Special Section: WHITE HOUSE YEARS: PART 2 THE AGONY OF VIETNAM

In the second installment of TIME's excerpts from White House Years, Henry Kissinger writes of the war that divided the U.S. at home and threatened to make a shambles of its policies abroad. He tells for the first time how during secret negotiations in Paris in April 1970—before the U.S. invaded the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia—he proposed that Cambodia's neutrality be guaranteed and that an international conference on the subject be convened. North Viet Nam's representative, Le Duc Tho, bluntly spurned the proposal, claiming that Hanoi expected to hold sway over all of Indochina some day.

The author gives...