Jeffrey Kimball (historian)

Jeffrey P. Kimball is an American historian and emeritus professor at Miami University. Among the ideas that Kimball developed was the idea of a Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth. He also argued that threats to use nuclear weapons had not been effective at advancing the United States' foreign policy goals either in the Korean War, Vietnam War, or the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. Historian Luke Nichter wrote that Kimball's books "shaped future works, and these volumes on my shelves stand as a reminder that my own work on the Nixon tapes would not have happened without them". According to historian Ken Hughes, Kimball is "the leading scholar of the 'decent interval'": the idea that Nixon eventually settled for securing a "decent interval" before South Vietnamese defeat. Hughes regrets that Kimball's work is "virtually unknown" outside academia.