NEW FRIENDS, OLD FOES

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An intimate conversation with Leonid Brezhnev halfway up a tree in an exclusive forested hunting preserve to the northeast of Moscow. The unusually candid talk with the Soviet ruler, writes Henry Kissinger, offered a "single, brief glimpse of humanity that was not repeated while I was in office."

Meetings in a book-choked study in Peking with Mao Tse-tung, the aging leader of one-quarter of all mankind. "I don't look bad," Mao told Kissinger just three years before his death, "but God has sent me an invitation." Much remained to be done, Mao was implying, and little time in which to do it.

In TIME'S final installment of excerpts from Henry Kissinger's memoirs, the former Secretary of State tells of his dramatic encounters with the leaders of the Communist world's superpowers. He also reflects on the dual dilemmas of defense and détente and on the bitter debate about relations with the Soviet Union that developed during Richard Nixon's second term. Any U.S. President, says Kissinger, "must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions." Yet an America weakened by Watergate found this balancing act all but impossible to maintain. Finally, TIME presents some of Kissinger's observations on politics, bureaucracy and diplomacy. ("Civil wars," he writes, "almost without exception end in victory or defeat, never in coalition governments—the favorite American recipe.")

Years of Upheaval, the second volume of Kissinger's memoirs, follows White House Years, which covered Nixon's first term, and will be published on March 25 (Little, Brown; 1,283 pages; $24.95): It recounts the period from Nixon's second Inaugural in January 1973 to his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Kissinger served as National Security Adviser during that entire period, and for the last year of Nixon's Administration was Secretary of State as well.