Daily Mail, Saturday, November 17, 1979

HENRY KISSINGER,
in Britain to publicise
his gigantic, 1500-page
memoirs' — and only
the first instalment,
at that—is not exactly
an ordinary author.
He still carries around
with him the magic
aura of power.

Pretty girls try to gate-
crash his Press confer-
ces. Hardened American
journalists still find them-
selves addressing him as
'Mr Secretary.

Somehow, few people are
interested in the life of
the actual Secretary of State,
Cyrus Vance. It's the word
from Kissinger the world's pres-
 wants to hear.

Yesterday morning, at his
public Press conference, he
deftily defended his record in
South-East Asia, quoting dates,
times, places and documents
with the easy assurance of the
high-grade professional he is.
But in the afternoon, in his
suite at Claridares, he found the
time to take me on a leisurely,
private tour of the world as he
sees it on the eve of the
Eighties.

The fall of the Shah, he
told, 'was a geopolitical event
of great significance.' The
psychological balance in the
world has been altered.

It was, he thinks, the
direct result of 'a major
decline of American pres-
tige both globally and
particularly in that area.'

He is clearly bitter about the
White House's failure to sustain
the Shah and or even offer
asylum to a 'leader who was
our loyal friend for 37 years
and the firm ally of six U.S.
presidents.

The CIA:
'a shambles'

But he refuses to offer public
advice to Mr Carter. 'I will not
second-guess anything the U.S.
Administration has done.'

I suspect that privately, how-
ever, he is terrified that Carter,
having been unpredictable in
his failure to react to provoca-
tion, may suddenly in despra-
tion, and just as unpredictably
over-react and provoke a world
crisis.

Kissinger does not believe
that U.S. intelligence agencies
possess at present either the
Information or the ability to
interfere effectively in Iran.

I asked him if he thought
the CIA was recovered from
the battering it received from
Congress and the media during
and after the Nixon collapse.

"It has a long way to go," he
told me. On the personnel side
it is definitely improving.

He is more doubtful about its
ability to get its analysts
satisfied with the results of
As for its capacity to mount
react operations, it is still in
a total shambles.

He is worried, as he puts it,
by America's inability to use
covert operations effectively at
the precise moment when radi-
nation takes place on
friendly countries.

I foresee a series of severe
crisis in the early part of the
1980s. First an energy crisis,
with demand outstripping sup-

'Henry Kissinger: The White
House. Kissinger & Michael Joseph
Nicolson & Michael Joseph
A14-93.

On the eve of publication
of his memoirs,
a unique look forward
by one of the world's
greatest statesmen

face the need to take big,
unpopular decisions in the early
1980s.

If the only thing the
Soviet have going for them
then is an overall strategic
advantage, there will be a
temptation to conceal or
postpone domestic prob-
lems by an adventurous
foreign policy.

The Soviet temptation, he
thinks, will be to use Cuba and
Vietnam to open up opportu-
nities for the radicalisation of
states friendly to the West.

I consider it absolutely un-
acceptable for the United
States to permit indefinitely
the presence of Cuban expedi-
tionary forces in Africa. We
cannot accept the use by the
Soviet Union of proxy forces
originating only 90 miles from
our shores.

On Vietnam, I asked him if
he was happy with the idea of
China acting as a policeman in
South-East Asia. 'I regard this
as an essential development to
keep Vietnam from dominating
South-East Asia

> 'When I was in Singapore in
> May, I found that other Asian
> leaders shared this view, and
> regarded the Chinese move
> against Vietnam as having
> saved them from a debacle.'

Mrs Thatcher :
'a new force'

Kissinger:
Why the
West has to
get tougher
by Paul Johnson

ply. Second, a continuing eco-
nomic crisis. And third, extreme
military weakness at precisely
the point when these two crises
are at their worst, and when we
can expect major upheavals in
key areas—areas over which we
are gradually and increasingly
losing control.

The Russians :
'a temptation'

He cites three areas as
examples: the pressure of the
Polisario guerrillas on Morocco,
one of the West's principal
allies in Africa;

Pressure by leftist-controlled
Iraq on Saudi Arabia and the
Arab empires of the Persian
Gulf.

And, not least, growing tur-
moll in Central America, which
is bound in the long run to
affect Mexico, now more impor-
tant than ever with its vast new
oilfields coming into operation.

Kissinger agrees with the
theory of some Western strate-
gists that Soviet military
superiority over the U.S. will
reach a maximum point some-
time in the early 1980s. He does
not think that, even with a
major rearmament effort start-
ing immediately, the U.S. can
even begin to redress the
balance for three or four years.
He calculates the Soviet
superiority as follows: 'First,
we are rarely equal with the
Soviet Union in strategic
forces;

Second, they are clearly
ahead of our tactical or theatre
nuclear forces;

"Third, they are vastly super-
ior in conventional forces;

His worry is that the Soviet
leaders are running into
increasing trouble with their
domestic economy, and may

Mrs Thatcher :
'a new force'

Chinese policy, then, is a plus
for the West in what is other-
wise a gloomy world scene as
Kissinger surveys it. I pointed
out that in his book, he has a
phrase about Nelson Rockefeller
being quintessentially American
in his unquenchable optimism'.
Was his own pessimism un-
American then?

"Not at all. Nelson Rockefeller
was a good friend of mine and
we agreed about these things.
If Nelson were alive, I think
he'd stand by my assessment.
Optimism is justified only if
you are prepared to face up to
reality and willing to do some-
thing about it.

"The most important
thing is to restore the
credibility of United States
power and resolution, be-
ginning with the Middle
East. This will require a
major effort on our part."

He regards Margaret
Thatcher as a principal ally in
the campaign to make America
incredible again. "She is one of
the few really creative forces in
the world today. Before she
won, my wife said to me: "No-
body that unusual can get
elected." I said to her: "We are
heading into a period of crisis
in which we need to elect
unusual people."

Kissinger chose his words
carefully to avoid any possible
offence to his old friend Jim
Callaghan. She sees what needs
to be done and she does it. If
she succeeds here, may intro-
duce a new style of politics in
the West.

He himself chose to play a
part in such a new-style West-
ern leadership? Would he be
prepared to serve again as Sec-
retary of State under a Repub-
lican President? The answer
is 'Yes' if: 'That would really
depend on the President. Our
philosophies would have to be
compatible.'

Personally, I would be easier
in my own mind if Kissinger
were back taking decisions as
he was during the warnings
His knowledge of the world
and its leading personalities is
unstinctive understanding of the
power - process. I think we
should take his warnings
seriously.

There is no question that
they carry great weight in
Downing Street.

ing or Cambodia in February 1973, the last of President Lon Nol in April 1975 and the entry of the Khmer Rouge to Phnom Penh. Then in December 1978 the invasion of Kampuchea by the Vietnamese. In 1979 we see the terror and tragedy of a devastated region. Words like 'honour, dignity, self respect or even credibility ring hollow when seen against the present day destruction of what was Cambodia as well as South Vietnam. To William Shawcross in Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, "Neither the United States nor its friends nor those who are caught helplessly in its embrace are well served when its leaders act, as Nixon and Kissinger acted, without care. Cambodia was not a mistake it was a crime. The world is diminished by the experience".

To Henry Kissinger by April 21, 1970 when Sihanouk's National United Front of Cambodia broadcast an appeal to overthrow Lon Nol over the Viet Cong's clandestine radio the basic issue had been laid bare "it was whether Vietnamization was to be merely an alibi for an American collapse or a serious strategy designed to achieve an honourable peace. If the former, neither the rate of withdrawal nor events in neighbouring countries were important", he writes. "My intellectual difficulties arose with those who preferred that there was a middle course of action that would avoid collapse in Vietnam and yet ignore the impending communist takeover in Cambodia".

This is a fair summary of the position and the critics are wrong to argue that there was freedom of choice in reacting to the events in Cambodia that April. The Administration was by then gravely circumscribed being 15 months into a strategy which had as its central pillar the proposition that if the Vietnamese would not negotiate seriously then the United States would use maximum pressure and wait for military progress to force negotiations. It is fair, too, for Kissinger to point out as he does repeatedly in the book that a negotiated settlement in 1969 was the objective of the vast majority of American opinion both as measured in polls and among politicians and pundits. Liberal America had never faced up to the situation which Nixon had to come to terms with when it became clear from the secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho that there was no chance

from more than the sum of its actions out reflects its attitudes, its morale, its inner peace. De Gaulle's initial question posed the real choice. It meant getting out of Vietnam quickly and cutting one's losses, it meant separating credibility from virility.

Foreign policy throughout the period 1969-73 will be seen by the readers of this book to have been bedevilled by interagency rivalries and personality clashes between in particular Kissinger in the White House and Rogers, Secretary of State, and Laird, Secretary of Defence. This seemingly endless bickering does little to establish trust in the manner in which United States policy is formed and it must have impaired the overall effectiveness of that policy. Yet despite this considerable diplomatic achievements were obtained over this period.

It is in relations with the Soviet Union, the central issue of any United States

After reading 'Sideshow'.
by Wm Shawcross

Old man on a cow,
old man on a cow;
got no clothes on,
got no clothes on;
got no hope now,
got no hope now;
cow just goes on,
cow just goes on;
poor
old
man:
"Yah!"

Christopher Logue.

Christopher Logue.
tion of the circle, however necessary, presents great problems for the sensible conduct of State Department business and for relations with allies. But if President Nixon's visit to China had not been negotiated in total secrecy the subsequent lobbying against and the consequential tough press clarifications could have jeopardised Chinese cooperation.

The new China policy was potentially deeply divisive within the United States and perhaps only, Nixon could have achieved so wide an acceptance for it. It marked a dramatic recognition of China's emergence as a potential super power and it must be one of the great events of the Nixon Presidency.

Henry Kissinger has written a book daunting in its detail but revealing in its range. It is a book written by a man who still hopes to be once again Secretary of State and at times this shows through particularly in asides about contemporary issues. It is excruciatingly flattering in its pen portraits of the world's leaders, dead as well as living. It is at times defensive in tone but it also has shafts of self depreciation and wit. With the publication of the next volume it will be easier to make an overall assessment of the man and his policies.

Henry Kissinger will always be associated with a global intellectual analysis, with substantive achievements in relation to the Soviet Union and with the complex negotiations over Salt and the imagination of the interim Middle East demilitarization agreement. But it also cannot be avoided that he will be associated, apart from Cambodia, with serious errors in supporting for too long white racialism in Southern Africa, in manipulating Latin America, particularly Allende, and for neglect over Cyprus. Yet when the overall balance is weighed, Henry Kissinger, despite mistakes and the inevitable controversy that comes to any man who has a mind of his own and is prepared to exercise it, will be judged well by history. For on the major issue concerning the Soviet Union and the delicate balance of power which determines our survival he is shown to be careful, clear-headed, constrained and consistent.

The White House Years is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Michael Joseph today at £14.95.

© Times Newspapers Ltd, 1979

FOREIGN
POLICY

NUMBER 37 WINTER 1979-80 $3.00

3
Muscle And Brains
Stanley Hoffmann

28
The Anti-Soviet Brigade
Dimitri K. Simes

43
Will MX Backfire?
William H. Kincade

59
Kissinger's Track Back
David Watt

67
Hold The Malaise!
Chester L. Cooper

71
18 African Guideposts
Helen Kitchen

AMERICA AND ULSTER

87
Healing Hands
Kevin M. Cahill

101
Hands Off
Conor Cruise O'Brien

111
Begin's False Autonomy
Mark Heller

133
True Neutrality For Israel
Nahum Goldmann

THE GERMANIES AT 30

142
New Country,
Old Nationality
Melvin Croan

161
All Quiet
On The Eastern Front
Josef Joffe

176
Dateline Bonn:
Uneasy Super-Ally
David Schoenbaum

37

[LC]

KISSINGER'S
TRACK BACK

by David Watt

Last September in Brussels, Henry Kissinger offered a highly theatrical recantation of his old and sensible but now unfashionable views on nuclear deterrence. No one who listened or read the text could have much doubt that the last American secretary of state intends, if he can, to become the next secretary of state. Nor does there seem to be much doubt that if a Republican should win the White House in 1980 Kissinger would have a good chance of pulling it off. His belief in a global balance of power, now suitably refurbished in a more anti-Soviet form, fits in neatly with the alarmist mood of the Republican party and (who knows?) the American people. His vast experience will be attractive to any president anxious to establish a quick contrast with the much-lamented amateurism of Jimmy Carter.

It is as well to be clear about this, because the realization makes a reassessment of Kissinger's past record at the summit of American foreign policy making a regrettable necessity—regrettable because from a historian's point of view a reappraisal is hopelessly illtimed. There is no way an unbiased account of the Nixon presidency and the Vietnam war can be produced by contemporary writers. Outsiders like David Halberstam and William Shawcross, overwhelmed by the superfluity of sources, fall back on preconception and occasionally prejudice as the framework of discourse. Kissinger himself, an insider who has the ability and the historical sense to write a great history of his times, has been forced by pride and ambition to expend his information and experience 10 years too early and in defense of a dubious case, thereby dodging the most difficult parts of the record.

DAVID WATT, former Washington correspondent and political editor of the Financial Times, is director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

59.

[LC]

Watt

One looks in vain in *White House Years* (his account of his period as Nixon's national security adviser in 1969-1973) for a breath of criticism of any of the front runners for the Republican nomination in 1980, or indeed of any section of the right, though their attitude to the Vietnam war and other issues was often not much less demented, even from Kissinger's point of view, than the left's. There is no real attempt, either, to face squarely the constitutional propriety of Nixon's attitude to the Congress. Very little about telephone tapping (though we are promised more in the second volume). A gingerly and often tendentious discussion of any issues likely to be politically sensitive in 1980, notably arms control and Israel.

WHITE HOUSE YEARS. Henry Kissinger.
1,521 pages. Boston. Little, Brown and
Company. 1979. $22.50.

Yet polemic has its advantages. Kissinger may not have written a very good history of Nixon's foreign policy, but he has produced an astonishing tour de force. This enormous volume—its convoluted narrative, its grim humor, its diplomatic gossip, its philosophical diversions—is really one long argument with historical illustrations. It presents a view of the world that, whether one agrees with it or not, is coherent in itself and an important indication of how Kissinger will behave if he returns to power. A less biased and self-interested account 10 years on would presumably have shared the same virtues of stylistic felicity and psychological insight, while avoiding the more blatant distortions contained in his existing text; but it is unlikely that it would have had the same revealing emotional and intellectual force behind it.

The argument, though presented in the Kissinger memoirs with unusual vigor and consistency, is not in itself unfamiliar. It is not even, in the historical sense, revisionist, since there is every reason to believe that Kissinger embraced it from the moment he first

60.

set foot in the White House. It was, and is Kissinger's basic assumption that world peace can only be assured by a stable balance of global power. Since the most important power today is in the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, the first task of the United States is to insure that in the main theaters of the world and overall the Soviet Union is confronted with a firm assertion of American interest backed with sufficient force to insure that negotiation can take place on equal terms. After a while it should be possible on this basis to build up a framework of balanced agreements that not only assures stability and even cooperation between the adversaries, but also keeps lesser powers and unsettling influences in their proper places. But woe betide the system if either side forgets that it is ultimately founded on an equilibrium of force.

This simple, bipolar model is the starting point of the Kissinger doctrine, but his memoirs are also concerned with the application of two important refinements. The first is "linkage"—the notion that once a serious dialogue between the superpowers is in train it is not necessary to have physical confrontation in all parts of the globe. Providing that the overall balance is secure, one can trade off unwanted advantages in one field in order to improve the position in another, or refuse concessions in one area (say, arms control) in order to insure Soviet cooperation in some remote part of the global arena (say, Vietnam).

The second variation is the modification of
of a bipolar structure by the addition of
China to the exercise. Kissinger's most endur-
ing claim to the thanks of the human race is
often said to be that he reopened China to the
world, but his memoirs make it perfectly
plain that his and Nixon's primary motive
was a rather less altruistic desire to put the
screws on the Russians. The new system
hardly merits the title "triangular," since
China is not for the moment in the same
class as the others and is cast by Kissinger in
a role that is basically ancillary to U.S. pur-
poses; but there is little doubt that if Kis-

61.

[LC]

singer returned to power he would exploit
Soviet fears of the Chinese for all they were
worth, undeterred by accusations of risky
provocation of the Soviet Union.

Cutting Corners with Nixon

So much for the theoretical substance of
Kissinger's foreign policy. Its practical opera-
tion is harder—not, he thinks, because it does
not work if resolutely applied, but because
the traditions and exigencies of American
domestic politics make the application so dif-
ficult. "There is in America," Kissinger says
quite rightly, "an idealistic tradition that sees
foreign policy as a contest between evil and
good. There is a pragmatic tradition that
seeks to solve 'problems' as they arise. There
is a legalistic tradition that treats interna-
tional issues as juridical cases. There is no
geo-political tradition." His chief objective in
office was to establish such a tradition, that
would "found American foreign policy on a
sober perception of permanent national inter-
est, rather than on fluctuating emotions that
in the past had led us to excesses of both in-
tervention and abdication."

Kissinger and Nixon were constantly frus-
trated in this aim by the Congress, by the
press, and by a considerable part of public
opinion that persisted in being emotional,
particularly about the war, and whose per-
ception of American national interest did not
comprehend the Nixon/Kissinger insistence
that a collapse of the American position in
Vietnam would upset the balance of the
global structure and possibly bring it crash-
ing to ruins. Nevertheless, the Nixon White
House pressed on with its policy undeterred,
giving the absolute minimum of information
to the Congress; attempting constantly to
hoodwink, if not manipulate, the media; and
relying on the confused, uneasy patriotism of
the majority of the voters for support.

Kissinger is more than a little ambiguous
in his memoirs about whether the implemen-
tation of this Grand Design would have been
easier or cleaner under a different president.
One of the chief lessons of the book, of course,

62.

Watt

is intended to be that most of Carter's foreign
policy is a hopeless relapse—sweeping Wil-
sonian moralism combined with weakness
toward the Soviet adversary. But are we to
assume that a strong, dynamic Republican
leader like John Connally would be able to
operate without subterfuge and manipula-
tion? The picture of Nixon that emerges
from *White House Years* implies for much of
the time that his peculiar frailties accounted
for a lot. The Nixon of the Kissinger portrait
is a timid, tormented figure, experienced, able,
and often desperately courageous, but petri-
fied in the face of almost all human contact
and only able to function on powerful doses
of Walter Mittyish fantasy administered, and
to some extent realized, by devoted but sinis-
ter personal attendants. Such a personality
was virtually bound to cut corners.

But there is something more systematic in-
volved here. Kissinger has the gall to remark
at one point that "Congress is in no position
to make coherent tactical decisions because its
knowledge of the mosaic of foreign policy is
so fragmentary." As he admits elsewhere, a
notable cause of this lamentable ignorance

—Thomas Reed

63.

lay, in his day, in the deliberate policy of the White House, and in fact there are a number of crucial moments in Nixon's first term when Kissinger implies that any president would have been right to disregard the open tradition of the American Constitution and to pursue a secret and devious course.

The Cambodian bombing of 1969 is one such incident, for although Kissinger concedes that it might have been better to take the congressional leadership into the administration's confidence, he does not regret his determination that the press should not discover the truth, and when the story leaked he allowed a witch hunt among his own staff to proceed. He is similarly unrepentant about the covert attempt by the CIA to prevent the election of Salvador Allende in Chile. We may assume that the leopard would not change his spots during another term of office.

### Modified "Hands-Off"

What, then, are we to make of this as a prospectus for the next (Republican) administration's foreign policy? Would it work in 1981? With the best available will in the world, it seems doubtful, due to the nature of the world today and to U.S. opinion.

So far as the world is concerned, the obvious question looming over the Kissinger strategy is whether the kind of understanding with the Soviets hammered out between 1969 and 1972 is any longer a sufficient condition of balance. In Europe, no doubt, it is because military forces are already arrayed against each other there in some kind of equilibrium that it is strongly in the U.S. interest to maintain. But elsewhere, the slippage (that is, the lapse of countries from the American sphere of influence) that the U.S. geopolitician laments can hardly be prevented by these means.

Kissinger may well be right in assuming that his brilliant, great power diplomacy in the early 1970s gained the United States a free hand to conclude the Vietnam war on slightly less humiliating terms than might otherwise have been the case, though he overestimates the long-term significance of this

64.

[LC]

Watt

particular achievement. But from Angola through the Horn of Africa and South Yemen to Iran, Afghanistan, and the latest Indo-China war, it is, to put it mildly, very hard to be sure that pressure on the Soviets actually could have led to a different outcome by removing the "source of trouble" or permitting America to settle matters to its own satisfaction by a series of coups de main.

What can certainly be agreed with the Soviets is a modified "hands-off" policy for both sides, but if, as seems probable, the forces of nationalism and anti-colonialism continue, notwithstanding, to upset Kissinger's geopolitical balance with no more than general encouragement and a few arms from Moscow, some means of learning to live with the situation will have to be devised.

This will not be easy—and in reading *White House Years* one realizes that this is to some extent the fault of Kissinger himself, who told the American people years ago that if they conducted their external affairs according to his *realpolitiker* precepts he would devise a system that would in effect make the world stand still for them. He now disowns authorship of the exaggerated rhetoric of the early Nixon foreign policy reports—"an era of world peace" and so forth—but still sticks to the substance of them. When the status quo is disturbed, it can only be (a) because his geopolitical hand is not on the tiller and (b) because the subtle and ruthless Soviets have outwitted lesser men. The net result may well be to propel Kissinger back to the summit of affairs, but it will produce expectations that he could not possibly fulfill under present conditions and that he and his president would be sorely tempted to appease by irrelevant showdowns and international tantrums.

The situation is likely to be made even worse by the baleful inheritance of Lyndon Johnson's and Nixon's (and Kissinger's) earlier handling of public opinion. The most striking lesson to be gleaned from the Kissinger memoirs is that the United States is paying an exceedingly heavy price for the violence done to the proprieties of the American

65.

Constitution from the Tonkin Resolution onward. Kissinger is quite right that a democracy cannot conduct foreign policy unless it is prepared to give some tactical discretion to the Executive. But for the Executive to proceed regularly in secret, as it did in the Nixon/Kissinger era, because it dared not put its case to the test of public opposition, was a blunder even more than it was a crime, and it was also the origin of the present paranoid skepticism of the Congress and the press in the face of all external activities of the U.S. government.

If, as Kissinger implies, foreign policy cannot be conducted effectively on any other basis, so much the worse for Kissinger and foreign policy. But I do not believe it. A sober perception of American national interests in the next decade suggests, certainly, that the U.S. government should maintain rough parity with the Soviet Union in strategic armaments and improve the conventional capabilities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It does not demand the staking of American superpower prestige and influence on the outcome of every regional struggle in which Russian interest can be detected.

The problem is to get the American people—confused, worried, and bruised as they are by decades of conflicting exhortations from their leaders—to take a more balanced and less Manichaean view of the world and to recognize that many changes and some losses are not only inevitable but actually cause more trouble to the Soviets in the long run than the inappropriate assertion of U.S. power.

In some moods Kissinger seems to agree with this cool view. Yet in his attempt to make a comeback, he cannot resist the temptation to strike heroic attitudes; and instead of taking the laborious and politically hazardous course of trying to educate the voters to the new realities of America's limited power, he tries in office to bypass them and in opposition to play on their fears. His book is in many ways superb; but it will not make it any easier for him to lead American foreign policy through the perils of the 1980s if he is called to do so.

66.

Verdi's careful orchestration: by adding trumpets and trombones, for example, to Verdi's clarinets, bassoons, and cellos just after Amelia's words "il feroce decreto mi vuol parte ad un'opra di sangue" in Act III. The Covent Garden Orchestra is excellent throughout (whereas the NBC strings were occasionally ragged and the winds harsh), and Davis's cast is at least a match for Toscanini's: as Riccardo, Carreras is lighter (though no more elegant) than the robust and energetic Jan Peerce; Caballé is a stronger and more full-bodied Amelia than the nonetheless excellent Herva Nelli; Wixler is smoother and suaver as Renato than Robert Merrill, whose voice, especially in Act III of the Toscanini version, becomes somewhat coarse and unpleasant. But the two performances are very close in tempi and overall conception. Listening to Toscanini's for the first time in perhaps 10 years, I felt the same regret that I felt 25 years ago when I heard it broadcast: that when he finally came to broadcast and record complete

operas, Toscanini chose a minor (though still delightful) work like *The Masked Ball* (to say nothing of *La Bohème*) rather than the *Tristan* or *Figaro* he might have given us. But this time I also felt grateful that Davis is young, ambitious, and versatile enough so that at the end of his career we probably won't have such regrets.

Finally, there is one last very important recording event of the year: the excellent first volume (Columbia M4-35193) of the long-awaited two-volume set of the complete music of Anton Webern, prepared under the supervision of Boulez. It contains all of what we used to think of as the Webern canon: Opp. 1-31. But Hans Moldenhauer, whose definitive biography of the composer, written in collaboration with his wife Rosaleen, has just appeared this year, has recently discovered many other Webern works. These will appear in the second volume of the Columbia set, and I would prefer to withhold detailed comment on the first volume until I can hear them.

## White House Years
by Henry Kissinger

(Little, Brown; $22.50)

Of few other books could it more appropriately be said that there is less here than meets the eye. Or the hand. For this massive volume, impossible to carry on the bus or even to read in bed, tells us far more than we need to know about the author's first four years as Richard Nixon's foreign policy adviser. This book harbors many gems, to be sure, but they are deeply encased in padding, like a set of old dishes packed in styrofoam. Henry Kissinger, or "Doctor," as he prefers to be addressed in the academic title he quaintly brought along with him into the corridors of power, has not resisted the attempt to tell nearly everything he knows. And a good deal more besides.

He cannot resist the temptation to pontificate, a habit no doubt induced by years of lecturing to captive students, or of demonstrating his erudition. Thus, before each major foreign trip, the reader is treated to a slide-show capsule history. "Bordered on the south by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the

Himalayas, and on the west by the Hindu Kush mountains that merge with the heavens as if determined to seal off the teeming masses, and petering out in the east in the marshes of Bengal, the Indian subcontinent has existed through millennia as a world apart," we are told in preparation for his celebrated "tilt" toward Pakistan in the 1971 war. This lecture, which goes on and on for paragraphs, reveals the good doctor's talent for travelogues, but also why his text runs to 1476 pages.

Unfortunately the exigencies of a huge publisher's advance, said to amount to some five million dollars, and the 1980 presidential elections, in which, as an unemployed statesman, he has a professional interest, did not permit him to write the reflective volume of which he is no doubt capable. This one is more in the nature of what might be called a campaign autobiography: the campaign for his return as secretary of state in some future Republican administration.

Nonetheless, buried deep in these

multitudinous pages is a book worthy of his scholarly, as well as of his worldly, ambitions. One gets glimpses of it from time to time, particularly in the cameo vignettes of the great and the not so great. Here Kissinger's unexpected talents as a biographer, and his well-known expertise at vindictiveness and flattery, are put to good use.

In a few striking paragraphs the author draws portraits of some of the foreign leaders he encountered in his years at the top—Mao, Chou, Brezhnev, De Gaulle, Wilson, Heath—and twists his rapier in the back of those who, like McGeorge Bundy, have given him less than he believes to be his due. The capsule biography form also offers him the opportunity to lay flowery wreaths at the bier of past benefactors, such as Nelson Rockefeller, to whom he has most appropriately dedicated this volume, and at the feet of such possible future ones as John Connally. Any future employer, however, would do well to watch his step. Kissinger's comments on his former boss, Richard Nixon, are sly, vicious, and dripping with innuendo. Doctor Kissinger proves himself to be, on a very high level indeed, accomplished both as a flatterer and a character assassin.

But Kissinger is not Keynes, and one does not read his little essays in biography for revelation. One is merely surprised that they are written so deftly. Nor does one read Kissinger to find out what the guiding principles of American foreign policy ought to be. For what is most striking about this book is that the celebrated diplomatist does not seem to know. He does, to be sure, incant such phrases as "equilibrium," "balance of power," and "national interest," but they tend to float errantly in an undefined void.

For him the purpose of foreign policy is simply the aggrandizement of the power of the state. The uses to which such power may be put are purely incidental. There are, to be sure, a few ritualistic curtsies to "morality." No foreign policy text would be complete without them. But the author uses the word in a very special sense. For him it does not mean equity, justice, self-determination, or dedication to principles higher than the law of nations. Rather, as he makes clear in relating his part in the devastation of Cambodia, the plotting against Allende's Chile, the unqualified support of the shah of Iran, and the encouragement of Pakistani genocide, morality is whatever seems most advantageous to the power of the

28

The New Republic

[LC]

state he happens to serve.

Kissinger does not offer a view of foreign policy so much as a set of negotiating tactics. He tells us how to pin an opponent to the ground, or even how to cripple him for life, but not the reasons why he should be considered an opponent. For Henry Kissinger such questions do not even seem to arise. Life is a struggle for supremacy. Victory goes to the strongest. Anything that stands in the way—the Congress, the press, a recalcitrant public—should be cajaled, lied to, intimidated, “contained.”

But we live in a country that expects its foreign policy to have at least some relation to moral values. And so Kissinger tells us, in recounting the resignation of three of his key aides over the invasion of Cambodia, that “morality can best be demonstrated not by a grand gesture but by the willingness to persevere through imperfect stages for a better world.” But the decision to devastate “poor Cambodia” was most definitely, he assures us, “not a moral issue.” It was all part of what he calls, in a frequent incantation, a “Greek tragedy.” Presumably by that phrase he does not mean what the Greeks meant—the moment of searing revelation that

comes in the aftermath of blind and violent passion. If so, there is no indication of such self-knowledge here, only self-justification.

No, this is not a book about morality in foreign policy, and Kissinger is ill-advised even to raise an issue that can only cast doubt on his motives, if not his decency. Any man who can calmly recount how he plotted to overthrow the democratically elected government of another country—in this case Chile—does not have a serious claim to our attention on moral grounds.

The case of Chile is instructive and, together with the chapter on the India-Pakistan war over Bangladesh, perhaps the most significant in the book. Not because it deals with events that captured the attention of many Americans—the long sections on the Indochina war have understandably aroused greater controversy—but because it reveals the assumptions that govern Kissinger's view of foreign policy. Salvador Allende was expendable on three counts. First, having won only a 36 percent plurality, he was not “really” elected. (By this logic Woodrow Wilson, who in 1912 garnered but 41 percent of the vote in a three-way race, should

have been replaced by William Howard Taft in a British-engineered coup.) Second, he might not observe “democratic guarantees” (although Kissinger fails to note that Allende did hold a democratic election three years later and increased his plurality in parliament). Third, and obviously most important, he had “avowed his dedication to totalitarian Marxism-Leninism.”

We can forget about the problem of democratic guarantees, which seemed not to concern Kissinger at all with regard to the shah of Iran, whom he describes as a “gentle, even sentimental man” whose authoritarian methods were “in keeping with the traditions” of his society. No, Allende’s sin was that he was an “admirer of the Cuban dictatorship and a resolute opponent of ‘American imperialism.’” That being the case, it was clearly “neither morally nor politically unjustified for the United States to support those internal political forces seeking to maintain a democratic counterweight to radical dominance.” In other words, it was “moral” to funnel money into opposition parties and, after Allende won the election, to foment civil unrest, encourage a military coup d’état, and finance terrorist groups that, in a

## SOCIOLOGY • CONTINUUM BOOKS

> “An Academic Voltaire” * completes his historic trilogy, THE DARK SIDE OF THE DIALECTIC

Alvin W. Gouldner

Volume III THE TWO MARXISMS

Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory

Analyzes Marxist theory as it developed during its founders' lifetimes and within the framework of a theory of the social production of texts. $17.95

Volume I THE DIALECTIC OF IDEOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY

> “The scholarship is stunning. Wittgenstein, Habermas, Rawls, and Coser are closely read and digested... Gouldner is an academic Voltaire.

—The Journal Of Politics* $14.95

Volume II THE FUTURE OF INTELLECTUALS AND THE RISE OF THE NEW CLASS

> “Analyzes intellectuals and the educated labor force, anatomizes modern society and its politics, and theorizes about our culture, knowledge and sensibility. And that is just a beginning ... presented with unusual verve.”

—Norman Birnbaum, The New York Times $8.95

Andrew Arato and Paul Breines

THE YOUNG LUKACS AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN MARXISM

> “The best historical introduction to the young Lukacs that is available in English. A superb piece of historical craftsmanship.” —Alvin W. Gouldner

> “A challenging critique of the man whose controversial ideas linked social theory with intellectual creativity.”

—Booklist $16.50

Charles A. Meconis
WITH CLUMSY GRACE

The American Catholic Left, 1961-1975

> “Sympathetic but critical ... traces the origins, achievements, and failings of the Catholic left ... should stand high on the reading list of anyone seriously interested in recent American history.”

—Library Journal $9.95

Elias Canetti
THE TONGUE SET FREE

Remembrance of a European Childhood

A searching portrait of the background and intellectual development of the social theorist and author of *Crowds And Power*, “a book of immense distinction in which the fruits of human action *en bloc* have been wisely tabled and formulated.”

—The London Times $12.95

## THE SEABURY PRESS

815 Second Avenue • New York, N Y 10017

December 15, 1979

29

[LC]

# The Russian Empire: A Portrait in Photographs by Chloe Obolensky with an introduction by Max Hayward

(Random House; $24.95)

Holy Russia has never been captured more fully than in this excellent collection of photographs. This is the Russia of the ordinary people—metalworkers in St. Petersburg, peasants on country estates, Cossacks in the Ukraine, convicts in Siberia. The book includes only a handful of photographs of the czars and their families, and one of Tolstoy playing a board game with his family. It is a matchless depiction of the Russia we have lost.

Peasants of Nizhny-Novgorod, c. 1880.

Blind wandering pilgrims, c. 1870.

botched kidnapping attempt, murdered the head of the Chilean armed forces when he refused to go along with a coup. "I cannot accept the proposition that the United States is debarred from acting in the gray area between diplomacy and military intervention," Kissinger blandly observes. This is, to be sure, a logical policy, given his premises. But to pretend it has anything to do with morality is unworthy of such an avowed exponent of realpolitik. Kissinger should, like Dean Acheson, whom he professedly admires, have the courage not to pay lip service to sentiments he so clearly despises.

What are his convictions? That we live in a Hobbesian world where power is the only arbiter and the only morality. That international life is an incessant struggle for dominance. That the weak are meant to be victims and that the strong can avoid that fate only by being merciless. What he refers to as the "national interest" must be based upon such principles. Anything else, to use one of his favorite derogatory terms, is purely sentimental. Thus those State Department officials who wondered whether it was right for the United States to try to prevent Chileans from electing a president of their choice are contemptuously

dismissed for "confusing social reform with geopolitics." Secretary of State William Rogers, Kissinger's hated bureaucratic rival, is described as having "no grasp of geopolitical stakes." And what are those stakes? "By geopolitical," he explains, "I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium." And what is equilibrium? Essentially the balance of power, which is to say, the status quo.

One could, of course, argue over the morality of a policy dedicated to counterrevolution and the perpetuation of the status quo. Such an argument might be interesting, but not to Kissinger. Even on his grounds, however, one could ask whether such a policy is realistic. Is it really in America's "national interest" to go to war in defense of the status quo? Is it reasonable to interpret any political change anywhere as a threat to the balance of power? Is every third world palace coup equally crucial to America's vital interests? The trouble with Kissinger's definition is that it is devoid of any sense of proportion or priority—the failing that led him to pursue "honor" for four futile years in Vietnam and to attempt an intervention in Angola. He still has not learned the

difference between a vital interest and a peripheral one. For him it is all "linkage."

It is this curious concept of linkage that led him to prolong the war in Vietnam and to devastate Cambodia. Obsessed with the Soviets and indifferent to the moral claims of others less powerful, he sees the world as a vast chessboard with two kings, a few rooks, and a field of pawns. Thus the revolt of the Bengalis in 1971 against the murderous Yahya Kahn regime in West Pakistan is seen only in terms of Kissinger's own diplomatic preoccupations. "There was no doubt about the strong-arm tactics of the Pakistani military," he admits of the slaughter in Bangladesh. "But Pakistan was our sole channel to China." Too bad for the Bengalis, who got in the way when Kissinger needed a postman to deliver his billet-doux to Chou En-Lai. To have failed to back the Khan regime "would have undone our China initiative." That the Bengalis might have had priorities that, to their minds, were more important than ensuring that Henry Kissinger had pressed duck in Peking is apparently not worthy of a serious statesman's consideration.

But it may be worthy of ours. Particularly since Kissinger reveals that

30

The New Republic

[L]

"Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord."

he was urging Nixon to threaten the Soviet Union with war if it put pressure on China. The logic goes something like this. The Indians, with Russian weapons and encouragement, were backing the Bengali secessionists and making vague threatening noises at West Pakistan. The Pakistanis had linked up with India's old nemesis, China. If Pakistan were humiliated by a friend of Moscow, that is, India, then the Chinese would not take Uncle Sam "seriously." Thus the puzzling "tilt" toward Pakistan. "The major problem now is that the Russians retain their respect for us," Kissinger explained to Nixon in their coded language of geopolitics. "We have to prevent India from attacking West Pakistan." If the Indians did attack—and it is questionable that they ever intended to—then the United States would "have no choice" but to aid China. And if the Soviets should then threaten Peking, Washington "would not stand idly by."

So, folks, while the fighting in Vietnam was still going on, we almost got embroiled in a war with Russia in order to save face for China—a nation which at that time we did not even officially recognize. Such is realpolitik as played by the masters: the same kind that plunged Europe into war over the

assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists in 1914. Thus does Nixon, in Kissinger's words, deserve our everlasting thanks for having the courage to "preserve the world balance of power for the ultimate safety of all free peoples."

Kissinger's obsession with the Russians leads him down other curious byways. Allende, for example, had to be overthrown not only because he was a "Marxist-Leninist," but because halfway around the world the Russians, presumably with a wink from Moscow, had made forays into Jordan. And to wrap it all up, Washington was at the time putting pressure on the Russians to dismantle their nuclear submarine refueling base in Cuba. This, in Kissinger's language, was an example of "linkage." There is a kind of logic in all this; there is also a kind of madness. Not madness of the certifiable sort, to be sure, for it takes a great deal more to certify a statesman than it does an ordinary citizen, but madness nonetheless. Linkage may have its uses, but only if the connection between events remains somewhere this side of paranoia. One gets the impression that around the White House it was not only Nixon who had to be humored lest he go

off the deep end, but the good doctor himself.

Diplomacy as conducted by Kissinger, for all its Byzantine intricacy, was hobbled by an intellectual straightjacket. Kissinger's tendency to see every nationalistic contretemps everywhere in the world as linked to the Russo-American cold war suggests not only intellectual blinders, but intellectual narcissism as well. That is, an incapacity to see the world except in reference to an abused and insufficiently-appreciated self. His celebrated megalomania, which he often uses as the object of gentle jokes designed to charm his admirers and disarm his critics, is merely the other side of an ill-concealed insecurity. Fame and power seem to have made Kissinger more at ease with the insecurity, but have made him no less intolerant of those with other views on how the world operates.

All of this would be of no public consequence—certainly we are all entitled to our own neuroses—did it not deeply affect his perception of international relations and his conduct of American diplomacy. An inability to perceive the validity of others is matched by an incapacity to view their struggles as anything more than an

A Yakut riding a reindeer.

Blacksmiths

December 15, 1979

31

extension of one's own. Thus the Cambodians, Bengalis, Chileans, and Vietnamese, for example, are not only treated as pawns in the great battle of the superpowers, but viewed as entities of a lesser order of reality. A diplomacy that sees the world in terms of pawns may or may not be immoral. But it is certainly self-deceiving and prone to dangerous obsessions. Were Kissinger still directing American foreign policy we would, no doubt, long ago have sent the Marines into Nicaragua to defend Somoza—"a friend of our country and a pillar of stability in a turbulent and vital region," to use Kissinger's description of another free world friend, the shah of Iran. We would be aiding the Moroccans in the Sahara war and the South Africans against Angola. And it would all be done in the name of the higher logic of "equilibrium" and the balance of power.

Kissinger is in no sense an ideologue. He is a game player, as bored by matters of ideology, not to mention morality, as are the Soviets themselves. The game is all, and what makes it worth playing is a competitor worthy of one's own guile. Were the French, for example, as powerful as the Russians, he would be absorbed in containing them. He is a counterrevolutionary, to be sure, but because he lives in a satiated status quo country. Were he an Iranian or a Cuban he would be calling for a "new international order." Kissinger gets on with the Soviets because he shares their view of the world as a jungle in which every beast is out for his own advantage. He could serve their government, or any other, with equal distinction because he is concerned only with the mechanics of foreign policy, not its political content or

moral weight. Indeed, one can almost see him in Andrei Gromyko's shoes, or Brezhnev's, for that matter, cynically manipulating other countries for the greater glory of his own, piously defining the exercise of his nation's power as coterminous with the interests of mankind, brutally squashing rebellious satellites, bankrolling congenial dictators, and defending it all as a "historical responsibility for preserving the balance of power."

Henry Kissinger's world is one where power is exercised for its own sake, power devoid of moral restraint, of responsibility for its consequences, even at times of rational objective. There is something compelling about such a cynical use of power, particularly when it is rationalized with such intellectual verve. Kissinger not only appeals to the "Sockless Joe" in all of us, the redneck who wants to give some pesky little runt a sock in the jaw, but provides a certified PhD reason for doing so. Thus the continuing fascination Kissinger holds over the public mind, not to mention itchy politicians and moonstruck journalists.

Doctor Henry Kissinger has constructed a diplomacy for a Hobbesian world. When he exercised that diplomacy he helped create the kind of world that would justify it. This book tells how he did it. And it also reveals what might happen were he to regain the power for which he so palpably yearns.

## Ronald Steel

Ronald Steel's biography of Walter Lippmann will be published next year by Little, Brown-Atlantic Monthly Press.

## Night of the Aurochs
by Dalton Trumbo
edited and with an introduction by Robert Kirsch

(Viking; $9.95)

It was impossible to dislike Dalton Trumbo. In Hollywood, where you are only as good as your last marriage, he stayed wed to the same woman for almost 40 years. In an epoch of family dissolution, he wrote scores of affectionate, self-mocking letters to his son and daughters. When others became informers, or watched their lives

destroyed during the years of the Red Menace, the blacklisted screen writer poured out scripts under a variety of pseudonyms (one of which won an Oscar), and when the pendulum swung back in the 1960s, refused to malign those who had done him in. Years ago, when I was in servitude as a film critic, I spent a long afternoon listening to

him—people rarely talked to Trumbo; the only time you got to speak was during his inhalations. He was witty, forthcoming, and, in his declining years, still full of wonder at the Day-Glo extravagances of Celluloid City.

Trumbo's decency and restless intelligence were evident in his pacifist 1939 novel, *Johnny Got His Gun*, and they enliven portions of his last book, *Night of the Aurochs*. Unhappily, portions are all there are. Trumbo never completed the novel; he suffered from cancer during the writing of much of the work, and at the time of his death three years ago only 10 chapters were completed. They, and a file of notes and emendations, were edited by Robert Kirsch. It cannot

have been an easy or pleasant task. For one thing, the subject—the Holocaust—is too monumental to be apprehended in fragments, if at all. Second, Trumbo's idea—the investigation of evil—seems to have been too demanding for his fading powers. This is not to say that a healthy Trumbo could have done any better. We have a flourishing and robust William Styron and look at what he has given us.

In *Night of the Aurochs* the author presents the story of one concentration camp official, Ludwig Richard Johann Grieben. Like a parent who makes sure that his children go off to school with all things clearly labeled, Trumbo announced in this first-person account that "My Christian names (were) derived from Beethoven, Wagner and Bach." In other words, a Good German about to go Wrong. Trumbo did a good deal of reading in Freud and Adler and he adroitly connects the binary lusts for sex and power. Grieben, the nominal Catholic, wonders, "what is it that makes us cruel when we long to be

[LC]

photo of Dalton Trumbo by Mitzi Trumbo

32

The New Republic

"Le Duc Tho: His profession was revolution, his vocation guerrilla warfare"

"Leonid Brezhnev alternated between pummeling me and wearing a grave mien."

Mao Tse-fung to an extraordinary degree "distilled raw, concentrated willpower"

treatment the book is likely to receive at the hands of reviewers.

With what appeared to be weary resignation, he predicted that in a number of publications the book will be reviewed by well-known critics of his actions in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Middle East. He indicated that he was less concerned about favorable or unfavorable responses to the book than that it be given a fair hearing.

The book, which is about three-quarters of a million words long, covers the years from 1969 to 1973, when Kissinger was Richard Nixon's chief foreign-policy adviser. He is now at work on a second volume, covering his years as secretary of state.

A full text of the interview follows

**Q: How do you think this book will alter history's assessment of your performance?**

**A:** Well, I can't judge, since I don't know what history's assessment of my performance will be. It think it *will* probably affect contemporary assessments of my performance.

Intended it to be a document of reconciliation, in the sense that I intended to describe, as honestly as I was able, what the factors were which we considered in making a decision. That doesn't mean those factors were correctly considered. I described what the domestic pressures were, and some of the sense of anguish perhaps felt on both sides of these various controversies.

I hope that the contemporary perception will be some sense of the complexity of the problems, of the simultaneity of the pressures that a policymaker has to deal with, of the rather tragic domestic period in which all the contenders were, really, sort of devouring each other without an attempt to construct some coherence in that potential chaos.

Now, whether they will judge me better or worse for it, that I cannot tell. I have tried to write it in a way so that when all the documents become available, it will stand up — not to score journalistic points.

See INTERVIEW, H-2

policy — even, in most instances, the secretary of state — and managed from start to finish by President Nixon and by Dr. Kissinger and his brilliant but often overtaxed National Security Council staff.

Henry Kissinger is keenly aware of the liabilities of this short-circuit diplomacy. In fact, he does not in principle defend his own improvisations. "The State Department," he writes, perhaps laying ground for the next volume, covering the years when he was secretary of state, "should be the visible focus of our foreign policy; if the president has no confidence in his secretary of state he should replace him, not substitute a security adviser for him. If he does not trust the State Department, the president should enforce compliance with his directives, not circumvent it with the NSC machinery. Yet, while these postulates are beyond argument as a matter of theory, they are not easy to carry out."

The blatant but brilliant successful violation of these "postulates" recounted here was to a remarkable degree the result of an accident of circumstance: that Richard Nixon, incurably suspicious of what he took to be the enmity of the permanent foreign policy bureaucracy, and in any event contemptuous of its con-

See REVIEW, H-2

[LC]

Mixed Media

SOHO WEEK
LY NEWS

Jane Perlez

# KISSINGER'S CAMBODIA ITCH

10/18/74

"Cambodia was not a moral issue; neither Nixon nor his opponents should ever have presented it in those terms." Henry Kissinger in *White House Years*.

"In Cambodia, the imperatives of a small and vulnerable people were consciously sacrificed to the interests of strategic design... Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime." William Shawcross in *Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia*.

No two sentences delineate so clearly the stark debate between two books that deal with American policy in Cambodia. One is written by the former Secretary of State and architect of American foreign policy, the other by a journalist and critic. Both men are foreigners to this country, one a German refugee, the other an Englishman whose father was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Kissinger blames the genocide in Cambodia on Hanoi's "quest for hegemony." Shawcross sees the atrocities by the Khmer Rouge — and the famine being reported daily on the front pages — as the result of American bombing of Cambodia.

Kissinger's 1521-page tome, the occasion of a three-part excerpt in *Time* magazine, a celebrated but lightly watched David Frost interview last week and the making of Kissinger the millionaire, landed in reviewers' laps last Tuesday. It will be next month before the major opinions are in, guaranteeing a carefully timed, drawn out schedule of publicity. The daily *New York Times* reviewer John Leonard started the ball rolling yesterday with a benign review that noted, perhaps tongue in cheek, that Kissinger had produced something bigger than *War and Peace*. Little, Brown and Co., publishers of *White House Years* ($22.50 and $75.00 for a deluxe, limited signed edition) sent the book out with an elaborate glossy promotion package: four-color portrait of Kissinger; four black-and-whites of Kissinger alone and with Nixon, Anatoly Dobrynin and Indira Ghandi; and a biographical summary.

It is clear that Kissinger has added to and rewritten portions of his account on Cambodia in the light of Shawcross' work, which was published in May. Winston Lord, formerly on Kissinger's staff and now president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, read the Kissinger book chapter by chapter as it was written. Lord said yesterday that Kissinger "tried to hit on the main points he thought unfair" in Shawcross' argument. While Kissinger refuses to name Shawcross in the text — Shawcross is referred to as "revisionist history" or "implacable critic" — there are footnotes citing *Sideshow*. Kissinger is highly emotional when he refers in his indirect way to Shawcross:

"The bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation except apologists for the murderous Khmer Rouge." Kissinger then goes on to make his nominally sympathetic, but backhanded, reference to Cambodia: "Poor Cambodia," he writes, "gradually turned into the butt of our national frustrations." A page earlier, he says: "The ultimate victims of our domestic anguish were the gentle people of Cambodia."

## 'Significance Escapes Me'

Kissinger's refusal to see any moral problem with the bombing of Cambodia and its consequences for the country is revealed in his description of discussions with three of his staff, Winston Lord, Tony Lake and Roger Morris. (The latter two resigned in protest against American bombing of the Fishhook and Parrot's Beak areas of Cam-

Winston Lord read the manuscript for "substantive comment," along with William D. Rogers. Not the Secretary of State, whom Kissinger treats with disdain, but the former undersecretary for economic affairs in Kissinger's State Dept. "Kissinger had files assembled and a chronology assembled," Lord said in a telephone interview. "He'd write the damn thing in longhand. It was then typed out by one of his staff, who did a little smoothing out, and then it was sent to Rogers and me for substantive comment. I had been with him throughout the period. He was bouncing the thrust off me. I would say: 'You ought to be more self critical, this is too long, policy should be explained here, this should be treated at greater length.' I was writing in the margin on how to adjust the tone and did some light editing where the prose was getting particularly cumbersome. I would send in my comments and Rogers would send in his and then he'd go to do a third draft with his staff [at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington].'" Lord wouldn't say where Kissinger had accepted or refused his advice. It was a mistake, he added, to look for news in the *White House Years*. More valuable, said Lord, was "the revelation of the texture of the time, the nuances, the motives, the portraits. There are no major revelations I can point to. It's not that kind of book."

Among others Kissinger asked for advice were Jessica Catto, the wife of a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and now publisher of the *Washington Journalism Review*, who is not known for her foreign policy brief. Harold Evans, editor of the *London Sunday Times*, and ironically Shawcross' newspaper editor, polished up Kissinger's prose. Sealed packages of Kissinger's manuscript flowed in and out of the *London Times* office in New York en route to Evans in London.

* Kissinger, who was to become a master manipulator of the press — flattering correspondents with enough leaks and glamor to feed their egos — professes in the beginning of his book to be “ignorant of the ways” of Washington or government when I proclaimed at the press conference announcing my new position that “would have no dealings with the press.” But Kissinger learned:

"I soon found how naive my attitude was. One of the most important functions of the Presidential Assistant is to explain the President's policies and purposes. I learned that I could not ignore the media and I began to see journalists, though at first almost always at their initiative. I experienced the symbiotic relationship in Washington between media and government. Much as the journalist may resent it, he performs a partly governmental function." Kissinger says that if both journalists and government officials are realistic, "mutual respect" can be established.

Interestingly, one of the first comments on the Kissinger book was in Sunday's *Washington Post*, a paper that is serializing the book and has a long record of admiration for the former Secretary of State. The *Post* comments were written by Chalmers Roberts, whom Kissinger quotes approvingly in his own book. Kissinger praises Chalmers as the "distinguished diplomatic correspondent."

Roberts goes overboard in returning Kissinger's praise. On Sunday Roberts described *White House Years* as "a volume exquisite in the writing and leavened with humor" — words some of us would find impossible to apply to the former Secretary of State's account of his years 1969-1973.

Book Review
From
The New Haven Register

[L]

THE NEW HAVEN REGISTER, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1979

BOOKS

# ‘Lone Ranger’ Of Foreign Policy

WHITE HOUSE YEARS by Henry Kissinger(Little,
own; $22.50)

This first volume of Kissinger's memoirs could
well stand alone as the finest of all produced by
riders in the Nixon White House. It is candid,
casionally to the point of embarrassment; forthright
the view of the world Nixon and Kissinger shared,
d chilling in its moments when the trappings of
wer obviously overcame those who shared the
tlight in those years.

The book covers the foreign affairs of this country
Nixon's first term," from the time Kissinger, an
advisor to Rockefeller, was tapped to join the admin-
istration as assistant to the president for national
quality affairs.

Hardly of Nixon's circle, from Harvard, no less,
Kissinger found his job was meant to be special from
start.

Nixon, himself ever an outsider, shunned after his
eat in 1960 and never invited into the circles of
the Eastern Establishment and distrustful of its
members, particularly those who made up the back-
bone of the State Department, had every intention of
using foreign policy from the White House. That
tant that Kissinger's influence was to be extraordi-
inary; State and its chief, William Rogers, relegated
secondary roles, and lesser ones at that.

Everyone is entitled to an opportunity to write
story as they saw it, and Kissinger can't be faulted
taking it in this book, a sweeping, detailed review
his role in Nixon's policy making. His stamina on
lomatic missions hasn't faded. The nearly 1,500
ces here are fresh, with only occasional lapses into
liness.

As Nixon's assistant, Kissinger is careful here not
jump to directly into the spotlight. He is cautious
give the president the credit for the decision
cess, picturing himself as one who poses the
ices, or carries out the will of his boss.

You don't find Kissinger breaking down the barri-
to China, or the Kremlin; laying the groundwork
a new policy in the Middle East, or breaking
rough the impasse in Vietnam. Yet, there's enough
to suspect that the man was no ordinary mortal,
that Nixon and Kissinger, despite their differing
kgrounds, were able to find a magical glue that
bled them to work as a team on a par with FDR
Harry Hopkins, or Wilson and Colonel House.

Vietnam, of course, was the major problem con-
ting them. Nixon, the campaign nonsense about a
being just that, had to end the war if he wanted
e re-elected. It took well over a year before the
t House evolved a strategy — principally troop
action and arms aid to South Vietnam — and
only four years to reach a breakthrough in the
is talks.

Kissinger's role as our negotiator was noble, not
for the "peace at hand" fiasco in late October,
that he goes in great lengths to blame here on
North Vietnamese, but for finally negotiating the
e a few months later.

Leaders suffer with Kissinger through these talks,
lering how it ever came off.

ught in the conference table, Kissinger faced
communists before him daily reversing them-
s on points in the agreement, and, over his
ider, Nixon back home, more and more agitated
he stalling, sending angry messages, looking, as
White House public relations men advised, for a
aganda victory, if the cease-fire couldn't be had.
he Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, a
note in American history, were the result.

here are other dark notes evident here. Nixon,
'll he had achieved, exhibited from the start the

personality flaws that were ultimately to bring his
downfall.

The president, as Kissinger describes him and the
country at the time of Nixon's fall, was a "with-
drawn and elusive man," given to few moments of
joy, who often rambled in "convoluted" thought, and
was rehearsed by Kissinger and other aides in the
casual conversation he would have with other leaders
of state.

Shortly after his overwhelming victory over
McGovern in 1972, Kissinger saw Nixon become
more and more inaccessible. "I was struck," Kissinger
writes, "by how restless Nixon was, now that he
had achieved the overwhelming electoral approval
which had been the ambition of a lifetime. It was
almost as if it had been sought for its own sake; as
if, standing on the pinnacle, Nixon no longer had any
purpose left to his life...he withdraw into a seclusion
even deeper and more impenetrable than in his years
of struggle. Isolation had become almost the spiritual
necessity to this withdrawn, lonely, and tormented
man who insisted so on his loneliness and created so
much of his own torment. It was hard to avoid the
impression that Nixon, who thrived on crisis, also
craved disasters."

Others get spattered in Kissinger's ink. The White
House crew of Haldeman and Ehrlichman are not
beloved; nor is Rogers. The Russian leaders were
bears, crude and uncouth, wholly lacking in the

charm of the Chinese. DeGaulle was imposed
hardly tolerated Kissinger.

There is much of Kissinger that shows the
that duality that makes one hesitate in
unbounding praise on him.

The Soviet global strategy is simply,
opportunism," his European view, perhaps
bombing of Cambodia was "a minimum of
d strategy fully compatible with international
d reservations there.

Kissinger admits he supported the wiretare
some his staff and others in the White House
"I had no reason to doubt (it) was legal and e-
ed practice in these circumstances." More
moral issues of wiretapping, is promised in
volume. More would have been better said no

And he admits that humility, absented i
more than one occasion where Nixon, so disti-
media reporters, deserved the credit mo-
others.

With the president such a natural fall guy
media, "it would have required superhuman
c of dedication and restraint...to reject these p-
lares. None (in the administration,) my
cluded, reached within himself for these quali-

One can understand. But the laurels didn't
for nothing. That's why Kissinger's book, be-
the contributions he made, is one publishing
worthy of that label.
JOHN J. I.

JOHN J. I.

The Way Kissinger Saw It

By ROBERT CLERC

Enquirer Editorial Writer

Webster tells us that “grand” is one of those peculiarly American indeterminate words that can convey any number of meanings. Among the more common are 1.) higher in rank or dignity than others in the same grouping or class, 2.) most important, 3.) imposing because of great size, 4.) characterized by spending or display, and 5.) eminent, distinguished, illustrious.

> Regardless of which definition one chooses, however, *White House Years*, the first of two volumes of Dr. Henry Kissinger's memoirs, ranks as a grand book.

It is an imposing work, almost intimidating in fact, with some 700,000 words contained in 1,552 pages. But if the book is grand in size, it is equally grand in style. Kissinger begins on Page 1 putting the reader's mind at ease that this will not be, just another stilted, sterile essay by a retired bureaucrat. His facility with words, his willingness to share insights clearly and succinctly and his appreciation of the humor and irony of a situation mark him quickly as an author of the highest caliber.

> HIS FIRST volume treats the three turbulent years from 1969, when Kissinger began his public life as special security advisor in the Nixon administration, to 1972 and the formal end of the Vietnam War. During that period, Kissinger's duties took him to the most sensitive trouble spots and brought him in contact with world leaders of every stripe and persuasion. He shares his impressions of each with an incisive candor and charm that has come to be the Kissinger trademark.

> In the first chapter, he sets that tone by exposing his early—and he suggests natural—aversion to the President he served so well. He explains that “all my political experience had been in the company of those who considered themselves in mortal opposition to Richard Nixon. I had taught for over 10 years at Harvard University, where among the faculty disdain for Richard Nixon was established orthodoxy. And the single most influential person in my life had been a man whom Nixon had twice defeated in futile quests for the Presidential nomination, Nelson Rockefeller.”

> He quickly admits that he “had little direct evidence on which to base a judgment” of Nixon. But that did not alter the fact that he had done so.

> A SIDE note is appropriate here. The few pages Kissinger gives to Rockefeller by way of background for his own entry into public life are nothing short of poignant. He gives

books

the reader a forthright look at the inner Rockefeller, a man perceived by Kissinger to be torn by his inability to reconcile the advantage of his great wealth with his aspirations for public office. He makes no bones about his final appraisal of the New York governor: “A man who could have been one of our great Presidents would never achieve his goal. This knowledge was all the harder for his friends because we know deep down that but for tactical errors and hesitations, it should have been otherwise.”

Kissinger is equally forthright in his observations on Nixon. He acknowledges that he received his appointment to the White House staff because Nixon wanted from the beginning to bridge the gap that separated him from the Ivy League intellectuals. More important, even, he wanted to run his own foreign policy. Kissinger analyzes Nixon at times with a cutting rigor:

> “The meeting of any new person filled Nixon with an undefined dread. He feared being confronted with some unexpected question, some unanticipated issue, or some line of argument for which he was not prepared and which might make him appear less in control of events than his self-image required.”

AT THE same time he is fair. Kissinger finds reason in these personal failings to take full measure of the President's successes:

> “Not by nature courageous, he had steeled himself to conspicuous acts of rare courage. Not normally outgoing, he had forced himself to rally his people to its challenge. He had striven for a revolution in America foreign policy so that it would overcome the disastrous oscillations between overcommitment and isolation.”

The book is laced with personal perceptions of the world leaders that shaped the course and consequences of the '60s and '70s. He recounts a reception hosted by Charles de Gaulle and observes that “other heads of government and many senators who usually proclaimed their antipathy to authoritarian generals crowded around him.”

On Le Duc Tho, with whom he negotiated the settlement of the Vietnam War, he says “our private banter grew longer as our meetings progressed and some limited human contact developed; it revealed that Le Duc Tho's profession was revolution, his vocation guerrilla warfare. He could speak eloquently of peace but it was an abstraction alien to any personal experience.”

The list goes on and on. Golda Meir, Mao Tse-tung, the Shah of

Iran, Chou En-lai, Leonid Brezhnev are but a few of those who are transformed by Kissinger's words from newsworthy abstractions to real people. He educates us to just how terribly and humanly fallible are the ways of these larger-than-life world leaders. It is evident throughout that the book was written with the expectation that it will be a sourcebook for future historians who engage in analyses of this tempestuous period in U.S. global relations.

PERHAPS MOST important, we learn a great deal about the future of American dealings in foreign affairs from Kissinger's candid appraisal of the opening of U.S. relations with the Peoples Republic. “China was not important to us because it was physically powerful; Chou En-lai was surely right in his repeated protestations that his nation was not a superpower. In fact, had China been stronger it would not have pursued the improvement of relations with us with the same single-mindedness. Peking needed us to break out of its isolation and as a counterweight to the potentially mortal threat along its northern border. We needed China to enhance the flexibility of our diplo-

macy. Gone were the days when we enjoyed the luxury of choosing the moment to involve ourselves in world affairs. We were permanently involved—but not so physically pre-dominant as before. We had to take account of other power centers and strive for an equilibrium among them."

Prepublication publicity on this first Kissinger volume has been heavy and varied, everything from *Time* magazine's serialization to constant teasers in the nation's daily press. Even Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the *Doonesbury* cartoon feature, had some fun with the memoir by making it the subject of a series of strips.

BUT MOST of the attention has been focused on the size of the work. Trudeau observed through his characters that Kissinger required more than 1,500 pages to accomplish what Albert Speer did in just 520. It is the kind of hyperbole that political satirists trade in regularly.

The truth is, the work is at least three eminently readable books contained in one volume. Kissinger offers his readers an accounting of the administration's early years, the peak Vietnam years and the formalization of peace. He does this with insights that are sometimes ironical, often droll and usually fascinating. Seldom does his story drag, and when it does—the chronology of the SALT negotiations comes im-

mediately to mind—intellectual honesty would have it no other way.

It is evident, as mentioned above, that the Kissinger memoir was written in the certainty that it will be a primary source for future historians. At the same time, the author has failed in no way to honor the reasonable expectations of his contemporary popular audience.

The second volume of the Kissinger memoirs will take up with advent of the Watergate crisis. From what we've seen in the first, it may be our long-needed deliverance from the dead and self-serving stuff on that period that has littered the bookstore bargain counters to date. We should hope that it is just as grand as *White House Years*.

[LC]

White : : :

From page 1

ing with the State Department and the CIA — as staffed with his enemies), but in Kissinger he found an almost perfect tool for his projects. Kissinger, with a profound knowledge of history and a better feel for foreigners than most Americans could muster, approved of the vision and, with his own staff, was able to implement it, blunting the damages when Nixon's subjectiveness led him astray. (But for Kissinger, the director of Central Intelligence would not even have been admitted to NSC meetings.)

THERE WERE more difficulties, based on Nixon's history. Wil-

liam Rogers had once been a close friend and in a sense his bureaucratic superior; Nixon gave him State (where his abilities were wasted) partially as a favor and partially to gratify his own vanity. It didn't work; Rogers was too proud and Kissinger too arrogant to spare anguish — Kissinger was virtually supreme in policy formulation, and he left far more noses out of joint than were perhaps necessary.

The sheer bulk of the book will intimidate many; here is a work that will be discussed by thousands who have never read it. That is unfortunate, for Kissinger is not boring, and he has produced what is as much an engrossing textbook as a history. He has a superb grasp of what constitutes power, here and abroad, of how our government fits together, how other governments fit together and how they all interact.

There are breathtaking flashes on almost every page — 'the inexhaustible masochism of American intellectuals who took it as an article of faith that every difficulty in U.S.-

Soviet relations had to be caused by American stupidity or intransigence," to our invincible conviction that a concept called "goodwill" can serve to oppose ruthless opportunism.

ALL THOSE interested in our place in the world should buy and read this book — never mind if you don't finish it now; get a book mark and keep working at it. Our real problem is that we regard everything in foreign affairs as a temporary obstacle which some transient juggling will obviate, admitting us to the golden future when all nations love each other and conflict has vanished.

There's more to it than that — foreign affairs never end, and we are engaged in a game that will outlast us. Kissinger can make that clear — he can almost make clear what we were doing in Vietnam, which is something America might start to consider again.

There are very few books that constitute an education in themselves. This is one of them.

Morris is The Post's news analyst.

LC

HENRY KISSINGER: Taking a view of his world.

Henry Kissinger writes as he performed in those unhappy years from 1969 to 1973: an incandescent and opportunistic figure gifted with a dazzling mind that has an intuitive grasp of how the interests, needs and fears of modern states play off against each other. His world is a dynamo, an unpredictable set of gears that demands a steady hand on the throttle. His world, too, is one dominated by superpower diplomacy: by summits, SALT negotiations and man-to-man talks with the Soviet ambassador. It is a world that dominated the U.S. foreign-policy agenda in the early 1970s; and for the progress realized on much of that agenda, Kissinger deserves much of the credit he gives himself.

Yet his very single-mindedness and preoccupation with power also blinded Henry Kissinger to other elements in the calculus of diplomacy. He was America's leading practitioner of *realpolitik*, and paid little heed to issues (such as the problems of black Africa) that did not immediately interest him. He seems to have shared much of Nixon's hatred toward antiwar dissenters, and devotes many

pages of *White House Years* to a stalwart defense of Vietnamization. He makes a painful (and utterly unconvincing) attempt to rationalize the administration's 1970 secret bombing of neutral Cambodia. And he dismisses one of the uglier episodes of those years by saying, loftily: "I shall deal in another volume with the moral issues raised by national security wiretapping and the political style of the Nixon Administration in general."

The public diarist, especially when he is a person so egotistical as Henry Kissinger, cannot be expected to blithely second-guess himself or to admit having made egregious mistakes. One searches this book in vain for anything resembling a reappraisal of, say, the causes behind the Cambodian tragedy. Kissinger is out to defend his record, and it will not do for him to examine its considerable flaws. Despite this, however, he offers a dazzling and authoritative close-up look at a pivotal era in U.S. foreign affairs as seen by a central participant; and even as a self-serving memoir, the book is a masterpiece.

LAKELAND, FLA.
LEDGER
D. 36,131 SUN. 11,892

OCT 21 1979

Self-serving irony and sarcasm

By John Leonard
From The New York Times

WHITE HOUSE YEARS. By Henry A. Kissinger. Illustrated. 1,521 pages. Little, Brown. $22.50.

"On the vagaries of Nixon, Kissinger is shrewd and not altogether lacking in compassion."

The first volume of Henry A. Kissinger's memoirs is longer than Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," and we don't even get to Watergate. The question is, is it worth the time it takes to read it? The answer is yes. Of course, it is self-serving — especially on Cambodia and Chile and the "Christmas bombings" of North Vietnam in 1972 — but the principal purpose of almost any memoir is to serve the self.

Consider, first, the style. Kissinger's years in the White House and the State Department did not, miraculously, repress his impulse to write decent prose. If his irony shades often into sarcasm, at least he is acquainted with irony. Other memoirs of the first Nixon administration, not counting William Safire's, seem to have been written by ticker-tape machines after midnight on Wall Street, while nobody human was looking.

Pith counts. On the White House reaction to the shooting down of an American reconnaissance plane by the North Koreans: "It was as if someone had pushed a button labeled 'crisis management' and the answer that came up was 'nonchalance.'" On H.R. Haldeman, for whom government was basically an exercise in public relations: "It was risky to approach Haldeman, since he was likely to interpret any substantive concern as a sign of emotional instability."

Anecdotes help, too. From the gooney birds on Midway to the hilarious textile negotiations with Japan to the flap about a nonexistent baby water buffalo to the meeting in the White House with a nun and two Catholic laymen who had been named unindicted co-conspirators in a plot to kidnap him, Kissinger has a lively eye and some charm. He will also deprecate himself, and, twice, admits fallibility: wiretapping may require "more stringent safeguards," and he should not perhaps have given the impression to journalists that he had opposed the Christmas bombings.

To be sure, buzz words abound. They include "linkage," "equilibrium," "ambiguity," "fashionable," "whipsaw."

"rout." "honor" and "impotence." And there are occasional lapses into the sermnette. on such subjects as the history of Russia. India and Pakistan, and the motivation of the younger generation that opposed our "historical misadventure" in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Dean Acheson who wrote "Present at the Creation" — and whom Kissinger admires almost as much as he does Chou Enlai and somewhat more than he admires the Shah of Iran — would not have sniffed at the style of "White House Years" and would probably have agreed with its geopolitics.

As for substance, how can we fail to be

interested in the summit meetings with Mao Tse-Tung and Leonid I. Brezhnev and Golda Meir and Eisaku Sato, the SALT talks and the secret negotiations with the Russians, the Chinese, the Germans and Le Duc (Ducky) Tho? Richard M. Nixon's initiative, so ably abetted by Kissinger, to open our relations with China was a stunning success. Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy," for a while anyway, kept the lid on in the Middle East. The only boring pages in "White House Years" are those devoted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and even Marcel Proust could not have made NATO interesting.

On the "incursivity" with his cross who er refuse brisk. It prevent remaining fluke in which fl e elected h ty — a fl u United S clear th total vic t bargaining we bomb i treaty m if it had cussed i between Nobel p America

On the Kissinger ous," la ness of often he is shrewd compass wanted a Kissinger that pol Secretar kept co agrees th really, th partmet when th directive there w tives h temper down.

And a motorcycle fake st sages na th conver with O Sorel Nixon away f us that he flight t

asm

On the secret bombing and subsequent "incursion" of Cambodia, he disagrees with his formidable critic William Shaw-cross who wrote "Sideshow" after Kissing-er refused to talk to him. On Chile, he is brisk: It was in our national interest to prevent Salvador Allende Gossens from remaining president of Chile "through a fluke in the Chilean political system." which fluke was Allende's having been elected by a plurality rather than a majority — a fluke which could happen even in the United States. On Vietnam, he makes it clear that the North Vietnamese wanted total victory, on the field of battle or at the bargaining table. According to Kissinger, we bombed them into a peace treaty, which treaty might have preserved a viable South if it hadn't been for Watergate, to be discussed in Volume II. In the meantime, between Nixon's first inauguration and the Nobel prize-winning treaty, another 19,000 Americans died.

On the vagaries of Nixon — courageous, Kissinger tells us, "secretive and deviant," lacking "in self confidence or largeess of spirit," and "beside himself" so often he must have been twins — Kissinger is shrewd and not altogether lacking in compassion. From the beginning, Nixon wanted to run his own foreign policy, and Kissinger was his Lone Ranger, carrying that policy around in his saddlebags, and Secretary of State William P. Rogers was kept constantly in the dark. Kissinger agrees that this was "a poor system," but, really, the State Department and the Department of Defense dragged their heels when they didn't agree with a presidential directive. Kissinger also allows as how there were a number of presidential directives he ignored, while waiting for the temperature in the Oval Office to cool down.

And he loved it — the helicopters and the motorcycle escorts, the sunglasses and the fake stomachaches, the hand-written messages carried by personal pouch from China through Pakistan to Washington, the conversations with Andre Malraux, if not with Oriana Fallaci. As a kind of Julien Sorel who went to Washington, he was Nixon's own Harvard professor, snatched away from Nelson A. Rockefeller. He tells us that the only time while he was in office that he couldn't sleep was on the eve of his flight to China.

COMMUNITY PAPER
ELIZABETH, N.J.
DAILY

NOV 2 1979

John P. Roche

Kissinger's SAI

Age must be having its impact: although a number of reviews have appeared, I—a speed reader—have yet to finish Henry Kissinger's 1,500-page epic, "White House Years" (Little, Brown). Maybe they reviewed "Time's" excerpts? It is not easy reading: Mr. Dooley once suggested Theodore Roosevelt's book about the Spanish-American War be titled "Alone in Cuba." He might similarly suggest "Alone in the World" as an appropriate subtitle to Henry: Nothing that occurred anywhere between 1969 and 1973 is omitted.

In the light of the contemporary debate on the merits of the SALT II Treaty, it is particularly interesting to read Kissinger's discussion of the background of SALT I, signed by President Nixon in May, 1972. As he indicates, President Lyndon Johnson scheduled a summit with the Soviet leadership to discuss nuclear arms limitation for the fall of 1968.

In objective terms this was in-
genuous: Brezhnev and Kosygin, who
then seemed equal in stature, were not
about to do serious business with a
lame-duck president. If anything, they

would use talks with LBJ to pressure
his Republican successor. However,
on this topic Johnson was quite
irrational. In 1970, talking about the
accomplishments of his administra-
tion, he said, "Johnny, above all we
kept the lion in the cage."

He wanted to go down in history as
the president who took the first great
step to keep the nuclear lion perma-
nently caged and, had the Soviets not
invaded Prague in August 1968, he
would have announced his summit.

My position in a sentence is that
while I firmly believe in arms control, I
am convinced the regulation of strate-
gic nuclear weapons cannot be de-
coupled from other, so-called conven-
tional, systems. To broaden this a bit, I
feel that "linkage" is part of the
essential package, that if we assume
good faith in vacuum-packed negotia-
tions on ICBMs and say "boys will be
boys," as Moscow incites a Yom
Kippur War or ships Cuban sepoys to
Angola, we should be taken off for
psychiatric care.

As I read Kissinger on this subject, I
found myself nodding agreement.
Indeed, he puts the case for cold-eyed

The Book Shelf

By
Roger
Harris

Kissinger tome
bogs down in
Viet quagmire

Henry Kissinger ascended to power so quickly and unexpectedly that there is a temptation to believe he emerged fully grown from the forehead of Zeus or, at the very least, from the anterior lobes of Nelson Rockefeller. One of the virtues of his first volume of memoirs, "White House Years" (Little, Brown, $22.50), is to remind us that he was an historian and a professor long before he was a diplomat.

Another virtue is that Kissinger writes quite well. His powers of analysis are keen and his style is often graceful and sometimes witty. The background sketches on the history of different areas that were the focus of our foreign policy can be read separately as informative essays and would be quite useful in a course in international relations.

This does not quite exhaust the virtues of the work. But it comes pretty close. For, unfortunately, the nuggets of excellence tend to get swamped in a sea of tedi-um, wrongheadedness and maddening shadowboxing against mythical opponents. Kissinger seems to want to fight again all the battles of Vietnam to prove that defects could have been victory if only others had his in-sight.

Also on the book shelf this week is a volume of "lost" poems of Ernest Hemingway, Frederic Morton's wonderful look at the gilded age of old Vienna and an exciting and funny new novel by that good practitioner, Elliott Baker.

The undoing of Kissinger's book is also the undoing of his foreign policy and that of his predecessors, too. It can be summed up in a word — Vietnam. One of the reasons that this book is as long as it is (1.496 pages with footnotes) is that Kissinger is determined to prove that he was right on Vietnam no matter what.

In this, he is reminiscent of members of the royal house of Bourbon in France, of whom it was said that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The book is full of depressing passages like this that show either Kissinger's blindness or duplicity:

"All of us who negotiated the agreement of Oct. 12 were convinced that we had vindicated the anguish of a decade not by a decent interval but by a decent settlement. We thought with reason that Saigon, generously armed and supported by the United States, would be able to deal with moderate violations of the agreement . . . Perhaps the Vietnamese parties could even work out a peaceful modus vivendi . . . In blissful ignorance of the future, we landed in Washington, near joyous that we had brought home both peace and dignity."

There is also something arrogant about the length of the book. Kissinger seems to suffer from total recall, going on endlessly about long forgotten military plans or diplomatic negotiations. We are frequently reminded that there is more to come by phrases like: "I plan to deal with that further in a later volume." All these words just carry us up to 1973, or the time when Kissinger was named secretary of state.

Kissinger is at his best in writing about European politics. He is most at home with his subject matter and freest of axes to grind. He has a good instinctive feeling for the trends and tendencies. Perhaps Kissinger's policy was most creative in this area, too. He seemed to enjoy negotiating with the Russians and he had a number of successes in this field. China comes across more as a happy accident, with the opportunities falling into Kissinger's lap. He admits frankly he knew nothing about the Mideast when he moved to Washington.

Then there's Richard Nixon. Kissinger treats him here as a sort of noble savage who blew all the fine points of diplomacy but somehow stumbled into the right approach. Was he merely being kind to Nixon? Or was this necessary to protect his own reputation?

Where's Papa?

The idea of a new volume by Ernest Hemingway seems, at first blush, not so much interesting as shocking. We might as well be told there is a new book of plays out by Aeschylus or a new novel by Stendahl. But, after we get over our shock at the mere presence of "Ernest Hemingway," 88 Poems" (edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis (Har-

Henry Kissinger has written the first volume of the story of his years in government

court Brace Jovanovich/Brucoli Clark, $8.95), it is clear that many of these poems are extremely funny and others are good in a different way.

Hemingway wrote poetry before he wrote fiction, but he never pursued it seriously as a career. About half of these poems have never been published before and the rest are not familiar. Many of them are highly personal verses that probably were not meant to be published. Hemingway used them to take verbal swipes at friends and enemies. We are reminded again, as we were in "A Movable Feast," that Hemingway sometimes had a nasty streak.

Some of the best poems in this book are really prose, such as this one: "There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning."

Old world charm

Anyone who has seen the movie "Mayerling" with Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux or the remake with Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer or any of the numerous other remakes knows a great deal about the double suicide of Austria's Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress, Mary Vetsera. Nevertheless, we should count ourselves fortunate to have a new book on the subject, "A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889" by Frederick Morton (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $14.95).

Our gratitude is chiefly for Morton's mastery of style and technique. The author of "The Rothschilds" is a thoroughly delicious writer. He handles words the way a great pastry chef handles the icing on a wedding cake. The story of the star-crossed lovers is well told. But there is a great deal more to the book.

This is also the story of Vienna at a time when it was not only a city of great wealth and power and great charm but one of the major intellectual and cultural capitals, too. This was the era of Johannes Brahms and Johann Strauss, and waiting in the wings for their turn at fame and fortune were Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler and Arthur Schnitzler. It was a fascinating era and Morton captures it well.

After the war

Elliott Baker is a superb novelist who has never quite received all the credit he deserves. He is best known for one book, "A Fine Madness," which was a marvelous satirical comedy with great bite. He goes in for that acid touch known as black humor, a field that has been overpopulated lately, but he has the wit to be able to carry it off.

The truth is that Baker has produced a number of books of quality. His new one, "And We Were Young" (Times Books, $8.95) is a short novel that is up to stand-

The Sunday Star-Times
NEWARK, N. J.
SUN. 567.265

OCT 28 1979

(Continued on next page)

More on the
Book Shelf

(From Preceding Page)

ard. It has the humor of Baker at his best
and it also is replete with great power
and a great sense of excitement that
carries the reader along.

The story concerns some World War
II buddies that meet again in New York
after the war but not under the happiest
conditions. They are rivals in politics and
over women and this rivalry has poten-
tially tragic overtones.

Before the fall

Echoes of The Great Crash of 1929 are still very much with us. With each gyration of the financial markets, we are paintfully reminded that we are passing a fateful 50th anniversary. As if we needed further reminders, there are recently a number of new books about the event.

Of these, particular credit should go
to "1929: America Before the Crash" by
Warren Sloat (Macmillan. $14.95). Sloat,
for many years a capable journalist, does
not attempt to explain the causes of the
crash, which has never been satisfactori-
ly explained. In fact, he doesn't really dis-
cuss the crash at all. What he gives us is a
view of America just before it happened.

Sloat uses as a starting point a party
held Oct. 21, 1929 in Dearborn, Mich. to
honor Thomas A. Edison on the 50th anni-
versary of his invention of the incandes-
cent bulb. There were 500 national lead-
ers here — the people who brought us to
the edge of the crash — and Sloat takes a
close look at them.

Way out

Doris Lessing, one of England's fin-
est writers, has made a rapid shift in
direction. She was once known for her
sensitive and highly personal fiction in
such novels as "The Golden Notebook."
For some time now, she has moved in the
direction of something akin to science
fiction. The transition appears to be com-
pleted now with the publication of
"Shikasta" (Knopf. $10.95).

The full title of the novel is "Re:
Colonised Planet 5 Shikasta: Personal,
Psychological, Historical Documents
Relating to Visit by JOHOR (George
Sherban). Emissary (Grade 9) 87 of the
Period of the Last Days" which is quite a
mouthful. We are also told that this is just
the first of a series of novels as to be
known as "Canopus in Argos Archives."

With all this preoccupation with
other galaxies and other eras, the author
is still more than a little occupied with
the planet earth in the 20th Century and
some of this new technique is mainly use-
ful in providing a fictional device for
topical commentary, as in passages such
as this:

"A note on sexual choice. Of course
developed individuals with us are andro-
gynous, to put it into the nearest Shikas-
tan terminology possible: We do not have
... characteristics that are considered

as appertaining to one sex rather than
another...

Wild and woolly

Sometimes there seem to be cycles
in the production of books. There have
been a number of volumes recently by
some fine naturalists. First there was a
new work by Edward Hoagland, followed
by one by Barry Lopez. And now there is
another fine volume, "Fauna and Fami-
ly" by Gerald Durrell (Simon & Schuster,
$9.95).

Durrell is not only a fine writer but is
the brother of the well-known novelist,
Lawrence Durrell, and this figures
prominently in this work, which is subti-
tled: "An Account of the Durrell Family
of Corfu," the island where the family
lived in those balmy days before World
War II — as they seemed then.

It was there that young Gerald de-
veloped a penchant for wildlife and the
house was often filled with local and
exotic fauna — birds, lizards and animals
of both the common and unusual variety.
There were also some strange human
fauna on the premises that added to the
division — mysterious Indians, passion-
ate Turks and foul-mouthed sea captains.

The Sunday Star-Ledger
NEWARK, N. J.
SUN. 567.265

OCT 2 8 1979

## Henry Kissinger

By Henry Kissinger

Little, Brown, 1,521 pages $22.50

Reviewed by Raymond Colley

Henry Kissinger confesses early on in this first volume of his memoirs to intellectual arrogance and admits to a reputation for being never burdened with any excess of humility. Even in the unlikely event they had never heard of him before, readers of this account of Kissinger's first four years in the Nixon White House will find little to argue with in that personal self-estimate.

No one in all these 1,521 pages comes off quite so well, quite so benignly wise and ultimately triumphant, as the formerly obscure Harvard professor who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for an illusory ending of the Viet Nam War.

Nonetheless, though it is at least as self-serving as most Washington memoirs, Kissinger has put together a genuinely brilliant, eloquent, educational, dramatic account of those frantic, dangerous, world-changing years when former President Nixon and he confronted Viet Nam, the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, the India-Pakistan War, the 1970 Middle East "war of attrition." Soviet attempts to install a submarine base in Cuba, the first SALT (strategic arms) treaty, the first summit trip by a U.S. President to Moscow. Nixon's historic journey to China, and seemingly ceaseless other crises and bold adventures in foreign affairs.

At the same time, those who the polls say are losing faith in government may be further disheartened by the Kissinger book, which presents a dismayingly unseemly and unifying record of petty political finagling, cynical "public relations" manipulations, and astonishing bureaucratic infighting and indiscipline.

There are no great new revelations in the book. Its fascination and value lie rather in Kissinger's insights into the character of the players on the world stage, the intricacies of diplomacy, how the game is played.

Thus Kissinger's own eminence as Nixon's national security adviser traces to the President's deep and long-standing hostility to the Eastern establishment and the State Department, which he considered to be infested with his liberal, Ivy League, striped-pants enemies.

Hence, Kissinger writes, Nixon was determined to keep personal control of foreign policy in the White House rather than the State Department, and to that end appointed his old friend, William P. Rogers, as secretary of state precisely because Rogers knew nothing about foreign policy.

"Few secretaries of state can have been selected because of their Presidents' confidence in their ignorance of foreign policy," Kissinger observes in the dry, droll style that is the trademark of his almost countless snifty put-downs of other people in this book.

Kissinger's view of Nixon himself is one of the more fascinating parts of the book, especially given the administration's later disaster over Watergate. "Nothing is more askew," Kissinger writes, "than the popular image of Nixon as an imperial President barking orders at cowed subordinates." Actually, according to Kissinger, Nixon "hated to give orders — especially to those who might disagree with him," rarely disciplined anyone, and constantly shrank from show-downs.

Over time, Kissinger says, this led to a "fragmented administration" in which almost everyone "looked out for himself" and in which, in turn, "lay one of the root causes of Watergate."

As with nearly everyone else in the book, Kissinger cannot resist taking potshots at his old boss, picturing Nixon as devious, banal, gauche, even to the point of observing trivially that Nixon's pants legs were always a "trifle short." He also suggests, with minimal subtlety, that on at least three occasions Nixon drank too

Continued on page 4

## Henry Kissinger

[LC]

Continued from page 1

much, including once at the Moscow summit and once in China.

On that last occasion, after many toasts in mandarin, a potent Chinese brew, Kissinger reports that Nixon got so carried away he made a toast of his own which sounded very much like a proposal for a U.S.-Chinese defensive military alliance. "Luckily," Kissinger observes snipingly, "by that hour the press was too far gone itself" to notice.

In the end, though, Kissinger's overall judgment on Nixon is sympathetic and positive. This "lonely" and "tormented" man, "so ungentlemanly in some of his motivations," Kissinger writes, "had navigated our nation through one of the most anguishing periods in its history. Not by nature courageous, he had steeled himself in conspicuous acts of rare courage" and "forced himself to rally his people to its challenge."

Even now, nearly a decade later, the Nixon-Kissinger handling of the Viet Nam peace negotiations, the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, the "Christmas bombing" of 1972, remain the most emotionally charged controversies of Nixon's first term.

Kissinger devotes a great deal of space to defending himself and the administration; he makes no apologies and is without in his scorn for critics, from George McGovern to the New York Times.

The Nixon negotiating posture on Viet Nam in 1969-70 was softer even than the platform the Democrats in 1968 had rejected as too dovish, he notes, and yet the administration's hypocritically self-righteous critics endlessly accused Nixon of being too hawkish.

When the administration announced (prematurely) a breakthrough on Viet Nam in late October, 1972, McGovern and others charged it was a cynical Nixon maneuver aimed at influencing the presidential election. Yet, Kissinger reports persuasively, Nixon actually would have preferred no breakthrough before the election.

The "Christmas bombing," which had critics accusing Nixon of mass murder and even genocide, actually caused, by Hanoi's own count, only about 1,300 civilian deaths, Kissinger notes. That was far fewer, he adds acidly, than the North Vietnamese had killed in their own recent attacks on civilians near An Loc. The final bombing "speeded the end of the war," Kissinger insists.

To the critics charge that he and Nixon were allowing South Vietnamese President Thieu to torpedo a peace settlement, Kissinger replies with a lengthy account of the U.S. pressures put on

reached their bottom line quickly, explained it reasonably, and defended it tenaciously."

Nixon's determination to run foreign policy from the White House led to endless bureaucratic war with Rogers and the State Department — and to the unprecedented secrecy in which Nixon and Kissinger conducted policy, mostly through secret "back channels" that bypassed the State Department and everyone else.

Kissinger portrays Rogers and State as constantly trying to undermine Nixon's policy directions and even direct orders, and his contempt for the department bureaucracy is monumental. Some American diplomats, he observes in connection with State Department bumbling on the Middle East, feel a "crisis is somehow not genuine unless we are a party to it."

Other parts of the bureaucracy don't fare much better. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird is

Continued on page 6

Thieu. Nixon, determined not to have peace blocked again in January, 1973, said to Kissinger of Thieu: "Brutality is nothing. You have never seen it if this son of a bitch doesn't go along, believe me."

In other areas, Kissinger makes clear he much prefers the Chinese and their diplomatic style to the Soviets and their crude, bullying, and chiseling tactics.

Of the late Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, Kissinger writes, "He was one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met." And of U.S. dealings with Chinese diplomats, he says they "proved meticulously reliable. They never stopped to petty maneuvers; they did not haggle; they

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO, ILL.

D. 77,072-SUN, 1,139,079 7

OCT 21 1979

Columbus Citizen-Journal
COLUMBUS, OHIO

OCT 29 1979

Kissinger memoirs 'ex

"White House Years" by Henry A. Kissinger (Little, Brown and Co., $22.50).

Kissinger's years in the White House and the State Department did not repress his impulse to write decent prose. If his irony shades often into sarcasm, at least he is acquainted with irony.

On the White House reaction to the shooting down of an American reconnaissance plane by the North Koreans: "It was as if someone had pushed a button labeled 'crisis management' and the answer that came up was 'nonchalance...'"

He will also deprecate himself, and, twice, admits fallibility: Wiretapping may require "more stringent safeguards," and he should not perhaps have given the impression to journalists that he had opposed the Christmas bombings.

Henry A. Kissinger

They include "linkage," "equilibrium," "ambiguity," "fashionable," "whipsaw," "rout," "honor" and "impotence." And there are occasional lapses into the sermonette, on such subjects as the history of Russia, India and Pakistan, and the motivation of the younger generation that opposed our "historical misadventure" in Vietnam.

As for substance, how can we fail to be interested in the summit meetings with Mao Tse-tung and Leonid Brezhnev and Golda Meir and Eisaku Sato, the SALT talks and the secret negotiations with the Russians, the Chinese, the Germans and Le Duc (Ducky) Tho?

President Richard M. Nixon's initiative, so ably abetted by Kissinger, to open our relations with China was a stunning success. Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy," for a while anyway, kept the lid on in the Middle East. The only boring pages in "White House Years" are those devoted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

On Chile, he is brisk. It was in our national interest to prevent Salvador Allende Gossens from remaining president of Chile "through a fluke in the Chilean political system," which fluke