As I noted in the thread about Books in translation , I’m in the middle of reading Robert Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger, which I read a few pages at a time before I go to sleep because it’s so boring. One of the things that makes it tedious is the repetitive nature of the peace talks that Kissinger engages in with the North Vietnamese. Time and time again, chapter after chapter, he sits down with them, and they never budge an inch off their chief demand, which is “Leave Vietnam now, and let us do what we will with so-called ‘South’ Vietnam.” Kissinger and Nixon keep waiting for this position to change, even a bit, so they could use it as an excuse for leaving Vietnam “See, we got them to concede something so we can now claim a small victory”—but they wouldn’t budge an inch.
The reason the North Vietnamese stuck to their guns was the American public. The North Vietnamese kept claiming that the war was very unpopular in the U.S., which it was, and which the 1960s anti-Vietnam war protests’ made obvious. The protests, public as they were and huge as they were, underscored the point the North Vietnamese were making to Nixon and Kissinger: this war did not have the support of the American people, and the U.S. could not maintain a war that was so unpopular with the American public. Time was on the Vietnamese side. They didn’t need to concede a thing (mainly, Kissinger was asking them to allow the South Vietnamese puppet government to stay in power for a little while which would save face for the U.S., who could then claim “Well, the South Vietnamese government fell but we were out of the country for x months or y years so that’s not our fault.”)
The U.S. position was untenable: Kissinger tried to argue that Nixon could go on bombing them for years, but they refused to buy it, and a large part of their refusal was the public protests in the U.S. The Nixon administration was so opposed to the protests because they said the protests were giving aid and support to the enemy, acknowledging that the protests worked against U.S. interests in the peace negotiations, which they did. Rather than achieving “anything,” I think the protests were the single largest cause of the U.S. finally pulling out of Vietnam.