In the second installment of TIME's excerpts from White House Years, Henry Kissinger writes of the war that divided the U.S. at home and threatened to make a shambles of its policies abroad. He tells for the first time how during secret negotiations in Paris in April 1970—before the U.S. invaded the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia—he proposed that Cambodia's neutrality be guaranteed and that an international conference on the subject be convened. North Viet Nam's representative, Le Duc Tho, bluntly spurned the proposal, claiming that Hanoi expected to hold sway over all of Indochina some day.
The author gives an intimate look at the anguished debates and bitter wrangling within the Nixon Administration that accompanied every military move in Indochina, the efforts to end the war and how they were thwarted by Hanoi's rigid refusal for nearly four years to accept a settlement that would amount to anything less than a sellout of Saigon, the rationale behind the mining of North Viet Nam's ports and the Christmas bombing of 1972, why he declared "peace is at hand" on the eve of Nixon's reelection, his attempts to build bridges to dissident students and professors, the acid exchanges with South Viet Nam's leaders as a peace treaty drew near, and the angry threat from Nixon that finally brought Saigon around. The memoirs describe Kissinger's painful falling-out with Nixon and his decision—never acted upon because Watergate intervened—to resign from public office some time in 1973.
White House Years, to be published on Oct. 23 (Little, Brown; 1,521 pages; $22.50), covers Kissinger's stewardship as National Security Adviser during the period following Richard Nixon's 1968 election, ending with the signing of a Viet Nam peace treaty in January 1973. A second volume, now in preparation, will recount the years to January 1977, during most of which Kissinger was Secretary of State.
"THERE WAS NO ALTERNATIVE"
I cannot yet write about Viet Nam except with pain and sadness. When we came into office, over half a million Americans were fighting a-war 10,000 miles away. Their numbers were still increasing on a schedule established by our predecessors. We found no plans for withdrawals. Whatever our original war aims, by 1969 our credibility abroad, the reliability of our commitments, and our domestic cohesion were alike jeopardized by a struggle in a country as far away from the North American continent as our globe permits.
The Nixon Administration entered office determined to end our involvement in Viet Nam. But it soon came up against the reality that had also bedeviled its predecessor. We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two Administrations, five allied countries and 31,000 American dead as if we were switching a television channel. For a great power to abandon a small country to tyranny simply to obtain a respite from our own domestic travail seemed to me—and still seems to me—profoundly immoral and destructive of our efforts to build a new and ultimately more peaceful pattern of international relations. We could not revitalize the Atlantic Alliance if its governments were assailed by doubt about American staying power. We would not be able to move the Soviet Union toward the imperative of mutual restraint against the background of