Imperfect Hindsight

It is a reliable rule of statecraft that it is hard to win at the bargaining table what you are unable or unwilling to win on the battlefield. Henry Kissinger, a cold-eyed realist and practitioner of power politics, knew this well. During the four years that he negotiated America's exit from Vietnam, he regularly resisted those people -- ranging from Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to the doves in the Senate -- who wanted to speed up troop withdrawals and, in Kissinger's view, undercut U.S. leverage at the Paris peace talks. And after the peace accord was signed in January 1973, he...