Book description...This book deals with the way the United States ended its involvement in the longest war in its history." The opening line of this book is as unambiguous as its title. Kissinger was, of course, President Nixon's national security advisor, later his secretary of state, and is currently an academic and author. In fact, Kissinger's latest book is really a selection of chapters gathered from four previous books, which he has rearranged and somewhat rewritten. In this insider book par excellence, Kissinger keeps fairly, if not wholly, grounded in objectivity as he records and interprets events in this "black hole of American historical memory." As he sees it, the problem with the Vietnam War by the time Nixon became president was not that American involvement there needed to be terminated--"every administration in office during the Vietnam war sought to end it"--but how to end it. The war on the home front brought into glaring light the "tension" between U.S. idealism and the need to be immersed in the pragmatic world of international power-play. To the author, the lesson of Vietnam--"the tragedy described in these pages"--is that "America must never again permit its promise to be overwhelmed by its divisions." The density of Kissinger's prose style will not keep most readers from realizing the important place of this book within the complete historiography of the Vietnam War
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