War Reviewed at Paris Meeting : ‘Why Did You Desert Us?’ Vietnamese Ask Kissinger

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger faced a barrage of hostile Vietnamese interrogators on Friday when he returned to the building where, 15 years ago, he concluded a doomed peace treaty with North Vietnam.

“Why did you desert us, what sort of a man are you?” asked one of dozens of refugees from what was formerly South Vietnam, America’s ally against the North Vietnamese in the war. The Vietnamese gathered at 19 Avenue Kleber, where Kissinger and Hanoi negotiator Le Duc Tho had locked horns for four years to try to end the Vietnam War.

“This is the first chance we have had to get at a man who we see as being responsible for maintaining the war in our country and then pulling out the Americans, leaving us alone,” said one Vietnamese.

‘Involuntary Victims’

“In the last 12 years, what have you done to bring relief to your involuntary victims?” another questioner chimed in.

Kissinger, now a globe-trotting current affairs analyst, was in Paris to discuss the lessons of the war at a “Committee to Rethink Vietnam” conference organized by opponents of the Communist regime.

Many of the questioners were Vietnamese “boat people” who fled their homeland after the Communist regime installed itself in South Vietnam in 1975.

Time and time again, Vietnamese refugees in France asked him the same question: “Why did you leave us?”

Kissinger shrugged off the harsh questioning, saying: “The Vietnamese have a moral right to ask me these questions. I’m a big boy and I can take it.

Kissinger Sees ‘Obsession’

“The Vietnamese obsession that the 1973 peace accord was a plot against the south by the U.S. government is a tragedy,” he said, adding that North Vietnam “from the first day never made the slightest attempt to observe peace.”

The world rejoiced at the January, 1973, peace accord between the United States and North Vietnam. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but ominously the North Vietnamese refused to accept the award.

The Paris talks were kept secret for almost three years, and the discretion of staff members at the Paris conference center is still evident 15 years later.

The only employee from the time who still works there, a waiter during the talks, declined to give his name, and his only comment was: “They were fascinating years, and journalists were offering huge sums for the stupidest details.”

Size of Table

A detail that delayed talks for many months was the shape of the table at which the U.S. and North Vietnamese delegation should sit.

Finally, it was agreed the table should be rectangular, and the amount of space allocated to each delegate was measured down to the last centimeter.

More than a year after the peace accord was reached, President Richard M. Nixon had left the White House in shame after the Watergate scandal, South Vietnam had virtually collapsed, and in March, 1975, North Vietnamese troops launched a mass offensive that drove U.S. forces out of the country.

The peace accord had come to nothing, and Kissinger offered in vain to return the much-criticized Nobel award.

For the last two days, senior U.S. officials, Vietnam veterans, former South Vietnamese military leaders, refugees from the Communist regime and analysts have probed the reasons for American failure and criticized Hanoi.

William Colby, former CIA director and a senior military officer in Vietnam, said Washington had been unprepared for the strategy of North Vietnam’s guerrilla army, which demoralized troops and weakened U.S. popular support for the war.

He said Washington is still learning strategic lessons from the war.