The Kissinger transcripts : a verbatim record of U.S. diplomacy, 1969-1977 [electronic resource].

Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest LLC, 2007-

Access is available to the Yale community.

As national security adviser (1969-1975) and secretary of state (1973-1977), Henry A. Kissinger played a central, and sometimes dominating, role in shaping U.S. foreign and military policy during the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In this role Kissinger helped prosecute as well as negotiate an end to the Vietnam War; he carried out secret diplomacy to advance detente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China. He pressed for covert operations to destroy the Allende regime in Chile, and implemented the tilt to Pakistan during the 1971 South Asia Crisis. In later years he presided over U.S. policy during the October 1973 Middle East war soon after which he employed a "Shuttle Diplomacy" to contain the Middle East crisis. These are only a few of the prominent political events in which he played a major role. Some three quarters of the 2,163 declassified documents in this collection were produced by Kissinger and his assistants on the National Security Council Staff. Even after Kissinger became Secretary of State, he relied on the NSC system for keeping meeting records, especially of the most sensitive matters such as relations with Beijing and Moscow, Middle East diplomacy, or meetings with the president. For those events when he did not rely on the NSC staff to record a meeting, he depended on a State Department country desk director or more senior officials, such as deputy or assistant secretaries of state, to prepare the .memcons.. A noteworthy feature of the records of Kissinger's memcons is that they are literally verbatim records of the meetings.

English

December 10, 2008

National Security Archive (U.S.)