19691776 Club
In a Paris apartment, Kissinger opens back-channel talks with Hanoi's envoy
The public negotiators keep arguing over table shapes while a quieter conversation starts down the hall.
By 1969, American troop strength in Vietnam had climbed to 536,000 and the war had turned into the country's most divisive political fight in a generation. Richard Nixon, newly in office, wanted a way out that did not look like surrender. In the Paris apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger met secretly with North Vietnamese representative Xuân Thuỷ to search for terms neither side would state in public. The channel ran alongside the official Paris talks and collapsed without an agreement…
