WHITE HOUSE YEARS: PART 3
War in Jordan. Should the U.S. intervene, or should it give Israel the go-ahead to help King Hussein with attacks against the Syrian invaders? "I have decided it," says Richard Nixon in a dawn phone conversation with Henry Kissinger. "Don't ask anybody else. Tell him [Israel's Yitzhak Rabin], 'Go.' "
War on the Indian subcontinent. Would the Chinese jump in on Pakistan's side? Would the Soviets then move against China? "We were on the verge of a possible showdown. If the Soviet Union threatened China, we would not stand idly by. A country we did not recognize and with which we had had next to no contact for two decades would obtain some significant assistance."
These are among the dramatic moments described by Kissinger in this final installment of TIME's excerpts from his forthcoming memoirs, White House Years. Kissinger muses on the statesman's craft ("Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited"); assesses Charles de Gaulle, the Shah of Iran, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin; and sums up the philosophy that he believes should guide U.S. foreign policy. He concludes with a moving essay on the role of faith in a technocratic age.
White House Years will be published on Oct. 23 by Little, Brown (1,521 pages; $22.50). It covers Kissinger's service as National Security Adviser during Nixon's first term and ends with the signing of a Viet Nam peace agreement in January 1973. A second volume will recount the period up to January 1977, during most of which he was Secretary of State.
MIDDLE EAST MANEUVERS
"As 1970 began, "writes Kissinger, "the gods of war were inspecting their armaments, for it was clear they would soon be needed." Israeli bombers were conducting "deep penetration " raids on Cairo and the Nile Delta. Moscow was installing its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles near the Nile and the Suez Canal, and at least 15,000 Soviet combat personnel were in Egypt to operate and defend the sites. Despite the growing danger of an Egyptian-Israeli war, however, the biggest blowup of 1970 occurred in Jordan. Twice in three months, Palestinian guerrillas tried to assassinate Jordan's King Hussein. When the King's troops began retaliating against the fedayeen, it looked as if the Soviet-backed regimes of Iraq and Syria might intervene. To complicate matters further, guerrillas hijacked four foreign airliners in early September and directed three of them to a dirt airstrip 30 miles from the Jordanian capital of Amman: there they held hundreds of passengers as ransom for imprisoned fedayeen. "Black September," the climactic clash between Hussein and the guerrillas who increasingly threatened his rule, was beginning to unfold. To weigh the situation, Kissinger activated his crisis committee, the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG). At the group's urging, the U.S. began placing airborne infantry units on alert and moving planes and ships into the eastern Mediterranean to discourage meddling by the Soviets or their clients.
If the Soviet Union had pressed for the release of hostages and a cease-fire around Sept. 10, the gain for the fedayeen would have been massive; the authority of