This was hardly a secret, even at the time. Nobody was under any illusions that we weren't running out on SEA; Vietnam was a Tar Baby and it was either quit, or mount an offensive that was politically impossible.
Theres a no brainer. We have him and good ol Nixon boy to thank for our situation now with China...
In 1972, Henry Kissinger and Chinese Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua included a paragraph in the Shanghai Communique with the phrase ". . .there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China."
Carter abrogated the 1954 mutual security treaty in 1979 when he recognized the mainland government as the sole government of all of China and dropped all official ties to Taiwan.
President Bush has recently said publicly we will do whatever is necessary to defend Taiwan, as he has reestablished our assistance in Taiwan's defense and acquisition of defensive weapons.
President Bush has appointed Condoleeza Rice his National Security Advisor; she distinguished herself by counselling firmness toward China in a key article for Foreign Relations--this at a time that Henry Kissinger warned the U.S. not to interfere in the interests of China.
President Bush's appointment of Henry Kissinger as head of a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the causes of the surprise attack on September 11, 2001, is for the purpose of bestowing maximum credibility in the form of a figurehead atop a ceremonial commission.
President Bush's appointment ought not be viewed as endorsing the China policies of Kissinger, or of seeking his advise on international matters.
Lt. Gen. Charles G. Cooper, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.) writes in the May 1996 Proceedings in "The Day It Became the Longest War" that a key meeting of the Joint Chiefs and LBJ at the White House in November 1965 set the outcome of the war.
During that fifteen minutes, at which Cooper was an aide to the chiefs, the service heads pitched their plan to bomb Hanoi and mine Haiphong. LBJ listened, then cursed them, humiliated them, and dismissed them.
Cooper closes with:
We shall never know. But had General Wheeler and the others been given a fair hearing, and had their recommendations been given serious study, it is entirely possible that 55,000 or so of America's sons would not have been killed in a war that its major architect, Robert Strange McNamara, now considers to have been a tragic mistake.
President Bush's prosecution of the response to the attack of September 11, 2001 was to use Special Forces, CIA, and precision bombing to win the hearts and minds of the al Qaeda (see also Buried Briquets).
Henry Kissinger to the contrary notwithstanding, President Bush is not likely to go wobbly vis a vis China.
bizarre thread