HENRY A. KISSINGER

February 2, 1995

Dear Bill:

Only the conviction that you are dealing with a somehow illegitimate usurper whose
unexpected (and undeserved) prominence obliges his betters to put him in his place can
explain a letter so patronizing, gratuitous, insulting and unjust as yours of January 14.
Why else would you presume to lecture me - on any basis and especially in the absence of
any creditable evidence - regarding "breaches of the best standards of behavior" - even
though you no doubt believe that you are being generous by calling the breach "minor".
And you add insult to condescension when you say Halberstam has the better of an
argument in which he answers a recital of factual inaccuracies by calling me a congenital
liar.

Your attitude comes to expression in the hypersensitivity with which you react to your
misinterpretation that I accused LBJ of political motivation in the 1968 negotiations, while
you seem to believe that I should passively endure explicit attack on my honor to the
effect that I had passed Johnson Administration negotiating secrets to Nixon, who in turn
used them to sabotage the peace talks - not to speak of all the other slime Halberstam
pitches in my direction.

I did not intend to accuse LBJ of political motivation in the negotiations of 1968 in my
reply to Halberstam. You pick on part of a sentence to the effect that LBJ wanted to
leave office with some progress - quite a different concept from what is usually
understood by political motivation which focuses on electoral benefit. What could be
more natural or human than the desire to contribute to ending the war which had blighted
LBJ's life and which caused him to lay down the Presidency? About what President could
such a statement not be made? The Johnson family, with whom I have stayed in friendly
contact all these years - far longer than many of his actual associates - is aware that I
respect the memory of the dead President. And you have personal reason to know that
neither Nixon nor I ever questioned the motives of the negotiators. The best proof of this
is that Vance was offered the position of Deputy Secretary of State and you an Assistant
Secretaryship in the Nixon Administration. You will remember that I tried my utmost to

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page two

persuade Cy and you to stay in government. Your recital of events in the summer of 1968 is therefore quite unnecessary.

As for your snide charge that I tried to "peddle slipshod research" to "extricate myself", three paragraphs in a letter to *Vanity Fair* do not pretend to be research. Nor did I try to "extricate" myself from events that date back a quarter of a century. What I tried to resist is Halberstam's method of dealing with policy disagreements via character assassination. My letter did not purport to represent a detailed history; it tried to demonstrate the outrageousness of the charge that I passed secret information to Nixon. You know better than almost anyone else that I possessed next to no negotiating information to pass on, since I had no access to day-to-day cable traffic. The various initiatives mentioned in your letter were surely not shared with me, and they are totally irrelevant. Mitchell would not have been even remotely interested in such esoteric points. His sole concern was whether there would be an agreement - any kind of agreement - before the election. On September 12, when I saw him, the negotiations were in recess and our negotiating team had not yet received instructions; there was no actual information on which to base a judgment, even had it been shared with me, which you know it was not. So far as I can tell, the Nixon camp followed my advice not to comment on the negotiations. Neither my critics in the Nixon camp nor the Halberstams of this world have ever come up with one secret I allegedly passed on. From what exactly, then, is it that I am extricating myself?

Nixon did intervene with Thieu apparently on October 16. This was clearly based not on anything he learned from me five weeks earlier but on a detailed briefing he received from LBJ that very day. Nixon's conduct was inappropriate, and I was unaware of the entire enterprise. But, like so many of Nixon's efforts, it was quite unnecessary. Thieu, as you correctly say, was the principal obstacle and needed no encouragement to stonewall. The only point I was trying to make was that those who charge sabotage must believe that but for Nixon's intervention, Thieu would have settled in the week before the election - an improbable hypothesis.

You have been in an excellent position to know that Nixon was working simultaneously on two tracks that never intersected. (I learned the details of the LBJ briefings only recently from Tom Johnson). Yet you have never lifted a finger to resist these assaults. Your letter with all its nitpicking red herrings colludes, in fact, with an author who contributed so much to debasing our public dialogue. You have no obligation to protect me against unfair assaults. But neither is it appropriate to use them as an occasion to read me moral lessons.

Dear Bill:

Or use such phrases as "peddling slipshod research" about a letter to the editor of *Vanity Fair* that makes no claim to research. And you add insult to condescension when you say Halberstam has the better of an argument in which he answers a recital of factual inaccuracies by calling me a congenital liar.

I did not intend to accuse LBJ of political motivation in the negotiations of 1968 in my reply to Halberstam. You pick on part of a sentence to the effect that LBJ wanted to _leave office_ with some progress - quite a different concept from what is usually understood by political motivation which focuses on electoral benefit. What could be more natural or human than the desire to contribute to ending the war which had blighted LBJ's life and which caused him to lay down the Presidency? About what President could such a statement not be made? The Johnson family, with whom I have stayed in friendly contact all these years - far longer than many of his actual associates - is aware that I respect the memory of the dead President. And you have personal reason to know that neither Nixon nor I ever questioned the motives of the negotiators. The best proof of this is that Vance was offered the position of Deputy Secretary of State and you an Assistant Secretaryship in the Nixon Administration. You will remember that I tried my utmost to persuade Cy and you to stay in government. Your recital of events in the summer of 1968 is therefore quite unnecessary.

As for your snide charge that I tried to "peddle slipshod research" to "extricate myself", three paragraphs in a letter to _Vanity Fair_ do not pretend to be research. Nor did I try to "extricate" myself from events that date back a quarter of a century. What I tried to resist is Halberstam's method of dealing with policy disagreements via character assassination.

My letter did not purport to represent a detailed history; it tried to demonstrate the outrageousness of the charge that I passed secret information to Nixon and that it was used by him to sabotage negotiations. You know better than almost anyone else that I

possessed next to no negotiating information to pass on, since I had no access to day-to-
day cable traffic. The various initiatives mentioned in your letter were surely not shared
with me, and they are totally irrelevant. Mitchell would not have been even remotely
interested in such esoteric points. His sole concern was whether there would be an
agreement - any kind of agreement - before the election. On September 12, when I saw
him, the negotiations were in recess and our negotiating team had not yet received
instructions; there was no actual information on which to base a judgment, even had it
been shared with me, which you knew it was not. So far as I can tell, the Nixon camp
followed my advice not to comment on the negotiations. Neither my critics in the Nixon
camp nor the Halberstams of this world have ever come up with one secret I allegedly
passed on. From what exactly then is it I am extricating myself?

Dear Bill:

Only the conviction that you are dealing with a somehow illegitimate usurper whose
unexpected (and almost surely undeserved) prominence obliges his betters to put him in
his place can explain a letter so patronizing, gratuitous, insulting and unjust as yours of
January 14. On the basis of what else would you presume to lecture me - on any basis and
especially in the absence of any creditable evidence - regarding "breaches of the best
standards of behavior" - even though you no doubt believe that you are being generous by
calling the breach "minor". Or use such phrases as "peddling slipshod research" about a
letter to the editor of Vanity Fair that makes no claim to research. And you add insult to
condescension when you say Halberstam has the better of an argument in which he
answers a recital of factual inaccuracies by calling me a congenital liar.

Your attitude comes to expression in the hypersensitivity with which you react to your
misinterpretation that I accused LBJ of political motivation in the 1968 negotiations, but
you seem to believe that I should passively endure the explicit attack on my honor that I
had passed Johnson Administration negotiating secrets to Nixon, who in turn used them to
sabotage the peace talks, not to speak of all the other slights

Halberstam pits me in my direction
I did not mean to
so in my reply to Halberstam. You factor in part of a sentence to the effect that LBJ

I have never accused LBJ of political motivation in the negotiations of 1968. Nor did I do
so in my reply to Halberstam. You factor in part of a sentence to the effect that LBJ

strong
pick on

CYJ

[Y]

when the negotiations were in recess and before our negotiating team had received instructions, so that there was no actual information on which to base a judgment. So far as I can tell, he followed my advice not to comment on the negotiations. Neither my critics in the Nixon camp nor the Halberstams of this world have ever come up with one secret I allegedly passed on.

Nixon did intervene with Thieu apparently on October 16. This was clearly based not on anything he learned from me four weeks earlier but on a detailed briefing he received from LBJ that very day. Nixon's conduct was inappropriate, and I was unaware of the entire enterprise. But, like so many of Nixon's efforts, it was quite unnecessary. Thieu, as you correctly say, was the principal obstacle and needed no encouragement to stonewall.

I have no cause to "extricate" myself from events of 26 years ago. You have been in an excellent position to know that Nixon was working simultaneously on two tracks that never intersected. (I learned the details only recently from Tom Johnson). Yet you have never lifted a finger to resist these assaults. Your letter colludes, in fact, with an author who has made character assassination his specialty and who contributed so much to debasing our public dialogues. You have no obligation to protect me against unfair assaults. But neither is it appropriate to read me moral lessons.

If the intent of your letter was friendly, as you claim, all I can ask is that you spare me any further effusions of your friendship.

Dear Bill:

Your attitude comes to expression in the hypersensitivity with which you react to your
misinterpretation that I accused LBJ of political motivation in the 1968 negotiations, but
you seem to believe that I should passively endure the explicit attack on my honor that I
had passed Johnson Administration negotiating secrets to Nixon, who in turn used them to
sabotage the peace talks.

wanted to <u>leave office</u> with some progress - quite a different concept from what is usually
understood by political motivation which focuses on electoral benefit. What could be
more natural or human than the desire to contribute to ending the war which had blighted
LBJ's life and which caused him to lay down the Presidency. About what President could
such a statement not be made? The Johnson family, with whom I have stayed in friendly
contact all these years, surely knows that I respect the memory of the dead President.
And you have personal reason to know that neither Nixon nor I ever questioned the
motives of the negotiations. The best proof of this is that Vance was offered the position
of Deputy Secretary of State and you an Assistant Secretaryship in the Nixon
Administration. You will remember that I tried my utmost to persuade Cy and you to stay
in government. Your recital of events in the summer of 1968 is therefore quite
unnecessary.

As for your insolent charge that I tried to "peddle slipshod research" to "extricate myself",
you know as well as I do that three paragraphs in a letter to *Vanity Fair* do not pretend to
be research. My letter tried to deal with two attacks on my honor and nothing else: that I
passed secret information to Nixon and that it was used by him to sabotage negotiations.
You know better than almost anyone else that I possessed next to no negotiating
information to pass on, since I had no access to day-to-day cable traffic. The various
initiatives mentioned in your letter were surely not shared with me. Nor would Mitchell
have been even remotely interested in such esoteric points. His sole concern was whether
there would be an agreement before the election. I met him on September 12 at a time

2

3

Dear Bill:

What do you think entitles you to so patronizing a letter.
I replied to Halberstam because those vicious fairy tales wander
into computer banks. The point of my response ~~to Vanity Fair~~ -
which I did not "peddle" as a profound piece of research as you
state - was very simple. When I met the delegation in September,
they were waiting for instructions; no agreement had been
reached. What had been proposed earlier is totally irrelevant.
They neither told me what had gone before, nor would it have
interested John Mitchell, whose only concern was whether there
would be an agreement - any agreement - before the election. The
details in your letter are interesting material for another
treatise. I have never challenged them; nor have I attacked the
substance of the agreement.

As to LBJ, I stood by him far more than many of his
associates. To say that in my judgement he wanted to leave
office with some progress on Vietnam is so human and so non-
political and so inherent in his decision to retire that your

tantrum is truly out of place.

You know the facts, however you try to obscure them by coy lawyerese. Nixon was briefed by LBJ on October 16. He approached Thieu via Anna Chenault on the same date. I knew neither of the briefing nor of the contact. Outrageous as it was, it surely did not influence Thieu, who would have played the same game regardless. Nixon required no information from me for this enterprise, and what I did say to him, as he explains in his memoirs, supported the negotiations.

So kindly get off my back with lordly references to minor breaches of the highest moral standards. And someone who went through the nightmare should be careful to make [about making?] snide and largely incorrect cracks about the negotiating record of 1972.

I am glad to note that your intent was friendly. I would hate to see what you would say were if otherwise.

JAN 23 1995

WILLIAM P. BUNDY

1087 Great Road Princeton, N. J. 08540

January 14, 1995

Dear Henry:--

I have come belatedly on a copy of the January *Vanity Fair*, with your reply to the Halberstam article, and note that you adhered to our understanding that you would make no reference to Dan Davidson. I don't think thanks are in order from me, but you did right to abide by the understanding.

However, in the process of proving how little influence you had -- I do not say otherwise in my draft chapter -- you get the facts badly skewed about the negotiation of the understandings that accompanied and made possible the bombing halt of October 30, 1968. Winding up those understandings in October was nowhere near as difficult as you suggest, for the following reasons:

A. The basic formula on military restraints was simple: no DMZ, no major city attacks -- you must know the litany by heart, though your memoir veers from saying it was quite meaningless to screaming foul when North Vietnam breached the DMZ in April 1972. My guess is that the deal did have some restraining effect, perhaps even a substantial one.

B. Likewise the "your side-our side" formula on seating was simple enough -- Saigon was assured a seat and Hanoi could bring the NLF, tho we would not cease to regard them as illegit.

C. Both formulae were *not* introduced in October, far from it. They had been tabled by Cy in July and then explained over and over to the North Vietnamese, and for good measure to the Soviets. In July too Bunker and Berger had gone over them carefully with Thieu, who had given his explicit concurrence. (You know from 1972 what that was worth, but certainly there was no hasty last-minute shoving a new draft with other matters down his throat, such as many would see in the 1972 record.)

D. The breakthrough was in fact about October 10. LBJ then had Averell and Cy go back and make dead sure NVN understood clearly what was expected, and checked that all necessary hands were aboard in the USG. On the 14th Abrams was brought in and gave his explicit concurrence, as did Bus Wheeler. By the 15th it was clear we had a US/NVN deal, and Saigon was informed at that time or perhaps earlier, certainly no later. And the three candidates were told the status on the 16th.

E. LBJ then again caused a slight delay, getting the
Sovs to endorse the check, so to speak. Which they did,
with some fervor.

F. Meanwhile Bunker and Berger had gone back and
back to Thieu, who as you might guess was reneging on his
admitted concurrence, pleading political difficulty, etc.
As in 1972 every kind of reassurance and mild threat was
invoked, short of a secret pledge, without success.

G. A clearcut factor at this stage was the
intervention of Anna Chennault, who had been signed up by
Nixon personally in July to be his contact with the Thieu
government, at a meeting in NY also attended by Bui Diem.
(He had asked me for permission to see Nixon, which I
readily granted. My date book nails down that date and
the date of the meeting, which is garbled in Anna's
mémoire.)

A perfect example of a semi-cutout deal to keep N
out of it from then on: all the contacts were to be with
Mitchell, and Anna's memoir shows many of these, mostly
in the last week of October. Just what Anna said is not
clear but the message of her exchanges was: "don't go
along with it, and we will deal kindly with you later."

H. The rest is on the public record -- Thieu's
rejection, the confusion that weekend, Humphrey refusing
to accuse Nixon, Nixon making some very unattractive
comments feigning surprise, etc. Anna's later account in
her memoir tells how she was shunned after the election,
having become radioactive through press references, and
denied any job by Nixon, who awkwardly thanked her at a
reception some months afterward for having kept quiet!

******

Altogether sordid, and I have always accepted that
you were not involved in the events described. The point
in regard to your letter is that this was no complicated
negotiation on the substance of the deal. What happened
was so similar to your 1972 difficulties that I would
have thought you might have sized it up correctly: in
both cases the hitch was Thieu and Thieu alone. He had
even less justification in 1968 than in 1972.

As you can tell, this true account, verified many
times over in my researches, is hard, nay impossible, to
square with any suggestion of political motives on LBJ's
part. On that point, Nixon's claimed source was wildly
off, as you could have told them (Bryce Harlow, claiming
as his subsources Joe Califano, who was not in the loop
at all, and Tommy Thompson, securely in Moscow and also
not in the loop). The fact was that LBJ never told
Humphrey or any of his people any more than he told

Nixon, perhaps indeed less; turned down repeated pleas to ease the position, including one Dean Rusk endorsed just before the convention disaster; and beneath it all was clearly lukewarm about Hubert and inwardly thought he could do business with Nixon, as indeed he did right after the election, tho Nixon's "help" at that time was infinitely ironic after what he had done to scuttle the deal. LBJ drove George Ball and others in the Humphrey camp up the wall right through the whole business, as well as Cy and Averell. In all, not a single action by LBJ fits with a political motive, while a great deal cuts dead against one.

In short, you have attempted to extricate yourself
from a minor breach of the best standards of behavior by
peddling a slipshod job of research that will only muddy
the waters if anyone takes it seriously. Not a
constructive contribution.

For that and many other reasons, including my
amateur judgment that to most readers Halberstam had the
best of the exchange, I think you would have been wise to
take my advice and not try to comment. These things do
pass over, and in your elder statesman status you really
should not be stooping to rebut statements by such
writers in such publications. It reaches heights of
absurdity for you, an ex-Secretary of State, to be
contesting what Bill Elliott said or did not say at a
Harvard department faculty meeting 35 years ago! One or
two others, after all, have attributed to you a degree of
arrogance, as they did to one of your predecessors we
both admire.

Yours in a relaxed spirit, and with friendly intent,

Bill

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## MAJOR BARBRA

### Simmons on Streisand

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Beverly Hills, California

### Regarding Henry

The article "The New Establishment: The Decline and Fall of the Eastern Empire," by David Halberstam [October], is filled with misrepresentations. For example:

- I have never been on Henry Kravis's airplane for any trip, much less "commandered" it for a trip to Japan. Therefore, Kravis could not possibly have said what was attributed to him by Halberstam.

- Neither Paul Volcker nor I remember the conversation with which Halberstam concludes his article.

- Despite our friendship I have never traveled, nor planned to travel, to China or anywhere else—with Bill Blass.

- The quote regarding my alleged arrogance, ascribed to Bill Elliott at his retirement party, is so bizarrely inconsistent with my recollection of the event and of the relationship with my Harvard mentor that I checked it with Sam Huntington, a senior professor of the Government faculty. He had not attended the dinner but had never heard of the incident, which would be unlikely if it had really happened. On his own, he consulted two senior professors who had been present at the dinner and with neither of whom have I had any contact for two decades. According to them, nothing like that transpired, nor had they ever heard Elliott say anything in

VANITY FAIR JANUARY 1998

vidious about me on any other occasion.
I surely recall only kindness from him.

—The concept of “shit files” was unknown in the Rockefeller campaign. Neither I nor anyone I knew in the Rockefeller group ever heard that phrase. I am aware of no files in the Rockefeller organization for which such a description—or any variation of it—would be appropriate. The research material I was familiar with consisted of newsclips and articles to support Nelson Rockefeller’s statements on foreign policy. Rockefeller had the quaint notion that a nomination had to be earned by substantive pronouncements, not negative advertisements, and campaigned in 1968 by advertisements laying out his program, which are available from the public record.

—The charge that I tried to ingratiate myself with Hubert Humphrey by offering nonexistent “shit files” for his 1968 campaign reflects the same recklessness. The only smidgen of fact it represents is that in July 1968, after Rockefeller had been defeated for the nomination, Zbigiew Brzezinski seems to have interpreted a conversation in which I expressed my disappointment as an invitation to use the Rockefeller foreign-policy research material. Recollections about the

conversation differ, though not about my subsequent actions. For according to Brzezinski's account, I refused to discuss his perception of the conversation when he tried to follow up a few weeks later. I had no further contact with him during the campaign and by his own admission no files of any character passed between us.

—Halberstam alleges that “unbeknownst” to Rockefeller I had established relations with Nixon and had been a semi-covert Humphrey man to boot. Halberstam achieves this insinuation of duplicity by presenting consecutive events as having been contemporaneous. I was first and last a Rockefeller supporter and, more important, a close friend. In his memoirs *RN* (page 323), Nixon writes that, after Nixon’s nomination, Rockefeller urged Nixon to establish contact with me. It was the Nixon camp which took the initiative in contacting me through Bill Buckley. Rockefeller was fully informed of my every meeting with the Nixon entourage. As for Humphrey, I had met him several times in Rockefeller’s company prior to 1968. Despite his personal regard for Humphrey, Rockefeller became convinced that a Nixon victory was in the national interest. For

that reason, both he and I supported Nixon without qualification.

—Halberstam alleges that I fed “vital,” “privileged” information on the Paris peace talks to the Nixon camp, which relayed it back to Saigon and thereby sabotaged the Vietnam negotiations.

Amid all this portentous innuendo, Halberstam never explains what the alleged sabotage consisted of. A chronology of events makes clear that Halberstam's determination to smear blinds his judgment. During the summer of 1968, negotiations were suspended. They were resumed at the end of September; a breakthrough occurred around October 15; an agreement was reached around October 30. Saigon had no role in any of this until the middle of October. After October 30 Nguyen Van Thieu dragged his feet on the procedural issue of how the guerrillas could participate in the negotiations—an issue which has always proved difficult to solve, as shown in the Israel-P.L.O. contacts over the years and the British attitude toward the I.R.A. The Johnson administration was quite unrealistic in believing that this could be settled in a week between the agreement and the election—which is what the charge of sabotage amounts to. Thieu reacted to the published agreement, not to information received from Nixon, of whose contacts with Saigon I was, in any event, unaware. Far from sabotaging the agreement, Nixon endorsed it after the election and helped break the procedural deadlock even before his inauguration. So what exactly is Halberstam charging? During the period of the alleged sabotage, a substantive agreement was reached in the record time of 30 days and the procedural issues were settled with Nixon's help before the inauguration.

As for my role in all this, I had two meetings with John Mitchell, on September 12 and October 23, both at Mitchell's initiative via Buckley. At the time of the first session, there could have been no inside information to pass on, even if I had had any, because the negotiations were in recess and were not to resume for two weeks. At the second, on October 23, Nixon needed no outsider's information because he had been briefed in detail by President Johnson on October 16 regarding the breakthrough and on October 30 regarding the Communist agreement.

My advice to the Nixon camp depended in any event on analysis, not inside knowledge. I was at the time not in the government and had no access to regular cable traffic, much less to the sensitive

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negotiating record, which was limited to five or six people. For two months in the fall of 1967 I had acted as emissary to the North Vietnamese without having a formal government position. I had gained a general knowledge of attitudes but knew next to nothing of day-to-day events in 1968. As Nixon describes in his memoirs, I urged Mitchell to avoid statements critical of the negotiations and indicated that I thought the negotiations would succeed. This conclusion was not based on inside information, which at that point would have indicated a stalemate. Rather, it reflected a judgment that Hanoi would try to commit both candidates to a bombing halt before the elec-

tion and that Johnson wanted to leave office with some progress on Vietnam. Not surprisingly, my advice was consistent with my public position in support of negotiations for two years and with a major article for *Foreign Affairs* being printed at that very moment and which appeared a few weeks later.

There are many more misrepresentations in the article. John Ehrlichman's alleged recol-

lection of my view regarding the duration of the Vietnam peace agreement is demonstrably false; many memorandums exist in which my actual views are spelled out in detail. The account of my childhood is as preposterous as it is unsupported. But to deal with these and other falsifications in detail would oblige me to write a piece as long as Halberstam's.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

New York, New York

**DAVID HALBERSTAM REPLIES:** As far as I can tell, the single most important factual disagreement that Henry Kissinger has with me is whether or not he once pressured Henry Kravis for the use of his jet plane. Mr. Kravis recounted this story to my source with great amusement—and seemed almost charmed by the imperial quality of Kissinger's request. Kravis told my friend that he did indeed intend to fly to China himself. "if I can have the use of Henry Kissinger's plane." Mr. Kissinger now denies ever being on the Kravis plane (although his enthusiasm for corporate jets and corporate helicopters is widely known and is considered by his wealthier friends to be almost childlike).

I do not want to do him an injustice on this point. It is quite possible that I am in error here

and that someone who is extremely careless with the truth about the secret bombing of a small country is, in fact, scrupulously honest about the use of corporate airplanes; if so, I apologize to Mr. Kissinger for placing him on the wrong corporate jet, and I also hope that Mr. Kravis will soon reverse what surely must be a company policy and let Kissinger on his plane in the near future.

The rest of his letter is filled with halfhearted denials of my article. Let me say simply that I think Henry Kissinger is a brilliant man, and on occasion this country has been the genuine beneficiary of his extraordinary abilities. But it is his personal behavior which remains so troubling. His relentless manipulations and deceits, some petty, some not so petty, inflicted not so much on sworn adversaries as on friends, colleagues, and would-be allies alike, are

at the crux of my article. As his colleague Helmut Sonnenfeldt once said of him, Henry lies not because it is in his interest but rather because it is in his character. The unattractive, lesser side of that character, despite his relentless denials, is now well documented, most particularly his devious behavior during the 1968 campaign, when he used his access to the Democrats to serve the Nixon campaign, and, even more important, his fierce hawkishness on Vietnam (and Cambodia) while at the same

time he professed his dovishness in the more liberal environs of Georgetown, where he deftly signaled his alleged differences with the policies of the man he served, Richard Nixon.

If he is angry at my rather mild portrait of him, and if he is so obsessed with attaining an accurate portrait of events, I suggest that he do what he says he has yet to do and read The Haldeman Diaries and study Haldeman's portrait of him in those years, a depiction far more devastating than anything I could ever have imagined, let alone written.

**CORRECTION:** In David Halberstam's essay, a comment was wrongly attributed to historian John Lewis Gaddis. We quoted Professor Gaddis as saying that Henry Kissinger came across in television appearances as a "grumpy talking bead... My sense is that he is unconsciously ill at ease with so public and democratic an instrument." Gaddis did describe Kissinger as "a grumbling television talking bead." The rest of the comment is Halberstam's.

Letters to the editor should be sent with the writer's name, address, and daytime phone number to: The Editor, *Vanity Fair*, 350 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10017. Address electronic mail to vfmail@vf.com. The letters chosen for publication may be edited for length and clarity.

Henry Kissinger

28

VANITY FAIR/JANUARY 1995