# 'White House Years' Both Puzzling And Pleasing

"WHITE HOUSE YEARS." By Henry Kissinger, Boston: Little, Brown, $22.50.

By EDWARD ZIEGNER

When Henry Kissinger, who comes to Indianapolis Tuesday for a Republican fund-raising dinner, sat down to write the first volume of his memoirs, he did not bother with being concise or succinct.

Perhaps this is impossible, when you have seen and done as much as Kissinger and have as much to say as he does. But the book is 1,476 pages of text, aside from the index, chapter notes, etc., and that is a lot of current history, even when you are writing with an ego the size of Henry Kissinger's, which is enormous in breadth, girth, height — any way you wish to measure it.

Brief example: Returning to the United States in 1973, after all preliminary negotiations for peace in Vietnam were agreed upon, Kissinger writes:

"I returned to the United States on January 13, stopping in Washington only to pick up Haig (Gen. Alexander) for the trip to Key Biscayne. The White House public relations exercise to cut me down to size was still perceptible. A large press contingent was waiting, but my plane was ordered by the control tower to a distant corner of Homestead Air Base, out of the range of even telescopic lenses."

## Superior Position

But it is somewhat unfair to carp or hammer at the eminent Henry K.

He is an unusual man in an unusual time. His "White House Years," if long

and in places extremely heavy going, at least has the virtue of being rather well written, and while the author has the diplomat's predilection of using a process of extensive description and excessive refinement of even the smallest detail, no man in our time has been in a better position longer to know the precise way in which history was made.

Kissinger, as Richard Nixon's assistant for national security affairs and later secretary of State, came out of a background so seemingly repugnant to Nixon it is a cause for amazement that the new president picked him. A Harvard professor and a close friend and adviser of Nelson Rockefeller, working for Richard Nixon?

Zounds! What next?

But for all that, there was a certain chemistry between them (at least for part of the time.) Kissinger doesn't get to Watergate in this volume; that comes in Vol. II.

Kissinger plunges through the years January 1969-January 1973 with the finesse of the diplomat, the eye of the historian, and a sense of time and place accentuated by his departure from Germany, one of the persecuted Jews, to find a home and a first rate education and honors and a place on the faculty of a great American university, Harvard.

## Few Heroes

Kissinger does not have many heroes; Charles de Gaulle is one, although when Kissinger and the le grande Charles first met, Kissinger proceeded to lecture the greatest French hero since Napoleon on the history of Europe, past, present and future.

Kissinger writes:

"De Gaulle, seized by profound melancholy at so much obtuseness, seemed to grow another inch as he contemplated me with the natural haughtiness of a snow-capped Alpine

## Best Sellers
In City,
Nation

From Indianapolis
Bookstores

### Fiction

1. "The Last Enchantment," by Mary Stewart.

2. "Paved with Gold," by Georgia Buchanan.

3. "Sophie's Choice," by William Styron.

4. "The Establishment," by Howard Fast.

5. "The Green Ripper," by John D. MacDonald.

### Nonfiction

1. "Marvella," by Marvella Bayh, with Mary Lynn Kotz.

2. "Aunt Erma's Cope Book," by Erma Bombeck.

3. "Restoring the American Dream," by Robert Ringer.

4. "The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet," by Herman Tarnower and Samm Sinclair Baker.

5. "Quest for the Best," by Stanley Marcus.

## Associated Press
Fiction

1. "The Establishment," by Howard Fast.

2. "Jailbird," by Kurt Vonnegut.

3. "Triple," by Ken Follett.

4. "The Dead Zone," by Stephen King.

5. "The Last Enchantment," by Mary Stewart.

LACKINGHAM, N. J.
THE RECORD
U. 152,235 SUN, 198,601

OCT 23 1979

# Kissinger memoirs
are going on sale

Washington Post News Service

NEW YORK — Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's memoirs, probably the most sought-after manuscript of the decade, will bring the former Nixon administration official as much as $5 million.

The memoirs, were to go on sale in book stores today, represent one of the most lucrative properties in publishing history.

To the giant media conglomerate Time Inc., however, the venture represents one of the largest amounts risked by an American publisher. Three Time subsidiaries — Time magazine, publisher Little, Brown and Co. and Book of the Month Club — bought up all important North American rights. All told, sources estimate, the three Time subsidiaries spent close to $3 million.

To recoup their investments, both Book of the Month Club and Little, Brown are putting high price tags

on the 1,521-page volume, which must become a huge best seller to make money. Publishing sources said that, at the least, all of the books now in print will have to be sold before the Time subsidiaries make a profit.

Kissinger owns the worldwide book and serialization rights — the memoirs will appear in 17 languages. Foreign publication will bring him another $2 million or more, it is estimated.

All contracts in the United States were signed before Kissinger had put so much as a word on paper, his agent, Marvin Josephson, said. Neither Josephson nor any other principals will confirm exactly the amounts Kissinger is getting.

Little, Brown has priced the volume at $22.50.

Book of the Month Club, which acquired rights to the book before the club was bought by Time in late

1977, will charge its 1.75 million members $17.95 for the book, the highest price it ever has set for a single-volume main selection.

The club far exceeded the $85,000 it usually guarantees an author and publisher for a main selection, but it is not known by how much.

More than a dozen publishers wanted the Kissinger book. Newsweek sought serialization rights and Literary Guild wanted the volume.

"Let's face it," said one publishing source, "Kissinger is charming, controversial and brilliant and was at the center of one of the most controversial administrations in American history. It was a seller's market from the start."

Kissinger caused a stir late last year when he decided he could not contain his memoirs in one volume and decided to write two books,

# Henry's White House his-story

11/13/79 [LC]

Quincy
Radatz

## Books/Lydia Long

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

White House Years" isn't a shortcut to the bottom line on our foreign policy between 1969 and 1973 — or to the souls of the men who put that policy together.

Not because it runs to 1,500 pages, but because, for the wealth of information, exhausting detail and breadth of scope, it won't still the controversy over decisions Mr. Kissinger made as President Nixon's national security adviser — if for no other reason than that those decisions are barely 10 years old and their soundness as yet unproved.

In a recent interview with David Frost, Mr. Kissinger said he tried to write a book which would bear the scrutiny of time — and on its first page calls "White House Years" "history" as if it already has. But the jury is still out on Chile, Cambodia and the Christmas bombings, and debate on "detente," strategic doctrine and our responsibility to old allies is the common fare of our evening paper.

As for gossip and confessions, Mr. Kissinger is as frustrated by the sluggishness of bureacracy as by the alacrity of critics, and he is generous with blame, but he is not always candid.

Mr. Kissinger is opinionated, incisive, and commands a power of analysis as well as expression, but he is also not through with his career (his retirement could end as early as 1980 were the winds of political fortune to blow the right way). Defensive-ness and reserve, echoes of the Harvard professor ("liberal doctrines of reformist intervention and academic theories of graduated escalation") and inaugural-speech expansiveness ("a leader owes it to his people to strive, to create and to resist the decay that besets all human institutions") remind us that its a little early to expect Henry Kissinger to let his hair down.

And it is also, after all, very long. We appreciate that Mr. Kissinger's career was extremely complex, and we admire the energy of a book this size. However, the comedown of the

American-Japanese alliance in the wake of "The Agony of Vietnam" raises the question of whether the author was selective enough in compiling its parts.

But if the chapters are not equally interesting, their subject matter is, in almost every case, central to an understanding of our role in global affairs.

While we may have to withhold judgments on Mr. Kissinger's particular interpretations of recent history, we can't ignore the unique contribution "White House Years" makes to the debates on current American foreign policy.

Mr. Kissinger's portrayal of the delicate and exasperating process of arms negotiations with the Soviets, and warnings of the "ruthless opportunism" of their global strategy come on the eve of the SALT II battle in the Senate.

His re-examination of the roots of the Middle East conflict, Israeli "intractibility" and a very complicated siege mentality comes at a time when we seem to be reassessing our own relationship with Israel.

Mr. Kissinger is well-known as the "Lone Ranger" who'd have us believe he ran American foreign policy in spite of the incompetence of the State Department, and his chief. His arrogance and ego are as well documented as his cool and brilliance as a strategist and tactician. And, however self-serving, "White House Years" tends to confirm his reputation.

But it reveals as well a less well-known side of Mr. Kissinger — a certain compassion and human understanding. And perhaps the greatest value of his book lies in the window it opens on the intricacies of a national character and the qualities of foreign leaders Mr. Kissinger came to know in the course of his travels as a negotiator.

On the Italians, who because they are so "civilized" and "imbed with the worth of the individual" stand apart from their fellow Europeans. On the Indians, whose resiliency and solace come from "hearing witness to the fragility of human existence." And on the North Vietnamese, through a portrait of politburo member Le Duc Tho. Mr. Kissinger writes, "His profession was revolution, his vocation guerrilla warfare. He could speak eloquently of peace, but it was an abstraction alien to any personal experience. . . He was the stuff of which heroes are made."

little to the understanding of the public personages and news events involved and makes a mockery of the media's constant prattling about their sacred First Amendment rights.

Except when there is a blowup like the Kissinger-Frost argument, viewers are seldom aware that a public figure hired by a network is in its employ.

There is no notice flashed on the screen warning the viewer that the person being interviewed is employed by the same network as the interviewer and that in such situations interviews are almost always guaranteed by their very nature to be soft and self-serving.

The only other exception to this rule in addition to the Kissinger interview has been Frost's interviews in 1977 with former President Richard M. Nixon, who consented to the interviews only after Frost agreed to pay him several hundred thousand dollars for them.

Even the venerable and seemingly incorruptible Walter Cronkite gently interviewed Lyndon B. Johnson as part of a package deal worked out by a CBS subsidiary, Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Networks usually get into these deplorable arrangements with public figures not at the suggestion of their news departments, which fully understand the compromising situations created by such contracts, but rather because of the misguided views of network presidents that such deals focus public attention on the networks and enlarge their audiences.

whether they be Lyndon Johnson's or Winston Churchill's. In the case of memoirs, however, the reader does know that these are indeed the unexpurgated words of the great man. An interview masquerading as hard news is quite different.

Networks throw millions of dollars around as if they were Susan B. Anthony coins, and I can't help but think how much good that $1 million in NBC money going to Kissinger could do, say, if NBC used it in pursuing the true story of the Nixon administration's role in Cambodia or in exposing some other situation crying out for investigation.

THE BLADE

TOLEDO, OHIO
810-260-5111 210-607

OCT 28 1979

## Books in Review

### A Pithy Chronicle

### Kissinger's Memoirs

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

By JOHN LEONARD

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

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

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

risky to approach Haldeman, since he was likely to interpret any substantive concern as a sign of emotional instability."

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

To be sure, buzz words abound. They include "linkage," "equilibrium," "ambiguity," "fashionable," "whipsaw," "rout," "honor," and "impotence." And there are occasional lapses into the sermonette, on such subjects as the history of Russia, India, and Pakistan, and the motivation of the younger generation that opposed our "historical misadventure" in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the Dean Acheson who wrote "Present at the Creation" — and whom Kissinger admires almost as much as he does Chou En-lai and somewhat more than he admires the shah of Iran — would not have sniffed at the style of "White House Years" and would probably have agreed with its geopolitics.

HENRY KISSINGER
He can write, too

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

And he loved it — the helicopters and the motorcycle escorts, the sunglasses and the fake stomach aches, the handwritten messages carried by personal pouch from China through Pakistan to Washington, the conversations with An-

As for substance, now can we fail to
be interested in the summit meetings
with Mao Tse-tung and Leonid I
Brezhnev and Golda Meir and Eisaku
Sato, the SALT talks and the secret ne-
gotiations with the Russians, the Chi-
nese, the Germans, and Le Duc (Ducky)
Tho? Richard M. Nixon's initiative, so
ably abetted by Kissinger, to open our
relations with China was a stunning suc-
cess. Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy,"
for a while anyway, kept the lid on in
the Middle East. The only boring pages
in "White House Years" are those de-
voted to the North Atlantic Treaty Or-
ganization, and even Marcel Proust
could not have made NATO interesting.

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

On the vagaries of Nixon —
courageous, Kissinger tells us, "secret-
ive and devious," lacking "in self-con-
fidence or largeness of spirit," and

Washington, he was Nixon's own
Harvard professor, snatched away from
Nelson A. Rockefeller. He tells us that
the only time while he was in office that
he couldn't sleep was on the eve of his
flight to China.

Mr. Leonard writes for the New York
Times.

Management With a Pithy Wit

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

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

And he loved it — the helicopters and the motorcycle escorts, the sunglasses and the fake stomach aches, the hand-written messages carried by personal pouch from China through Pakistan to Washington, the conversations with Andre Malraux, if not with Oriana Fallaci.

As a kind of Julien Sorel who went to Washington, he was Nixon's own Harvard professor, snatched away from Nelson A. Rockefeller. He tells us that the only time while he was in office that he couldn't sleep was on the eve of his flight to China.

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

ON THE SECRET bombing and subsequent "incursion" of Cambodia, he disagrees with his formidable critic, William Shawcross,

ROME, N.Y.
SENTINEL
IL 19,613

NOV 1 1979

Ella

# Kissinger's strange record on SALT

He recognizes that nuclear talks should not take place in a vacuum, but he was the architect of SALT I, which started all the trouble.

By JOHN P. ROCHE

25

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

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

In objective terms this was ingenuous:

Brezhnev and Kosygin, who then seemed equal in stature, were not about to do serious business with a lame-duck president. If anything, they would use talks with LBJ to pressure his Republican successor. However, on this topic Johnson was quite irrational. In 1970, taking about the accomplishments of his administration, he said, "Johnny, above all we kept the lion in the cage."

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

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

As I read Kissinger on this subject, I found myself nodding agreement. Indeed, he puts the case for cold-eyed realistic negotiations with the Soviets far more eloquently than I, and shares, in kindly fashion, my skep

ticism of LBJ's evangelical initiatives. In view of the recent hassle between the White House and the State Department over who said what to whom about Brezhnev's attitude on modernization of NATO's nuclear forces, his description of State's effort to force Nixon into SALT negotiations is morbidly hilarious.

Moreover, Kissinger's argument for linkage is compelling. Indeed, just as I was about to leap from my chair and shout "Good Old Henry!" I suddenly realized the author was the architect of SALT I, the dreadful agreement that got us into the present mess, that led us quietly to nap while the Soviets emplaced those 308 monster SS-18s, modernized five more systems, and deployed the mobile national SS-20 which, with a third stage, three wrenches and a screwdriver can in half an hour be converted to an intercontinental SS-16.

Sen. Sam Nunn recently described our SALT negotiating posture by reference to a Marx Brothers movie in which Chico, threatened, puts a pistol to his head and says, "One more step and I'll shoot." What Kissinger had lovingly described is the careful, handsome design of this pistol. By the time he finishes burnishing the stock and polishing the metal, you are likely to forget who is the target. This pride of craftsmanship in a suicide weapon is positively unnerving.

It also, of course, explains Kissinger's amazing double-talk in his testimony on SALT II. A leading candidate for Secretary of State can hardly observe "the SALT process is lunacy, and you can count on me to straighten it out" when in fact he set the lunatic scenario in motion.

Now, because SALT II is on the merits essentially indefensible, we are told the treaty is not really all that important: what counts is the SALT Process — movement to SALT III. If one had to anticipate, SALT III would involve the United States firing the Kissinger .357 squarely in its temple. Chico Marx was a better prophet than Karl.

Pakistanis provided
for secret 1971 trip to

*For three decades, the United States refused to recognize the People's Republic of (Communist) China. The U.S. even managed to keep the Peking regime out of China's United Nations seat for many years.

But in 1971, Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, on a secret mission to China that led to Nixon's precedent-making visit to Mao Tse-tung in 1972. Kissinger tells about it in this third of five excerpts from his forthcoming book White House Years.

By HENRY KISSINGER

I had one of the more painful meetings of my career on July 1, 1971. The ambassador of the Republic of China (Taiwan) James Shen, came to see me about preserving Taiwan's seat at the next United Nations General Assembly vote on Chinese representation.

I found it difficult to concentrate on the details, for that July 1 was the very day I was due to leave on my trip to Asia for a secret rendezvous in Peking to arrange for President Richard Nixon's visit.

No government less desired what was about to happen to it than that of Taiwan. It had been a loyal ally; its conduct toward us had been exemplary.

I was to visit Saigon, Bangkok, and New Delhi before landing in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan and springboard to my real destination.

I had suggested that we publish a schedule that would have me in Pakistan only 48 hours, from July 8 to 10, roughly equal to my earlier stay in India. Upon arrival I would plead a stomach-ache.

My discomfort would get progressively worse until President Yahya Khan would invite me over dinner to use the presidential rest house in Nathiagali in the mountains to recover. Under this pretext I could add an extra day to my Pakistan stay and disappear for two days to Peking.

(The gods decided to punish me for human presumption; in New Delhi I developed a genuine stomach-ache through which I had to suffer in secret, lest I ruin my credibility when we reached Pakistan.)

My visit to Islamabad followed the script to the letter.

During the course of his dinner in my honor Yahya began implementing our plan. My stomach-ache became a topic

of general conversation.

He urged loudly that I retire to Nathiagali. He was so convincing that one of my Secret Service agents who overheard the conversation immediately arranged for a colleague to make an "ad-vance" visit to the place.

Around midnight the agent called in great distress; he had looked over the guest house and found it unsuitable. There was nothing left to do other than to ask the Pakistanis to detain the hap-less agent in Nathiagali until my return from Peking.

At 3:30 on the morning of July 9 I arose in the state guest house in Islamabad and had an early breakfast. At 4 a.m. I and my party were driven in Pakistani military vehicles to Chaklala Airport. A Boeing 707 of Pakistani International Airlines was waiting at the military side of the airport, piloted by Yahya's personal pilot.

## Dummy motorcade

At 8 a.m. on July 9, while I was already approaching Peking, a dummy motorcade proceeded without me on the 3-hour, 50-mile journey to Nathiagali.

At 9 a.m. the next day (when I had already been in Peking nearly 24 hours), my aide David Halperin, from Nathiagali, phoned Islamabad to say that I needed an extra day's rest, and to cancel my appointments.

We landed at a military airport at the outskirts of Peking at 15 minutes after noon. Peking time, Friday, July 9. We were greeted by Marshal Yeh Chien-Ying, one of the most senior members of the Chinese Politburo and vice chairman of the military affairs committee; Huang Hua, recently appointed ambassador to Canada (later China's first UN ambassador and later still foreign minister); Han Hsu, acting chief of protocol (later deputy chief of the Chinese liaison office in Washington); and another interpreter, Chi Ch'ao-chu, who had studied chemistry at Harvard and since gone on to better things.

Chou En-Lai arrived. I greeted him at the door of the guest house and ostentatiously stuck out my hand. Chou gave me a quick smile and took it. It was the first step in putting the legacy of the past behind us. (The slight of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's refusal to shake Chou En-Lai's hand at the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indonesia had not been forgotten.)

Chou En-Lai was one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever

Kissinger, cei

met. Urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinarily intelligent, subtle, he moved through our discussion with an easy grace.

The talks between Chou and me were longer and deeper than with any other leader I met during my public service, except possibly Egypt's Anwar Sadat. Two ideological enemies presented their respective views of the world with a frankness rarely achieved among allies and with a depth that one experiences only in the presence of a great man.

On one occasion when negotiating the Shanghai Communique (that followed Nixon's subsequent visit), I objected to two sentences.

"You do not have to trade," said Chou impatiently, "all you have to do is to convince me why our language is embarrassing."

He was as good as his word; the most egregious passages disappeared from the Chinese text.

(Nothing ever being wasted in China, two months later they showed up again in a Chinese UN speech.)

Chou and I had reached the conclusion that the most important result of this first encounter would be comprehension by each side of the fundamental purposes of the other.

MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CAN.
GAZETTE
C. 112,143

OCT 11 1979

cover'
China

toure, tours the Great Wall on his second voyage to China, October, 1971

A presidential visit to China was re-
ferred to briefly by us both at the be-
ginning and then we did not return to it
until the end of the second day, about
18 hours before my departure. Instead,
Chou spent some time in our first
meeting, which lasted nearly seven
hours (including dinner), expressing his
general agreement with the concepts
outlined by Nixon in a speech in Kansas
City on July 6.

This put me at some disadvantage
since I was unaware of either the fact
or the content of the speech, proving
that even the most meticulous prepara-
tion is prey to the accidental.

Marked-up copy

The next morning Chou characteristi-
cally had his own marked-up copy of
the English text delivered with my
breakfast, with a request to return it
since it was his only copy. It turned out
to be extemporaneous remarks made
by the president to a meeting of Mid-
western news media executives.

Huang Hua had a draft communique.
In best "Middle Kingdom" Chinese tra-
dition it suggested that Nixon had soli-
cited the invitation. The purpose was
stated to be a discussion of Taiwan as a
prelude to the normalization of rela-
tions. I rejected both propositions.

Huang Hua, in a gesture wise, practi-
cal, and characteristic, suggested that
we put aside the drafting and each tell
the other frankly what his needs
were.

We reconvened on July 11. for 3½
hours before the unbreakable depart-
ture deadline. Huang Hua presented a
draft so close to our needs that we
could accept it with a change of only
one word.

Indeed, it was fortunate that I sug-
gested the Chinese submit their version
first; it was better for us than our own.
(Each side had leaned over backward
to consider the point of view of the
other.)

Return flight

The return flight to Pakistan seemed
much shorter than the journey to Pek-
ing. We arrived in Islamabad at the mil-
itary side of Chaklala airport about 3:00
in the afternoon of July 11. By 6 p.m.,
we were back in our own plane, head-
ing west to Paris via Tehran.

All attention in Paris focused on
the North Vietnamese which lasted
three hours; it turned out to be the
most hopeful I had had. For some in-
toxicating weeks we thought that we
might actually have simultaneous

breakthroughs toward peace in Viet-
nam and toward China.

That evening I dined in a restaurant.
A vacationing U.S. woman caught up in
the spirit of the time came up and chid-
ed me in a loud voice: It was a disgrace
for me to be in a restaurant with a
young lady when I should be working
for peace.

On the third anniversary of Richard
Nixon's inauguration day we were in
the thick of planning an event nobody
imagined possible in 1969: The visit of
a United States president to Peking.

I know of no presidential trip that
was as carefully planned nor of any
president who ever prepared himself so
conscientiously.

We arrived in Peking Monday, Feb.
21, at 11:30 a.m., which conveniently
was 10:30 p.m. Sunday night Eastern
Standard Time — a prime television
period.

The ever-present Chinese crowds
were held back in the side streets as
our motorcade swept through the
square, vast in its emptiness; past the
red walls of the Forbidden City on one
side, the massive, squat Great Hall of
the People on the other; by huge por-

(See NIXON, Page 69)

MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CAN.
GAZETTE
BORDOIS

OCT 10 1979

Bordôs

Soviet envoy kept 'T

*Henry Kissinger and Anatoly Dobrynin were a diplomatic duo for eight years. As U.S. secretary of state and U.S. Soviet ambassador to Washington, they had a personal channel that brought rapport between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev. In this second part of five excerpts from his forthcoming book, "White House Years," Kissinger talks intimately of his early experience with the Russians.

By HENRY KISSINGER

On Feb. 14, 1969, I was invited to my first official reception at the Soviet embassy in Washington.

It was not a brilliant assembly by Washington standards. The ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, was in his apartment upstairs, recuperating from a bout of flu.

A junior Soviet official tugged at my sleeve. He asked whether I could spare a few moments for his chief.

It was our first meeting. I found Dobrynin robed in a dressing gown in the second living room of his small apartment. Dobrynin greeted me with smiling, watchful eyes and the bluff confident manner of one who had taken the measure of his share of senior U.S. officials in his day.

He suggested that since we would work together closely we call each other by our first names. From then on, he was "Anatol" and I was "Henry" (or more often "Khenry," since the Russian language has no "h" sound).

We spoke in English. I did not make fun of him because he spoke with an accent.

Dobrynin said he had just returned from the Soviet Union. He said he had an oral message from his leaders that he wanted to deliver personally to the new president.

Opportunities lost

He mused that great opportunities had been lost in Soviet-U.S. affairs, especially between 1959 and 1963. He had been head of the U.S. division of the Soviet foreign ministry during that period, and he knew that Nikita Khrushchev seriously wanted an accommodation with the United States.

The chance had been lost then; we must not lose the opportunities at hand today, he said.

I told Dobrynin that the Nixon administration was prepared to relax tensions on the basis of reciprocity.

But we did not believe that these tensions were due to misunderstandings. They arose from real causes, which had to be dealt with if real progress were to be made.

Dobrynin's mention of the 1953-1963 period as a lost opportunity. I pointed out, was bound to sound strange to U.S. ears. That was, after all, the time of two Berlin ultimatums, Khrushchev's brutal behavior toward John F. Kennedy in Vienna, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Soviet Union's unilateral breach of the moratorium on nuclear testing.

If the Soviet leaders sought an accommodation with the new administration by these methods, crises would be unavoidable; more "opportunities" would be lost.

Dobrynin smiled and conceded that not all the mistakes had been on the U.S. side. I promised to arrange an early meeting with Nixon.

By the time Nixon took office, the political balance sheet was hardly in credit.

The Soviet Union had just occupied Czechoslovakia. It was supplying arms on a massive scale to North Vietnam. It had shown no willingness to help bring a settlement in the Middle East. And the Soviet Union at this point was nearing equality in strategic weapons.

The Kremlin knew Nixon as a Com-

munist-baiter; but it had never permitted personal antipathy to stand in the way of Soviet national interest.

Nixon had visited the Soviet Union when, as vice-president, he had had his famous "Kitchen Debate" with Khrushchev. Nixon had a far keener grasp of the characteristics of its leadership than any other recent presidential contender.

"Even before his inauguration, Nixon and I distilled a number of basic principles that were to characterize our approach to U.S.-Soviet relations as long as we were in office:

**The principle of concreteness:** We would insist that any negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union deal with specific causes of tensions rather than general atmospherics.

**The principle of restraint:** Reasonable relations between the superpowers could not survive constant attempts to pursue unilateral advantages and exploit areas of crisis.

**The principle of linkage:** We insisted that progress in superpower relations, to be real; had to be made on a broad front. Events in different parts of the world, in our view, were related to each other; even more so, Soviet conduct in different parts of the world.

We proceeded from the premise that to separate issues into distinct compartments would encourage the Soviet leaders to believe that they could use cooperation in one area as a safety valve, while striving for unilateral advantages elsewhere. This was unaccept-

able to meet the needs of the Soviet Union. It was in this sense that the two countries began to begin to put their differences to the test.

redesig

THE GAZETTE, Montreal, Wednesday, October 10, 1979

# The day Leonid Brezhnev kidnapped Richard Nixon

[LC]

(Continued from Page 29)

time had been chosen, as on almost all of my trips, to permit me to arrive in Moscow too late in the evening for serious talks. This reduced the effect's of jet lag by guaranteeing a night's rest before important conversations.

My Moscow trip was secret; it was to be announced only after I had returned. The Soviets had pressed for months for a clandestine visit, almost certainly for the simple reason that Peking had had a secret trip and they were entitled to equality!

In Moscow, a terrifying motorcade whisked us at a seemingly hundred-mile-an-hour clip to the complex of guest houses in the Lenin Hills overlooking the Moscow River.

The guest house was extremely comfortable. In the room set aside for a staff office was a safe, which the manager of the guest house graciously invited us to use for storage of our classified papers.

It was a rickety old contraption whose construction suggested that its inner chambers might even be moving parts; one could easily imagine that its shelves, like dumbwaiters, would transport the contents downstairs for our hosts' leisurely overnight review. We politely declined the kind offer.

## Babbler

The trip also marked my introduction to the use of the "babbler." This was a cassette tape I had brought with me, which played a bizarre recording of what seemed like several dozen voices talking gibberish simultaneously.

If I wanted to confer with my colleagues without being overheard by listening devices, we would gather around the babbler, speaking softly among ourselves. We could understand each other, but theoretically anyone listening in would be unable to distinguish the real conversation from the cacophony of recorded voices.

Usually we spoke elliptically or wrote notes to one another. A colleague and I sometimes took a walk in the garden, even there whispering to each other because West German security people had warned us that the trees contained listening devices.

I once joked to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko that there was a strange tree in the garden whose branches followed my every movement.

Our respect for the KGB (Soviet Secret Police) was such that our secretaries used manual typewriters brought from home lest the "telemetry" of electric machines be read by our solicitous hosts.

Gromyko and Dobrynin called on me at the guest house at 11 p.m. to settle the next day's program. I had my secretary, Julie Pineau, sit in to take notes. It clearly made Gromyko uncomfortable. Female stenographers oftened either Russian male chauvinism or Soviet secretiveness.

Negotiations with Communist party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev included the bizarre feature that he might disappear at any moment; or while you were being most persuasive he could be concentrating not on your remarks but on forcing food on you.

On one occasion he brought along a toy cannon to the

Kissinger, left, talks with Dobrynin (1972)

Middle East and Vietnam might be worth discussion at some point, and it seemed as if shadowboxing might go on all night. Nixon decided to put Vietnam squarely on the table. If he had not, the Soviet leaders surely would have: they were loaded for bear.

Now that the subject was Vietnam, the easy cam CORPORATION was vanished; the atmosphere clouded suddenly from one second to the other. Each of the three Soviet leaders in turn unleashed a diatribe against Nixon, who, except for two one-sentence interruptions, endured it in dignified silence.

Suddenly the thought struck me that for all the bombast and rudeness, we were participants in a charade.

The Soviet leaders were not pressing us except with words. They were speaking for the record, and when they had said enough to have a transcript to send to Hanoi, they would stop.

By the time the Soviet leaders had spoken their Vietnam piece for three hours, it was 11:00 p.m. The mood thereupon shifted as suddenly to congeniality as it had to animosity a few hours earlier.

We were escorted upstairs to a dining room that appeared to occupy virtually the entire second floor. Despite the late hour a full-course meal was served, preceded by the usual groaning assortment of hors d'oeuvres.

## Tomorrow: Mission to Peking.

Copyright © 1979 by Henry A. Kissinger.
From the forthcoming book:
WHITE HOUSE YEARS
Published by Little Brown and Co.

CP

On one occasion he brought along a toy cannon to the conference room. It refused to fire. Making it work precoccupied him far more than whatever profundities I might be uttering at the moment. Finally the contraption went off with a roar. Brezhnev strutted around the room like a prizefighter who has knocked out his opponent.

Brezhnev introduced the idea of "understanding" not to use nuclear weapons against each other. He called it a step of "immense significance," a "peaceful bomb."

That it was. It would have produced an explosion in the NATO alliance, in China, and throughout the world. I politely turned it aside.

When the presidential party took off for the Moscow summit in Air Force One on Saturday morning, May 20, the mood was one of optimism, even elation, untinged by excessive humiliation.

LEONID BREZHNEV
Toy cannon

We landed in Moscow at 4 p.m. on Monday, May 22 (having stopped in Austria to adjust to the time change).

At the Kremlin, Nixon's apartment was in the palace of the czars' apartments.

Alas, the splendid presidential apartment proved unsuited to the conduct of business. Our security experts were certain it was bugged by sophisticated equipment.

Nixon refused to use the babbler; its noise drove him crazy. Thus the president and I were reduced to using his U.S. limousine, parked outside, for really private conversations, hoping that its bulletproof windows would inhibit any electronic equipment aimed at it.

The first plenary session on Tuesday, May 23 took place in St. Catherine's Hall, a large, ornately gilded room, furnished sparsely with elegant candelabra and carved chairs around a long rectangular table covered in beige felt.

## Insights

These meetings with the top Soviet leadership, though inconclusive, provided interesting insights into the Soviet power structure. Brezhnev held no governmental position but was clearly the top man; yet he appeared to need the support of Premier Alexei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny to carry the Politburo with him.

On military matters Brezhnev as chairman of the Council of National Defence seemed to have exclusive authority; hence he met Nixon alone to discuss SALT.

On Vietnam, too, he seemed to have a dominant voice, suggesting that relations with Hanoi were probably handled primarily as a party matter — except for one collective attempt to browbeat Nixon, during which Kosygin showed the greatest passion.

Kosygin was clearly more polished and better educated than his colleagues. Podgorny was the hardest to fathom, perhaps because there was no depth there to penetrate.

A dramatic confrontation began when Brezhnev kidnapped the president of the United States.

Brezhnev suddenly suggested that he and Nixon go together to his dacha immediately. Nixon accepted — there was little else he could do, since Brezhnev was physically propelling him into his car — and off the two leaders sped in Brezhnev's big Zil limousine.

The dacha was about a 40-minute drive, even at modest speed, from the Kremlin.

Brezhnev, in high good spirits on our arrival at the dacha, then whisked him down to the boat landing for a hydrofoil ride. Brezhnev gave Nixon one of these hydrofoils as a gift, in return for the Cadillac that we gave him for his auto collection.

At last the Soviet leaders and Nixon moved into the conference room to face each other across the oval table. Finally, when Brezhnev mentioned in passing that the

CP

[Lc]

SADENA HEAR
NEWS COUTH
BENDS

OCT 23 1979

Kissinger's book

Little Brown

"We met for the first time at a reception given by the President for heads of delegations at the United Nations in September 1969. Gromyko walked up to me and said: 'You look just like Henry Kissinger.' And I replied: 'You look just like Richard Nixon.' This took him a few seconds to hoist aboard, especially as his entourage was reluctant to laugh until he had given the signal. By the next year he had absorbed the style. When we discussed which entrance he should use for his White House meeting with Nixon, Gromyko said it did not make any difference; the guards would salute and let him through wherever he presented himself; who would stop the president? To make sure that everyone—especially his associates—understood that it was playtime, he gave a hearty laugh reminiscent of a street corner Santa Claus."

That was, as Kissinger writes, in 1969. After that he saw a good deal of Gromyko. In the interval between 1969 and 1972, Gromyko as Soviet Foreign Minister expedited Soviet policy which included sending vast materiel to Southeast Asia to underwrite a war of aggression against South Vietnam and to kill 50,000 Americans. In the Middle East, the Soviets came close to triggering an explosion through the stimulation of Iraqi appetites. In South America, the Soviet Union did its best to satellize Chile. In Cuba, the Soviet Union triggered a crisis over Cienfuegos. And, of course, there were the routine things.

Then there was the summit in Moscow, in June of 1972. "During (that summit meeting) one of our Xerox machines broke down. Knowing the KGB's reputation for Orwellian ubiquity, I asked Gromyko during a meeting in the elegant St. Catherine's Hall in the Kremlin whether he could have some copies made for us if we held certain documents up to the chandelier. Gromyko replied without missing a beat that unfortunately the cameras were installed by the tsars; they were adequate for photographing

people but not documents."

It is a quite extraneous experience to bridge high principle and diplomatic requirements. One must assume that at Nuremberg, diplomats cracked jokes with Goering. But there wasn't anyone around (Churchill was not at Nuremberg) whose capacity for irony, and even whimsy, whose phenomenal memory for piquancies, caught all those fleeting illuminations from the prisms that dance right through wars and summit meetings and diplomatic banquets and press conferences.

A great deal happened in the years 1969 to 1976, but not the least was the emergence of the most acutely observant, agonizingly revealing social and diplomat historian of the century. There is no apparent genealogical relation between the (brilliant, to be sure) dryasdust Henry Kissinger who years ago wrote from Harvard and the various think-tanks learned books and monographs, and the author of "The White House Years."

This immense volume is at once tren-
chant and grand; amused and amusing;
in it are the suppurations of tragedy and
the erotic joys of small diplomatic trium-
phs. Nothing is too subtle to divine (the
paradox of Chinese insularity and
cosmopolitanism), or too trivial to notice
(Chou En-lai took him to an opera, "the
most stupefyingly boring three hours I
ever spent. I forget the plot, but at the
end I think the girl falls in love with a
tractor.").

Although one can hardly have expected
a book by Henry Kissinger denouncing
the career of Henry Kissinger, his critics
will be astonished at the frequency with
which he criticizes his own judgment, or
the frankness with which he reveals his
own uses of guile. But when he believes
he was correct (Cambodia, for instance),
one comes upon a juggernaut. His handl-
ing of the Vietnam guagmire, the
pressures on the White House, the
tergiversations of Nixon's aides—and in-
deed of Nixon himself—the erosion of

[L]C]

# The world according to Henry A. Kissinger

White House Years. By Henry A. Kissinger, 1,521 pages. Little, Brown. $22.50

Not long ago two members of a prominent public affairs institute fell to discuss- ing Henry A. Kissinger's new book during a break in a seminar. For several minutes they groped for a common frame of refer- ence.

"It's the phony candor that bothers me," one said tentatively.

"I become infuriated every 300 pages," said the other. "But Henry is a powerful historian."

"But what about Cambodia?" said the first.

The other replied, "I don't like it either. But I have to admit that he was right rather often."

The first can find nothing good in Kissinger, and therefore nothing good in this book. The other, less committed, cannot bring himself to open admiration, partly because Kissinger served Richard M. Nixon. Even today it still is risky in some intellectual circles to speak favorably of the former national security adviser and secretary of state, even though his vindication seems nearer with time.

It will be a shame if personal prejudice and policy differences detract from the reception for "White House Years." In more than 1,500 pages — too many, probably — it covers roughly the first term of the Nixon administration, including the breakthroughs to China and the Soviet Union and what was supposed to be a compromise settlement in Vietnam. It is a remarkably readable, challenging and provocative book.

These were years of unprecedented secrecy in foreign policy. At the urging of President Nixon, who distrusted bureaucracy, Kissinger pursued every important initiative without the knowledge of even the State Department. Today he is mildly repentant. It was a "poor system," he concedes, "one that never ought to be emulated."

Despite his training as a historian, Kissinger does not pretend that this is definitive history. It is the perspective of a central participant in the making of history, with the strengths and weaknesses that implies. "Obviously," he writes, "the participant's "perspective will be affected by his own involvement; the impulse to explain merges with the impulse to defend."

But with some exceptions, he is not defensive. Whatever "phony candor" means, he is remarkably candid about his own arrogance, his deceptions, and his means of neutralizing his opponents, including Nixon's first secretary of state, William P. Rogers. And with the license of popular history, he sprinkles his world view with revealing insights into the personalities with which he collaborated and collided.

About Abba Eban, Israel's former foreign minister: "I have never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Sentences poured forth in mellifluous constructions complicated enough to test the listener's intelligence and simultaneously leave him transfixed by the speaker's virtuosity. The prose flowed evenly, without high points, rus-

ting along inexorably like a clear mountain stream. To interrupt seemed almost unthinkable, for one knew that one would have to do so in an idiom that seemed barbaric by comparison."

About his relations with Rogers: "Neither Rogers nor I mustered the grace to transcend an impasse that we should have recognized was not in the national interest." About Melvin L. Laird, the secretary of defense: "There was about him a buoyancy and a rascally good humor that made working with him as satisfying as it could on occasion be maddening."

On occasion Kissinger's insights are unexpectedly compassionate. He refers only rarely to Pat Nixon, that most enigmatic of first ladies. But when he does his treatment is gentle.

"She was totally without illusions and totally insistent on facing her trials in solitude. Her dignity never wavered. And if she seemed remote, who could know what fires had had to be banked in her stern existence. She made no claims on anyone; her fortitude had been awesome and not a little inspiring because one sensed that it had been wrested from an essential genhteness."

Kissinger's ambivalence toward the President himself has been well documented, partly by Kissinger's own unseemly titling while still in office. There were moments when Nixon set Kissinger up to take the fall if policy failed. There were moments also when the national security adviser circumvented the jingoism of the President.

The subordinate is faithful to the leader in the interim judgment, however. "This man," Kissinger writes, "so lonely in his hour of triumph, so ungenerous in some of his motivations, had navigated our nation through one of the most anguishing periods in its history. Not by nature courageous, he had steeled himself to conspicuous acts of rare courage. Not normally outgoing, he had forced himself to rally his people to its challenge."

Many readers will quarrel with the judgment. And indeed Kissinger presumably is withholding his final judgment for his second volume. But no one can quarrel with his readability.

"White House Years" is so readable, in fact, that Kissinger may be suspected of economizing in his credits for the assistance he received. Never did he, as he often claimed, place his English verbs at the end of sentences. But no one who has struggled through his pre-White House books, such as "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy," can accept lightly the notion that he created this one without heavy editing.

In the end, however, this is not a book of anecdotes, insights, or even of individual foreign policy battles won and lost. What is important is the composite pattern of global forces and the elements that may sustain equilibrium.

To Kissinger the forces at play — nationalism, ideology, personal ambition, economic competition—all conspire to create disorder or the order of domination by the mighty. The powerful may seek domination or a more beneficent order.

BIRMINGHAM, ALA.
N. 14-15, JAN. 1979

[LC]

NOV 1 1979

A WORD EDGEWISE

BY JOHN P. ROCHE

# Kissinger's book offers 'interesting' SALT views

Age must be having its impact: Although a number of reviews have appeared, I — a speed reader — have yet to finish Henry Kissinger's 1,500 page epic, *White House Years* (Little, Brown). Maybe they reviewed *Time's* ex- cerpts?

It is not easy reading: Mr. Dooley once suggested Theodore Roosevelt's book about the Spanish-American War be titled *Alone in Cuba*. He might similarly suggest *Alone in the World* as an appropriate subtitle to Henry: Nothing that occurred anywhere between 1969-1973 is omitted.

## Interesting reading

IN THE LIGHT of the contemporary debate on the merits of the SALT II Treaty, it is particularly interest- ing to read Kissinger's discussion of the background of SALT I, signed by President Nixon in May, 1972. As he indicates, President Lyndon Johnson scheduled a summit with the Soviet leadership to discuss nuclear arms limita- tion for the fall of 1968.

In objective terms, this was ingenuous: Brezhnev and Kosygin, who then seemed equal in stature, were not about to do serious business with a lame-duck president. If anything, they would use talks with LBJ to pressure his Republican successor. However, on this topic Johnson was quite irrational. In 1970, talking about the accom- plishments of his administration, he said, "Johnny, above all we kept the lion in the cage."

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

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

nodding agreement. Indeed, he puts the case for cold-eyed realistic negotiations with the Soviets far more eloquent- ly than I. and shares, in kindly fashion, my skepticism of LBJ's evangelical initiatives. In view of the recent hassle between the White House and the State Department over who said what to whom about Brezhnev's attitude on modernization of NATO's nuclear forces, his description of State's effort to force Nixon into SALT negotiations is mordantly hilarious.

Moreover, Kissinger's argument for linkage is com- pelling. Indeed, just as I was about to leap from my chair and shout "Good Old Henry!" I suddenly realized the author was the architect of SALT I, the dreadful agree- ment that got us into the present mess, that led us quietly to nap while the Soviets emplaced those 308 monster SS- 18s, modernized five more systems, and deployed the mobile national SS-20 which, with a third stage, three wrenches and a screwdriver can in half an hour be converted to an intercontinental SS-16.

SEN. SAM NUNN recently described our SALT ne- gotiating posture by reference to a Marx Brothers movie in which Chico, threatened, puts a pistol to his head and says, "One more step and I'll shoot."

What Kissinger had lovingly described is the careful, handsome design of this pistol. By the time he finishes burnishing the stock and polishing the metal, you are likely to forget who is the target. This pride of craftsman- ship in a suicide weapon is positively unnerving.

## Explains double-talk

IT ALSO, OF COURSE, explains Kissinger's amazing double-talk in his testimony on SALT II. A leading candi- date for secretary of state can hardly observe "the SALT process is lunacy, and you can count on me to straighten it out" when in fact he set the lunatic scenario in motion.

Now, because SALT II is on the merits essentially indefensible, we are told the treaty is not really all that important: What counts is the SALT "process" — move- ment to SALT III. If one had to anticipate, SALT III would involve the United States firing the Kissinger .357 squarely in its temple.

CINCINNATI, OHIO
D. 134,138 SUN. 287,113

OCT 28 1979

# The Way Kissinger Sits

By ROBERT CLERC

Enquirer Editorial Writer

Latter-day

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

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

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

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

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

## books

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Le Duc Tho, with whom he negotiated the settlement of the

F INALLY Nixon and Pompidou met to settle matters and Kissinger found he had to negotiate the finer points of a most complex currency package — one involving the Canadian dollar, U.S. dollar, Japanese yen and all the European currencies, plus the price of gold — with France's president, who had for many years been a leading banker.

A deal was struck, an international agreement signed, and Nixon hailed this as being of the greatest of importance, an historic pact. In fact, the agreement was an awful one. Within weeks a new currency crisis was developing and currency policy differences were again straining transatlantic ties.

The full story of the 1971 dollar devaluation, now made complete by Kissinger's account, provides an example of Connally's foreign policy operating style that could and should be considered in weighing his credentials for the nation's top office.

The story also underlines the crucial need for top international economics experts in the White House. In his book, the former secretary of state praises the economics talents of three experts — Richard Cooper, Fred Bergsten and Robert Hormatz. It is some relief to know that these three now hold important and influential policy positions within the U.S. administration — Cooper is currently undersecretary for economic affairs at the State Department; Bergsten is assistant secretary of the treasury for international affairs and Hormatz is now moving from a senior state department position to become deputy U.S. special trade representative.

KISSINGER'S
TRACK BACK

by David Watt

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

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

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

59.

[LC]

Watt

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

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

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

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

60.

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

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

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

61.

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

*Cutting Corners with Nixon*

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

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

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

62.

Watt

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

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

—Thomas Reed

63.

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

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

*Modified "Hands-Off"*

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

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

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

64.

[L]

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

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

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

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

65.

[LC]

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

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

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

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

66.

[Lc]

in fact. Somehow, for all his flaws, Nixon emerges as a substantial man, far more fleshed out than his servant and sometime detractor Kissinger. It strikes me that, had Nixon determined policy in another direction than that which was pursued, Kissinger would have gone along with it, and found reasons to support it. He was, is, 'clever all right; but it is not at all clear that he possessed or possesses any guiding intelligence or a sufficient desire capable of translating his opinions into policies. He needed Nixon to do this; to see the wood from the trees. The crucial decisions of these White House years were Nixon's: all of them.

This may be why I detect humbug in much of the book: 'If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint. But I believed equally that no nation could face or even define its choices without a moral compass that set a course through the ambiguities of reality, and thus made sacrifices meaningful. The willingness to walk this fine line marks the difference between the academic's - or any outsider's - perception of morality and that of the statesmen.' Kissinger was an academic and an outsider who became the most inside of insiders and aimed to be a statesman. I do not think he helped his nation to face or to define its choices, nor do I think that the course he helped to steer through 'the ambiguities of reality' was either moral or immoral. In these years he did not become a statesman but remained Nixon's man. Certainly neither he nor Nixon made the sacrifices of Vietnam 'meaningful'. They did, however, in the end, stop them from being made.

Henry
Kissinger

WHITE
HOUSE
YEARS

If you can, try reading The White House Years in the original German. Since we do not yet have the technology required to change German into English, the English version does not rhyme.

The White House Years can be read on two levels, and in several positions. On one level it's a penetrating analysis of foreign policy making, and how it affects the lives of millions of people. On a lower level it is a series of titilating personality profiles of the famous and the powerful. There is no reason to pay for the book to get the gossipy profiles. Just leaf through it at the bookstore. Standing in one of the positions.

The book is successful because Kissinger had the good fortune to meet the remarkable people of our time and the common sense to write down what he thought about them. Selected quotes illustrate his elegant and sometimes punchy style:

**On Richard Nixon, President:**

"Nixon was always uncomfortable with people. Meetings were tense and formal.

It was difficult to gain his trust and friendship.

Over time, as we worked closely together, I came to look upon Nixon as a father. But not mine."

**On Pope Paul, Roman Catholic Pope:**

"Pope Paul died a month before we were scheduled to meet. I was very upset by his death. Since then, I have been assured that this insult was not intentional."

**On Mao, Leader of China:**

"Mao was 84 years old when Nixon and I met him for lunch. He was in poor health. He had suffered twelve strokes and his ears had been removed. Yet Mao still spoke eloquently of revolution, reform and oneness. But he would only speak to a spoon."

**On de Gaulle, King of France:**

"De Gaulle was more than a Frenchman. De Gaulle was France! I warned Nixon that de Gaulle's death would throw Europe into anarchy. War and pestilence would be inefitable. As predicted, these events came to pass, but we managed to keep them out of the newspapers."

**On Gerald Ford, American President:**

"It's unfortunate that I never met President Ford. I was very busy at the time. But I did get to see Chevy Chase impersonate him. He appeared to be a man worth knowing."

# I Wonder Who's Kissinger Now

**On Brezhnev, Russian Dictator:**

"The Russians were eager to negotiate a strategic arms limitation agreement, yet the talks in Moscow were difficult. Brezhnev was both a ruthless and effective negotiator. He gained several concessions from Nixon by refusing to tell him where the men's room was."

**On Dat Van, South Vietnamese Delegate to the Paris Peace Conferences:**

"This little yellow creep did his best to sabotage the peace talks. Illegitimate, often drunk, he had the foulest breath of any public official I ever met. His moronic analysis claimed that the peace treaty we negotiated would lead to the fall of South Vietnam. Jerk. He now runs a pizza parlor in Virginia. There's hardly any cheese on his pizza. Bastard."

My Greek tutor used to say, "The best way to assure your place in history is to write a history book." Kissinger has done just that. The role played by Kissinger is controversial and his account has been disputed. By all means read this remarkable and eloquent book. But don't pass final judgement on Kissinger until you see the movie.

— John Scanlon

Kramerbooks & Afterwords, a brasserie
1912 Eye Street, NW
Between 19th & 20th on Eye 466-3111

Kramerbooks & Afterwords, a cafe
1517 Connecticut Avenue, NW
ABOVE Dupont Circle 387-1400

Kramerbooks & Afterwords, a confiserie
1347 Connecticut Avenue, NW
BELOW Dupont Circle 293-2072

Kramer Books & Records
336 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE
On Capitol Hill 547-5990
Sidney Kramer Books
1722 H Street, NW
Downtown 298-8010

422

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

NORWAY, OIL, AND FOREIGN POLICY. By John C. Ausland, Boulder (Colo.): Westview Press, 1979, 140 pp. $15.00.

Norway's oil provokes some interesting questions: relations with OPEC and IEA, the rate of development, the use of the resources to promote industrial development, and relations with the Soviet Union in the Barents Sea. This brief book by a former American diplomat who has long lived in Norway considers all these in an enlightening way. Not the last word, but an excellent survey.

LAW AND POLICY IN PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENT. By Kamal Hossain. New York: Nichols, 1979, 284 pp. $32.00.

To find and produce oil, developing countries usually need the help of foreign companies. To suggest what legal and organizational arrangements will both encourage exploration and give the government the largest possible return is the purpose of this study by a former Cabinet Minister of Bangladesh who is now at Oxford. His work, supported by the Commonwealth Secretariat, draws on the experience of ten quite diverse countries.

IMMIGRANT LABOR AND RACIAL CONFLICT IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES: THE FRENCH AND BRITISH EXPERIENCE, 1945-1975. By Gary P. Freeman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, 362 pp. $20.00.

Neither Britain nor France is typical of other countries in its relations to immigrant labor. Nevertheless, this well-documented study of the two countries' contrasting political reactions, economic policies and administrative methods adds a good bit to our understanding of what may well be a continuing and troublesome issue for rich industrial countries.

OBSTACLES TO MINERAL DEVELOPMENT: A PRAGMATIC VIEW. By John S. Carman. Elmsford (N.Y.): Pergamon Press, 1979, 200 pp. $17.50.

These papers by a Canadian mining engineer with some 20 years of U.N. experience deal bluntly and vividly with, among other things, the fallacies of *The Limits to Growth*, the deficiencies of foreign aid, the damaging changes in Canadian taxation, inappropriate technology, small mining and the prevention of ghost towns. Among many interesting statements, the most important is the drubbing he gives mining companies and host governments for attitudes and behavior which imperil future production.

CRITICAL FOOD ISSUES OF THE EIGHTIES. Edited by Marilyn Chou and David P. Harmon, Jr. Elmsford (N.Y.): Pergamon Press, 1979, 420 pp. $32.50.

Some general, some detailed, these very miscellaneous essays coming out of a Hudson Institute program deal with nutrition, technology, chemicals in food, farm policy, lifestyles, regulation and even energy.

The United States

Gaddis Smith

WHITE HOUSE YEARS. By Henry Kissinger. Boston: Little, Brown; 1979, 1,521 pp. $22.50.

In every generation in this century, in the immediate aftermath of an epoch in American foreign policy, a commanding work by or about the President's most important adviser has appeared. In the 1920s we had *The Intimate Papers of Colonel House*, edited by Charles Seymour; in 1948 we had Robert Sherwood's

RECENT BOOKS

423

Roosevelt and Hopkins, now Kissinger's gargantuan *White House Years*, with another volume on the State Department yet to come. All of these works were the first to combine literary distinction with the revelation of great quantities of evidence not available to the outsider. They all illustrate the fact that the battle to control a historical reputation has only begun when the events are over. In time the works on Colonel House and on Harry Hopkins were corrected and challenged in considerable detail. The same fate awaits *White House Years*—but not for a long time, not until historians have access to the full archival record and the time to digest it.

Kissinger's literary monument to himself is a work of description, exhortation and scorn. He gives the reader more detail about the events of 1969-1973 than has yet appeared and he draws extensively on his famous notes and recordings as well as on secret memoranda and cables. He exhortes us to see the world as he does and above all to affirm (this is the major theme) that "diplomatic skill could augment but never substitute for military strength. In the final reckoning weakness has invariably tempted aggression and impotence brings abdication of policy in its train." And nearly everywhere there is scorn—masquerading as condescending praise for Nixon, but explicit for colleagues like William Rogers, and for his critics. The work is worthy in every way of the achievements of the man.

THE CRISES OF POWER: FOREIGN POLICY IN THE KISSINGER YEARS. By Seyom Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, 194 pp. $10.95.

A balanced critique of concepts, achievements, and failures. Brown argues that Kissinger's difficulties stemmed largely from "the inability of the Nixon and Ford Administrations to provide the domestic building blocks necessary to give the structure an immediate and secure foundation."

THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS: RICHARD HELMS AND THE CIA. By Thomas Powers. New York: Knopf, 393 pp. $12.95.

Although the author cannot penetrate Richard Helms' reserve, this is the most convincing of the many recent books on the CIA, and certainly the most temperate and objective. Powers seeks to explain, not indict. He demonstrates that the character and behavior of the CIA were shaped ultimately by the demands put on the agency by Presidents.

VIETNAM: THE DEFINITIVE DOCUMENTATION OF HUMAN DECISIONS. Edited by Gareth Porter. Pine Plains (N.Y.): Earl M. Coleman, 1979, 2 vols. $60.00.

Although the editorial point of view is passionately anti-war, these two volumes are in fact a reference work, and a very convenient one. The most important documents from "The Pentagon Papers" and *Foreign Relations of the United States* are reproduced in logical order together with a useful selection from Vietnamese sources.

ANNALS OF AN ABIDING LIBERAL. By John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979, 384 pp. $12.95.

Delightful essays mostly about the personalities, policies and posturings of American leaders in the 1970s. Galbraith, the serious humorist, is the Mark Twain of our time.

NAZI PRISONERS OF WAR IN AMERICA. By Arnold Krammer. New York: Stein and Day, 1979, 352 pp. $18.95.

III. 21 Nov 79

A 5

USSR INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES & CANADA

IZVESTIYA COMMENTS ON HENRY KISSINGER'S MEMOIRS

LD152114 Moscow TASS in English 1953 GMT 15 Nov 79 ID

"[IZVESTIYA on Henry Kissinger's Memoirs"--TASS headline]"

[Text] Moscow, November 5, TASS--To be getting attention to be in the limelight was always flattering to Henry Kissinger's boundless self-esteem and self-love to his inflated "ego". To achieve this, he was ready to any political striptease, to any politicalomersault, IZVESTIYA writes in an article about the pronouncements of the former U.S. secretary of state contained in his memoirs "The Years in the White House". It is not surprising that Kissinger is smearing detente, peaceful coexistence, disarmament to which he publicly swore allegiance quite recently.

"What has changed since then, the newspaper asks? Anti-communism, anti-Sovietism are again all the rage on the Potomac and are gaining one commercial advantage, what with the unprecedented arms race spurred on by war psychosis, by allegations about 'Soviet military menace' and the coming rivalry for the White House and the Congress, Kissinger chose his line, and he did so promptly and willingly."

Pointing out that Kissinger's sympathies and dislikes in his memoirs are quite obvious, IZVESTIYA writes that the author of the memoirs reserves the high-sounding epithets and expressions of admiration for Chinese leaders.

This servility of former Harvard intellectual to the Beijing rulers has both subjective and objective reasons, the newspaper writes. Kissinger belongs to the school of Washington geopoliticians that would like to play "the China card".

Touching upon the part of Kissinger's memoirs dealing with Soviet-American relations, particularly with the 1972 Moscow summit meeting, IZVESTIYA writes: One gets the impression that Kissinger would like to disregard this event completely, but since this is impossible, he treats it according to Washington's present "confrontational" approach. The author tries in every way to misrepresent the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence. Concerning the reason for this "metamorphosis of Kissinger's views", the newspaper stresses that his political opportunism, his unscrupulousness play not the least role by far. Moreover, acquisitory interests combine with his political leanings. But Kissinger's memoirs reveal more than the traits of his personality. Reading the memoirs of the former U.S. secretary of state, one unwittingly ponders on the destinies of the United States, the unscrupulousness of the ruling circles of that country. It is not for nothing that the U.S. ruling circles are stigmatized by the Watergate affair, the symbol of irreversible erosion of all moral values, both human and political ones, in the home and foreign policy of the USA.

# BOOKS

## Modern Guicciardini

### THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS

By Henry Kissinger

Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
Michael Joseph. 1,545 pages.

£14.95.

This is an extraordinary book, a continuation, for better or worse, of the Kissinger legend. Beguilingly written; massively constructed, sensitive and brutal by turns, funny one moment, forced the next, it is yet, one suspects, a gigantic publishing mistake by its American publisher, Little, Brown. Had the publisher realised what gems of description, analysis and blatant contention were coming his way he would surely have published Mr Kissinger's memoirs in four digestible—more profitable—gobbets rather than in this succulently indigestible pair (of which the tome under review is merely the first bite).

It reminds one of the massively elegant works of Guicciardini and Machiavelli. The scale of the literary and intellectual enterprise is dealt with in much the same way: "the flow of arguments and the author's mental concentration", as Professor Stanley Hoffmann admits in his review in the New York Review of Books, "are prodigious". Subjects are defined, distinctly, chapter by chapter. A few deft references relate the timing in one chapter (on, say, India and Pakistan) to the pressures at work in two others (say the opening to China and the closing doors to Vietnam). They are enough to reveal the pressures, the (famous Kissingerism) linkage. By this treatment each subject is rigorously scrutinised both in context and on its own.

The typical chapter opens with a broad account of the issues at stake and the story so far. In some instances the quality of evocation is tacky and contrived, a sentimental cover to the distinctly unsentimental (Kissinger's favourite word) policy revelations to come. But in others there is a sumptuous quality to Mr Kissinger's insights, for instance in the "mystical ambiguities" of the Middle East:

> What the parties to the Middle East conflict really want lies deep in an amalgam of convictions, resentments and dreams. Formal positions are like the shadows in Plato's cave—reflections of a transcendent reality almost impossible to encompass in the dry legalisms of a negotiating process (page 342).

There usually follows a staccato summary of immediate events of the day: often an amalgam of selective newspaper quotations intermingled with public statements on the record by Mr Kissinger, his president or one of their adversaries in Russia, Vietnam or the Washington bureaucracy. These, at a guess, are compiled by Mr Peter Rodman, Mr Bill Hyland or one of the committee of ex- and present helpers who have surrounded Mr Kissinger in compiling this book. But the prime author's hand is never absent. There is a tightness, a control and a self-indulgence that, mixed, are entirely his.

Then the fun begins. Nixon and Kissinger start to discuss, in gripping exchanges of notes, marginal comments and apparently minuted conversations, how to take control of policy from the massive departments of government that surround the White House. Each trusts the other's determination to prevail in this battle. By and large each supports the other's policy, with Kissinger the tougher (but deferring to a president's political needs) on Vietnam, Nixon the harder on Cambodia, on the short-term tactical use of the China card, on Mrs Gandhi and on Russia. Each, as the book progresses, starts to distrust and allow for, usually uncharitably, the other's personal fallibil-

ities. The common enemy is as much the state department, under the luckless Rogers, or the defence department, under the formidable Laird, as it is the antagonist abroad. A main gainer from this chaos was (another favourite word) "implacable" Hanoi:

> All this time Hanoi stood at the sidelines, coldly observing how America was negotiating not with its adversary but with itself (page 303).

Then the uplands are reached. The cut-and-thrust policy struggle is now set in its Kissingerian context: the strategy of "geopolitics", the ultimate reliance on American "credibility", no matter where. The author's clarity is, if not complete, devastating in its elegance and force. Uninformed critics of the secret Vietnam negotiation with Le Duc Tho are, on the strength of the analysis rather than their necessary ignorance, ruthlessly dumped for always advocating yet another concession. Those who fall for Mrs Gandhi's attempt to dismember Pakistan on the back of a convenient moral cause in Bangladesh are caned.

The rhythm is measured but never constant (the reader is quickly punished if he tries to skip): suddenly a quarter-hour by quarter-hour description of the Washington war over King Hussein of Jordan's war with his Palestinians erupts (pages 620-625) into the middle of a routine description of Middle Eastern affairs. And there, as always, is President Paradox in the middle of it:

> Once the point of decision was reached, Nixon acted with a kind of joyless, desperate courage—torn between his insights and understanding of the international reality and his fatalistic instinct that nothing he touched would ever be crowned with ultimate success (page 621).

At these moments, where hectic events unfold into reflection and exegesis, Mr Kissinger is at his self-justifying best. In the midst of a stupendous portrait of Mao Tse-tung ("I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated willpower"—page 1,058 passim), Mr Kissinger dares to interpolate his own essay on revolution—and gets away with it. "'I have not been able to change [the world]', replied Mao, not without pathos. 'I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking'."

It was a modest claim after a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot the very essence of his society. In its matter-of-fact resignation it underlined the revolutionary dilemma. The qualities needed to destroy are usually not those needed to sustain: the greater the upheaval, the more it may lead to a new apparatus even more pervasive and usually much more efficient than the one replaced. Revolutions conducted in the name of liber-

126

THE ECONOMIST NOVEMBER 24, 1979

BOOKS

ty more often than not refine new tools of
authority (page 1,063).

In such passages, though the nostrums
are Mr Kissinger's, they are embedded in
the personality of those he is writing
about. The book is spattered with major
character portraits Jane Austen would be
proud of (and with other minor ones—of
old soldiers, mediocrities, defeated ri-
vals, past and future political associates—
gooey enough to have been invented by
Georgette Heyer). Chou En-lai is the
hero, if there is a single one, of this book,
courted and conversed with through a
medium of secret signals and signs, spe-
cial channels, chance remarks and the
"firing of empty cannon" for months
before the breakthrough was made. Chou
said at the end of those pornic days of
secret meeting in Peking in autumn 1971:
"Come back soon for the joy of talking".
Mr Kissinger did.

Even where analysis is routine and
repetitive, as it often is on, for instance,
the Nato alliance, the simplicity and clari-
ty of expression rarely falter:

Too large to be a triwire, too small to resist an all-out Soviet onslaught, the allied military establishment was an accidental array of forces in search of a mission (page 83).

When the pace slackens, a footnote will
surprisingly pick it up (James Callaghan,
Edward Heath and other narrow losers
might sample the picture of Georg Kie-

singer, on page 99, crossing that "thin
dividing line between being hailed as a
master politician and being scorned as the
failed leader"). Ignore at your peril the
notes printed at the back of this volume:
they resemble in helpfulness those in
Louise and Aylmer Maude's translations
of Tolstoy (sample Kissinger's Vietnam
memorandums to the president, notes 11
and 12 to chapter VIII, and Nixon egging
on the pace in Cambodia, notes 9 and 10
to chapter XII).

If it is the concentration of mind which
produces the simplicity, it is the subtlety
and speed of instinct, the flash of political
awareness, which were to make Mr Kiss-
singer such a master bureaucrat in the
service of a president he admired but
didn't like—and which make this book,
from the opening pages of its seductive
foreword to the unconvincing glow of the
second inauguration of Richard Nixon at
its end, such a compellingly readable, if
wrist-breaking, chore.

So much for its texture: what does Mr
Kissinger's book say about his record?

Henry Kissinger was appointed national security adviser in 1968 by a man he disliked who had a few months earlier, at the Republican party convention in Miami, trounced Mr Kissinger's patron and closest political friend, Nelson Rockefeller. He brought to the White House a theory of world events that he has barely since modified, merely refined and polished by exposure to power:

In foreign policy there is no escaping the
need for an integrating conceptual
framework... The test of domestic policy
is the merit of a law; that of foreign policy,
nuances and interrelations... A conceptu-
al framework—which "links" events—is an
essential tool. The absence of linkage pro-
duces exactly the opposite of freedom of
action; policymakers are forced to respond
to parochial interests, buffeted by pressures
without a fixed compass (page 130).

The United States and the free world are
confronted, according to Kissinger, by an
implacable adversary, the Soviet Union,
plus surrogates or followers round the
globe who have, if Russia is not to press
forward, always to be checked. The worst
way to check them is by "sentimentality":
"moderation is a virtue only in those who
are thought to have choice" (page 225).
Equally "liturgical belligerence" achieves
little. If freedom is to be preserved,
totalitarian aggressors have constantly to
be shown the real "risks" attached to
aggression, and the real security to be
gained by "restraint". Cultivation of
those elusive "moderates" in Moscow or
Hanoi is usually pointless: if Moscow
moderates do exist they are better
strengthened by American "firmness,
which demonstrates the risks of Soviet
adventures, than by creating the impres-

sion that seemingly marginal moves are
free of cost" (page 122).

Immense patience is required, as these
carrots and sticks are applied to Russian
behaviour in every nook of world politics.
Policy is not created by theory or fiat; it
will only "emerge when concept encoun-
ters opportunity" (page 171): The Rus-
sians made it brutally plain to President
Nixon and Mr Kissinger that they simply
disregarded linkage until they were con-
fronted with its full effects in 1972 on the
eve of Nixon's re-election: no pressure
would they bring, for instance, on their
implacable disciples in Hanoi. Besides,
the state department, to Nixon's fury, so
destroyed linkage by premature response
that there was little reason early on for
Russiā to behave any other way than it
did. But in the end, according to Kis-
singer, the treatment works: the time for
progress in a Soviet negotiation, as the
vulgar, barnyard Moscow summit in
May, 1972, was at last to show, arrives
only when "incentives and penalties of
sufficient magnitude" have been generat-
ed "to impel decision".

By 1972 some of the incentives and
penalties developed by Nixon and Kis-
singer were these: first, and far the most
important, the meeting of geopolitical
minds with Peking ("The leaders of Chi-
na were beyond ideology in their dealings
with us"—page 1,063); the rearguard
refusal in the face of domestic pressure to
cop out of Vietnam, backed by a willing-
ness to bomb and bash the enemy even as
American troops were withdrawn; the
prevention, preferably accompanied by
massive and observable sabre-rattling, of
the break-up of Jordan by guerrillas and
Syria, of West Pakistan by Mrs Gandhi,
of Nato by congress ("One's actions must
be sustained; they must appear relentless,
inexorable"—page 604. "The time for
conciliation is after the crisis is surmount-
ed and a settlement or modus vivendi has
been reached"—page 629); the refusal,
notably in the Middle East, to pursue
fashionable attempts to make peace in
conjunction with Russia, thereby, over
time, discrediting the value of Russia as
an ally in the eyes of redeemable Arabs
like President Sadat; the effort, despite
domestic pressure, "to redress the strate-
gic balance" of nuclear weaponry; the
offering of arms limitation, commerce,
grain, consultation and understanding
only in return for Soviet help in maintain-
ing stability wherever conflict occurs.

This strategy of multiple Lilliputian
control of the lumbering giant is a cogent
one—and one that has been frighteningly
absent since Mr Nixon was hustled from
power, and Mr Ford and Mr Kissinger
left it. But in its "exorcism of the senti-
mental, its alleged immorality, it has not
made Mr Kissinger's policies in office

127

BOOKS

[L]C

popular.

That Mr Kissinger is hurt by this, and determined to hit back, is evident in every passage of his book: "the impulse to explain merges with the impulse to defend", he concedes in a foreword that calls on his readers to "transcend our divisions by recognising that serious people manned both sides" of the Vietnam barricades (a rule he subsequently finds it hard to keep as his own story unfolds). In the welter of documentation available in modern America, any version of events can be proved. He can only present "the myriad of possible considerations [that] in fact influenced the decisions in which he was involved. . . . None of this [will prove] that his judgment was right-only what it was based upon" (pages xxii-xiii).

But here emerges the contradiction in Mr Kissinger's book. His concern, in office and since, has been to attack the sentimental as being the worst form of defence against communist advance. But sentiment and disagreement over policy are, as Mr Kissinger sees vividly at each stage in his account, facts of politics. They, as much as Russian implacability, are part of the balance of power. Mr Kissinger's president's eventual failure was born precisely of his inability to create the unsentimental consensus he and Mr Kissinger needed in order to prove their point. Strong leadership should not, of course, follow every opinion poll (besides, Mr Nixon in fact enjoyed majority support for some even of his most unpopular decisions in Cambodia and Vietnam). But, over a two-term presidency, opinion must be with a president if his foreign policy is to prevail.

Mr Kissinger sees this, and, not altogether artfully, he clears the way in this volume for the story of the next which will doubtless show how a splendid construction was to be battered by Watergate and the breakdown of congressional leadership. Undoubtedly, the Kissinger theory would have stood a better chance under a different president—a Rockefeller, say. Mr Nixon's strengths are here much admired. He was courageous and lonely in decision. He was "overwrought" but "right" when the Cambodian sanctuaries were attacked. He suspected, as Kissinger did not, that peace was not quite at hand in autumn 1972. At several stages he overruled his security adviser-"I now believe wisely". In crises, he had an unusual sort of sanity: in mid-Jordan-blow-up he is unearthed in a bowling alley in the basement of the Executive Office Building. His judgment of politics was usually good: few remained certain, as he did, that Edward Heath would win in June, 1970. He was worth working for: when presidents "at-

tempt the tactical implementation of their own strategy they court disaster. Nixon never made that mistake" (page 142). He was a "superb expositor of carefully prepared positions", as the Peking summit was to show. So far as the conduct of relations with foreign powers was concerned, even Nixon's "personal antipathy to personal negotiation was not a weakness . . . but a strength".

But that antipathy was fatal at home:

> ... he was prepared to make decisions without illusion. Once convinced, he went ruthlessly and courageously to the heart of the matter; but each controversial decision drove him deeper into his all-enveloping solitude. He was almost physically unable to confront people who disagreed with him; and he shunned persuading or inspiring his subordinates. He would decide from inside his self-imposed cocoon, but he was unwilling to communicate with those who disagreed. It was the paradox of a president strong in his decisions but inconclusive in his leadership (page 482).

The accusation against Mr Kissinger's role in all this should not be of immorality. It should be twofold.

First, he failed to respond—and so helped blind his all-too-willingly-blanched president—to the internal weakness of some of the local regimes on which his would-be containment of Russia was based. This charge may or may not apply in the case of Vietnam (and on the fundamental decision to get out of Vietnam with honour and credibility intact rest the Cambodian decisions as well). *The Economist* believed it did not. Maybe nobody will ever know whether a credible America, unafflicted by Watergate, would in fact have been able to uphold a shaky government in South Vietnam and a distinctly shaky peace against North Vietnam's messianic mission and America's own "peace" lobby.

But the miscalculation permeates the rest of the book much less arguably. The "honest soldier" Yahya Khan, helpful as he was in opening the door to Peking, simply was not a sensible pillar on which to rest Mr Kissinger's correct subcontinental strategy. The Shah, rightly and ringingly though Mr Kissinger defends him (page 1,258 *passim*), was during these particular years grandly withdrawing from early reform into later dictatorship in ways that America could and should have discouraged. It is a revealing accident that, at the moment when Chou En-lai's invitation to Peking finally arrives, after weeks of nail-biting waiting for it, Mr Kissinger should have to fish America's president out of a dinner for a certain Anastasio Somoza. It illustrates something that, in a book devoted to the discouragement of Soviet meddling by linking every issue at stake, one of the

largest, southern Africa, is the subject of no comment at all. That Mr Kissinger vividly understood the local issues at stake, this book demonstrates without doubt. But that he subordinated them so remorselessly to geopolitics was bound, in the end, to disturb geopolitics as such.

Second, Mr Kissinger was sucked into the very Nixonian embattlements against American opinion that he so tellingly, often cattily, depicts. Indeed his own motives—love for his adopted country—somewhat oddly merge with his cold-eyed analyses to produce a furious display of that quality he most derides, sentimentality, in the fight with his critics over Vietnam, strategic arms and defence. He knew, after all, that Vietnamisation was unlikely to work. He points out to Nixon in 1969 that withdrawal of American troops

will become like salted peanuts to the American public: the more . . . come home, the more will be demanded. . . . Han-oi's adoption of a strategy designed to wait us out fits both with its doctrine of how to fight a revolutionary war and with its expectations about increasingly significant problems for the US (pages 1,481-82).

Hence, in part, his negotiating theory of "pre-emptive concession" rather than negotiating by driblets. The critics, he argues, never saw the damage they did:

> ... as the years went by, every concession produced demands for further concessions. In the face of media and congressional opposition, there never was any firm ground on which to stand (page 293).

And, over strategic arms,

As almost always happens, retreat by the administration spurred, rather than stilled, critics (page 539).

That such a huge proportion of this huge book is devoted to the fight for a president's policy inside the government is merely the most vivid illustration of how tough it is to conduct a democracy's struggle to contain non-democracy. In several asides, Mr Kissinger hints at remorse. The backchannels of information and diplomacy of which he was the prime architect produced something which, he adjures, must not be repeated: the "compartmentalisation of knowledge which was such a bane of the Nixon administration" (page 448). But of course it will be repeated. And so will the competition for, and manipulation of, American public opinion be repeated, whether it is by the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Irish, the Vietnamese or the Russians themselves. That, in the end, is where American foreign policy has to be made: in a million men's minds. And that is where a Kissinger again in the White House, with a new president, would have to found his policy next time round if his construction was to survive.

128

[LC]

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

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

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

## White House Years
by Henry Kissinger

(Little, Brown; $22.50)

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

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

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

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

Nonetheless, buried deep in these

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

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

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

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

28

The New Republic

state he happens to serve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## SOCIOLOGY • CONTINUUM BOOKS

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

Alvin W. Gouldner

Volume III THE TWO MARXISMS

Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory

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

Volume I THE DIALECTIC OF IDEOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY

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

—The Journal Of Politics* $14.95

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

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

—Norman Birnbaum, The New York Times $8.95

Andrew Arato and Paul Breines

THE YOUNG LUKACS AND THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN MARXISM

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

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

—Booklist $16.50

Charles A. Meconis

WITH CLUMSY GRACE

The American Catholic Left, 1961-1975

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

—Library Journal $9.95

Elias Canetti

THE TONGUE SET FREE

Remembrance of a European Childhood

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

—The London Times $12.95

THE SEABURY PRESS

815 Second Avenue • New York, N Y 10017

December 15, 1979

29

LC

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

(Random House; $24.95)

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

Peasants of Nizhny-Novgorod, c. 1880.

Blind wandering pilgrims, c. 1870.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30

The New Republic

[L]

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

A Yakut riding a reindeer.

Blacksmiths

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

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

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

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

off the deep end, but the good doctor himself.

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

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

December 15, 1979

31

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

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

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

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

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

Ronald Steel

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

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

(Viking; $9.95)

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

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

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

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

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

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

photo of Dalton Trumbo by Mitzi Trumbo

32

The New Republic

FOREIGN
POLICY

NUMBER 37 WINTER 1979-80 $3.00

3
Muscle And Brains
Stanley Hoffmann

28
The Anti-Soviet Brigade
Dimitri K. Simes

43
Will MX Backfire?
William H. Kincade

59
Kissinger's Track Back
David Watt

67
Hold The Malaise!
Chester L. Cooper

71
18 African Guideposts
Helen Kitchen

AMERICA AND ULSTER

87
Healing Hands
Kevin M. Cahill

101
Hands Off
Conor Cruise O'Brien

111
Begin's False Autonomy
Mark Heller

133
True Neutrality For Israel
Nahum Goldmann

THE GERMANIES AT 30

142
New Country,
Old Nationality
Melvin Croan

161
All Quiet
On The Eastern Front
Josef Joffe

176
Dateline Bonn:
Uneasy Super-Ally
David Schoenbaum

37

KISSINGER'S
TRACK BACK

by David Watt

59.

[LC]

Watt

60.

61.

[LC]

Cutting Corners with Nixon

62.

Watt

—Thomas Reed

63.

[LC]

Watt

### Modified "Hands-Off"

64.

65.

66.

The
re-emergence
of Henry Kissinger

By HENRY L. TREWHITT

Washington.

By the time he left the State Depart-
ment in 1977, Henry A. Kissinger had
eaten his way into a new wardrobe. Never
visibly unnerved, he spent on food the ten-
sions of eight years at the pinnacle of for-
eign policy. His attack on snacks during
airborne press briefings was truly awe-
some.

He never left the limelight entirely; he
merely stepped to its edge. With him went
several of his former Secret Service
agents, a private bodyguard many regard
as more of a conceit than a necessity. But

perhaps they contributed to the mystique
that converted him into a one-man intel-
lectual industry.

As a speechmaker he is reported to
earn $1,000 a minute, perhaps an exagger-
ation, but a small one. His memoirs com-
manded $2 million in advance. For con-
sulting at a Washington think tank, he re-
ceived office space, help in composing his
writings, and a fee. NBC contributed to
the golden flood in an arrangement both
the network and Mr. Kissinger have come
to regret.

Now he is back at center stage, slim
again, carrying "White House Years," the
book that is his return ticket to the unend-
ing Washington seminar on international
affairs. It is quite simply a tour de force.
No doubt it is infuriating to many of his
enemies and critics. But it is there for de-
bate. It is brilliantly organized and it with-

holds less, and is less self-serving, than
most such undertakings.

His reentry may be tentative for a
while. Another book is in the making. But
it is hard to imagine that Mr. Kissinger
will not make his judgments felt in the
developing presidential campaign. In that
respect he may be a torment, wittingly or
not, directly or indirectly, to the Carter
administration.

For what Mr. Kissinger represents
above all is a coherent view of a chaotic
world. It is a view that commands maxi-
mum balance of contending forces. Until
after World War II those forces were ex-
ercised by a small group of powers, the
United States, Japan and a few in Europe.
Later they were primarily the superpow-
ers, the United States and the Soviet
Union. Today they include all of the above
plus a large group of disparate nations in

the so-called Third World, some of which
may soon have nuclear weapons.

Mr. Kissinger never succeeded in
creating his balance. Indeed the realiza-
tion that the mix is constantly changing is
central to his theories. He does not hesi-
tate to defend the threat or use of force
when it is essential to the larger cause.
His is a perspective dictated by history, a
perception of morality that may or may
not transcend emotional or even humani-
tarian considerations of the moment.

The degree of success or failure of his
tenure doubtless will be debated for years.
Before he left office Congress was frus-
trating him at every turn, rejecting his ap-
peal for money to sustain South Vietnam
in the hour of collapse and to challenge
Cubans in Angola. Still he insists that the
Vietnam peace accords might have en-
dured had Watergate not brought down

President Nixon, that "tortured man...
who thrived on crisis, [but] also craved
disasters."

In any event his judgment of what is
needed is as crisp as ever, reappearing in
"White House Years" in a public climate
more favorable than in 1976. The argu-
ment for a calculated balance of power is
not new, indeed is as old as history. But it
is especially pointed at a time when the
Carter administration is criticized most of
all in foreign policy for lacking a clear
view of its goals and how it plans to reach
them.

There are enough parallels between the
foreign policy apparatuses of the Nixon,
Ford and Carter administrations to be
striking. How they evolved is another mat-
ter.

Mr. Kissinger arrived as the estab-
lished academic theoretician from Har-

vard, becoming, first, national security
adviser to Mr. Nixon. William P. Rogers, a
lawyer friend of the president, took over
the State Department.

In the Carter administration, Mr. Kiss-
inger's old job is occupied by Zbigniew
Brzezinski, another established academic,
from Columbia. Mr. Carter's Secretary of
State, Cyrus R. Vance, is, like Mr. Rogers,
a prominent lawyer. Unlike Mr. Rogers,
Mr. Vance had a long history of public
service when he arrived.

With time, of course, Mr. Kissinger
came to dominate the system, eventually
humiliating Mr. Rogers and succeeding
him in the State Department. Treating
foreign policy as a series of isolated prob-
lems, Mr. Rogers never developed the

48

[L.C]

long reach that would enable him to compete with Mr. Kissinger.

Similar rivalries exist between Mr. Vance and Mr. Brzezinski. But Mr. Vance, who also tends to treat foreign policy issues in lawyerly isolation, has guarded his turf more carefully than Mr. Rogers did. And Mr. Brzezinski, a theoretician who never mustered influence comparable to Mr. Kissinger's, has not emerged in sharp focus.

One reason for the distinctions may be the differences between the two presidents. Mr. Nixon came to office with a prime interest in foreign policy and views in harmony with Mr. Kissinger's. Mr. Carter arrived with little experience and contempt for traditional policies, but with a will sufficient to control compliant subordinates.

With Mr. Kissinger's re-emergence, the stage is set for a fundamental comparison of approaches to policy. The vehicle almost certainly will be the presidential campaign, for Mr. Kissinger inevitably will appear as an adviser to one or more Republican aspirants and possibly, depending on the identity of the victor, to the party nominee.

His is a policy of antipation and of attempts to control events as they develop. The Carter administration's is a record of reaction.

That is not necessarily a criticism, though the Republicans surely will make it one. Mr. Kissinger's anticipatory powers may have been in full bloom near the end of his tenure. His ability to control events was slipping badly, mainly because of congressional world weariness.

He bequeathed Mr. Carter a foreign

policy in which the American position had eroded severely. The Soviet Union, counting on the paralysis caused by Vietnam and Watergate, was groping for advantage. In his final months in office, Mr. Kissinger had maneuvered assiduously to soften the impact.

To some of the challenges the Carter administration responded assertively and with courage. The personal political risks accepted by the president in bringing the Mideast peace accords to reality were potentially fatal,

But it is not in Mr. Carter or Mr. Vance to adopt a broader geopolitical course or rewards and penalties and constant high risk as a steady diet. They would not, for example, make the strategic arms limitation treaty hostage to Soviet restraint in a wider framework, as a Kissinger-dominated foreign policy would have required. What Mr. Brzezinski might have done, had

he the freedom to reflect in policy his worries about Soviet expansionism, is not recorded.

Which policy approach corresponds more accurately to current reality is by no means certain. What is certain is that, for whatever combination of reasons, the American position in the world is more fragile than it was three years ago. And that, inevitably, will be the stuff of a political campaign.

It comes at a time when the public and Congress teptatively are shedding some of the inhibitions that followed Vietnam and Watergate. The trend surely will inspire political adjustments on both sides, including some jingoistic appeals.

But if the nation is lucky, it also will inspire serious discussion of what the U.S. role in the world ought to be and can be. That is where Mr. Kissinger's return to the scene is important.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, NOVEMBER 30, 1979

29

THE BOOK PAGE

"Henry Kissinger is just that — a foreigner who has more faith in this country than do most natives, a pillar of strength in a swamp of weakness."

White House
Years

By Henry Kissinger; Little Brown &
Co.; $22.50.

By BOB COLACELLO

Henry Kissinger's "White House Years" is heavy reading: 1,521 pages, eight pounds, $22.50 worth of history as seen from the heights, written in a style that can only be called "statesmanlike." Nonetheless, I couldn't put it down.

For four weekends I read on and on and on, sucked by the densely em-
broided details, riveted by the care-
fully chosen revelations, driven by the
skillfully constructed narrative,
amused by the sarcasm just beneath
the formalistic pomposity only fit-
ting for the important position of the
author. And the characterizations: for
the first time ever Richard Nixon
comes alive. Mao, Chou, Brezhnev,
Sadat, the Shah, Rockefeller, Ag-
new, Connally, Haig and Haldeman
emerge as human, as well as polit-
ical, creatures. But, as in all great lit-
erature, the finest drawn character is
the author, brilliant, egotistical,
manipulative, ambitious and — thank
God! — self-deprecating; Kissinger as
portrayed by Kissinger is a role only
the good Doctor himself could play.
Yes, dear Hollywood Reporter read-
er, there is a movie here.

Like a born screenwriter, Kissinger knows a good scene when he sees it. Take the night Syria invaded Jordan, and Israel threatened to counterattack. Where was Kissinger? Shuttling back and forth between the Situation Room and "an obscure alloy in the basement of the Executive Office Building . . . Nixon had decided to go bowling." Imagine this in Technicolor: the National Security Adviser hurriedly relating the contents of a hotline call from King Hussein to the President, who was "holding a bowling ball in one hand."

But, make no mistake about it, Kissinger has not written this opus to make fun of the easiest target of our time, Richard Nixon. Writing of the same Jordanian crisis, Kissinger's description of Nixon is almost poignant: "Once the point of decision was reached, Nixon acted with a kind of joyless, desperate courage — torn between his insights and understanding

“On a State visit to Ottawa in 1972, an
advance man decided that the tan furniture in
Pierre Trudeau's office would not flatter
Nixon on television and took it upon himself to
re redecorate the Prime Minister's private office
in blue-covered sofas.”
— From "White House Years"

of the international reality and his fa-
talistic instinct that nothing he
touched would ever be crowned with
ultimate success."

In fact, Kissinger's best writing is about Nixon, the strange, solitary, imperial President who "sipped, one after another, cups of coffee that were brought in without him asking for them," all the time surrounded by "clean-cut, young men" that "Halde- man had proudly picked from adver- tising agencies and junior executive positions."

The following paragraph is out-
standing Kissinger-on-Nixon: "The
meeting of any new person filled
Nixon with an undefined dread . . .
He therefore insisted on briefing pa-
pers that set out the possible course of
conversation in meticulous detail. But
since Nixon did not want to admit
that he needed guidance, he would im-
pose upon himself the extraordinary
discipline of committing these mem-
oranda to memory. And to show how
well he had done, as well as to play
the little games which so delighted
him, he would skate as close as he
dared to the edge of what he had been
advised to avoid. He sometimes cut it
very fine, as his advisers inwardly
squirmed, but he never went over the
precipice."

More Kissinger-on-Nixon: "Rich-
ard Nixon has to this day not over-
come his own social inhibitions . . .
Giving vent to his dislike for Tru-
deau, Nixon remarked that future
contracts with the Chinese could take
place anywhere but Canada."

Most importantly, Kissinger goes
out of his way *not* to disassociate him-
self from the President he served.
Even when he originally disagreed
with Nixon, *he now* agrees, as with
the Christmas 1972 bombing of
Hanoi. "Nixon and Haig were, I be-
lieve, essentially right," Kissinger
writes, even though history may have
let him off the hook. But then the au-
thor's Foreword rises to this climax of
honorableness: "I alone am responsi-
ble for the contents of this book, as
indeed I am for my actions as de-
scribed herein."

Self-serving? Show me an auto-
biography that isn't. On Cambodia,
the 1969 bombing of which has irra-
tionally earned Kissinger (and Nixon)
the epithets "murderer" and "crim-
inal," Kissinger's defense is quite
documented testimony of none other
than Prince Sihanouk. Talk about
surprise witnesses!

I don't want to create the impres-
sion that Kissinger has written a

merely dramatic book — there is a
very important message here, which I
will come to, but first allow me one
more choice anecdote. This one, hi-
larious yet chilling, is about LBJ.
Shortly before assuming office, Ki-
singer visited the soon-to-be-former
President. "I have one piece of ad-
vice to give you, Professor," Johnson
told him. Kissinger informs us: "I
leaned forward to profit from the dis-
tilled wisdom of decades of public
service," — and then moves in for the
kill — "'Read the columnists,' John-
son added, 'if they call a member of
your staff thoughtful, dedicated or
any other friendly adjective, fire him
immediately. He is your leaker.' "

What is the basic Kissinger mes-
sage? I think he states it here:
"Whereas in the 1920s we had with-
drawn from the world because we
thought we were too good for it, the
insidious theme of the late 1960s was
that we should withdraw from the
world because we were too evil for it.
Not surprisingly, American self-
doubt proved contagious; it is hard
for foreign nations to have more faith
in a country than it has in itself."

Yet, Henry Kissinger is somehow
just that — a foreigner who has more
faith in this country than do most na-
tives, a pillar of strength in a swamp
of weakness. It is hard to imagine a
U.S. government that included Ki-
singer at the mercy of Palestinian ter-
rorists to secure the release of Amer-
ican diplomats from the clutches of
Iranian religious fanatics, which is
where we stand (or kneel) at this writ-
ing.

But that's political speculation. Sticking to the purely literary, with "White House Years" Henry Kissinger has achieved the impossible: 1,521 pages, eight pounds, $22.50 and four weekends without a visit to Studio 54 later, he's got me waiting for the sequel.

Bob Colacello is executive editor of
Interview magazine and coauthor of
"Andy Warhol's Exposures." He
graduated from Georgetown Univer-
sity School of Foreign Service in
1969.

DEC 4 1979

BOOK PAGE

The Book Page, a weekly series of celebrity book reviews assigned and edited by George Christy, appears each Friday in The Hollywood Reporter.

Timely new publications of in-
terest both to the literary commu-
nity and to The Hollywood Re-
porter readership are reviewed by
celebrated personalities and
achievers in the fields of litera-
ture, film, theatre and fine arts.

30

• GEORGE CHRISTY •
THE GREAT LIFE

BONE-CHILLING "FOLK GUIGNOL" sums up the spirit of "Sweeney Todd," which is playing to sell-out audiences at the Uris Theatre on Broadway. Stephen Sondheim's musical about "the demon barber of Fleet Street, who never forgot and never forgave" and whose friends ("my faithful friends") are his silver razor and toothpuller ("see how they glisten"), has staging by the invincible Hal Prince that is of the highest theatrical art — it makes history, as does Hal's direction of the hit musical, "Evita." No director in the theatre today uses crowds with such adeptness and facility — they are modern-day Greek choruses, choreographed in tableaux that are charged with wit, raciness and a punctuality that streaks across the stage like the crack of a razor against a honking strap. As the psychopathic Sweeney Todd, Len Cariou bristles with tragic melodramatic terror, and goo-goo eyed Angela Lansbury, as Mrs. Lovett, whose meat pies are the worst in the world, emulates a comic-strip Tillie the Toiler. She becomes the accomplice to Sweeney Todd — baking pies of the potter and the priest ("not as hearty as a bishop, nor as bland as a curate") and anyone else who comes for Sweeney's close shaves. As with "Evita," the sets wrap around the theatre and pull the audience into the sooty grisliness of London's Industrial Revolution that Eugene Lee has designed like a gigantic Erector set. "Sweeney Todd" makes "Dracula" seem like a Mother Goose rhyme; Sondheim's elegies and epiphanies are wintry as December skies.

NEW YORKERS JAMMED the Whitney Museum, where Andy Warhol's exhibition, "Off the Wall," featured portraits of the '70s, from Baby Jane Holzer to Golda Meir, Truman Capote to Andy's late mother Julia Warhola, Jamie Wyeth to Mick Jagger. "Only in New York could you get a crowd like this together," declared jeweler Nicola Bulgari, as he surveyed Doris Duke, Interview's Bob Colacello, Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes, Kewpie-doll rouged Diana Vreeland with her coterie of men in black-tie, David Hockney, Valentino, Sly Stallone with new best friend Susan Anton, Gladys and Marty Poll, Adriana and Brooks Jackson, New York magazine's Joe Armstrong, Lester Persky, Marian Javits, and, in the center of it all, Andy himself, the court painter who also has published a book, "Exposures," in which he discusses his social disease — wanting to go out every night. "You catch it by kissing someone on both cheeks."

AT THE CHAMPAGNE PARTY afterward at actress Janet Villella's Park Avenue flat, Janet was a knockout in Galanos' moon-white silk with the wide black patent-leather belt, as she greeted director Jack ("The Elephant Man") Hofsiss, actress Jessica James of the formidable upper structure (she's appearing in "Gemini"), beauty Cornelia Sharpe, who's finished filming "She" with the newly svelte Anita Ekberg and Omar Sharif, San Francisco's Steve Silver ("I came for a week and stayed six"), and Marty Bregman. Mort Janklow, the hot literary agent who arranged the $3.2 million sale of Judith Krantz' "Princess Daisy," was praised by designer Jackie Rogers, who is writing a book Mort is representing — "dedicated to all the people who never left home, with a P.S.: it's never too late!" Paul Sorvino pooh-poohed the gay backlash at "Cruising" which Billy Friedkin has written from Gerry Walker's novel and which Billy is editing. "All the fuss from the gays made our producer Jerry Weintraub very happy — it means millions of dollars more at the boxoffice. The film isn't antigay — it's a murder mystery that takes place in New York's leather bars, with a surprise ending." Next night at Maxwell's Plum, the "singles-mingles" palace where naked ladies on the brass doorhанdles welcome visitors, Richard Tanner of Alfred Knopf was talking about Diane Keaton's bizarre book, "Reservations," which contains "pictures of hotel lobbies." He predicts Barbara Goldsmith's book, "Little Gloria, Happy at Last," will sell out next spring — "all about Gloria Vanderbilt's custody battles, which were endless." Richard himself has finished a bit role in Woody Allen's Untitled Project No. 4 — "we were bussed out to a Jersey City junkyard in 30-degree weather . . . one group was asked to look happy, I was with the 'sad' group. The open call on it was crazy. 2,000 actors jammed four city blocks — kids on crutches, others clutching African tribal masks or their high school graduation photographs. Do you suppose Bob De Niro started this way?"

Edie Adams and Barbi Bon-
ton Gradow, left, support
Builders Bash fund-raiser
for legendary Pasadena
Playhouse, which is reopen-
ing soon; Ed Asner, above.

Steve Rothman, left, is executive director of the Pasadena Playhouse; Earl Holliman and Betty Garrett, center; Paul Titos performed as a mime, right

Marcia Israel of the Judy's shops, left; actress Sharon Bilbrey and David Houk, above, owner of Pasadena Playhouse

Actress Michelle Brunetti and Jay "Dennis the Menace" North, left; Don DeFore, center; model Anita Melendez, right, and ex-welterweight champ Carlos Palomino

Actress Barbra O and her
husband, writer Robert
Price, left; Jan Sterling and
actor Alan Manson, above

Jim Frank