“’No foreign country will ever trust us again,’ he declaimed.
And Kissinger was right to an extent. When the south was finally overrun due to our lack of support - a lasting image on how the world viewed America was a helicopter on a roof with a long line of people waiting to get on and flee.
Kissinger and Ellsberg went way back, and I think Kissinger was so aggressive about the Pentagon Papers because he wanted to remove any suspicion that he might sympathize or be involved with Ellsberg. Kissinger was an office politics expert as well as a foreign policy expert!
Seems to me that Nixon left S. Vietnam in as good a shape as he possibly could’ve while still getting the US troops out. The defeat in 1975 was due to the cut off of aid by Congress. But what would’ve happened long-term if Congress had not cut off the aid, I don’t know.