OSLO (Reuters) – The 1973 Nobel Peace Prize to top U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, amongst essentially the most disputed within the award’s history, was given in the complete knowledge the Vietnam War was unlikely to finish any time soon, newly released papers show.
Nominations to the Peace Prize remain secret for 50 years. On Jan. 1, documents concerning the prize awarded to Kissinger and Hanoi’s chief negotiator Tho were made available on request.
The choice shocked many on the time as Kissinger, then U.S. national security adviser and secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, played a serious role in U.S. military strategy in the ultimate stages of the 1955-75 Vietnam conflict.
“I’m much more surprised than I used to be on the time that the committee could come to such a nasty decision,” Stein Toennesson, a professor on the Peace Research Institute Oslo who reviewed the documents, told Reuters.
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Kissinger and Tho reached the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords under which Washington accomplished a military withdrawal from South Vietnam after having largely ended offensives and avoided combat against the Communist North within the face of worsening troop morale and large anti-war protests in America.
However the ceasefire stipulated by the accords was soon ignored on the bottom by each North and South Vietnam, which refused to sign the deal claiming betrayal as Hanoi’s forces weren’t required to withdraw from the South.
The war raged on with the North’s forces rapidly advancing within the South, now left to fight without critical U.S. support and weakened by high-level state corruption and disarray.
Fighting ended only on April 30, 1975 after North Vietnamese forces captured the South’s capital Saigon, triggering a chaotic and humiliating evacuation of remaining Americans and native allies by helicopter from the U.S. Embassy rooftop.
Le Duc Tho refused the Peace Prize on the grounds peace had not yet been established. Two out of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee – all now dead – resigned in protest. Kissinger, while accepting the award, didn’t travel to Norway for the ceremony and later tried in vain to return the prize.
Tho, who died at 78 in 1990, was a general, diplomat and member of North Vietnam’s ruling Politburo. He oversaw the southern Viet Cong insurgency against the Saigon government from the late Fifties, and later the North’s decisive 1974-75 offensive that led to unification under rule from Hanoi.
Kissinger, 99 and still a outstanding commentator on foreign policy and conflict resolution including most recently the Ukraine war, didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment on the discharge of the 1973 Nobel Peace files.
AWARENESS THAT AWARD MIGHT PROVE UNMERITED
The papers, reviewed by Reuters, reveal Kissinger and Tho were nominated by a member of the Nobel committee, Norwegian academic John Sanness, on Jan. 29, 1973 – two days after the signing of the Paris accords.
Hundreds of individuals can nominate prize candidates, including certain professors, former Nobel laureates and heads of state.
“My reasoning is that this selection would underline the positive that talks have led to a deal that may bring armed conflict between North Vietnam and the USA to an end,” Sanness said in his typewritten letter, in Norwegian.
But Sanness, who died in 1984, added: “I’m aware that it is just within the time ahead that it’s going to turn out to be clear (what form of) significance the accords could have in practice.”
The nomination letter and the reports prepared on Kissinger and Tho for the committee’s deliberations showed it was “fully aware” the accords were “unlikely to carry”, said Toennesson.
“The prize was given to Kissinger for having gotten the U.S. out of Vietnam … with none peaceful solution in South Vietnam,” he said. Tho, he said, was nominated since the panel felt it “couldn’t give it to Kissinger alone”.
“He (Kissinger) needed a partner they usually then added Le Duc Tho, whom they knew little about. The report on (him) is kind of weak,” added Toennesson.
Among the many released documents is the unique telegram Tho sent from Hanoi that said it was “inconceivable” for him to simply accept the Peace Prize.
Tho wrote: “When the Paris agreement on Vietnam is respected, guns are silenced and peace is admittedly restored in South Vietnam, I’ll consider the acceptance of this prize.”
The U.S. military intervention in Vietnam within the early Sixties was billed as a move to contain the spread of Communism.
In the long run, the Paris accords sealed the U.S. exit from a war widely reviled at home as a hugely costly and divisive quagmire, but didn’t silence the guns or bring a negotiated peace in Vietnam.
On May 1, 1975, the day after the autumn of Saigon that ended the war, Kissinger tried to return the prize, via a U.S. cable to the Nobel committee during which he said the “peace we sought through negotiations has been overturned by force”.
The committee refused to take back the award.
(Reporting by Gwladys Fouche in Oslo, editing by Terje Solsvik and Mark Heinrich)
Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.
