In the autumn of 1965, Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger visited the American Front in Vietnam.

By now, Kissinger was a semi-official advisor to the Johnson administration and well-informed

about the struggles of the U.S. mission.

In his memoirs, Kissinger writes that, after arriving, quote, I soon realized we had involved ourselves in a war which we knew neither how to win nor how to conclude, end quote.

Over three weeks in October 1965, writes historian Robert K. Brigham, quote, Kissinger

met with several senior U.S. military leaders, including General William Westmoreland,

who assured him the war was going well, end quote.

Everywhere Kissinger went, U.S. leaders told him the same optimistic story. Give the war a year,

maybe 18 months. Afterward, in his official report to the U.S. ambassador, Kissinger expressed

his skepticism, but maintained the correctness of America's goals in Vietnam.

But Kissinger also kept private diaries during his trip.

They went much further than what he said on the record.

In these, Kissinger called the Army reports useless, quote,

eye-wash, end quote, and described firsthand the bureaucratic incompetence of the American

mission. Kissinger returned to Vietnam in 1966 to find the situation had gotten even worse. Briefed by

a Pentagon analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, Kissinger learned that the South Vietnamese were useless as a fighting

force. Neither side in the war had achieved enough to claim victory or lost enough to admit defeat.

But at the same time, during his trips, Kissinger became intoxicated by the wartime capital, Saigon.

He could not ignore the historical stakes, the intrigue, the opportunity.

Henry Kissinger, after all, had risen to prominence as a theoretician of the balance of power.

He began to see the Vietnam War as one grand puzzle to be solved, and who better to solve

it.

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