In a corner of my office at home, there is a photocopy of a poster that correspondents traveling with Henry Kissinger had produced to honor his 50th birthday on May 27. 1973. It is a parody of a well-known Braniff Airways poster of the time, which featured a beautiful hostess waving and saying: “I’m Dorothy, Fly Me to Miami.” Our poster had Kissinger waving, saying “I am Henry, Fly Me to Damascus.” At the bottom of my copy, Kissinger wrote: “Dear Bernie Gwertzman, Sorry I couldn’t Live Up to all your Predictions.”

The occasion was the culmination of one of the most grueling diplomatic efforts in recent history. Kissinger in 1973, without much trouble, had mediated an Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement that returned to Egypt some part of the Sinai that Israeli had captured during the six-day 1967 war. He would in 1975 fail in an attempt to negotiate a second accord between Egypt and Israel but later that summer, he would go back again to the region and negotiate an agreement allowing Egypt to recover much of the Sinai. But the mood in Washington in 1975 was quite grim. A Democratic Congress failed to appropriate funds to support the embattled Saigon regime and even though in 1973, the United States had pledged to come to Saigon’s assistance if the North Violated the 1973 peace accord. This produced a very grim Kissinger during our trips in 1975, as Saigon fell to the Communists in April 1975. Kissinger’s attempt to broker a second Egyptian-Israeli agreement failed in early 1975, due to Israeli resistance. Nixon had of course resigned as president on August 1, 1974 over the Watergate scandals, and Gerald Ford succeeded him.

The Israeli-Syrian accord which took 33 days to negotiate in May, 1974, and included almost daily flights by Kissinger and his embedded press corps between Israel and Syria and back again at night, was a grueling negotiation. As a reporter for The New York Times, in those pre-internet days, the best way for me to file was from Ben Gurion Airport in Israel after we had been briefed by Kissinger on his plane. I could use a pay phone to call the foreign desk and the desk would transfer me to the well-staffed “recording room” where dedicated typists could take our stories very quickly. This may have been Kissinger’s most successful negotiation. Toward the end, after all those days, there still was no accord and he and Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian leader, Bashir al-Assad, were trying to word an announcement that the talks had failed. Some of my TV colleagues had rushed out with stories that the talks had failed, But Assad at the last minute told Kissinger that after all these days, they should work out an accord, and they did after another long day of talks and an Israeli concession the next day.

My story on that accord had a very simple lead:

Jerusalem, May 29—Israel and Syria agreed today on an accord to separate their forces on the Golan Heights. The agreement, which was worked out by Secretary of State Kissinger in a month of intensive personal diplomacy will be signed by Syrian and Israeli military officers in Geneva on Friday.”

Of all the secretaries of state I had covered, Kissinger was easily the most successful. He achieved significant Middle East accords, and also was able to deal with the Russians, setting up fruitful talks between Nixon and Brezhnev in Washington and in Moscow. And of course, as an historian, Kissinger’s memoirs are a very important record of the negotiations to end the Vietnam war which happened in 1973.