The White House, Bureaucracy, and Foreign Policy: Lessons From Cambodia
Michael Nelson
Henry Kissinger published Volume One of his memoirs, The White House Years, through Little, Brown, a subsidiary of Time, Inc.; released it through the Book-of-the-Month Club, another Time, Inc. company; and permitted Time itself to run lengthy prepublication excerpts in the magazine's October 1979 issues. So perhaps it was not so surprising after all that Kissinger chose People, Time, Inc.'s hybrid of the old Life and the new National Enquirer, as his forum to discuss how he put his 700,000-word, 1,521-page opus together.
According to People's Patricia Burstein, Kissinger "worked on the project for more than 15 months, encouraged by his wife, Nancy, and with Tyler, their beloved yellow Labrador, usually at his side." (People: "Will Tyler like your memoirs?" Kissinger: "He is very understanding." ) The desk at which he wrote overlooked New York's East River ("very consoling"); while planted there for some 40 to 50 hours a week (P: "How did you keep your weight down?"; K: "I just didn't get up and have a soda or sandwich"), Kissinger said he used "a combination
