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Kissinger was surely one of the very few statesmen to try to do something positive to break the log jam of the Cold War; to try to end the war in Vietnam; to bring a halt to the cycle of war in the Middle East.

Experience helped Richard Nixon, but it didn't save him, and it certainly wasn't a blanket endorsement. He blundered terribly in dealing with Vietnam.

I'd like President Bush to think maybe there's another way to think, that maybe Kissinger was wrong when he says we had to go in there because he was wrong about Vietnam.

More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.

I greatly blame Congress, spurred on by its personal hatred of Nixon, for passing legislation in June through August of '73 which embargoed any further U.S. help to South Vietnam.

A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.

A triumph in which Kissinger could claim to have played some little part, in the presidential elections that November, President Richard Nixon had won the second greatest landslide in American history. Forty-seven million Americans had voted for him - and for his and Kissinger's policies - representing more than 60 percent of all the votes cast.

Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.

The conclusion that many uniformed military came away from Vietnam with was that political interference, dominance of strategy and even tactics were a very bad way to conduct a war, and that indeed, if that was going to be our practice, that we shouldn't wage conflict again.

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.