Plenary Session of the Paris Conference on Viet Nam," December 14, 1972. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Nguyen Phu Duc, The Viet-Nam Peace Negotiations: Saigon's Side of the Story. Edited by Arthur Dommen. Christiansburg, Virginia: Dalley Book Service, 2005. xiv, 463 pp. Duc was Special Assistant for Foreign Affairs to President Thieu.

Nguyen Thanh Le, Quoc dam phan Pari ve Viet nam, 1968-1973 (The Paris negotiations on Vietnam, 1968-1973).  Hanoi: Nha xuat ban chinh tri quoc gia, 1998.  254 pp.

Nguyen Thi Binh, "Statement by Minister Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, Chief of the Delegation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Viet Nam at the 170th Plenary Session of the Paris Conference on Viet Nam," December 14, 1972. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Nguyen Thi Binh, et al., Mat tran dan toc giai phong Chinh phu cach mang lam thoi tai Hoi nghi Paris ve Viet Nam: hoi uc. Hanoi: Chinh tri quoc gia, 2001. 688 pp.

Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold Schecter, The Palace File. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.  xiv, 542 pp.  Story of the relationship between the Saigon government and Washington, roughly 1969-75. Schecter has been both a journalist and a government official in the U.S.; Hung was a senior official in Saigon and is writing largely from his own knowledge.

Nguyen Van Thieu, "Excerpts From Thieu's Address to the Nation on the New Proposal for Peace," New York Times, October 25, 1972, p. 17. Interesting for the way he talked about the separation of North and South Vietnam without quite saying they were separate countries: "To restore peace first we must use the 1954 Geneva accords as a basis. This means North Vietnam is North Vietnam and South Vietnam is South Vietnam. For the time being one must accept the two Vietnams and neither side can invade the other. On the question of reunification of the two Vietnams, I can only say this must be realized through democracy and not through force."

Nguyen Xuan Phong, oral history. The text is copyright by, and has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University, in multiple parts: sessions one and two, September 25 and 26, 2002 (goes up to the early 1960s), session three and four, September 27 and 30, 2002 (goes up to the coup of 1963; Phong was working for Esso, an American oil corporation), October 1 and 4, 2002 (from the Buddhist protests of 1963 up to Phong's becoming Minister of Labor in 1965, but there are a lot of digressions to earlier and later periods), October 11 and 14, 2002 (he was minister of welfare, then he became the Chieu Hoi minister in 1967, then in 1968 he became a member of the RVN delegation to the Paris negotiations), October 16 and 23, 2002 (mostly on the Ngo Dinh Diem era, but also on the Paris negotiations), November 6 and 21, 2002 (Paris negotiations), December 5, 2002, and January 10, 2003 (to the end of the war in 1975), January 24 and February 7, 2003 (a lot about his time in a re-education camp after the war), February 18 and March 14, 2003, (more on re-education) May 22 and June 11, 2003, (after his release in 1980), June 19, 2003.

Larry A. Niksch, Current Status of the Paris Peace Talks. Washington, D.C.: Legislative Reference Service, Library of Congress, May 22, 1969. 23 pp. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University.

Lt. Col. Joe M. Palmer, USA, "Political Negotiations in Vietnam" Military Review, September 1966 (vol. XLVI, no. 9), pp. 62-69. Discusses possible future negotiations; misrepresents the 1954 Geneva Accords.

The Paris Agreement on Vietnam (Fundamental Juridical Problems). Hanoi: Institute of Juridical Sciences, Committee of Social Sciences of the DRVN, 1973. 403 pp. Includes the complete texts of the agreements.

"The Paris Agreement on Vietnam: Twenty-Five Years Later", Conference Transcript, The Nixon Center, Washington, DC, April 1998. Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger, Peter W. Rodman, Charles Whithouse, Leslie H. Gelb, Walter McDougall, and Dimitri K. Simes. Definitely a Nixon-administration view of the events.

Jacques Portes, La fin de la guerre du vietnam (1968-1975): Washington-Hanoi-Saigon-Paris. Paris: les Indes Savantes, 2016. 214 pp.

James Roy Powell, "Going for Broke: Richard Nixon's Search for 'Peace with Honor,' October 1972-January 1973." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of Kentucky, 1998. 314 pp. DA 9922627. Very critical of Nixon. The full text is available online if you are browsing the Internet from an institution, such as Clemson University, that has a subscription to ProQuest "Dissertations and Theses: Full Text."

John Prados, "Diplomacy on Multiple Fronts", in The VVA Veteran, 23:1 (January/February 2003), pp. 19-22. [I believe articles in this publication stay online only about two years after publication.] Contains some interesting new information about what Kissinger and Nixon were telling Thieu, during the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement.

Sophie Quinn-Judge, The Third Force in the Vietnam War: The Elusive Search for Peace, 1954-75. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017. x, 230 pp.

Major Alfred K. Richeson, USA, "The Four-Party Joint Military Commission." Military Review, 53:8 (August 1973), pp. 16-27.

I.S. Shcherbakov, "A Record of the Meeting with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Relations of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Khoang Van Tien," 17 January 1973. English translation from document in Russian archives apparently done for "Task Force Russia" in 1993. The text has been placed on-line in the Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University.

I.F. Stone, "The Hidden Traps in Nixon's Peace Plan." New York Review of Books, 18:4 (March 9, 1972).

I.F. Stone, "A Bad Deal that May Not Work." New York Review of Books, 19:9 (November 30, 1972). There was a letter to the editor from Tom Hayden, disagreeing with Stone's article, in issue 19:11-12 (January 25, 1973).

William H. Sullivan, Obbligato: Notes on a Foreign Service Career. New York: Norton, 1984. 279 pp. Sullivan deals only very briefly (pp. 240-47) with his role in the US negotiating team at the Paris peace talks.

Marek Thee, "Vietnam: The Subtle Art of Negotiations". Security Dialogue 3:2 (April 1972), pp. 163-71.

Harold Wilson, The Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. xix, 836 pp. Published in the United States as A Personal Record: The Labour Government, 1964-1970.  Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.  836 pp.  Includes some discussion of Prime Minister Wilson's efforts to serve as an intermediary for peace talks between Washington and Hanoi.

The Virtual Vietnam Archive of the Vietnam Project, at Texas Tech University, has placed online the texts of a considerable variety of documents relating to the Paris negotiations and the Paris Agreement. A few of these are:

60 ngay thi hanh hiep dinh [60 days of implementation of the agreement]. Hanoi: NXB Quan doi nhan dan, 1973. 46 pp.

 

For information on efforts (the most famous of which was known as Marigold) by Polish diplomats to get peace talks started between Washington and Hanoi, see Eastern Europe.

See also The Communist Viewpoint: International Relations.

There is also information about the Paris negotiations in many of the books listed in U.S. Policy in the Nixon and Ford Administrations.

For the aftermath and consequences of the agreement see The End: 1973-1975.
 

Return to Table of Contents

Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2023, 2024, Edwin E. Moise. This document may be reproduced only by permission. Revised January 19, 2024.