This attitude, however, was not entirely visible on the eve of Kissinger's accession. because in 1967 and 1968 he had privately put forward a position on the war that made him look far more dovish than anyone in academia, let alone government: the notion of the "decent interval." According to this scheme, an agreement permitting the collapse of the Saigon regime would be negotiated privately with the North Vietnamese. The plan was for the United States to begin removing forces at a rapid rate; after all of them had finally departed, the rebel forces would sit tight for a previously agreed-on period of time. Finally, after this "decent interval"-designed to dissociate American withdrawal from the fall of Saigon and thus eliminate the appearance of American failure-the insurgents would then rise up and destroy the South Vietnamese regime. Thus, Hanoi would have achieved its goals, the United States would have been successfully disengaged, and the structure of America's international relations would remain essentially intact.

THE "decent interval" approach would yield startling insight into Kissinger's later policy recommendations on the war. To begin with, the Saigon regime was not being defended out of any real sense of principle. Kissinger was willing and eager to uphold a corrupt totalitarian government with the most brutal possible methods for the mere sake of diplomatic gain. Thousands of lives could be sacrificed and whole civilizations destroyed in the name of opposing a takeover which Kissinger had earlier been prepared-and was probably still prepared-to accept.

Further, it revealed deep ignorance of psychological realities in Indochina. How, after years of American falsehood and aggression, could the NLF and the North Vietnamese trust the United States to keep its part of such a delicate bargain? And why, in turn, should the insurgent forces, after years of being beaten and brutalized by the U.S. military machine, care to allow the continuation of the Saigon regime-however temporarily-for the simple sake of American prestige? For in fact, the liberation forces in Vietnam, after years of struggle and base-building, could not be expected to behave like an ordinary sovereign power and give in to compromise-particularly when the compromise was to be struck with a nation whom they had long hated and distrusted.

BY ALL accounts, Kissinger vastly overestimated the ability of American leaders to extricate themselves successfully by means of negotiations: it is probably for this reason that he was thought of as a dove, that many of his colleagues felt his influence on Vietnam would be cast in favor of nearly unconditional withdrawal, not threats graduated to force. Nonetheless, on entering government in January 1969, he had few illusions about what an American withdrawal would involve. According to one man who consulted with Kissinger in the preparation of the first Vietnam options paper, "He felt that the threat of escalation was essential. He was very explicit about that. He thought you couldn't negotiate without it."

There was one aspect of the policy of threat, however, which was not then entirely clear even to those who realized that Kissinger would not be soft on the issue of Vietnam. Kissinger did not think that, if the other side were successful in its resistance, the United States should then move toward compromise; for he had long believed that the ultimate strength of the United States lay in its monopoly of physical force, and that if the military were exposed to defeat, if her troops were bullied and thwarted by a group of Vietnamese guerrillas, then the last strain of American credibility would be irretrievably lost. And the result was that as the NLF and Hanoi continued to prevent final U.S. victory, Washington would become bolder in its threats and more willing to engage in the wholesale use of military force.

On entering office, Kissinger abandoned the idea of negotiating a "decent interval" with the North Vietnamese. Many factors could have contributed to his change of position: the North Vietnamese may have met such a suggestion with skepticism and distrust; and it was unclear that Nixon had ever approved of the interval idea at all, that he was willing to sacrifice the Saigon regime in talks with Hanoi. In any event, the decent interval was transformed into what was known in White House jargon as "firebreak"; the United States would leave Vietnam in a show of military force, and only after Saigon had been sufficiently shored up so that it might survive on its own. With the "decent interval." the South Vietnamese would only have been given a year or two to last after the final American withdrawals; but now, under "firebreak." Saigon would be guaranteed a minimum of three to five years-a guarantee which the American administration proposed to keep, if necessary, by physical force.

IN FACT, the new administration began almost immediately to treat U.S. involvement in Vietnam as a military contest. In March 1969, a conintgent of U.S. Marines entered Laos in a mission now known as Dewey Canyon I-a mission which even a number of close Kissinger aides did not know of at the time. The bombing of predominantly civilian areas in Laos was vastly stepped up, and the U.S. air command began the use of B-52s in raids on Cambodia that May. Throughout this period, Kissinger was telling visitors-particularly student groups-that the war would be over soon. that the Administration needed only nine more months to master the situation and begin to move the U.S. out.

But then, it was not so surprising that Kissinger would consciously misrepresent the Administration's position. For it was part and parcel of great power diplomacy that one must lie and distort to attain one's ends. And in fact, it was Kissinger who-more than anybody else in the White House-perpetuated the myth to colleagues and friends that the United States was gradually extricating itself from Indochina and would continue to do so regardless of the circumstances. In private meetings with visitors-and in background sessions with the press-Kissinger continued to imply that American withdrawal would soon be final and unconditional. "He never said it that way," one former Defense Department official said recently, "but in a way that he gave people the impression that the President was really getting us out of Vietnam."

It is a central lie, one which has confused and irritated dozens of colleagues and succeeded at times in stifling Congressional and public criticism of the war. And for a time, it actually capitalized on a widespread willingness to disbelieve Nixon, who, in his speeches and statements, was far more truthful in public than Kissinger had been in private. Last January, for example-months after Cambodia and days before Laos-Kissinger told a group of colleagues at Harvard that by the time the U.S. finally pulled out of Vietnam, "you'll have nothing to criticize us for except that we didn't do it sooner"-implying that complete withdrawal was a foregone conclusion. But shortly thereafter-when Nixon made a nation-wide statement indicating that full withdrawal was still a highly conditional proposition-several of Kissinger's Harvard colleagues felt deceived and angry.

BUT THE signs had long been there. By the fall of 1969, it had become clear to critical observers that the new Administration was not going to opt for immediate extrication; the removal of ground troops was slow and inconclusive, and the rest of the war machinery continued to pound away at all of Indochina. President Nixon's November 1969 nationwide address-the Vietnamization speech, largely of Kissinger's design-was an attempt to buy time for the war by neutralizing domestic opposition, time which would be spent to practice strategy and tactics against the NLF and Hanoi. As one former White House consultant recently put it, "It then occurred to people that what he [Kissinger] basically had in mind was a policy of threat." And the U.S. invasion of Cambodia some months later demonstrated clearly that the political strategy had remained the same, regardless of military conditions.

Not that Cambodia made any sense from a military point of view. In fact, each of the major reasons which the Administration cited as provoking the invasion was a greater falsehood than the next. Nixon claimed in his speech that South Vietnam was threatened by the sudden appearance of the North Vietnamese on its Cambodian flank; yet subsequent reports have shown that the North Vietnamese had in fact been drifting westward and waiting cautiously to see what action the rightist military junta of Lon Nol-who had overthrown neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk the month before-would take against them. And a major ex post facto rationale for the invasion-that it closed the port of Sihanoukville-is an even greater fabrication: authoritative Administration sources now state that Sihanoukville was closed to the Communists by Sihanouk himself in late 1969 in an effort to force the North Vietnamese in Cambodia to recognize Sihanouk's territorial rights at the end of their war with the United States.

Because Kissinger's conversations with Nixon are secret, it is unclear precisely what role he played in the decision to invade Cambodia. It seems evident, however, that he recommended some form of escalation-such as the bombing of North Vietnam-and it is well-known that he supported the decision that Nixon finally made. And it is certain that the Kissinger's notions of the use and threat of force.

THE INVASION of Cambodia was an incontestable expression of a policy that the Administration had been following all along: escalation and graduated threat. As a result of the action, allied forces are now fighting in Cambodia, and the United States has been committed to a defense of Lon Nol as well as Thieu-Ky. And the invasion was a jumping-off point for other aggressive actions by which the United States has simultaneously attempted to demonstrate its strength and unpredictability: a brutal bombing raid on North Vietnam last November and the ground invasion of Laos by the South Vietnamese last February.

The Laos invasion-the first real test of "Vietnamization"-was a miserable failure, but it has merely deflected the U.S. effort to escalate the war. For although U.S. ground troops continue to pour out of South Vietnam, Nixon's and Kissinger's refusal to set a deadline for withdrawal seems to indicate plans for leaving a residual force-one that will be small enough not to offend the American public and yet large enough to sustain Saigon indefinitely. And with the machinery of American involvement in South Vietnam-the bombers, the spy planes, the computers and automated battlefields-left intact, further escalation may well take the form of renewed bombing of the North, and, perhaps, the destruction of Hanoi and Haiphong.

For his own part, Kissinger is certainly willing to escalate further. He is hard-line and uncompromising. The more frustrated a problem gets, the more vindictive and personalized his judgment becomes. And he has yet to recognize that it would require little less than wholesale slaughter to defeat Hanoi and the NLF in their native lands. "Henry," an ex-aide said recently, "is not willing to accept the imbalance of power which is there as a reality."

Yet wholesale slaughter does not stray far from describing current U.S. policy in Indochina. For years American bombers have pounded the land and people of three countries in Southeast Asia. They have murdered hundreds of thousands, created millions of refugees in South Vietnam and Cambodia, and forced much of the population of Laos to live in underground caves. And the bombing policy is not something which Nixon and Kissinger merely inherited from their predecessors. They have broadened and intensified it. And it is not so much that the bombing has been a successful military tactic as part of the policy of threat-witness the use of South Vietnamese ground troops on the Ho Chi Minh Trail after weeks of sustained pounding by American B-52s.

THE regimes which Nixon and Kissinger seek to defend in Southeast Asia are among the most cruel and totalitarian in the world. Their leaders imprison their political enemies, commit indiscriminate murder, and impose a rule of terror and dictatorship on their native populations. And it is not out of some perverted sense of fairness or democracy that these regimes are being defended. It is out of a harsh, brutal calculation of what an imperialist power like the United States must do to maintain itself in the world.

If smaller, more vulnerable men like Lt. William Calley can be sentenced for killing women and children in Vietnam, then there must be a higher tribunal for statesmen like Kissinger, who uphold the policies which make such atrocities necessary. But then, there is always the danger of lapsing into academic exercises about old atrocities when other deeper-ving ones have yet to surface. And if Henry Kissinger can be accused of anything, it is playing his power game so well that his policy threatens to explode the very balance of forces which he has so ruthlessly defended.