(no subject)
"Once in Paris, the South Vietnamese raised procedural objections that nullified any hope of a peace settlement. The United States had originally proposed that the delegations be seated at two long tables to emphasize the two-sided nature of the talks, but North Vietnam had demanded a square table with one delegate on each side to underscore its contention that the NLF was a separate party to the talks. To get around this impasse, Harriman had proposed a round table, and the North Vietnamese had acquiesced. But Saigon refused to go along.... Instead of drafting cables at night, the U.S. delegation sketched table designs, the two sides proposing at various times such inventive geometric creations as a broken parallelogram, four arcs of a circle, a flattened ellipse, and two semicircles that touched but did not form a circle. Finally, under pressure from the Soviet Union, Hanoi agreed to compromise: a round table placed between two rectangular tables."
-Herring, George C. America's Longest War pp. 265-266
Our incompetent delegates failed to propose a triangular table. It's careless mistakes like this that lost the war in Vietnam.
-Herring, George C. America's Longest War pp. 265-266
Our incompetent delegates failed to propose a triangular table. It's careless mistakes like this that lost the war in Vietnam.