Later this week we will reach a milestone that should get careful attention from historians -- specifically, historians of the Vietnam War.
Thursday, October 26 will mark 50 years to the day since Henry Kissinger declared that "peace is at hand" in Vietnam. Those words, promising an imminent end to a long, frustrating and deeply unpopular conflict, electrified the United States and the world when they were spoken, and one can guess they will be recalled fairly widely on the coming anniversary day. Far more important than just remembering Kissinger's words, though, is to revisit the larger (and largely forgotten) story of what actually happened in October 1972, and what those facts tell us about events in the next three months and the peace agreement that was eventually concluded, though without bringing peace, in late January 1973.
The first thing to remember is that when Kissinger spoke in October, he was not referring to an agreement that was still under negotiation or in any way hypothetical or conditional. The peace that was at hand on that day was a final draft that had been officially and unequivocally approved by Richard Nixon, President of the United States, and North Vietnam's prime minister Pham Van Dong (that's verified in both Nixon's and Kissinger's memoirs, by the way).
None of this was secret, at the time or later. A few hours before Kissinger stepped up to the podium in the White House briefing room to deliver his pronouncement, Hanoi's official news agency broadcast an announcement confirming the agreement and giving a detailed outline of its terms.
Remembering these facts is important not just as a matter of historical accuracy. They are relevant to the present, too, because they conclusively disprove a false belief that remains influential to this day: the claim that the final U.S. bombing campaign in North Vietnam in the last weeks of 1972, most often remembered as the "Christmas bombing," was the decisive factor in forcing the enemy to accept the January agreement.
During the last 50 years, that false memory has helped perpetuate an exaggerated faith in air power that distorted American strategic thinking in Vietnam and ever since. In fact, comparing the October and January texts shows in plain black and white that the North Vietnamese conceded nothing in the final agreement that they had not already conceded in the earlier round, before the bombing. Aside from a few minor procedural changes and a handful of cosmetic revisions in wording, the two texts are for practical purposes identical, proving that the bombing did NOT change Hanoi's decisions in any meaningful way.