This Copy For

BACKGROUND BRIEFING
United States Foreign Policy

## CONTENT OF THIS BRIEFING IS STRICTLY EMBARGOED UNTIL 6:00 A.M., EDT., JULY 2, 1970.

IT MAY BE ATTRIBUTED TO ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS.

DIRECT QUOTATION IS NOT PERMITTED.

### EMBARGOED FOR WIRE TRANSMISSION UNTIL 11:00 P.M. EDT JULY 1, 1970.

AT THE WHITE HOUSE

WITH DR. HENRY A. KISSINGER, ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS; LIEUTANANT GENERAL JOHN W. VOGT, JR., DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS FOR THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF, AND WILLIAM H. SULLIVAN, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR EAST ASIA AND PACIFIC AFFAIRS.

AT 10:14 A.M. PDT.

JUNE 26, 1970

FRIDAY

San Clemente, California

THE PRESIDENT: Before the briefing begins, I would like to set it in context briefly and then leave the men who are the experts in the field to tell their story and also to give you the opportunity to ask them questions, if you would like.

Just about two months ago on April 30 I announced a decision by the United States to join the South Vietnamese forces to go into the enemy occupied territories on the border of Cambodia and Vietnam. That decision, as all of you will recall, was and is highly controversial. It set off a very great national debate, a debate which still rages, not with the same intensity, but nevertheless, which still raises great questions among the American people. Among many of these who are here, there will be different points of view and there will be differing points of view on your staffs.

I am sure at your editorial meetings, you have had some individual discussions on this subject over these past few weeks.

It would be, at this time, rather easy for us in this briefing simply to lay out what are the facts, facts that I discussed when the operation was announced, which I also covered in the interim report which I made on June 3, and which I will cover again when I make the final report next Tuesday, and then will elaborate on when I go on national television with the three anchor men of the three major networks for an hour's program.

That program, incidentally, will not be limited to this subject, but will cover the whole range of our foreign policy.

I do not want this meeting to be that kind of meeting, however, where we simply tell you we decided it for these reasons -- it is successful -- and you write it that way.

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I want you to think about these questions. I urge
you to do so. I want you to raise, with the briefing team,
questions that you may have. I think there are three major
questions that will occur.

The basic one is: "Was it worth it?" Some would
say, "Was it worth it, even though it might have been success-
ful, speaking in strictly military terms, was it worth it from
the standpoint of the effect on the people in the United States?"

Therefore, let's look at the people in the United
States, the questions that they raised, why they were opposed
to what was done. I think there were three major reasons,
and there may have been others, but these were the first ones.
I think first, most of those who opposed what we had to do --
what I felt we had to do in Cambodia -- did so because they
thought that it would increase American casualties, that more
Americans would die in this very costly and divisive war.

Second, they thought that it would expand the war.
Here we were already mired down in Vietnam and now we are
going to buy a new war in Cambodia. Therefore, that caused
tremendous concern here, that we were expanding the war and
expanding it without going to the Congress to get the approval
for the expansion of the war.

Third, they felt that it would prolong the war. We
had enough problems on our hands getting Vietnam out of the
way and now here we were in Cambodia -- a broader Southeast
Asian war. And related to the problem of prolonging the war,
it was felt that it would inhibit, if not destroy, our troop
withdrawal program.

As you know, as of April 15, we had withdrawn 115,000
from the high point which was reached before I took office.
I announced an additional withdrawal of 150,000 which will
be completed during the spring of next year.

The answer to those questions, I have said, are the
opposite in each case; that rather than expanding the war,
it actually changed -- and as I tried to over simplify it --
that this operation involved not expanding a war into Cambodia,
but bringing the war in Vietnam to an end.

As far as casualties were concerned, we believe that
the evidence will show that it very definitely will reduce
American casualties. As far as a prolonging of the war, we
believe that the evidence will show that this was essential,
not simply to continue our withdrawal program, but to give
us a chance to shorten the war.

Now I have stated conclusions, flat conclusions.
Don't accept them on this basis. Listen to the briefers.
These are the experts. Ask the questions, ask the tough ones.
Many of you I see around this room have attended meetings that
I called. At the meetings we have in the White House, we
expect tough questions. We answer them, I hope with good
grace, and that is what I would like to do.

A word about the briefing team: Henry Kissinger,
the Advisor for National Security Affairs, will open the
briefing and set the general stage for the decision, why it
was made and so forth. He will be followed by Ambassador
Bill Sullivan. Many of you know him. He was in Laos for
several years. He looks very young. Actually, he is not so
young in terms of service. He is now the Deputy

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Assistant Secretary for Southeast Asian Affairs, one of our top experts in this field. And he knows Southeast Asia, knows Laos, knows Cambodia, and knows Vietnam. Both of them will finish their briefings this morning.

This afternoon they will continue to the extent that is necessary, and then you will hear from General Vogt. Lieutenant General Vogt is one of our top men in the Armed Services. He is not only a fine tactician but he is a fine strategist, in my view. He works with the National Security Council, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense.

He is particularly, I think, useful on this occasion from your standpoint because he just returned from that area. He has been to Cambodia. He has talked to the government leaders there. He has also been to Vietnam.

Let your questions and discussion range not only to Cambodia and Vietnam, but to the rest.

One final thought I would like to leave with you and then I will go on to the other points. When I spoke yesterday at the National Convention of the Jaycees in St. Louis, I remarked about the fact that I had seen there, as I had seen and as you have seen in every city of the world, the signs and heard the shouts of those who say, "Peace Now." I don't resent that when they say, "Peace Now." Everyone in this room wants peace now.

Of course I, perhaps because I have the responsibility for the lives of our men, want it more, if anybody could want it more than anyone else. I could have had it on January 20, 1969 -- 17 months ago. It would have been very easy to bring the boys home and say we now have peace, and blaming everything that happened on the five years that went before.

The great question -- and it is the question that Americans had to answer in World War II, in Korea, and we answer now, and in lesser incidents that did not erupt into war -- is not the question of peace now; it is the question of peace that will last.

In this terribly difficult war which we should like to have away from us, so we could direct our attentions to other priorities at home and abroad, it is my view that how it ends will not only determine whether the United States can play a role in the world -- some would prefer not to play it; but let's assume that we take that point of view of "Let's concentrate on America," what I call the new, shall we say, "isolationist idea," not critically, but it is a fact: Some want us to turn away from our responsibilities abroad, concentrate on the terrible problems of our cities and the rest. Let's assume we did all that.

We still live in a world in which there are other nations and other great powers who do not share that view. Look a the Mideast. There is not any question but that as the Soviet Union increases its power in the Middle East, as it develops its military presence, and particularly in the naval presence in the Mediterranean, not only in the Southern Mediterranean, but now in the Northern Mediterranean, that the extent to which it moves, how aggressively it moves, will be greatly affected by how it evaluates the United States of America in every other part of the world.

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If the United States shows weakness; if we show
a tendency to retreat from a position which we have taken,
and which we believe is right, when the pressure is put on
us; if we show weakness at home, then we can certainly get
out of that trouble, wherever it is -- be it Vietnam or any
place else -- but the real problem is: It may buy us trouble
some place else because whether the leaders of the Soviet Union
or the leaders of China -- and this is not Cold War rhetoric,
this is simply a statement of fact -- there are other leaders
in the world, other people in the world who want to expand
their systems. They are trying to expand. The only reason
that any other nation in the world today can be neutral, no
nation could afford the luxury of neutrality if it were not,
in the present world, for the power of the United States.

That is a fact. The people of India know it. The
people in Indonesia know it, and any other nation. Because
if we were not there, then those who would expand would expand.

So Vietnam must be considered in that category and in
that context.

I covered as much as I feel is appropriate for me
to cover.

As you know, you are invited for lunch at the luncheon
break. We would like to have you take a brief walk over to
the house that we have here. We are going to have the lunch
around the swimming pool.

Incidentally, Mrs. Nixon and Tricia will be there.
While I speak about my family -- and I am proud of all of
them -- I want to say, as I see several here who are members
of the Inter-American Press Association, Mrs. Nixon, on Sunday,
is going to do something quite unusual. She is going, as the
First Lady, to Peru, where 40,000 people died in the most
terrible destructive accident that has ever occured, an
earthquake.

Actually what happened, it was an earthquake and a
 mudslide just suffocated them all. So she is taking down
 Air Force One with $2 million or $3 million worth of supplies,
 medical supplies that have been contributed by the people
 of the United States. She is going around with Mrs. Velasco
 and cover those areas.

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MR. KLEIN: I think I might say, "What do you say now?"

Gentlemen, I would first like to extend an additional welcome to you for the President, and tell you how pleased we are that all of you can be here and that we have this opportunity to spend part of a day with you and enable you to ask the various questions which the President posed.

We have switched the order just slightly from what the President said and General Vogt will be on this morning, as you see. He will BACKGROUND and then Ambassador Sullivan this afternoon.

We have a couple of questions which have come up and I thought I might just clarify those first of all.

Because of the nature of this particular meeting, we would like to regard this as a BACKGROUND meeting. We thought it was more valuable to do it on a BACKGROUND basis because of the fact that it would allow for more candid and open discussion in this type of a meeting and because of the fact that those of you who are here are at the executive level of the various media and there will be a full opportunity for your working reporters and all to be BACKGROUNDED later.

Additionally, we have had some questions as to the selection of those who were invited to be here. I might just say in general that this was a most difficult task and what we tried to do was to invite you on the basis of giving as broad a cross-section of the country as we could and to cover all the media as fully as we could.

There are, the President said, a variety of views on the war within the room, and we think that adds to the opportunity for interesting questioning. But basically, that was the criteria in trying to do this. Additionally, we gave, I guess, a little more of a westward tilt, because we are in California, so we have additional people from California.

Finally, I might say that we are pleased to have you here, because I think it gives you an opportunity as you wander through our compound and over to the home to see that it has been possible to set up, I think, a very good working setup here in California, and it is one which we think adds to the breadth of the views of those who are here, in and out conferring with the President, people that he sees, as well.

You may have noted yesterday that he made some comment in this regard as to the value of getting a variety of views from around the country. Certainly you represent that and certainly we feel we do this in terms of the time that he spends here on a working basis.

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With that I would like to go right into the start of our program this morning. As you have noted on your agenda, the first gentleman who will be speaking is Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. I am sure all of you know that he has been serving the President in, I think, a most able capacity as the Assistant for National Security Affairs. You have a copy of his biography in your folder.

Briefly, of course, he has a very distinguished career at Harvard where he is a professor and is now on leave. He has served the Government many times. He has been Associate Director of the Center for International Affairs and on the faculty at Harvard since 1960.

He is the Director of the International Seminar, and has been since 1951. Basically, the thing that I noted in having the opportunity to work with Henry is that he is a most thorough man, a man who provides the President with a great variety of options to examine, and one who, I think, for example, if things go well in the SALT talks, a great deal of credit will be due to the very detailed and outstanding work done by Dr. Kissinger and his staff.

In providing the President with all the knowledge which is necessary if he has to take a risk for peace, we know what the risk is. I think this has been essential in that particular aspect.

Without any more, I would like to say that Dr. Kissinger would like to start off by covering a broad range of foreign policy and as we go on more, we will zero in to Southeast Asia.

Dr. Kissinger.

DR. KISSINGER: Herb, Gentlemen:

I speak to this group with some nostalgia. It is not too long ago that I sat on the other side of briefings like this and listened to tired bureaucrats telling me how everything that they had done had been carefully considered, that no alternatives were possible, and that if I only had the information that they did, I would completely agree with them.

Here I am, gentlemen, to tell you that all alternatives have been considered, that if you only knew what I do, there would be no need for this briefing.

Also, until January, 1969, I had not made a mistake in foreign policy, because I kept my own score card. I am not saying that this condition has changed. (Laughter)

I thought that the most useful thing that I could do, lest you get bogged down in the jungles of Southeast Asia, would be for me to talk in a general way about some of the things we are trying to do in foreign policy and wind up with the basic approach that led us into taking the actions that we did over the recent months. Then my colleagues, General Vogt and Ambassador Sullivan, can go into more detail on the military and diplomatic aspects, respectively.

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This Administration came into office at what really, I am sure, historians will record as a dividing line in American foreign policy.

Until the end of World War II, we were essentially isolationists. Then there was a tremendous outburst of enthusiasm, and energy that projected us into international affairs. It was the philosophy of the Marshall Plan which one can even interpret as a projection internationally of our domestic New Deal.

It was based on an assumption that social and economic programs would produce political stability and that the United States was the only country strong enough to resist aggression anywhere in the world. Indeed, to be precise, it was a combination of our World War II experience and our experience of the 1930's.

Our World War II experience led us to believe that aggression was unambiguous, that we could resist it by mobilizing superior resources, that one could draw a clear line, that the United States was the country which would make the difference and that we would have to not only commit ourselves, but to design programs, sell them and execute them. This was our attitude where there were confrontations.

And in the under-developed countries of the world, we believed the experiences of the 1930's and 1940's, where domestic instability had been cured by programs of social engineering, were also relevant to the problems of political stability elsewhere.

Now these assumptions were not necessarily precisely accurate, even for the period of the 1940's and 1950's, but they were a pretty good crude approximation. The United States was the only country that was strong enough to resist aggression any where in the world. The West European countries had been smashed by the war. Each of them, with the exception of Great Britain, had been occupied at one stage or another during the war. Each of them had lost its war at one stage or another and Britain had won the war only to emerge as a less than great power, which may be an even more painful experience than losing a war.

Japan had been completely smashed in World War II. In fact, there was no other center of power in the world, so that if the countries bent on expansion or seemingly bent on expansion were to be resisted anywhere, it had to come from the United States.

The same was true in relation to the new nations. We were the country that had the resources and we were the country that had a philosophy for development, a philosophy which I do not believe actually fitted the conditions of these countries perfectly, but nevertheless, it enabled us to conduct this policy.

Our early experience in Europe seemed to reinforce these tendencies. The Marshall Plan was a great success. It was a great success, incidentally, for a misleading reason. The Marshall Plan was a great success because government had been well established in Western Europe. There was a long tradition of self-government and the challenge to domestic stability was indeed the disparity between

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economic performance and the expectation of the population. While in other parts of the world what was at issue was precisely the nature of political legitimacy, who would govern, and therefore, purely economic programs were not enough.

But I don't want to repeat the history of the last 20 years. I want to make one fundamental point: When President Kennedy came into office, there was a great deal of newspaper and other comments that many believed, including, I must say, myself, that this was a new beginning in foreign policy, and domestic policy.

I am sure as historians look back on it, they will regard it as the last flowering of the previous approach to foreign policy. I have read a great deal of the allegedly provocative speech that President Nixon made on April 30, that allegedly contributed so much to our polarization. I would invite you gentlemen to read President Kennedy's Inaugural Address.

I am not saying this as a criticism. I am saying it as an indication of the change that has occurred internationally and domestically. It was not President Nixon who said, we will fight any foe, we will resist any aggression. Anywhere in the world where anyone will call on us, Americans will be there. It went something like that. This is not a direct quote.

But you read the Inaugural Address of 1961. I don't say this, I repeat, as a criticism, because I believed that myself at the time. I say this to indicate that this Administration came in at what was truly a watershed, when it had become apparent through the tragedy of Vietnam and through other experiences, that the United States could not alone police the world; that many of the programs that one had assumed would automatically bring political stability were not enough for the conditions of the period.

Whoever came in in 1968 would have had to reassess the assumptions on which our policy was based. So that, in a very profound sense, what this Administration has had to do is to preside over the beginning of a new phase of American policy at the precise moment when it has had to liquidate the most outstanding vestige of the previous phase of American policy, because, after all, part of the reason why we got into the war in Vietnam was the theory that aggression, wherever it occurred, was our job, that we had been able to shut off the conventional aggression and nuclear aggression and now we had to shut off guerrilla wars.

This is what has made the task of this Administration complex, and as in all revolutions or transitional phases, it is very difficult to draw neat dividing lines. The past continues to exist while you are trying to shape the future and there is not some magic date on which you can say, from this day on there is a new foreign policy, because we want, of course, to preserve the best elements of what existed and put it into the service of the new approach toward which we are striving.

Now this is the basic problem of foreign policy. And I am certain that when the history of this period is written, people will not remember the theological debates

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that rent us now concerning which particular formula would be
most suitable for ending the war in Vietnam. But we
hope that they will remember that in this period we began
tortuously, and with all the uncertainties that I described,
a new approach that may characterize American foreign policy
for the next few decades.

Now this is why, in our internal deliberations,
the President has placed such enormous stress on wanting to
know where we are going before he permits any discussion of
the tactics of particular policies, which is one of the things
that usually obsesses high officials.

At any rate, the process itself is a boring subject
and I don't want to spend any time here on describing it,
although I would be delighted to answer questions about it.
You can make awfully stupid decisions with a brilliant
process.

The only point that I really wish to stress as
far as this group is concerned is the basic question the President
has asked me to produce from the bureaucracy. That is where are
going and what are our choices? No matter what comes
out from various quarters to the contrary, that is one question I
has constantly kept before us.

I repeat, this does not guarantee that we will
give the right answer but you certainly cannot give
a good answer unless you ask the right question.

Now, where are we going? First, we have had to
recognize, as I said at the beginning, that the period in
which the United States alone could make the decisions,
run all the programs, define the nature of aggression, resist
it, supply the manpower, the material and the personnel, was
at an end; partly because it is beyond our physical resources,
but even more importantly, because it is beyond our psychological
resources.

The United States alone cannot make itself responsible
for every part of the world at every moment of time against
every danger and to capitalize every opportunity. It is not
good for us and it is disastrous for other nations. It is
not good for us for reasons which require no further explanation,
because we will take ourselves apart in domestic
disputes if every interest in every part of the world becomes
a subject of the American domestic debate, but it is also

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Now this is why, in our international deliberations,
the President has placed such enormous stress on wanting to
know where we are going before he permits any discussion of
the tactics of particular policies, which is one of the things
that usually obsesses high officials.

I have read all the accounts of how our decision-
making process has broken down in recent months, and I have
read them with enormous fascination. I hope at least
some of them will win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It
is fascinating to know how many senior officials can be
both opposed to and ignorant of key decisions, and that is
a neat trick.

Somebody asked me the other day, What about me?
I said I was so embarrassed that no one had yet accused me
of having been ignorant of this decision. The only
excuse I had is that in moments of stress I revert to my
native language, and the President probably didn't understand
what I was talking about.

The only point that I really wish to stress as
far as this group is concerned is the basic question the President
has asked me to produce from the bureaucracy. That is where are we
going and what are our choices? No matter what comes
out from various quarters to the contrary, that is one question h
has constantly kept before us.

The United States alone cannot make itself responsible
for every part of the world at every moment of time against
every danger and to capitalize every opportunity. It is not
good for us and it is disastrous for other nations. It is
not good for us for reasons which require no further explana-
tion, because we will take ourselves apart in domestic
disputes if every interest in every part of the world becomes
a subject of the American domestic debate, but it is also

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disastrous for other countries if they can shift the burden of every difficult decision to the United States, and if they do not have to face the fact of direct confrontation with the realities of their own situation.

It cannot be a permanent pattern of international relations that other countries maintain, that their security is of greater concern to the United States than it is to them, or that if they are taken over by some other country, it is worse for us than it is for them.

Therefore, in the Nixon Doctrine enunciated at Guam, the President attempted to lay down some principles which would govern our future relationships to the rest of the world. One of them, of course, was that we would honor all of our existing commitments. The other was that where there was a nuclear threat, the United States would have to take a special concern because that immediately had global consequences.

Thirdly, in the face of other attacks, the principal responsibility had to be borne by the countries directly concerned, and that the United States would assist where it would make a difference and where our own interests were involved, and not on a general principle that we had to be in the front line.

And this was given particular interpretations for the problem of guerrilla warfare in which we believe that the best resistance to guerrilla warfare is to prevent the conditions from arising on which guerrilla warfare feeds by removing as many of the causes of dissatisfaction and by strengthening the ability of the local governments to deal with their own situation; that where guerrilla wars were fermented and supported from the outside in areas where we thought we had vital interests, we would give material support, but only in the rarest circumstances would we consider American manpower.

Now, stating a doctrine is a lot easier than implementing it. As I said, we are in a transitional period. Many people think that the Nixon Doctrine is a cookbook, it is like a recipe out of a cookbook which you can pull out and then apply automatically to all situations.

This is not the case, nor was the Nixon Doctrine conceived in order to permit the United States to withdraw totally from the rest of the world, as the President has pointed out on many occasions. The Nixon Doctrine is our realistic way remaining committed to the rest of the world. It can lay a basis for a continuing practical relationship, not a basis for total withdrawal.

Now obviously there are no neat, precise applications for it, especially when we are already engaged, as we have been, in Vietnam, with 540,000 troops, when this Administration came into office; and especially when in neighboring countries like Cambodia, developments can affect what we are attempting to do in Vietnam.

But the Doctrine indicates the trend of our policy. This is where we intend to go. This is where we will go.

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We cannot do it from one day to the next, and it means
that some vestiges of the past will continue, as I have pointed
out.

Now let me come back to that in a minute, because I want
to make one or two observations about other areas of the world.
I do this to indicate to you that while the focus of our concern
is Vietnam, we are dealing here with a general problem and the
problem of the relationship of the United States to the rest of
the world. This goes beyond what happens in Southeast Asia.

First, there is the relationship with the Communist
world. When America committed itself to a more or less permanent
foreign policy at the end of World War II, the Communist world
was monolithic or was thought to be monolithic. Indeed, it
was monolithic. One could think of it by some analogy, though
even that was not fully accurate, to Hitler's Germany. One dealt
then with a state with a high ideological component. The Soviet
Union was led by and governed by single rule.

The Soviet Union at that time, while enormously aggressive
in Europe, confined its attention to, essentially Europe. It
would have been unthinkable in the late 1940's that there would
have been a Soviet military presence in the Mediterranean of the
size and scope that we have now to contend with.

Since that time, the Communist world has changed
enormously. First, China has become Communist. A country of
over 800 million people and for many years the dominant country
in Asia, has fallen under Communist rule.

Secondly, the Soviet Union has had many changes in
leadership, but more importantly, quite important changes in
its structure. Now again, it would be foolish for me to attempt
to give a full account of the changes in the Communist world. But
I would like to highlight just a few of them to indicate the
problem that we now confront, and the problem that they now confront.

According to Communist theory, the growth of Communism,
the spread of Communism around the world, should end international
tensions. According to Communist theory, it is the capitalist
form of government that produces international conflict and that
will be abolished by the growth of the Socialist camp.

In fact, the more Communism has spread, the more intense
international conflicts have become within the Communist world
itself. The Red army has been used four times since the war
against its own allies. The reason is that there is no mechanism
in the Communist world for dealing with interstate dispute.

Perhaps the most intense international conflict that
exists today is between Communist China and the Soviet Union.
This affects international events in a most complex way. Within
the Communist countries, essentially the Soviet Union, we are now
in a position where perhaps it can be argued that the Communist
Party has no real function except a vested interest in the pro-
motion of international tension. They are not needed to run the
state. They are not needed to run the economy. They can justify
themselves best by vigilance against foreign danger.

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But still the Soviet Union has been more complex and less fanatical than Communist China. It is one reason why we are now engaged in the talks with them on the limitation of strategic arms, talks in which I believe that the vestiges of the previous period and the approach of this Administration clashed initially, though they have now come together.

When arms control first became a subject of consideration, there was a small group of dedicated men who believed that the only way you could get the government ever to focus on the problem was to browbeat the senior officials as much as possible about the advantages in the abstract of the limitation of armament, and therefore, much of the intellectual community put themselves enthusiastically behind the concept of it and they were much better about the theory of why you should do it than they were about the practice of what it is that you should do.

Now when we came into office, we were assailed from all sides by the argument that we had to immediately come forward with a proposal, that we had to rush into negotiations on the limitation of strategic arms. We resided it and we were the subject of many profound editorials that pointed out that where in previous Administrations the White House had put itself unreservedly behind arms control, in this Administration we had dragged our feet, and therefore, no progress was being made.

But this was not the case. We believed that the desirability of limiting strategic arms was not worthy of discussion any more. That issue we considered settled. But what was difficult was to determine that when you entered into negotiations about a subject of that complexity that you knew what you were talking about, because you have different weapons systems on both sides, different purposes on both sides.

The most disastrous course, it seemed to us, would have been to start it as a pure negotiating process -- for us to put forward a proposition that we had not really understood, for them to put forward a proposition and then to stake each others' prestige on them.

So what we did instead was -- what I believe, what I know, having worked on this subject both at Harvard and in the government -- the most thorough analysis that has ever been made of the requirements of control, weapon system by weapon system. We delayed the opening of the negotiations by eight months until we knew what we were talking about. We did not focus on just one negotiating proposal. We had packages of proposals which made it possible for the other side to respond to various approaches and which made it possible for us to respond to the various propositions of the other side.

I believe that largely as a result of this preparation we can say this: First, the nuclear test ban negotiations lasted four years and they concerned only one relatively simple problem. The Non-Proliferation Treaty negotiations lasted three and a half years and they concerned a problem that did not even affect us, but other countries. We currently have negotiated in Helsinki and Vienna less than a year. It is possible to say today, that the negotiations have been the most thoughtful on both sides that have been conducted in this field. If there is going to be an agreement, it will be

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in much less time than either of the others, and it will be
much more comprehensive than either of the others.

I don't want to give any deadlines, because, as I
will point out in a few minutes, I have my doubts about dead-
lines, but I think that the prospects for some agreement
are very reasonable, as the Secretary of State pointed out
yesterday. In any event, whether we get an agreement in the
reasonable future or not, we are so close to understanding
what the problem is that any time that there is a political
decision on the other side or on both sides, if you will,
to go ahead with it, we now know how to get it.

But we are quite optimistic and we think that in the
long term, we may reach this achievement.

Now that I have spent this much time on other subjects,
I now would like to turn to Southeast Asia. I will be glad
to answer Middle East questions in the discussion period.

I have spent much time on other subjects because
I wanted you to understand relationships. Of course, Vietnam
is the most anguishing problem we face. We realize -- I hope
we realize -- what it does to many of our young people. No
one can be indifferent to the division in our society that is
partly reflected as a result of the war.

But we also believe that precisely because we are not
here only to liquidate one war, but because we have a larger
responsibility to try to create what we hope is to be a more
lasting peace, that what we do in Vietnam has to be measured
in terms larger than Vietnam itself, and history teaches us that
people do not forgive their leaders for producing disasters,
even if what they do seems to reflect their immediate wishes.
Even this, however, is a problematical statement because we
are not sure that it does actually reflect their wishes.

Now then, what is it that we think has been at stake
for us in Vietnam and what is it that we have attempted to do?
One of the striking experiences that I have had in the White
House, being present at almost all of the meetings that the
President has with leaders from other countries is this: I
have yet to see a non-Communist leader from a foreign country
in the White House who will tell the President, "You have
done everything any country can possibly be expected to do.
You have done your duty, get out of there now. You are tearing
yourself to pieces and we need you more for other purposes."

They have never said this. They have invariably said
the opposite. Now I admit the Prime Minister of Sweden was
not at the White House, and maybe he would have said it if he
had been there. I am talking about the ones that I have heard,
and the intensity of their concern seems to increase with their
geographic proximity to Vietnam.

When the President took his trip around the world last
year, we met with the leaders of many of the countries there.
Bill Sullivan can talk about this in greater detail. But
again, it might have been quite comforting to us and easy if
Suharto or some other leaders had said, "Look, you have done
your job now."

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He did not have to say get out. If he had said, "It makes no difference to us what you do there. If you think what you do there has any impact on us, you are crazy or you are wrong." -- They would not even have to say, "You are crazy" -- but, "You are not fully correct," in diplomatic language. It might have been very reassuring to us and we could have come back and said, "Well, the Asians don't want it, why should we want it?"

I can assure you this has never happened. The opposite has always happened. Now this is not a conclusive argument, but at least it is not an irrelevant argument, because if we left and produced more chaos which in turn might eventually produce other American commitments, we would only have bought ourselves a very temporary respite.

I will say a word about the domestic situation as it seems to us in a minute.

But let me say how the situation looked in Vietnam from the President's point of view. First, he had announced a troop withdrawal of 150,000 men, and being from a university, I am extremely sensitive to the mythology of universities and of the intellectual. According to it, shortsighted men who have an emotional commitment to war can think of nothing better than conflict or they are so unimaginative that they are immune to the insights developed in study groups outside. They are looking for alibis by which they can trick the people into an escalation of the war. Therefore, unless they are browbeaten, harrassed, character-assassinated, they are going to produce unimaginable horrors.

But, look at it from a sensible point of view. We had begun last year a withdrawal of American forces. We had reduced the sorties of our air force by about 25 percent. We had changed the orders to the military commanders. We had reduced American casualties. Can anyone believe that we were so mad as to expect that with reduced forces, reduced sorties, a reduced budget and changed orders, we were going to achieve the kind of victory that the previous Administration by constantly escalating forces, bombing of the North, and orders to apply maximum pressures, was unable to bring about?

Patently, we must have had something else in mind. And the choice before us was never whether we could find some pretext to escalate the war and sneak back into a course from which only the riots of people could prevent us. Rather the choice was this: Should we get out then and there or should we try to get out in an orderly, carefully planned way? This was the only choice we had, or thought we had.

The other choices are fictitious choices constructed for rhetorical purposes.

Why did we believe that this was the choice we had? And remember one other thing, because it is important to remember. The President did not have to make the decision in April from some points of view. The consequences of his not making the decision would not have shown up for six to nine months. But I was present -- because there were occasional meetings of advisors -- at some of the meetings that took place. And the President kept asking this question: What do I tell the American people

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nine months to a year from now when the consequences of not
acting become apparent, when we have lost another 8,000 men?
What do I tell them? What have I ordered these casualties for?
That was what was on his mind.

He could have ridden along this year easily enough
and had the approbation for restraint and everything else that
went with it. But the problem as he saw it was this: He had
engaged in a measured policy of withdrawal. He had shown
enormous self-restraint. He had made very generous offers
for peace, including, at the latest, on April 20, in which he
considerably modified some emphasis in our peace proposal.
He had done all of this and the other side had not only rejected
all these measures, had not only started an attack in Laos, but
was now beginning to move into Cambodia.

And the situation in Cambodia was that there were
sanctuaries along the Vietnamese border from which the North
Vietnamese had been attacking into South Vietnam for four years,
but the problem we now faced was this: Here were 40,000 to
50,000 North Vietnamese troops confronting on the one side about
one million South Vietnamese and American troops, and on the other
side, some 40,000 Cambodian troops of not spectacular effective-
ness but nevertheless, of not total good will towards them.

These troops, wedged in between these two forces,
were beginning to move into Cambodia. If we had simply stood
idly by and then had waited until they returned with the
sea routes open and the Cambodian sanctuaries untouched, we
would have faced this problem because of the Cambodian
sanctuaries and the enormous amounts of supplies there.
We are going to distribute some figures of supplies captured
which I will not bother to repeat now. We would have faced
the problem of defending 600 miles of frontier against
conventional attack.

The Saigon government would have had to be prepared,
through the process of Vietnamization, to defend 600 miles of
its frontier against conventional attack, fight a guerrilla war,
conduct a negotiation, reform itself and stand the withdrawal
of 150,000 Americans, all in one year.

Our judgment was that this could not be done, and as
precarious as the program of Vietnamization is, it would
become impossible under those conditions.

This is why we concluded it was either a question of
doing something at least against the sanctuaries or of facing the
alternative of getting out immediately.

This situation dictated the move, and it has achieved
a reasonable, if limited objective. We have picked up a
substantial proportion of the supplies in Cambodia. On the
whole, we have captured more supplies in a month and a half
in Cambodia than in the whole year of operations in Vietnam
last year.

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We will distribute statistics, and I will not spend any time on it. The major point I want to make is this: The thing that has made the strategy in Vietnam so difficult is that the enemy has always been able to mesh main force operations and guerrilla operations.

What has happened in Vietnam, as a result of Cambodia, is the separation, at least for a period of months, of main force operations from guerrilla operations. This should give a tremendous boost to the pacification program in South Vietnam.

Secondly, the South Vietnamese have gained in confidence. Thirdly, the North Vietnamese, particularly as we go into our next phase in which we will plan to emphasize the diplomatic track more, will have the tough question to ask themselves. The question is not whether they can restore some bases -- of course they can restore the bases -- but whether they want to go through another year of resupply and then another year or two of tremendous blood-letting, when we have offered what we consider is a reasonable proposal for self-determination which we moreover have declared we are perfectly prepared to discuss in the context of their own proposals.

So we think that Cambodia has given us the time to carry out our policy in Vietnam; that it has been militarily successful; but more importantly, that it has given the South Vietnamese the margin of time which we, at least, think is a reasonable margin on which they might operate.

I have gone on too long, but there are a number of questions that we are always asked, which I would like to answer, and then I will conclude.

These questions that we are asked. Indeed, a friend of mine wrote me a letter about them a few months ago. Let me raise the questions and then answer them.

The first question is: Are you the prisoner of the Thieu government?

The first thing I want to say about the Thieu government is that its problem is quite different from ours. Our war ends when we withdraw out troops. Their war continues when we withdraw our troops. Therefore, they are operating on a different time scale from the one we are operating on.

We are an advanced country, and they are operating in an area where they are asked to develop a governmental structure at the moment that a guerrilla war has to be conducted and their foreign allies are withdrawing.

Nevertheless, this is not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is this: The way to get kudos with respect to this answer is to say, "We are independent of the Thieu government, we do whatever we want to do."

But I do not want to insult you this way. Of course we are to some extent related to the Thieu government. They are our allies. And it would be an absurdity and an insult to you to pretend that we have no relationship or no obligation to them.

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What we are trying to do, through the Vietnamization policy, is to enable them to stand more and more on their own feet and as time goes on, in the foreseeable future, to become more independent of them. To put it a more acceptable way, they will become more independent of us.

The reason we believe Vietnamization can have some impact on negotiations is precisely because we believe that as this happens, at least to some extent, Hanoi faces the prospect of having to deal with Saigon rather than with us, and we believe they would rather deal with us.

The second question is: To what extent are you dependent on what Hanoi does?

The answer is to some extent, the same. Of course we are, to some extent, dependent on what Hanoi does, and it would be again insulting to you gentlemen to pretend that what Hanoi does is irrelevant to our actions.

Indeed, one of the problems with Cambodia was exactly this. One reason Vietnamization succeeded as well as it has with whatever shortcomings, which are considerable, is because the President, in three speeches, said if they step up American casualties, we would take decisive action to prevent this.

We know from captured documents, about which Ambassador Sullivan will speak, that one of their chief strategies was to step up American casualties. So we had to exercise some restraint on Hanoi's intransigence.

But again, the purpose of our policy is to get ourselves into a position, and it will be achieved, where we will be less subject to their actions and as our troops withdraw, this will be increasingly true. What we are talking about is the time we need between where we are going and where we are.

The third question: Can Vietnamization succeed?

Now, I have noticed that whatever the policy is that any Administration pursues on Vietnam, there is serious criticism as to its feasibility. That is as it should be. Indeed, it is inevitable, because any policy is likely to have major uncertainties and those who compare what they want with what is, have a certain advantage.

But I would like to say this about Vietnamization. It depends first on what you mean by success of Vietnamization. Vietnamization doesn't have to succeed 100 percent in every province of Vietnam at every moment of time in order to be successful. Vietnamization has to create enough of a problem for Hanoi so that it faces the prospect of a conflict which it does not want to sustain and thereby for it to have an increased incentive to negotiate.

This gets me to another question. Why don't you negotiate rather than Vietnamize?

Let me state flatly what the position of this Administration is. We believe that the quickest, most reliable, most certain way of ending the war is through negotiation.

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We want to end the war by negotiation, and when
the history of this period is written, we will, I am sure,
be able to demonstrate that we made major efforts to bring
about an end to the war through negotiations.

The problem is, however, that you cannot negotiate
unless you can pose for the other side some consequences
of a stalemate that are worse than the consequences to
them of negotiation.

The other side has fought with courage
and great dedication for 25 years. They are not going to
be talked out of their struggle. Unless we can create
objective conditions such that will look more attractive
to them to settle than not to settle, there will be no
negotiation.

We pursue Vietnamization in order to bring pressure
on negotiation. If Vietnamization can not work, negotiations
cannot work, and only an immediate pullout will be left to us.
But if you have any questions about it, let me tell you now,
we far prefer negotiation to Vietnamization and that is the
main thrust of our policy, and that is what we hope we can
bring about.

Why wouldn't we set a deadline?

Precisely because we believe that negotiations might
work. A deadline is an admission that we cannot negotiate
an end of the war. Once a deadline is set, there is no
possible incentive for the other side to negotiate.

Strange as it may be, we don't set a deadline
because we would like to beat the deadlines that have been
suggested, and secondly, because we believe that given the
state of domestic discussions, where as soon as you have
announced a policy, it becomes the subject of debate, it would
probably just shift the debate to the length of the deadline
rather than to the end of the war.

This gets me to one final point which I will make
very rapidly. Mr. Healy from Boston knows that there is a
school of thought at Harvard which says I can say nothing
rapidly, but I will try to make this one fairly rapidly.

Are we polarizing this country by carrying out our
policy?

To some extent
What happened in May was extremely painful and extremely
difficult. And I am not saying that no mistakes were made.
But I am talking about the major thrust of our policy.

Can we abdicate our best judgment of where we
ought to go in order to prevent demonstrations by a
minority, a minority which very often refuses to engage
in any dialogue, and which does not have a program, but
only profound emotion, which I nevertheless respect?

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Now what we are trying to do is to have a rational debate. Very often there is a tendency on some part of going into a china shop and smashing all the crockery and saying, "Look what you have made me do.", without debating the merits.

But have we polarized the country? To some extent what happened in May was extremely painful and extremely difficult. And I am not saying that no mistakes were made. But I am talking about the major thrust of our policy.

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Now this depends on an analysis of where we think we stand in our country right now. Is the war in Vietnam the cause of our torment, or are there deeper reasons? Even if the war in Vietnam caused it, is it now the principal reason?

When you look around the world you see student riots in Berlin, which have co-determination with the universities. You have student riots in Paris which do not have co-determination. You have student riots in the United States which has a race problem, Vietnam, and slums. And you have student riots in Holland which has no race problem, no slums and no Vietnam.

Therefore, you could conclude that what we are facing in this world is not capricious students -- I will not say anything as pat as this -- but a resolve against a condition of modern society which is much deeper than any policy issue -- a state of mind which, precisely because it will not grapple with specific issues, and just with a mood, is very hard to deal with -- which leads to a rebellion against authority of any kind, not just the authority of this President, but the authority of any President, whether he be president of a university or the President of the United States.

What we have to attempt to do, really, all of us, is to preserve some vestige of authority in this country, if we are ever going to move with confidence and competence toward a better future. What we have to do in Vietnam inevitably has some elements of ambiguity.

We have to convince the American people that we will pull out our troops, but we have to convince Hanoi that the withdrawal is not independent of their actions, so that they have an incentive to negotiate. We have to do many things which cannot be done unless the intermediary leadership in this country does not support every detail of our policy that is irrelevant -- but hopefully it will at least support the proposition that there is only one man who can bring peace in Vietnam, and that is the President of the United States. If confidence in him and in all institutions is systematically destroyed, we will turn into a group that has nothing left but a physical test of strength and the only outcome of this is Caesarism.

We suffer from the illusion that by not yielding to this trend we constitute the best protection to the very people who are often out on the streets against us. The very people who shout "Power to the People" are not going to be the people who will take over this country if it turns into a test of strength.

Upper middle-class college kids will not take this country over. Some more primitive and elemental forces will do that if it happens. This is why we have spent an enormous amount of time in the White House in recent months talking to the college students.

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But at the same time, while we have believed that we have a course which we believe will bring peace to Vietnam. In any event, the difference between us and others who share this objective, except for those who want to get out today, is so relatively narrow that it is not worth tearing the country apart over. Moving out of Vietnam, which we will do, at our own pace, as an exercise of a planned policy, is essential not just for foreign policy reasons, but even more importantly, for the vitality and future of the American society.

I am sorry I have talked so long, and I will be glad to answer your questions.

MR. KLEIN: Before we take your questions, I would just like to take a moment to introduce the co-host with me for the President, Ron Ziegler, the President's Press Secretary.

Now we will go to questions with Dr. Kissinger and as he said, he will be glad to take them on a broad cross-section of foreign policy, any part you like.

Q Can you bring us up to date on the Middle East?

DR. KISSINGER: On the Middle East, we have just launched a diplomatic initiative and I would prefer not to go into the details of that, but perhaps I can give you our analysis of what the problem is and what we are trying to deal with.

Incidentally, I would have to say that if there is the danger of a general war in this Administration, I do not believe, and we do not believe that it will come from Southeast Asia. It is very hard to see what we could do in Southeast Asia that would produce a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union.

But it is possible to conceive situations in the Middle East in which a direct confrontation could arise, unintended, maybe, even by the major contestants.

First, what makes the situation in the Middle East so potentially dangerous is the fact that it has many similarities with the Balkans before World War I. You read the history of what produced World War I. There were a lot of books written about who really caused World War I.

When you really study it, the nightmare of it is that no one caused World War I, that no one wanted it at that particular moment except for Austria and Serbia, all the leaders of major countries actually went on vacation during July, 1914, then came back from vacation and a week later they were in a general war.

Now the problem in the Middle East is that you have two contestants, that is Israel on the one side, and the Arab States on the other side; each of them deeply concerned with their own problems, security and interests. Each of them is allied or connected with one or the other of the major countries. Each of them to some extent not fully under the control of the major country concerned.

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When you have a situation where, in the minds of the contestants, the local issues are paramount and the concern with a general peace is relatively less, it is possible that they will bring about a confrontation among each other that the great powers did not necessarily want, but that once entrained, is very difficult to arrest.

That is what produced World War I. In a way, this is what happened in 1967. Probably the Soviet Union did some mischief in 1967, but it never intended a war. However, at some point, events in the Middle East in 1967 got out of control.

If they now get similarly out of control through a similar series of misunderstandings now, the consequences could be much more serious. This is why the United States has felt that we must try to bring about more settled conditions in the Middle East, even though this is a terribly painful process and even though precisely for the reason that I gave, it is not likely to find the approbation of either of the two contestants.

After these general remarks, let me go on to some of the local conditions that make the issue so intractable. Usually when you talk about settlements, you can say a good settlement is one with which both parties are equally happy. That is beyond reach in the Middle East. The best you can do in the Middle East is to make a settlement with which both parties are relatively equally unhappy.

The reason for it is as follows: It is not that right confronts wrong, but that there are some nearly insoluable dilemmas here. First, the Israeli dilemma, a population of 2-1/2 million, surrounded by 80 million people of varying degrees of hostility.

Israel has managed to survive by their superior quality of trained manpower. This is a very illusive asset. They are inferior in material, probably even inferior in numbers of material, and probably inferior in the quality of their material in some respects, except that they have a larger base of trained manpower.

When we made our analysis at this time last year, we considered it would take a long time for the Arabs to bring up the level of their manpower, but I am frank to say, we did not count -- no one counted -- on the fact that the Soviets would inject their own combat manpower into this area, and therefore, literally from one month to the other, change that side of the equation. There was never any question that the Egyptians had more planes. There was a question, however, whether they could ever get pilots good enough to fly them.

Now that portion of Egypt that is covered by the Soviet air force is taken care of. The Israeli problem now is this: 2-1/2 million or 3 million people cannot possibly hold off 80 million people unless they are militarily superior. The Israeli survival has depended on their capacity to launch a rapid knockout blow. Under normal conditions if these were two opponents with roughly equal strength, you would say you want to bring about a military balance, but a military balance is death for Israel, because a war of attrition means mathematically that Israel will be destroyed. They will run out of men before the Arabs do.

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As it is now, if the Israelis have 100 casualties, it is like 10,000 for us. When you read of 100 Israeli casualties, you have to transpose this into about 75 times as much. So the Israelis have to aim for superiority. It is in the nature of their condition.

On the other hand, the Arabs cannot possibly accept this. If the Israelis have to aim for superiority, the Arabs have to aim for a condition in which their impotence is lessened or reversed.

I am not passing judgment. I am trying to say what makes that situation so inherently explosive.

When the Israelis try to vindicate their superiority, then there is an incentive for the Soviets to come in as balancers.

Secondly, normally you would make a number of propositions. You would say there has to be a military balance. Secondly, you would say, "There ought to be a legal state of peace." Well, that is all right, but most wars have started among countries that have had a legal state of peace.

What the Israelis are asked to do is to give up territory in return for the presumed good will of Arab governments, which may not survive the process of settlement, and which, even without settlement, are not in free control of their territories, as in Jordan.

Well, I could go on, and I simply want to say that this is one of the toughest problems we have. What we are trying to do is to strike a balance between these various concerns, is to give the Israelis enough of a sense of military security so that, in hysteria, they will not strike out and try to settle things before the balance shifts against them.

We are trying to give the Arabs enough of a sense of dignity so that they do not feel that they are at the mercy of the Israelis, and we are trying to create demilitarized zones around Israel in order to remove some of these dangers which I mentioned, so that the Israelis don't feel that by withdrawing from conquered territories, they are merely moving their enemies close to their main centers of population.

The situation in the Middle East is further complicated by the introduction of Soviet combat personnel in the form of SA-3 missiles and Soviet combat aircraft. One has to distinguish here what may be the original intention of the Soviets and what may be the long-term consequences of their actions.

I consider it quite arguable that the Soviets originally went into Egypt with combat personnel in order to prevent Nasser from being overthrown by the deep penetration raids that the Israelis were launching last December, January and February.

But at the same time, the British acquired an empire by building coaling stations for their commercial ships to go to India. Intentions are irrelevant when you are talking about historical processes. The danger that arises from the persistence of a Soviet combat base in Egypt is that the Eastern Mediterranean may become a Soviet lake as a result.

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It may become very difficult for our fleet to operate in that area in the face of short-range Soviet bases. What is more important, because one can argue that there is no law that says our fleet has to operate there is that the oil supplies of the Middle East may become totally at the mercy of the Soviets and their radical clients.

It is important for us to keep in mind that there are different levels of conflict in the Middle East. There is on one level -- and in many ways the easiest one, even though, it is complex enough -- the conflict between the Arabs and Israelis over the conquered territories.

There is also, on the deeper level, the conflict between the Arabs and the Israelis over Israel's existence. This cannot be settled by giving back the conquered territories. After all, the Palestinians, the ones who have caused the upheavals in Jordan, are contesting Israel's right to exist, not Israel's right to possess conquered territory.

Thirdly, there is the thrust of the radical Arab movement against the moderate regimes in that area -- Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and so forth. There is the thrust of the radical regimes against Western interests in this area. Therefore, many of the moderate regimes are suffering from schizophrenia. On the one hand they can see how Israel's behavior helps the radicals. On the other hand, they are terrified lest Nasser emerge out of these conflicts in such a strong position that he can topple every moderate regime in the area. Those are two separate problems.

For example, before the 1967 war, a large part of the Egyptian army was in Yemen, trying to establish a base from which, it is safe to say, if that had succeeded, Saudi Arabia probably could not have survived. After Saudi Arabia had gone, the pressures on the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, particularly now that Britain has withdrawn from there, would have been overwhelming.

Iran certainly considers its own security intimately linked up with the Persian Gulf and with what happens in Saudi Arabia. If you add to it that 90 percent of the oil of Japan comes from precisely that area, and I think 80 percent of the oil of Europe -- I will check that figure for you, but it is of that magnitude -- you have some sense of what a radical Arab movement, backed by the Soviet Union, can do.

If, then, the defense of Egypt becomes a Soviet responsibility, and the Egyptians are free after an Israeli settlement for maneuvers throughout the Middle East, then you may have a whole new complex of problems separate from the Arab-Israeli thing.

So what we are trying to do is very delicate. We are trying to separate the issue of Israel's conquest, to which we cannot give an American position from Israel's existence, to which we are now committed.

We are trying to get a settlement in such a way that the moderate regimes are strengthened, and not the radical regimes. We are trying to expel the Soviet military presence,

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not so much the advisors, but the combat pilots and the combat personnel, before they become so firmly established. Here I have to repeat something the President said when he was in here.

It is, of course, nonsense to say that we did what we did in Cambodia in order to impress the Russians in the Middle East. It was not as simple as that. But we certainly have to keep in mind that the Russians will judge us by the general purposefulness of our performance everywhere. What they are doing in the Middle East, whatever their intentions, poses the gravest threats in the long term for Western Europe and Japan and, therefore, for us.

Q Dr. Kissinger, if Russia poses that threat in the Mediterranean, why hasn't she tested us there to pull us away from Southeast Asia faster?

DR. KISSINGER: Well, I don't think that the Russians want to pull us away from Southeast Asia all that fast. You see, the Russians are not yet firmly established to that degree of influence in the Mediterranean. I think you can make the opposite argument that they don't want to test us in the Mediterranean. If they can keep present trends going they may feel that they will gradually increase their influence to a point where we will be in the position where we have to test them and they want to delay that as long as possible.

Secondly, as far as Southeast Asia is concerned, the Russian position is very ambivalent, I sometimes think that one of the curses of the modern state is that the combination of its intelligence and foreign services always makes the assumption that the other side is more rationale than it is. You get all this brain power analyzing the motives and purposes of the other side and then trying to make sense of a lot of discoordinate moves.

I think as far as Southeast Asia is concerned, they are waffling a bit. I am not certain that they want us out of Southeast Asia if it is to be at the cost of their own influence and an increased Chinese domination. They do have an objective consequence of keeping the war going.

Q What are our commitments to Cambodia?

DR. KISSINGER: We have no formal U. S. commitment to Cambodia. We do want "a neutral and independent Cambodia." The reason for this is that we don't need it as part of the American system of defense, but at the same time we want to deny it to Hanoi's use as a supply base and route. Even if Phnom Penh should fall, if we can prevent the North Vietnamese from using the areas in Cambodia they hold for supplies, that is, blocking off ports, preventing their build-up of large bases along the border, then we could reduce the bad consequences of the fall of Phnom Penh.

We do not want; we are not seeking any other war involving our ground forces in Southeast Asia. If and as the North Vietnamese develop a supply system in Cambodia, and start rebuilding their bases, with the agreement of the Cambodian Government, we are prepared and will engage in air interdiction in the area.

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Q Is our goal in Vietnam a complete, flat withdrawal or simply a scaling down of hostilities to an acceptable level?

DR. KISSINGER: It is best to keep this sort of position somewhat ambiguous because one of the things that North Vietnam has to negotiate is the scale of the American presence and the timeframe of our withdrawal, and if we are less than explicit in our answers it is not because we don't have some ideas in our mind, but because we need to keep these ideas in reserve for negotiations.

We look forward to an eventual liquidation of a significant American presence, but we want to avoid any timetable in order to preserve our flexibility. We really do want to leave, but we will do whatever is essential to meet our responsibilities and commitments to the outcome in Vietnam.

I don't mean to imply that we really want to stay and we will simply reduce to whatever level is tolerable for the American people. We want to get out in due time, but we do have to meet our responsibilities there.

Q Do we stay until the South Vietnamese can replace us or do we leave on a pre-determined schedule and sort of force the South Vietnamese to take our place whether they are ready or not?

DR. KISSINGER: That is probably a misreading of the situation. The South Vietnamese are making a very substantial effort now and I don't know whether they are able to expand that by more than a relatively small percentage and our withdrawals take cognizance of their progress.

The fact of the matter is that we have had a schedule of withdrawals which were, in our judgment, not only geared to what they could do at the time we made it, but what we could, with luck and reason, expect. We pretty well stuck to that schedule, therefore our estimates have thus far been on the mark.

Q Dr. Kissinger, earlier you said the North Vietnamese would rather negotiate with us than with Saigon. Why would they rather negotiate with us if the U. S. public support withers away and the U. S. determination in the war collapses, or if the South Vietnamese simply fail to develop enough to take our place, to fill the vacuum. Why would North Vietnam not anticipate either or both of these possibilities and therefore prefer not to negotiate with us?

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DR. KISSINGER: If those two propositions are true, then they will not negotiate. If they are proved true, then what we do will prove to be wrong in that it will fail. If we cannot hold public opinion, and if the South Vietnamese cannot do what I said needs to be done, then the policy will fail.

We cannot bluff the North Vietnamese. They have only one foreign policy which concerns Vietnam, and they put all their intellectual resources on this.

Now, I don't accept both of these propositions. I certainly don't accept the proposition that the South Vietnamese cannot do enough to pose a major problem for the North Vietnamese.

We have -- Bill Sullivan can talk about it more this afternoon -- but we have some documents, for example, which we captured in Cambodia which indicated that the North Vietnamese had the most serious doubts about what happened last year. They felt they had not been at all successful last year, and they were very worried about the impact of the pacification program on their situation in South Vietnam.

I say they were worried. They were not hopeless. The same document, of course, speaks of ways to defeat it. This is of course, what you would expect.

Now, I would think that the factors that make for negotiations are that the war has been very painful for the North Vietnamese also. They are a heroic people, but there is a limit to what can be taken. The fact is that as they get more and more weakened, no matter how they assess their prospects in the South, they must also assess the future relationship with China and other countries. They may purchase whatever it is they are trying to get in the South by a generation of impotence vis-a-vis neighbors who have historically been much more worried some to them than countries 12,000 miles away.

Thirdly, if you have read the Ho Chi Minh testament, you will note he insists that their struggle depends on unity between Communist China and the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the attacks on the sanctuaries, their appeals were rather plaintively repeated that they required that unity.

Well, that unity has not been forthcoming. In fact, Cambodia seems to have exacerbated the division between Communist China and the Soviet Union. (I am trying to list the factors that might induce them to negotiate.)

Fourthly, in Cambodia they have seen that the South Vietnamese army, at least for certain types-of operations, has become very effective, and for those types of operations might even be superior to theirs. I hasten to add that those types of operations are not guerrilla types of operations, which still have to be left open. That also is on the side of negotiations.

On the side against negotiation is the fact that the very qualities that made the North Vietnamese fight with so much singlemindedness and, one has to say, courage for 25 years may make it very difficult for them to settle. Stubborn, even heroic qualities, do not necessarily make for good negotiating qualities.

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