[Y]

③

Kissinger: It is not for me to create or destroy the Kissinger legend. I think one thing to remember is that many of the people that are now writing are of the Vietnam generation and were activists or were influenced by the activists in the Vietnam debate. And they are in a very complicated position because what they recommended led to a decocker. But they don't want to say that what they did, led to a decocker. Or there is now a massive revisionism going on in which those of us who rightly or wrongly thought that Americas honor requires that we do not betray an ally are now accused of doing the things they recommended. And I think that is in the heart of this revisionism. Isaacson for example in his book says President Nixon should have proposed, when he came in, that he would withdraw unilaterally in a 15 month-period. If you look at the realistic American debate of the period President Nixon had never said anything like this as a candidate and on the democratic side President Johnson had never said anything like this. Senator Kennedy, McGovern, the people who were in the protest movement at the convention, also have never said anything like this. They called for a mutual withdrawal, for a de-escalation, not for the end of hostilities. Now how could Nixon as a republican candidate suddenly propose something that the most radical groups had never proposed and for which there was no realistic basis whatsoever? We had nearly 600,000 people there at the time. We in fact asked the joint chiefs how long it would take to remove them. They told us 15 to 18 months. We could not leave for about 15 month 550,000 troops between 700,000 betrayed South Vietnamese and 500,000 aggressive North Vietnamese. So this is one of these myths that he suddenly invented. Or at the end he

the protesters at the time recommended. The critics know that the country is ashamed of what happened and are rewriting history, for example Isaacson's claim that we betrayed Thieu. The fact is that overthrusting Thieu was a key plank of the protesters, which we in the Nixon administration consistently rejected.

Isaacson's book is part of the Vietnam debate which will not end.

[Y]

## Insert A to page 5

Both alleged quotes are good examples of the Isaacson method. Eagleburger is one of my best friends. We have worked together for the last thirty years off and on. We see each other frequently and talk on the phone almost every week. Eagleburger saw Isaacson at my request. How probable is it that he made such a statement? What was the question? What else did he say? Why was nothing favorable quoted?

As for Tony Lake, he worked in my office from June 1969 until February 1970, and on my staff until April 1970. After that he was at universities and worked with Opposition presidential candidates. I like and respect him, but I do not consider him an unbiased observer. Nor does he have any first-hand knowledge about the main period of my tenure.

## Insert B to page 8

It is a new kind of biography. It uses no documents. It relies entirely on interviews, a full list of which is in the Appendix. But it gives no explanation of why particular individuals were selected. For example, much of the material in the alleged operation of my staff comes from five men who left my staff in April 1970, most of whom afterwards worked for candidates of the Opposition party and who have no knowledge of anything afterwards. A Harvard professor who is quoted about the operation of a magazine I briefly edited at Harvard did not come to Harvard until six years after the magazine closed.

Isaacson alleges that my diplomacy relied on telling a different story to every interlocutor. But he did not interview a single person with whom I negotiated. The only German leader he interviewed was Egon Bahr, who made no such claim. But Kohl, Schmidt, Genscher, Scheel, Von Staden and Weizsäcker, who have known me for years, were not interviewed, nor were Doenhoff or Augstein, close friends among journalists.

The same is true in every country. Nobody who dealt with me was interviewed in France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Japan, China or anywhere else. Isaacson quotes Israeli Prime Minister Rabin invidiously - who happens to be a close friend - but he did not interview him. Nor Eban, who spends six months a year in New York. Where did their alleged quotes come from? And in what context were they made originally? Would either of them, if asked, have chosen these quotes?

["fact that when they recently bombed Baghdad only four people knew about it. I don't criticize this. I am simply pointing out that when you are passed to make actual decisions there are many factors you have to take into account.", "Q.: And finally one quote I like very much. It's one by ambassador Dobrynin. He said, "Kissinger is the only person I know, who has learned to eat caviar with chopsticks." What did he mean by that?", "Kissinger: He said it at a toast, when he wanted to show that I was using American-Chinese the relationship to influence the Soviet Union.", "Q.: Since Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford regarded you as \"the greatest diplomat of our times\" - why hasn't there been a Kissinger comeback, when Reagan and later Bush became Presidents?", "Kissinger: For two reasons: 1. Presidents do not like in their entourage someone who has an independent public position. And therefore in case of a disagreement with me they would have had to take into account that I have a certain public following. 2. I have found myself in the strange position that while the Vietnam revisionists attack me from the left the conservative Republicans attack me from the right for being unwilling to negotiate with the Soviets. And for a republican President the opposition of the conservative right is very painful and even dangerous. I had very good personal relationships with both Reagan and Bush and saw them quite often.", "Q.: Isaacson writes you were living in the past, when the Soviet empire started to crumble in the late eighties. But didn't you have a strong influence on american foreign policy at that time through your close friends Eagleburger and Scowcroft in the State Department and the White House?"]

[Y]

concentrates on people who for a variety of reasons left working with me, who really tell things that are very hard to know. And there is no analysis of serious negotiations for instance in the Middle East. Instead he writes about me throwing a map at Dayan during the Galan Heights negotiations. It is not a big deal. But I think that anybody who negotiated with me has ever seen me losing my head. It is a kind of destructive type of biography. It is indeed a serious problem.

Q.: There is a chapter in Isaacsons book about the secret life of Henry Kissinger as a sex symbol and that exactly is the reason why I started speaking about the decline of american biography-writing. It contains a lot of gossip and ends with the final verdict: "The dirty little secret about Kissingers relationship with woman was that there was no dirty little secret. Nothing romantic ever developed". If that's the result, why is it worth a chapter in this book?

Kissinger: The question is how does he even know that? What he did is he called some of the ladies, with whom I was seen publicly on the telefone. They did not know him. What are they supposed to say? (What did he expect them to say? Many of them know Nancy. What kind of a biography is it when you read the telephone ask people what was your relationship to Henry Kissinger?)

Q.: In view of these judgements do you finally plan to write the definitive Kissinger-biography and if so why didn't it happen earlier?

Kissinger: Well I have written two volumes of my memoirs. One period is missing - the two and a half years of President Ford. I am now writing a long book which will come out next spring which is not a biography but which is a full statement of my view of the nature of foreign policy. Through a series of historical examples shows what I think of power and morality in foreign policy. But I have no intention of writing an autobiography.

[Y]

Q.: You changed and you watched world politics during the last 25 years as no other person did. Which foreign politician impressed you most during the last decades?

Kissinger: Adenauer, de Gaulle, Sadat, Tschu En-lai, Nixon, in his way, they are not all of the exactly same stature. In a way Mrs. Thatcher, And I have very high regard for Kohl. Very high regard Schmidt, he is a remarkable man, good friend of mine.

Q.: In Jacob Heilbrunns review of Isaacson's book I found this assessment: "Among the true diplomats of the last 20 years the true realist was not Henry Kissinger but Hanns Dietrich Genscher. It was Genscher, in emphasizing human rights und close diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, who struck the balance that eluded Kissinger and finally brought down the Berlin Wall". Do you agree?

Kissinger: Genscher is a good friend of mine and I have high regard for him. I don't want to make a competitive statement. I think Genscher will agree that when we worked together we were in substantial agreement. When Genscher came in he did not know very much about foreign policy. On the other hand I have never known someone learning it so well. Genscher and I had some tactical disagreements. My major disagreement with Genscher, if I had one, was that I would have liked other countries than Germany carry out Genscher's policy because I was afraid there was a potential for it becoming to nationalistic. But I didn't disagree with the substance of his policy.

Q.: In hindsight: what do you regard as your biggest success in your time as National Security Adviser and Foreign Secretary?

Kissinger: I came into office at a time when America had 550 000 troops abroad and it was loosing a war, when the confidence in America's ability to manage international affairs was

11

[Y]

collapsing and we tried to start a tradition which avoided the oscillations between commitment and withdrawal which was so characteristic of America. And with the openings to China, the Middle East Initiative, the attempt to improve relations with Europe, with having a policy of resistance against Soviet expansion and also concrete negotiations with the Soviets to start a pattern that could be sustained over a period of years. I like to think that if you look at the nature of American initiatives most of them originated in the Nixon period. I am not saying I did them all alone but that is what I tend to look back on. That is what we were really trying to do.

### Q.: And the biggest failure?

Kissinger: The biggest sadness is: we wanted to end the war in Vietnam honorably the way de Gaulle endet the Algerian war so that America could look back to it without division. And here we did not succeed. We did not heal the domestic wounds in America of which Isaacson's book is an example.

### Q.: White House speechwriter Robert Hartmann said about your work for President Ford: "People who employ geniuses, as Ford did with Kissinger, have to pay a price". Could it be that any genius, who works in this complicated world and especially in Washington, has to pay a price as well. And could this price be a book like that of Mr. Isaacson?

Kissinger: Yes. I think that is true. And again you have to remember: every President has his entourage and that entourage is extremely protective of him and giving their identity through him. Then comes somebody like myself who has an autonomous position. That's very painful to them. But I am sure that if you would interview President Ford, who is and has remained one of my closest friends, he would say that on balance we had an extraordinary relationship. But I think it is a fair statement which does not mean that I am saying that I am a genius.

↑ Hartman was a speechwriter to the looked at foreign policy from that perspective.

[Y]

③

Kissinger: It is not for me to create or destroy the Kissinger-legend. I think one thing to remember is that many of the people that are now writing are of the Vietnam generation and were activists or were influenced by the activists in the Vietnam debate. And they are in a very complicated position because what they recommended led to a disaster. But they don't want to say what that disaster did, led to a disaster. So there is now a massive revisionism going on in which those of us who rightly or wrongly thought that America's honor requires that we do not betray an ally are now accused of doing the things they recommended. And I think that is in the heart of this revisionism. Isaacson for example in his book says President Nixon should have proposed, when he came in, that he would withdraw unilaterally in a 15 month-period. If you look at the realistic American debate of the period President Nixon had never said anything like this as a candidate and on the democratic side President Johnson had never said anything like this. Senator Kennedy, McGovern, the people who were in the protest movement at the convention, also have never said anything like this. They called for a mutual withdrawal, for a de-escalation, not for the end of hostilities. Now how could Nixon as a Republican candidate suddenly propose something that the most radical groups had never proposed and for which there was no realistic basis whatsoever? We had nearly 600 000 people there at the time. We in fact asked the joint chiefs how long it would take to remove them. They told us 15 to 18 months. We could not leave for about 15 month 550 000 troops between 700 000 betrayed South Vietnamese and 500 000 aggressive North Vietnamese. So this is one of these myths that he suddenly invented. Or at the end he

PROTESTER AT THE TIME
1 the critics recommended.

The critics know that the country is ashamed of what happened & are trying to escape responsibility by rewriting history.

Isaacson's claiming we betrayed Thieu.

The fact is that one thing
There was a key plank
of the protesters which
we in the Vietnam administration
unstantly injected

[Y]

4

says we betrayed Thieu, because we said the North Vietnamese could keep troops under very strict restrictions. If you read the public statements of President Nixon and myself you will see that we proposed precise terms and then those terms were accepted we settled. I took a special trip to Saigon in August before there were any serious negotiations to tell Thieu that when our terms were accepted we would settle. Of course it was terribly painful for Thieu, for whom I had deep sympathy, but the reason we had to do it was because we were convinced Congress would vote us out of the war at the next session. So it is not the question of my legend, it is the question of massive revisionism in which whoever writes history can determine what has happened.

a publicly

a that were criticized at the time by people Isaacson admires as being too generous to Saigon.

Q.: Nevertheless, though you didn't authorize Isaacson's biography about you, you gave him two dozen interviews and access to private papers. So you trusted him?

Kissinger: Yes. He told me that the personal attacks had already been done, that he wanted to make an analysis of the foreign policy, not of all the horror stories that he is telling and I discussed with him in great detail why we did what we did on the theory that it is useful to have a description of our policy.

the author rewrites to fit predetermined purposes.

Q.: Isaacson writes: „This book contains disclosures and judgements, that Henry Kissinger would surely dispute”. I am sure you will. Which are they?

Kissinger: I dispute totally his analysis of the Vietnam war, especially his analysis of how Nixon was running the government. His account of almost all negotiations is totally onesided even when he is favorable to me. It is a journalist's book. He doesn't understand historical circumstances. And the reader can tell which Germans he interviewed. He interviewed exactly one German, Egon Bahr.

the arms control negotiations his presentation implied of middle East diplomacy.

1. His account of the Harvard years is false. He relies entirely on interviews which are selective & several of them cannot be accurate.

and it does not seem & are unskilled any comments.

S

Q.: His judgements about you are mostly in a strange way conflicting. On page 1 he calls you ,,Americas most admired person'' and on page 2 he quotes liberal intellectuals and conservative activists calling you ,,a power manipulator, dangerously devoid of moral principles''.

Kissinger: That is not for me to judge. That is obviously not something that is for me to answer.

Q.: But that is not just a simple judgement, it is a vicious judgement.

Kissinger: Yes, but that has to be answered by people who know me better. But there is a pattern. He uses examples from the period of the Vietnam crisis when we had near-civil war-conditions. And of course he never admits the riots and demonstrations that were going on. This is part of a peculiar american debate in which we simply cannot come to grips with the past and keep the Vietnam war going for ever.

Q.: Let me quote some of the judgements about you by people close to you which I found in this book. For instance Lawrence Eagleburger. He is quoted as saying: ,,Nixon and Kissinger developed a conspiratorial approach to foreign policy management''.

Kissinger: Eagleburger denies having said that I don't believe that if you would interview Eagleburger he would say anything remotely like this. Eagleburger is one of my close friends. Eagleburger tells me, that he did say many favorable things that were not reported. But of course I was not present, when they talked.

Q.: Or Tony Lake, once your aide und today National Security Adviser of President Clinton. I quote him: ,,Some secrecy is necessary. But Henry crossed the line from secret to deceit.''

Insert A

Kissinger: Lake is one of those who left early and who had no independent knowledge after April 1970. But I noticed that the Clinton Administration prided itself on the

[Y]

[Y]

## Insert A to page 5

It is a good example of the Isaacson method. Eagleburger is one of my best friends. We have worked together for the last thirty years off and on. We see each other frequently and talk on the phone most every week. Eagleburger saw Isaacson at my request. How probable is it that he made such a statement? What was the question? What else did he say?

As for Tony Lake, he worked in my office from June 1969 to February 1970 and on my staff until April 1970. After that he worked with Opposition presidential candidates. I like and respect him, but I do not consider him an unbiased observer. Nor does he have any knowledge about the main period of my tenure.

## Insert B to page 8

It is a new kind of biography. It uses no documents. It relies entirely on interviews, but it gives no explanation of why particular individuals were selected. For example, much of the material in the alleged operation of my staff comes from five men who left my staff in April 1970, most of whom afterwards worked for candidates of the Opposition party and who have no knowledge of anything afterwards. A Harvard professor who is quoted about the operation of a magazine I briefly edited at Harvard did not come to Harvard until six years after the magazine closed.

The same is true in every country. Isaacson quotes Israeli Prime Minister Rabin invidiously - who happens to be a close friend - but he did not interview him. Nor Eban, who spends six months a year in New York. Where did their alleged quotes come from? And in what context?

Fact that when they recently bombed Baghdad only four people knew about it. I don't criticize this. I am simply pointing out that when you are posed to make actual decisions there are many factors you have to take into account.

Q.: And finally one quote I like very much. Its one by ambassador Dobrynin. He said, "Kissinger is the only person I know, who has learned to eat caviar with chopsticks." What did he mean by that?

Q.: Since Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford regarded you as "the greatest diplomat of our times" - why hasn't there been a Kissinger comeback, when Reagan und later Bush became Presidents?

[Y]

concentrates on people who fall a
variety of reasons left working with
me, who really tell things that are
very hard to know. And there is no
analysis of serious negotiations for
instance in the Middle East. Instead
he writes about me throwing a map at
Dayan during theiran Heights
negotiations. It is not a big deal.
But I think that anybody who
negotiated with me has ever seen me
loosing my head. It is a kind of
destructive type of biography. It is
induced a serious problem.

Q.: There is a chapter in Isaacsons book about the secret life of Henry Kissinger as a sex symbol and that exactly is the reason why I started speaking about the decline of american biography-writing. It containes a lot of gossip and ends with the final verdict: "The dirty little secret about Kissingers relationship with woman was that there was no dirty little secret. Nothing romantic ever developed". If that's the result, why is it worth a chapter in this book?

Kissinger: The question is how does he even know that? What he did is he called some of the ladies, with whom I was seen publicly on the telefone. They did not know him. What are they supposed to say? What did he expect them to say? Many of them know Nancy. What kind of a biography is it when you on the telefone ask people what was your relationship to Henry Kissinger?

Kissinger: Well I have written two
volumes of my memoirs. One period is
missing - the two and a half years of
President Ford. I am now writing a
long book which will come out next
spring which is not a biography
but which is a full statement of my
view of the nature of foreign policy
through a series of historical
examples shows what I think of power
and morality in foreign policy. But I
have no intention of writing an
autobiography.

[X]

(10)

Kissinger: Adenauer, de Gaulle, Sadat, Tschu En-lai, Nixon, in his way, they are not all of the evil, some are good. In a way, Mrs. Thatcher. And I have very high regard for Kohl. Very high regard. Schmidt, he is a remarkable man. Very good friend of mine.

Kissinger: Genscher is a good friend of mine and I have high regard for him. I don't want to make a competitive statement. I think Genscher will agree that when we worked together we were in substantial agreement. When Genschen came in he did not know very much about foreign policy. On the other hand I have never known someone learning it so well. Genscher and I had some tactical disagreements. My major disagreement with Genscher, if I had one, was that I would have liked other countries than Germany to carry out Genscher's policy because I was afraid there was a potential for it becoming nationalistic. But I didn't disagree with the substance of his policy.

Kissinger: I came into office at a time when America had 550 000 troops abroad and it was losing a war, when the confidence in America's ability to manage international affairs was

[Y]

collapsing and we tried to start a tradition which avoided the oscillations between commitment and withdrawal which was so characteristic of America. And with the openings to China, the Middle East Initiative, the attempt to improve relations with Europe, with having a policy of resistance against Soviet expansion and also concret negotiations with the Soviets to start a pattern that could be sustained over a period of years. I like to think that if you look at the nature of American initiatives most of them originated in the Nixon period. I am not saying I did them all alone but that is what I tend to look back on. That is what we were really trying to do.

**Q.:** And the biggest failure?

**Kissinger:** The biggest sadness is: we wanted to end the war in Vietnam honorably the way de Gaulle endet the Algerian war so that America could look back to it without division. And here we did not succeed. We did not heal the domestic wounds in America of which Isaacsons book is an example.

**Q.:** White House speechwriter Robert Hartmann said about your work for President Ford: "People who employ geniuses, as Ford did with Kissinger, have to pay a price". Could it be that any genius, who works in this complicated world and especially in Washington, has to pay a price as well. And could this price be a book like that of Mr. Isaacson?

**Kissinger:** Yes. I think that is true. And again you have to remember: every President has his entourage and that entourage is extremely protective of him and gains their identity through him. Then comes somebody like myself who has an autonomous position. That's very painful to them. But I am sure that if you would interview President Ford, who is and has remained one of my closest friends, he would say that on balance we had an extraordinary relationship. But I think it is a fair statement. Which does not mean that I am saying that I am a genius.

[Y]

③

Kissinger: It is not for me to judge.
~~Create or destroy the Kissinger legend.~~ I think one thing to remember is that many of the people that are now writing are of the Vietnam generation and were activists or were influenced by the activists in the Vietnam debate. And they are in a very complicated position because what they recommended led to a disaster. But they don't want to say that what they did, led to a disaster. So there is now a massive revisionism going on in which those of us who rightly or wrongly thought that America honor requires that we do not betray an ally are now accused of doing the things they recommended. And I think that is in the heart of this revisionism. Isaacson for example in his book says President Nixon should have proposed, when he came in, that he would withdraw unilaterally in a 15 month-period. If you look at the realistic American debate of the period President Nixon had never said anything like this as a candidate and on the democratic side President Johnson had never said anything like this. Senator Kennedy, McGovern, the people who were in the protest movement at the convention, also have never said anything like this. They called for a mutual withdrawal, for a de-escalation, not for the end of hostilities. Now how could Nixon as a Republican candidate suddenly propose something that the most radical groups had never proposed and for which there was no realistic basis whatsoever? We had nearly 600,000 people there at the time. We in fact asked the joint chiefs how long it would take to remove them. They told us 15 to 18 months. We could not leave for about 15 month 550,000 troops between 700,000 betrayed South Vietnamese and 500,000 aggressive North Vietnamese. So this is one of these myths that he suddenly invented. Or at the end he

1 the critics recommended.

The critics know that the country is ashamed of what happened & are trying to escape responsibility by rewriting history and Isaacson's claiming we betrayed Thieu.

S

Kissinger: Eagleburger denies having said that. I don't believe that if you would interview Eagleburger he would say anything remotely like this. Eagleburger is one of my close friends. Eagleburger tells me, that he did say many favorable things that were not reported. But of course I was not present, when they talked.

Kissinger: Insert A, Lake is one of those who left early and who had no independent knowledge after April 1970. But I noticed that the Clinton Administration prided itself on the

## Insert A to page 5

As for Tony Lake, he worked in my office from June 1969 to February 1970 and on my staff until April 1970. After that he worked with Opposition presidential candidates. I like and respect him, but I do not consider him an unbiased observer, or that he has any knowledge about the main period of my tenure.

## Insert B to page 8

The same is true in every country. Isaacson quotes Israeli Prime Minister Rabin invidiously - who happens to be a close friend - but he did not interview him nor Eban, who spends six months a year in New York. Where did their alleged quotes come from? And in what context?