KISSINGER ASSOCIATES, INC.

350 PARK AVENUE
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022-6022
(212) 759-7919
TELECOPY: (212) 759-0042

November 27, 1991

Techn. dr Curt Nicolin
Honorary Chairman ASEA AB
Chairman Incentive AB
P.O. Box 7373
S-10291 Stockholm
Sweden

Dear Curt:

I enjoyed receiving your letter of November 21. You are right that the only really substantial source of an oil alternative to the Middle East is Russia and that, on present course, the Russians are not capable of even maintaining their output. Indeed, chaos in the Soviet oil sector has been an important factor sustaining oil prices since the end of the Gulf War.

In the long run, of course, the oil resources of Russia as well as the other republics will be developed and brought to market. I agree that it would be a significant contribution to international economic stability if the United States could find a way to help the Soviets develop these resources. However, I am skeptical that the combination of our deficits and their confusion will produce much in the near term. This is one for the private sector.

I look forward to seeing you in Gothenburg in January.

SUITE 1021 • 1800 K STREET, N. W. • WASHINGTON, D. C. 20006 • (202) 872-0300

Techn. dr CURT NICOLIN
Honorary Chairman ASEA AB
Chairman Incentive AB

NOV 25 1991

Stockholm, November 21, 1991

Dr Henry Kissinger
350 Park Avenue, 26th floor
New York NY 10022

Dear Henry:

May I ask you, if you think the following idea
is crazy or potentially possible?

The OPEC cartel has created effects on the world
economy in the negative, and the actions taken
by OPEC in the 70ies have had very marked effects
on the world economy growth in the 80ies. Unfor-
tunately the other sources of oil in the world seem
to be too small to counter the cartel effects. Under
the influence of the problems in Soviet their oil
production is declining, and judging from what I
hear, they are not able to invest neither for main-
taining production nor of course for expansion.

Suppose that United States would make a deal with
Soviet to provide the assets and the knowledge for
extended oil production. First of course for their
own needs but also for massive export, and that
United States as a compensation for its willingness
to support would make a deal that it would handle
the export totally or for a major part of the total
export. My speculation is that then balance in forces
to the OPEC cartel would greatly improve and the
world economy benefit.

Kind regards,

P.O. Box 7373, S-10391 STOCKHOLM, Sweden
Visiting address: Hamngatan 2, Stockholm
Telephone +46 8 613 65 00
Telefax +46 8 611 28 30

JUN 26 1991

UNIVERSAL CONSOLIDATED COMPANIES, INC.

325 EAST STAHL ROAD
FREMONT, OHIO 43420-9683

F.W. NIGGEMYER
president

June 25, 1991

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
350 Park Avenue, 26th Floor
New York, New York 10022-6022

Dear Henry,

I am a Director of Meridian National Corporation which operates, through its subsidiary Meridian Environmental Services, a sulfuric acid recycling facility in Detroit. Additionally the company holds a permit to construct an additional/expanded hazardous waste recycling plant on the same site. In an effort to redirect the company's resources, we have decided to sell this facility. In this effort, we have had discussions with USPCI, a subsidiary of Union Pacific Corporation. While there has been considerable good faith discussion and we have been encouraged by the statements and opinions of several middle management people, we are presently unable to determine the seriousness of interest at the senior level.

I would appreciate any assistance or advice you could give me in order to productively direct our efforts.

Many thanks for your assistance.

FWN:kmm

"NIXON'S THE ONE"

TEL No.714-993-5075

Nov 13,91 13:16 No.003 P.02

THE RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY & BIRTHPLACE

John H. Taylor
Director

November 13, 1991

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10022

Dear Henry,

You have probably have noticed, from subtle variations in the relentless flow of pro-Nixon propaganda, that I have switched posts and coasts and now serve as director of the Library & Birthplace. With Suzanne's assistance we attempted to lure you back to Yorba Linda about eight months ago when you were speaking in Orange County, but your schedule was understandably full.

I write today to ask whether you would entertain an invitation to give the closing address at a Library & Birthplace-sponsored conference in Washington on March 11-12th that now bears the working title of "The Nixon Conference on the New World Order." Jim Schlesinger has agreed to serve as conference chairman, and should you be able to join us, he would issue the formal invitation.

The speakers and panels are being assembled by Dimitri Simes, who provided indispensable support to President Nixon during his visit to the Soviet Union last spring and whose colleagues at the Carnegie Endowment are indulging his willingness to assist RN and his Presidential library in this way. It is Dimitri's and our view that many of the issues on the international stage today can usefully be viewed through the prism of the foreign policy accomplishments of the Nixon Administration -- a time when, it could be argued, you and President Nixon laid the first bricks in the new world order in Moscow, in Beijing, at Paris, and in the Mideast.

18001 Yorba Linda Boulevard • Yorba Linda • California USA 92686

Telephone: (714) 993-5075 FAX: (714) 528-0544

"NIXON'S THE ONE"

TEL No.714-993-5075

Nov 13,91 13:16 No.003 P.03

November 13, 1991

Page 2

While plans for the conference are still in
formulation, tentative commitments have already been
made by Margaret Thatcher, Eduard Shevardnadze, and
President Nixon for major addresses and by Lionel
Olmer, Joseph Joffe and of course Dimitri Simes and Dr.
Schlesinger to chair panel discussions.

The John M. Olin Foundation is providing major support for the conference, but we intend to seek corporate support as well -- hence my second inquiry through Suzanne about whether you believe an approach to American Express would be fruitful. In January 1990 RN accepted an invitation from Jim Robinson and TIME magazine to speak at the "Man of the Decade" dinner the companies jointly sponsored in New York City. Afterwards Mr. Robinson praised RN's assessment of a rapidly changing world -- a world that has changed so much more dramatically since then that the company might welcome an association with a high-level effort to assess the implications of these developments for American foreign policy in the early 21st century.

But while such a conference would be thinkable
without American Express, it would be unthinkable
without you. So no matter what your views are on the
corporate question, I hope your schedule will permit
you to join President Nixon and our other guests for an
historic two days of debate and analysis.

With respect,

DEC 13 1991

AMERICA'S ROLE IN THE EMERGING WORLD

*A Nixon Library Conference in Washington*

December 12, 1991

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger and Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10022

Dear Henry:

I was delighted to learn that you are willing to deliver an address at America's Role in the Emerging World -- A Nixon Library Conference in Washington to be held March 11 and 12, 1992, here in Washington, D.C. We have tentatively scheduled your speech between 3:15 and 4:00 PM on March 12. This will be the final substantive event at the conference and will allow us to conclude on a high note.

Although we are still in the organizational stage, we already have confirmations from a distinguished group of speakers, which, in addition to yourself, includes Senators Richard Lugar and Pat Moynihan, Zbig Brzezinski, Bill Simon and, of course, President Nixon himself.

Your participation means a great deal to President Nixon and to me, and I am extremely pleased that you will be able to join us. I will call you later to discuss further details. Naturally we will cover your travel and other expenses connected with the conference.

In the meantime, please do not hesitate to call me if you have any questions. With best regards, I am most

CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

James R. Schlesinger
Chairman

George P. Shultz

Dimitri K. Simes

William E. Simon

John H. Taylor

Theresa Hollingsworth
Conference Director

THE RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY & BIRTHPLACE
18001 Yorba Linda Boulevard, Yorba Linda, California 92686 Tel: 714-993-5075 Fax: 714-528-0544

CONFERENCE OFFICE
4717 Alton Place, NW, Washington, DC 20016 Tel: 202-966-6225

JAN.02.00 11:55 PM

ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT NIXON PREPARED FOR DELIVERY TO
THE INSTITUTE OF WORLD ECONOMY AND
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, MOSCOW

Friday, March 22, 1991

The Moment of Truth

I am honored to appear before this distinguished group of foreign policy scholars. This is particularly true because of my great respect for your former colleague, Dimitri Simes, who is accompanying me on this trip, and also because I am aware of the important role the Institute played in developing new foreign policy thinking and the resulting shift away from tension and hostility between East and West.

Profound changes have occurred since my first trip to the Soviet Union in 1959, when Nikita Khrushchev and I met in what later became known as the Kitchen Debate at the American Exhibition in Moscow. The most significant change is that this will be the first time in seven visits that I will meet not only with government leaders but with leaders who are not in government, with leaders in newly proud and assertive republics, and even ordinary people without having to assume that chance encounters with them are a courtesy of the secret police.

Let me first put the present relationship between our two countries in historical perspective. Since 1959, both the United States and the Soviet Union have gone through the ordeal of unpopular foreign wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan. We were on different sides in those conflicts. But it is vitally important to note that in the two centuries of our relationship there has never been an occasion when American soldiers and Soviet soldiers fought each other in war.

We have had profound differences in part because as the only two nuclear superpowers we inevitably became geopolitical competitors and at times adversaries on the world scene. Efforts to reduce those differences have been made by both sides. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson participated in meetings at the highest level with Soviet leaders. After each of these summit meetings, some naive observers predicted that we were entering a new era of good relations between our two countries. Some of you are old enough to remember the Spirit of Geneva in 1955, the Spirit of Camp David in 1960, the Spirit of Vienna in 1961, and the Spirit of Glassboro in 1967. We learned, however, that good personal relations between government leaders do not automatically produce good state relations. Spirit without substance evaporates very quickly.

JAN.02.00 11:58 PM

P.003

In 1972, I became the first American President to visit Moscow. Since then, Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush have had productive summit meetings with Soviet leaders. Progress was made on difficult issues like arms control. But we continued to be adversaries in many areas -- military, economic, and ideological. But just as important as finding agreement on some issues was our success at developing a process for disagreeing on other issues without resorting to armed conflict.

Then came 1989 -- the year of the century for those who cherished peace and freedom in the world. The Berlin Wall, the ugly symbol of the conflict between East and West, was torn down. As a result, most foreign policy observers, both East and West, said that this marked the end of the Cold War. Since then, we have seen dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, in the Third World, and in the Soviet Union.

In the newly independent countries of Eastern Europe, we have learned that democracy and free markets do not instantly produce economic progress.

In the Persian Gulf, where our interests have traditionally clashed for over 40 years, we joined in condemning Iraq's unprovoked aggression against Kuwait. But because we acted together in opposing the aggressors in Iraq does not mean, as some observers suggest, that in the future we shall be partners and allies rather than adversaries in all conflicts that may develop in the world. Iraq was a special case. Most of the nations that joined the allied coalition did so not because they liked each other but because they hated or feared Saddam Hussein. This may not happen again in a future conflict.

But assuming that the Cold War is over, we all hope that we will now be able to create a new world order that will finally operate according to the great principles of peace that brought the League of Nations into being after World War I and the United Nations after World War II. But again, we must leaven our hopes with reality. Since the end of World War II, 140 wars have been fought in the world. Eighteen million people have been killed in those wars, more than were killed in all of World War I. Most of those wars would have been fought even if there had been no Cold War. Even today, there are 20 wars being waged in the world in which thousands of people are killed every year.

We cannot shrug off our responsibilities by pointing out that because of the role the United Nations played in the Gulf War, we can now rely on the UN to produce and preserve peace whenever wars erupt, as they inevitably will. The UN at times can play a very constructive role. But one fact stands out above all others. For a really meaningful new world order to exist -- not just peace, but peace with freedom and justice -- cooperation between the Soviet Union and the United States is indispensable.

JAN. 02. 00 11:58 PM

3

The challenge for the leaders of both of our countries is to meet that awesome responsibility.

Let me now turn to a sensitive subject: the internal situation in the Soviet Union.

Like all successful politicians, President Mikhail Gorbachev is not one-dimensional. He is a troika -- a sincere, true-believing communist, a patriotic Russian nationalist, and most significant of all, a brilliant, pragmatic politician. In the six years he has been in power, he has changed the world. Even more important, he has changed the Soviet Union.

But when we look at the all-important issue of the economy, let me be undiplomatically blunt. Soviet economic policies have been a dismal failure. President Gorbachev has boldly advocated reform, but his government's policies have failed to recognize two fundamental truths. There is no halfway house between a command economy and a free economy, and there can be no successful private enterprise without private ownership. The inadequacy of President Gorbachev's reforms have led some critics in the United States to charge that he cannot cut the umbilical cord which joins him to the Marxist-Leninist communist philosophy that has nurtured him throughout his life.

I vividly recall Nikita Khrushchev telling me 32 years ago before a worldwide television audience, "We are behind you now economically, but in five years we will pass you, and I will be waving goodbye; follow us if you want to be able to compete with us." President Gorbachev has called Khrushchev's overly optimistic comments wild and totally unrealistic. He was right. The past 30 years have proved without question that when a free economy competes with a command economy, it is simply no contest.

Yet freedom is not a magic wand that creates prosperity with one flick of the wrist. There is no better proof than in the nations of eastern Europe, where reality has fallen so dramatically short of expectations. In China ten years ago, I commented that communism gives all people an equal share in poverty, while freedom gives all people the opportunity to work their way out of poverty. What many people may not realize is that an opportunity is not the same as a guarantee. They may ask, "What about free housing, free education, free health care, all of which are guaranteed by communist command economies?" The answer is that no thing is free. Only free people can produce the wealth to provide things some people cannot provide for themselves.

Americans wholeheartedly endorsed the beginning of President Gorbachev's historic reforms. But it is already a cliche to say that perestroika has run into serious roadblocks. Some of its architects have been sidelined or have left the government

JAN.02.00 11:57 PM

altogether. And now even the "new thinking" in foreign policy is
under attack: Momentum is being squandered in a climate of
mutual recriminations, intolerance, and outright personal
hostility.

We know that the Soviet people are discouraged, and we can
easily understand why. If it is hard to live by bread alone, it
is harder still to live with shortages of bread. Lines for food
and other necessities are getting longer, crime is becoming more
prevalent, and long-suppressed ethnic tensions are exploding
across the Soviet Union. The temptation is strong to give up or
even to give in to nostalgia about the way things were before
perestroika, when at least basic goods were available, some
rules, even if arbitrary and counterproductive, were observed,
and there was some predictability and stability.

But trying to go back to the so-called "good old days" would
be tragic and futile. Attempts to turn back the historical clock
always fail. There is nothing more destabilizing than trying to
arrest a revolution in mid-course. And yours, whether those who
started it intended it or not, is by now a true revolution, one
that has broken irrevocably with old Marxist-Leninist ideology,
with old habits of being submissive to dictatorial government
authority, and with relying on the State to take care of your
material needs and even your souls.

I am confident that in this perilous moment you will triumph
over your misgivings and discouragement. Great peoples show what
they are made of not when the going is easy, but during times of
crisis, when the going is tough. This is your greatest crisis,
your moment of truth. The decisions you make today will
ultimately determine the place you will hold in history and the
future you will build for your children. It will also determine
the course of U.S.-Soviet relations. The American people have
made an emotional stake in the success of your reforms. It would
be painful to them, and harmful to the spirit of cooperation we
both want so strongly, if their high hopes for meaningful reform
in the Soviet Union prove to be shortlived.

Let me turn now to another sensitive subject, the future of
the relationship between the central government of the Soviet
Union and the republics. The general rule is that this is an
internal problem, that it is your business, not ours. But when
internal problems affect foreign policy, then it is everyone's
business. The Baltics are a case in point. The Baltics did not
join the Soviet Union voluntarily. They were incorporated into
the Soviet Union by the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact, which has
been condemned by the Soviet Parliament and by President
Gorbachev. The United States has never recognized the legality
of Soviet domination over these nations. This issue poisons our
relationship. It would serve the interests of the Soviet Union
at home and abroad to move expeditiously to respect the wishes of

JAN.02.00 11:53 PM

P.006

[LC]

the people of the Baltics, which were overwhelmingly clear when they voted for independence.

There is little doubt that the stormy process of change unleashed by reform threatens the very fabric of your nation. It is easy to understand the temptation to restore stability at almost any cost. But can the legitimate need to restore stability justify brutal repression? Can coercion and violence keep reluctant populations together? Can you, in the great departure from a centrally planned economy, encourage free market forces one day and the next day harass new entrepreneurs, essentially punishing anyone who takes literally your own new emphasis on individual economic initiative? Will any of these measures allow your great country to integrate itself into the international community and the international economic system? The answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no. The trouble with your reactionaries is that they have a number of legitimate complaints but no adequate solutions to either repairing your structural economic problems or keeping the republics from leaving the union.

I do not suggest that America has all the answers. Yours is a country with a long and great history and a unique tradition. You have to sort things out for yourselves. That does not mean measuring success by blindly adopting foreign models, including those of the United States. Your tradition emphasizes spirit, great art, inner growth. Perhaps these things seem less important to millions of Soviet citizens currently deprived of basic necessities. yet they are great accomplishments, not just for your country but for civilization as a whole. By Marxist-Leninist materialistic criteria, the whole history of Russia prior to 1918, in comparison with the much more prosperous West, was one great failure. But I am convinced that while you paid an enormous price for your preoccupation with spiritual values, you enriched all mankind.

The United States and the Soviet Union are different, and our solutions may not be applicable to your situation. But there are certain truths that have been borne out over and over again throughout history. In the long run, freedom works, releasing people's creative energy works, allowing people to exercise their right of self-determination works. These ideas may sound almost like cliches. But unless your country is prepared to embrace them, there is a danger.

The accomplishments since my last visit in 1986 have been extraordinary -- glasnost, allowing free elections, allowing the eastern Europeans to determine their own destiny, accepting the unification of Germany, and beginning to disengage from the collection of international outlaws Moscow used to support in the Third World. But if after all this you turn back to the dark days of reaction and do not stay the course of enlightened

JAN.02.00 11:53 PM

P.007

reform, you may find yourselves on the sidelines of history, isolated from the mainstream of international developments. Your spectacular reforms at home and all of your statesmanlike initiatives abroad will be neither appreciated nor rewarded. You will then find yourselves in an even weaker position than when you originally started. I cannot believe your talented, creative people would settle for such a fate. The Soviet people are not emerging from 70 years of repression in order to become irrelevant. Instead they should be preparing to play the major role on the world stage that is worthy of a great and free people.

I know enough about the great resources of your land and the resourcefulness of your people to be optimistic about your long-term future. But only you can be the architects of your own destiny. Our interests are in a stable and peaceful transition of the Soviet Union from what it is today, the sick man of Europe, into a modern and democratic nation. We wish that for the sake of your people. We also wish it for the sake of the world, because democratic nations are less threatening to their neighbors and more reliable as partners.

Some now say that the time has come to sacrifice the democratic reforms you have begun in the interests of stability. But now that you have begun the process, it will be impossible to stop. It is possible to have stability without reform in the short run, but in the long run there can be no stability without reform. I am not saying it will be a smooth and simple process. Democracy cannot be perfect because democracy is government by people, and people are not perfect. But unlike dictatorship, democracy unleashes the power of people and produces the progress that everyone desires.

You are entitled to expect us not to interfere in your internal affairs. But we cannot be indifferent to what is happening on the territory of another nuclear superpower. You have won the admiration of the civilized world by telling the shocking truth about your recent history. Now, when we see attempts to stifle this truth again, shouldn't we pass the same moral judgement that led us to applaud Soviet reforms to start with, even if this time a moral judgement may have to go against you? To paraphrase Andre Sakharov, how can one trust the foreign policy of a government that persecutes its own people?

For too many years, both of our great nations had to subordinate our foreign policies, indeed very often our domestic policies, to the confrontation between East and West. The Cold War was enormously expensive, both in energy and other kinds of resources that we hope can now be expended more productively. We will continue to disagree on some issues. But because we are the two major powers in the world, we also have many areas where we can work together: the environment, antiterrorism, the war

JAN.03.00 12:00 AM

P.008

7

against drugs, the proliferation of new weapons technologies,

and, as we were reminded in the Gulf, making sure the world is
safe from brutal aggressors like Saddam Hussein. I am not
talking about bringing the world into a new age of perpetual
harmony. Instead I am thinking about our historic responsibility
to exploit the opportunity provided by the winding down of the
Cold War to build a more stable and mutually beneficial
relationship between the two most powerful nations in the world.

Americans respect and admire the Soviet people. Our
governments will continue to have differences, but differences
between governments should not mean that our people cannot be
friends. And the friendship we cultivate will inevitably be
reflected in the policies of our governments.

I came to the Soviet Union as a friend 32 years ago. I
return today as an even better friend. That is not because I
believe there are no longer any differences between our
governments. It is based on the profound recognition that
working together our two peoples have so much to offer each other
and the world.

Looking at the situation in the Soviet Union today, it is
easy to despair, to give up, to try to recapture the certainties
of the past, to resist the dawn of an uncertain and dramatically
different future. But if you turn away from the path of economic
and political reform, you will not only let down your own
country. You will let down the world.

The people of the United States have watched the events of
the last six years with hope and mounting anticipation. If the
promise of reform is not soon followed by the reality of reform,
they will lose faith in our new relationship. If that happens,
the consequences for peace and freedom everywhere in the world
will be catastrophic.

In the life of a nation, moments like this come once in ten
generations. You have begun a process that if successfully
completed will guide the course of the Soviet Union for many more
generations to come. But if you fail to live up to the challenge
of the process you have begun, what started in triumph could end
in tragedy.

Your moment of truth has arrived. You hold the future in
your hands.

END

APR 08.1991

Appointments

Visit of Former President Richard Nixon

To the Soviet Union

March/April 1991

Moscow

<table><tr><td>Mikhail Gorbachev</td><td>President of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Boris Yeltsin</td><td>Chairman of the Russian Republic Supreme Soviet</td></tr><tr><td>Dr. Vladlen Martynov and Directorate</td><td>Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO)</td></tr><tr><td>Aleksandr Yakovlev</td><td>Chief, Group of Consultants to the President of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Andrei Kozyrev</td><td>Foreign Minister of the Russian Republic</td></tr><tr><td>Yevgeny Primakov</td><td>Advisor to President Gorbachev and Member of the Security Council of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Dmitri Yazov</td><td>Minister of Defense of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Mikhail Moiseyev</td><td>Chief of Staff, Armed Forces of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Gennadiy Yanayev</td><td>Vice President of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Aleksandr Bessmertnykh</td><td>Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Victor Kryuchkov</td><td>Chairman of the KGB of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Anatoly Dobrynin</td><td>Advisor to President Gorbachev, Former Ambassador to the U. S.</td></tr><tr><td>Eduard Shevardnadze</td><td>President of the Foreign Policy Association, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Boris Pugo</td><td>Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>Boris Gromov</td><td>First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Gavriil Popov</td><td>Mayor and Chairman of the Moscow City Council, Member of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR</td></tr><tr><td>Leonid Abalkin</td><td>Director, Institute of Economics</td></tr><tr><td>Boris Zolotukhin</td><td>Chairman, Subcommittee on Legal Reform, Russian Congress of People's Deputies</td></tr><tr><td>Vladimir Lukin</td><td>Chairman, Committee of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Economic Relations of the Russian Congress of People's Deputies</td></tr><tr><td>Sergei Stankevich</td><td>Deputy Mayor of Moscow and Member of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR.</td></tr></table>

## Republic of Lithuania

<table><tr><td>Vytautas Landsbergis</td><td>President of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania</td></tr><tr><td>Gediminas Vagnorius</td><td>Prime Minister of the Republic of Lithuania and members of the Cabinet</td></tr><tr><td>Halina Kobeckaite</td><td>General Director, Department for Ethnic Affairs, and 15 other representatives of ethnic minority communities in Lithuania</td></tr><tr><td>Algirdas Brazauskas</td><td>Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party</td></tr><tr><td>Eduardas Vilkas</td><td>Lithuanian Liberal Union</td></tr><tr><td>Kazimieras Antanavicius</td><td>Lithuanian Social Democratic Party</td></tr></table>

Note: Dimitri Simes met with OMON at President Nixon's request.

Republic of the Ukraine

Boris Paton
President of the Ukrainian Academy
of Sciences

Ivan Drach
And ten Leaders of the Rukh
Opposition Movement

Leonid Kravchuk
Chairman, Ukrainian Supreme Soviet
of the Ukraine

Republic of Georgia

Zviad Gamsakhurdiya
Chairman, Supreme Council of the
Republic of Georgia

Akaki Asatiani
Vice President, Republic of Georgia

Tedo Paatishvili
Chairman, Georgian Supreme Soviet
Committee on Foreign Relations

Iliya II
Patriarch of All Georgia

Also other senior Georgian officials as well as five top leaders
of opposition parties.

NOV 12 1991

Remarks of Former President Richard Nixon at the Dedication of
the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library,

Simi Valley, California

November 4, 1991

Governor Wilson and distinguished guests.

Pat and I are honored to participate in this tribute to two
people whose friendship we have cherished for over thirty years,
Ron and Nancy Reagan.

It has been widely and appropriately noted that this is a
very special occasion because for the first time in our nation's
history five Presidents and six First Ladies are in attendance.

But as a politician I am even more impressed by the fact
that we have with us today four men who were elected Governors of
their states. In the past forty-five years I have been elected
to the House, Senate, as Vice President, and as President. I
never made it for Governor. About all that can be said for my
efforts in that respect is that by losing in 1962, I paved the
way for Ronald Reagan to win in 1966.

This magnificent library is a splendid tribute to a great
President of the United States. But Ronald Reagan does not need
a building to remind us of his legacy.

He will always be remembered as the President who built up
the military power which President Bush used so brilliantly in
winning our spectacular victory in the Persian Gulf.

He will be remembered even more for another reason.

NOV 12 1991

Throughout his career Ronald Reagan has been a leader who had profound beliefs, the courage to fight for those beliefs, and the eloquence to inspire his countrymen to support those beliefs.

He believed in the American dream.

He believed in freedom and democracy.

He believed America was on the right side of history -- standing for what was good against the forces of evil in the world.

Some dismissed him as an ideologue. But history has proved he was right.

Permit me to put it in personal terms. Thirty-two years ago in Moscow, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev jabbed his finger into my chest and said, "Your grandchildren will live under Communism." I replied, "Your grandchildren will live in freedom."

At that time, I was sure he was wrong. I was not sure I was right. Now we know.

Thanks in great part to the strong and idealistic leadership of President Ronald Reagan, Khrushchev's grandchildren now live in freedom.

Nuechterlein Piece

--WHY "reveal (HK) as the essential conservative he has always been"

--particularly admiring of your character sketches although HK "writes with some delicacy of those with whom he worked who might in the future be in a position to grant favors or inflict revenge"

--"a courtier's talent for hiding his deeper feelings behind a surface frankness"

--On the substance and the issues, "there is not, in the end, either ambiguity or ambivalence. Kissinger has told us clearly what he thinks"

--HK was more subtle than Nixon but nonetheless "he had, in the end, little more patience or respect than did the President for the 'inexhaustible masochism' of the demoralized liberals"

--RN's treatment of HK in RN "is personally more generous than Kissinger's of him in WHY." But HK's treatment "taken whole," is not "nearly as negative as some reviewers have indicated." "Kissinger's Nixon had no style at all, but he did have considerable substance"

--Re HK balance of power approach, rejects some arguments that HK was amoral or cynical, while conceding memoir has few references to such liberal concerns as human rights. "Indeed, conservative assumptions and conclusions predominate". Yet it was a conservatism that the American right "felt distinctly uncomfortable with". (China, Salt, detente, etc)

--on effectiveness of HK policies, "even there...judgments can seldom be unambiguous." But RN and HK set very high standards for themselves.

--Elaborates on HK view of need for detente with Soviets along side HK's "running polemical battle" with liberal intellectuals.

--Understands HK policies towards the Shah and the "tilt" in South Asia. But on Chile, HK and RN acted "wrongly"

--Straddles the fence on alleged HK preoccupation with the US-Soviet relationship. Understands the central importance of that relationship but "there remains an element of truth in the charge from the Left that HK occasionally displayed excessive preoccupation with US-Soviet relations... detente was....oversold"

--HK did not dismiss Right's concerns out of hand "as he often does with those of the Left". However, HK "understood and sympathized with conservative hesitations, but he could not....accept a 'counsel of despair'..."

--Strongly defends HK Vietnam policies (p 382 ff)

--Conclusion: Referring to HK view of "neither elated nor sad" after Paris peace signing, "one senses that he means to suggest...a metaphor for the kind of balance (neither euphoria nor despair) he had hoped to bring to American foreign policy. In the short run, clearly he had not succeeded....Carter explicitly rejected HK's balance of power perspectives...By mid-1980.... Kissinger had not necessarily been vindicated but a great many people were willing to listen again to his arguments..." Hoped HK might write more books "in defense of those arguments" which would benefit US foreign policy.

Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy

JAMES A. NUECHTERLEIN

There once was a time, not so long ago, when Henry Kissinger led a charmed public life. No major government official can for long expect to escape substantial criticism, but Kissinger, during and beyond Richard Nixon's first presidential term, came as close to that state of political blessedness as anyone in recent American memory. Radicals of right and left launched occasional assaults, but virtually everyone in between joined in a Kissingerian celebration. There were, of course, those who could assume only the worst of any man associated with Nixon, but for a great many others — especially in the liberal community — there was a greater need to find someone to whom to attribute the apparent successes of Nixon's foreign policy. Liberal mythology could not easily find room for a Nixon committed to SALT agreements, détente and openings to China. So Kissinger became, in the public view, the better angel of Nixon's nature, the presumably lonely but influential dove in a covey of Nixonian hawks.

Things are no longer at all that way. Kissinger has become a highly controversial figure, and his memoirs (White House Years [Boston: Little, Brown; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979]; pp. xxiv + 1521; $25.00) have received a decidedly mixed and uneven reception. The reasons for that divided reception almost certainly have less to do with their literary or intellectual qualities than with their point of view. Events since the early 1970s have drawn Kissinger out of his ideological closet, and the memoirs reveal him as the essential conservative he has always been. (The first unambiguous sign of that came in Nixon's own memoirs, which presented a Kissinger with whom no liberal could feel entirely comfortable.) White House Years has drawn fire (and support) because of what it so clearly stands for and what it equally clearly rejects. The argument over the memoirs reflects fundamental divisions over the nature and practice of American foreign relations. Appearing at the time of the crises in Iran and Afghanistan and the general disarray of the Carter Administration's foreign policy, the book has become the occasion for a Great Debate concerning the ways Americans should arrange their relations with the rest of the world.

That is, in a way, unfair to the book itself. Ideology for the moment aside, White House Years is an extraordinary accomplishment. Its size (1521 pages) provides only the roughest measure of its monumental qualities. Kissinger has brought to his labors prodigious amounts of intelligence,

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sophistication and insight. Even those who abominate the book's ideology or find it fatally lacking in moral urgency ought to acknowledge its seriousness of purpose and depth of perception. Critics might find the case the book makes uncongenial, but they cannot reasonably ignore the power and suppleness with which that case is argued.

What gives the book its particular value is the combination of perspectives Kissinger brings to it. American diplomats, even highly skilled ones, have seldom approached their efforts armed (or encumbered) with academic knowledge, and few professors of international relations have had the opportunity (or embarrassment) of attempting to test their elegant models of how the world works against recalcitrant political reality. *White House Years* gives us the intellectual-as-statesman, and there is nothing quite like it in American political letters. It is both a detailed account of the diplomacy of the Nixon presidency to January 1973 and a running analytical and philosophical commentary on the assumptions and conduct of modern American foreign policy.

It is also more surprisingly - a work of considerable literary merit. Kissinger's earlier scholarly writings had a reputation for heaviness of both substance and prose; this, too, is by any standard a weighty book, but it is not a ponderous one. (Though Kissinger was badly served by his editors: he has a weakness for repetition, and better editing would have saved readers a certain amount of tedium. Aphorisms, however witty and penetrating, lapse into banality the third time around.) The writing is always clear and often graceful. One could, for example, cull from *White House Years* a kind of diplomat's commonplace book, a slender, epigrammatic primer on the art of negotiation.

Kissinger also reveals a formidable talent for analysis of character. His sketches of various associates and world leaders are arrestingly shrewd, subtle and deft. His portrayal of Richard Nixon - about whom more below - captures the man as well as anyone ever has; it is at once unsparing and compassionate, and seems precisely right in its perceptions and judgments. Kissinger appears to possess an almost preternatural sense for the springs of motive and behavior; one quickly comes to understand his success as a negotiator. The character sketches are accompanied by a series of fascinating mini-essays on a broad range of topics, from the attractions of Marxist ideology to the tunnel-visioned lunacies of the White House public relations staff. All of this is spiced with frequent, often deadpan, wit (quoting Nixon at the Great Wall of China: "This is a great wall"; or on the Italians' style in diplomacy: "one sometimes could not avoid the impression that to discuss international affairs with their Foreign Minister was to risk boring him").

The weapon of wit serves more than literary purposes for Kissinger. He is a master of the self-deprecatory comment, which he uses regularly to preempt and deflect criticism from others. Kissinger suffers neither fools

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gladly nor criticism lightly, and stories abound concerning his ego, his vanity, his tyrannical habits with staffers, his backbiting, his devious intrigues in palace politics. Yet charm covers many sins, and it is difficult to remain exercised about the egocentricity of someone who will disarmingly confess, as Kissinger does here, that "the capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait," or who can suggest to reporters that an appropriate form of address to him might be "excellency." The humor may alter nothing, but it does tend to confound criticism. No recent American political figure, with the possible exception of John Kennedy, has used the press for his own purposes more skillfully than Kissinger; indeed, those White House public relations men whom Kissinger delights to tease could well have taken lessons from him. Through flattery and subtlety, Kissinger was able to get from the press the respectful attention that Nixon, with more blunt instruments, never obtained.

As he has managed the press, so Kissinger, in *White House Years*, carefully handles others. He obviously does not consider his public career at an end, and he writes with some delicacy of those with whom he worked who might in future be in a position to grant favors or to inflict revenge. (Some critics have complained that, in this and other ways, the memoirs are self-serving; so they are, of course, but one waits for examples of memoirs which are not.) His depictions of men like Melvin Laird, Nixon's Secretary of Defense, or John Connally, who served briefly as Secretary of the Treasury, require a good deal of careful textual analysis for clues to their deeper meanings, and even then final judgments often remain oblique and ambiguous. Kissinger displays a courtier's talent for hiding his deeper feelings behind a surface frankness, and he is seldom entirely straightforward. His compliments are normally tinged with subtle reservations, his criticisms with at least token concessions. He affects an air of detachment and self-control in his reactions to others that on other evidence, such as Nixon's memoirs, he could not always in practice sustain. One feels sure that the Kissinger diaries, should they ever appear, will be far less ambivalent and restrained in their judgments on men and situations than are the Kissinger memoirs.

But the memoirs are what we have, and they are quite frank enough for public purposes, especially with respect to the analysis of major events and larger questions of policy that establishes their significance. Whatever personal or literary qualities Kissinger's book displays, it is with its substantive arguments that we are primarily concerned. And on those arguments, while there is still subtlety, there is not, in the end, either ambiguity or ambivalence. Kissinger has told us clearly what he thinks, and it is because he has done so that his book has received so controversial a reception.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger intended nothing less than a fundamental reconstruction of American attitudes toward foreign policy. From

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the beginning, they were united in their distrust, bordering on contempt, for a foreign policy establishment that in their view had lost its confidence and abdicated its responsibilities in the face of ideological challenges from an increasingly radicalized antiwar movement. The President was more open and blunt in his condemnations, but his Assistant for National Security Affairs shared his distaste for the self-doubt and even self-hatred they both saw at the root of a dangerously advanced loss of will in the national leadership community.

Kissinger, the Harvard academic, always hoped to win over by persuasion the foreign policy intellectuals whom Nixon assigned from the beginning to the ranks of the permanent opposition, but he had, in the end, little more patience or respect than did the President for the "inexhaustible masochism" of the demoralized liberals. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger doubted for a moment the fundamental purposes and values of American society, and that absence of doubt or questioning separated them fundamentally from their critics and allowed them to pursue without hesitation a set of policies anchored in a sure sense of the American national interest.

The two made, in some ways, an unlikely team. Prior to their initial meeting following Nixon's election in November 1968, Kissinger had shared the widespread disdain among intellectuals for Nixon, and, by his account, they were never personally intimate. He summarizes their relationship as "close on substance, aloof personally," and that description is reflected in his treatment of Nixon throughout the memoirs. The Nixon of *White House Years* is the personally graceless figure we are by now thoroughly familiar with from other sources: awkward (he conducted his first conversation with Kissinger so vaguely that Kissinger came away from it unaware that he had been offered the job as National Security Advisor), insecure, posturing, self-pitying, devious, impulsive, endlessly suspicious, instinctively combative.

Kissinger tells us that his personal dealings with Nixon were invariably courteous and generally amiable, but suggests that they each remained somewhat wary of the other. This may be, but it may be also that Kissinger is attempting in retrospect to establish the kind of gulf between himself and Nixon that, in the aftermath of Watergate, all the former President's advisors have attempted to construct. He does not tell us, for example, of the effusive personal note he wrote Nixon on the eve of the 1972 presidential election and which Nixon reproduces with evident pride in his memoirs. Nixon, a painfully shy man (an odd trait in a politician), found it difficult to establish close relations with anyone, but he appears to have felt toward Kissinger genuine affection as well as deep respect. Certainly his treatment of Kissinger in his memoirs is personally more generous than Kissinger's is of him in *White House Years*.

Whatever their personal relations may have been, their working relationship was close indeed. Nor is Kissinger's treatment of Nixon, taken

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whole, nearly as negative as some reviewers have indicated. The two men agreed on all the fundamentals and most of the specifics of American foreign policy, and they worked as a genuine team. But both remembered who was President. Much of the tactical maneuvering on issues Nixon left to Kissinger, but the broad strategic goals, though jointly conceived, remained the President's prerogative. They worked well together because, in the end, they thought so much alike. It is not surprising, then, that Kissinger pays high tribute to Nixon's intelligence and toughmindedness. But he also offers frequent and undoubtedly genuine testimonials to the President's courage and will. Passages like the following recur often in *White House Years*: "Nixon could be very decisive. Almost invariably during his Presidency his decisions were courageous and strong and often taken in loneliness against all expert advice." Nixon did his share of temporizing and agonizing, according to Kissinger, and he seldom could resist tasteless self-dramatization, but he was at his best when it mattered most. Kissinger's Nixon had no style at all, but he did have considerable substance.

The Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, highly complex in operation, was simple in design: "Our objective," Kissinger says, "was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality." (In Kissinger's diplomatic lexicon, there exists no higher term of praise than "unsentimental.") Sentimentality involved any and all forms of unreality, anything that might get in the way of seeing the world as it is and of most effectively advancing the American and ambiguous Kissinger displays a courtier's talent for hiding his deepest national interest in that world. For Kissinger, reality required a striving toward equilibrium both in international relations and, prerequisite to that, in American attitudes.

From the first time that he met Nixon, Kissinger emphasized that the goal of the new Administration's policy must be to moderate the nation's "violent historical fluctuations" between polar extremes — manic nationalism and peevish isolationism, euphoria and despair, global evangelism and global renunciation, expecting too much of national power and being ashamed to use it. This meant, above all, coming to terms with the realities of power — its uses, its necessities, its limits, its ambiguities.

Only a stable, mature America, Kissinger believed, could carry out its unavoidable leadership responsibilities with the kind of consistency and steadiness of purpose necessary to preserve a decent peace. To that end, it would have to disabuse itself of its illusions of a peculiar moral destiny. A moralistic America, bemused by notions of its own purity of motives, would in Kissinger's view inevitably fluctuate between feckless crusading and irresponsible abnegation, contributing in either case to dangerous international uncertainty and instability.

The balance of power he wanted America to pursue was neither an anachronism nor a moral insufficiency; it was nothing less than the guarantor of world peace. It was in this sense that Kissinger hoped to establish

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a new "geopolitical" tradition in American foreign policy. He never suggested that America should discard or ignore its moral values, though his critics, then and since, insisted that he was essentially amoral. But he was persuaded that "there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint." America, he warned, would have to learn to live in a world marked by imperfect choices, partial fulfillments, and the absence of final resolutions: "the management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end."

The insistence on realism, the ready acceptance of power politics, the unashamed advocacy of the national interest, the suspicion of moralism, the preoccupation with stability and order: all these qualities led Kissinger's critics to label him, quite correctly, as a conservative. Readers will find few references in *White House Years* to such liberal concerns as human rights or the question of Third World attitudes towards the United States. Kissinger likewise says little about social justice or the unequal distribution of wealth among nations.

Indeed, conservative assumptions and conclusions predominate in *White House Years*. Kissinger's open distaste for India, particularly for Indira Gandhi, is obviously related to his general impatience with moral preachments. He challenges the widespread liberal assumption that social reform and economic development will necessarily blunt radicalism or bring political stability. He finds no difficulty in justifying American support for authoritarian regimes where the national interest requires it. The arms race is to him a function, not an independent cause, of international conflict. He pays very little attention to the United Nations or to the vagaries of world opinion. His views on the origins of the Cold War and on Soviet-American relations in general fit comfortably into the cold warrior tradition. He is, in short, in no way a man of the Left.

Yet if the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy was conservative, it involved a conservatism with which many American right-wingers felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was, after all, the Nixon Administration that established diplomatic contact with China, signed a SALT agreement with the Soviet Union, and in general popularized the concept of détente. None of these things made conservatives happy (one of them complained typically that he didn't mind Nixon going to China, he only objected to his return), while many liberals had to maneuver awkwardly to avoid indicating approval of Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments. (Thus the resort to Kissinger-as-good-fairy noted at the outset.)

Kissinger's impatience with sentimentality extended to the sentimentality of the Right. He did not flinch from the use of power, but he understood, as so many American conservatives of the "Why Not Victory?" school apparently did not, that the realities of nuclear weapons and of increasing Soviet military strength made the game of power politics more dangerous and more complex than it had been earlier. For Kissinger, the balance of

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power meant just that – a balance – and it precluded dreams of final triumphs over Communism or of America being able everywhere to have its way. America had overextended itself, and the wise use of power in volved recognition of its limits as well as of its necessities. Kissinger did not intend that the United States should exchange liberal moral crusades for conservative ones, and where necessary his anti-Communism, however genuine and firm, deferred to his geopolitics. It caused him no ideological agonizing to strike deals, where possible and beneficial, with Marxist regimes.

Kissinger's most severe critics have portrayed him as essentially cynical in his approach to international relations, interested finally neither in ideology nor morality but simply in the exercise of power for its own sake. Ronald Steel has gone so far as to suggest that Kissinger's preoccupation "only with the mechanics of foreign policy, not its political content or moral weight" suggests that he could as easily serve the Soviet or any other government as the American. For Steel, Kissinger's counterrevolutionary tendencies derive simply from the accident of his representing a wealthy, status quo society. Given a different client, Steel argues, he could just as well function as spokesman for a revolutionary new international order.

It seems unduly harsh to ascribe to Kissinger, as Steel does, the view that "we live in a Hobbesian world where power is the only arbiter and the only morality" and that "the weak are meant to be victims and ... the strong can avoid that fate only by being merciless." No doubt Kissinger's view of reality has its Hobbesian-Darwinian elements (and he could, after all, summon a great deal of historical evidence in defense of such a view) but not everyone who sees the world as a difficult and unforgiving place arrives at amoral cynicism as the only means for dealing with it. In the present case, Steel's attack ignores Kissinger's recurring argument that the pursuit of the balance of power requires a "moral compass" to provide ultimate direction and purpose to a nation's policies. Kissinger is uncomfortable with much moral rhetoric because, he suggests, that rhetoric often ignores the complexities and ambiguities of moral behavior, particularly in the tangled world of international relations. Such a perspective can, of course, serve as an excuse for amorality, but it does not do so necessarily.

It is true that Kissinger does not provide an extended justification for his obvious assumption that pursuit of the American national interest is entirely consistent, at least in general terms, with efforts to create a just and decent international order. The failure to provide the justification for that assumption may be an important omission in the argument of the book (though how it could be accomplished except through rhetorical assertion is not clear), but that should not lead us to suppose that the assumption is either nonexistent or unimportant. Indeed, it is not too much to argue that the most significant contemporary division in American attitudes

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toward foreign policy lies between those who can easily make that assumption and those who cannot.

Kissinger perhaps has better reasons than most for making the assumption. He grew up in a German Jewish family in Bavaria, and was nine years old when Hitler came to power. Several years later, after suffering considerable persecution, the Kissingers escaped to America. Kissinger says simply, "I therefore have always had a special feeling for what America means, which native-born citizens perhaps take for granted." When he tells us briefly a few sentences later of his faith in America, "its greatness, its idealism, its humanity," we have no reason for scepticism. Kissinger is no moralist, but he is, beneath all his sophistication, an old-fashioned patriot and nationalist.

Kissinger in power was a counterrevolutionary (although he never says so) because of both his own instincts and his sense of the national interest. America's had been a middle-class and democratic revolution, while the revolutionary of the twentieth century typically appealed to one form or another of authoritarian Marxist socialism, which meant he understood, even if most American liberals did not, that the United States was not his natural ally. American liberals found it difficult to be unambiguously anti-Communist (non-Communist was their preferred label) because of their instinctive identification with "progressive" movements and their lingering assumption that Marxism, however corrupted in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, remained in essence such a movement. Kissinger never allowed his own anti-Communism so to dominate his thinking as to rigidify his strategic options, but his conduct of foreign affairs cannot be fully understood outside his perception of the essential ideological component of modern international conflict and his sense of the relationship of that ideological conflict to the American national interest.

The final test of a foreign policy rests, of course, not in the elegance of its outlines or the sophistication of its philosophy but in the effectiveness of its practice. Even there, however, judgments can seldom be unambiguous. Different observers will use different measures of effectiveness, and, in any case, politicians find themselves as much or more the captives of events as shapers of them. They typically spend more time reacting than initiating. As Kissinger suggests: "There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstances." Still, both Nixon and Kissinger had high intentions for their foreign policy; the standards they set for themselves were in many ways more ambitious than those set for them by others, though they and their critics often had different standards in mind.

As ever in the postwar world, American policy had above all to concern

itself with relations with the Soviet Union. There the perennial and contradictory imperatives remained: to persistently discourage Russian problems and adventurism without regularly subjecting the world to the threat of nuclear war. For Kissinger, this meant that the United States would have to search seriously for ways to achieve peaceful relations with Moscow without letting the search for peace turn into "a form of moral disarma-
ment." Again the key was equilibrium, the need for Americans to avoid excesses both of conciliation and of truculence. America had to maintain military deterrence, but it also needed to find diplomatic means to induce the USSR to keep cold war rivalries within manageable limits. Kissinger wanted both to persuade the Russians that the US would do whatever was necessary to protect its vital interests and to indicate to them that there existed possibilities for mutually respectful and beneficial coexistence.

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger harbored any illusions concerning Soviet attitudes or intentions. They both assumed that Russia's actions depended on her strategic opportunities and were therefore quite impervious to "gestures," "signals" or any other unilateral indications of "good will." Soviet-American relations should be conducted, Nixon and Kissinger insisted, on the basis of strict reciprocity. To act otherwise would be to trivialize the nature of great power conflict. Kissinger's reading of Russian history and Communist ideology persuaded him that the Soviets' attitudes toward the West were deeply rooted and would not be reversed, not the actions flowing from them stemmed, by ingenious tactical maneuverings. The Soviet Union, after all, had its own national interest, one, moreover, which a fundamentalist ideology tended to set in concrete.

At the same time, Kissinger and Nixon also assumed that the Russian leaders were sane men with a rational interest in avoiding nuclear confrontation. The Soviet belief in inevitable conflict with its capitalist enemies did not preclude a genuine desire to prevent World War Three. Moreover, there were things the Soviet Union wanted recognition of its interests in central and eastern Europe, nuclear parity, expanded economic relations with the West - that it was in the power of the United States to deny. These things Kissinger was ready to trade in exchange for assurances of Soviet political and military restraint and of a more stable pattern of coexistence. The Kissinger doctrine of "linkage" attempted to persuade Moscow that it could expect concessions only by seeing its relations with America in comprehensive terms, and not by pursuing piecemeal diplomacy that would attempt to extract Soviet benefits in specific areas of interest without reference to its behavior in other spheres. By this process, Kissinger, knowing that he could not transform Soviet ideology, nonetheless hoped to develop "habits of moderation" in Soviet conduct that might, over an extended period of time, cumulatively alter the nature of Russian policy. It was, in a sense, the application to international relations of the techniques of behavior modification.

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It was not a promising time to attempt to implement such a policy. The American disaster in Vietnam had, among other things, destroyed the national consensus behind containment of Communist expansion. The Kissinger-Nixon policy required broad support for a continuing commitment of military strength and political determination to challenge Soviet ambitions; the new relationship required that the US stand ready to impose penalties as well as offer incentives. To Kissinger, détente, if it was not simply to be a form of disguised surrender, had to follow from and not be a substitute for a true balance of power.

But Vietnam had sapped American will. The Administration found its military budget under constant attack – even though Nixon was already reducing the share of the national budget devoted to defense spending – and its diplomacy under persistent liberal suspicion that it was insufficiently responsive to presumed desires for improved relations on the part of the Soviet Union. Kissinger acerbically refers to the tendency of American intellectuals to accept "as an article of faith that every difficulty in US-Soviet relations had to be caused by American stupidity or intransigence." (It might be noted generally that Kissinger carries on in *White House Years* a running polemical battle with liberal intellectuals. He indicates in the foreword that his intention is "to réconcilé, not to score retrospective debating points," but he concedes a page later that "the impulse to explain merges with the impulse to defend." Defend Kissinger does, occasionally against the Right, but most often and with most feeling against the Left.)

More serious liberal criticism of the Kissinger Soviet policies (and later of *White House Years*) focused on his presumed tendency to perceive all other aspects of American foreign policy from within the framework of Soviet-American relations and Cold War assumptions. Critics have accused Kissinger of a kind of monomania, of seeing everything everywhere as fitting in somehow to the all-embracing East-West struggle. It is argued that Kissinger's habit of attributing all world tensions and conflicts to Soviet scheming led him to ignore other sources of upheaval – nationalism, poverty, anti-authoritarianism, indigenous radicalism – and to foster, in misguided appeals to strategic necessity and national security, the kind of indiscriminate American interventionism that had produced the catastrophe in Vietnam.

To Kissinger's supposed tunnel vision are ascribed such controverted American policies as uncritical support for the Shah of Iran, the "tilt" against India in the India-Pakistan war of 1971, and the efforts to prevent Salvador Allende's accession to the presidency of Chile in 1970. None of these actions can be discussed in detail here, but it may be noted that Kissinger makes a better case in defense of the first two policies than of the third. The case of the Shah is complex, but he had been a strong and strategically-located defender of American interests in the Middle East for

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a very long time, and, in any case, the alternatives to the Shah within Iran, as subsequent events have shown, were not attractive. In the conflict on the subcontinent, India clearly used the occasion of internal difficulties in Pakistan to settle old scores, and Kissinger and Nixon owed support for other reasons to the Pakistanis, who had given assistance to the US on a number of occasions, particularly in the delicate maneuvering leading to the opening to China.

Kissinger's defense of American policies in Chile is vigorous ("no responsible national leader could have done otherwise") but not, in the end, persuasive. The financial aid channelled to Allende's opponents during the presidential campaign was not unjustifiable, though it may have been unwise, but the attempt to prevent the Chilean Congress from choosing Allende as President, if necessary by military coup (Allende ran first, with thirty-six percent of the total, in the popular vote in September 1970, but since no candidate had a majority, the final decision under the Chilean constitution then rested with the Congress), made neither political nor moral sense. (It should be noted in passing, however, that Kissinger insists that the US played "no role whatever" in the coup that removed Allende from power in 1973. He promises details on these events in his second volume.) Not only did Kissinger and Nixon act foolishly and wrongly in Chile, but it does seem that their actions stemmed, as their critics have charged, from excessive preoccupation with fears of Soviet penetration in the western hemisphere.

Specific policies for the moment aside, judgments on the effects of Kissinger's overriding concern with relations between the superpowers are difficult to make. No doubt Kissinger's concept of linkage, with its emphasis on Russian behavior in every sphere of international activity, reinforced a natural American tendency to suspect Soviet influences at work whenever potential or actual challenges to American interests arose. We can assume that this had the effect of introducing certain distortions into American perceptions.

On the other hand, it was simple necessity that placed US-Soviet relations at the heart of American foreign policy. All the then-fashioned talk of the decline of the superpowers ignored the compelling reality that the immense military capabilities of the two nations, including the capacity to destroy the world, made their strategic relations the inescapable central element in international relations. It would, therefore, be impossible to imagine a sensible foreign policy for America that did not place relations with the Soviet Union above everything else, and which did not to a considerable extent interpret events elsewhere within that framework.

More particularly, Kissinger knew that the Soviets stood ready to exploit situations which they might not have created but which nonetheless worked objectively in their interests. Thus, for example, the Russians had not been the main force behind the Cuban revolution, but they had still benefited

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immensely from it (a precedent Kissinger had all too clearly in mind during his calculations concerning events in Chile, especially since there was evidence at just that time that the Russians were attempting to establish a nuclear submarine base in Cuba). To some extent, then, American "paranoia" concerning Soviet behavior was impossible to avoid, as was that of Moscow towards the us. Each nation, in prudential concern for its own essential interests, had to suspect the worst about the other's activities and intentions. (Which, among other reasons, is why it is absurd to assess Cold War blame simply on the basis of who first did what to whom. The essential issues have always concerned fundamental political values.)

There is also a question as to how much difference a lesser emphasis on Soviet-American relations would actually have made to American policy. Kissinger almost always had the Soviet factor in mind when he considered policy options around the world, but it was seldom the only factor he had in mind. So in the Middle East, Kissinger remained leery of too-active American involvement and counseled a strategy of delay, partly because he wanted to make the Arab nations see that they could attain their ends only through turning away from Moscow toward Washington, but also because he understood, as the State Department apparently did not, that the proclaimed American goal of a "comprehensive settlement" could not be attained, given Arab attitudes, without unacceptable American coercion against Israel, America's closest ally in the region. (It would seem that the State Department still has not learned that lesson.) Here as elsewhere, American policy operated within limits that attitudes toward the Soviet Union affected, but did not normally determine.

If the Left attacked Kissinger (especially after Nixon's first term) as an unregenerate and anachronistic cold warrior, critics on the Right accused him of sacrificing American interests, and eroding American political will, through pursuit of an illusionary détente whose major effect was to lull the United States into a false sense of security under cover of which the Soviet Union gradually managed to establish military superiority. Liberals might view the Moscow and Peking summits as long overdue and as signaling, as Kissinger sardonically puts it, that "it was left to diplomacy only to sweep up the cobwebs left over from an already transcended Cold War," but conservatives worried that a premature euphoria over peaceful co-existence had, without changing strategic and political realities, eroded the vigilant anti-Communist consensus necessary to preserve Kissinger's ostensible goal of a balance of power.

It is significant that Kissinger does not dismiss these criticisms out of hand, as he often does with those of the Left. He in fact shared conservative suspicions concerning Soviet motives, saw that détente could undermine support for maintaining necessary American military strength, and worried whether American opinion could over time maintain the subtle combina-

tion of fundamental will and flexible tactics necessary to make his policy work. He was not certain, in his own words, "whether America could sustain both the willingness to confront and the readiness to cooperate at the same time." Certainly the American record since the Nixon-Kissinger years has not been reassuring on that score, tending not so much subtly to combine cooperation and conflict as to alternate erratically between them.

Still, Kissinger felt the efforts toward détente had to be made. Part of the reason involved tactical necessity. As already noted, the misadventure in Vietnam created just the kind of "moral disarmament" Kissinger had feared; the pressures on the Administration toward conciliation and against any sort of hard line seemed irresistible. Kissinger favored the SALT agreement of 1972 on its own merits, but he also believed that, in a political atmosphere notably unsympathetic to military spending, it was as advantageous an arrangement on strategic weapons as America could obtain. In his more gloomy moments (Kissinger displayed an occasional weakness for cosmic pessimism) he entertained doubts whether the democratic West retained the confidence and will to withstand the relentless pressures, political and military, mounted by its enemies.

The yearnings and pressures for accommodation between the super-powers, which were in practice directed disproportionately towards the us, came from America's allies and from neutrals as well as from within, and the us could not afford to appear indifferent to the longing for peace. Kissinger understood and sympathized with conservative hesitations, but he could not, he finally concluded, accept a "counsel of despair" which assumed "that the American people could maintain their vigilance only by a strident militance that conceded to our adversaries a monopoly on the global yearning for peace, and that would gradually maneuver the United States government into isolation." And in the end, of course, Kissinger, as with any responsible modern statesman, felt he had to explore any possibility for limiting nuclear competition.

Most of what Kissinger says is plausible, and much of it is persuasive, but it does not tell the whole story. After all the defenses are offered, there remains an element of truth in the charge from the Left that Kissinger occasionally displayed excessive preoccupation with us Soviet relations; and it also must be said that détente was, in the popular phrase, "oversold." Kissinger attempts to deflect to Nixon's 1972 campaign oratory any blame for extravagant claims that the Moscow and Peking summits had guaranteed "a generation of peace," but he himself expresses his doubts and qualifications more emphatically in retrospect than he did at the time. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Kissinger, like Nixon, felt more had been accomplished with respect to establishing a new relationship with the Soviet Union than was in fact the case.

The summits had been successes, and the praise for them was deep and

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widespread, so it was natural enough that Nixon and Kissinger should, in
pride at their handiwork, minimize marginal reservations. Even so, Kiss-
singer should have foreseen that the American people, watching their
leaders exchange enthusiastic toasts and expressions of appreciation with
the rulers of China and the Soviet Union, would reach the natural con-
clusion that the Cold War was indeed at an end. Surely he ought not to
have been surprised that in the aftermath of the summits renewed efforts
at containment of Communism would evoke quizzical and hesitant
responses.

Kissinger rightly attributes a good deal of the loss of American firmness
to the collapse of faith in the executive branch of government following
Watergate. There can be no doubt that the erosion of Nixon's domestic
support made conduct of a determined, or even coherent, foreign policy
virtually impossible, and the Russians naturally took advantage of the
opportunities that events within America handed them. None of that was
Kissinger's fault, but he did hold some responsibility for a confused set of
foreign policy attitudes that détente, however justified, had helped foster
and which contributed to the extreme difficulty of maintaining the balance
of power.

All other aspects of American foreign policy in the Nixon-Kissinger years fell under the shadow of Vietnam. Without success there, there could be no larger success for the Administration's foreign relations. By 1969, the us was thoroughly frustrated and disillusioned by the war and desperately wanted a way out, but most Americans still insisted that the way out not become a humiliation. The war had to be ended, but it had to be ended honorably; trying to accomplish both these things at once tested the Administration beyond any other issue, and it came close to tearing America apart. Kissinger's account of these events is the fullest we have to date. In putting it together he has created a fascinating and compelling defense of the government's policies. On no issue did the Nixon Administra-tion receive greater opposition from the foreign policy establishment; on no issue, it now seems clear, did it deserve greater support.

It had been the Administration of Lyndon Johnson that had enlarged
the war, found it unwinnable and unsettleable, and then passed it on to
Nixon and Kissinger. Yet soon after leaving office, major policy-makers in
that Administration such as Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman and Cyrus
Vance turned into born-again doves strongly critical of those who found
the mess they had left behind difficult to clean up. Increasingly, moreover,
that criticism was expressed in terms of moral outrage, even though, as
Kissinger notes concerning the emotional indulgence of antiwar critics in
general, "emotion was not a policy" and "no one had a monopoly on
anguish." Like so many other liberals, these men knew only that they
wanted America out of Vietnam, and in what Kissinger describes as "a

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headlong flight from responsibility," the greater part of the liberal com-
munity refused to see that until late 1972, when North Vietnam finally
reversed its previous position, the only way out was abject capitulation.

Only a relative handful of radicals wanted an American defeat, but a
very great many liberals refused to concede that the only "terms" the North
Vietnamese were interested in were unconditional American withdrawal
plus the American overthrow of the government in the South of Nguyen
Van Thieu. To antiwar critics, Nixon's policy of Vietnamization -- gradu-
ally withdrawing American troops while helping the South Vietnamese
to build their own defense capabilities -- merely provided a cover for a
perverse Administration insistence on a "military solution"; those same
critics had no difficulty believing in a genuine desire for a reasonable
settlement by North Vietnam. It annoyed Kissinger, during the secret peace
negotiations with the North, to be lectured endlessly on the futility of the
war and the duplicity of American diplomacy; it drove him to distraction
that Hanoi's favorite texts for those lectures were provided by prominent
American critics of the war.

Nixon and Kissinger offered ever greater concessions to the enemy, but
those concessions satisfied neither Hanoi nor the domestic opposition.
Encouraged by internal American divisions, the North remained obdurate,
while antiwar critics, forced at given points to recognize that concessions
which they had urged and had assumed would end the war did no such
thing, simply retreated, again and again, to some new set of proposals that
would - surely this time - bring an end to the fighting. (Kissinger's evidence
on this point is extensive and devastating.)

Kissinger found the tone of the debate even more disturbing than the
substance: the antiwar movement became ever more shrill and strident in
its attacks on American policy and on what it saw as American escalation
of the conflict. The incursion into Cambodia,¹ the renewed bombing and
the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, the n-52 "Christmas bombing"
that preceded the final settlement in January 1973: each of these actions
produced, in Kissinger's terms, an "emotional orgy" of condemnation and
moral outrage. He understood the passion and frustration of the critics, but
he resented their moral simplicities and their failure to concede the good
faith and moral decency of those who disagreed with them.

The irony was that both China and the Soviet Union indicated that they
understood what antiwar critics found so hard to believe: that the Nixon
Administration was indeed committed to withdrawal from Indochina.
Their willingness to conduct friendly negotiations with America while the
war wound down made sense on no other basis. (Even then, the negotia-
tions had the effect of leaving Hanoi increasingly isolated.) Peking and
Moscow displayed more realism about the course of the war and the
direction of American policy than did the indignant protesters inside the
United States.

HENRY KISSINGER

307

The opening to China, climaxed by Nixon's trip to Peking in February 1972, represented a particular triumph for Nixon and Kissinger. (Kissinger had handled the preliminary negotiations - and had preceded Nixon to Peking entirely in secret. Most of the Administration's major diplomacy went through Kissinger's office rather than through the Secretary of State; Nixon's first term constituted, in many ways, a continuing humiliation of William Rogers and the State Department.) The new relationship with Peking put pressure on Hanoi, made Moscow nervous (and therefore more eager to make its own deals with Washington), and showed the Administration's critics that Nixon and Kissinger were not so bogged down in Vietnam as to be unable to initiate important new diplomatic ventures. Kissinger remained certain that the United States would be respected and taken seriously only so long as it refused to be humiliated or to abandon its commitments in Vietnam. Critics choked on the words, but to Nixon and Kissinger America's "honor" and "credibility" were indeed at stake in the manner in which the nation managed its withdrawal from the war.

It is for this reason that the Administration was determined to act so firmly in response to North Vietnam's massive spring offensive at the end of March 1972. Kissinger and Nixon alike saw this as Hanoi's last great effort to win the war in the field; they were convinced that failure of the offensive would force Hanoi to begin genuine negotiations. Conversely, they were also agreed that a victory for the North would require cancellation of the Moscow summit already scheduled for May; Nixon would not go to Russia having just suffered a humiliation accomplished by Soviet arms.

The stakes, then, were enormous, and so were the risks. Nixon and Kissinger felt that they had to take decisive action in order to display to North Vietnam their absolute determination not to be defeated. But the action they decided on, the mining of North Vietnamese ports, meant the possibility - even, they thought, the likelihood - that the Soviets would feel themselves forced to cancel the summit, which of course would generate a firestorm of domestic protest. The decision was made no easier in light of the opposition, because of the risks involved, of Secretary of Defense Laird and CIA Director Richard Helms. (Rogers, in Kissinger's acid formulation, "was for the operation if it succeeded and against it if it failed.") One can appreciate Kissinger's pride in describing the decision to go ahead with the mining as "one of the finest hours of Nixon's Presidency."

For the decision worked, better, almost, than could have been hoped. The Soviet Union did not cancel the summit (Moscow and Peking as usual did not match the moral outrage of American protestors), the SALT treaty was signed, and after the North Vietnamese offensive petered out, meaningful negotiations to end the war finally began. Hanoi no longer insisted on the overthrow of Thieu and on being granted, through negotiation, a share of the power in Saigon it had not been able to win through force. There were still hard times ahead, however. As Hanoi softened, Saigon

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hardened: Thieu objected to a peace settlement that left large numbers of North Vietnamese troops stationed on his territory; he now held out for a clear military victory, but Kissinger and Nixon knew that with a compromise settlement obtainable, the limits of American support for South Vietnam had been reached. Thieu's stubbornness produced renewed obstinacy from the North; in the end it took the Christmas bombing (and another outburst of moral revulsion) to break the deadlock and secure the settlement.

The settlement did not hold up, of course, but Kissinger insists that except for the collapse of executive authority because of Watergate, it could have. We will never know. In any case, the American share of the most disastrous war in its history was at an end. Whether or not it had ended in "peace with honor," it had at least not ended in the national humiliation Kissinger and Nixon had feared.

At the very end of White House Years, Kissinger describes himself, having just initialed the Paris agreement ending the war a few days after Nixon's second inaugural, in a mood of serenity: "I was at peace with myself, neither elated nor sad." One senses that he means to suggest, in his own mood, a metaphor for the kind of balance (neither euphoria nor despair) he had hoped to bring to American foreign policy.

In the short run, clearly, he had not succeeded. His dreams of a new geopolitical perspective in American thinking, of conscious focus on establishing and maintaining a balance of power linked to the national interest, had not survived his term in office. The Administration of Jimmy Carter explicitly rejected Kisinger's balance of power perspectives, and sketched ambitious new goals for American policy: greater concern for human rights, lesser preoccupation with Soviet-American conflicts, revival of American idealism and moral leadership. Kissinger's new sobriety had, apparently, been superseded.

By mid-1980, however, the Carter Administration found itself in a new mood. The euphoria of its earlier days had been replaced, if not by despair, at least by grim determination. Kissinger had not necessarily been vindicated, but a great many people were willing to listen again to his arguments. And it remained entirely possible, given certain circumstances, that Kissinger, not yet given over to the judgments of history, might find the opportunity to write not just one but several additional volumes in defense of those arguments. If so, the world of American political letters would be the better for it. So also, in my view, would be the conduct of American foreign policy.

NOTE

1. Kissinger attacks in detail and with some vehemence the criticisms of the Administration's Cambodian policy by the British journalist William Shawcross.

HENRY KISSINGER

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