rung in Kreisen der Johnson-Admini-
stration.

Im Zweifel, ob er Nixons Angebot akzeptieren und damit in die Arena der Regierung zurückkehren sollte, wandte sich Kissinger zunächst an Gouverneur Rockefeller. Der riet ihm dringend zu, ebenso wie Kissingers Kollegen von der Harvard-Universität, unter ihnen auch McGeorge Bundy, derzeit Präsident der Ford-Stiftung.

Kissinger sagte zu, Nixon berief ihn noch in der gleichen Woche. Wenn Kissinger heute daran zurückdenkt, dann empfindet er wegen seines Zögerns so etwas wie ein Gefühl der Beschämung, weil er meint, der Präsident sei mit ihm ein größeres Risiko eingegangen als er mit dem Präsidenten.

Bei einem Zusammentreffen vor der Amtsübernahme des Präsidenten fragte ich Kissinger, ob er von Nixon irgendwelche Zusicherungen über sein künfti-

Intellektuelle, vor allem die aus Har-
vard, verdächtig sind. Doch mit der
Zeit zeigte sich bei beiden mehr Ge-
meinsames, als vorauszusehen war.

Nixon durchschaute bald, daß Kis-
singer nicht nur als der einzige aner-
kannte und geachtete Intellektuelle sei-
ner Administration ein Gewinn für ihn
war. Kissinger konnte ihm zudem auch
jene Konzepte liefern, mit denen Politik
zu machen war.

„Rechtsanwälte“, schrieb Kissinger einmal (und Nixon war ein Rechtsanwalt), „beschäftigen sich lieber mit tatsächlichen als mit hypothetischen Fällen. Sie haben wenig Vertrauen zu der Möglichkeit, künftige Ereignisse abstrakt vorauszusagen. Aber Planung ist ihrer Natur nach hypothetisch. Ihr Erfolg hängt von der Fähigkeit ab, die gegenwärtigen Verhältnisse zu transzendieren.“ Offenbar sieht Kissinger sich selbst als das erwählte Werkzeug,

Wenn Nixon einen Kurs der Risiken und der Überraschungseffekte einschlagen wollte, so konnte er sich dabei nicht eines Außenministers bedienen, der wegen seiner außenpolitischen Unerfahrenheit von den Ratschlägen seines Ministeriums abhängig war. Außenminister Rogers übernahm im Laufe der Zeit die Aufgabe, den Präsidenten gegenüber der Bürokratie abzusichern, statt selber Außenpolitik zu planen und zu verwirklichen.

Nixon und Kissinger — eine
Partnerschaft der Außenseiter.

Der Präsident brauchte Kissinger,
um in der Lage zu sein, seine eigene
Außenpolitik zu formulieren und in die
Wege zu leiten. „Der Bürokratie“, so
hatte Kissinger geschrieben, „erscheint
Originalität als ein Unsicherheitsfak-
tor.“

All dies erklärt, warum Nixon und
Kissinger instinktiv ihre Außenpolitik
am liebsten im geheimen betreiben.
Besonders Kissinger mit seiner gründli-
chen Kenntnis der europäischen Diplom-
matie des 19. Jahrhunderts praktiziert
Politik gern abseits von Öffentlichkeit,
Kongreß und Bürokratie. Allerdings
wandelte er sich inzwischen zum Reali-\sten und lernte, Kompromisse einzuge-
hen; tatsächlich kann er seine Politik
ausgezeichnet öffentlich verteidigen
und mit Protestgruppen diskutieren.

Auch Nixon zieht es vor, mit ver-
deckten Karten zu spielen. Solche Ge-
meinsamkeit erklärt, warum Kissinger
dem Präsidenten so nahe steht und sein
loyaler, persönlichster und ergebenster
Diener wurde. Zudem verbindet die
beiden, so meinen einige von Kissin-
gers akademischen Kollegen, ein psy-
chologisches Band: Nixon und Kissinger
empfinden sich als soziale Außenseiter,
von der herrschenden Klasse eher tole-
riert als akzeptiert.

Seit der Präsident und Henry Kissinger Politik machen, läßt sich schwer entscheiden, wer zuerst eine neue Idee hatte und wer wen beeinflußte. Kissinger gestand mir einmal: „Oft weiß ich nicht, ob ich der Schauspieler oder der Regisseur bin.“

Die Zeit sollte es rasch lehren. Der Präsident begann mit der Arbeit und beauftragte Kissinger, einen Expertenstab für den Nationalen Sicherheitsrat, Amerikas wichtigstes Entscheidungsgremium, zu rekrutieren. Unter seiner Führung — und mit Nixons offenkundiger Billigung — wurde das „Unternehmen Kissinger“ zur Urquelle einer neuen Außen- und Militärpolitik.

Im nächsten Heft

Kissinger zieht ins Weiße Haus ein und schafft sich ein Mikro-Außenministerium — Der Berater des Präsidenten findet eine Friedensformel für den Vietnam-konflikt

The Denver Post

„Tut mir leid, Mr. Kissinger ist nicht zu sprechen – er macht gerade Außenpolitik“

ges Arbeitsgebiet erhalten habe. Kissin-
gers Antwort: „Man kann doch mit
dem Präsidenten keinen Vertrag ma-
chen.“

Doch blieb er bis zum tatsächlichen
Beginn seiner Arbeit im Weißen Haus
mäßtrauisch. Dann aber gedieh ihre Zu-
sammenarbeit in einer für die ameri-
kanische Geschichte beispiellosen Inten-
sität: Kissinger wurde der de-facto-
Außenminister des Präsidenten. Nie-
mals zuvor verließ sich ein Präsident
derart auf einen außenpolitischen Be-
rater, dem die offizielle Funktion des
Außenministers fehlte.

Für einen in Deutschland geborenen
Juden war das ein einzigartiger Auf-
stieg zu Macht und Ruhm. Kaum je-
mand hätte voraussagen können, daß
es zu einer derart engen Beziehung zwi-
schen zwei Männern so verschiedener
Herkunft kommen würde: zwischen
dem Intellektuellen mit eher europä-
ischen als amerikanischen Ansichten
und dem Mittelklasse-Amerikaner, dem

das diesen Mangel der Rechtsanwälte
kompensieren soll.

Nixon wußte auch, daß sie beide die gleiche Vorstellung davon hatten, wie die Vereinigten Staaten mit Russen und Chinesen verhandeln sollten: nicht als ideologische Mächte, sondern als Träger gemeinsamer Interessen, in die mittlere Mächte sich nicht einmischen dürften. Sie teilten ebenfalls die Überzeugung, daß Verhandlungen mit den Kommunisten nach dem Prinzip gegenüberstiger Zugeständnisse geführt werden müßten. Sie mißtrauten gleichermaßen dem State Department und der Bürokratie.

Gemeinsam war ihnen die konspira-
tive Gesinnung, eine Neigung zu Ge-
heimdiplomatie und theatralischen Ef-
fekten. Zu so verstandener Diplomatie
passen Bürokraten nicht; wo selbst von
einem streng geheimen Dokument mit
geringster Auflage noch 60 Kopien um-
laufen, ist Geheimhaltung schwerlich
möglich.

162

[LC]

13

The Nixon Watch

Two Loners

A new book is out with a fascinating account, the best
that I've seen, of the way in which Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger have worked together to alter the
shape and course of United States foreign policy and,
as the President justly said in China last year, to
"change the world." The book is *The Retreat of Ameri-
can Power* (Doubleday; $8.95). Its author is Henry
Brandon, an associate editor and for 23 years the chief
Washington correspondent of the London *Sunday
Times*. Its thesis is that the President and Kissinger
between them have devised and the President has
successfully and prudently conducted "an orderly re-
treat from obsolete global commitments to safer and
more solid positions . . . without serious adverse con-
sequences on world security."

In order to sustain the thesis, Brandon has to take
the so-called Nixon Doctrine at face value and with
total seriousness. He must and does excuse the ambi-
guities and contradictions in which Mr. Nixon has
expressed his doctrine ever since he first enunciated it
on the island of Guam in 1969, in a rambling and con-
fusing dissertation to reporters that to this day has not
been put on the public record, on the ground that the
obfuscation has been necessary in order "to lead the
retreat of American power in a responsible way, fast
enough to maintain support at home and slow enough
not to lose confidence abroad or to tempt the enemy
into wrong assumptions." Brandon also must and
does accept at face value the President's familiar claim
that he has had to frame and apply his policy of read-
justment abroad in such a way as to withstand and
beat back a "wave of new isolationism" at home.
"What we had to do first," Mr. Nixon told Brandon
and a visiting London editor in February 1970, "was
to make it plain to the American people that in fact we
cannot opt out of the world, and second, to seek their
support in continuing a policy even though it is a
policy of revised involvement." I doubt that the Presi-
dent has ever really believed that he had to convince
significant numbers of Americans that "we cannot opt
out of the world," and a less considerate writer than
the sensitive and gracious Henry Brandon might call
Mr. Nixon's "policy of revised involvement" a policy
of continuing commitment on the cheap. These are
minor carpings. With them vented, I turn from the
major proposition of an admirable book to its percep-
tive account and analysis of the relationship between
the President and Henry Kissinger.

Brandon knew and admired Kissinger and knew
and did not admire Richard Nixon long before the
President won his second nomination at Miami Beach
in 1968. In a telephone conversation after that occur-
rence, Brandon recalls, "Kissinger not only confirmed

14

THE NEW REPUBLIC

all my fears and misgivings, but reinforced them in no uncertain terms. He shared my mistrust of the man and his character." Kissinger, who had been Governor Nelson Rockefeller's foreign affairs adviser since the 1950s and had assisted his efforts to do Nixon out of the Republican nominations in 1960 and 1968, told Brandon that he "profoundly distrusted" Nixon and "served Rockefeller to keep Nixon out." Kissinger said he thought and feared that Nixon lacked principle, lacked the inner security and confidence a leader needs, and was "frozen" in a "cold-war outlook" that could induce him to take "undue risks" in a time of "waning military preeminence." Much later, Kissinger told Brandon that "he remained distrustful until he actually began to work for the President." Brandon's detailed account of how Nixon and Kissinger got together after the election, partly at the urging of and upon the recommendation of others, comes to this: it took Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard - "a poor German refugee" and "a German-born Jew" - two meetings and five days to overcome his distrust sufficiently to agree to be Nixon's assistant for national security affairs and enter upon a relationship that "grew into something unprecedented in American history." Kissinger became "the President's de facto Secretary of State" and "his loyal, most personal, most dedicated servant rather than, as one cynical comment put it, his Rasputin."

How did this come about? One of Brandon's several answers is that Nixon knew in 1968, from Kissinger's writings, that he and Kissinger "held a shared view about how the United States should deal with the Russians and Chinese - not as ideological powers, but on the basis of a mutual interest with which no middle power should be allowed to interfere." Other shared views and characteristics - dislike of the State Department, a disdain for bureaucracy, and "a conspiratorial mind, a penchant for secret diplomacy and the coup de théâtre" - drew them to each other. Brandon gets closest to the inward answers, answers that Kissinger has said nobody except himself and the President will ever really get at, in two analytic passages.

"Kissinger," Brandon writes, "has the rare gift of being a conceptual thinker, a quality which separates the intellectual from the politician and which made Kissinger a particularly valuable aide, for he was able to give the President's policy instincts intellectual content. The President is not a profound thinker, but he can ask profound questions, and Kissinger's ability to give him the answers, to explain to the President where he might find himself half a dozen moves from where he stood, gave Mr. Nixon the kind of intellectual sense of security he needed."

Brandon observes that "their relationship grew in intimacy and yet retained a formality which neither ever dropped." Then he writes: "They are also both loners, and in a theatrical sense, tragic figures who

have achieved more than they ever expected, and yet lack the contentment and happiness it ought to bring. Neither can come close to anyone for fear of being unable to meet the demands of friendship or intimacy. They hold enormous power in their hands, but they remain in isolation. Both suffer from insecurities and feel the need of reassurance, but both have gained confidence from the use of power. Kissinger has been accused of displaying an arrogance of power, but if anything his fault is an arrogance of intellect which makes him believe that he can control and manage reality. This also leads him, if the facts do not vindicate his theories, to believe that the facts are wrong. His insecurities also develop from a sense of being disliked, of being surrounded by enemies, or of losing support among those he cares about, and from attacks in newspapers which tend to upset him as much as they do other public personalities. His most obvious insecurities, however, are his total dependence on, getting his ideas accepted and his need for protection from his adversaries, of which he has as many as most eminent grises did in history."

Brandon suggests that Kissinger's steadfast loyalty during the Cambodia "incursion" in 1970 sealed his and Nixon's friendship. Although he deplored the President's bellicose announcement of the action, Kissinger "stood like a rock" with Nixon against the protests that erupted nationally and within the White House. Secretaries Rogers and Laird "enraged the President" by intimating their doubts to the press and thereafter "he had reservations about both of them."

Brandon had to close out his book for the printers before ups and downs in the final Vietnam negotiations and some White House leaks fostered an impression of differences between the President and Kissinger and of sharper differences between Kissinger and certain other assistants, notably (though Brandon doesn't name them) John D. Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman. Brandon, however, sensed the makings of friction before most other outsiders did. He writes that Kissinger "was careful to ensure that the President would harvest the ultimate credit for all foreign policy achievements, but the spectacular visibility and fulsome credit he was given by the media after a time began to grate on the President. Some men of the President's inner circle resented the massive publicity even more than Mr. Nixon." Former Commerce Secretary Peter G. Peterson is quoted: "Henry's relation with the White House staff is as intimate as was that between Caesar and Brutus." In a remark that foreshadowed his famous and misguided burst of vainglory in an interview last November with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Kissinger once said to Brandon: "Often I don't know whether I am the actor or the director." He takes care nowadays to behave and talk as if he knows that Richard Nixon is the director.

Although Brandon doesn't try to guess at how long

THE KIRKUS REVIEWS

Brandon, Henry.

THE RETREAT OF AMERICAN POWER.

Doubleday $8.95.

(3/16. LC: 72-90969)

Unlike Drew Middleton's paleolithic ravings (see below), Henry Brandon's analysis of the American "retreat" is a thoughtful and refined effort to grapple with the constructs and realities of the evolving Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy blueprint by "selectively retracing" the principal decisions of 1968-72 and pinpointing "the play of the forces of change" which have prompted the new diplomatic stance. To wit, after initial portraits of the two main actors (nothing much new is said, although we hadn't known that Henry's "real" name is Heinz), Brandon moves chronologically through the early Vietnam policy formulations (the President wanted "everything carefully laid out" which perfectly complemented Kissinger's innate *Grundlichkeit* or thoroughness), the Cambodian incursion, the Middle East initiatives, and on through the trips to Peking and the USSR, the SALT bargaining, and the zigzag negotiations to end the Southeast Asia involvement. What all these Nixon-Kissinger occurrences, thrusts, and responses add up to, claims Brandon, is an unmistakable policy of American disengagement from the world *where in the past it has been over-engaged* — the meaning of the Nixon Doctrine. It is important to understand that this approach is much different from isolationism or "retreat" as rightists use the term; the drawing back of American muscle by Nixon-Kissinger is a "carefully controlled" process designed to strengthen, not weaken, the country; it is a policy cut from the cloth of *detente* and Brandon suggests that its "intricate weave" could be a serious problem for the future, i.e., "the difficulty of anybody else's assuming its management." For 23 years Brandon has served as *The London Sunday Times'* chief U.S. correspondent, a position which allows both familiarity and objectivity, a happy combination of traits which, more than anything else, accounts for his persuasive appraisal of just what Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger are hatching.

Shifting
the
Game Plan

THE RETREAT OF AMERICAN POWER. By Henry Brandon. Doubleday. 368 pp. $8.95

A WORLD ELSEWHERE: THE NEW AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY. By James Chace. Scribner's 108 pp. $5.95

By DAVID P. CALLEO

FOREIGN JOURNALISTS have long been among the shrewdest observers of the American scene. Formerly, they used to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously. Since World War II they have been particularly helpful to that part of the public eager to be told of its world responsibilities.

One of Washington's best journalists, Henry Brandon of London's Sunday Times, has written an extraordinarily comprehensive and well-informed survey of the Nixon administration's foreign policy. Brandon's book benefits not only from his own formidable experience, but from an apparently well-briefed knowledge of the Nixon government's innermost thoughts and recollections. On the whole, Brandon likes what he has been told. The result is a bit like having Joseph Alsop write the Pentagon Papers.

Brandon sees Nixon's leadership, with Kissinger's complementary talent, taking American foreign policy in a radical new direction. The administration, he believes, is skillfully retrenching from postwar hegemony and confrontation and positioning the country favorably for a coming world, no longer characterized by relatively stable alliances but by "shifting coalitions." Brandon portrays his thesis through a general survey of the administration's policies, from Vietnam through China, India, Japan, the Middle East, Moscow, Europe, the SALT talks and the monetary crisis.

While the account is absorbing, not everyone will conclude from it that the administration has really embraced a radical new strategy. Neither a cease-fire in Vietnam, after four years, nor the SALT agreements, however worthy in themselves, gives convincing evidence of a major shift in American policy. Even the motives behind the Peking visit, however radical the ultimate consequences may prove to be, can as easily be explained as exploiting divisions in the enemy's camp, rather than attributed to a strategy of retrenchment and devolution. For the administration, Mao may well be only a giant Tito.

DAVID P. CALLEO is a professor of European studies at Johns Hopkins, and has recently written, with Benjamin M. Rowland, America and the World Political Economy.

Certainly, Kissinger's notion of a balance-of-power system does not appear all that different from the Cold War visions of Acheson, Dulles and Rusk. All tended to define local conflicts as confrontations between American and Soviet power. With his celebrated "linkages," so, it seems, does Kissinger. Thus, according to Brandon's account, desperate Palestinian guerrillas battling King Hussein were seen primarily as a Soviet test of American will. Bangladesh was a Soviet affront to the world balance of power; Russia, it was feared, would henceforth dominate the subcontinent. The view from the White House is familiar. The official imagination, it seems, remains unable to accommodate the notion that India was intervening to stop unimaginable human suffering and, in the process, giving the *coup de grace* to a political monstrosity left behind by the British. Apparently no one can believe that Russia will be no more able to dominate India than we have been—let alone accept the heretical vision that neither American nor even Chinese security demands a second major power to "balance" India in her own subcontinent.

This administration's continuity with its predecessors seems especially apparent in its relations with the Western European states and Japan. No serious initiative has yet been seen to redefine political and military relationships away from our postwar hegemony. The trip to Peking seems, as much as anything else, a move to preempt any Japanese bid for independence. China and America will "contain" Japan.

To be sure, the administration has been busy elsewhere. But the rapid deterioration in America's economic relations with Europe and Japan ought to be sufficient inspiration to an administration genuinely dedicated to retrenchment. Brandon suggests that neither Nixon nor Kissinger has any real grasp of international economic issues, a view confirmed by his account of the first devaluation crisis.

The ambivalence between Nixon's policies and the rhetoric used to describe them appears more clearly in James Chace's *A World Elsewhere*. Nixon and Kissinger, Chace says, waffle between federalism and statism—between Jean Monnet's vision of a single community of advanced industrial nations, which has so mesmerized postwar American policy, and the Gaullist view of a plural world of states, which ought now to inspire our search for a new global balance. Chace observes, for example, the ambiguity of the Nixon Doctrine, which often appears to mean not that we will reduce our commitments, but that we plan to sustain them with reduced forces.

Chace himself argues for a new American policy firmly based on the Gaullist view. Nation states, he argues, remain the principal sources of political vitality and legitimacy. No federal or imperial system can contain them peacefully. World order will either be founded upon a political balance acceptable to the five actual or emerging major centers of political vitality, or there will be no order at all. Continuing to pursue Monnet's Pan Atlantic Community would be unfortunate. Chace believes, because such a grouping lacks internal cohesion and American power can no longer supply it.