Kissinger Watch

When Henry Kissinger left Paris last week, ending his third round of talks with Chief North Vietnamese Negotiator Le Due Tho, the Paris press corps heaved a collective sigh of relief. "My desire for an agreement," said CBS Bureau Chief Peter Kalisher just before the negotiations adjourned, "is topped only by my desire for Kissinger to go home so I can get some sleep."

Maybe it was the press's own fault.

Paris newsmen took it as a challenge when both sides declared that the peace talks would be secret, even as to the sites. CBS's Kalisher recalls reading a magazine piece on Thanksgiving Day. "In the article," Kalisher recalls, "Henry Kissinger said he thought the talks should be secret and that he had the means to make them so. I ripped out the article, and wrote the following to him on it: 'Dear Henry: Eat this with your Thanksgiving dinner. Bon appetit.' "

The strategy was simple, but exhausting. It consisted of stationing motorcyclists outside the U.S. embassy residence and the residence of Le Due Tho. Whenever either of them emerged, the motorcyclist roared in pursuit, with a cameraman clinging to the back seat. NBC buttressed its eight-man Paris bureau with 22 temporary employees, including five motorcyclists; CBS and ABC added 17 and 14 Paris staffers respectively, and ABC installed radio-telephone systems in an armada of cars and cycles. Skirmishes between reporters and gendarmes multiplied; Keystone Cop car chases through Paris streets and country roads proliferated.

When the latest round of talks began, the secrecy surrounding meeting sites was officially abolished. By that time, though, newsmen had become understandably suspicious. Sure enough, Kissinger sped off to an unannounced villa in Neuilly, but the motorcyclists were in hot pursuit. Later in the week, ABC Correspondent Louis Cioffi tried to dangle a microphone into the garden from an adjacent building, but it got tangled in a bush and was spotted by security men. Kissinger kidded Cioffi about this embarrassment, but let the mike stay where it was.

At a villa in Gif-sur-Yvette, an alternate site, the networks erected a 16-ft. scaffold in the hope of getting a shot of Kissinger and the North Vietnamese strolling behind the garden wall. One CBS cameraman found an orphanage behind the villa and promised to support one of the children for a year (at $10 a month) in return for a vantage point on the building's roof.

The results were marginal. Every time that Kissinger emerged from whatever villa, he walked into a blinding glare of television lights, while every reporter and cameraman strained to catch the expression on his face. Then the press motorcycles chased his limousine back to Paris. (At a press conference before his departure, Kissinger said he was pleased that the cyclists had survived.)

Still, some feel that the experience has honed their journalistic skills. Says John Rolfson, ABC Paris chief, half jokingly: "Just imagine what geniuses we'll be when we have a story where we actually know what's going on."

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