UNEXPECTED PRIZE

Shortly before 11 a.m. on Oct. 16, 1973, a Situation Room officer interrupted a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group on the Middle East to deliver an Associated Press news bulletin. It announced that North Viet Nam's Le Due Tho and I had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for our efforts to end the Viet Nam War.

I had not even known that I was a candidate. I threw the dispatch on the table. My colleagues read it with astonishment rather than jubilation; they congratulated me but without real passion. For we all were ill at ease. I knew that unless the agreement that Le Due Tho and I had worked out could be enforced, the structure of peace for Indochina was unlikely to last. I would have been far happier with recognition for a less precarious achievement. I am prouder of what I accomplished in the next two years in the Middle East.

I asked the Nobel committee to donate the prize, totaling $65,000, to a scholarship fund for children of American servicemen killed or missing in action in Indochina. The Paula and Louis Kissinger Scholarship Fund, named for my parents, was established for this purpose. On April 30, 1975, as Saigon fell, I wrote to the Nobel committee, returning the Peace Prize and the equivalent of the cash award. The committee refused to accept them, replying that intervening events "in no way reduce the committee's appreciation of Mr. Kissinger's sincere efforts to get a cease-fire agreement put into force in 1973."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.