Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia

by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

Henry Kissinger had been operating at a furious pace, sticking close to Nixon while trying to keep everyone in the administration in line on the eve of another high-risk military campaign. However, for this weekend he had a long-standing commitment to go to Boston to meet with an organization called Project Runnymede.39 Conceived at MIT during a protest of the Cambodian invasion, its purpose was to bring together responsible academics, businessmen, and a sprinkling of moderate students to wrestle with the complexities of the Vietnam War. For this evening, the group was appropriately eminent, including among others Jeremy Wiesner, Provost of MIT; Cyrus Vance, former Deputy Secretary of Defense; Osborn Elliott, editor of Newsweek; and Jeremy Stone, Executive Director of the American Federation of Scientists. A less famous attendee was a man named Daniel Ellsberg—a consultant from the RAND Corporation who had known Kissinger for many years.