Grasshoppers & Elephants: Why Viet Nam Fell (1977) By Wilfred Burchett
 
Burchett is a left-wing journalist with far-ranging contacts among Asian revolutionaries, and, during the late-1967 US peace overtures that followed Lyndon Johnson's abdication, he agreed to act as a secret envoy between the State Department and Hanoi. Meeting negotiator Averell Harriman in Paris, Burchett was impressed with his sincerity, and thinks a President Humphrey would have ended the war; but US intelligence agencies always underestimated the Vietnamese, he asserts, believing the crudest stick-and-carrot games could alter the war's outcome, and Henry Kissinger remained devoted to duplicity. In a 1971 interview, Kissinger asked Burchett to tell North Vietnam that the US wanted "total withdrawal" of its own troops--a message followed by the saturation bombing of Hanoi. However, the "Vietnamization" of the war under Nixon deprived Saigon army troops of US air cover and allowed the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to accelerate their plans for taking over the South.
 
The 55-day offensive in 1975 that ended the war was not an invasion, says Burchett; it was a mass uprising of the population, led by National Liberation Front infiltrators into the Civil Guard, army, trade unions, and countryside. The scope of NLF support was shown by the rapidity of the government's collapse as more than a million Saigon troops melted away, and by the speed of reconstruction efforts during Burchett's two-month visit just after the military victory. Like Tiziano Terzani in Giai Phong! (1976), Burchett charges that the US had aimed for maximum last-ditch disruption. This, too, is an eyewitness book of vignettes, with forthright revolutionary sympathies; to the closeups of tanks and cadre, Burchett adds an "inside-outside" view of US diplomacy itself.
 
Soft Cover
265 Pages
In Good Condition