News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Kissinger Phone Calls to Be Released

Date: February 10, 2002

Perhaps the considerable discussion on men Like Ron Dodge will be brought to light...

"Kissinger Phone Calls to Be Released
By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The public will get its first look at transcripts of phone calls Henry Kissinger made in the Nixon White House during a time of war in Vietnam, secret diplomatic deal making and Watergate.

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He had guarded the privacy of the records for three decades.

The National Archives received copies Monday of 20,000 pages of transcripts and notes from Kissinger's calls from January 1969 to August 1974, when Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal.

During that period, Kissinger was national security adviser and, during Nixon's final 11 months in office, doubled as his secretary of state.

"To look at these transcripts is to be in the room when he's conducting all his telephone diplomacy — the secret opening to China, the secret trips to Paris on the Vietnam War negotiations, his backstage leaks to the press — you name it," said researcher Thomas Blanton.

Kissinger routinely had his secretaries tape the calls or listen and take shorthand on what was said, then type summaries, sometimes verbatim transcripts, of the conversations.

The copies of records that the National Archives received Monday had been held sealed at the Library of Congress (news - web sites). Kissinger agreed to let them go to the archives.

"It will take up to a year to do a careful, page by page review of the documents before they can be opened to the public," said Karl Weissenbach, director of the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the archives.

Late last year, Kissinger agreed to release 10,000 pages of notes and transcripts of phone calls made from September 1973 to January 1977, when he was secretary of state under Nixon and President Ford. Those records are still under review and have not yet been made available to the public.

The new batch of records covers Kissinger's years in the White House as Nixon's top foreign policy adviser. The records were obtained in response to renewed pressure in the past three years from the National Archives and lawyers from Blanton's nongovernment group, the National Security Archive based at George Washington University.

They are not believed to contain tapes of his phone calls.

Kissinger has long considered the transcripts to be his personal property. He justified his decision to restrict access to them by saying much of the information could be found in other documents already open to the public.

He twice refused to let the National Archives inspect them to determine if they were government records.

Just before he left government, Kissinger had all the phone records moved from his office at the State Department. Blanton said they were put in a vault at David Rockefeller's estate in New York.

They stayed there only briefly.

By the end of 1976, Kissinger had deeded the records to the Library of Congress but restricted public access to them until five years after his death.

In the late 1970s, a reporter and two organizations sued Kissinger to gain access to the records.

A federal court ruled the documents were government records because they were prepared on government time by government employees. The court said the records should be returned to the State Department.

In 1980, the Supreme Court reversed the decision, saying private parties could not sue to gain access to them under the Freedom of Information Act. The court said the government could seek their return, but no agency tried until the past few years.

Kissinger and a spokesman could not be reached immediately.

Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia historian who serves on a State Department historical advisory panel, said he had asked Kissinger to consider making the records public.

"I and others have urged him to view these items philosophically and as a part of history, and I think as time passes, he, more and more, has viewed these records in that light," Zelikow said."