Word: fording
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been 17 years since Henry Kissinger published the second of his three volumes of memoirs, which took him through Richard Nixon's resignation, and some wondered whether he would ever really write this final volume. The Gerald Ford years, after all, were filled with events (communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, the end of detente with Russia, arms-control stalemates) that weren't exactly ripe for recounting with relish...
...worth the wait. Kissinger again displays an intellectual ambition, provocativeness and mix of sweep and detail that make other memoirs seem pale. Of course that doesn't mean Years of Renewal (Simon & Schuster; $35) is a relaxing beach read. The narratives and character sketches (including those of Nixon and Ford, excerpted in this issue) are often vivid delights, but they are leavened by meticulous trudges through old battlegrounds (some repetitive of previous volumes) that make up in defensiveness what they lack in concision. To paraphrase a reviewer of one of his first books, 40 years ago: Kissinger...
...most painful failure was the collapse of the Vietnam peace accord. Kissinger's outrage that Congress would not go to the aid of South Vietnam in 1975 when the North launched its final offensive is sincere and understandable. But he glosses over any differences he may have had with Ford, who displayed a more sensitive feel for the wariness of Congress and the weariness of the public. And he never confronts the basic reality that his 1973 peace accord fudged rather than resolved the issue of whether the communists accepted South Vietnam as an independent country. He is right...
...started in 1971 when Charn was hired by the Ford Foundation to build a clinical education program at Harvard, with the help of a grant from the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, a Ford Foundation subsidiary...
...There was an agenda in the early 1970s," says Charn, a lecturer on law at HLS. "People were concerned about the lack of mentorship and real world experience in law school. So the Ford Foundation sponsored the first wave of these clinics, to inculcate responsibility in law students...