The Internment of Cahir Healy M.P., Brixton Prison July 1941-December 1942

The arrest and internment in Brixton prison of the leading NorthernIreland nationalist politician and Stormont MP, Cahir Healy,in 1941 has long remained something of an historical enigma.Contemporaneous accounts that his arrest amounted to littlemore than an unwarranted act of anti-nationalist persecutionor was the result of his alleged involvement in ‘actsprejudicial’ during time of war both benefited from theblanket of secrecy that surrounded the case. This article castslight on this affair. It offers an insight into the strategicconsiderations of Northern nationalist politicians at a timewhen British victory in the war was uncertain. It argues thatsome senior nationalist activists, including Healy, did envisagea situation in which British defeat and German victory couldbring closer the prospect of Irish unity, did contemplate apolicy of cooperation with Germany and did take steps to makethis known to the German Legation in Dublin. The article alsoexamines Healy's relationship with fellow internees in Brixtonprison and his continued post-war association with figures onthe British far-right, particularly Sir Oswald Mosley.     

Leaving Vietnam: Nixon,Kissinger and Ford, 1969–1975 Part three: January 1973–July 1975

The final volume of the Foreign relations series of documents on Indochina during the Nixon and Ford presidencies is not as detailed as those which preceded it. However, the documents do not support the view that, once the January 1973 Agreement between the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam and the United States had been concluded, the US was prepared to accept DRV's hegemony over the rest of Indochina, provided only that there was a ‘decent interval’ before it occurred. In fact, both the Nixon and Ford administrations did seek to prevent this from happening, but found their hands tied by congressional opposition. In the case of Cambodia, the United States also found itself the victim of its own illusions about the willingness of the People's Republic of China to support an alternative government led by the former ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Following the more or less total collapse of American policy in April 1975, some interesting ‘post‐mortems’ from various government departments on the history of US involvement in Indochina are also printed in the volume under review.     

Leaving Vietnam: Nixon,Kissinger and Ford, 1969–1975. Part one: January 1969–January 1972

Some have suggested that Richard Nixon's narrow victory in the US presidential election of November 1968 was due to his persuading the Government of South Vietnam (GVN) to boycott the Paris peace talks for the settlement of the Vietnam War between the US government, that of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam (DRV) and the representatives of the communist guerrilla movement in South Vietnam. This seems doubtful. The new president had abandoned the hawkish stance he had adopted when vice‐president in the Eisenhower administration and was anxious to bring the unpopular war to an end. The question was: how? The president, together with his influential National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, adopted a policy of ‘Vietnamization’, which involved the progressive scaling down of the US military presence and the handing over of responsibility for waging the war to the GVN. At the same time, the president recognized that too precipitate an American withdrawal and, above all, one which took place under the terms of an agreement which was too favourable to the communists, would have a deleterious effect upon its allies and its own position as a Great Power. In order to bring about a satisfactory agreement with the DRV, the US employed a twin strategy: secret talks between Kissinger and senior DRV representatives in Paris, coupled with veiled threats of an escalation of the war if the communists acted unreasonably and occasional displays of military strength, such as the incursion into Cambodia in 1970. Although it seemed, briefly, that there might be a breakthrough in Kissinger's secret negotiations with the DRV later in 1971, they broke down mainly as a result of the communists' insistence that the US in effect dismantle the South Vietnamese government for them. An angry Nixon secretly considered retaliation against the DRV to force it to modify its demands and publicly revealed the existence of the negotiations and much of their content to the American people in a speech on 25 January 1972. At the same time, however, he insisted that Vietnamization would continue.