meets pamela churchill who is -- who's randolph's wife and who eventually runs off with avril harriman and becomes the american ambassador in paris at the end of her life. so he meets -- in this kind of milieu, that's where he meets the head of oss for europe. third richest woman in the rat united states. he is the son of an ambassador. and he's -- you know, a genalvi. loves the finer things in life. they run into each other in london and after they ran into each other, talk about fan mail, bruce goac that he had just met ngquote, patriarch cal, with his physique, much like god, as painted by michelangelo. here's a ernest as he's getting ready to go to europe. he's grown this beard by the way because of irritation from the sun during the war patrols on pilar. so ernest eventually shaves his beard. and goes to europe. he is there as a war correspondent. he is driving around the battlefie battlefield, looking for excitement. ernest gets a jeep from the army and he gets a private. and that's the -- you know, that sort of task force hemingway. and he's going around looking for good stories

kissinger's i should say view of melvin laird was somewhat similar to what john kennedy thought about avril harriman, that he was the crocodile on the side of the creek who could bite your head off if you did it wrong. so laird's positions and what laird did and how he related to the president's enterprises was of huge importance to the white house, and that's why certain things happened the way they did during that period of the vietnam war. and i think jeff is right about laird's commitment to de-americanizing the war, but the way that the nixon administration went about doing that had a lot to do with the character of melvin laird, who, by the way, played a very important role in watergate, not only with nixon in convincing him to finally yield the tapes in 1973-'74, but also with gerald ford. >> time for one, maybe two questions. yes? >> my name is mark gellar, i'm with the program at cal state fuller ton. we've been asking similar questions. i'll try it again a different way. could we actually have won the vietnam war? how and what would it look like? >> okay. start with jeff. >> that's an impo