Under the lights, even our softest lights, he complained. His right eye was clearly bothering him. His answers to my first questions were curt, stiff, cautious. But I avoided the phrase "war criminal," and after a while he settled into his standard defensive posture: speaking in that ponderous, suffocating drone that implies great meaning while revealing nothing.

As we changed tape, he snapped to life. "Good questions," he said, which meant I hadn't laid a glove on him. Then doubt crossed his face. "It depends on how you edit this." And just as quickly, his confidence revived. "No, you can't make this look bad no matter how you edit it."

His legendary arrogance and insecurity alternated throughout the remainder of the interview. But he grew testy as I probed. He defended the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, saying, "I personally believe we should have gone in deeper and we should have stayed longer," and he dismissed any possibility that the relentless U.S. bombing of Cambodia led to the disintegration of civil society and the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

"We could have won the war in Cambodia, which was possible," he argued. "Vietnam was questionable."

Asked why he did not push to end the war after he realized it was unwinnable, Kissinger groaned. "Could it have ended a year earlier, six months earlier? How do I know?" he shrugged. "I don't think so. Besides, by that time our casualties had gotten down so low that that was not a major factor in the situation."

Perhaps not for Kissinger or Nixon, but those casualties surely mattered to the thousands of Americans who died needlessly in the waning years of the war, not to mention the Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians who continued to die as Nixon and Kissinger pursued "peace with honor."

When Kissinger's associate, Daniel Ellsberg, gave the Pentagon Papers -- the government's secret history of the Vietnam War -- to the New York Times, Kissinger went ballistic. He was deeply involved in the Nixon administration's vendetta against the whistleblower. (And this is the man President Bush is now relying on to draw out truth-tellers from government agencies.) But he deflected my question about his campaign to destroy Ellsberg's career and reputation, saying only, "Ellsberg is one of the brightest people I have ever met."

Displaying his notorious thin skin, Kissinger interrupted me if I questioned anything he said. He asked me why we were still debating these matters 30 years after the war ended and then erupted at his opponents. "They present the history of the Vietnam War as if a bunch of power-crazed maniacs, first in the Johnson administration and then in the Nixon administration, who love to kill people, continued a senseless war, which the moral protesters wanted to end." His voice rising in agitation, Kissinger exclaimed, "How plausible is such an interpretation of history?"

Out of the blue, he complained that people had no right to call him a "psychopath" for his conduct of the war. "It gets to be a nuisance," he said, "but I'm a big boy."

When the camera stopped rolling, Kissinger immediately said, "I bet McNamara was less strong than I was."

Kissinger seemed very pleased with himself. I must have looked disgusted.

"I love McNamara," he added. "He's a wonderful man."

Ah, the language of diplomacy.

As we packed up our gear, I asked Kissinger one last question. Something I really wanted to know. "What if the United States had allowed Vietnam to go communist after World War II?"

"Wouldn't have mattered very much," Kissinger muttered. Lights off. No camera recording what he was saying. "If the Vietnam domino had fallen then, no great loss."

With that he rose, stiffly, from his chair and left the room.

Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in the Vietnam War -- nearly 21,000 of them during Kissinger's watch. More than 600,000 Vietnamese soldiers were killed during the Nixon-Kissinger years. No one is certain how many civilians died.

And yet Kissinger had just told me that none of these deaths were necessary, from a geopolitical point of view.

He is an old man now and he shows no signs of remorse. And he has never displayed a willingness to challenge the foreign policy establishment that continues to consult and flatter him.

Kissinger promises a "full accounting" of the circumstances leading to the Sept. 11 tragedy and vows, "We will go where the facts lead us." But I don't know why anyone would believe him. Kissinger's specialty is the coverup. He knows where the bodies are buried, literally and figuratively, and he knows how to keep them there. And President George W. Bush knew all that when he appointed him.

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