Kissinger Video Interview
5. How did the U.S. invasion of Cambodia affect the negotiations with China?
Henry Kissinger: What happened is the Chinese actually told us they wanted us to send an emissary to Beijing. And whereupon State Department produced two huge volumes, one on substance and the other on procedure. The one on substance listed all the subjects. Frankly we in the White House weren't all that eager to talk about claims and assets and arms control, protocol questions about communications, cars I mean - to work through that would have taken forever. And then procedurally they wanted to brief seventeen nations, and I forget how many Congressmen and Senators. And it's in relation to that that President Nixon said we're gonna kill this baby before it is born, or before it grows up. Luckily from that point of view this coincided with the incursions into Cambodia, and the Chinese therefore broke off contact with us. And we didn't resume it through the State Department channels. And frankly the State Department was so scared by our, what they considered, wild behaviour that they never asked the question what happened to the Warsaw channel. It isn't that they said come on lets get going again. They were very happy not to be saddled with this tar baby.
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