AUG-12-1998 12:27

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.01/08

1

2142 WORDS

8/12/98 Draft #2

To the Editor of The New York Review of Books:

I have read Tony Judt's review with some sadness.

It is over twenty years since I left government.

One would have thought that to be enough time to permit a calm discussion of the challenge America has faced <u>since being</u> [The] Vietnam War destroyed the national consensus on foreign policy. The deeper meaning of the period is that it crystallized the inherent tension between America's idealism--the perception we have of ourselves as a nation with a special mission--and our growing involvement in a world of power, hence of relative judgments.

How to strike the balance between these competing realities is not a simple matter, and practitioners of foreign policy are apt to get it wrong from time to time.

The reconciliation of ambivalent pulls is a task never likely to be completed, but we will not manage any progress unless we grant the good faith of the principal

AUG-12-1998 12:27

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.02/08

2
participants in the debate and have sufficient confidence
in ourselves to risk a truthful definition of the issues.

Both Bundy's book and Judt's review fail to meet
this test:

- Judt asserts that I have reclassified public
papers as "personal" in order to close them to "prying
eyes." This is flatly untrue. No public document has ever
been reclassified by me. The papers in my collection at
the Library of Congress are copies of originals in the
files of either the State Department or the Nixon and
Ford libraries. They are available to researchers on the
terms established by the originating departments.

The only unique papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations that a court of law -
not I - confirmed to be personal papers.

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official
record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the
truth. No administration recorded its deliberations,

AUG-12-1998 12:27

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.03/08

There is also a complete record of all my memos and the President's past, any negotiation (front or behind, outlining the strategy + afterwards) decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier only to protect against unintended slip-ups.) There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

- To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view, Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not say that the quote is drawn from a paragraph comparing Metternich's greater emphasis on moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power politics, especially as it relates to his effect by cutting the sentence in half and omitting the next sentence: "...something akin to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of power is reinforced by a shared sense of values. And in the modern age, these values would have to be democratic."

AUG-12-1998 12:27

KISSINGER ASSOC.

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4

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by distortions of the underlying reality. I have always had the highest regard for William Bundy, and his late brother McGeorge. Therefore, I find it painful that his resentments have driven him into abandoning any sense of perspective. Bundy's basic attitude toward Nixon and me is similar to that of the Bourbons toward Bonaparte: our besetting sin was replacing him and his group in an office to which they felt they were entitled.

This is why Bundy and Judt make no allowance for the realities impinging on policymakers, which he should know better than most. He castigates Nixon and me for failing to brief Japan about China in 1971, and the European allies in 1973 on our alert in the Middle East crisis. As a former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy knows only too well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese government without a leak; it was a painful decision not to give advance warning, though all

AUG-12-1998 12:28

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.05/08

friends and allies--and especially Japan--were consulted
to the utmost ~~afterwards~~ once the US-China dialogue began
in earnest.

As for the alert, we faced what we considered
a Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into
the Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours
away. To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased
the readiness of our military forces and simultaneously
called a meeting of the NATO Council as well as briefed
in the capitals of our principal allies. Why this is
treated by Bundy and Judt as some kind of conspiracy
against Europe is beyond me. Should we have waited for
~~approval of the NATO Council? Not one of our allies at~~
the time made that argument.

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt
treats its alleged penchant of Nixon and me for covert
operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon's downfall and

AUG-12-1998 12:28

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.07/08

7

Judt (or Bundy) achieve their effect by suppressing the context of covert operations they cite as egregious examples. They claim, for example, "misleading promises to the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been triggered into fighting Iraq by our misleading representations. The fact is that when the US decision to support the Kurds was made in July 1972, the Kurds had already been fighting Saddam's oppression for several years. They were supported by Iran, Israel, Britain and other neighboring countries. Nixon was asked to support them in 1972 when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds' existing sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have been destroyed earlier - that was our real choice. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a moral assault is at a minimum inappropriate.

AUG-12-1998 12:28

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.08/08

Similar distortions run through the entire review and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive response. This enables Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in describing the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the military violation of a neutral state." Give us a break.

It would have been more honest, to describe what happened accurately, as Bundy, given his previous position, the facts should be among the first to know. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based permanently in Cambodia, killing Americans in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real question is why the Johnson administration, of which Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade, not why we "violated" it. It is also relevant that Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, to defend Cambodian mentality, including in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary

TOTAL P.08

AUG-12-1998 12:30

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.01/05

of the Johnson administration) as well as publicly. He implied that he would ignore such attacks because the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists.

The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched an offensive (the mini-Tet) two weeks after Nixon assumed his office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. After four weeks of this and suffering over 1,500 dead, Nixon retaliated by bombing a ten-kilometer-wide zone along the South Vietnamese border where the sanctuaries were located. Sihanouk did not protest and even invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, the Speaker, all Democrats, and about twenty other congressional leaders. None urged widening the circle of those privy to the information.

Judt quotes with approval a Bundy argument that the bombing "made it more rather than less difficult to

AUG-12-1998 12:30

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P. 02/05

10

persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a political compromise." Since it would be too absurd to argue that the best way to achieve a ceasefire, especially with genocidal murderers like the Khmer Rouge, is to stop the military operations, Bundy, unilaterally endorsed by Judt, retreats to saying that "a much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat alive" would have done the trick. Shades of the "graduated escalation" which doomed the Johnson administration's effort in Vietnam and of which Bundy was a principal architect. Is it not much more likely that it was the congressional cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for negotiations?

Similarly grotesque is the treatment of European
 policy. The reviewer alleges that our initial coolness to
Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated Germany and, for that
matter, all of Europe. Records of conversations with
other European leaders make it clear that they were very

AUG-12-1998 12:31

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.03/05

11

wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it the beginning of a
possible national German foreign policy. We shared that
suspicion at first but, influenced by Helmut Schmidt and
others, dealt with it by integrating Ostpolitik into an
overall Atlantic approach. Shortly after being sworn in
as Chancellor, Brandt sent his closest aide on these
matters, Egon Bahr, to Washington to work on coordinating
our policies. Bahr and I worked closely together for the
rest of the way, as his memoirs describe. We conducted
backchannel negotiations with the Soviets that produced a
guarantee for access to Berlin and for its status,
without which Ostpolitik could never have succeeded. And
when Schmidt replaced Brandt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher
became Foreign Minister, we succeeded (now in the Ford
administration) in achieving in the Helsinki Final Act a
provision allowing for the peaceful change of frontiers
that became the basis for the unification of Germany.
Genscher has credited our policy for this in his memoirs.

AUG-12-1998 12:32

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P.01/01

12

As for the charge that relations with Europe were
so bad when I left office that they took a decade to
repair, the surviving heads of government who have
remained warm friends will be as astonished to hear this
as I was. The closing words of Schmidt's laudation a few
months ago when I was made an honorary citizen of the
town where I was born are more reflective of my relations
with Europe's leaders:

"Dear Henry:

Let me use this occasion to express my admiration for
your judgment and also my gratitude for your friendship.

What unites me with you is the dedication to human
freedom and the democratic credo that since 1776 has been
the basis of the American constitution and law
as the basis since 1949 it
has found a home in Germany and is the basis of our own
constitution. What ties me to you is the sense of duty,
the willingness to analyze carefully and rationally
before one offers advice or acts. It is also the

TOTAL P.01

AUG-12-1998 12:31

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P. 04/05

13

readiness in private and personal conversations to say
truthfully what one really thinks and not something that
others might like to hear.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in the end, in politics,
foreign or domestic, it is as in life itself: mutual
sympathy can bring about friendship. But friendship
lasts only when each side can rely on the other's
reliability and truthfulness.

Not only I personally, but--much more important--
all Germans have every reason to be grateful to this
great American who left Germany, it is now sixty years
ago. Gratitude and friendship--that is what has brought
me here this morning."

Bundy, son of a distinguished family and with a
record of devoted service to our country, cannot manage a
similarly generous attitude. He and Judt prefer to view
the record of the Nixon administration not in terms of

****************** -COMM.JOURNAL- ****************** DATE AUG-12-1998 **** TIME 17:37 *** P.01

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START=AUG-12 17:37

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FILE NO.= 159

| NO. | COM | ABBR/NTWK | STATION NAME/ TELEPHONE NO. | PAGES | PRG.NO. | PROGRAM NAME |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | OK | @ | 12033252360 | 001/001 | | |

-KISSINGER ASSOC.

2179 WORDS

8/12/98 Draft #3

One would have thought that to be enough time to permit a
calm discussion of the challenge America has faced since
the Vietnam War destroyed the national consensus on
foreign policy. The deeper meaning of the period is that
it crystallized the inherent tension between America's
idealism--the perception we have of ourselves as a nation
with a special mission--and our growing involvement in a
world of power, hence of relative judgments.

1

2179 WORDS

8/12/98 Draft #3

2

3

decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully
than the ones in which I served. There is a nearly
complete verbatim record of all my negotiations,
backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier only to
protect against unintended slip-ups.) There is also a
complete record of all my memoranda to the President
prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel outlining
the strategy and afterwards reporting the results). There
are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

- To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view,
Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something
akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not say
that he is fiddling [with] the quote which is from a
paragraph comparing Metternich's greater emphasis on
moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power
politics, specifically that he is cutting the sentence in
half and omitting the next sentence: "...something akin
to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of

4

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by
distortions of the underlying reality. I have always had
the highest regard for William Bundy. Therefore, I find
it painful that his resentments have driven him into
abandoning any sense of perspective. Bundy's basic
attitude toward Nixon and me is similar to that of the
Bourbons toward Bonaparte: our besetting sin was
replacing him and his group in an office to which they
felt they were entitled.

5

Asia, Bundy knows only too well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese government without a leak; it was a painful decision not to give advance warning, though all friends and allies--and especially Japan--were consulted to the utmost once the US-China dialogue began in earnest.

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into the Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours away. To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased the readiness of our military forces and _simultaneously_ called a meeting of the NATO Council as well as briefed in the capitals of our principal allies. Why this is treated by Bundy and Judt as some kind of conspiracy against Europe is beyond me.

6

operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon's downfall and
cites Bundy approvingly to that effect. Phrases like
"morally repugnant" for a covert operation in Chile that
was never carried out--and was in many ways an
extrapolation of the activities of our predecessors--
drop lightly from Bundy's pen. One would have thought
that an official who served in one of the key positions
in East Asia when our South Vietnam ally Ngo Dinh Diem
and his brother were assassinated in a coup instigated by
an administration under whose aegis the Phoenix Program
in Vietnam also took place, an administration which
conducted the Bay of Pigs and the war in Laos as CIA
projects, and which planned the only assassination plots
of any American administration should show some restraint
in giving moral lectures on covert operations to his
successor.

A fair study comparing the number and scope of
covert operations in the Nixon administration with those

7

of preceding administrations would not support the charge
of the review.

Judt (or Bundy) achieve their effect by suppressing
the context of covert operations they cite as egregious
examples. They claim "misleading promises to the Kurds,"
as if that suffering people had been triggered into
fighting Iraq by our representations to them. The fact is
that when the US decision to support the Kurds was made
in July 1972, the Kurds had already been fighting
Saddam's oppression for several years. They were
supported by Britain, Iran, Israel, and other neighboring
countries. Nixon was asked to support them in 1972 when
the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour
arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds' existing
sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have
been destroyed earlier - that was our real choice. It is
possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a
moral assault is at a minimum inappropriate.

8

Bundy, given his previous position, knows the facts. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based permanently in Cambodia, killing Americans in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real question is why the Johnson administration, of which Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade, not why we "violated" it. It is also relevant that Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, to <u>defend</u> Cambodian neutrality, including in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the Johnson administration) as well as publicly. He implied that he would ignore such

9

10

persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and
negotiate a political compromise." Since it would be too
absurd to argue that the best way to achieve a ceasefire,
especially with genocidal murderers like the Khmer Rouge,
is to stop the military operations, Bundy, endorsed by
Judt, retreats to saying that "a much more limited
program of bombing to keep the threat alive" would have
done the trick. Shades of the "graduated escalation"
which doomed the Johnson administration's effort in
Vietnam and of which Bundy was a principal architect. Is
it not much more likely that it was the congressional
cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for
negotiations?

Space does not permit dealing with the equally
distorted descriptions of the energy crisis and the
India/Pakistan war of 1971. I will confine myself to the
grotesque treatment of the Nixon administration's
European policy. Judt, following Bundy, alleges that our

11

initial coolness to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated
Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of
conversations with other European leaders make it clear
that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it
the beginning of a possible national German foreign
policy. We shared that suspicion at first but, influenced
by Helmut Schmidt and others, dealt with it by
integrating Ostpolitik into an overall Atlantic approach.
Shortly after being sworn in as Chancellor, Brandt sent
his closest aide on these matters, Egon Bahr, to
Washington to work on coordinating our policies. Bahr and
I worked closely together for the rest of the way, as his
memoirs describe. We conducted backchannel negotiations
with the Soviets that produced a guarantee for access to
Berlin and for its status, without which Ostpolitik could
never have succeeded. And when Schmidt replaced Brandt
and Hans-Dietrich Genscher became Foreign Minister, we
succeeded (now in the Ford administration) in achieving

12

"Dear Henry:

What unites me with you is the dedication to human
freedom and the democratic credo that since 1776 has been
the basis of the American constitution and has since 1949

CYD

O

13

found a home in Germany as the basis of our own
constitution. What ties me to you is the sense of duty,
the willingness to analyze carefully and rationally
before one offers advice or acts. It is also the
readiness in private and personal conversations to say
truthfully what one really thinks and not something that
others might like to hear.

14

Bundy, scion of a distinguished family and with a record of devoted service to our country, cannot manage a similarly generous attitude. He and Judt prefer to view the record of the Nixon administration not in terms of serious men trying to do the best for their country in a difficult situation, much of which they inherited, but as a tale of deceit, discrimination, and conspiracy.

When I was in office, there was a vigorous public debate in which I was an eager participant. As Secretary of State, I travelled to thirty eight states, must have testified before one hundred congressional committees, and delivered perhaps an equal number of speeches and interviews. I gave a full accounting for my tenure in office in my memoirs, including a forthcoming volume on the Ford period. I will stand on that record. The decisions and judgments of high officials are of course always fair game. But their honor should not be lightly impugned.

1

2142 WORDS

8/12/98 Draft #2

One would have thought that to be enough time to permit a
calm discussion of the challenge America has faced. [The]
Vietnam War destroyed the national consensus on foreign
policy. The deeper meaning of the period is that it
crystallized the inherent tension between America's
idealism--the perception we have of ourselves as a nation
with a special mission--and our growing involvement in a
world of power, hence of relative judgments.

2

3

- To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view,
Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something
akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not say
that the quote is drawn from a paragraph comparing
Metternich's greater emphasis on moral consensus with
Bismarck's balance-of-power politics, and he achieves his
effect by cutting the sentence in half and omitting the
next sentence: "...something akin to the Metternich
system evolves in which a balance of power is reinforced
by a shared sense of values. And in the modern age, these
values would have to be democratic."

4

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by distortions of the underlying reality. I have always had the highest regard for William Bundy and his late brother McGeorge. Therefore, I find it painful that his resentments have driven him into abandoning any sense of perspective. Bundy's basic attitude toward Nixon and me is similar to that of the Bourbons toward Bonaparte: our besetting sin was replacing him and his group in an office to which they felt they were entitled.

5

friends and allies--and especially Japan--were consulted
to the utmost afterwards once the US-China dialogue began
in earnest.

As for the alert, we faced what we considered
a Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into
the Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours
away. To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased
the readiness of our military forces and _simultaneously_
called a meeting of the NATO Council as well as briefed
in the capitals of our principal allies. Why this is
treated by Bundy and Judt as some kind of conspiracy
against Europe is beyond me. Should we have waited for
approval of the NATO Council? Not one of our allies at
the time made that argument.

6

cites Bundy approvingly to that effect. Phrases like
"morally repugnant" for an operation in Chile that was
never carried out drop lightly from Bundy's pen. One
would have thought that an official who served in one of
the key positions when our South Vietnam ally Ngo Dinh
Diem and his brother were assassinated in a coup
instigated by the department in which Bundy had a key
position, under whose aegis the Phoenix Program took
place, who served in an administration which conducted
the Bay of Pigs and the war in Laos as CIA projects, and
which conducted the only assassination plots undertaken
by an American administration should show some restraint
in giving moral lectures on covert operations to his
successor.

A fair study comparing the number and scope of
covert operations in the Nixon administration with those
of preceding administrations would not support the charge
of the review.

7

8

Similar distortions run through the entire review
and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive
response. This enables Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in
describing the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the
military violation of a neutral state." Give us a break.
It would have been more honest, to describe what happened
accurately, as Bundy, given his previous position, should
be among the first to know. Four North Vietnamese
divisions were based permanently in Cambodia, killing
Americans in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the
safety of a specious neutrality they were violating
daily. The real question is why the Johnson
administration, of which Bundy was then the principal
staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade, not why
we "violated" it. It is also relevant that Cambodian
chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had invited US attacks
on the sanctuaries, to <u>defend</u> Cambodian mentality,
including in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary

9

of the Johnson administration) as well as publicly. He implied? that he would ignore such attacks because the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists.

10

11

12

"Dear Henry:

What unites me with you is the dedication to human
freedom and the democratic credo that since 1776 has been
the basis of the American constitution. Since 1949 it
has found a home in Germany and is the basis of our own
constitution. What ties me to you is the sense of duty,
the willingness to analyze carefully and rationally
before one offers advice or acts. It is also the

13

Not only I personally, but--much more important--
all Germans have every reason to be grateful to this
great American who left Germany, [it is] now sixty years
[ago]. Gratitude and friendship--that is what has brought
me here this morning."

Bundy, Scion of a distinguished family and with a
record of devoted service to our country, cannot manage a
similarly generous attitude. He and Judt prefer to view
the record of the Nixon administration not in terms of

14

serious men trying to do the best for their country, but
as a tale of deceit, discrimination, and other epithets.

When I was in office, there was a vigorous public
debate in which I was an eager participant. As Secretary
of State, I travelled to thirty eight states, must have
testified before one hundred congressional committees,
and delivered perhaps an equal number of speeches and
interviews. I gave a full accounting for my tenure in
office in my memoirs, including a forthcoming volume on
the Ford period. The decisions and judgments of high
officials are always fair game. But their honor should
not be lightly impugned.

It is a pity that the wounds of Vietnam are never
permitted to close. It is especially sad when they are
being ripped open by someone who at one time was one of
the principal victims of the kind of assault being
practiced in this review.

1

1636 WORDS

One would have thought that enough time to permit a calm
discussion of the challenge America has faced since the
Vietnam War crystallized the tension between the idealism
of a nation which has always looked on itself as [being]
on a special mission and its growing involvement in a
world of power politics, hence of relative judgments.

How to strike the balance between these tendencies
is not a simple matter and practitioners of foreign
policy are apt to get it wrong from time to time. But we
will never manage that task unless we conduct a calm
debate granting the good faith of the principal
participants. Above all, the various protagonists must
have sufficient confidence in their views to risk a
truthful definition of the issues.

- Judt asserts that I have reclassified public
papers as "personal" and closed to "prying eyes." This is
flatly untrue. No public document has ever been
reclassified by me. All the papers in my collection at
the Library of Congress are copies of originals in the
files of either the State Department or the Nixon and

2

The only personal papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations held by a court - not
me - to be personal papers.

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official
record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the
truth. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, no
administration recorded its decisions and negotiations
more carefully and fully than the ones in which I served.
There is a nearly complete verbatim record of all my
negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I put in the
qualifier only to protect against slip-ups.) There are no
unrecorded agreements; none has ever been claimed since I
left office.

- To prove my anachronistic views, Judt quotes me
as writing: "One can hope that something akin to the
Metternich system evolves." He does not say that the
quote is drawn from a paragraph comparing Metternich's
greater emphasis on moral consensus with Bismarck's
balance-of-power politics, and he achieves his effect by
cutting the sentence in half and omitting the next
sentence: "...something akin to the Metternich system
evolves in which a balance of power is reinforced by a
shared sense of values. And in the modern age, these
values would have to be democratic."

3

Distortions of fact are exceeded by distortions of
reality. I have always had the highest regard for Bundy;
therefore I find it painful that his resentments at an
incomplete career drive him into abandoning any sense of
perspective. Bundy's basic attitude toward Nixon and me
is similar to that of the Bourbons toward Bonaparte: our
besetting sin was being in an office to which he - or at
least his group - felt they were entitled.

Bundy knows better than most the ambiguities of
decisionmaking. Therefore he makes no allowance for
realities impinging on policymakers. He castigates Nixon
and me for failing to brief Japan on the opening to China
in 1971, and the European allies in 1973 in going on
alert in the Middle East crisis. As a former Assistant
Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy knows only too
well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese
government without a leak; it was a painful decision not
to give advance warning, though it might have been more
elegant had we sent a special emissary rather than our
ambassador.

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a
Soviet ultimatum. We thought a Soviet move into the
Middle East to be imminent. To demonstrate our
determination to resist, we increased the readiness of
our military forces and _simultaneously_ called a meeting
of the NATO Council. What would Bundy and Judt have us

4

do? Respond to an ultimatum only subject to approval by
the NATO Council?

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary demonstrations of hypocrisy. Throughout
the review, the alleged penchant of Nixon and me for
covert operations is cited as the ultimate cause of
Nixon's downfall. Phrases like "morally repugnant" for an
operation in Chile that never was executed drop lightly
from the pen. One would have thought that an official who
served in one of the key positions when our South Vietnam
ally Diem and his brother were assassinated in a coup
instigated by the department in which he had a key
position, under whose aegis the Phoenix Program took
place, an administration which conducted the Bay of Pigs
and the war in Laos as CIA projects, and under whose eyes
the only assassination plots involving an American
administration were planned, would show some restraint in
giving moral lectures on covert operations to his
successor.

Moreover, what is he talking about? I would think a
fair judgment would compare the number of covert
operations with those of preceding administrations. I
doubt that the charge of the review would then stand up.

Judt (or Bundy) achieve their effect by suppressing
the context of those covert operations they cite as
horrible? examples. They claim "misleading promises to

5

the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been
triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations. The
fact is that when the decision to support the Kurds was
made in July 1972, the Kurds were already fighting and
had been for several years. They were supported by Iran,
Israel, Britain and other neighboring countries. Nixon
was asked in 1972 to support them when the Soviet Union,
disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq
beyond the capacity of the Kurds to match. Without our
help, the Kurds would have been abandoned earlier - that
was our real choice. It is possible to argue the
practical issue; to elevate it to a moral assault is
inappropriate.

Similar distortions run through the entire review
and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive
conventional wisdom response. This enables Judt to write
about the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the military
violation of a neutral state." Give us a break. It would
have been more honest, not to say honorable, to describe
what happened accurately, as Bundy is among the first to
know. Four North Vietnamese divisions were in Cambodia
killing Americans and then withdrawing into the safety of
a neutrality they were violating daily. The Cambodian
chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had invited attacks on
the sanctuaries, both to Chester Bowles (then an emissary
of the Johnson Administration) as well as publicly saying

6

the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists. The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched attacks two weeks after Nixon assumed his office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. Sihanouk invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services Committee, the Speaker, and about twenty other congressional leaders - all from the Democratic opposition party. None urged widening the circle of those privy to the information.

Cambodia seems to block rational thought. Judt quotes with approval a Bundy argument that the bombing "made it more rather than less difficult to persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a political compromise." Since it would be too absurd to argue that the best way to achieve a ceasefire is to stop military operations, Bundy or Judt retreat to saying that "a much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat alive" would have done the trick. [These are] shades of the graduated retaliations which failed so ignominiously in Vietnam and of which Bundy was a principal architect. Is it not much more likely that it was the congressional cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for negotiations?

7

Similarly grotesque is the treatment of European policy. The reviewer alleges that our coolness to Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of conversations with European leaders make it clear that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it the beginning of a possible national German foreign policy. We shared that suspicion initially but dealt with it by building Ostpolitik into an overall Atlantic approach. Within days of being sworn in as Chancellor, Brandt sent his closest aide on these matters, Egon Bahr, to Washington to work on coordinating our policies. He and I worked closely together for the rest of the way. We conducted backchannel negotiations with the Soviets that produced a Berlin agreement without which Ostpolitik could never have succeeded. And when Schmidt replaced Brandt and Genscher became Foreign Minister, we succeeded (in the Ford Administration) to achieve the provision at the European Security Conference for the peaceful change of frontiers that became the basis for the unification of Germany - as Genscher has stated in his memoirs.

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As for the charges of deceit, dissimulation and
other epithets, I can only say that, as Secretary of
State, I travelled to thirty eight states, must have
testified before one hundred congressional committees,
and given perhaps an equal number of speeches and
interviews. Let Judt produce any knowing
misrepresentation other than errors of judgment. The
judgment of high officials is always fair game; but their
honor should not be lightly impugned.

It is a pity that the wounds of Vietnam are never
permitted to close, especially when they are being ripped
open by someone who was one of the principal victims of
the kind of assault being practiced in this review.

AUG-11-1998 12:14

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2

- Judt asserts that I have reclassified public papers as "personal" and~~closed~~to "prying eyes." This is flatly untrue. No public document has ever been reclassified by me. ~~All~~ the papers in my collection at the Library of Congress are copies of originals in the files of either the State Department or the Nixon and Ford libraries. They are available to researchers on the terms established by the originating departments.

The only ~~personal~~ unique papers in the collection are ~~current~~ oral records of telephone conversations held ~~by a court~~ by me - ~~to be personal~~ confirmed/ papers.

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3

There is a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I put in the unintended insert, but I know it's not the one I intended.) There are no qualifier only to protect against (slip-ups.) There are no unrecorded agreements, none has ever been claimed since I left office.

Distortions of fact are exceeded by distortions of the underlying reality. I have always had the highest regard for Bundy and his

AUG-11-1998 12:15

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6

position, under whose aegis the Phoenix Program took
place, an administration which conducted the Bay of Pigs
and the war in Laos as CIA projects, and under whose eyes
the only assassination plots involving an American
administration were planned, would show some restraint in
giving moral lectures on covert operations to his
successor.

Moreover, what is he talking about? I would think a
fair judgment would compare the number of covert
operations with those of preceding administrations,
doubt that the charge of the review, would then stand up.

Judt (or Bundy) achieve their effect by suppressing
the context of these covert operations they site as
horrible? examples. They claim "misleading promises to
the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been
triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations. The
fact is that when the decision to support the Kurds was
made in July 1972, the Kurds were already fighting and