The Washington Post
Sunday, December 21, 1986

JAN 12 1987

Henry Kissinger

# Not Its Power, But Its Weakness

The foreign policy mistakes that surround the sale of arms to Iran have been widely blamed on the excessive power of the National Security Council staff.

My view, perhaps unorthodox, is that the exact opposite is true. The root cause of the United States' foreign policy difficulties is not the strength but the weakness of the national security adviser's staff. It has singularly failed to perform what should be its principal task: to develop realistic options for the consideration of the president and his principal advisers. To be sure, the NSC staff has engaged in occasional acts of operational bravado. But these acts have proved so damaging precisely because of the absence of a system for setting realistic objectives and establishing a relationship between ends and means.

This becomes clear when one considers that the sale of arms to Iran was not an isolated event. In the long term, the events surrounding the Reykjavik summit may prove to have been more damaging than Iran. At Reykjavik—as on Iran—the president lacked a reasoned statement of options and consequences. The failure at Reykjavik was not the predominance of the NSC staff but the administration's inability to develop a strategy that related diplomacy, military policy and arms control policy to a coherent national purpose.

The Tower Commission, recently established to look into the proper role for the NSC staff, should therefore interpret its charter to include 'the gamut of national security policy decision-making.

In Greek mythology the gods sometimes punished man by fulfilling his wishes too completely. In its sixth year the Reagan administration is paying the price for the seeming effortlessness and excessive self-confidence by which its considerable successes have been achieved. President Reagan's extraordinary instinct, his vast popularity and the temporary 'Soviet weakness caused by a succession of aged leaders made unnecessary the shakedown of procedures and personnel that a crisis usually imposes early in a presidential term. As a result, exorbitant reliance has been placed by his subordinates on President Reagan's persuasive skills. They have acted on the apparent belief that the major challenge to American statesmanship is the public presentation of its decisions and not their quality.

Counting on the safety net of the president's hold on the American public, his advisers felt secure in pursuing their clashing preferences with a single-mindedness unusual even by the not exactly gentle standards of Washington. "Nothing ever gets settled in this town," said Secretary of State George Shultz to the House Foreign Relations Committee. "It is a seething debating society in which the debate never stops, nobody ever gives up, including me." Policy thereby becomes fragmented into a series of ad hoc decisions driven by immediate problems or negotiating deadlines. Spurious compromises emerge, permitting each department or agency either to pursue its own preference or withdraw into sullen dissociation until the next occasion for battle. The State Department's relentless skill in edging toward negotiating positions never fully made explicit confronts the Defense Department's uncanny proclivity to block progress by means of unacceptable

proposals. But the result has been confusion and incoherence more often than a long-range strategy. Nor was the NSC staff sufficiently subtle to distill a realistic strategy from the president's idealistic aspiration to abolish nuclear weapons or his compassionate desire to pay for the release of hostages. In fact, it seems that on Iran the NSC staff mistook a presidential objective for a directive; rather than helping establish priorities, the NSC staff became one of the players.

In the end, the only player who turned out to have no safety net was Ronald Reagan. I can think of no recent president so abandoned by his associates in his hour of crisis. He was alone on the parapet.

Moreover, whatever the failings of the NSC staff, departmental abdication bears a share of the blame. In 1985, the State and Defense departments and the CIA clearly knew that weapons were being shipped to Iran.

> "Exorbitant reliance has been placed by his subordinates on President Reagan's persuasive skills."

It is difficult to believe that they could not have learned that something similar was going on in 1986 had they chosen to inform themselves. After all, hundreds of tons of equipment can hardly be moved from depots across the oceans without somebody's becoming aware of it. In such circumstances, the president is entitled to assume that Cabinet members who do not resign will cooperate in the implementation of his policy and defend his decisions when necessary.

In the case of Iran, not only decision-making but implementation seems to have broken down. What, for example, happened to the 40 Committee representing all concerned agencies, which in previous administrations supervised clandestine operations?

The objective of improving relations with Iran is surely valid given Iran's geopolitical importance. But the timing is open to question. What analysis or intelligence buttressed the belief in the existence of a moderate faction in Tehran? Why was it thought that supplying arms would help the moderate faction when their use was bound to serve radical ends? Why was a senior American sent to Tehran without an assurance of whom he would meet or of an agenda for discussion? How can one contribute to ending a war on an equitable basis by supplying arms to the side that has the upper hand and whose victory would undermine all moderate forces in the Moslem world? Who could possibly believe that the sale of hundreds of tons of equipment could be kept secret, especially as it involved at least three arms dealers of different nationalities? And did anyone—proponents or opponents of the scheme— describe to the president the damage that would result to U.S. credibility worldwide and especially in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, as well as the impact on oil prices, from

continued

the inevitable disclosure that the United States had acted
in flat contradiction of its own passionately declared
antiterrorism policy?

It is clear that the advocates of the Iran arms sale gave
at best incomplete answers to these questions. But did the
opponents present a systematic rebuttal? Did their claim
of not being fully informed reflect a White House decision
to exclude them or a departmental decision to adopt a
posture of protective ignorance. Or both? How could they
be ignorant if they had access to the full range of
intelligence? If intelligence was withheld from Cabinet
members, we face a breakdown of the system. If,
however, the ignorance was self-imposed, the president
faces a collapse of discipline and cohesiveness. The Tower
Commission must get to the bottom of these issues if it is
to contribute to improving national policy.

Nor will the commission be able to contribute to
improving national security decision-making if it does not
examine such cases as the Reykjavik summit. Was any
consideration given to the danger that announcing a
summit in such close proximity to the Daniloff-Zakharov
swap had to appear as an extortion—above all to the
Kremlin? What tempted Mikhail Gorbachev into the
unprecedented and disdainful step of presenting a sweep-

"If the [Cabinet's] ignorance was self-imposed, the president faces a collapse of discipline and cohesiveness."

ing agenda without advance notification and demand that
it be negotiated on the spot? What induced the U.S.
delegation to go along rather than confine itself to asking
questions and setting out a work schedule leading to an
eventual subsequent summit? By what process did the
numbers and concepts discussed at Reykjavik emerge?
Why were the principally affected allies not consulted?

Indeed, Reykjavik, because it culminated years of
effort, worries me even more than Iran, which repre-
sented a limited misjudgment. At Reykjavik, the Soviets
took advantage of the weakness of the American deci-
sion-making process by suddenly agreeing to American
positions put forward over the years primarily to paper
over departmental differences. For example, did the
Defense Department representative acquiesce in the
Reykjavik agenda because of its merit or because he
assumed that the more sweeping the schemes the more
likely they were to be aborted by implementing negotia-
tions over verification?

An unintended result of the decision early in the
Reagan administration to give the dominant role in policy
formulation to the departments has been to exalt the
operational role of the NSC staff at the expense of
long-range national policy. It has produced a succession of
NSC advisers who lacked either strength or the full
confidence of the president (William Clark excepted). It
has tempted the NSC staff into conducting special presi-
dential missions no one else was eager to undertake.

A fundamental need, therefore, is to strengthen the
quality of the NSC staff, to focus its work on defining
priorities and options and give it the authority to raise
issues beyond what the various departments put for-
ward. Department heads, no matter how dedicated,
cannot avoid identifying sound national policy with the
preferences of their bureaucracies. These preferences
are often valid; but under the pressure of events the
urgent generally has priority over the important.

The NSC staff should not as a general rule conduct
day-to-day operations involving other nations. This is
especially the case with activities that go beyond the
establishment of a channel for diplomatic communica-
tion. Clandestine operations, because of their potential
for embarrassment, require a significant White House
role in their design; for the same reason, the NSC staff
should stay far away from their execution.

This issue is often wrongly put in terms of departmen-
tal prerogatives. But any presidential appointee who
insists on his advice as a right has already lost the
bureaucratic battle. The real bond between the president
and his Cabinet members is intangible; it depends on
personal confidence, not on an organization chart. Confi-
dence cannot be commanded, much less extorted by
power plays, and prerogatives will not last if they result
from pressure.

Like all general administrative rules, the exclusion of
the NSC staff from operations should not be pushed too
far. In the end the president must be free to use those
instruments with which he feels most comfortable.
There are some missions in which a presidential emis-
sary can operate more flexibly and with greater author-
ity and discretion than a departmental representative:
sensitive talks with the Soviets have, in my view, long
suffered from the absence of such a mechanism.

In the end there is no substitute for presidential
involvement in decision-making. Limiting his role to
ratifying a consensus of his subordinates is likely to
evoke the most self-centered reactions at the cost of a
sense of long-term direction.

The recent crises in U.S. foreign policy have occurred at
a moment when the U.S. bargaining position remains
strong; with rapid remedial measures an opportunity for
major achievement still lies before the United States.

©1986, Los Angeles Times Syndicate

The 37th President of the United States was born in a small farmhouse in Yorba Linda, California and raised in Whittier. He attended Whittier College and Duke University School of Law and then joined a law firm in his home town. He and Patricia Ryan were married in 1940.

In 1942 he applied for and received a Navy commission and was assigned to duty in the Pacific. He won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1946; in 1948 he took the lead role, as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in investigating espionage charges against Alger Hiss. After two terms he was elected to the U.S. Senate. In 1952 General Eisenhower selected him as his running mate. He was Vice President for eight years. After losing to John F. Kennedy by a razor-thin margin in 1960 and then making an unsuccessful bid for governor of California in 1962, he practiced law, wrote, and traveled extensively in Europe and Asia.

He was elected President in 1968 and won re-election in 1972 by an historic margin. While in office he opened the door to the People's Republic of China, established the policy of detente with the Soviet Union, ended American involvement in Vietnam, and pursued domestic initiatives that included establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, launching the "war on cancer," and bringing about the peaceful desegregation of public schools in the South. He made four appointments to the Supreme Court, including the current Chief Justice, William Rehnquist.

After he left the Presidency in August, 1974, the President and Mrs. Nixon returned to their home in San Clemente, where they lived until moving east in 1980.

Since leaving office, President Nixon has traveled throughout the United States and in dozens of countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Mideast. In the fall of 1985 he undertook a five-week fact-finding trip, visiting and meeting with top leaders in China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Pakistan, Turkey, and Great Britain. In 1986 he returned to the Soviet Union and met with Mikhail Gorbachev. In October, 1989, during his sixth visit to China, he publicly expressed the outrage of the American people over the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square that June.

In the spring of 1991, after his first meeting with Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, he became an outspoken opponent of further aid to Gorbachev's communist regime. After the fall of Soviet communism, he advocated vigorous measures by the United States and its allies to support Russia's historic transition to political and economic freedom. In the course of this work he wrote articles, gave speeches, consulted with the Bush and Clinton Administrations, and made annual visits to non-communist Russia beginning in 1992.

His ten books include *Six Crises* (1962); his memoirs; and his most recent book, *Beyond Peace* (May, 1994). In 1985, he became the first former President to voluntarily give up lifetime Secret Service protection, saving taxpayers $3 million a year.

On January 20, 1994, during ceremonies at Yorba Linda honoring him on the 25th anniversary of his first Inauguration, he participated in the announcement of the establishment of The Center for Peace and Freedom, a policy center at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace dedicated to the perpetuation of his legacy of enlightened national interest in foreign policy and pragmatic idealism at home.

Henry A. Kissinger

EULOGY FOR RICHARD M. NIXON

April 27, 1994

AS DELIVERED

During the final week of Richard Nixon's life, I often imagined how he would have reacted to the tide of concern, respect, admiration, and affection evoked by his last great battle. His gruff pose of never paying attention to media comment would have been contradicted by a warm glow and the ever so subtle hint that another recital of the commentary would not be unwelcome. And without quite saying so, he would have conveyed that it would mean a lot to him if Julie and Tricia, David and Ed, were told of his friends' pride in this culmination to an astonishing life.

When I learned the final news, by then so expected yet so hard to accept, I felt a deep loss and a profound void. In the words of Shakespeare: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."

In the conduct of foreign policy, Richard Nixon was one of the seminal Presidents. He came into office when the forces of history were moving America from a position of dominance to one of leadership. Dominance reflects strength; leadership must be earned. And Nixon earned that leadership role for his country with courage and skill.

When Nixon took his oath of office, 550,000 Americans were engaged in combat in a place as far away from the United States as it was possible to be; America had no contact with China, the world's most populous nation, or negotiations with the Soviet Union, the other nuclear superpower; most Moslem countries had broken diplomatic relations with the United States; and Middle East diplomacy was stalemated - all of this in the midst of the worst domestic crisis since the Civil War.

When Richard Nixon left office, an agreement to end the war in Vietnam had been concluded and the main lines of all subsequent policy were established: permanent dialogue with China; readiness without illusions to ease tensions with the Soviet Union; a peace process in the Middle East; the beginning, via the European Security Conference, of establishing human rights as an international issue, weakening the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe.

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Richard Nixon's foreign policy goals were long-range, and he pursued them without regard to domestic political consequences. When he considered the national interest at stake, he dared confrontations in 1970 and 1972, despite the imminence of elections, and in 1973 in the midst of the worst crisis of his life. And he bore - if with pain - the disapproval of long-time friends and allies over relaxing tensions with China and the Soviet Union. He drew strength from a conviction he often expressed to me: "The price for doing things half-way is no less than for doing them completely. So we might as well do them properly." Then Nixon's greatest accomplishment was as much moral as it was political: to lead from strength at a moment of apparent weakness; to husband the nation's resilience and thus to lay the basis for victory in the Cold War.

Shy and withdrawn, Richard Nixon made himself succeed in the most gregarious of professions and steeled himself to conspicuous acts of extraordinary courage. He held fast in the face of wrenching controversy to his basic theme that the greatest free nation in the world had a duty to lead and no right to abdicate.

Richard Nixon would be so proud that President Clinton and all living former Presidents of the United States are here, symbolizing that his long and sometimes bitter journey had concluded in reconciliation.

I wish that in his final hours I could have told Richard Nixon about Brian McDonnell who, during the Cambodian crisis had been fasting on a bench in Lafayette Park across from the White House until, as he said, President Nixon had redeemed his pledge to withdraw American forces from that anguished country in two months - a promise which was in fact kept. Across the chasm of the decades, Brian called me the day Richard Nixon fell ill and left a message: "When you talk to President Nixon, tell him I am praying for him."

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So let us now say goodbye to our gallant friend. He stood on
pinnacles that dissolved into precipices. He achieved greatly
and suffered deeply. But he never gave up. In his solitude, he
envisaged a new international order that would reduce
lingering enmities, strengthen historic friendships, and give
new hope to mankind - a vision where dreams and possibilities
conjoined.

Richard Nixon ended a war and he advanced the vision of
peace of his Quaker youth. He was devoted to his family, he
loved his country, and he considered service his honor. It was
a privilege to have been allowed to help him.

Kissinger piece: Newsweek Magazine

At this moment of sadness and reflection, I can do no better
than to restate - in slightly condensed form - what I wrote in
*White House Years* about the night that the peace was signed in
Vietnam. At that moment, Nixon could look forward to a healing
of the domestic divisions and then to turning to the
opportunity before him. America's relations with China and the
Soviet Union were closer than theirs were with each other,
multiplying the President's options. He could look forward to
rebuilding relations with Europe. And he planned a new peace
initiative in the Middle East.

Around midnight, Nixon called me from the Lincoln Sitting
Room. He knew that every success brings a terrific letdown, he
said; I should not let it get to me. And there were many
battles yet to be fought. Listening to him, I could picture

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the scene: Nixon would be sitting, solitary and withdrawn,
deep in his brown stuffed chair, his legs on a settee in front
of him while a small reading light broke the darkness, a wood
fire casting shadows on the wall of the room. The loudspeakers
would be playing romantic classical music, probably
Tchaikovsky. Though he was talking to me, Nixon was really
addressing himself.

What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish
its design. This man, so lonely in his hour of triumph, had
navigated our nation through one of the most anguishing
periods of its history. Not courageous by nature, 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 American
foreign policy so that it might overcome the disastrous
oscillations between overcommitment and isolation. Despised by

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the Establishment, ever ambiguous in his human perceptions, he
had nevertheless held fast to a sense of national honor and
responsibility, determined to prove that the strongest free
country had no right to abdicate. What would have happened had
the Establishment about which he was so ambivalent shown him
some love? Would an act of grace have liberated him from the
wilderness of his resentments? By now it no longer mattered.

Enveloped in his solitude, he could envisage a new
international order that would reduce lingering enmities,
strengthen historic friendships, and give new hope to emerging
nations. It was a worthy goal for America and mankind. In his
moment of triumph, he stood alone on a pinnacle that was soon
to turn into a precipice. And yet, with all his insecurities
and flaws, he had brought us by a tremendous act of will to
the extraordinary moment when dreams and possibilities
conjoined.

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