Pierre Asselin
speaker
562 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3d ago
Pierre Asselin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
cut off communist supply lines into the South. And then, as I mentioned earlier, you have the Americans engaging leaders in Beijing, leaders in Moscow, further increasing the pressure on Hanoi. And then in 71, 72, the Americans make their big diplomatic push for an agreement.
And at that point, Hanoi will be much more accommodating than it would have been in 69, let's say, during Nixon's first year in office, and much more accommodating than it ever was during the Johnson years.
Well, so you know, it's funny, right? When it comes to negotiating peace, there are certain cities we associate with peace because of their history, right? It's no coincidence that all this stuff happens in Geneva, right? to the point where people get confused between the Geneva Accords, the Geneva Conventions, and Paris is another one of those places, right?
I mean, Paris is where the Americans negotiated their independence, right? Paris is the site of countless other major negotiations. So having Paris as a site for negotiations is symbolic, and it attests to the seriousness with which both sides are going to approach the talks. Beyond that, in this particular case, you also have the fact that common acquaintances
of the Americans and the North Vietnamese are French and therefore can facilitate these meetings, both the public and semi-public ones, which are going to take place in a hotel, and then the secret ones, which are going to take place at the private homes of people that Kissinger and leaders in Hanoi know. And that back channel that Nixon opens in 69 is going to function
No one's going to be aware of the existence of these stocks, except Nixon, Kissinger, and a couple of their advisors, and then the guys on the other side in Hanoi. And as part of the effort to keep everything secret, they met at the private residences of people they both knew in Paris or outside Paris.
I mean, it takes four years. The real productive phase of the talks unfolds in the second half of 72 and early 1973. Prior to that, they're talking about But they're not really negotiating, you know, it's it's and they spend, you know, particularly under Johnson, they spend a lot of time talking about talks. Right. Like what what shape should the table be? Right.
How many people should be present and should the press be there and so on and so forth?
Because that, and again, right, we might think, oh, this is stupid, but that's the thing, right? If it's like a square table, it basically means that all four sides are equal, right? But that was the problem with Vietnam, right? Hanoi did not recognize the government in the South. The government in the South did not recognize Hanoi, right?
So these little things that many people are quick to dismiss as stupid or inconsequential actually mean an awful lot in the context of a serious negotiation.
So this is where it gets really, really interesting, Don. After Nixon assumes the presidency... We technically have two ongoing negotiations with respect to Vietnam. We have these kind of semi-public talks that were initiated by Johnson. And then we have these secret talks that were initiated by Nixon. Now, the secret channel becomes the primary channel for negotiating.
But then to help maintain the secrecy of those meetings, Nixon and Kissinger and leaders in Hanoi will agree to keep the semi-public channel going. In the semi-public negotiations, all four parties are represented. The Americans are there, the North Vietnamese are there, Saigon is there, and the Viet Cong is there. But in the secret channel, it's just the Americans and the North Vietnamese.
What's interesting in the secret channel is that it's an American-North Vietnamese negotiation. And essentially, the main party to the war in the South, the government in Saigon, is not part of those talks. It's not even informed about the existence of the talks, much less their substance.
So when we talk about the North Vietnamese, we're talking about the leaders of Northern Vietnam, officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, ensconced in Hanoi. They're really the masterminds, if you will, of the anti-American, anti-South Vietnamese effort, right? They are the guys in charge of...
The People's Army of Vietnam, what we call the North Vietnamese Army, the NVA, those professional soldiers who come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to take on South Vietnamese, American, and other allied forces in the South who were extremely well-equipped and trained. Now, when we talk about the Viet Cong, we're talking about indigenous Southerners, people in the South.
who will join the anti-Saigon, anti-American crusade as part of an organization known as the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam, which is presumably autonomous, independent, and southern, but which we now know was in fact controlled and established by Hanoi. So when it comes to all major decisions,
It's really basically Le Xuan and two or three of his advisors in Hanoi who make those calls. And then the Viet Cong will essentially follow. So publicly, again, right, as part of its effort to control the narrative of the war, Hanoi will claim that the Viet Cong is this popular indigenous front that merely seeks emancipation from the evil Americans and their South Vietnamese abettors.
But in reality, it's an instrument used by Hanoi essentially to facilitate the mobilization of the South Vietnamese masses and recruit fighters among them.
Yeah. After the partition of Vietnam, after the French War, there was a 300-day period during which people could move from the south to the north, the north to the south. And we saw about like a million people. leave the North to resettle in the South. A lot of these guys were Catholics, were concerned about, you know, living under a communist regime in Northern Vietnam.
And then those guys, you know, become really, really staunch supporters of the regime in Saigon.
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