For my generation the relationship with Europe was the central point of American foreign policy. Even during my time in government there was disagreement, sometimes very strong disagreement. But they were all like arguments within a family. I am not sure if the generation which doesn't have these experiences has the same view of things.

At any rate, mutually assured destruction was never our policy.

With respect to the relationship between nuclear weapons and the advent of détente, one has to consider two things. One, the nature of nuclear weapons in themselves, and secondly, the advent of nuclear parity.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.

We first became conscious of the plane publicly on a Monday. I thought then by the weekend it would be done. But then the Chinese military, the defense minister made a statement saying that if there was no apology from the United States, the Chinese military and the Chinese people would never understand. No reference to the government or the Communist Party, and that obviously presented an internal problem to the Chinese leadership, which was travelling at that moment.