| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Pierre Asselin. A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement. (The New Cold War History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xx, 272. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95.
The Paris negotiations and resulting 1973 peace agreement have been among the most hotly debated of Vietnam War topics in recent years, and Pierre Asselin's slim monograph is a valuable contribution to this ongoing controversy. It uses North Vietnamese as well as American sources and is carefully crafted and admirably even handed, a good example of the so-called "new Vietnam scholarship."	1
The coverage is narrow, and much of the ground covered is familiar. Asselin dismisses as insignificant the sporadic and unproductive diplomatic contacts between the United States and North Vietnam before 1968; he devotes but one chapter to the period 1969–1971. He focuses on 1972, emphasizing the importance of the heavy losses suffered by all sides in the Easter Offensive and the continued military stalemate as reasons for both North Vietnam and the United States to begin substantive negotiations. He discusses in depth the near-agreement of October 1972, aborted when South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu balked at U.S. concessions, another near miss in early December when only the status of the demilitarized zone stood in the way of an agreement, the infamous Christmas bombing, and the subsequent rush to a settlement.	. . .

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