Henry Kissinger was President Nixon's national security adviser from 1969 to 1973, when he became secretary of state. He helped engineer Nixon's policy of warmer relations with both China and the Soviet Union, leading to historic summits in both Beijing and Moscow. He also played a major role in Nixon's Vietnam policy, including increased U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, a widening of the war into Cambodia, and the eventual "Vietnamization" of the war and withdrawal of U.S. forces. After Nixon's resignation, Kissinger served as secretary of state under President Ford, continuing to pursue the complex, cooperative relations with the Soviet Union known as détente. Henry Kissinger was interviewed for COLD WAR in March and April of 1997.

On détente:

The debate about détente in the United States took a very curious form. First of all, I don't remember where the word "détente" ever came from. It's not a word that I had in my lexicon, and it suddenly emerged in the discussion. But that's a secondary point, because by itself it doesn't really mean more than a certain relaxation of tension.

When President Nixon came into office, the conventional wisdom of all the media and the people who thought of themselves as intellectuals was that he was a warmonger and that they had to moderate him. And we were under enormous pressure to start negotiations on trade, on SALT, on a whole complex of things. And this continued for many years. We had the view that we wanted to link political and strategic issues together, and we moved at a very deliberate pace.

Then, when a number of agreements were reached with the Soviet Union, the debate about détente took a very curious form, because some liberals seemed to take the view that if Nixon was for relaxation, maybe tension wasn't all that bad -- and they suddenly developed theories of the need to intervene in human rights procedures that we'd never heard before and that were strenuously rejected before. Secondly, arguments were developed about the technology of SALT that would certainly have done great credit to theology students at a theological academy, but that were really not fully relevant. And when today we look at the capacity of the Soviet system, this idea that the Soviets were doing this as a monumental trick, so that on one morning they could fire thousands of missiles at us and destroy us, is today absurd. ... Thirdly, a whole new class of graduates emerged who moved from the left to the right early in 1973, and appeared in the guise of neoconservatives, so suddenly we were on the defensive. And Nixon, the old red-baiter, was accused of being soft on communism.

There was, however, a true substantial difference between us and many of our critics. Our critics thought history was moving towards an apocalyptic showdown in which Soviet nuclear capacity would be pitted against American nuclear capacity. We never thought that this was the likely direction of policy and of history. We thought the real threat was creeping expansion of the Soviet sphere, so we had our eye on geopolitical changes. ...

Our view was that over any historical period, a long period of peace would benefit us more than the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a very rigid system, a very stagnant economy. They had not, at the time that we had détente, ever had a legitimate succession: all of their successions had been by death or by sort of coup-like efforts. And moreover, we had all the industrial nations and, at that point, China on our side. So over any historical period, we thought that a long period of peace worked more in our favor than in the Soviet favor. Our critics argued exactly the opposite: they argued we were being softened up and that some cataclysmic assault would start on us. But that was really the essence of the debate.

On "back-channel" negotiations with the Soviets:

One reason for the back-channel negotiation was that President Nixon, who was very decisive and very capable of making big decisions, was not however capable in overruling subordinates to their face. And therefore he found it very, very painful -- in fact he found it, for all practical purposes, impossible -- to tell a bureaucracy, "I disagree with you, and you will do it my way." He'd rather set up a back channel, so that he avoided that problem.

Secondly, by that time our bureaucracy had got so cumbersome, and there were so many people, and papers pushed back and forth -- and moreover, the skill of the bureaucracy in interpreting presidential orders, even if they were clearly given, in an [way] that coincided with their preconceptions was so great -- that Nixon decided that for the sake of coherence he was going to negotiate in a back channel. So there was a front channel which did the rough work, but then the fine-tuning was done in the back channel. And it worked pretty well.

On SALT I:

The importance of SALT I was that the two sides kept their [missile] build-up and established ground rules about how to count missiles. One can argue that they kept their buildup at the level of their plan -- and I wouldn't argue that that might not be true. But what we knew, however, was that the Soviets were building about 300 missiles a year and we were not building many. So the significance of SALT I was that it created a framework, that it kept the numbers, and that it provided a basis against which to measure then the more complex follow-up negotiations which had to occur.

On the Helsinki accords and human rights:

At first, quite frankly, we looked at Helsinki primarily as an exercise to link some political conditions to the military conditions. But gradually, since the Soviets showed such an interest in the recognition of borders, we wanted to create obstacles to the repression of revolutions in Eastern Europe by making human rights an international issue. And we thought that probably one effect of détente would be a greater Soviet difficulty in keeping the satellite orbit under control. That was our reason for including human rights.

On ending the U.S. involvement in Vietnam:

It was a tragic situation in Vietnam. We had withdrawn, over a period of four years, 520,000 of the 550,000 troops we found there, at a rate of about 150,000 a year; and we were down to 30,000 troops. And we had to retreat without a debacle, which was not easy. And we were now down to the last 30,000 troops plus [some] air and naval forces.

I have great sympathy for [South Vietnamese President] Thieu, and at the same time I have great sympathy for our problem. We faced 65 congressional resolutions in the year 1972 alone that were urging unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam. We would need a congressional supplementary appropriation in January of the following year for the excessive expenditure (in terms of the yearly budget) that we had incurred in resisting the North Vietnamese offensive. So we felt, when the North Vietnamese accepted, and exceeded actually in accepting, what Nixon had proposed publicly nine months earlier, that we had no choice except to proceed.

On the other hand, Thieu was faced with a situation no American ally has ever been asked to undertake -- namely the total withdrawal of American forces. We haven't done that in Korea, we haven't done that in Europe, we've never done it anywhere. So we probably did not take [that] into sufficient consideration. But frankly, if we had, I don't know whether we could have come to a different conclusion. ...

Our view was that the ending of the war might bring about a measure of national reconciliation in the United States, in the sense that those who wanted an end to the war had achieved their objectives, and those who wanted honor -- in the sense of not condemning people who had relied on us to live under communist rule -- they had achieved their objective. So we thought it would be possible to achieve levels of assistance to South Vietnam which, together with the military equipment we were leaving behind, would enable them to resist all but a total military invasion; and that if an all-out assault was started in South Vietnam, we would reintroduce American air and sea power. That was our basic view. I believe it is an open question whether it could have succeeded, because we cut off aid almost immediately. In the first year of peace, we gave $2 billion, which is what we thought was the appropriate level. The second year that was cut to $1 billion; the third year it was cut to $700 million, while fuel prices were rising. [This meant] that the South Vietnamese army was not only required to fight alone, but it had to cut their ammunition expenditures by 70 percent, air power by 80 percent. And the final collapse occurred at a moment when the Congress was debating a total cutoff of aid and was discussing some terminal grant. How long [South] Vietnam could have lasted, I don't know. In 1975, it was killed by American domestic politics. Whether it would have lasted much longer is a question that will be debated forever.