Books

By John G. Kester [lc]

# Breaking Confidences

> "One feels comfortable, if occasionally bamboozled, with Kissinger, but a bit soiled reading Woodward."

Over the noisy luncheon crowd, I was complaining to my friend of the treachery that provided the raw material for Bob Woodward's and Scott Armstrong's *The Brethren*. (I hadn't read it yet.) When the subject seemed exhausted, he asked what I was reading. "Oh, Henry Kissinger." Kissinger's *White House Years* was, I said, a revelation of how personalities and institutions maneuver to shape national-security policy. "And," I went on, "his descriptions of his secret negotiations, and his explanations of Nixon's thought process, and—"

A light went on. I had been touting one book and condemning the other—in each case for disclosures of confidences. The waiter came to spare me from having to solve the dilemma.

Two blockbuster books published a few weeks apart. Each a lifting of the veil to reveal personal relationships heretofore kept secret. Each snatched off the shelves by Washingtonians eager to know—what?

I bought the Woodward book to assure myself it was as wretched as I had told my luncheon companion. It wasn't. In unexpected ways, it was not bad at all. Many of its descriptions of the Supreme Court justices rang true to my own observations as a law clerk fifteen years ago—just as Kissinger's characterizations of relationships in the national-security arena touched chords recalled from my times of work there.

Yet there is something very different about these two books. One feels comfortable, if occasionally bamboozled, with Kissinger, but a bit soiled reading Woodward. One sees in Kissinger's memoirs some history, some lessons for future leaders. But it's hard to shake the feeling that *The Brethren* might better have been left unwritten.

On reflection I think that the two works are not of a piece, and that they differ, as lawyers like to say, not just in degree but in kind. They are in two distinct traditions. In reliability, usefulness, and taste, *The Brethren* and *White House Years* are opposites.

John G. Kester, a Washington attorney, served as law clerk to the late Justice Hugo L. Black, and later in senior positions in the Department of Defense.

Here is why I think my lunchtime reaction was right.

Henry Kissinger could not have the clearest understanding of every event he describes, and one must consider the selectivity an adequate ego may impose on recollections. But Kissinger at least tries to document what he says. The authority he cites most often is himself — he, Henry Kissinger, was there, and this is how he remembers it. One can challenge his recollections, one can find other documents, one can mistrust the author, but the reader at least knows who is making the assertions. Caesar may not have told it exactly right in the *Gallic War*, either. But it was Caesar talking, and historians have been able to evaluate it based on what they know of the author from other sources.

No such safeguards attach to *The Brethren*. We don't know who said what. We are not able to judge why the source said it. We don't know how much is distant hearsay. The sources are those often regarded as the least reliable: anonymous sources, those who for some

reason don't want to have to answer for what they say, usually because of fear or shame. Their biases we can only guess at. In fact, except for some quotes from purloined documents perhaps out of context, we have only the word of the authors that they didn't make parts of it up.

I don't think they did—I suspect the accounts of debating, vote shifting, and opinion drafting are reasonably accurate. Many people at the Supreme Court know how and why such things happen each term. Much of the personal gossip may also have some basis, from someone's viewpoint, but it is harder to be sure. And the accuracy problem there becomes greater.

To tell a good story, Woodward and Armstrong have taken liberties the scrupulous historian avoids. Barbara Tuchman once condemned "the 'he must have' style of historical writing: 'As he watched the coastline of France disappear, Napoleon must have thought...'" *The Brethren* is sprinkled with such inside-the-head reflections: "He detected a tone of skepticism in Brennan's voice." "He felt that he was in many ways ill prepared." "Burger was upset." "Blackmun was both pleased and frightened." "Extraordinary, thought Brennan." Stewart's "stomach knotted as he drove through the Washington traffic." Maybe, as Woodward and Armstrong ambiguously claim, these all "come from" justices, their statements or writings. I doubt it. With no place to check, who can say?

Kissinger understands the system he is writing about. He helped design it and run it. Woodward and Armstrong are outsiders who have tried—and succeeded better than most—to overcome ignorance with diligence. But still they make big and small errors that to lawyers are ludicrous, and they occasionally mistake the commonplace for the sensational. Breathlessly they tell us, for instance, that the Chief Justice circulated an "inadequate" opinion. Once, they say, even an "incredible" one. What such epithets most often mean is not that the reasoning was illogical in some de-

THE WASHINGTONIAN 53

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monstrable sense, but rather that someone disagreed with it. Justices have never been overly charitable about each other's opinions.

Then the authors report that Justice William Rehnquist "distorted" the meaning of prior cases. I doubt that Rehnquist thought so. Rarely does a judge in dissent not think the majority has misread the precedents, and vice versa. But Woodward and Armstrong appear to find large meaning in such stuff. Their major conclusion—that justices with views in the middle often cast swing votes—is startling only for its banality.

And the characterizations. In my experience in government I didn't meet any true villains, people striving daily to do nasty things. But Woodward is able to discover people in our public life who make Richard III look mildly flawed by comparison. Warren Burger has not been beloved in this city the way Earl Warren was. That is no news to anyone in Washington who has followed the Court at all. Maybe Burger doesn't deserve to be.

But can the Chief Justice really be as simple a character as *The Brethren* suggests? Or could it be a function of who talked and who kept silent, and of the journalistic axiom that controversy is news while complexity is not?

*The Brethren* tries to convert the Chief Justice into a judicial Nixon, as Woodward saw Nixon—conspiratorial, secretive, self-indulgent, clumsy in the use of power, lacking in generous instincts. At one point, broadcasting to us from inside the Chief Justice’s brain, the authors report that “already he felt a kinship with these people, with Mitchell and Nixon.” One has the feeling of rereading *All the President’s Men*, with the robed Burger a sort of Nixon in drag.

Kissinger, by contrast, sees complexities, even in his portrayals of adversaries. Le Duc Tho is a devout Leninist and connoisseur of prisons who had spent more time in jail than Kissinger had at Harvard. There is nothing flat in characters seen through Kissinger's eyes. People I've met tend to be more like the ones Kissinger describes than the two-dimensional cutouts of *The Brethren*.

A final test for potential inaccuracy in each book might be this: If the author completely misrepresents a series of events, who is going to answer back? The author of *White House Years* is inhibited by the threat of rebuttal. Kissinger knows that others who were there will be writing their versions. Nixon already has.

The victims of *The Brethren*, however, must stay silent. They cannot demote with the nameless sources of *The Brethren* without demeaning the Supreme Court, and themselves breaching

54 THE WASHINGTONIAN

the confidentiality they have pledged to honor. The authors of *The Brethren* did not have to worry much about rebuttal; and even if they are shown wrong in some particular, they, unlike Kissinger, will be able to lay off the error on a source, and remind us that they are only reporters who write about what they are told.

In *White House Years*, the author is the acknowledged source. *The Brethren* by contrast is based on the grossest breaches of tradition and honor—whether by justices or by former clerks.

The Court's administrative office cautioned me when I reported as a law clerk in 1963 that I was not to get tricked into conversations with reporters. The

## One has the feeling of rereading *All the President's Men*, with the robed Burger a sort of Nixon in drag.

subject came up between advice on health insurance and a warning never to leave my car in a justice's parking place. It was not much of an issue. I don't recall that Justice Hugo Black, for whom I worked, ever mentioned it. Only three reporters covered the Court in those days, and the leading one—Anthony Lewis of the *New York Times*—gathered information on the cases by the ambitious expedient of reading the briefs rather than trying to quiz the law clerks. It was understood, I think, that clerks did not repeat much about their justices' activities—definitely not personal comments — even to other clerks. Certainly not to outsiders. As far as I know, that commitment and understanding have never changed, although I heard of a few breaches in recent years when clerks let their friends know that a big case was coming down. To us old-timers, that was shocking.

Woodward and Armstrong grandly claim to have had interviews, of an unspecified sort, with "several" justices and "more than 170 former law clerks." Did help from a justice mean a response to "Please mail a list of your former law clerks"? More than one of the former law clerks interviewed for the book told me that they had provided no more than background on the history of the Court and an elementary discussion of how the Court processes cases. Most likely the bulk of the book came from a handful of people. Perhaps it represents not a hemorrhage, but a few pricked boils.

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THE WASHINGTONIAN 55

POLITY

THE JOURNAL OF
THE NORTHEASTERN
POLITICAL SCIENCE
ASSOCIATION

MEMORANDUM

Publicity Department

Enclosed are two copies of a book review that appeared in the
most recent issue of Polity.

JAR/bf
Enclosure

SEP 9 1981

James A. Riedel, Book Review Editor, Graduate School of Public Affairs, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, New York 12222

## Review Articles

### Congress & Foreign Policy

Cecil V. Crabb, Jr., and Pat M. Holt, Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the President, and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1980).

Thomas M. Frank, and Edward Weisband, Foreign Policy by Congress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

R. Gordon Hoxie, Command Decision and the Presidency: A Study in National Security Policy and Organization (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1977).

Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1979).

Lawrence J. Korb, The Fall and Rise of the Pentagon: American Defense Policies in the 1970's (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).

John Lehman, The Executive, Congress, and Foreign Policy: Studies of the Nixon Administration (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976).

Alan Platt, and Lawrence D. Weiler, eds., Congress and Arms Control (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1978).

Paula Stern, Water's Edge: Domestic Politics and the Making of American Foreign Policy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).

Stobe Talbott, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979).

John T. Rourke, University of Connecticut

When examining the current limits of thinking on foreign policy, it is difficult to avoid thinking Pendulum." The origins of the cycles or tidal ebbs and flows aside, one cannot help conjuring up scenarios in which one or more of the main actors, or both, swing inexorably to and fro, and Congress over foreign policy proceeds with the slip that will cleave assume-

The works included in this volume, the study of Congress's role in foreign policy. The first, represented by Holt, and Platt and Weiler, span the period from the second approach, representing here, examines congressional influence in the overall foreign policy process, looking for primary consi-derations of the approach benefits by placing them in the context of avoiding the potential of unifoc-ular offer a further advantage of being grounds. Some, such as Frank, basically academics. Others are contains essays by legislators, foreign and Disarmament Agency (ACI) observers, and associates of foreign observers, and associates of disarmament program. Pat Holt, with Nelson's office; Stobe Talbott, with Porter; John Lehman is also a course, Henry Kissinger.

Four essential questions can be asked. First, what is the current role of the President in foreign policy? Executive, and in terms of his or her role, has the President caused the undisputed upswing in activity on the foreign policy front with acclaim, caution, or consti-tution? Is the current congressional balance of power been permanent?

Dealing with the first question, little doubt that the proverbial direction. Frank and Weisband, with their mood through Senator J. Willi-ams, Congress had "hobbled the Pres-

Review Articles 689

When examining the current literature on Congress and foreign policy, it is difficult to avoid thinking of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum." The origins of the pendulum analogy (as distinguished from cycles or tidal ebbs and flows applied to other political phenomena) aside, one cannot help conjuring up the image of a massive, gleaming disc swinging inexorably to and fro in the struggle between the executive and Congress over foreign policy control while a goggle-eyed public waits for the slip that will cleave assunder the corpus americanus.

The works included in this review essay allow for two approaches to the study of Congress's role in the formation and conduct of American foreign policy. The first, represented by Frank and Weisband, Crabb and Holt, and Platt and Weiler, specifically focuses on the legislative role. The second approach, represented by the balance of the works discussed here, examines congressional impact as part of a study which includes the overall foreign policy process. The former has the advantage of allowing extensive primary consideration of a single variable. The latter approach benefits by placing congressional action in perspective and avoiding the potential of unifocal overemphasis. The volumes reviewed offer a further advantage of being authored by individuals of varied backgrounds. Some, such as Frank, Weisband, Korb, Crabb, and Hoxie, are basically academics. Others are practitioners. The Platt and Weiler study contains essays by legislators, former staff members of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), congressional staff members, a foreign observer, and associates of Stanford University's arms control and disarmament program. Pat Holt is a former staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Paula Stern served in Senator Gaylord Nelson's office; Stobe Talbott writes from the perspective of a *Time* reporter; John Lehman is also with ACDA; and Henry Kissinger is, of course, Henry Kissinger.

Four essential questions can be examined through these nine volumes. First, what is the current role of Congress—absolutely, relative to the executive, and in terms of historical change? Second, what variables have caused the undisputed upsurge of recent legislative interest and activity on the foreign policy front? Third, are the changes to be greeted with acclaim, caution, or consternation? Fourth, what does the future hold? Is the current congressional assertiveness an aberration or has the balance of power been permanently altered?

Dealing with the first question, the current role of Congress, there is little doubt that the proverbial pendulum has swung in the legislative direction. Frank and Weisband (p. 5) trace the changed congressional mood through Senator J. William Fulbright, who worried in 1961 that Congress had "hobbled the President by too niggardly a grant of power."

Invitation to Struggle: Congress, Washington, D.C.: Congressional

Band, Foreign Policy by Congress
1979).

on and the Presidency: A Study in
ization (New York: Thomas Y.

e of the Pentagon: American De-
Con., Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).

Press, and Foreign Policy: Studies of
Praeger Publishers, 1976).

leds., Congress and Arms Control
(8).

Politics and the Making of Ameri-
Greenwood Press, 1979).

The Story of SALT II (New York:

cticut

[LC]

P 8

690 Review Articles

By 1974 Fulbright was describing the presidency as a "dangerously powerful office" and, if not exactly hailing the "slow, obstreperous, [and] behind the times" Congress, at least crediting it with posing "no threat to the liberties of the American people." Examples of the upswing of legislative activity are numerous, including the Cooper-Church amendment, the War Powers Resolution, the Turkish arms embargo, prohibition of action in Angola, defense spending reductions, military sales reporting requirements, Panama and SALT II Treaty travails, and other actions and reactions.

How much Congress's weight has increased vis-à-vis the executive is less certain. Frank and Weisband represent (p. 3) the view that there has been a "revolution" that has "radically redistributed the power of government" and that "among the booty" is "control over U.S. foreign policy." Crabb and Holt, by contrast (p. 3), contend that "although recent years have witnessed a new congressional militancy in foreign relations, the fact remains that the president is still in charge of American foreign policy."

The other studies do not address the question of control per se but tend implicitly to favor the Crabb and Holt conception of an expanded, but still limited and secondary, role for Congress. Kissinger's chronicle, which extends through the signing of the Vietnam Peace Agreement and the end of Richard Nixon's first term, leaves the reader with the impression of decision makers embattled by a partially imaginary legislative foe. On Vietnam there is little doubt that Congress acted as a continual prod that kept the administration moving toward disengagement with only occasional and temporary military relapses. Whether, as Kissinger continually laments, congressional doves gave comfort to the North Vietnamese, or whether Congress would have eventually mandated an end to American involvement, the facts are unmistakably clear that the administration retained considerable freedom in its alternating carrot and stick diplomacy. The war was ended by Richard Nixon, not William Fulbright.

In a variety of other diplomatic postures, such as the "tilt" toward Pakistan in 1971, the initiative toward China, detente with the Soviets, and assorted Middle East maneuvers, it is clear that Congress played a tangential role at best. Even in those instances where Congress threatened Kissinger's realm, as in the United States commitment to NATO, the administration was able to prevail. In the case of the Mansfield amendment to reduce the number of American troops in Europe, Senate votes, which Kissinger terms (p. 947) "a close call" and having come "none too soon for our sanity," upheld the executive position by the lopsided margins of 73 to 24, 68 to 29, and 61 to 36.

The studies and views in P similar impression of considera- ginal impact. In the lead essay, pattern has not changed signifi- formulates, negotiates, and pres- yes." Talbott reaches the same congressional advisors to the S- impact. There is some evidenc- tude, as illustrated by the statem- to Paul Warnke's nomination a ministration to harden some of

In the related field of defense- War College Professor Lawren- gressional budget cuts but is le- cuts. For example, while he sl- FY1974 Congress cut more de- be that the budget presented v secretary of defense cut an ave- partment requests before sen- Secretary Melvin Laird in the 4.3 percent. Also, after a Dep- percent of the gross national share began to grow again, re- significantly, the investment categ- evaluation) of the defense bu- FY1975 to 37.4 percent in FY1- does, that congressional budget military, policy choices seem to be made by a majority of Rep- Platt and Weiler, Representa- "Congress has exercised only military force structure," while mittee staff observes (p. 60) Capitol Hill seldom transcend the

Consideration of the second legislative activity is addressed what more indirectly in the oth- the obvious, the specific reacti- cesses in Vietnam, and to a re- gence during the postwar peri- Congressional reassertion after and Weisband generalize that executive while the end of war

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The
O
Date
WAR
A
SP
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CO
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The studies and views in Platt and Weiler's edited volume leave a similar impression of considerable congressional activity with only marginal impact. In the lead essay, Platt finds (p. 6) that the arms control pattern has not changed significantly since World War II. "The executive formulates, negotiates, and presents national policy, and Congress votes yes." Talbott reaches the same general conclusion. He finds (p. 95) that congressional advisors to the SALT II negotiations had little substantive impact. There is some evidence, however, that the general Senate attitude, as illustrated by the statements of Henry Jackson and the resistance to Paul Warnke's nomination as chief SALT negotiator, caused the administration to harden some of its positions.

In the related field of defense spending, a similar pattern exists. Naval War College Professor Lawrence Korb relates a history of recent congressional budget cuts but is less clear on the strategic impact of those cuts. For example, while he shows that from fiscal year (FY) 1971 to FY 1974 Congress cut more deeply than in the previous decade, it may be that the budget presented was fatter. From FY 1963 to FY 1970 the secretary of defense cut an average of 21.5 percent from the service department requests before sending the budget on to Congress. Under Secretary Melvin Laird in the early 1970's, the average cut was only 4.3 percent. Also, after a Department of Defense (DOD) low of 5.5 percent of the gross national product (GNP) in FY 1976, the defense share began to grow again, reaching 6.0 in FY 1980. Perhaps more significantly, the investment categories (research, development, testing, and evaluation) of the defense budget grew markedly from 31.3 percent in FY 1975 to 37.4 percent in FY 1980. Although it can be argued, as Korb does, that congressional budget levels and procedures have disrupted the military, policy choices seem largely to remain with the executive. In Platt and Weiler, Representative Les Aspin concludes (p. 45) that "Congress has exercised only a limited influence on U.S. policy and military force structure," while Thomas Dine of the Senate Budget Committee staff observes (p. 60) that "disputes over military budgets on Capitol Hill seldom transcend the mundane."

Consideration of the second basic question, the causes of increased legislative activity is addressed specifically in Crabb and Holt and somewhat more indirectly in the other works. Almost all the authors point to the obvious, the specific reaction of Congress to perceived executive excesses in Vietnam, and to a more general pattern of legislative resurgence during the postwar periods. Lehman terms (p. vii) the "cycle of Congressional reassertion after wars ... historic and reliable," and Frank and Weisbland generalize that war tends to swing the pendulum to the executive while the end of war tends to trigger a swing toward Congress.

residency as a "dangerously pow-
ing the "slow, obstreperous, [and]
editing it with posing "no threat
e." Examples of the upswing of
ing the Cooper-Church amend-
Turkish arms embargo, prohibi-
nding reductions, military sales
SALT II Treaty travails, and other

creased vis-à-vis the executive is
present (p. 3) the view that there
cally redistributed the power of
ty" is "control over U.S. foreign
(3), contend that "although re-
essional militancy in foreign rela-
t is still in charge of American

question of control per se but
olt conception of an expanded,
Congress. Kissinger's chronicle,
Vietnam Peace Agreement and
ives the reader with the impres-
partially imaginary legislative
Congress acted as a continual
ng toward disengagement with
elapses. Whether, as Kissinger
gave comfort to the North Viet-
the eventually mandated an end
mistakably clear that the ad-
m in its alternating carrot and
Richard Nixon, not William

res, such as the "tilt" toward
China, detente with the Soviets,
clear that Congress played a
aces where Congress threatened
commitment to NATO, the ad-
e of the Mansfield amendment
in Europe, Senate votes, which
having come "none too soon
ition by the lopsided margins

692 Review Articles

Unfortunately, the authors do not explain why this is so. Rather they seem to accept the movement as a law of political nature.

Crabb and Holt (p. 190) divide the causes of congressional assertiveness between internal factors and external factors. The former category includes the diffusion of power within Congress, the rise in the number and expertise of staff, and the increase in House activity vis-à-vis the traditionally involved Senate. External factors include public opinion, lobbyist pressures, and the weakened, post-Watergate presidency. These factors are variously seconded by the other authors, and other causes are also added by them.

Partisan politics is often cited, although there is nothing to indicate that it is uniquely associated with the current era as a motivational source. In her study of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, Stern sees Jackson's pretentions to the White House as the driving force to link granting most favorable nation (MFN) trade status with increased Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. In her words (p. xiv), "Without understanding the election imperative of would-be president Henry Jackson and all the other politicians who had a role in the Jackson amendment struggle, one cannot understand the history of the Jackson amendment." Representative Aspin also pays attention to electoral based politics, claiming that Congress primarily responds to political stimuli with the result that the members of the House Armed Services Committee are only interested in what directly affects them.

The role of legislative staff influence is an area of relatively recent academic focus, and Stern's narrative shows a substantial role for the assistants of Jackson and other members. According to Stern, the idea of the amendment originated with and was pushed by Jackson's aide Richard Perle (p. 23), whose "Jewish affiliation is not so much religious as political"; Abraham Ribicoff's aide Morris Amitay, who later became head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); and Representative Vanik's aide Mark Talisman, also Jewish. Although the amendment could not have succeeded without the backing of the "principals," Stern's detailed description makes it clear that the aides negotiated among themselves, with the executive, and even with foreign governments with considerable license. Not necessarily negating Stern's argument, but presenting a different slant, Dine argues (Platt and Weiler, p. 66) that the legislative staff is still no match for the executive's expertise. He points to the fact that in 1977 the professional staff size of the Armed Services Committee ranked fourteenth of fifteen standing House committees and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had only one person assigned to strategic arms control issues. Contrasting the approximately two dozen professionals on each of these two com-

mittee staffs with the 333 people at Pentagon, Dine concludes that "sufficient analytic resources to

Lobbyists play a particularly important role in the Jackson-Vanik amendment, especially the early advocate of the amendment, because it has been captured by Jackson's lobby, who was the principal m-ambivalence did the American people have in mind. The amendment's legislative interest is the interplay of the Jewish lobby. Both sets of stakeholders differ in differing reasons. Labor president A. L. M. (Alvin A. M.) decreases in exit visas. When Congress between the positions of labor and management, alienating Meany, only 1/2 of the time also.

A last external cause identified is weakness, which receives partial recognition, this factor is relative, withing a decrease in executive pendulum theory. Institutional of the studies. With regard to the war, Lehman points (p. 71) "the postwar period. Support was not in addition to supporting the war to re-establish congressional authority in this instance, then, congression and executive strength is the determining factor."

Executive weakness has also been gregarional activity, the dependence of the presid-ently weakened the presiden-cially proven more capable, much of tige might have been mitigated. Nixon and Carter both suffered from the postwar period. continuing bane to any presiden-and Nixon spent as much effor-ment as from the Soviets lest they take action that might arm and larly, on the early question of

[L.C.]

[L]

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plain why this is so. Rather they
of political nature.

 causes of congressional assertive-
 external factors. The former category
 Congress, the rise in the number
 rise in House activity vis-à-vis the
 al factors include public opinion,
 post-Watergate presidency. These
 other authors, and other causes

though there is nothing to indicate
the current era as a motivational
Vanik amendment, Stern sees Jack-
ses the driving force to link granting
atus with increased Jewish emigra-
ids (p. xiv), "Without understand-
the president Henry Jackson and all
the Jackson amendment struggle,
the Jackson amendment." Repre-
electoral based politics, claiming
political stimuli with the result that
rvice Committee are only inter-

ce is an area of relatively recent
shows a substantial role for the
ers. According to Stern, the idea
was pushed by Jackson's aide
affiliation is not so much religious
Morris Amitay, who later became
Affairs Committee (AIPAC); and
Aisman, also Jewish. Although the
without the backing of the "prin-
kles it clear that the aides nego-
tive, and even with foreign gov-
Not necessarily negating Stern's
int, Dine argues (Platt and Weiler,
no match for the executive's ex-
1977 the professional staff size of
d-fourteenth of fifteen standing
foreign Relations Committee had
arms control issues. Contrasting
nals on each of these two com-

mittee staffs with the 333 people assigned to congressional liaison at the Pentagon, Dine concludes that "these crucial committees clearly have insufficient analytic resources to oversee military legislation."

Lobbyists play a particularly interesting role in Stern's recounting of the Jackson-Vanik amendment struggle. Rather than having been an early advocate of the amendment, the "Jewish lobby" is portrayed as having been captured by Jackson's initiative. It was Jackson, not the lobby, who was the principal manipulator. Only after initial division and ambivalence did the American Jewish community exercise its considerable influence in Jackson's legislative and electoral behalf. Also of considerable interest is the interface between the positions of the AFL-CIO and the Jewish lobby. Both supported Jackson's amendment, but for differing reasons. Labor president George Meany wanted to block MFN status for the Soviets, while AIPAC wanted to use MFN as bait for increases in exit visas. When compromise loomed, Jackson had to choose between the positions of labor and AIPAC. Ironically, Jackson compromised, alienating Meany, only later to lose the goal of increased emigration also.

A last external cause identified by Crabb and Holt is presidential weakness, which receives particular support in other volumes. To a degree, this factor is relative, with an increase in legislative strength equating to a decrease in executive influence. In that sense it refers to the pendulum theory. Institutional pride is certainly in evidence in several of the studies. With regard to the Cooper-Church amendment to end the war, Lehman points (p. 71) to a phenomenon probably typical in a postwar period. Support was drawn from members who, apart from or in addition to supporting the substance, also saw the measure as a step to re-establish congressional authority in the foreign policy process. In this instance, then, congressional activity is the independent variable, and executive strength is the dependent variable.

Executive weakness has also been an independent factor, with congressional activity the dependent variable. The Watergate revelations certainly weakened the presidency in a general sense. Had Jimmy Carter proven more capable, much of this loss of institutional power and prestige might have been mitigated. However, as several of the studies show, Nixon and Carter both suffered from a lack of creditability which spurred congressional activity. Divisions within the executive are also a continuing bane to any president. Kissinger's memoir indicates that he and Nixon spent as much effort keeping secrets from the State Department as from the Soviets lest dissident bureaucrats leak information or take action that might arm and activate congressional antagonists. Similarly, on the early question of whether SALT II would be negotiated as

694 Review Articles

a treaty or an executive agreement, the State Department labeled it a treaty despite White House objections, leading Vice President Mondale to explode (Talbott, p. 215), that the "yahoos at the State Department [had] better learn the difference between a treaty and an agreement." In the end, the State Department won and SALT II was submitted and is still pending as a treaty.

Simple ineptness also hurts the executive cause. At one point in the SALT II genesis, Congress, already aggravated over a perceived lack of consultation, was further angered when it caught the administration creating a *post hoc* study to support its position. The effort was described (Talbott, p. 136) by a Senate aide as a "fabrication, ... an attempt to deceive Congress, ... not just tendentious—but an outright lie." Similarly, the executive was in disarray on the Jackson-Vanik amendment. As Ways and Means Committee Chairman Al Ullman put it (Stern, p. 96): "This whole matter has been poorly handled by the White House; ... the entire trade bill [has been] endangered by irresponsible delays and conflicting policies emanating from the White House."

The third major issue addressed explicitly or implicitly by these volumes is the efficacy of increased congressional involvement in foreign policy. While none of the authors condemn legislative activism in the field, all express varying levels of concern. Frank and Weisband are the most optimistic about the enhanced congressional role. They believe (p. 8) the new system of "codetermination" of foreign policy will result in the "democratic legitimization" of policy necessary to build a replacement for the foreign policy consensus shattered by the war in Vietnam. They even contend, somewhat naively it would seem, that the White House has increasingly come to see Congress's new role "in terms of foreign policy benefits."

Clouding this positive opinion are the mixed reviews of congressional action during the last decade. Pat Holt is the least critical in the case studies he contributes to *Invitation to Struggle*, but co-author Cecil Crabb worries about Congress's ability to "unquestionably ... foul up foreign policy." Crabb seems concerned that Congress has gone too far and quotes that bellweather of congressional involvement, William Fulbright, who professes (p. 204) that "those of us who prodded what seemed to be a hopelessly immobile herd of cattle a decade ago, now stand back in awe ... of a stampede." Taking a stand that tends to support Holt more than Crabb, Frank and Weisband contend (p. 157) that, "while it is easy to come up with instances of legislative overkill, the general proposition [of negative congressional meddling] has not been proven." They do worry, however, that (p. 210), "unless Congress can organize

itself to deliver informed, timely synonymous with nondetermina-

The case studies themselves the question. As noted, Holt is pathetic to congressional involvement in his case. The value of Congress from Indochina depends that, Kissinger shows, Congress could not operate with the free other hand, he was not a Gulliver.

Negative interpretations of the Stern, Korb, and Hoxie. Stern having "contributed to the coll tives." She concedes that the ar Jackson but wonders whether supplies the answer—no. Korb overreacted to its former passiv at the point of "suffocating" t thors, Hoxie is the most critic the congressional role in nation tial prerogatives in a generally excesses and a breakdown in le the late 1960's and early 1970 not warrant the present over i 381) it a "self-evident truth" t foreign policy, to legislate nat forces" and calls (p. 32) for a tive balance."

The fourth and final issue de tion of the pendulum. Is the phenomenon or has there been making system? As befits their Weisband and Crabb and Holt former authors, in line with that the balance will swing back that each swing generates a co are shorter in duration. They persuasive evidence that the p ... is a revolution that will no gressional influence they find than ad hoc, vehicles of con

[LC]

Review Articles 695

State Department labeled it a leading Vice President Mondale yahoons at the State Department a treaty and an agreement." In SALT II was submitted and is

utive cause. At one point in the cavated over a perceived lack of it caught the administration creation. The effort was described as "fabrication, ... an attempt to us—but an outright lie." Simi- the Jackson-Vanik amendment. nan Al Ullman put it (Stern, p. ily handled by the White House; ngered by irresponsible delays the White House."

licity or implicitly by these vol- leational involvement in foreign tlem legislative activism in the n. Frank and Weisband are the gressional role. They believe (p. " of foreign policy will result in ly necessary to build a replace- hattered by the war in Vietnam. it would seem, that the White ngress's new role "in terms of

mixed reviews of congressional is the least critical in the case tuggle, but co-author Cecil Crabb questionably ... foul up foreign Congress has gone too far and involvement, William Fulbright, as who prodded what seemed to a decade ago, now stand back and that tends to support Holt contend (p. 157) that, "while legislative overkill, the general beddling has not been proven." "unless Congress can organize

itself to deliver informed, timely decisions, co-determination will become synonymous with nondetermination."

The case studies themselves do not provide conclusive evidence on the question. As noted, Holt is sympathetic. Kissinger is loudly unsympathetic to congressional involvement; yet he generally does not prove his case. The value of Congress's role in securing American disengagement from Indochina depends on one's views of that episode. Beyond that, Kissinger shows Congress to be nettlesome but not debilitating. He could not operate with the freedom of a Talleyrand or Bismarck; on the other hand, he was not a Gulliver bound by Lilliputians.

Negative interpretations of the congressional role can also be found in Stern, Korb, and Hoxie. Stern views (p. 198) Jackson's maneuvers as having "contributed to the collapse of his own stated diplomatic objectives." She concedes that the amendment was good domestic politics for Jackson but wonders whether it was good foreign policy and implicitly supplies the answer—no. Korb contends (p. 173) that "Congress has overreacted to its former passive role vis-à-vis the Pentagon" and is now at the point of "suffocating" the defense establishment. Of all the authors, Hoxie is the most critical of the recent trend. Concentrating on the congressional role in national security affairs, Hoxie views presidential prerogatives in a generally favorable light, although he does concede excesses and a breakdown in legislative-executive communication during the late 1960's and early 1970's. The errors of the past, says Hoxie, do not warrant the present over involvement of Congress. He declares (p. 381) it a "self-evident truth" that "Congress is not equipped to conduct foreign policy, to legislate national strategy, or to command the armed forces" and calls (p. 32) for a restoration of the "congressional-executive balance."

— The fourth and final issue dealt with by these works is the future position of the pendulum. Is the current congressional upswing a temporary phenomenon or has there been a permanent change in the foreign policy-making system? As befits their focus on the legislative role, Frank and Weisband and Crabb and Holt address this question most directly. The former authors, in line with their pendulum analogy, necessarily feel that the balance will swing back toward executive dominance. They find that each swing generates a counterforce and also that successive swings are shorter in duration. They also argue (p. 6), however, that "there is persuasive evidence that the present period of congressional-ascendence is a revolution that will not be unmade." Arguing for continued congressional influence they find are: (1) the increasingly legislated, rather than ad hoc, vehicles of congressional activity; (2) the increase in legis-

696 Review Articles

lative staff; (3) the democratization of Congress, making external or in-
ternal domination more difficult; and (4) the growing self-confidence
and accustomization of Congress in asserting itself.

Similarly, Crabb and Holt find (p. 206) that "a persuasive case can
be made for the contention that Congress will continue to exercise a pow-
erful—and in some instances a decisive—voice in foreign affairs for the
indefinite future." Supporting their view, they cite changes in the global
and domestic setting—executive encouragement of legislative involve-
ment and the positive results Congress has achieved in foreign policy.

These two sets of authors are cautious, however, about their predic-
tions. Each sees potential for a revision to the cold war system of execu-
tive dominance. Beyond the pendulum effect, both Crabb and Holt and
Frank and Weisband identify a public preference for a strong presi-
dency, a norm of low public and Capitol Hill interest in international
affairs, and a continued difficulty in orchestrating congressional policy-
making as factors which may undo the recent revolution. The authors
agree that a revolution has occurred and that its permanence is in doubt.
To draw a rough analogy, Congress is in its "Articles of Confederation"
stage. Whether it can organize and sustain a more rational "constitu-
tional" system remains to be seen.

A supplementary point that Crabb and Holt, Frank and Weisband, Hoxie, Lehman, and Korb all call for is greater cooperation between the executive and legislative branches. Although none present elaborate schemes to match those put forward in other places, each wants to avoid the acrimony and policy disruptions that have been occasioned by the power shift and turf wars between the two branches. If they agree on any point, it is that, while the pendulum may continue to swing, the extremes of its travel to and fro should be constrained lest a Poe tragedy really occur. One is left with the feeling, though, that perhaps Crabb and Holt's title is the most sagacious index of the future. It echoes Thomas Cronin's classic formulation that the Constitution created an "invitation to struggle" between the president and the Congress in foreign affairs. Indeed, it made the struggle all but inevitable, both in the past and in the future.

The Maoist Mod

Lynn T. White, I.
sonal Energies in
University of Calif

Thomas P. Bernstein
The Transfer of YC
Yale University Pre

David M. Raddock
Cultural Revolution
Press, 1977).

Peter R. Moody, Op.
ford, Cal.: Hoover In.

Simon Leys, Chinese

Wayne Bert, Wilming.

Events of the last few
many Westerners a lit
Their astonishment is
of the period of the C
ity rejected many of
Criticism of the arbit-
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rule of law. Nonethele-
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style democracy.

Besides the new polic
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remains in contemporar-
political style of Mao ai

* Beginning with this issu-
tion of Chinese words and n
other major journals.

BACK TO BACK:

COLLATE:

OTHER:

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ISSUE
DATED

12 JUN 1981

Henry talking

**For the Record.** By Henry Kissinger.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £9.95.

There was a time, in the days of Nixon and Ford, when Henry Kissinger, who had come to the US as a German-Jewish refugee boy to make his remarkable career, seemed to fly round the globe from place to place like the very personification of American foreign policy. What role does Kissinger play in the US today, out of office, with all that this implies in Washington?

From his new book, which presents selected statements made by him the years 1977-80, it is hard to know. Some sections of some of the statements are interesting in their insights, but they throw no light on the question how far Kissinger's views have today any weight in shaping political thought in Washington.

Thus, in a question-and-answer conversation with the editors of the German magazine Der

Spiegel, he is revealing in thinking aloud about Bismarck. He says that it was Bismarck's strength that he knew how to use military power with deliberate political moderation. It was his weakness that he prepared no successor to carry on his policy of moderation, with such fatal results for German politics. This reflection leads Kissinger to express his doubts about the West German *Ostpolitik*, because he is uneasy in general about any independent German policy towards the East-West conflict being carried on in the centre of Europe.

In another reprinted speech he reveals a sense of humour concerning his relationship with Golda Meir as Israel's Prime Minister:

> "I will not insult your intelligence by pretending that Golda was always easy to deal with . . . On the occasions when I did not immediately embrace the total validity of her considerations, she showered on me the outrage reserved for the obtuseness of a specially favoured nephew. My wife is fond of saying that some of the best dramatic performances she ever witnessed occurred during debates between Golda and me."

Incidentally, in that same speech, Kissinger expressed his doubts about that independent West Bank Arab state whose merits are being pushed so hard by the EEC powers:

> "A Palestinian state on the West Bank is bound to be an element of instability both for Jordan and for Israel; it will compound the crisis, not solve it. Such a state — whatever the professions or guarantees — must have objectives that cannot be compatible with the tranquillity of the Middle East."

All in all, his new book shows that Kissinger still has a gift for phrases that are both illuminating and compressed, as for instance:

> "We face, in the Soviet Union, a strange amalgam of ideology and bureaucratic and economic stagnation, coupled with enormous ability in one limited field — the accumulation of military power."

Not a bad description.

Y. BERNSTEIN

JUL 2 1981

Russinger

thinking about it much, he had shared the antipathy of the more assimilated Western Jews to the Easterners he saw in Prague, particularly when hats, coats or sidelocks made them stand out from other people in the street. He was equally antipathetic towards the books of Martin Buber, who was trying to import into the Western literary tradition the oral Chasidic tradition, which merged religion, mysticism and folklore. Until the Yiddish actors arrived in Prague, Kafka almost never used the word "we" — not even to link himself with his family; afterwards he began to write about the Jewish people in the first person plural.

The Polish Yiddish Musical Drama Company consisted of six actors and a pianist. In the corner of a shabby café called "The Savoy" they performed with no scenery and only the most basic furniture — a table and a few chairs. When the actors embraced they had

this attitude (history or history), stopping periodically "to let my Jewishness collect itself."

His new interest in Judaism did not at first make him more tolerant of the religious rituals, which struck him as being "on their very last legs ... (they) have only a historical character." In December 1911 he watched his sixteen-day-old nephew being circumcised. The short, bow-legged mohel had already performed 2,800 operations. "One sees blood and raw flesh, the mohel works briefly with his long-nailed trembling fingers, pulling skin from somewhere like the finger of a glove over the wound ... Now only a short prayer remains to be said, while the mohel drinks wine, and with his finger, which is not yet quite unbloody, puts some wine on the child's lips."

When his assistant said grace after the meal, the two grandfathers were the only people present who were not day-dreaming or bored or failing to understand the Hebrew. But Kafka went on reading books about Yiddish literature and about Judaism, and early in 1912 he went for the first time to an event organised by the Bar Kochba Society, an evening of folk songs and a lecture.

He did not attend a Kol Nidre service in 1912, as he had in 1911, but on the eve of Yom Kippur he sat down to write his first letter to Felice Bauer, the girl who was to become his fiancée. He had met her only once, but the letter pursues the idea they had half-jokingly intended to go to Palestine.

*The World of Franz Kafka. Edited by J. P. Stern. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £9.95.

JUNE 19, 1981

767

THE FRIEND

Looking Abroad

Of Realists and Idealists

THOSE Friends who read *The Guardian*, and it is my impression that many of them do, will have seen the text of a moving appeal made by George Kennan when he received the Albert Einstein Peace Prize this year.* Kennan says the things that Friends say about the nuclear arms race and concludes with a call for a dramatic gesture:

> ... an immediate across-the-boards reduction by fifty per cent of the nuclear arsenals now being maintained by the two superpowers—a reduction affecting in equal measure all forms of the weapon, strategic, medium range, and tactical, as well as all means of their delivery—all this to be implemented at once and without further wrangling among the experts, and to be subject to such national means of verification as now lie at the disposal of the two powers.

Thus Kennan joins a distinguished line of men; Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Mountbatten, and others who on retirement have warned against the perils of our present course and urged us to rise against this madness and assert our common humanity. They have provided CND with ammunition for its campaign but, so far at least, have had little effect on those responsible for national policy.

Why is it that the wisdom of elder statesmen and intellectual giants should have so little impact? This is all the more remarkable because each one of those I have named has played an influential role in public life. Einstein advised Roosevelt to make the atomic bomb. Russell was a conscientious objector in the First World War, but I also heard him tell an audience of undergraduates at Cambridge in 1948 that the West should impose its will on the Soviet Union by threatening to drop the

atomic bomb on Moscow before it was too late. Mountbatten had been Chief of the Defence Staff. Kennan has had a distinguished career as an American diplomat and was the anonymous author of a celebrated article in *Foreign Affairs* (1947), in which he outlined a policy for the containment of communism that became the strategy of the United States in the Cold War period.

I came across some clues to an understanding of this puzzle when reading the memoirs of Henry Kissinger.† An advocate and practitioner of *Realpolitik*, he writes:

> Throughout history the political influence of nations has been roughly correlative to their military power... diplomatic skill could augment but never substitute for military strength.

For him the balance of power is the pre-condition of peace. Not that Kissinger lacks passion or moral conviction. One need only read the description in his book of his childhood in Nazi Germany to understand his love of America and faith in it. Nor is he insensitive to nuclear dilemmas:

> When nations are able to inflict tens of millions of casualties in a matter of hours, peace has become a moral imperative. No one entering office could evade this fundamental responsibility.

Kissinger is among those—and they are to be found in the governments of all states—who think that there is an inevitable clash of interests among sovereign nations and that the stronger will seek to impose their will on the weaker, if necessary by the threat or use of military force.

*The Guardian, 25 May 1981.

†Henry Kissinger, *The White House Years* (Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Michael Joseph, 1979).

THE FRIEND

768

JUNE 19, 1981

In such a world, national security is bound to be the principal concern of policymakers. The stronger you are, the less likely it is that your opponent will take risks which end in war.

We may hold that it is high time for humankind to think differently, to rise above the narrow national interests and to take a global view of its problems, but it is impossible to deny that *all* great powers before and since the dawn of the nuclear age have behaved very much in accordance with Kissinger's principles.

It is true, of course, that the apostles of *Realpolitik*, such as Metternich, Bismarck, and Kissinger, have not been the only statesmen and that others, to mention only Presidents Wilson and Carter, have had a loftier vision of our destiny when they entered office. However, their record of achievement in bringing about a better world has been very disappointing.

There is something about the cares of office which makes it almost impossible for the statesman to fulfil whatever ideals he might have had. The sheer complexity of the problems, the drag of bureaucratic procedures, the need to take into account so many interests, domestic and foreign, and the interplay of personalities, often from very different cultural and political backgrounds, all make it extraordinarily difficult for him not to be overwhelmed by the immediate needs of tactical manoeuvre in pursuit of limited policy goals.

It is not only the complexity of things that will turn even the most fervent idealist into a compromising realist. It is the problem of national security which casts its spell on any government. As a private citizen one is free to make radical proposals for the conduct of national affairs. Things look very different from the window of a government department. Moreover, it is a sad fact that most people are convinced that arms are necessary for national security against potential aggressors. They may differ over the type of armament that is

necessary; whether one should have an independent deterrent or depend on US nuclear protection; whether one should seek arms control now or wait until one has caught up with the adversary; but there is no disagreement that national security is the primary responsibility of any government. And if the world's governments agree on nothing else, they are unanimous here.

The interesting thing about the contradictory views of Kennan and Kissinger is that they are the fruits of the experience of two men who consider themselves to be realists. Kennan has emerged from his long period of service as some one whose concerns have become global rather than narrowly national. Kissinger, who is still young at 58, is confirmed in his presuppositions and sees the world in terms of a ceaseless power struggle in which the national interest is dominant.

Neither would deny that values are important in shaping the policy-maker's outlook. But both would probably agree that once values become established as a rigid system of absolute truth, whether it is the right of the master race to rule the world, the inevitable achievement of the classless utopia, or the supreme virtues of free enterprise, then they become extremely dangerous, for ideology stifles compassion and obscures the realities of our common humanity.

The essential difference between them lies in Kennan's optimistic realism and Kissinger's pessimistic realism. I doubt whether the answer to the arms race is to be found in some sweeping prescription, such as Kennan's fifty per cent across-the-board reduction. There is probably no complete answer, but we may help to make the world a more humane and civilised place if we can persuade people to think again and to ask whether in our age we do not have to take a fresh look at such concepts as national security and the purpose of national policy. That seems to me to be the real message behind Kennan's appeal. WOLF MENDL.

The Pittsburgh Press
PITTSBURGH, PA.

D. 260,845 SUN. 655,968

FEB 2 2 1981

In his latest book, "Selected Statements," Henry Kissinger re-examines his political views.

# Kissinger Alters World View

[L.C.]

SELECTED STATEMENTS, by Henry Kissinger. Little, Brown & Co., $12.95.

By ROBERT HAZO

This new collection of Kissinger utterances and writings since 1977 leaves little doubt the former secretary of state's intellectual agility is 'unimpaired.

The task he is faced with is, indeed, formidable: to adjust and, in some cases, reverse stands he took in the past to accommodate current political realities.

Since those realities include the emergence of hard-line conservatism in the Republican Party, the effort required is substantial. After all, Kissinger was, in some sense, the architect of detente and the midwife of Salt II.

The sleight of hand he employs to smudge the historical record and shift the perspective on what he did is impressive.

Indeed, there is no other political personality today who approaches him in his command of communication and mastery of the media.

One tactic he employs is to shift emphasis. In the past he always held that the U.S.-Soviet conflict was a major and overwhelming, but not total, determinant of political history. Now, the qualification is forgotten.

Nothing less than the fate of the world, according to Kissinger, will be decided by the balance of power between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union.

(In a speech in Pittsburgh a while ago, he even claimed all revolutionary or liberation movements in Africa, Asia and South America were under the orchestration of Moscow.)

In line with the conventional wisdom he argues for a vast increase in American military power without concerning himself with how that power will be used or how it will be paid for.

Since his advocacy of linkage really amounts to the United States having the ability to apply political, military and economic pressure at virtually any threatened point around the globe, the message we get is not only hard-line, but rather pessimistic.

In the past, during the heyday of detente, Kissinger seemed to be saying, prepare for the worst but hope for the best. Now he comes close to advocating, prepare for the worst and expect the worst.

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one titled Dr. Ross — One Man Band (Yukona 7087), by, of course, Dr. Isaiah Ross, who performs in what is loosely called the one-man-band tradition.

Ross uses a combination of guitar, harmonica, drums and cymbals to earn this title. The thorough liner notes say he preferred it that way because he couldn't rely on the members of bands he had formed. By learning all the instruments, he said, "I could make all the music I wanted, the way I wanted it, by myself."

And the music is pretty good. Ross is clearly most at home with the harmonica, with his solos strong and forceful. He also shows an uncanny ability to use the harp as a mimic for his own lyrics.

The album is taken from a 1964 performance at the University of Chicago Folksong Festival, where Ross had returned to performing after years of inactivity — the story of many bluesmen who lived in relative obscurity until a period of revival in the '60s.

Dr. Ross is not a doctor, by the way. His nickname grew out of his habit of reading medical books. The music is still a good prescription for blues buffs.

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BOOK BRIEFS

For the Record

By Henry Kissinger

Little Brown ■ 332 pp. ■ $12.95

This collection of assorted Kissinger speeches, congressional testimony, and interviews given since he left office in 1976 ranges over a variety of topics, from SALT II to Iran to reflections on foreign affairs. They add little to the basic philosophy of history and state-craft that he has elaborated in other books and contain fewer tidbits of the inside information and acid-etched personality sketches that enlivened the first volume of his mem bers. But Kissinger is never entirely without interest. In his 1979 testimony, reprinted here, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on SALT II, which the Reagan Adminis-tration must now wrestle with, he dis plays a distinctly more hawkish ap-proach than he revealed when he was in public office and negotiating the first SALT treaty. He argues persuasively for a stronger U. S. military posture, both conventional and nuclear, on the ground that treaties such as SALT only ratify the existing balance of forces.

In another article, he defends his most controversial actions since leaving office—his efforts on behalf of the deposed Shah of Iran. His basic view is that whatever the Shah's shortcomings, he had been a loyal U. S. ally for a generation. But Kissinger does not address the fundamental problem of U. S. global strategy raised by the Shah's fall and the collapse of the Nixon doctrine, which sought to disengage the U. S. from the role of global policeman by encouraging surrogates around the world. The Shah proved unable to defend himself, much less U. S. interests, but readers will have to wait for the second volume of Kissinger's memoirs to learn what he thinks we should have done to prop up the tottering gendarme.

Nashville Banner
NASHVILLE, TENN.
D 82,572

FEB 2 1 1981

Economic Vitality Is U.S.'Best Asset: Kissinger

[L]C

Books

FOR THE RECORD: Selected Statements
1977-1980

By Henry Kissinger

Little Brown and Co., $12.95

THIS book makes available some of Henry Kissinger's speeches and other public statements since he left office in January 1977, as U.S. secretary of State.

He has chosen the addresses he considers most important — the fall of the shah of Iran, the SALT II treaty, human rights as a goal of foreign policy, the future of NATO, Communist parties in Western Europe and appreciations of remarkable personalities Kissinger has known.

In the course of his various remarks over the three-year period, Kissinger makes it abundantly clear that America's position of leadership in the world imposes the responsibility of stability (no matter what party is in office).

Speaking of Communist parties in western Europe, he observes that "we must avoid giving the impression that we consider Communist success a foregone conclusion ... Communist parties are marked by a fundamental flaw: parties that do not speak for the humane values which have inspired the peoples of the West for centuries are unlikely to appeal to a majority in a western nation except in a moment of unsettling crisis. Their most powerful weapons are fear, dis-

trust and discouragement; their principal asset is the myth of their inevitability."

IN the section on the future of business and the international environment, Kissinger concludes that "America's economic vitality is its greatest asset. It is the product of the creative spirit of a free and industrious people and of an economic system that gives opportunity to private incentive. It is the foundation of prosperity, its military strength, and constructive relations in a world of peace."

The speech on the "Energy Crisis and World Order" has Kissinger observing that the energy crisis has placed at risk the entire range of our foreign policy. It mortgages the prospects of our own economy; it weakens the industrial democracies economically and potentially militarily; it undermines the world economy; and it frustrates the hope for progress of most of the new nations. Kissinger calls for an "energy strategy: the use of our vast resources of coal, and points to nuclear power as one of the best hopes to close the gap between supply and demand, especially for some of our allies in Western Europe and Japan.

Dr. Kissinger addressed the U.S. Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations in July 1979 concerning the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), clarifying the meaning and importance of the treaty as one ele-

ment in the overall national security policy of the United States.

"The creativity of a world of diversity and peaceful competition can be the basis of unparalleled human progress," observed Kissinger. "A stable balance is the most hopeful — perhaps the only — basis for the control and ultimately the reduction of weapons of mass destruction.

"WE face the chilling prospect of a world sliding gradually out of control, with our relative military power declining, with our economic lifeline vulnerable to blackmail, with hostile forces growing more rapidly than our ability to deal with them, and with fewer and fewer nations friendly to us surviving," he warned the senators.

Kissinger made it clear that "rarely in history has a nation so passively accepted as radical a change in its military balance as the U.S. If we are to remedy it, we must first recognize the fact that we have placed ourselves at a significant disadvantage voluntarily. This is not the result of SALT," he declared. "It is the consequence of unilater-

al decisions extending over a decade and a half: by a strategic doctrine adopted in the '60s, by the bitter domestic divisions growing out of the war in Vietnam, and by choices of the (Carter) administration. All these actions were unilateral, hence avoidable. They were not extracted from us by clever Soviet negotiators; we imposed them on ourselves by our choices, theories, and domestic turmoil. It is therefore in our power to alter them."

This is an informative book which will provide every reader with at least another viewpoint on subjects of vital concern to each of us. Beyond this, it is a patriotic and positive statement of what America can be and can do in the years ahead.

Henry Kissinger served as assistant to the president for National Security Affairs, and as secretary of State, under Presidents Nixon and Ford. His experiences as national security adviser from 1969 to 1973 were documented in his memoirs, White House Years. An account of his years as secretary of State will be published later this year.

— CLARENCE DUNCAN

HENRY KISSINGER
A responsibility for stability

Police Probe West End Area Killing

# Woman Beaten, Strangled To Death

By MARSH NICHOLS

Banner Staff Writer

Homicide authorities said today an examination on the body of 68-year-old Hazel Smith revealed she was both strangled and beaten on the head by the intruder who forced his way into her West End area duplex.

Metro Detective Maj. J.W. Irvin said finger marks were found on Miss Smith's neck in addition to several blows made by a blunt instrument on her head.

"They were bruise marks that looked like someone had choked her," Irvin said. "She had been choked."

Miss Smith, who lived alone in her

duplex at 309-A Lauderdale Road, was found dead by a neighbor on Friday. Her body was discovered in a neighbor's back yard and police said the front door of her dwelling had been kicked in.

Homicide Lt. Sherman Nickens said police today were searching for an "extra-large black man" who authorities were told entered a residence about four houses from the victim's home only hours before she was slain.

A purse stolen in that burglary was found beside Miss Smith's duplex during the investigation.

Police said the woman's clothing had been ripped but officers were awaiting the results of an autopsy to

determine whether she had been sexually assaulted.

About 3 a.m. today, Nickens said he ordered a surveillance on the house, when neighbors reported a television set was on as well as some lights.

Nickens said footprints found in the wet front yard Friday indicated the suspect is "better than 6 feet."

At least two neighbors said dogs were barking in the Cherokee Park neighborhood early Friday.

Mrs. Wayne Potts, 217 Mayfair Ave., said her teen-age son heard their dog "having a fit" about 3 a.m. Friday.

"Bob said it woke him up and he was complaining about it when he

came down to breakfast," Mrs. Potts said.

Neighbors, who described their area's residents as "loving, churchgoing people," said the woman's killing has frightened them.

A retired registered nurse who lives a few doors away from the victim's small duplex said, "It scares me to death."

"We're not safe in an apartment, we're not safe in a home, a hotel or a motel," she said.

"Look at me. I'm as secure as I can be but if they want to get in they're going to make a way to get in," she said.

Phyllis Williams, Miss Smith's niece, said her aunt moved into Cherokee Park about four years ago. She said Miss Smith preferred to live in a duplex for safety reasons.

Services for Miss Smith will be held at 2 p.m. Monday in the Sewell Funeral Home in Albany, Ky. Burial will be in the Albany Cemetery.

Miss Smith was a native of Albany and the daughter of the late John and Ethel Smith.

She was a retired employee of Battlefield Pharmacy on Franklin Road.

Miss Smith was a member of the McClurken Church of the Nazarene.

An artist's sketch of the suspect.

Beaver Data
Seizure Irks

DA Shriver

FEDERAL TIMES
WASHINGTON, D.C.
W. 50,627

FEB 23 1981

BOOKS by John Barkham

A Voice From the Past

FOR THE RECORD:
SELECTED STATEMENTS 1977-1980 by
Henry Kissinger, Little
Brown. 332 pages,
$12.95.

As this was being
written Henry Kissing-
er was in the Middle
East seeing heads of
state on "private
visits" before the Rea-
gan Administration
took office. Kissinger's

private visits are strongly reminiscent of his
shuttle diplomacy as secretary of State. It is
hard to believe that his talks will have no bear-
ing on future foreign policy.

Indeed at a meeting with the editors of the
German newsweekly, Der Spiegel, in 1978, he
was asked outright whether he might become
secretary of State once more. He responded
with a characteristically humorous evasion:
"We cannot demoralize the professional For-
eign Service with this prospect before them."

But, as Gertrude Stein once presciently re-
marked: "History teaches that history
teaches." We are already faced with the fact
that Kissinger's former protege, Alexander
Haig, is the secretary of State while Kissinger
periodically visits global trouble-spots for a
first-hand study of foreign policy problems
likely to confront the Reagan administration.

All of which makes this collection of Kissing-
er statements on foreign policy over the past
three years of considerable interest insofar as
they look ahead and look back at the actions of
the Carter administration.

If you seek evidence in these pages of Kiss-
inger's differences with Carter foreign policy,
they are not hard to find although invariably
couched in polite, discrete diplomatic language.

"If our foreign policy," he said at New York

University in 1977, "is well conceived, it must
reflect national purpose and not personal
idiosyncrasy." Was this an oblique reference to
Carter's human rights policy, which alienated
certain countries whose security is important to
the United States?

Nor, it is clear from other speeches, would
Kissinger have turned thumbs down on the
development of the neutron bomb and the B1
bomber. This follows logically oh his belief that
the Soviet Union's military strength has grown
rapidly in the last ten years.

"Yet," he added, "the West probably remains
technologically superior. There must be a rea-
son why the Soviets at no time since the end of
World War II have ever run the risk of a direct
confrontation with the United States once they
understood that certain actions would indeed
produce it."

Like a red thread the theme of preparedness
in these troubled times runs through Kissing-
er's utterances. Speaking of foreign policy to a
convention of the Society of Newspaper Editors
in Washington in 1980 he declared:

"Rarely in history has a nation so passively
accepted so radical a change in military bal-
ance. We will pay a heavy penalty if we
continue to take comfort in soporific assurances
that the military establishment is still second to
none."

In the most recent section of the book, the
foreword written last August, Kissinger struck
the same urgent note of warning.

"We no longer have the option of turning our
backs on the world. Our security is not self-
ensuring, our preferences do not automatically
prevail, our interests and values require vigi-
lance and effort if they are to survive."

After our performance in Iran these points
should by now be crystal-clear to every thinking
American. One can only hope that Kissinger's
pragmatic view of contemporary history will
become part of American foreign policy wheth-
er or not he himself is in office.

KISSINGER

[L.C]

# 'Odds Are in Our Favor' ✓

FOR THE RECORD; SELECTED

STATEMENTS, 1977-1980, By Henry Kissinger. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., xiii + 332 pp., $12.95.

One of the most influential statesmen of our time, Henry Kissinger, served as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and as Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. An earlier volume, "White House Years" (1979), reported his experiences as national security adviser from 1969 to 1973; he is currently at work on memoirs from his tenure as Secretary of State.

This book makes available 16 of his speeches and other public statements since he left office in January, 1977. Representing those concerns which he feels are the most important, they speak incisively and forthrightly to our time. He addresses such urgent and interrelated matters as communist parties in Western Europe, the future of business and the international environment, the energy crisis and world order, continuity and change in American foreign policy, Anwar Sadat and the Middle East, SALT II, the future of NATO, the controversy over the Shah, the future of American

foreign policy and the geopolitics of oil.

Other insights respecting both domestic and global concerns are shared with us in other formats: an appreciation of Golda Meir, a conversation with Walter Laqueur on lessons of the past, interviews on world affairs generally and on Iran specifically, a memorial to Nelson Rockefeller and comments on "the footsteps of history." These 16 pieces were offered in a variety of contexts: formal and high-level audiences both at home and abroad, award assemblies, funerals, printed media and symposia.

Each of these pieces touches, whether directly or indirectly, upon the foreign policy enterprise. Kissinger has three major concerns in this regard, which surface wherever and whenever that enterprise is addressed: national security, nonpartisanship and continuity. "Our security is not self-ensuring; our preferences do not automatically prevail; our interests and values require vigilance and effort if they are to survive," writes Dr. Kissinger. He calls for realism and for national self-assertiveness respecting the unending challenges that confront us. "The task of statesmanship," he affirms, "is to attempt to shape events according to a vision of the future, with the moral fortitude to act boldly even when consensus and cer-

tainty are often unattainable."

What about the future of the United States-Soviet Union relationship? Kissinger is optimistic because of the inherent superiority of the entire Western experience, discerning our national future as linked inextricably with the fortunes of the NATO countries. He predicates his assessment on economic, demographic and political indices: three times the gross national product of the Soviet Union, four times the population and internal stability fostered by "legitimate" leadership.

Kissinger is convinced that ours is a matter of will, not of resources, in the contest for world leadership. If we do indeed realize our capacities, we will prevail. "All the odds are in our favor," he writes; ours is "the wave of the future."

Readers of other Kissinger publications have come to expect his pen to yield both style and substance. They will not be disappointed with this present offering. Without exception his remarks are informative, provocative and eminently relevant to the sensitivities of our time.

— DONALD N. BOWDLE

History and Religion Department.
Lee College,
Cleveland, Tennessee

Richmond Times - Dispatch / Mar 15, 1981

MAR 9 1981

Book Reviews

*The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe.* By Steven Ozment. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. Pp. xii + 458, with illustrations. $25.00 (U.S.)

It is an important moment when a scholar of Steven Ozment's stature publishes what appears to be a long-awaited synthesis of intellectual and religious history over a period as vast as that between 1250 and 1550. Scholars and teachers might expect a useful analysis of the links between medieval and Reformation thought, one combining thoughtful focus on the strands which held or unraveled as the world changed, with careful attention to the historical and religious context of the period, seen as a unity. Professor Ozment has long been known as a Reformation scholar who takes cognizance of the medieval period, particularly in his *Mysticism and Dissent* (1973). Thus, it is unfortunate that the present volume shows all the signs of being a too-hasty revision and assemblage of the lectures and previously published articles which Ozment notes in his Introduction, one which fails to satisfy at a number of points.

A major problem for this reviewer is the book's lack of coherence. One would have hoped for the author to have identified a number of *continua* which would be traced from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, to which reference could be made in order to link, for example, the scholastic theory of knowledge with humanist and reforming treatments of similar issues. These links, or their breakage, are frequently asserted, but seldom demonstrated. The volume falls into two disparate sections, medieval and Reformation, and the treatment of themes in the first is not generally carried over into the second.

This may result from the author's apparent indecision about what sort of book this was to be. If a synthesis, then the lack of thematic unity stands out more glaringly: this reviewer had high hopes that "The Idea of Reform" would serve as a point of reference for the whole work, but the "idea" is never presented concretely. If the book is an expanded critical essay, providing a critique of recent work in many fields (which Ozment does at many points,

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some of the critiques quite useful), then the claims of the sub-title are too
vast. Further, if the work is directed to medievalists and Reformation ex-
perts, then the documentary apparatus is inconsistent at best: to give but one
example among many, on p. 30, Ozment cites Thomas on the sacraments
with a reference to a translated collection of his works, without giving even
the title of the original work; the preceding note on the same page gives a full
Latin quotation from the *Summa*. For whom are these notes intended?

In the first, essentially medieval part of the book, the reader is given a very
full and complex treatment of the scholastic, spiritual, and ecclesiopolitical
"traditions" of church and intellectual history. While I disagree with Oz-
ment's reliance on what he calls the "Ockhamist" tradition, since most con-
temporary scholars are whittling away at any sense that this formed a
coherent tradition after Ockham himself, his treatment is very detailed, and
he identifies a number of threads which I expected would serve as the warp
on which the weft of Reformation thought would be entwined. Un-
fortunately, this is not the case; and Ozment fails to consider a very basic
question: the relationship between intellectual life and thought, on the one
hand, and the reality of late medieval Christianity. Ozment appears to be
reaching toward a description of what he terms, "the oppressive religious
culture" of the late Middle Ages (p. 243, and *supra*), but he fails to define it
clearly, or to demonstrate that it was a consequence of the very patterns of
scholastic and mystical thought on which he expends so much effort. The
bare summary on pp. 179-81 is full of unsupported generalizations ("The
papacies of Gregory VII and Innocent III and the scholastic synthesis of
Thomas Aquinas were exceptions, not the rule;" "... in the late Middle
Ages the traditional mixing of the sacred and the profane, ..., was finally
overcome."), and provides no transition to the next, Reformation section.

Here, the manner of presentation changes. Instead of continuing a
discussion of "traditions", as illustrated from a variety of thinkers and
movements, Ozment presents a largely disconnected series of synoptic
passages from Reformation figures, treated *seriatim*. The portraits must
have been excellent lectures: lucid, and always interesting; but the points
established previously are not taken up. Even here, internal consistency is
lacking: after bringing Luther up to 1519, criticizing at length Erikson's
*Young Man Luther*, the course of the Continental Reformation moves onto
other ground, only to return to Luther later, in a chapter taken from
previously published work. If there is a unifying theme here, it is Luther's op-
position to "Ockhamist Pelagianism", but the previous discussion of this
point is not sufficient to prove the connection.

The discussion of "Humanism and the Reformation" is perhaps the most
enlightening in the book, revealing clearly the points at issue between Luther
and Erasmus. A later chapter, "Marriage and the Ministry", is interesting,
but is not linked, except superficially, with the central themes of the book as
a whole; again, previous work has been included without careful attention to
the demands of the subject. For a book on "Late Medieval and Reformation

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*Europe*, there is an appalling inattention to England. Granted, the English case was peculiar, but this is no reason for it to be treated as if the English reformation began sometime around 1548.

The "idea of reform" is best considered in the chapters dealing with political thought and its links to religious change, yet the recent work of Skinner is far more satisfactory. The sections of historical narrative, which might have provided a framework within which to discuss reform, are well-presented, if ordinary: there is little re-assessment of recent scholarship. Finally, almost no attention is paid to "ordinary religion", a matter which is presently attracting a good deal of attention; what there is, is given in the most general, traditional terms. This is particularly vexing given Ozment's frequent assertion that the Reformation was primarily a consequence of ordinary and intellectual dissatisfaction with the state of late medieval religion.

The result is a book which will not satisfy scholars, especially medievalists, nor will it appeal to teachers in need of an analytic summary of late medieval and Reformation religious history. One can only hope that Professor Ozment will turn his attentions again to these matters, and produce the sort of synthetic interpretive essay which he is uniquely qualified to write.

Orono, Maine

Malcolm C. Burson

*Darkness Visible*. By William Golding. London: Faber and Faber; Toronto: Oxford University Press; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Pp. 265. $13.95. (U.S. price: $10.95)

In its title, William Golding's 1959 novel, *Free Fall*, echoed a line from *Paradise Lost*; God speaks about man: "Ingrate, he had of me/All he could have; I made him just and right, /Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall" (III. 98-99). The same source supplies the suggestive title for Golding's seventh novel, his first in twelve years:

> A dungeon horrible on all sides round
> As one great furnace flamed, yet from these flames
> No light, but rather darkness visible
> Served only to discover sights of woe.

(I. 61-64)

Didactic tabs are a Golding trademark; indeed, his tendency to insert thematic hints in his fiction has made him a target for purist critics who insist on art without a message. Golding ignores such strictures to carry on his twenty-five year preoccupation with the theme of fallen human nature; the thesis that man is sadly prone to evil: "I believe that man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the hope that it may be something like the truth."

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Alexander Pope's context for Milton's oxymoron ironically foreshadows Golding's intense and circuitous story-telling in this novel: "Of darkness visible so much be lent/As half to show, half veil the deep intent" (The Dunciad, IV. 3-4). *Darkness Visible* unfolds as if Golding deliberately tried to "half veil the deep intent" of his writing. As if indeed he wanted to institute as a narrative method the Sullivan-Bauhaus architectural principle that form follows function. The function of his fiction he once made clear, is to hold up for humanity a mirror to reflect the basic character of man, not merely his often benign exterior. His wartime experiences are said to account for Golding's dark vision of human nature: "The basic point my generation learned about man was that there was more evil in him than could be accounted for by social pressure." The function of *Darkness Visible* may be to show that evil man can produce only an evil world, a cruel civilization in which a good man is hard to find. The dense narrative and sectional structuring, the form of the novel, then, reflects the complicated, multi-layered morality, social, political, personal, of today's world. The darkness of title and story extends beyond the nature of man to project a contemporary society of bombs and brutal terrorists; of older people confused and dismayed by unfamiliar, jarring experiences; and of the pervasive amorality of our diminishing century: an overall picture aptly symbolized by the context of Milton's phrase, a description of hell.

The novel is a formidable, challenging work in which Golding once more demonstrates that he is a master of oblique narrative. It will likely revive complaints about his earlier major works (Pincher Martin, 1956, Free Fall, and The Spire, 1964); namely, that he obstructs his readers with gratuitous difficulties. Problems of comprehension may result from such factors as the intensity and deliberate ambiguity of some areas, the use of the film device of sudden "jump cuts," the changes in point of view, or Golding's richly allusive style which can make readers uneasy about missing important symbolism. The opening pages, for example, a brilliant set-piece about the firebombing of London, evoke the Biblical burning bush, Dante and every inferno of history, and Little Gidding's "intolerable shirt of flames." Indeed, the novel is complex, but the story is relatively simple.

The novel has three major parts, of seven, four, and five chapters respectively. The order is chronological, less complicating than the "memory sequence" of *Free Fall*. Part One presents most of the story of Matty, the protagonist; introduces an ageing schoolmaster pederast, Pedigree; and concludes with a chapter of sporadic diary entries, the tortured thinking and planning of the hapless Matty. Here is his first horrific appearance:

> A figure had condensed out of the shuddering backdrop of the glare. . . . it was impossibly small. . . . Nor do small children walk out of a fire that is melting lead and distorting iron.

> . . . A child's stride is quick, but this child walked with a kind of ritual gait. . . . It was perhaps something animal that was directing him away from the place where the world was being consumed.

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With "no background but the fire" and horribly disfigured by his "birth" from the burning bush which mercilessly did not consume, Matty moved slowly from various specialty hospitals to several schools, to menial jobs in England and Australia, eventually back to England to work as a handyman at a posh private school in Greenfield whose pupils include the sons of oil-rich Arabs and African rulers, tempting bait for kidnap plots. By then he has become an unlearned Bible addict, memorizing whole chapters, seeking an answer to the old questions, "Who am I?" and "What is my role in life?" No wonder that, like others before him from the Gnostics to the Moonies, Matty begins to have visions: two preternatural visitants who promise him an unspecified, worthy future assignment. So he ponders, a delayed-action human bomb, awaiting its tremendous moment.

Part Two features the Stanhope family: father, a radio-TV chess expert remote from his family; a live-in nurse-housekeeper-mistress; and the beautiful twins, Toni, the dark-haired terrorist-to-be, and Sophy, a fair, driven female villain who belongs in Milton's or anyone's hell.

The two stories converge in Part Three, five chapters of two thickening plots, Sophy's and Golding's. Her actions terminate the story and Matty's life in a second flaming inferno. Other characters are mostly victims of Golding's degenerate society: Sim Goodchild, a confused bookseller, ironically named, for his interest in the beautiful twins is latently sexual; bemused Edwin Bell, a schoolmaster with no answers about life; and Sophy's fellow plotters, criminals all. Pedigree as a cliché character is balanced by a physical education master so easily manipulated by Sophy that he is openly called Fido.

*Darkness Visible* fuses character and plot into pervasive and almost intolerable ironies. The attractive innocence of the twins is but a gloss; they become amoral and mindlessly evil. The ugly, disfigured Matty is all simple goodness, the prelapsarian innocence of Lok in *The Inheritors* (1955). The scarified Matty is repugnant to sad old Pedigree, but the handsome lad who attracts him is an intuitive conniver. Repulsive in character and lifestyle, Pedigree hopelessly accepts his pederasty, but the respectable Goodchild and Bell are equally rudderless in modern society. Sophy's dictum, "The way towards simplicity is through outrage," is best exemplified, not by her cold-blooded plotting, but by Matty's outrageous death in a burning bush which did destroy. His mission to rescue the kidnap victim ironically fulfills his diary premonition: "What am I for? Is it to do with children?"

Appearance versus reality has rarely been so forcefully staged to inject fiction with such genuine thematic power. What is Golding saying by presenting human goodness through the wholly innocent Matty? Is an unaware, pre-rational goodness all that is possible in a depraved era? Are the twins, beautiful as goldfish but predatory as piranhas, typical of those who are presently to inherit the corrupt earth? Milton supplied the title, but Yeats

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cogently stated the theme: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . ." And Eliot characterized Golding's urgency: a "conscious impotence of rage/at human folly."

Golding's thematic hinting is evident but muted in this novel. The "running down" of contemporary moral values and social order is hinted in a dialogue between Sophy and her father:

"We're not very wholesome, are we?"

"That's a good word."

"You, Mummy, Toni, me—we're not the way people used to be. It's part of the whole running down."

"Entropy."

"You don't even care enough about us to hate us, do you?"

Stanhope's laconic "entropy" suggests that Golding is aware that his efforts to deliver the story with a minimum of direct assertion and a maximum of effect may result in a loss of communicative power. Certainly the more typical Golding signature passages of impressionistic writing, trenchant, colourful, evocative as the opening pages of *Free Fall*, can lapse into an ambiguity that fails to render some passages explicitly enough. Yet it is the well known Golding narrative mode: intensity, implication, not overt statement; symbolic, figurative, not literal. Here *passim* is poetry's fusion of language, imagery, symbol and allusion; not the ways of everyday prose: entropy indeed when encountered as a whole.

Golding's *animus* towards the evil potential of mankind does inform all his work, and we really must accept his thematic bent as his special *donum*, his card of identity among novelists. He has tabled a timely, impressive report about our erring age. Let us hope fervently that he will destroy the putamen of his years of re-working and pruning, not leave it for tedious dissection and reassembling by textual critics. The given work is a rewarding challenge for the present and a worthy offering to the future. The epigraph he chose from the *Aeneid* signals his confidence about this novel's future: *Sit mihi fas audita loqui. Darkness Visible* is a glowing and memorable work of art and soul.

Carleton University

A.A. MacKinnon

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*Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance.* By Patrick Grant. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 246 pp., cloth, $15.00.

The blanket title of Grant's second book is a telling indication of its diffusion of interests. The author compounds this difficulty by his arbitrary choice of texts and his self-indulgent, if learned, forays into areas only obliquely related to his central thesis. The study charts the breakdown during the seventeenth century of a belief in Augustinian correspondences between matter, image, and transcendent Idea and the impact on the literary imagination of empirical philosophy. This is itself a large and worthwhile project, but Grant's idiosyncratic tastes and evident restlessness with the strictures of his argument inevitably jeopardize its coherence. He is, for example, more concerned to establish the "cross-diffusion" between Capuchin devotional exercises and Crashaw's poetry than to elucidate clearly the conflict between the allegorical temper (represented here by Spenser) and the emerging Lockean materialism of the new age. Even more disruptive to the logic of the book is the fact that Grant seems intent on salvaging, at whatever cost, his earlier publications. *Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance* is finally a collection of articles, some approaching monograph length, fitted with varying degrees of success to a single Procrustean bed.

Despite Grant's claims that we are reading a unified work, the awkward transitions and forced comparisons of authors only serve to reinforce our scepticism. Chapters 4 and 6 extend in interesting and complementary ways his discussion of the spiritual models of the Metaphysical poets in *The Transformation of Sin*, but the approach to Crashaw and Norris has little connection to the typology of *Paradise Regained*, the subject of the intervening chapter. The poor organization of the book is unfortunate since it masks Grant's very real strengths. His analyses of specific poems and images—the *effectus passionis* motif of Book I of *The Faerie Queene* or the fine chapter on Crashaw—provide memorable instances of intelligent close reading. Both are eloquently argued, offering many original insights, particularly Grant's thesis that Crashaw's poems "attempt to give us a sense of the distortion of the physical world seen without God" (94) and that they draw on the Capuchin doctrine of referring the creatures.

The two chapters devoted to John Norris demonstrate another strength offset by a characteristic weakness. The biographical portrait of the reclusive pastor rivals in its wit Christopher Hill's account of the eccentric Welsh prophet, Arise Evans. Unlike Hill, however, who gracefully acknowledges that his subject is a "tiny footnote to history," Grant feels compelled to justify at length the inclusion of Norris in his study. His claims for the significance of Norris's rejection of poetry in favour of extensive philosophical disputes with John Locke remain unconvincing. The fact that Norris was a poet of quite limited talents prior to his recantation, and that

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writers like Dryden continued to produce poetry unhampered by the
philosophers' attacks on the imagination suggests that what Grant inflates
into a "direct confrontation between philosophy and poetic practice" (209) is
in this particular instance less a matter for serious debate than for en-
tertaining social history.

Perhaps the most puzzling fault of Grant's book is its inconsistent, often
naive, sense of genre. We are reminded that for Augustine and Boccaccio,
"Allegory . . . is not simply the depiction of a preconceived set of abstractions
by a parallel set of images. It is a mimesis of the way in which images par-
ticipate in the mysterious and imageless fullness of intellectual vision." (10)
A sophisticated appreciation of allegory is crucial to Grant's entire
argument—in fact, the omission of Bunyan is indefensible. When Grant
ponders alternative readings of *The Tempest*, however, his use of the term is
rigid and simplistic. Shakespeare's play, "does not reduce simply to
allegory," (68) nor does Miranda represent a "simple allegory." (81) Grant
here ignores what any critic raised on Augustine should remember. His grasp
of the inherently ironic nature of drama is more tenuous yet. The following
passage baffles me in its awestruck discovery of the most basic generic truths.

Although *The Faerie Queene* also provides countless examples of contrasting
ways of seeing things, Spenser does not at all so consciously manipulate the
perspectives of the characters themselves to show each of them offering a
special interpretation of what the nature of things is. But throughout *The Tem-
pest* are many juxtaposed view points, each with a claim to validity, and we
constantly observe people in the process of seeing things their own way and
then we attempt to make our own judgement on the adequacy of the images
they choose to make significant, and in which they may be said separately to
believe . . . Shakespeare observes rather than dwells in the image-making
process he describes, and the *The Tempest* becomes a dramatization, not sim-
ply an expression, of the Augustinian type of theory. (pp. 64-65)

The fact that dramatic perspective differs from epic narration in its tactics
and that an audience (which Grant misnames the reader in this chapter)
discriminates between contrasting viewpoints when watching a play may be
news to Grant, but I suspect it is not to the majority of his readers.

In her recent review of Renaissance non-dramatic scholarship in 1979, An-
nabel Patterstn issued a helpful warning about the recycling of articles in
books. Grant must do considerable wrenching to fit his articles on *The Tem-
pest* and *Paradise Regained* into his current thesis. In each case, the
argument was more succinctly and coherently stated in the original version;
in neither was the transplant warranted. The problem of sustaining logical
consistency in a book that embraces so many diverse figures as Grant's at-
tempts to do is one with which we can all sympathize. He would be well ad-
vised, however, either to publish his next book as a collection of disparate ar-
ticles or to choose his thesis and relevant texts with greater care.

University of Toronto

H. Jennifer Brady

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*Freud, Jews and Other Germans. Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture.*
By Peter Gay, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Pp. XVI, 289.
$12.95. Oxford University Press paperback, 1979, $3.95.

This is an important book for those interested in German-Jewish relations, German culture, and Modernism and their interrelationship. The "heart of this collection" of essays is a skillful, incisive probing of interactions between Jewish and other Germans at "the high point in the arc of German-Jewish hope", the Wilhelmian era. This is not another Holcaust narrative. Instead, the author goes beyond the well-documented and oft-repeated and, more successfully than others, comes to terms with this difficult issue intellectually and morally.

Gay's success did not come easily. Not that Gay lacked the intellect; he is a highly respected historian. The difficulty for Gay, as it is for most who are challenged by the topic, was one of emotion. He belongs to a group of brilliant Jewish emigrees, like Einstein, Bruno Walter, Kissinger for example, who fled Hitler's Germany. Like many other victims, he suffered personal losses, hated things German, and thought that the only good German was a dead German. Gay transcended his sufferings and his emotions. These essays, therefore, are a very personal work. They are also evidence of a splen-did mind at work, examples of cultural history at its best. Most of the essays, like "Sigmund Freud", "Encounter with Modernism", "The Berlin-Jewish Spirit", "Hermann Levi", "Aimez-vous Brahms?", and "For Beckmesser", have been published previously. Some have been revised. All are now more accessible to the reading public by virtue of this publication.

Common to all the essays is a refreshing, intelligent dismantling of long accepted myths. For example, much has been made of Freud's participation in the uniquely Viennese cultural milieu at the turn of the century. Gay not only proposes that "Freud lives far less in Austrian Vienna than in his own mind." but that "Vienna, that distinctive, impalpable, all-pervasive, electric atmosphere in which everyone who counted, and everyone who was anyone acted both as teacher and pupil in an intense, continuing seminar on Modernist culture—that Vienna is an invention of cultural historians in search of quick explanations" (pp. 33-34). How often do scholars and intellectuals in search of vicarious excitement create false images of places and times? No doubt the Vienna of popular myth is attractive and stirs the imagination, if not the intellect. But did it exist? If Freud was not typically Viennese or Austrian, what was he? Gay points out that most of Freud's teachers and associates were "famous Germans from Germany". Freud was more a participant in a "larger German culture" rather than a crucial and active figure in *fin de siècle* Viennese intellectual circles.

Gay's most important correctives concern German Jews of the Wilhelmian era who, he asserts "made distinctive contributions to German culture, as Germans far more than Jews" (p. 93). Looking backward from the

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Holocaust, many writers have assumed that the gulf between Germans and German Jews was irreconcilable. Gay thinks not. To contemporaries anti-Semitism in Germany seemed less dangerous than in Russia or France. Integration appeared to be advancing steadily. Many a German Jew, such as the painter Liebermann, saw no incompatibility between German culture and Jewish faith. Gay argues that while Jews as individuals contributed to German culture, their contribution was not recognizably Jewish. Gay disputes the existence of an identifiable Jewish-German culture.

Modernism, the author points out has frequently been viewed as a Jewish phenomenon. Gay thinks otherwise. He demonstrates, for example, that the German avant garde was not preponderantly Jewish. In fact, most were not Jewish, and many Jews were far from Modern. According to Gay, the claim for intimacy or even identity between Modernism and Jewishness, made paradoxically by both anti and philo-Semites, is not valid: "There was nothing in the Jewish cultural heritage, and little in their particular social situation, that would make them into cultural rebels, into principled modernists" (p. 101). Gay attacks the stereotype of the Jew as a restless and clever individual and furthermore notes: "There is a historical and sociological study that desperately needs to be undertaken: that of stupid Jews" (p. 99).

In "Encounter with Modernism" and "The Berlin-Jewish Spirit", the author provides perceptive vignettes of German Jews, and analyses their contributions to German culture. Gay notes that Jews, like other Germans, were to be found in every political, social, philosophical and cultural camp in Germany. He can find a Berlin but no "Jewish" spirit. German Jews wanted to be like other Germans and were, as Gay forcefully demonstrates. Other Germans, however, would not grant them this wish, as exemplified in the essay "Hermann Levi: A Study in Self-Service and Self-Hatred". Levi, the "most accomplished conductor in the German Empire who was also a Jew" (p. 189), worshipped the anti-Semite Wagner and obsequiously sought his respect. Through this case study Gay illuminates Jewish self-hatred which afflicted a number of prominent Jewish-Germans such as Walter Rathenau, Heinrich Heine and Kurt Tucholsky. Criticism of Jews, especially eastern European Jews—anti-Semitism—marks the most poignant stage of Jewish efforts to be accepted as equals, as Germans.

Gay's analysis is masterly, but it is not without problems. His case for the "Germanness of Jewish high culture" is convincing, but were "Germanness" and "Jewishness" identical as Cohen claimed? Was Jewishness merely a matter of accepting Judaism? How could one become "more of a Jew without becoming less of a German" (p. 120)? What does Gay mean when he writes: "Wassermann hopelessly longed to be all his life, a secular saint, a Christian Jew and Jewish Christian" (p. 150) or that the writer Steinheim was "wholly non-Jewish in feeling" (p. 146)? Gay increases the confusion when he writes of "non-Jewish Jews", "Jewish agnostics, Jewish atheists, Jewish Catholics, and Jewish Lutherans" (p. 174). He notes that "ethnic characterizations are

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the fruit, not of insight, but ignorance" (p. 145) but then states: "He [Liebermann] was even a strict Jew, certainly not in a religious sense, but in this: that he watched jealously and suspiciously to see that no Jew sin against his race and religion by unworthy conduct and thus burden himself with heavy guilt for Jewry as a whole" (p. 182).

Despite the confusion about Germanness and Jewishness, this collection of essays contributes much to an understanding of European history at the turn of the century. Like his hero, Freud, Gay seeks to be scrupulously honest. He peels away layers of easy answers and facile generalizations which obscure truth. Furthermore, he makes the esoteric accessible and whets the reader's appetite for more of the same. One need not be familiar with Freud or Brahms to appreciate Gay's comments and thoughts. This is a book well worth reading.

St. Thomas University

Juergen Doerr

*White House Years*. By Henry Kissinger. Boston: Little Brown and Com- pany, 1979. Pp. xxiv, 1521. $20.00.

The memoirs of retired statesmen for the most part have not proven to be the most edifying or enlightening documents for historians, particularly when the statesman in question does not regard his retirement as permanent. In the United States, where prestigious lawyers have frequently been recruited for positions of authority in foreign affairs, the normal reticence of members of that profession reinforces a tendency to obscure the actual processes of policy making behind a curtain of generalizations, banal homilies, and careful attention to minutiae. There is perhaps some significance in the fact that no American secretary of state since Dean Acheson has even bothered to publish memoirs, keeping in mind that the volume reviewed here covers the period 1969-72 when Dr. Kissinger was national security adviser. Presidents, of course, have been quite voluble by contrast, as befits career politicians, although the products of their labours have ranged from the defensive rationalizations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to the benumbing tedium of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Henry Kissinger, to be sure, comes from an altogether different background and tradition, and his audience naturally anticipates a more penetrating and objective analysis of foreign policy decisions from an established scholar, even though his previous publications too often affected the ponderous generalizing that predominated academic commentary on foreign affairs in the Cold War era. Ponderous generalization there is indeed in this heavy (1476 page) tome, particularly on such matters as the origins of

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the Cold War: "The United States despite itself had become the guardian of the new equilibrium" (page 60); or on the sources of student unrest in the 1960s: "the metaphysical despair of those who saw before them a life of af-fluence in a spiritual desert" (page 299). Minutiae and extraneous detail are also abundant: on page 349 the reader is treated to a careful paragraph on the exact number and distribution of incidents of violence on Arab-Israeli borders in 1968-69. On page 279 we learn of the exact position of the American negotiators at their first meeting with the North Vietnamese in 1969: "seated on sofas . . . with its back to the Rue de Rivoli, leaving the view of the Tuileries Gardens to the Vietnamese." On page 440 we are told of the state of the chairs ("red and heavily upholstered") at Kissinger's initial meeting with Hanoi's special envoy Le Duc Tho.

Naturally there is also defensive pleading. The Americans were dragged unwittingly into the Cambodian crisis in April 1970 after the fall of Prince Sihanouk. There was not even a C.I.A. listening post in Phnom Penh when the coup took place, largely because of pressures from dovish elements in the United States Congress; and since Sihanouk had tacitly accepted American bombing in eastern Cambodia to counterbalance the North Vietnamese presence in that area, the Americans had no incentive to stimulate or even applaud the change in regimes. Nixon's hard line on widening the war was influenced by such extraneous factors as his nervousness over the fate of the Apollo 13 mission and his visceral desire to demonstrate that he could be more bellicose than Spiro Agnew at national security meetings. On C.I.A. actions to block the election of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 Kissinger argues that the United States has a right to move "in this gray area between diplomacy and military intervention," but in any case this particular effort was "amateurish, being improvised in panic and executed in confusion. The 'covert operations' never got off the ground" (page 677). Even under his masterful direction American foreign policy was clumsy, inhibited by bureaucrats and misguided congressional zealots, not to mention the ec-centricities of his employer, and these two most controversial episodes of the Nixon-Kissinger era were the products of reactions to unexpected events, not careful deliberation and planning.

Yet for all these conventional features of the political memoir, Kissinger's rendition of events also contains unusual and valuable glimpses of the processes of foreign policy. His account of the marathon negotiations with Le Duc Tho, which understandably preoccupies most of the latter part of this chronologically organized book and provides a running theme throughout it, is detailed and insightful, punctuated by short dissertations on the tactics and strategy of negotiating from a position that he characterizes as relatively weak, a significant admission from a key figure in an administration that adhered publicly to the conventional American Cold War doctrine of negotiating only from strength. Beyond this analytical dimension, there are times when the narrative acquires a dramatic momentum rarely achieved in the tedious historiography of diplomatic negotiations.

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Kissinger is in fact a finer stylist than might be expected on the basis of his previous works. His narrative may lack the rolling cadences and eloquence of a Winston Churchill or Harold Nicolson, and his characterizations are less biting than those of Dean Acheson, but he writes lucidly and with an appreciation for the complexity of individual character that belies his image as the prototype for Dr. Strangelove.

Characteristically Kissinger's comments seem most apt when dealing with his counterparts, particularly those on the other side of the negotiating table, even when—as in the case of the "monomaniacal" Le Duc Tho or the "condescending" Indira Gandhi—the individual is perceived as fundamentally unlovable. His treatment of Nixon is neither defensive nor dispassionate: an "oddly vulnerable . . . lonely and tormented man" who shrank from personal confrontations and sought to balance an image of toughness with a "vista of promise . . . a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen friendships, and give new hope to emerging nations." (page 1476). Kissinger does, to be sure, bowdlerize his Nixon a bit: that statesman's remarks about "State department jerks" and "lily-livered Am-bassadors from our so-called friends in the world" are relegated to footnotes. Nevertheless his portrait is probably the best we will ever have from an in-timate of the American Tiberius.

Less edifying, or at any rate less novel, is Kissinger's treatment of the broad themes of change in international affairs in his term in authority. The continuing Cold War confrontation, the growing Russian military threat, the need for American "credibility" to deter Soviet agression and foster deten-tate—these are the pervasive themes of this volume. The rapprochement with China, the Bangladesh crisis, "Black September" in Jordan are all develop-ments knit into the broader fabric of Soviet-American relations. Kissinger does pay attention to the growing strains in the Atlantic alliance and the dif-ficult adjustments with the Japanese, but these matters are treated episodically, their long term implications neglected. The concerns of un-derdeveloped nations and the emerging nationalism of these regions does not figure in his account, save when these issues impinge upon the changing structure of East-West accords. His gratuitous defense of the Shah of Iran as "that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally . . . one whose understanding of the world situation enhanced our own" (page 1261) reflects Kissinger's van-tage point. Could this be the same Shah whose quest for oil revenues would shortly transform the distribution of global economic power, divide the Western allies, and stimulate a decade of bickering between industrial and non-industrial nations over the division of world resources?

Kissinger is clearly in his element when playing a complex Great Power game with Russia and China, and his account of these developments is as clear as his diplomacy was dexterous. But there is less evidence of his un-derstanding of the new economic and political pressures in the world: the

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multinational corporations, the commodity rich nations, the amalgam of religious and political zealotry that are features of our current international nightmare. These problems he ignored until overtaken by them in 1973-76, and the record indicates he coped with them with far less finesse. We must await his next volume ("Foggy Bottom Years"?) to determine if Kissinger has been able to incorporate these unanticipated experiences into his view of the world.

Dalhousie University

Graham D. Taylor

*Sartre's Theory of Literature.* By Christina Howells. London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979. Pp. viii, 251. $31.50 (U.S.). Paper.

In 1954 Irving Howe noted with distress the "appalling" desire of a generation of graduate students to be "critics." Their criticism would not, however, accompany the "writing of poetry or the changing of the world or the study of man and God." No, they would be, instead, "just critics—as if criticism were a subject, as if one could be a critic without having at least four non-literary opinions." Among those quondam graduate students are to be found a number of the luminaries of contemporary criticism. But they have abandoned their "new critical" fathers for Parisian godfathers and have instilled in a new generation of graduate students a much more subtle notion than their fathers had of the self-referentiality of literature. And they have provided their students with more complex tools for examining the self-enclosure of the literary Text. Indeed, that latter word, in the course of twenty-five years, has seen its initial letter rise from lower to upper case.

Among the Parisian godfathers of contemporary "literary theory" we will not find Jean-Paul Sartre. He was never "just" a critic. His effort to align existential freedom with Marxism was part of an effort to "change the world." And while he made no study of God, he did propose an ontology in which Man is the being who aspires to divinity! For Sartre literature could never be limited to the "literariness" and fictiveness that define the interests of the semiotics, structuralism, and deconstructionism that have displaced the critical idiom of an earlier generation. Far from being self-referential, literature was, for Sartre, an act of dévoilement, a disclosure of the world.

Christina Howells' superb monograph reminds us how far Sartre's criticism was from the textual fetishism that is now *à la mode* in Paris and the major universities of this continent. At the same time, she makes clear that Sartre was profoundly aware of the "*Critique du Signifiant*" and that he managed to incorporate much of it into his own distinctive view of "*la réalité humaine*" and the literary activity that reveals the "lived experience" of this

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reality. One of the virtues of her study is its limited focus, its strict concern with the "theory of literature" that emerges in Sartre's work from his essays of the 1930s, through the period of "committed literature" of the post-war years, to the studies of Genet and Flaubert of the 1950s and the late 1960s.

She outlines with great care the principal concerns that guided Sartre's theorizing about literature—his distinctions between "perception" and "imagination," between "terrorism" and "rhetoric," and between "signification" and "sens"—and does not allow herself to be tempted into the dangerous waters of *Being and Nothingness* and *Critique of Dialectical Reason*. She is not, however, philosophically naive, and when it is necessary to clarify Sartre's critical activity by reference to those philosophical works she does so with a sure hand. Indeed, she is particularly effective in detailing the importance for Sartre's criticism of his *L'Imaginaire* of 1940. But one regrets her linguistic purism and her refusal to offer translations for her citations from Sartre. Nor does she seem to be concerned with the linguistic nuances that would justify her refusal.

On the other hand, her book benefits from her familiarity with nineteenth-century French literature (indispensable in a study of a man who wrote on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Flaubert) and with contemporary French criticism. In her chapter on Sartre's *Baudelaire*, for example, she outlines the importance for Sartre's thinking of French Romantic aesthetics and the extent to which he and Baudelaire shared a Romantic frame-of-reference. This is no minor point, for Sartre's book has often been attacked as a "reduction" (the tic-like response of "just critics" to a critic who has more than four non-literary opinions) of the poet to the categories of Sartrean ontology.

But one regrets that Howells did not concern herself with Sartre's comment of 1969 that *Baudelaire* was "very inadequate" and "extremely bad." She may have assumed that this dismissal merely indicated the progressive complexity of an enterprise in which *Saint Genet* represented an advance over *Baudelaire* and in which the massive study of Flaubert, *L'Idiot de la Famille*, represented an advance over *Saint Genet*. My own impression is, however, that Sartre meant that *Baudelaire* was schematic and facile. Howells notes that the famous *Qu'est-ce que la littérature?* of 1948 was marred by a polemical zeal that led Sartre to simplify important and complex views of language he had worked out in earlier essays on Blanchot, Bataille, and Parain. It seems likely that *Baudelaire* suffered equally from Sartre's post-war polemics.

But Howells has performed a major service by her detailed exposition of the formidable *L'Idiot de la Famille* and by her careful analysis of Sartre's response to his structuralist adversaries. The competition had improved since the late 1940s and Sartre could not get away with mere polemics. Howells makes clear that Sartre borrowed considerably from the linguistic theories so important to structuralism and that he adapted his borrowings to his growing emphasis on the manner in which human freedom is alienated. She concen-

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trates on Sartre's adaptation of the Lacanian view that man "is spoken" by language and on his increasing willingness to incorporate into his thought the "facts" of psychoanalysis while rejecting the "mechanistic mythology" of Freudian theory. But if Sartre's later thought pays greater tribute than did *Being and Nothingness* to the limitations on freedom, Howells never forgets that Sartre is the incorrigible defender of that freedom and the proponent of the view that man can be spoken only to the degree that he first speaks in freedom. Her analysis of Sartre's view of language is indispensable in this regard, outlining as it does his insistence that literature seeks always to reveal the lived experience of the self, and his extraordinary analysis of Flaubert's effort to forge a style that would not only communicate the singularity of his life but, across that singularity, the universal experience of his age.

Howells also reminds us of Sartre's old distinction between "terrorists" and "rhetoricians." The Terrorists believe that language can never be adequate to the thought it seeks to express. In their frustration they become mesmerized by the play of language itself, by the *signifiant*, not the *signifié*. Rhetoricians, on the other hand, are linguistic optimists who refuse to be cowed by language and who believe (with Sartre) that "*La Vérité est toujours 'disable'.*' They would applaud Sartre's effort, in the *Flaubert*, to answer the question, "What can we know about a man today?"

Those who seek an answer to the "critical terrorists" who insist, today, that literature turns endlessly in the orbit of its literariness would be wise to consult Howells' book. It will not do to cite, against Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida, the achievements of Johnson, Arnold, and Leavis. The theoretical equipment of Terrorism is too powerful to be overthrown by pious nostalgia. Sartre's is the only modern critical enterprise that can match in power Terrorist theories of literature. Humanists will have to risk its rigours and its refusal to divorce literary criticism from those bodies of knowledge (philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytical) that help us to know what a man is. But the disgruntled critics who are now whining about the influence ("over our best students") of the Parisian godfathers will have to overcome their ridiculous and anti-intellectual obsession with "reductiveness." They will need, that is, to purge themselves of the Terrorist-within-them. Howells will show them that a "theory of literature" that begins, *axiomatically*, with a view of freedom is not reductive. Vive la Liberté!

University of Toronto

T.H. Adamowski

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*In Due Season*. By Christine van der Mark. Intro. by Dorothy Livesay. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1979. Pp. 372. $14.95. Paper, $6.95.

This book was published first by Oxford University Press (Toronto) in 1947. The novel presents a picture of a rural community in northern Alberta in the thirties. A woman, Lina Ashley, struggles to survive on an isolated homestead with only her old father and her young child, Poppy. The old man dies, and though Lina's husband returns briefly, he only fathers another child, and Lina must resume her solitary but stubborn struggle to make the land yield her a living: "But in due season, we shall reap, if we faint not."

Lina does not faint, but she becomes grim and unforgiving. She loses her sense of community as she deals harshly with a neighbour whose land she wants, and she loses contact with her daughter who turns for comfort, and eventually for love, to Jay Baptiste, a Metis. Poppy runs off to the bush with Jay, and Lina rejects her second child because of the role he has taken in the affair. Lina's legacy is the land, "tranquil, beautiful, utterly still," for which she has sacrificed everything. The day is sullen as the book opens; as it closes, Lina, who has systematically repressed her feelings, crouches and begins "mechanically to milk."

The first half of the book achieves a certain dramatic tension arising out of Lina's struggle to establish herself on the land, but once her success is assured, this clear focus blurs. Poppy's story could have provided material for a strong continuation of the narrative line, but as the child matures she weakens rather than evolves as a character, and the relationship between Poppy and Jay is given only sketchy treatment. What is emphasized in the second half of the narrative is local colour. Attention shifts to the community at Bear Claw, e.g., Miss Walker's school, Mrs. Howe's store, a revival meeting, a Valentine dance, a court case involving a Cree Indian, etc. Though vividly presented, this material is extrinsic to the main narrative. Livesay's suggestion in the introduction that the book has "sociological as well as literary significance" raises reader expectations that are bound to be disappointed. It would be fairer to say that the book has some literary value, but that its significance is principally sociological.

Livesay also praises the book for being "one of the first, if not the first, Canadian novel wherein the plight of the Native Indian and the Metis is honestly and painfully recorded." Others have made similar comments. Though there is some painful recording of fact (all the Two Knives children have lice), van der Mark romantically stresses the Indians' "free primitive movements, the firelight playing on happy faces." In fact, Lina's husband, Sim, is inspired to leave her a second time by the sight and sound of the "strange beating and singing" at the Indian encampment. When Poppy flees with Jay, he has become a romantic figure in a beautiful white embroidered parka.

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An earlier book which presents a sharp contrast to *In Due Season* is Hubert Evans' British Columbia novel *The New Front Line* (1927). In a reversal of van der Mark's approach, Evans romanticizes white pioneer labour on the land and treats the Indians realistically. Van der Mark deserves credit for making clear that what is pioneering for one ethnic group is displacement for another. Too often the pioneer experience is presented as if the native peoples are invisible, but *In Due Season* does sometimes sound like *The Noble Savage*.

Van der Mark's novel was worth reprinting, but given its limitations, no very large audience for the work is likely to develop. It will be of greatest interest to specialists in Canadian studies and Canadian women's studies. The author's daughter, Dorothy Wise, contributes a useful afterword about her parent to this re-issue. Van der Mark, who died in 1969, published another novel set in Alberta called *Honey in the Rock* (1966).

Dalhousie University

E.L. Bobak

SPECIAL FEATURE

Theodore Draper

Kissinger's Apologia

In the first pages of the first volume of his memoirs, Henry Kissinger remarks with some bitterness about the way he was treated by McGeorge Bundy, his dean at Harvard and a predecessor as National Security Adviser to the President. It was "with a combination of politeness and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people of, by New England standards, exotic backgrounds and excessively personal style." By any standards, Kissinger's book is also exotic and excessively, if understandably, personal. It is numbingly long and stupefyingly detailed. It runs on and on for almost 1,500 pages; it needs over 400 pages to get through the first year of his service in 1969 alone. It is largely a chronicle of events, with set pieces on famous and infamous people whom he met or worked with, bits and pieces of potted history, and scatterings of familiar reflections and ruminations to leaven the lump. The main narrative pushes on relentlessly, often week by week or day by day and sometimes even hour by hour. Since this volume ends in 1972, we must be resigned to another volume; and about 3,000 pages before Kissinger tells all. Dean Acheson, who served longer and participated in much greater history-shaking events, needed only one volume and a quarter as many pages to tell his entire story.

In at least one respect, the book is, by any previous standards, exotic. I know of no diplomatic memoirs that are so un-diplomatically indiscreet. Some of Kissinger's pen portraits of colleagues in his own government, including the president under whom he served, can only be described as scathing. His frequently savage denigrations

are scarcely alleviated by his habit of following them with a few kind words, as if to take the sting out of them or protect himself from the accusation of unmitigated malice. A typical exhibition of this technique of wound-ing and salving is his comparatively friendly treatment of former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. Laird was often "Byzantine" in his political maneuvers; his good humor was often "rascally"; he was the "probable source" of any newspaper story he complained about; he could be "maddening"; he was a "master-leaker of trivialities." But Laird was also "magnificent—strong, loyal, daring and eloquent" in crises. One gets the impression that Laird was not a man one would want to buy the proverbial second-hand car from. And the Secretary of Defense comes out relatively untarnished compared with the President and Secretary of State who, besides Kissinger himself, are the key figures in the drama that slowly but inexorably unfolds.

The drama began when Richard Nixon unexpectedly invited Kissinger to become his Assistant for National Security Affairs in November 1968. I happened to exchange some words with Kissinger at a conference in Princeton that same week. Kissinger was still dazed by the appointment. I wondered aloud how long he would hold his new job. Kissinger said that he would be lucky to hold it for six months. I was not the only one to whom he spoke at this time in this vein. I tried to be more optimistic—he would not come out too badly if he held on to it for a year. No one who had known him in previous years (my own acquaintanceship with him went back to 1944 in the 84th Infantry Division) could have

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predicted that he would long survive in Washington's political jungle. Yet he not only survived; he managed, without any political constituency, by sheer force of intellect and personality, to outlast the President whose native habitat was in the darkest recesses of that jungle. He was appointed Secretary of State four year later by a jealous Nixon who already resented his subordinate's disproportionate share of credit for the conduct of foreign policy, which was Nixon's special pride and exclusive prerogative. Kissinger largely succeeded in extricating himself from the Nixon administration's disgrace and downfall. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, even found it necessary as almost his first order of business to announce Kissinger's retention to restore some confidence in the shaky new presidency.

Considering where he came from and how far he had to go, Kissinger's feat in Washington was an authentic *tour de force*. The same must be said of his memoirs, whatever opinion one may have of his ideas and policies. His book conveys much of the brute force, the intellectual virtuosity, and the insatiable appetite for power that enabled him to come out on the top, only slightly soiled, of a political dunghill. It is not for the average reader; I can sympathize with those reviewers who have dealt with it impressionistically; it would require another book to do justice to it substantively. Yet its very flaws contribute to its ultimate impressiveness—the inexhaustible self-absorption, the endless assault of detail, the craving for vindication. One thing is certain—no one who wishes to think or write about the world events of the 1970s can ignore it.

How did Kissinger do it? More of the answer than was previously accessible comes out, consciously or not, in these pages. The more he tells us about his triumphs and travails, the more disquieting they become.

The necessary condition for Kissinger's rise was an odd couple—Richard Nixon and William Rogers.

Kissinger's Nixon is a study in political pathology. There were, according to Kissinger, two Nixons—the one that functioned or malfunctioned most of the time in periods of relative stability, the other one that acted spasmodically when confronted by a crisis or critical decision.

The first Nixon was “weird” in his administrative approach. “He was almost physically unable to confront people who disagreed with him; and he shunned persuading people or inspiring his subordinates.” He made decisions “inside his self-imposed cocoon.” He saw himself as “the lonely embattled leader propping up faltering associates.” Yet he distrusted his associates so intensely that he worked to tear them down. Obsessed by past resentments and suspicions of betrayal, he lived in a self-induced ambience of ubiquitous enemies. He resented and suspected most of all the members of his Cabinet and the bureaucracies that served them. At the same time he was incapable of giving direct orders to or imposing discipline on even his Cabinet. He was “petty in calm periods” and “small-minded in dealing with his associates.” He was rancorous and vindictive—more so in victory than in defeat. The preoccupation of his White House with public relations was “monomaniacal.” Nixon had such an uncontrollable tendency to give impetuous and irresponsible orders that he depended on his subordinates, Kissinger in foreign and H. R. Haldeman in domestic policy, to save him from himself by disregarding his instructions until he had cooled off. He dreaded meeting new people. In negotiations, which he tried desperately to avoid, “he was nervous to the point of anxiety.” He sought refuge, in dealing with foreign leaders, in laboriously memorized memoranda or escape into “general observations.” His skill at avoiding unpleasant subjects was “finely-honed.” He was so insecure that he constantly needed “reassurance” from the few persons close to him. He could be “maddening” in calm times.

Kissinger enjoys showing Nixon at his crassest. One story, with which Kissinger must have regaled countless dinner parties,

has Nixon memorials like the late DameCAT, who of the rest was faux pas. On another appropriate occasion by citing her professor’s successful marriages, this tale was Kings locally, in Killy, “strange” for a president, Exotic is cóil, the second crisis or duty. Kissinger gave me to understand that he was “extremely his “strategic” “not by nature himself to do” The attributions and almost total bestows on him out of his own memory, a gpt now sorely

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has Nixon planning to go straight from a memorial Mass for Charles de Gaulle at Notre Dame Cathedral to the gastronomic pleasures of the restaurant Maxim's, a "mind-boggling" *faux pas* from which Kissinger rescued him. On another occasion, Nixon thought it appropriate to congratulate the Shah of Iran by citing one of former President Eisenhower's profundities to the effect that all successful political leaders had in common marriages "above themselves." Kissinger ends this tale with the punch line: "The King of Kings looked off into the distance with melancholy." Kissinger's president was surely, in Kissinger's words, a "flawed" and "strange" man. Has anyone who ever worked for a president described him in these terms? Exotic is one word for it.

The second Nixon emerged only in times of crisis or during the need for critical decisions. Kissinger gives him the saving grace of being able to make "lonely decisions" that were "extremely courageous" and demonstrated his "strategic grasp." Nixon was, to be sure, "not by nature courageous," but he "steeled himself to conspicuous acts of rare courage." The attribute of courage in crisis is the highest and almost the only praise that Kissinger bestows on Nixon, sometimes to take the sting out of his less admirable traits. Nixon in his own memoirs treats Kissinger much more gently, a gentlemanly restraint that he may now sorely regret.

Kissinger's Rogers is a study in political sadomasochism. The sadism was Nixon's, the masochism Rogers's. Kissinger says that Nixon told him at their first meeting before his appointment that he regarded Rogers as the "ideal man" for Secretary of State, for one reason because Rogers was unfamiliar with foreign affairs, for another because Rogers was "one of the toughest, most cold-eyed, self-centered, and ambitious men" Nixon had ever met. At that preliminary meeting, according to Nixon's memoirs, Kissinger advised him to build up a "national security apparatus" in the White House to coordinate foreign and defense policies and develop "policy options." Since Nixon planned in any case "to direct foreign policy from the White House," this

recommendation suited both of them—Nixon to have a foreign-policy "apparatus" at his immediate disposal, Kissinger to be its coordinator and developer. Nixon's appointment of Kissinger was something of a fluke. He hardly knew Kissinger, but one of the things he says he knew was that Kissinger had made "disparaging comments" about him—a mild version of what Kissinger used to say about Nixon. Nevertheless, Nixon was sufficiently impressed by a single encounter with Kissinger to decide on the spur of the moment to offer him the post of National Security Adviser "in an uncharacteristically impulsive way." One of the things that must have endeared Kissinger to Nixon was the former's immediate advice to make the White House itself the headquarters of a foreign-policy and defense "apparatus."

Other presidents have appointed weak secretaries of state in order to direct their own foreign policy. But there has never been a case as shameful and indecent as that of Nixon's treatment of his old, "personal friend," William Rogers. In his memoirs, Nixon added indignity to injury by calling Rogers "a strong administrator" and "a resourceful negotiator." Rogers was given to administer a single area of policy, and that only for a time. If he was as tough, cold-eyed, self-centered, and ambitious as Nixon described him before Rogers took office, then Nixon deliberately set out to humiliate him.

The bone Nixon was originally willing to throw to Rogers was Middle Eastern policy. He chose this one, according to Kissinger, for thoroughly malicious reasons. If everything else was reserved for the White House, Rogers had to be given something with which to occupy himself. At the same time, however, Nixon believed that any active policy in the Middle East was then doomed to failure and to stir up domestic hostility against anyone identified with it. The ill-fated Rogers Plan, of December 1969, which Nixon says he knew all the time had no chance of being accepted by Israel and which made Rogers, "as Kissinger frequently reminded me, 'the most unpopular man in Israel,'" exactly suited what Nixon had in mind for Rogers.

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Otherwise, Rogers and the State Depart-
ment were deliberately and systematically
depived of every other area or policy that
traditionally pertained to them. This move
was initiated by Nixon almost immediately in
February 1969 with respect to Soviet-
American negotiations. Kissinger's and Nix-
on's divergent explanations of how it was
accomplished show each of them retrospec-
tively making the other responsible. Kissinger
explains that Nixon "wished to establish his
dominance over negotiations with the Soviet
Union" and, therefore, "required the exclu-
sion of Rogers, who might be too anxious and
who might claim credit for whatever progress
might be made"—this before Rogers was even
given a chance to show what "a resourceful
negotiator" he was. Nixon, on the other hand,
relates that "Kissinger had suggested that we
develop a private channel between Dobrynin
and him"—and Nixon agreed. In any case,
Rogers was left out of the first meeting
between Nixon and Soviet Ambassador
Anatoly Dobrynin. Rogers must have sensed
what was happening because much of a
weekend was spent, Kissinger says, "fighting
off Rogers's pleas—basically not
unjustified"—to attend. At this meeting,
Nixon set up privately with Dobrynin the first
of the notorious "back channels" that effec-
tively cut the State Department out of Soviet-
American policy and made it the monopoly of
the White House, which, in practice, meant
Kissinger and his "apparatus."

GRADUALLY, the maw of Kissinger's "back
channel" swallowed up one area, issue, and
policy after another. After the Soviet connec-
tion came SALT, the strategic arms limitation
talks. The Vietnamese negotiations followed
suit. China was next. If Kissinger had had his
way, according to Nixon, Rogers and the
State Department would not even have been
permitted to gnaw away at the bare bone of
the Middle East. Kissinger "bridled" at
Nixon's assignment of all Middle Eastern
problems to Rogers in 1969 and 1970 and
tried to get them for himself too. By 1970,
relations between Kissinger and Rogers had
deteriorated to such an extent that, Kissinger

says, the two of them could not engage in a
"rational discussion." By the end of that year,
Nixon almost automatically approved Kis-
singer's "tactical management of foreign
policy" on a day-by-day basis, though the
President still reserved for himself the
ultimate decisions, especially in a crisis. By
1971, Kissinger succeeded in adding Middle
East diplomacy to his laurels, leaving Rogers
totally naked of responsibility for foreign
policy and not even knowing most of the time
what was going on. After 1971, Kissinger
could not recall a single occasion when Nixon
made any change in a negotiation once
Kissinger had set it in motion.

This system led to situations that would be
ludicrous if the consequences had not been so
serious. Time after time, the President,
Kissinger reveals, lied to his Secretary of State
and, on occasion, to his Secretary of Defense
as well. He lied to cover up decisions he had
made months earlier without their know-
ledge. He lied to Rogers about Kissinger's first
trip to China in 1971. He again lied to Rogers
about Kissinger's trip to Moscow in 1972. He
lied to both the Secretary of Defense and
Secretary of State about the number of
American troops to be withdrawn from South
Vietnam. Nixon even asked Soviet leader
Brezhnev's cooperation to deceive Rogers.

The secrecy and duplicity with which
Nixon, assisted by Kissinger, conducted
foreign policy inevitably resulted in
tragicomic confusion and cross-purposes.
The American SALT negotiator, Gerard C.
Smith, was more than once put in the
humiliating position of bargaining with
Soviet representatives without knowing what
Kissinger had already agreed to. In 1971,
Kissinger managed three negotiations in three
months, and in all of these, as he put it, "the
regular bureaucracy had not participated,
indeed, was unaware" of their very existence.
In one of them U.S. Ambassador in Bonn
Kenneth Rush followed Kissinger's orders
"without the knowledge of his own State
Department." During the India-Pakistan
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236

[L]

members of the same team, and the President sought to have his way by an indirection that compounded the internal stresses of our government." In December 1971, we are told, neither the Secretary of State nor the Secretary of Defense nor anyone from their departments was permitted to attend a "crucial meeting, where, as it turned out, the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship was taken."

This Nixonian practice was not merely "weird"; it was a gross perversion of the American system of government. Kissinger observed and lent himself to it; he relates the circumstances with no more than an occasional expression of wonderment about how odd the whole procedure was. "Weird" is hardly the word for it; it was diseased. The disease permeates Kissinger's pages and contaminated all who came in contact with it.

We can now begin to get the answer to the question: How did Kissinger do it?

But first, there is another related question: Why did Richard Nixon subject his old, "personal friend," Bill Rogers, to such humiliation and degradation? Kissinger volunteers an explanation that must be seen to be believed.

During the 1950s, Kissinger relates, Rogers was the "psychologically dominant partner" in the friendship with Nixon. Memory of his formerly dominant role may have reinforced Rogers's alleged "tendency" to disagree with Nixon and to refuse to do battle for him "at critical junctures." This background leads into Kissinger's extraordinary interpretation of the pathological relationship between the President and Secretary of State:

> In consequence he [Rogers] could not really grasp that in the new relationship his was the clearly subordinate position. Even less could he face the proposition that he might have been appointed, at least in part, because his old friend wanted to reverse roles and establish a relationship in which both hierarchically and

substantively he, Nixon, called the tune for once.

In fact, Kissinger notes, Nixon started on this course immediately—the day after his inauguration—before Rogers had had a chance to show any evidence of the "tendency" ascribed to him. In Kissinger's own narrative, Rogers took all the indignities heaped on him for over two years without fighting back. Kissinger absolves himself by carefully noting that Nixon began to exclude Rogers from all important negotiations "at a time when it would have been inconceivable for me to suggest such a procedure." Very little then is left of the idea that Rogers brought his debasement on himself by failing to recognize that he was no longer the dominant partner or did not grasp his subordinate position. Moreover, even on Kissinger's showing, Rogers was not always wrong. He was admittedly right in January 1971 to protest against using South Vietnamese forces for an offensive in Laos.

The first stage of Kissinger's rise had little to do with his abilities, his nuances, or his concepts. It was made possible by Nixon's need to reduce Rogers to a figurehead. That done, Nixon had to fill the vacuum with someone else. Only Kissinger could benefit. As Kissinger himself recognizes: "This curious antiphonal relationship between the two men had the consequence of enhancing my position, but my own role was clearly a result of that relationship and not the cause of it." Nixon's vengefulness was Kissinger's opportunity.

Kissinger does not hide the fact that he took full advantage of the opportunity. After describing Nixon's administration as "an array of baronies presided over by feudal lords" beset by the zealous retainers of a central authority, Kissinger admits that he "became the beneficiary of this state of affairs." In the first phase, he explains: "Ironically, one reason why the President entrusted me with so much responsibility and so many missions was because I was more under his control than his Cabinet." As for Nixon's strategy of using him against Rogers,

237

[L.C]

Kissinger acknowledges: "I do not mean to suggest that I resisted Nixon's conduct toward his senior Cabinet officer. From the first my presence made it technically possible and after a time I undoubtedly encouraged it."

Some presidents with weak secretaries of state have taken on much of the diplomatic burden themselves. But Nixon was unwilling or unable to be his own secretary of state. As Kissinger portrays him, he had no mind for the kind of diligent effort required for developing or enforcing policy. He was, for example, "bored to distraction" by the technical arguments put forward by different departments on the SALT negotiations. "His glazed expression," Kissinger reports, "showed that he considered most of the arguments esoteric rubbish; he was trying to calculate the political impact and salability of the various options, of which only the broad outlines interested him." Beyond the "broad outlines" and most often before they were set, Kissinger took over. Except for the Middle East, and even that only until 1971, "Nixon would listen to the agencies for a while and then act from the White House; thus my office assumed constantly growing responsibilities."

Rogers was not the only victim of this eerie practice. Nixon also dealt with the other Cabinet members, except for former Secretary of the Treasury John Connally, through White House assistants. This system did not conform to the "bureaucratic politics model," which presupposes that official policy and action largely result from "bargaining" by different "players" in the government. In the triangle, Nixon-Kissinger-Rogers, the last was hardly a player at all; he was, in important matters, not even a spectator; he simply did not know what was going on. The appearance of division in high councils, Kissinger observes, makes White House politics "not so different from life at royal courts." The analogy with royal courts fits Nixon's administration better than any other "model" and is particularly apt for Kissinger's place in it. Initially, at least, he derived his power wholly from the favor of a miscreant lord in the White House.

THIS SETUP INEVITABLY resulted in a vicious feud between Kissinger and Rogers. Pride supposedly prevented Rogers from admitting to himself that his old friend, the President, deliberately made many important decisions when the Secretary of State was off on foreign trips. Yet Kissinger adds that Rogers was not totally wrong to blame him.

Nixon distrusted State and wanted sensitive matters handled by the White House alone, but my presence made the two channel procedures possible and I was quite willing to step into the breach to conduct negotiations with my small staff and no interagency liaison. The procedures so painful to Rogers were clearly instigated by Nixon; it is equally evident that I nurtured them.

Nixon's version of this feud is characteristic of the man. He blandly remarks that no human organization could be free of personality and policy conflicts, such as those that took place among Rogers, Kissinger, and Laird. One might imagine from Nixon's account that Rogers and Kissinger just happened to hold low opinions of one another: "Rogers felt that Kissinger was Machiavellian, deceitful, egotistical, arrogant, and insulting. Kissinger felt that Rogers was vain, uninformed, unable to keep a secret, and hopelessly dominated by the State Department bureaucracy." These are the harshest words that Nixon puts in his book about Kissinger and Rogers, still playing them off against one another, as if he were not personally culpable and had not stacked the cards in favor of Kissinger. Nixon also adds this tidbit not found in Kissinger's book: "Kissinger suggested repeatedly that he might have to resign unless Rogers was restrained or replaced."

Ironically, Kissinger's subsequent tenure as Secretary of State made Rogers's ordeal at his hands a dangerous precedent. Kissinger protected himself by holding onto the post of National Security Adviser as well as that of Secretary of State, preventing anyone else from doing to him what he had done to Rogers. Since it would be unseemly for a

Secretary are studded with men who, as if he had not thought for a moment, did not think for a second, are so far from being considered to be fit to be the adviser and primarily co-ordinator of significant policy decisions.

At the time that his role as President's and operator/ambassador/Kissinger's, and operator/ambassador/Rogers's,官 ficials "in the situation" on including military clashes" between neither of the apportioned method of President's and operator/ambassador/Kissinger's, nor of these persons, must, of course, be the shortcoming in the credit for the claims that he should not have made.

KISSINGER'S role in the "situation" to the "personnel" him takes up star. In late 1971, aware of a desire to return from Kissinger's, becoming

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Secretary of State to seem to accept Rogers's punishment as a model, Kissinger's memoirs are studded with *mea culpas* about the way he behaved and Rogers was treated. "Though I did not think so at the time," Kissinger writes, as if he had finally seen the light, "I have become convinced that a President should make the Secretary of State his principal adviser and use the national security adviser primarily as a senior administrator and coordinator to make certain that each significant point of view is heard."

At the time, however, Kissinger pretended that his role as National Security Adviser conformed to the latter specifications rather than, as he now reveals, to those of the President's principal foreign-policy adviser and operational head. When Kissinger tells of Ambassador Rush's instructions to act on Kissinger's orders without the knowledge of his own State Department, he comments guilty: "It was an odd way to run a government." In another connection, Kissinger magnanimously places the responsibility for conditions that put State Department officials "in an extremely uncomfortable position" on "the personalities at the top, including myself." Moreover, the "personality clashes" between Kissinger and Rogers "did neither of us any credit." Still later, Kissinger apportions praise and blame for Nixon's method of government in this way—the President's "complex personality" contributed the "impetus" but "I, as the organizer of these procedures and their driving force, must, of course, share the responsibility for the shortcomings" as well as "perhaps undue credit for the successes." Even when Kissinger claims that Nixon's procedures "worked" in practice, he now professes to believe that they should not be repeated.

KISSINGER'S REFERENCE, becomingly modest, to the "perhaps undue credit" foisted upon him takes us to the second stage of his rising star. In late 1971, Kissinger became acutely aware of a change in Nixon's attitude. On his return from his first trip to China in October, Kissinger saw signs that "the President was becoming restive at the publicity I was

receiving." By now he knew Nixon and his minions, Haldeman, Erlichman, and Ziegler, well enough to realize that his disembarkation at a remote corner of Andrews Air Force Base, "inaccessible to newsmen and photographers," was no accident. As Kissinger puts it plaintively, "it was not a heroic homecoming."

Nixon subsequently found other opportunities to teach Kissinger "a lesson in the limits of my authority." During the Vietnam negotiations in 1972, Kissinger virtually defied Nixon's wishes and substituted his own judgment for that of the President on how to deal with the North Vietnamese. Whoever was right, Presidential assistants are not supposed to be so headstrong and even insubordinate. Kissinger refers to his "solitary procedures," another way of saying that he went off on his own and confronted Nixon with accomplished facts. In return, the White House took pains "to distance itself" from Kissinger because the President "was bound to become restless with an Assistant who was beginning to compete with him for public attention." Nixon became so "restless" that at one time he would not see Kissinger for several weeks. When *Time* magazine chose both of them as Men of the Year, Kissinger knew that Nixon would not be pleased and even tried unsuccessfully to remove his name. Not surprisingly, "Nixon's broodingquietude with my new-found celebrity inevitably transmitted itself to his staff, only too eager to build him up and relishing the bonus of cutting me down to size after years of riding high."

In the second stage of Kissinger's meteoric career, then, Nixon replaced Rogers as the main rival. Nixon, according to Kissinger, first saw him as a "surrogate," then as a "competitor for public attention." That a presidential assistant—whose only strength, Kissinger tells us, is "the President's confidence"—could hold his own in such a competition makes one wonder about the power of the imperial presidency. Presidents have had competition from Cabinet members, whom they had to get rid of, but this must be the first time that a

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president has had so much competition from a
mere assistant, whom, in addition, he did not
even dare to dismiss.

What made Kissinger do it? He drops a
hint, though it is supposed to apply to
someone else. "In contemporary America,"
Kissinger observes with reference to Nixon,
"power increasingly gravitates to those with
an almost obsessive desire to win it."

Most of the reviews of Kissinger's book I
have seen have been so impressionistic that
they suggest how difficult it was for the
reviewers to deal with it substantively. Even
with more space at one's disposal it is
impossible to do justice to all of Kissinger's
themes—Chile, the Middle East, nuclear
strategy, Cambodia, India-Pakistan, China,
the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. I have chosen
to limit myself to the last three in order to deal
with these subjects more thoroughly than
would otherwise be possible.

The "opening to China" by Nixon and
Kissinger may well be their most important,
enduring contribution. It was overdue, but
that is no reason for taking credit away from
them. In his book, Kissinger generously gives
Nixon the main share of that credit, without
neglecting to mention that he had come
independently to the same judgment about
China and designed many of the moves in that
direction. Kissinger also makes clear that
neither Nixon nor he took office with more
than a nebulous idea about how to go about
inaugurating a new China policy. The first
move was made by the Chinese immediately
after Nixon's election. Both sides maneuver-
ed warily for another year before it was clear
that they were going to make a serious effort
to reach an understanding, and it took
another year and a half to reach one.

The main question that arises is what
Kissinger understood by a Chinese-American
accord. Kissinger has some trouble making up
his mind.

Back in July 1968, when he was still
working to make Nelson Rockefeller the next
president, Kissinger had written into one of
Rockefeller's speeches the idea of engaging in

a dialogue with Communist China in order to
form "a subtle triangle of relations between
Washington, Peking, and Moscow." It was—
and is—one of Kissinger's conceits that such
moves could be "subtle," as if no one were
quite so clever as he is. This "triangular
theory" suggested that China, Soviet Russia,
and the United States were more or less
equivalent power centers, each of which could
try to play off one of the others against the
third. Kissinger himself must have had some
such arrangement in mind when he told
Theodore H. White in November 1972 that
"what the world needed was a self-regulating
mechanism," the key to which was China.¹ If
there were such a thing as a "self-regulating
mechanism" in world affairs, this one would
have to be based on the assumption that the
Washington-Peking-Moscow triangle was all
that really mattered and that the three powers
were so nearly matched in strength that one
could not overcome a second without the aid
of the third.

In this book, Kissinger recalls his triangular
theory of 1968 with the following explana-
tion:

Our relations to possible opponents should be
such, I considered, that our options toward
both of them should be greater than their
options toward each other. If we could free our
diplomacy from the dead weight of two decades,
each Communist superpower would have
greater inducement to deal with us constructive-
ly.

This diplomatic recipe is a good example of
Kissinger's occasional weakness for abstract
formulas that get lost in muddled verbiage.
Does "our options toward both of them"
mean our options toward both of them
together or toward each of them singly? It
cannot mean the first, because they were no
longer together; once the split between them
occurred we had options toward each of them
separately, not both at once. But the real
trouble is in the second sentence. It betrays
Kissinger's intermittent yearning to have the

¹ Theodore H. White, *The Making of the Presidency 1972*
(New York: Bantam edition, 1972), p. xviii.

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240

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best of all possible worlds. The facts of life, demonstrated abundantly in every day's newspaper, are that the closer we get to one of the Communist superpowers, the less likely the other is to "deal with us constructively." In practice, the more one of them deals with us "constructively," the more apt is the other to deal with us "destructively." We cannot have it both ways. This sort of spurious profundity cannot stand close examination.

The muddle gets progressively worse as Kissinger repeatedly tries to explain the new China policy.

On the one hand, Kissinger tells us that he belonged to the *Realpolitiker* school of thought, which argued that the Soviets were more likely to be conciliatory if they feared an American policy of rapprochement with China; it also urged that the United States should expand its contacts with China "as a means of leverage against the Soviet Union." With respect to Soviet-American negotiations in 1970, the China initiative gave the United States "an ace in the hole." On the Chinese side, he once told Nixon, "Washington was being brought into play as a counterweight to Soviet pressures." In briefings, Kissinger favored China over Soviet Russia because the former was the weaker party.

This interpretation can only mean that the United States and China were using each other, as well they might, against the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, Kissinger pushes a more conciliatory, benign line with respect to both Communist powers. The move toward China, he explains, was intended to shape a new "global equilibrium" to give the United States a "balancing position" to improve relations with both the Soviet Union and China. He also makes getting "the two Communist powers competing for good relations with us" the essence of the triangular strategy, as if the United States could shift from hostility to benevolence in its China policy without incurring the increased hostility of the Soviet Union.

This line of thought lands Kissinger in a flagrant contradiction. On page 763, he explains:

> Neither Peking nor Moscow was quarreling with the other to curry favor with us; they were currying favor with us because they were quarreling. We could not "exploit" that rivalry; it exploited itself.

According to this interpretation, the United States did not and could not make the Soviet Union and China into rival, quarreling powers, though it is less clear why we could not exploit that rivalry whether or not it exploited itself, whatever that may mean.

But on page 1076, Kissinger tells the reader who may have forgotten what he had been told some 300 pages earlier:

> If we appeared irresolute or leaning toward Moscow, Peking would be driven to accommodation with the Soviet Union. If we adopted the Chinese attitude, however, we might not even help Peking; we might, in fact, tempt a Soviet preemptive attack on China and thus be faced with decisions of enormous danger.

Here, what we do becomes most instrumental in determining the relationship between Peking and Moscow. We can drive China into the hands of Russia or provoke Russia into attacking China. What has happened to the Sino-Soviet hostility that had, on page 763, "followed its own dynamic"?

This kind of inconsistency haunts Kissinger's interpretation of the new China policy. He wishes to make it, as might be expected, an achievement of world-shaking significance. It betokened "a geopolitical revolution," "a new international order." But he also pronounces: "The China card was not ours to play."² If it was not ours to play, what in the world were we playing with in Peking?

² In an interview in the *Wall Street Journal*, January 21, 1980, Kissinger reiterated: "Well, I have always objected to the concept of the China card. I do not feel happy with the notion that we use China to annoy the Soviets as a penalty for Soviet conduct." His reasons were that the Soviets may not react rationally and that the Chinese may think that we might downgrade them if we improve our relations with the Soviet Union. This reasoning makes it appear that if we call our rapprochement with China something other than a "card," it will make the Soviets less likely to react irrationally or China less nervous about improved Soviet-American relations. As a political theorist, Kissinger sometimes betrays a peculiar propensity to substitute words for realities, as if a "China X" would be in reality so different from a "China card."

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And if the United States did not have a China card to play, must we conclude that China did not have an American card to play either?

Kissinger's play is with words, not with cards. The question is what kind of China card we are playing with, not whether it is a card at all. There are cards and cards, some more valuable than others. What is the real difference between regarding China as "a means of leverage," "an ace in the hole," and a "card"? Reality does not change just because, or solely because, of a change of terms.

Something else is at stake here. The troublesome problem is a legacy of the triangular theory. The triangle of China, Soviet Russia, and the United States is not made up of equivalent sides. China does not threaten the Soviet Union anywhere as much as the Soviet Union threatens China. The Chinese have extremely limited military capabilities outside their own borders; the Soviets have vastly greater external capabilities. Much as the Chinese stick in the Russian crawl and force the Russians to keep about 45 divisions on the Chinese border, China represents much less of a deterrent to Russia on a world scale than the triangular theory would lead one to expect. It is not to denigrate the desirability of a Chinese-American understanding to recognize that the United States can potentially be more useful to China than China can be to the United States. So long as the Soviet armed forces are gigantic enough to permit a buildup on all fronts, including the Chinese, the Russians can enjoy maximum freedom of action. In most parts of the world, they have to worry much more about what the United States will do than what the Chinese will do.

The Chinese-American rapprochement was and is a good thing in its own right. It has considerable, but limited, effect on the Soviet-American relationship. It is a "card," but it is not "an ace in the hole," whereas Kissinger thinks it is "an ace in the hole" without being a "card."

The least candid, most untrustworthy portion of Kissinger's book deals with the Soviet Union and the policy of detente.

Until 1969, when he went to Washington, Kissinger held very severe and consistent positions on both. In brief, he was anti-Soviet and anti-detente. He was anti-Soviet in the sense that he considered the Soviet Union to be the most dangerous, most implacable enemy of the United States and all that it stood for. He was anti-detente because he viewed it as an insidious Soviet tactic to lull and gull the West in preparation for the next period of Communist expansion. He pursued these themes with sophistication and tenacity for about a dozen years before he was called on to do something about them.³

How could someone with this background become converted to detente, and how does he explain it now?

The first surprise is the type of relationship that Kissinger soon established with the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. It can only be described as the coziest and chummiest imaginable. Few foreign ambassadors in American history have ever benefited so much from such close rapport and bonhomie. I do not mean to suggest that Kissinger and Dobrynin should have been at verbal swords' points, whatever the relations of their countries may have been. But what actually passed between these two went far beyond a civil working diplomatic association. Dobrynin was Kissinger's first "back channel," which sent the latter on his way to effective operational control of American foreign policy. He has rewarded Dobrynin with such fervent, effusive praise that it should stand the Soviet Ambassador in good stead for promotion in the Soviet hierarchy. Only one other person—Prime Minister Chou En-lai of China, who is written about with gushing veneration—gets higher marks from Kissinger. Despite Dobrynin's long service in Washington over almost two decades through every *Sturm and Drang*, despite "his unquestioning support of the Soviet line," Kissinger virtually nominates him for a future Nobel Peace Prize: "If someday there should come about the genuine

³ Interested readers may follow Kissinger's pre-1969 views in greater detail in my article in *Commentary*, June 1974.

relaxation period during which he made a career of it.

One can for "a time" (and "moved to Washington" is a good example) say that a Soviet ambassador whose "skirmisher" terlocutor (a Soviet officer) is effective, and that other, to be sure, is effective. But I do not think that we can say that the American ambassador, in 1970, for example, had a record of "no records: "The American ambassador to the Soviet Union, in 1970, for example, had a record of "more records: "The American ambassador to the Soviet Union, in 1971, for example, had a record of "even more records: "The American ambassador to the Soviet Union, in 1972, for example, had a record of "even more records: and Kissinger têtes.

This "mutual ad" political co

As Kissinger interview had set out, his Vietnam, rapprochement with the new relationship, new relationship, the official detente. The Union was relationship. Kissinger will because of his foreign policy position was not a foreign policy statesman. Nevertheless, availability,

⁴ Kissinger's thes by him on May 26, 1972.

242

relaxation of tensions and dangers which our period demands, Anatoly Dobrynin will have made a central contribution to it."

One can understand Kissinger's admiration for "a thoroughgoing professional" who "moved through the upper echelons of Washington with consummate skill" and whose "skill at putting his American interlocutor on the defensive was infinite." Such a Soviet operator might be considered more effective, slippery, and dangerous than any other, to be handled with the greatest care. Instead, Dobrynin was permitted to enjoy confidences and take liberties that he was never expected to reciprocate. After an important meeting between the Chinese and American ambassadors in Warsaw in January 1970, for example, Kissinger matter-of-factly records: "The day after the Warsaw meeting Dobrynin appeared at my office, seeking a briefing, undeterred by the fact that this was a favor Moscow never vouchsafed to us on any topic." Kissinger did not express surprise or administer a rebuke at such a question; he merely "evaded his request." Dobrynin would not have dared to ask the question at all if he and Kissinger had not had other such tête-à-têtes.

This "back channel" was more than a mutual admiration society; it was also a political commitment.

As Kissinger told Oriana Fallaci in the interview he now recalls with acute pain, he had set out to achieve three things: peace in Vietnam, rapprochement with China, and "a new relationship with the Soviet Union." That new relationship was consecrated in 1972 with the official sanctification of the policy of detente. The new relationship with the Soviet Union was the political side of his personal relationship with Dobrynin.

Kissinger invested so heavily in Soviet good will because he believed that Soviet cooperation was needed to solve the most acute foreign problems confronting the United States. Necessity was only one step away from availability, if "vested interests" could be

created linking both sides.⁴ His theory of "linkage" was, therefore, critical for the success of this program. As Kissinger saw it, a Soviet-American understanding could not be based on a single issue, even one so important as arms control; a relaxation of tension had to encompass all outstanding issues. The Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy aimed at achieving nothing less than "fundamental settlements" through "an integrating conceptual framework." Though Kissinger had long detested detente and had even distrusted it when France and Germany had embraced it, he was converted to it by 1971. The summit meeting

Moscow in May 1972 made it "the integrating conceptual framework" without which, he insists, it is impossible to conduct a serious and fruitful foreign policy.

The summit meeting of May 1972, therefore, was not content with the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT I). The linkage to other outstanding issues came in another key document—the "Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." It contained 12 basic principles that, in effect, tied the arms agreement, according to Kissinger, to "an agreed code of international conduct"—the code of detente. It was or should have been, in Kissinger's scheme, far more important than the arms agreement, which was in itself a highly problematic first installment. If either side broke the code, the whole point of an arms agreement was lost; and if the code prevailed, an arms agreement could be a welcome but unessential factor in keeping the peace.

Kissinger is apparently so embarrassed by his role in the codification of detente that his book comes close to distorting the record. He reduces his interest in the principles of detente to the merely "tactical," designed to intensify Soviet dilemmas, reduce Soviet influence in the Middle East, and "outmaneuver the 'peace' pressures" at home. If one took this ex post facto rationalization seriously, detente was a weapon of the Kissingerian cold war, not a process of conciliation.

The real story of detente, SALT I, and the "Basic Principles" cannot be found in these

⁴ Kissinger's theory of "vested interests" was put forward by him on May 29, 1972 (Department of State Bulletin, June 26, 1972, p. 884).

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Washington, D.C. 20540, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of the late President Richard M. Nixon, who in 1974 presided over a special session of the Soviet Parliament. The meeting was the first of two, the second having been the first time that a Soviet premier had been awarded the honor ofing, D.C. 20540, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of the late President Richard M. Nixon, who in 1974 presided over a special session of theernen, D.C. 20540, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of the late President Richard M. Nixon, who in 1974 presided over a special session of the

969 views
June 1974.

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pages. Detente stood or fell on the "Basic Principles," as Kissinger himself had previously interpreted them:

> They state that both sides will attempt to their utmost to avoid military confrontation and that neither will attempt to take unilateral advantage in situations, recognizing that the great nuclear powers cannot be pushed in a position that jeopardizes their basic survival without noting it and therefore recognizing that the attempt of traditional diplomacy to accumulate marginal advantages is bound to lead to disastrous consequences in the nuclear age.⁵

With one exception, this paraphrase closely followed the text of the "Basic Principles."⁶ The exception was the theory of "marginal advantages." As Kissinger subsequently developed it, the theory held that the balance of power no longer fully applied in the nuclear age. Kissinger explained:

> The reason is that the determination of national power has changed fundamentally in the nuclear age. Throughout history, the primary concern of most national leaders has been to accumulate geopolitical and military power. It would have seemed inconceivable even a generation ago that such power once gained could not be translated directly into advantage over one's opponent. But now both we and the Soviet Union have begun to find that each increment of power does not necessarily represent an increment of usable political strength.⁷

The last sentence implied that the Americans and the Soviets had been moving toward a meeting of minds on the obsolescence of "marginal advantages" and "increments of power." If the Kissingerian theory was valid, there was nothing to worry

about; even if the Soviets violated the understanding and grabbed for marginal advantages and increments of power, they could not be translated into "usable political strength." Logically, the "Basic Principles" merely spelled out the theory of marginal advantages; the principles were not even needed if the theory operated as postulated.⁸

THE READER of *White House Years* will not get a word about marginal advantages or increments of power, even though they played such a large part in Kissinger's thinking in the years of detente. Instead, he offers a version of detente that differs little from the familiar carrot-and-stick policy of "posing risks and incentives to encourage Soviet restraint." If that were all there had been to Kissinger's detente theory, he could hardly have been accused of originality. What made his version distinctive was that he gave it a theoretical foundation that made detente seem structurally sound and even built into the nature of the new international order. All this has mysteriously disappeared from a memoir that

⁸ Kissinger was not always fully consistent. On the occasion of signing the principles, he stated: "Of course, these principles have to be implemented. If there is bad faith on either side, the aspirations expressed here cannot be realized. Speaking for our side, I can say we will attempt to implement these principles in the spirit in which they were promulgated. We have no reason to suppose that this will not be done by the leaders of the Soviet Union, but if events should prove these hopes on either side to be incorrect, then we will, of course, both of us, have to draw the appropriate conclusions" (Ibid., June 26, 1972, p. 885). According to the theory of marginal advantages, however, neither side would gain any increment of usable political strength even if it failed to implement the principles.

The theory of marginal advantages was also written into the President's foreign policy report to Congress of May 3, 1973. It took the position that a certain balance of power was still inherent in any international system, but that it was no longer "the overriding concept" because continual maneuvering for marginal advantages in the nuclear era had become "both unrealistic and dangerous." Why? Because "both sides possess such enormous power, small additional increments cannot be translated into tangible advantages or even usable political strength. And it is dangerous because attempts to seek tactical gains might lead to confrontations which could be catastrophic." But if the tactical gains were sure to be wasteful, why should they lead to catastrophic confrontations? "Unrealistic" maneuvering should be more dangerous to the interests of the maneuverer than to anyone else.

⁵ Department of State Bulletin, June 26, 1972, p. 885.

⁶ The second principle read in part: "The USA and the USSR attach major importance to preventing the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations. Therefore, they will do their utmost to avoid military confrontations and to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war." It also stated: "Both sides recognize that efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly, are inconsistent with these objectives." The third principle committed both powers "to everything in their power so that conflicts or situations will not arise which would serve to increase international tensions."

⁷ Department of State Bulletin, July 10, 1972, p. 40.

otherwise going, Unfortunate events converted him to his former views: he su
mmer of 1976, Kissinger of a new era in world politics"—as since 1960, less global re
incarnated in some sort of global war, power to its world poli
advantage over waste of effort in various theories.

The Ang-
new Kissin-
old, pre-Ni-
of 1976, Ki-
of a new era
define its in-
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since 1960,
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⁹ "I think the re-
period of stagna-
Union is no
(Interview with
12, 1975).

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otherwise goes into the minutest of details.

Unfortunately for Kissinger's theory of marginal advantages, the Soviets were not converted to it. They showed their disrespect for his "integrating conceptual framework" by sending their Cuban proxies into Angola toward the end of 1975. If Kissinger had been right, the Soviets should have realized that a mere increment of power in such a faraway African country could not give them any "usable political strength." In that case, since the Soviet leaders were supposed to be so innately cautious and patient, they would have considered the Angolan intervention a waste of time and substance. Instead, Kissinger was converted to the Soviet point of view: he suddenly woke up to how usable this marginal advantage could be to the Soviets. Beginning in January 1976, he began to change his line somewhere between 90 and 180 degrees. He was apparently not prepared for such a change and for this reason may have reacted with unusual outrage. As late as April 1975, he had expressed the opinion that he expected the Soviet Union to move toward making relations with the United States better, not worse.⁹

The Angolan intervention brought out the new Kissinger, who remarkably resembled the old, pre-Nixon, Kissinger. In the first months of 1976, Kissinger announced the beginning of a new era—that "the U.S.S.R. has begun to define its interests and objectives in global terms"—as if the U.S.S.R.'s interest in Cuba since 1960, to go back no further, had been less global than its interest in Angola. He reincarnated the old doctrine of "containment" in so many words—"It is our responsibility to contain Soviet power without global war. ..." He restored the balance of power to its traditional position of primacy in world politics. He saw a single marginal advantage or increment of power, not as the waste of effort that it had been in the previous theory, but as encouragement to seek

further marginal advantages and increments of power—"If adventurism is allowed to succeed in local crises—an ominous precedent of wider consequence is set." He served notice that "cooperative relations" with the Soviet Union—he would have said "detente" if the term had not become politically taboo—could not "survive any more Angolas." Kissinger's strange Soviet interlude was over.¹⁰

We have gone beyond the bounds of *White House Years*, which ends at the beginning of 1973. The book cannot be understood solely in terms of its own period; it was written by the born-again, anti-Soviet, post-1976 Kissinger and reflects many of his latter-day preoccupations. One result is suppression of all evidence of his responsibility for the illusions of detente. This silence is the most deafening confession he could have made. He admits to some minor errors of judgment; he cannot bring himself to mention a major one.

Kissinger has, more recently, called for a policy that "must be pursued over an indefinite period of time."¹¹ Kissinger's own Soviet policy would have done better if he had followed this advice.

Of all the subjects in his book, Kissinger dwells at greatest length and with most pathos on the Vietnam war. In the end, I am sure, it will far outweigh in importance anything else with which he had to deal.

One way to judge Kissinger's policy is to subject it to the test of his own guiding ideas or concepts. He has repeatedly put forward two, though not always with the same emphasis. They may, in his own words, be referred to as "nuances" and "geopolitics." He sometimes relies on one, sometimes on the other, without ever making clear how they fit together.

"Nuances" are just about the smallest change one can use in diplomacy. The dictionary says that nuance means: "A slight or delicate variation or difference in expression, feeling, opinion, etc." The important

⁹ "I think the relationship has had a setback. It has had a period of stagnation. I have the impression that the Soviet Union is now fairly anxious to pick it up again" (Interview with Pierre Salinger in *L'Express*, Paris, April 12, 1975).

¹⁰ San Francisco, February 3, 1976; Laramie, Wyoming, February 4, 1976; Boston, March 11, 1976.

¹¹ *Wall Street Journal*, January 21, 1980.

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thing is that it should be slight or subtle. Such variations or differences do not by their very nature alter anything of substance or something of the essence. No serious or experienced negotiator would be taken in by them. Yet Kissinger has always given them a place of inordinate importance in his scheme of things. He has gone so far as to hold that nuances are all that really matter. On one occasion, he said: "The difference between great policy and mediocre policy or substantial policy and average policy is usually an accumulation of nuances." ¹² He has maintained that "intangibles" can determine the outcome of events.¹³

In this book, nuances again get co-star billing. One sentence reads: "I wanted to accumulate nuances for a long-range strategy." Now, there may be nuances in the way a long-range strategy is expressed, for expression is the chief function of nuances, but no accumulation of nuances can add up to a long-range strategy. Another example of muddled verbiage makes "nuances and interrelations" the test of foreign policy. By "interrelations," Kissinger explains, he means the "linkage" of events. In this passage, an accumulation of nuances is no longer enough to make up a long-range strategy or, as Kissinger also calls it, "an integrating conceptual framework." In any case, nuances and interrelations are not of similar or comparable status. Interrelations may be given this nuance or that, but the nuance is still bound to make no more than a slight or subtle difference to the interrelations. Only a dimwit would be won over to any interrelation because of the nuance given to it. Moreover, neither of them nor both together can do what Kissinger here asks them to do—satisfy the need for "an integrating conceptual framework." By themselves, nuances and interrelations beg the question; they need an integrating conceptual framework to give them function and direction. It is not enough

to expound, as Kissinger does here, on the need for an integrating conceptual framework and then make it nothing more than a mix of nuances and interrelations in the abstract. Here, as elsewhere, there is much less in Kissinger's theorizing than meets the eye.

Despite his long infatuation with nuances, Kissinger in this book leans most heavily on "geopolitics." He defines the difference between Secretary of State Rogers and himself in terms of Rogers's "tactical" perspective and his own "strategic and geopolitical" approach. Again and again, he uses the term "geopolitical" as if it were his personal revelation or trademark. The United States, he laments, has "no geopolitical tradition."¹⁴ For a word that is made to do so much work, however, Kissinger makes very little effort to explain just what should be understood by it. His one attempt is quite inadequate and even misleading: "By 'geopolitical' I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium." It hardly helps to substitute an even more general and elusive term, "equilibrium," for "geopolitical." Geopolitics since Sir Halford Mackinder's time early in this century has always been based on a single factor—geography—as the determinant of history. Equilibrium has no such concrete, clear-cut connotation. The mere reference to equilibrium does not tell us whether it is geopolitically sound or not. Traditionally, geopolitics has had more to do

¹⁴ This is something of an exaggeration. A marked aspect of the work of Frederick Jackson Turner was geopolitical. As late as 1918, long after he had developed his "sectional" theory of American history, Turner "still thought in terms of geographic determinism, and he sought explanations for political and social behavior in physiographic pressures, rather than in the many forces responsible" (Ray Allen Billington, *Frederick Jackson Turner*, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 372). A fully developed American geopolitical system appeared in 1942 with *America's Strategy in World Politics* by Professor Nicholas John Spykman of Yale University (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1942). One reason why geopolitics never came to dominate American political and historical thought is that, as Professor Hans J. Morgenthau once put it, "geopolitics is a pseudo-science," based on "the fallacy of the single factor" (*Politics Among Nations*, New York: Knopf, 2nd ed., 1955, p. 146).

¹² Interview, *New York Times*, October 13, 1974.

¹³ "Statesmen must act, even when premises cannot be proved; they must decide, even when intangibles will determine the outcome" (Speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 17, 1975).

with work. In any case, test his V of nuance

CURIOUSLY, war has nuances of position in House. His victory as to Vietnam, the two more alternative Foreign Affairs 1968, he Vietnam c

Unquestionably then [in] dilemma thousands of now is c

What was "credibility" "honorably" were not in imperative

¹⁵ The father of Mackinder, with power and, the probable victory. The geopoliticians that it would hand through the conquest of Europe, the Far East, favored in the difficult balance Germany in the as fundamental of space at its conquer. The through geog through equil

¹⁶ *Look, August*

¹⁷ *No More York: Harper*

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with world mastery than with equilibrium.¹⁵
In any case, Kissinger cannot complain if we
test his Vietnam policy by his own standards
of nuances and geopolitics.

CURIOUSLY, KISSINGER'S VIEW of the Vietnam
war has never had anything to do with
nuances or geopolitics. He came to his basic
position on the war before going to the White
House. He had given up the hope of military
victory as early as 1966 after making two trips
to Vietnam at the invitation of then Am-
bassador Henry Cabot Lodge.¹⁶ It took him
two more years to come forth with an
alternative to military victory. In his article in
*Foreign Affairs*, written in the summer of
1968, he implied that a wrongheaded
geopolitical assessment had landed us in the
Vietnam dilemma.

Unquestionably, the failure to analyze ade-
quately the geopolitical importance of Vietnam
then [in 1961-62] contributed to the current
dilemma. But the commitment of five hundred
thousand Americans has settled the issue of the
importance of Vietnam. For what is involved
now is confidence in American promises.

What was also involved, he went on, were
"credibility," "prestige," and ending the war
"honorably," above all the last. In effect, we
were not in Vietnam as a result of geopolitical
imperatives; we were there because, as

Kissinger also said a month earlier in 1968, we
had created our own difficulties through a
series of military and political "conceptual
failures."¹⁷ In a geopolitical perspective, it
would have mattered little whether or not
there were 500,000 Americans in Vietnam; the
importance of Vietnam would have been
settled by its geographical location. Whatever
may be thought of Kissinger's argument that
the 500,000 Americans settled the issue of the
importance of Vietnam, geopolitics was
involved only in the sense that they had been
sent in defiance of geopolitical consid-
erations.

Geopolitics is also no respecter of credibili-
ty, prestige, or honor. The geopolitical
outlook is peculiarly hard-boiled and cold-
blooded. It sweeps aside such vulnerable
human sentiments as credibility, prestige, and
honor. Its criterion is the conquest of space
and power, whatever means may be necessary
to achieve the goal. This is not to say that
credibility, prestige, and honor are not
important from some points of view; they are
simply not geopolitical concepts; they are, in
fact, as ungeopolitical or antigeopolitical as
one can get.

In *White House Years*, Kissinger's position on Vietnam is essentially the same as that of 1968. For all his flaunting of geopolitics, his justification for what we were doing in Vietnam is primarily moralistic. His emphasis is on "our moral position," on avoiding "dishonor," on getting out "with dignity." The difference between the United States and South Vietnam in the later stages of the Paris negotiations was, he says, that "our goal was honor," their "problem was survival." Whatever one may think about this statement of the American goal, it belongs to a tradition of chivalry, not geopolitics.

Kissinger also has a more pragmatic
rationale for the last four years of the
American war in Vietnam—that "sacrificing
our friends" would have shaken "the con-
fidence of all who depended on us." He does
not push this one as hard and as often as
"honor," but it is worth considering whether
there is anything to it.

Other people's "confidence" in the United

¹⁵ The father of modern geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, saw Eastern Europe as the key to world power and, therefore, believed that Russia was the most probable victor in the coming struggle to dominate the world. The school of pre-World War II German geopoliticians, headed by General Karl Haushofer, held that it would be possible for Germany to gain the upper hand through an alliance with Russia or outright conquest of Eastern Europe. Professor Spykman did not expect any one dominant world power to come out of World War II; he foresaw three "autonomous zones" in the Far East, North America, and Europe, with China favored in the first, the United States in the second, and a difficult balancing act between Great Britain, Russia, and Germany in the third. Geopolitics tends to regard "space" as fundamental, and the power with the greatest amount of space at its command the most likely to expand and conquer. The geopolitical tradition has emphasized war through geographical expansion rather than peace through equilibrium.

¹⁶ *Look*, August 9, 1966.

¹⁷ *No More Vietnams?* Richard M. Pfeffer, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) pp. 11-13.

are on the
framework
in a mix of
abstract.
and less in
the eye.

nuances,
heavily on
difference
gers and
"cal" per-
geopolit-
e uses the
personal
 States,
dition."¹⁴
much work,
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 political."
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Jackson
1973, p.
system
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dominate
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opf. 2nd

247

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States transfers the stake in Vietnam to the world outside. It implicitly admits that there was nothing in Vietnam itself to justify the American role in the war. By shifting the attention away from Vietnam, it is of a piece with the idea that the presence of 500,000 American soldiers settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam. In both cases, a geopolitical aberration is said to create reasons for increasing the cost of the aberration. On this reasoning, one could never cut the losses inevitably incurred by a miscalculation of such magnitude.

Here, again, we face a general, abstract, psychological term—"confidence." Even if the confidence of our other dependents and allies were shaken, we could not judge how much this factor should influence American policy in Vietnam without asking: How much was it shaken? For how long? In relation to what other reasons for retaining confidence in the United States? What other options did these allies and dependents have, even in the worst of eventualities?

All we get from Kissinger is shaken "confidence," as if this were an absolute. The real problem of Vietnam was concrete and relative. What was the expenditure of men and material in Vietnam worth in relation to American interests, domestic and foreign, as a whole? On this question, Kissinger has some surprises in store for the reader.

European public opinion as represented by the media, he concedes, opposed the war; European leaders, though they did not say so publicly, "wanted the war ended quickly," but also "wanted America's credibility unimpaired." The discretion of European leaders is easily understood; nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that Europeans looked on with increasing distress and disbelief as the United States spent itself in eight years of a hopeless war on the other side of the globe. If those eight years were not enough to attest to America's "credibility" as a faithful ally, how many more would have been necessary? What in any case does "credibility" in this intangible and abstract form mean in these circumstances? It is one of those words, like "geopolitics," that is being used as a substitute

for thought and deserves to be put back in the dictionary for a rest.

If authority were needed to testify that the United States conducted its war in Vietnam at the expense of the rest of the world, two of the highest-ranking testimonials would come from President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger. In 1971, Nixon declared:

> Now, in terms of our world situation, the tendency is, and this has been the case for the last five to six years, for us to obscure our vision almost totally of the world because of Vietnam.¹⁸

In this book, Kissinger relates that he told Thieu in 1972: "We have fought for four years, have mortgaged our whole foreign policy to the defense of one country."

In the same year, Kissinger received some sage advice from Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Ch'iao Kuan-hua, who presumably spoke with the approval of Kissinger's favorite statesman, Chou En-lai: "One should not lose the whole world just to gain South Vietnam."

It is in connection with China that Kissinger finally gets the geopolitical position of Vietnam straight. He writes: "The China initiative also restored perspective to our national policy. It reduced Indochina to its proper scale—a small peninsula on a major continent."

On that major continent, China is the geopolitical center of gravity. If China is permitted to develop its economic and military potential in coming decades, a politician would presuppose that this small peninsula would be most likely to gravitate to the Chinese sphere of influence. In fact, the first American political theorist to work out a complete geopolitical system almost four decades ago assigned just such a role in the region to China.¹⁹

Still, Kissinger has given us some standards for judging his handling of the Vietnam negotiations. Did nuances matter or did geopolitics prevail? Was honor saved? Were

¹⁸July 6, 1971 (in *Department of State Bulletin*, July 26, 1971, p. 93).

¹⁹Spykman, op. cit., p. 469.

our friends. Could the confidence world at

By far the best of the books in Vietnam before, the intimate knowledge of nothing like war so far

Nuclear effect which From the determination of Vietnam names re- Van Thieb negotiator North Vi- example, proposed Vietnam, North cou- rse decades ago assigned just such an unwary Vi-

My father, another Nixon ad- critical, in his philosophi- in question- nuance w- might at a price to That Kiss- only him administra- other dov- seem too considera- strain that sections c- which he science.

248

our friends in Vietnam sacrificed or not? Could the settlement have restored the confidence of our allies and dependents in the world at large?

By far the longest and most anguished part of the book deals with the negotiations that brought an end to the American intervention in Vietnam. Even if the outlines were clear before, Kissinger adds so much to our intimate knowledge of the events that there is nothing like it in the entire literature on the war so far.

Nuances, Kissinger soon found out, had no effect whatever on the North Vietnamese. From the beginning they were inflexibly determined to get all American forces out of Vietnam and to overthrow the South Vietnamese regime headed by President Nguyen Van Thieu. The masters of nuance in the Paris negotiations were, according to Kissinger, the North Vietnamese, not the Americans. For example, the North Vietnamese negotiators proposed a "coalition government" for South Vietnam, but in such a way that, as Kissinger understood it, it would effectively give the North control. Kissinger complains that this ruse deceived "many unwary Americans"; no such American gimmick ever deceived many unwary Vietnamese.

My favorite Kissingerian nuance is still another. What separated everyone in the Nixon administration from its moderate critics, Kissinger claims, was "not a philosophy but a nuance." The "philosophy" in question was American withdrawal; the nuance was a "lingering hope that Hanoi might at some point negotiate, paying some price to accelerate our total withdrawal." That Kissinger should want to pass off not only himself, but everyone in the Nixon administration as secret doves, differing from other doves only slightly, by a nuance, would seem too farfetched to deserve serious consideration. Yet it is symptomatic of a deep strain that runs through the Vietnamese sections of the book—an "ambivalence," to which he confesses, and even a guilty conscience.

The "lingering hope" of "some price" to be paid by North Vietnam is thus made to justify four years of a futile and repulsive war. What was there to the hope? What was the price?

Kissinger had from the outset little or no hope that he could get any real concession from the North Vietnamese left to themselves. His hope originally rested on getting the Soviet Union to bail us out. His early strategy called for trading an improvement in Soviet-American relations for Soviet pressure on North Vietnam to make peace on acceptable terms.²⁰ Kissinger's proposed barter never had a chance. He even accepted with minimal protest the indignity of receiving no reply for months from Dobrynin, though no such letdowns seem to have spoiled their warm personal relationship.

What else was there to the lingering hope? There were, Kissinger points out, only two real choices—military escalation and Vietnamization. The former as a long-term strategy had been ruled out; it was, in any case, incompatible with the policy of piecemeal withdrawal. But the latter was equally unsatisfactory to Kissinger, who finally agreed to it with some reluctance. Yet, it is clear, he oscillated between these poles, never able to commit himself fully to either one. This equivocation more than anything else led to the interminably long, excruciatingly tortuous negotiations with North Vietnam and their disastrous denouement.

The heart of the matter was Vietnamization. It implied that the United States had become embroiled in a Vietnamese civil war, and that the only way to get out was to give the civil war back to the Vietnamese. The American problem from this point of view was less with North Vietnam than with South Vietnam. Even if the Nixon administration saw its duty as the preparation of South Vietnam for fighting its own battles, that preliminary period could not last forever. At some point it was necessary to make the Thieu

²⁰ "In all my conversations with Dobrynin I had stressed that a fundamental improvement in US-Soviet relations presupposed Soviet cooperation in settling the war [p. 266]. . . . But Hanoi would not move without some pressure. Therefore Soviet participation could become crucial [p. 267]."

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