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North Vietnam. Yet, when the precarious peace wrought by the Paris Agreement [1973] was challenged, the United States, in the throes of physical and psychological abdication, cut off military and economic assistance to people whom we had given every encouragement to count on our protection. This consigned those we had made our wards to an implacable—and, in Cambodia, genocidal—Communist conqueror.

The shame and the terror of the last helicopter leaving the U.S. embassy in Saigon in April 1975 should be indelibly imprinted on our memory of the past century of horror. Kissinger's account of the confusions and humiliations surrounding that retreat is particularly poignant. Then there was Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge were at the same time taking over Phnom Penh and would end up by systematically murdering between one and two million Cambodians, 15 to 30 percent of the population. The American ambassador offered to evacuate Sirik Matak, the former prime minister, who on April 12 responded, as the U.S. evacuation was underway, with a handwritten note in elegant French:

Dear Excellency and Friend:

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it.

You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we all are born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].

Please accept, Excellency and dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.

The week of the U.S. evacuation, the headline in the *New York Times* read: "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." The Khmer Rouge first executed all members of the former government who had stayed behind, then all government employees and their families, and then forced the two million inhabitants of Phnom Penh to leave the city for a war-ravaged countryside that

could not support them. Sirik Matak was shot in the stomach and left without medical aid. He died after three days.

## Who Did What

It is a bitter story, and the bitterness with which Kissinger tells it is fully warranted. In 1965, Father Dan Berrigan, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and I were the first cochairmen of what then was called Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. In the present book, Kissinger indicates, but does not develop, the point that already by 1965 he thought U.S. policy in Vietnam a dangerous mistake. The question was how to withdraw with honor, which meant, above all, keeping faith with those who counted on us. In January 1969, four of us met with Kissinger, newly installed as Nixon's National Security Advisor, in the White House. He told us that, if a year later we did not see persuasive evidence of a policy of U.S. withdrawal of troops from Indochina, he would join our protest against the war. This is compatible with the account of his intentions—and Nixon's and, later, Ford's policies—offered in the present book. By 1971, I had largely withdrawn from what had become Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, which was probably the largest continuing organization in what was known as the peace movement. I was thoroughly disillusioned with the "radicalized" liberalism that seemed increasingly to want not a just settlement but a Communist victory, and was on my way to joining the company that would go by the name of "the neoconservatives."

As in the case of Senator Jackson, who was championed by this company, Kissinger's book is very hard on conservatives and, especially, on "neocons" who, he charges, were complicit in the callous cutting off of even meager assistance to allies in Indochina. He expected better of these people, and his particular disappointment with *Commentary* and its then editor, Norman Podhoretz, is acute. Later, in 1982, Podhoretz would publish *Why We Were in Vietnam*, a scathing account of the abandonment of Indochina, but by then it was too late to make any difference in policy, as distinct from the never-ending polemics of the intellectual class. I expect that Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and other major players in the neoconservative world of the time will, in due course, have something to say about Kissinger's view of their part in what led up to the catastrophe of 1975. As for my part, I was simply weary of Vietnam and paid slight attention. That is no excuse. I was stirred to action again in the summer of 1975 when I joined with Jim Forest of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Fr. Berrigan, and a few

OCTOBER 1999

81

others in protesting to Hanoi its brutal treatment of
those in the conquered South. That, too, was too
late. We appealed to a little over a hundred people
who were identified as national leaders in the
movement against the war to join us in our protest.
The split was almost exactly fifty-fifty. Those who
declined made clear that they subscribed to the
maxim, "No enemies on the Left." They were pleased
by Hanoi's victory. (For further reflection on those
turbulent days, see "Remembering the Movement" in
my 1992 book, *America Against Itself*, University of
Notre Dame Press.)

The Nixon-Kissinger "breakthrough" with China is almost universally acclaimed, and *Years of Renewal* contains fascinating details about meetings with Chinese leaders, especially with Chairman Mao, who in his last years expressed his preference for "rightists" in world affairs and spoke repeatedly about his soon going to meet the judgment of God. One gets the impression that Kissinger was embarrassed by the second subject. We are not told what he thinks about President Clinton's strange notion of U.S. "partnership" with the brutally repressive regime in Beijing, which is perhaps just as well since after he left office the entanglement of his Kissinger Associates Inc. with corporations operating in China has compromised the credibility of what he says about China policy. On other questions, Kissinger takes pains to answer his critics, especially his conservative and neoconservative critics, about his role as it appears in light of the much later ending of the Cold War.

## How the Evil Empire Ended

In the 1970s, Kissinger was much criticized for policies of “détente” and “coexistence” that seemed to assume that the Soviet empire was a permanent feature in world affairs. He now takes much credit for the “third basket” of the 1975 Helsinki agreement of the European Security Conference, dealing with human rights. It is true that leaders such as Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa in Central Europe courageously used the third basket to challenge “the evil empire,” but it must be candidly said that little thanks is owed Kissinger for that. The critics at the time had ample reason to say that Helsinki looked like a ratification of Soviet hegemony and the division of Europe created by Yalta. The conservative criticism, Kissinger writes, “was a pity because we did not differ with their analysis of the nature of the Soviet system. Where we disagreed was in assessing its implications for American foreign policy. . . . Far better, we thought, to seize the initiative and control the diplomatic

process. In the meantime, we would keep open the
possibility that what had begun as tactics might
evolution into a more reliable pattern of coexistence."

His critics did not think U.S. policy should be
aimed at "a more reliable pattern of coexistence."
They thought the goal should be, however long it
took and through however circuitous a policy, the
end of the Soviet empire. For Kissinger, the
paramount concern was for stability and order so
that he could "control the diplomatic process."
Looking back on the end of the Cold War, Kissinger
goes further: "Reagan's policy was, in fact, a canny
reassertion of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon
and Ford Administrations clothed in the rhetoric of
Wilsonianism—a quintessentially American
combination of pragmatism and idealism. In an
important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived
from a Reaganite variant—not a rejection—of the
strategies of the 1970s."

One can understand why Kissinger says that now,
but it is utterly implausible. Reagan was neither a
historian nor a philosopher, but he made no secret
of his belief that the Soviet empire was a temporary
aberration, a brutal yet fragile artifact that, if
carefully but firmly pressed, could not be sustained.
There is no evidence from the time that Kissinger
shared that view. Reagan's position was strongly
supported also by Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher. In Kissinger's account of the ending of
the Cold War, she is not mentioned. Most
astonishingly, there is not even one mention of
John Paul II. Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher, John
Paul II—in almost every telling these four were the
crucial players in the collapse of the evil empire. In
some of the more persuasive scholarly accounts,
John Paul II was the most crucial player, since
without him there would have been no Walesa, no
Solidarity, and no “Polish miracle” that began the
unraveling of Soviet control. In Kissinger’s
extended discussion of one of the most important
political, moral, economic, and military events in
human history, John Paul II did not exist,
Gorbachev was a pawn of events beyond his control,
Thatcher goes unmentioned, and Reagan is
grudgingly commended for following Kissinger’s
lead. (I say grudgingly, recalling that “the rhetoric
of Wilsonianism” is a deeply pejorative phrase in
the Kissinger lexicon.) Such a reconstruction of
history is as unseemly as it is incredible.

Kissinger is commonly described as a practitioner
of Realpolitik, one who favors stability and order
over justice. He writes that his devotion is "to
evolution over revolution," which is sensible enough.
He wants always to be "realistic" and to deal with the
problems of the "real world," which, he says again

82

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and again, are “complicated,” “convoluted,” “ambiguous,” etc. One is reminded of Herbert
Butterfield’s observation that realism is not a school
of thought but a boast. Given the moralistic
boastings and sentimental fuzzy-mindedness of some
foreign policy practitioners, not least in the current
Administration, such realism is not without its merits.
But it also has its severe limitations. From the
evidence of his memoirs, Kissinger is never more in
his element than when relishing the complexities of
making an improbable deal. There is a frequently
anti-intellectual tone in his dismissal of critics who
presumably don’t know about that real world.
Kissinger presents himself as the consummate deal-
maker, and never more pleased than when a deal can
be made circuitously and secretively, producing a
public surprise. It is not unlike, I suppose, the
satisfactions in doing magic tricks. At the risk of
psychologizing, the impression is not entirely
dissimilar from Kissinger’s extended and fascinating
description of the personality and habits of Richard
Nixon. In any event, Kissinger’s “real world” is a
world largely impervious to big ideas and clear moral
judgments. In this connection, one notes that
Kissinger has a thing, as they used to say, about
religion.

In underscoring the complexity of the real world
of international affairs, Kissinger employs religious
vocabulary in criticizing those who are simplistic or
deceived by abstractions. He has no use for the
“theology” of the arms control crowd; Hanoi
employs “sacramental phraseology” in negotiating;
Cambodian genocide has a “near liturgical quality”;
and the bureaucracy is given to delivering
“homilies.” “Sacramental” is the word employed
repeatedly to signify what is unreal, evasive, or
delusive. One is left wondering where this habit of
speech—and, one supposes, of mind—comes from
in Kissinger’s life experience. He certainly gives no
indication of having thought much about religion,
or Christianity in particular. Apparently indifferent
to philosophy and tone deaf to religion, he makes
embarrassing missteps. For instance, in analyzing his
difficulties with Archbishop Makarios, the president
of Cyprus, he twice asserts that the source of the
problem was “a legacy of the Greek Orthodox
clergy’s historic claim to both secular and religious
leadership.” Anyone who knows the slightest thing
about Orthodoxy knows that the tradition, from the
Byzantine Empire to Moscow’s evil empire, is exactly
the opposite: the subordination of the Church to
the state in what is pejoratively called
caesaropapism.

More than with the first two volumes, I am struck
by the ways in which *Years of Renewal* underscores

Kissinger's observation that anyone entering upon
public service had better get a good education first
because afterwards he has to live on his intellectual
capital. Kissinger evidences very little intellectual
curiosity. These thousands of pages are infinitely
detailed about tactics, maneuverings, logistics, and
personalities but are impatient of ideas, except for
the one big idea of power. Apart from memos and
briefs related to the tasks at hand, he seems to have
had little time for reading, which is perhaps not
surprising, given the exhausting pace at which he
worked, caught up, one gathers, in a perpetual
shuttle from crisis to crisis, from deal to deal. His
critics on the domestic front are, in distinction from
those who gladly betrayed their country's interests,
persistently described as Wilsonians, ideologues,
idealisers, moralists, and others trapped "in our
nation's historic quest for moral purity." In this
context, "moral purity" drips with authorial
derision.

I suppose Kissinger may have written these three
big books for most of the reasons mentioned at the
outset of this reflection, but certainly not for the last
one—“to try to make sense of one’s life and the
world of which it is part.” At least there is slight
evidence in these curiously impersonal books that
that was among his purposes. In a time of narcissism
and tell-all exhibitionism, there is a lot to be said for
such reticence. At the same time, his determination
to, as he might put it, stick to the facts of the real
world may reveal more about Henry Kissinger than
the true confessions he did not write. The third
volume concludes on a personal note, however. It is a
letter from his father, who was then very ill, written in
1946.

In all the hard times of the war, the
confidence lived in me that God will protect
you. I am grateful to Him that He was with
you. . . . Always keep in mind that we find
real satisfaction only in what we are doing
for others. Try always to be good, faithful,
helpful, reliable, selfless.

I would have liked to see you grown up
and to be witness of your success and
happiness. God bless you.

The last words of the book are, “My father
recovered and lived until 1982 through all the
events described in these memoirs.” The clear
implication is that his father got to see what he
hoped to see. One must hope that Henry Kissinger
is right about that.

FT

## Review Essays

implications, for it would commit the United States to what British prime minister Tony Blair called "the humanitarian war" around the globe. And it offers cold comfort for those who would be saved by such wars because, as we have seen in these books, only a great televised massacre will prompt decisive action by Washington. In an age dominated by spinmeisterei, not realpolitik, we now have the CNN Doctrine.

# The Renewal of Henry A. Kissinger
by David Eisenhower

*Years of Renewal*. By Henry A. Kissinger. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. 1,119 pp. $35.)

In a telling scene from his third volume of memoirs, Kissinger recalls the end of an era. It is mid-May 1975, a month after the Khmer Rouge unleashed genocidal terror on Cambodia's gentle population and two weeks after North Vietnam's armored columns rolled into Saigon. On the afternoon of May 12, word came to Washington that Khmer Rouge units had seized an American vessel, the *Mayaguez*, on the high seas. In response, President Ford ordered U.S. Marine, naval, and air forces into action to rescue the ship and crew and launch retaliatory air strikes against the port of Kompong Som.

Kissinger's account of this "Mayaguez incident" includes a dozen vignettes sprinkled with maxims, asides, and a sobering litany of mishaps. William Colby, the beleaguered director of a demoralized Central Intelligence Agency, the target of sensational congressional hearings at the time, provides consistently inaccurate estimates as to the whereabouts of the ship and crew. A war-weary Pentagon stalls about mounting B-52 strikes from Guam and undertakes only two of the four strikes Ford had ordered against Kompong Som. Efforts to manage the crisis are constantly interrupted by previously scheduled trips and duties, including a black-tie dinner Ford hosted for Dutch prime minister Johannes den Uyl, who superciliously lectures his hosts on the inappropriateness of military force to "solve political problems" (p. 566). Ford and Kissinger, still in evening dress, then receive word that several dozen Marines have been killed, but the *Mayaguez* and its crew have been rescued. Though a small and symbolic victory in the context of recent defeats, Ford and his advisers rejoice, certain that a turning point had been reached.

Almost all the grand themes of Kissinger's volume are present in this episode, and Kissinger concludes, with his acute sense of irony, that after a decade of war to save all Southeast Asia from communism, the United States

David Eisenhower is a best-selling author and historian. He is currently director of the Public Service Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication. He is a member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Board of Advisors.

652 | Orbis

"had excited "For admiral of the war, health care management, the realist was a good our account year which was written long ago," Nix said, "but the role center out product of both events was not 19 of a person.

Review Essays

"had ended by rescuing a ship" (p. 575). And throughout, in the midst of the excitement and emotion, Kissinger kept his eye fixed on the broader ramifications: "Foreign policy knows no resting place and . . . its every success is usually an admission ticket to a new set of decisions" (p. 570). Only this time, the new set of decisions would not involve Vietnam. With the *Mayaguez*, the Indochina war was finally and forever over. The new set of decisions would involve the healing process and the lessons to be learned, and Kissinger remained at the center, closer to Ford than anyone else and clearly indispensable.

In the week of the *Mayaguez*, Kissinger left Washington on one of many speaking forays to set forth the lessons of Vietnam and his formula for the "healing process." First, he believed that the end in Vietnam meant the end of America's "unique relationship with history" stemming from America's prior sense of safety and uniqueness (p. 1061). In a word, Vietnam taught Americans to appreciate "complexity," and henceforth her aspirations would have to be realized in partnership with other nations. Secondly, among partners, compromise was necessary, and that meant a new era of limits in which peace was "not as a gift to be given but a service to be rendered for international stability and our own self interest" (p. 556). Hence the title, *Years of Renewal*, for Kissinger's account of the Ford years, the lengthy final volume of a trilogy on his eight years at the pinnacle of the U.S. government, and hence the tone and organization, which differ significantly from the earlier volumes treating the Nixon years. While all three volumes are replete with anecdotes, vignettes, and descriptions written in Kissinger's vivid and familiar style, the philosophical digressions are longer and the tone more argumentative in this last one.

The long interval between the appearance of this book and his second volume in 1982 accounts in part for these differences. The end of the Cold War has cast the diplomacy of the Kissinger era in an altogether new light, and Nixon's détente and triangular diplomacy, not to mention Vietnam policies, are almost universally criticized by the Right as well as the Left. Perhaps that is why Kissinger, in this book, seems less exuberant and less certain of the verdicts both contemporaries and future historians will render on his career.

Another reason for the difference in tone is that Kissinger's personal role changed radically after 1972. During Nixon's first term, Kissinger played a central but supporting part, rarely if ever venturing actions not carefully worked out with the president. Dominating a National Security Council (NSC) planning process invented in the 1968-69 transition, he was surely a key conceptualizer, but his distinctively "Kissingerian" concepts were subordinated to Nixon's pursuit of "peace with honor" in Vietnam. In any event, as Kissinger indicated in his book *Diplomacy* (1994), he strongly approved of Nixon's fundamental approach, even comparing his concept of the national interest to that underlying Teddy Roosevelt's foreign policy as opposed to that of Woodrow Wilson. But Kissinger's vision differed from Nixon's in emphasis if not purpose, and if Watergate had not intervened it seems likely that after the final Vietnam settlement in January 1973, Kissinger and Nixon might have gone their separate ways. Instead, because of Watergate, Kissinger gained an unprecedented opportunity to fashion foreign policy on his own.

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Fall 1999 | 653

## Review Essays

Within just ten weeks after the Paris accords, Nixon faced a full-blown domestic crisis over Watergate which soon absorbed the bulk of his time and energy. Even before the Senate hearings in June, it was becoming evident that the scandal was a fatal wound. In May, Nixon delegated responsibility over the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) to Kissinger, initiating an expanded role for Kissinger that increased after his appointment as secretary of state and grew even more rapidly following Gerald Ford's confirmation as vice president. Though none would say it out loud, the slow transition to Ford had begun; the Nixon era was over.

Interregnums have occurred before in American history, but rarely so early in a president's elected term, with so much at stake, and with so much responsibility placed on a single unelected individual. Kissinger describes how the "political establishment," concerned about the effects of Watergate, accepted "by tacit consensus" (p. 189) a role for him that amounted to a surrogate presidency. Indeed, for an interval beginning in the winter of 1974, Kissinger functioned as something even more important than surrogate. He was a quasi president in his own right and was accorded the kind of popularity and visibility typical of a president at the height of his powers. Kissinger's international stature—cemented by the Nobel Peace Prize—eclipsed every other foreign leader on the scene. And while Kissinger relinquished that authority in principle when Ford became president, he continued to exercise it in fact well into Ford's term, at the behest of the new president himself. For instance, Kissinger reprints a telegram he dispatched to the Shah of Iran dated March 10, 1975. He was protesting the shah's "brutal and indefensible" decision to strike a deal with Iraq and cut off the assistance Iran had been giving to the beleaguered Kurds. Dispensing with any reference to "the President's views," Kissinger writes in the first person: "With respect to the Kurdish question, there is little I can add to what I have already said to you personally during our recent meeting. . . . I will, of course, follow with great interest the evolution of Iraqi-Iranian relations and of Iraqi policy in your area generally and toward the Soviet Union in particular" (p. 594).

Indeed, *Years of Renewal*, with its orderly presentation, philosophical passages, and uplifting "reflections," resembles the memoir of a president such as Harry Truman more than that of a secretary of state such as Dean Acheson. And the title Kissinger selected indicates the basic task that absorbed his as well as Ford's attention from August 1974 onwards. The major innovations of the Nixon era—achieved at such cost—were all but complete, but still had to be consolidated. What was needed was a respite, a period of "repose" similar, perhaps, to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars examined by Kissinger in his book *A World Restored*.¹ As a student of that era, Kissinger was well prepared to guide the major powers, and especially post-Vietnam America, towards a new "equilibrium" in the 1970s. According to Kissinger, equilibrium describes

¹ Henry A. Kissinger, *A World Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich, and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822* (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). See p. 323.

654 | Orbis

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a stable international order in which all the major states are generally satisfied with the status quo. It presupposes the willingness not only to act in concert against revolutionary change, but to accept evolutionary change within a framework of order. And that, in turn, requires a modicum of domestic contentment within the great powers lest regime change render any of them revolutionary.

Kissinger strove for such an equilibrium, reasoning that the post-Vietnam international scene was essentially stable. Thanks to Nixon's opening to China and Beijing's admission to the United Nations, no major power was isolated. Thanks to the "tacit coalition" of all the non-Soviet bloc powers, the USSR was effectively deterred even as détente satisfied the Soviets' craving for legitimacy (p. 92). The only questionable building block, therefore, was ... the United States itself. Traumatized by Vietnam and Watergate and susceptible to populist "enthusiasms" on the left and right of its politics, the United States might still prove to be a power unable or unwilling to play its required geopolitical role. That is why Kissinger's early efforts to assert U.S. leadership and, in Kissinger's words, "turn foreign policy into an act of healing," were so critical. The tasks of bringing about international and domestic "equilibrium" were deeply interwoven.

Kissinger's first major initiatives in 1974 involved the shoring up of relationships downgraded during the Vietnam era. NATO, which Kissinger had first tried to address in his abortive "year of Europe" (1973), was severely strained. The anti-Makarios coup in Greece in July 1974 raised the threat of war between Turkey and Greece to the destruction of NATO's southeastern flank. It also invited the insurgent Congress to intrude in foreign policy matters. A second major area neglected during the Vietnam era was the Middle East, which became Kissinger's prime focus of attention in the wake of the Yom Kippur war and the oil embargo. Latin America was a third region in which the United States could assert positive leadership in the interest of "healing" its foreign relationships, while at the same time rebuilding a bipartisan consensus at home. Unfortunately, as Kissinger feared, the patient refused his medicine. As early as August 1974 and increasingly thereafter, Kissinger's "equilibrium" came under attack by an entrenched wing of antiwar Democrats opposed to Kissinger's realism and U.S. engagement, and by the ascendant wing of "neoconservatives" led by Senator Henry Jackson, which challenged détente on the basis of human rights and concerns about the U.S.-Soviet strategic balance. Having previously enjoyed a kind of immunity from criticism, Kissinger was now obliged to mount a political defense against liberals, neoconservatives, and the establishment media. The result, in terms of these memoirs, is surprisingly counterintuitive. First, a Kissinger beset by often unfair assaults becomes an uncharacteristically sympathetic figure. Secondly, a Kissinger trying—and failing—to appeal to Americans' better natures punctures the caricatures of him as an amoral "Dr. Strangelove" or "modern Machiavelli."

That is because, as Kissinger shows in *A World Restored*, the equilibrium of nineteenth-century Europe, and his own twentieth-century version, had a palpable moral dimension. At the root of Kissinger's policies is a principled conservatism which resembles Edmund Burke's "legislative reason." Like Burke,

blown one and meant that over the past role it grew president. It began;

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2-1822

Fall 1999 | 655

## Review Essays

Kissinger links freedom to order and liberty to restraint, and hence, Western freedoms flourish best in a climate of international stability. In principle, Kissinger opposes basing government policies on moral imperatives, a Wilsonian trait evident in both the antiwar Left and the neoconservatives. Both movements advanced variations of Wilson's "national faith" premised on American innocence and uniqueness. But misguided Wilsonianism was to blame in large part both for the Vietnam war and for the obstruction of his, Nixon's, and Ford's efforts to resolve it. As Kissinger put it forty years earlier, the most fundamental problem of politics "is not the control of wickedness, but the limitation of righteousness."²

But consolidation and order had an institutional as well as moral dimension. International and domestic stability required "legitimate" governments, which in the fall of 1974 meant a functioning president restored to the prerogatives of his office. By his own account, Kissinger recognized that the extraordinary role he had assumed in 1974 was a temporary expedient. The Vietnam controversies and Watergate had unduly weakened the presidency. In addition, Ford's unique status as a president who had not sought or been elected to national office was both an asset and a problem. Another precondition of renewal, therefore, was a gradual diminution of Kissinger's own role. And that accounts for yet another characteristic of this volume. Whereas Kissinger's first two volumes chronicle his personal rise, *Years of Renewal* chronicles a gradual process whereby Kissinger ceded power back.

That process is underway in earnest by the half-way point of the book and is dramatized by Ford's emergence at the Helsinki summit. Three months after Helsinki, Kissinger lost his NSC position in the "Halloween massacre," the shakeup prompted by Ford's decision to begin preparing for the 1976 election. Anticipating the contest with Ronald Reagan, Ford decided to put all major foreign policy initiatives "on hold," in effect viewing foreign policy to be a political liability. At the same time, the triangular diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing, Kissinger's bailiwick, had all but faded away. The de-emphasis of superpower negotiations began at the Ford-Brezhnev summit in Vladivostok, which not only failed to produce a durable SALT framework, but offended the Chinese, who concluded that the Americans would not stand up to the USSR as they had hoped. Kissinger's discussions with Mao Zedong in October 1975 are accordingly full of malaise. "We see that what you are doing is leaping to Moscow by way of our shoulders," charges Mao. "You see we are the fifth [of the major powers]. We are the small finger" (p. 883). A rupture is averted thanks to Ford's visit to Beijing in December. He assures the Chinese that the People's Republic stands under the American nuclear umbrella, whereupon the ailing Mao subsides. But Mao still concludes, "It seems to me at present there is nothing very much between our countries. . . . [P]robably this year, next year, and the year after there will not be anything great happening between our two countries" (p. 892). A month later, Kissinger, now demoted to the status of a

² Ibid., p. 206.

“mess of détritus”

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one of the 1975 abuses overrunning January 1976, aid in the country's despair would have been of re

onwards. America's success in the Korean War, and the steps taken by China, the Soviet Union, and the other powers which

656 | Orbis

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"messenger," makes a final journey to Moscow that effectively marks the end of détente.

Kissinger's praise of Ford is unstinting throughout *Years of Renewal*. In fact, his portrait of Ford recalls his description of Castlereagh as "solid, ponderous, pragmatic . . . a plain dealer."³ Kissinger characterizes Ford as perfectly suited to the task which Ford himself described as restoring "stability . . . to recover our economy, our energy situation and our position in the world" (quoted p. 391). Ford also emerges as decisive, principled, and—as a disciple of fellow Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg—a committed internationalist. Their working relationship was further enhanced by Ford's choice of Kissinger's original patron, Nelson Rockefeller, as vice president. Finally, even the election of the so-called McGovern Congress in November 1974 had a paradoxical silver lining. During the Watergate crisis, Congress had enacted a series of measures to curb the so-called Imperial Presidency that had allegedly usurped powers during the Cold War. In 1973 and 1974, Congress had already "reclaimed" powers by means of the War Powers Act, bills cutting off military aid to Turkey during the Cyprus crisis, and the Jackson-Vanik amendments to the 1974 Trade Act, which seriously damaged meddling, launched a "second Watergate" in early 1975, in the form of sensational investigations into alleged CIA illegalities and abuses. But Congress, under the sway of its most intransigent antiwar elements, overreached, permitting it to be outmaneuvered and checked decisively. The telling moment arrived when the communist offensive in Vietnam resumed in January 1975. Ford decided to back measures to restore military and economic aid for South Vietnam and Cambodia despite the long odds against those countries' survival, despite heavy media pressure and poll data against it, and despite the contrary advice of Ford's personal staff and the certainty that Congress would reject additional aid. He did so because picking a symbolic fight with Congress over the "abandonment" of allies was an effective and low-cost way of restoring the credibility of his office while obliging the neo-isolationist Congress to take the rap for defeat in Southeast Asia.

Viewed dispassionately, the U.S. military effort in Vietnam from 1969 onwards had never been waged to gain certain victory, but rather to demonstrate American reliability and a credible military posture in a region critical to the success of Nixon's China initiative. Once U.S. forces were withdrawn, not even Ford favored reentering the conflict. The question was simply whether the United States would aid South Vietnam to the extent permitted by the Paris accords in the face of massive communist violations, or "bug out." Thus, by stepping up on the issue of aid, Ford emerged as the champion of U.S. commitments—both legal and moral—and forced the congressional doves to take their contrary notion of what was "legal" and "moral" to its logical, disastrous conclusion. And Congress, instead of grudgingly approving Ford's requests, which might have proven to be too little and too late in any case, decided to

³ Ibid., p. 30.

western Kissinger in traitments experience both efforts to solve problems."² moral government to the extent that the state. And Kissinger's articles a

the book's months later," the election. A major war and a new and axis of vostok, led the USSR into fifth (of thanks people's ailing here is last year, our two us of a

Fall 1999 | 657

Review Essays

accept Ford's challenge. Thus, the McGovernite Congress—over Ford's symbolic protest—"led" America out of Indochina and assumed the onus of forsaking two allies amidst the chilling scenes of Vietnamese refugees and Cambodia's disintegration. Ford's confrontation with Congress plainly suited Kissinger. Increasingly excoriated for his role in prolonging the suffering, Kissinger was sure that the communists were about to serve up far greater horrors that would expose the credulity and naiveté of the antiwar left. So it was, and in his book, Kissinger reprints excerpts from a dispatch filed from the field by his long-time critic, Sidney Schanberg of the *New York Times*, which typified mainstream media coverage at the time. Reporting from Cambodia in mid-March 1975, Schanberg minimized the chances that the imminent Khmer Rouge victory would be followed by a bloodbath, predicted a peaceful accommodation between the Cambodian parties, and profiled Khieu Samphan, a top communist leader, as an idealist with a reputation for "integrity" (pp. 503-4). Kissinger coolly concludes, "Debacles are rarely forgiven even if they arise from leaders carrying out the people's ostensible wishes" (p. 811). The McGovern Congress, in other words, had done the unforgivable.

In the ensuing *Mayaguez* affair, Ford was able to deal Congress out almost entirely, effectively nullifying the War Powers Act just eighteen months after its passage. To be sure, the liberal Congress pressed on, mounting a last stand in the controversy over "covert" aid to Angola later that year. But after May 1975, the McGovernite Congress gradually metamorphosed into a Jacksonite Congress, and almost all Ford's attention thereafter was focused on his problems with the resurgent Right.

Meanwhile, Kissinger was energetically engaged in "cabinet" diplomacy to save the equilibrium abroad. The final Indochina crisis coincided with an intense phase of Middle East "shuttle diplomacy" and Kissinger's strenuous efforts to unify the response of the oil-consuming Western powers facing the challenge of OPEC. Kissinger also adjusted rapidly to the arrival of a whole new cast of characters, including Yitzhak Rabin, Helmut Schmidt, Giscard d'Estaing, and Edmund Wilson, all of whom proved disposed to cooperate on the energy crisis, international finance, the Helsinki summit, the specter of "Eurocommunism," Angola, and other African issues. The solidarity NATO achieved in the wake of the Vietnam war thus set the stage for decades of cooperation, and the NATO summits of 1975-76 were a vital affirmation of American purpose and leadership.

The Helsinki conference, for instance, was to have been the crowning achievement of a *Soviet* diplomatic campaign to legitimize the partition of Germany and the communist grip on Eastern Europe. But thanks to NATO solidarity and the painstaking work of British, French, German, and American diplomats, the "Final Act" agreed upon by thirty-five heads of state at Helsinki in fact provided the "political space" for emergent dissident groups to demand that their communist regimes respect human rights and that the Soviets keep their hands off Eastern Europe. Almost as meaningful was the emergence of Ford. He was at the center of the conference, rebutting all talk of an America in retreat, sought out by his counterparts for private meetings, and dominating

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658 | Orbis

Review Essays

the plenary sessions while the hour and a half Soviet delegates watched from their seats in the rear of the modernistic Finlandia hall.

The final sections of *Years of Renewal* are devoted to a list of new concerns indicative of America's awakening after its long national nightmare. To be sure, Kissinger's star is descending as he is stripped of his post as NSC adviser and loses control of SALT policy. China policy is on hold, and after the Israeli-Egyptian interim accord in September, Ford promises Rabin there will no more Middle East initiatives until after the 1976 election. Negotiations on the status of the Panama Canal are likewise postponed past the elections. But as late as 1976, Kissinger remains hyperactive, and his "shuttle" negotiations in Africa pave the way to majority rule in Southern Rhodesia (and ultimately South Africa), thereby defusing radical movements in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, Kissinger's talents are never better demonstrated, including his ability to empathize with others, his knack for bridging chasms, and his incredible stamina. These final forays connect Kissinger's notion of equilibrium to the future, demonstrating that his idea of stability is not an embrace of a rigid status quo or a "defeatist" rearguard fight against change, but rather a timely and practical accommodation to change for the mutual benefit of all. Thus, Kissinger does not drape himself in righteousness for ending white minority rule in southern Africa, but instead reminds the reader how close the Rhodesian crisis was to the South African one, which was directly linked to the Angolan crisis, which impacted NATO via Portugal's flirtation with "Eurocommunism," Latin American policy via the Cuban intervention in Angola, and East-West relations via Soviet and Chinese patronage of various factions there. In sum, to craft a foreign policy on moral grounds to the exclusion of pragmatism, interests, and geopolitics is itself immoral, because it is stupid. Those are my words, not Kissinger's, whose chosen tone in this final testament is true to the title, healing rather than combative. And that is why, though some readers might complain about its overwhelming detail and occasional stretching of points to accommodate subsequent events, "Kissinger's third" is sure to cement his reputation as a statesman, not just a diplomat.

> Crafting a foreign policy on moral grounds to the exclusion of pragmatism is itself immoral.

In *A World Restored*, Kissinger lauds Austria's Prince Metternich for brokering peace "coolly and unemotionally, arranging his combinations in an age increasingly conducting policy 'by causes.'"⁴ He also wrote that "the test of a statesman . . . is his ability to recognize the real relation of forces and to make his knowledge serve his ends."⁵ Those, it is fair to say, are the standards by which Kissinger would hope to be judged. Some may say that he failed by those very standards inasmuch as America in the 1990s has reverted to form. Wilsonianism is triumphant once again, and American foreign policy displays missionary qualities that recall those of the pre-Vietnam era. But decades will

⁴ Ibid., p. 319.

⁵ Ibid., p. 326.

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press out months long a last but afteratonite problems

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owning ion of NATO. Americanolski demand keep pace of america nating

Fall 1999 | 659

## Review Essays

pass before Kissinger's career can be fully and fairly judged, which is something Kissinger probably understands as well as anyone. As he explained long ago, the statesman must bridge a gap between a people's experience and his own vision, hence "statesmen often share the fate of prophets. . . . Their greatness is usually apparent only in retrospect when their intuition has become experience."⁶

All in all, Kissinger's three volumes add up to an amazing story. The entire work runs roughly 4,000 pages, much longer than the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter memoirs combined. But its length is commensurate with Kissinger's task, which is to chronicle the Vietnam era and extract its enduring lessons. In that sense, it resembles Churchill's multivolume work on World War II. Like Churchill, Kissinger treats in depth a period of grave international stress that casts in bold relief the challenges facing current Western leaders: how to reconcile democracy with power and discern the role of democracy in a radically changing world. Covering different eras, their themes are nonetheless similar, including the paradox of power, the "contingency and impermanence" of politics, the importance of personality in the shaping of history, and above all, the complexity involved in translating moral aims and values into practical actions that tangibly advance the cause of democracy. Both works emanate from perspectives based on earlier studies of European statesmanship, and both authors, thanks to their personal experiences with totalitarianism (namely, Nazi Germany), were imbued with a sense of the fragility of democracy and how much is riding on wise leadership.

Though in different times, Churchill and Kissinger also address the same audience—those who shape America's destiny, which in the final analysis determines the destinies of all Western nations. Both highlight the ambiguities of their times: Churchill explaining why the Allied victory of 1945 resulted in an uncertain peace and Kissinger describing how American leaders attempted to parlay the setback in Vietnam into a favorable and lasting peace. Both had faith in the capacities and "moral significance" of the United States,⁷ but as Kissinger's account shows, altered circumstances rendered American society no longer immune from social and political schisms.

Kissinger's task as a writer is harder than Churchill's. His trilogy does not cover an inspirational triumph that is nostalgically recounted each night on the History Channel. Rather, it covers an era Americans still prefer to forget. Moreover, *Years of Renewal* appears at the height of what may be called the "Carville era," a time of superficial moralism, preoccupation with materialism, political correctness in all things, and political values pushed aside in favor of polls, focus groups, and media campaigns. Undeflected by it all, Kissinger has provided a vivid depiction of a critical era and a catalog of lessons that may yet prove prescient. But whatever his personal legacy, Kissinger's literary monument stands as a reminder that no matter how favored by fate and

⁶ Ibid., p. 329.

⁷ See Henry A. Kissinger, *White House Years* (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), p. 229.

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["Review Essays", "geography, America depends on creative leadership, an active and enlightened citizenry, and a commitment to the principles that inspire all great strivings and achievements.", "Modernity and Its Discontents\nby Paul Hollander", "*American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas.* By Dario Fernandez-Morera. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. 294 pp. $62.95.)", "*Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.* By James C. Scott. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. 444 pp. $37.50; $16.95, paper.)", "*Conquest and Cultures: An International History.* By Thomas Sowell. (New York: Basic Books, 1998. 493 pp. $35.00.)", "This reviewer has spent a large part of his professional and personal life trying to understand the antinomian or adversarial impulses among Western, and especially American, intellectuals and their susceptibility to questionable and often patently destructive ideas.¹ I tried to unearth some of the motives and circumstances that contributed to the rise and persistence of these attitudes and beliefs, including the central, animating conviction that American society has been the most unjust and morally corrupt in history. After almost three decades of thinking and writing about these matters, I remain bemused by the combination of embittered idealism and estrangement that underlie the recurring attachments to dubious ideas and theoretical remedies of the human condition.", "From time to time these beliefs led to the (usually short-lived) admiration of political systems—especially those which described themselves as “communist” or “socialist”—that appeared to be desirable alternatives to the alleged corruptions of American society. The dominant notion of “communism,” however, did not mean the designation Marx had reserved for the highest stage of socialism, which was ostensibly characterized by social harmony, material abundance, the withering away of the state, and the absence of social problems.", "There was an easily discernible correlation between the intensity of the intellectuals' rejection of American society and their sympathy toward commu-", "¹ See the author's *Political Pilgrims*, 4th ed. (1998), *Anti-Americanism*, 2nd ed. (1995), *Decline and Discontent* (1992), and *The Survival of the Adversarial Culture* (1988), all from Transaction Books, New Brunswick, N.J.", "*Paul Hollander* teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His books include *Soviet and American Society: A Comparison*, *Political Pilgrims*, and *Anti-Americanism*. His next book will be entitled *Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism* (Yale University Press, in press).", "Fall 1999 | 661", "ing ago, I know now, was the beginning of the Cold War. The con-querer's is. In like as that I would say, to all, of course, all, of course, all

22 THE JERUSALEM POST

BOOKS

JUNE 25, 1999

# From the pinnacle of power

YEARS OF RENEWAL (The Concluding Volume of His Memoirs) by Henry Kissinger. New York, Simon & Schuster. 1151 pp. $35.

By SHIMSHON ARAD

Someone once told Kissinger that Dean Acheson compared leaving the office of secretary of state to the end of a great love affair. Diplomacy has been Kissinger's love affair. All that Kissinger had aspired to, however, while he was at Harvard, was to be head of the State Department's Planning Staff, or an assistant secretary of defense. To be asked by Nixon to serve as national security adviser, and then as secretary of state, was considered a remote prospect.

Having participated in, and contributed to, some of the biggest diplomatic developments of the past 30 years, Henry Kissinger, like Winston Churchill, deemed it quite proper to write his own version of the history he had helped shape. His first two volumes of memoirs were published in 1979 and 1982, and dealt with Nixon's White House. This was indeed the period when Kissinger's reputation soared. We now face this concluding account that records his years with Ford. It is huge and covers a wide range — relations with the Soviet Union and China, the Middle East, Africa, arms control and the energy crisis. Compared with the glittering achievements of the Nixon era — and with the exception of the Middle East chapters — this last volume reflects the frustration and anguish that afflicted Kissinger's last years in Washington. It is defensive in tone, but never lets the passing anger blemish the impassioned analysis.

The chapters dealing with Israel and the Middle East are the most revealing, testifying to Kissinger's gifts as a superb diplomat and affirming his unique standing as a policy-maker. But before exploring the subjects close to us, a note on Kissinger's view of Ford. Not unexpectedly, Kissinger titles his chapter on the new president: "Ford, not a Lincoln." Ford's human qualities eased the pain of the people of Nixon's White House. He would settle on goals in one or two crisp meetings, and neither feared controversy among his advisers nor objected to having his preconceptions challenged.

The Cyprus crisis turned out to be one of the first of many, and "a seminal event for Ford's presidency." Soon after Ford assumed office in August 1974, Congress cut off mili-

tary aid to Turkey, a strategically indispensable ally. The Greek majority insisted on a unitary state, which, "by turning the Turkish population into a permanent minority, in effect disenfranchised the Turks."

In this context, Kissinger observes most poignantly that, "in the long run, the most successful [statesmen] understand that only those agreements are destined to last in the maintenance of which the other side develops an interest." An astute historical lesson to our own dilemma with the Palestinians. Referring to President Makarios, Kissinger cites Talleyrand, who said of the Bourbons that they neither learned nor forgot anything. The link to Israeli-Egyptian relations is illustrated by Kissinger's observation that Sadat, when faced with an uncompromising Israeli attitude, "appealed to America's support in obtaining concessions from Israel." He did so by giving the US a "reputation for fairness we were then obliged to uphold." This element of cherishing praise for "fairness" is essential in understanding Ford's relations with Israel.

In December 1974, the Jackson-Vanik and the Stevenson amendments were introduced, linking trade and credits to the Soviet Union with Moscow's policy on emigration. When examining the whole sad chapter of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, we clearly see – 25 years later – how shortsighted were those in Israel and in the US who insisted on dictating to the US terms to be imposed on the Soviets. Jackson and his Jewish and Israeli supporters demanded 100,000 emigrants a year, while Gromyko indicated willingness to grant 45,000. Humiliating a big power resulted in stopping the large-scale emigration of Jews for over 10 years. In frustration, Kissinger appealed to prime minister Rabin "to intercede with the Senators." It was, of course, "somewhat degrading for a secretary of state to have asked a foreign leader for help on what was essentially an American domestic issue."

In October 1974, Kissinger traveled to Moscow to see Brezhnev. Before dinner, Brezhnev took Kissinger aside "to assure me that the Soviet Union had not encouraged the 1973 M.E. War." Brezhnev hinted that they had sent signals to the Americans warning that a war was coming, but, as Kissinger reveals, "we had simply excluded in our deliberation the possibility of an Arab attack on Israel." The Soviet leader repeated the standard Soviet line on the Middle East: that Israel should return to the 1967 borders, that the US and the USSR should "guaran-

tee these borders and that the Geneva Conference should be reconvened."

The Americans rejected the Soviet position. "We had no incentive to participate in a diplomacy – much less a multilateral conference – in which the Soviet Union would appear as the lawyer for the Arab side." Kissinger pleaded repeatedly with ambassador Dobrynin that the US would cooperate with the Soviet Union in the Middle East only if Moscow "separated itself from its radical clients." So long as the US kept Israel strong, the American "trump card would be that the Soviet Union... had no means to bring about either a military conclusion or a diplomatic breakthrough."

Kissinger admits that they had "grossly underestimated Sadat." It never occurred to them that "he might be clearing the decks for military action." And later, when he advocated a peaceful settlement, it started to dawn on Kissinger that in Sadat the US could have a partner. Two weeks after the end of the Yom Kippur war, Egypt agreed to hold direct talks with military representatives of Israel. These were followed by a change of government in Jerusalem – Golda Meir resigned and Rabin replaced her. Rabin's first coalition was not a very stable one and his request to Kissinger was not to rush with the peace process before he had a chance to consolidate his grip on power.

As it turned out, Ford's relationship with Rabin "never really prospered," says

Kissinger. The first encounter was "close to a disaster." Kissinger was really concerned. He had known Rabin since Rabin's years as ambassador in Washington, "where he had shown unusual understanding." Part of the problem between Ford and Rabin "was the psychological makeup of the two men." Tough as Golda Meir could be, observed Kissinger, she never showed that side publicly when it came to Israel's relations with the US. Rabin was plagued by the moderate Alon on one side and by his "hawkish" Peres on the other. That made his life very complicated. Peres, says Kissinger, "was intuitive, where Rabin was analytical, intellectual where Rabin was practical." It was only in their second experiment in working together – between 1992 and 1995 – that their different traits complemented one another.

Ford interpreted Rabin's approach as representing a wish to stall. Kissinger knew that Rabin had problems with his cabinet. It was in this context that Kissinger came up with the idea of the "exploratory" shuttle. The shuttles had a way of bringing home to the American team "the vastness of the gulf between the national styles and perceptions" of the Egyptian and the Israeli leaders. Israel's negotiators "dared not avow what they feared the most: that the U.S. was being seduced by a newly moderate charismatic Arab leader." Kissinger was not oblivious to Israel's deep concerns, but both he and Ford expected a bolder move to overcome the fear and suspicion and seize the opportunity. In historical perspective, Kissinger was right. But with the political and psychological constraints of the Seventies, it had to take some time for Rabin and Peres to be ripe.

And as history has proven, they ultimately concluded the agreement with Egypt, which implied withdrawal in the Sinai, and subsequently produced the Sadat 1977 visit to Jerusalem and the Camp David Accords.

Over a hundred pages are devoted in detail to Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy," the "step-by-step" mechanism and Ford's "reassessment" threat. In addition, there are more than 30 pages dealing with the energy crisis, and 39 pages recording the Lebanese crisis of 1975-76 and the tacit understandings the Americans attained between Syria and Israel on the "red lines" in Lebanon.

This book is a very valuable contribution to the history of Israel and to its relations with its neighbors and with the US. It should be required reading for all practitioners in diplomacy and those who wish to engage in politics in a serious manner.

ARIEL JEROZOLMSKI

The National Interest

Summer 1999

HK

RN

5 pp.

Books

Henry, Act III

Walter A. McDougall

Henry Kissinger, *Years of Renewal* (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 1119 pp., $35.

ACCORDING TO Walter Isaacson's *Kissinger: A Biography*, the consulting firm of Kissinger Associates became active in 1982, when the firm's chief "realized he did not feel like writing a third volume of memoirs and that Ronald Reagan was never going to make him secretary of state." Perhaps so, but that does not explain why we had to wait seventeen years for the finale of the trilogy that began with *White House Years* (1979) and *Years of Upheaval* (1982). More to the point are the facts that Kissinger Associates proved more successful, hence time-consuming, than expected; that Kissinger wanted to devote what spare time he had to more interesting projects (above all, his magisterial *Diplomacy*, 1994); and that the memoirs themselves had to be revisited in light of the end of the Cold War, the death of Nixon and each new revelation about the 1970s.

Thus, even though the author must have begun *Years of Renewal* years ago, the final product contains subtle replies to William Bundy's *A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency* (1998), William Burr's *The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks With Beijing and Moscow* (1999), *The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House* (1994), Isaacson's biography (1992) and the selective release of Nixon tapes by the National Archives. One result is that although Kissinger's third

volume covers his service in the Ford administration, the first 166 pages consist largely of rebuttals and clarifications made necessary by all the above. For instance, Kissinger bluntly disputes Bundy's "caricature" of policy making in the Nixon administration as obsessively secret, deceptive and thus self-defeating. No recent president, he argues, tried harder than Nixon to explain to the Congress, media and public what he was doing and why. The audiences just hated the message, or messenger, and refused to listen. Moreover, Kissinger adds, by 1972 he himself was often called to the microphone to explain and persuade, and while he grants that domestic politics were hardly his long suit, he denies trying to mislead.

One may add that if charges of willful hypocrisy are to be hurled about, the veterans of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who designed, then deserted, the Vietnam War amidst yawning "credibility gaps" are ill-advised to cast the first stones. As for the transcripts of taped conversations, avidly peddled as the unvarnished truth by those who would profit from them, Kissinger warns that they are "flotsam and jetsam" of little historical use because it is impossible to gauge the moods, motives and contexts of remarks made in private. Nixon in particular was prone to venting his deepest insecurities about people not present, while at the same was "obsessively incapable" of disagreeing with people who were present. Kissinger grants that Nixon's language was at times inexcusable, but denies ever seeing him intoxicated during working hours,

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and stands by the eulogy he delivered at Yorba Linda in praise of a flawed but courageous and "near great" maker of tough decisions.

ENTER Gerald R. Ford, who, by contrast, was guileless: "With Ford, what one saw was what one got." And given that he was an unelected president taking office in an era of polarization and paranoia, "Providence smiled on Americans when—seemingly by happenstance—it brought forward a President who embodied our nation's deepest and simplest values." In an unspoken comparison to Clinton, Kennedy and perhaps Reagan, Kissinger meditates on how television and the computer have replaced the written word—and a politics of substance—with the visual image—and a politics of impressions:

> The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values, stars by consensus. When a candidate's views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchor-persons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital. Radicalism replaces liberalism, and populism masquerades as conservatism.

Contrary to his bumbling media image, Ford was just such a hero in Kissinger's eyes. He took office at a moment when most of the old establishment, not to mention the antiwar movement and the "McGovernite Congress", had turned isolationist in the belief that anti-communism had corrupted America, and that American Cold War exertions had polluted the world. At the same time, conservatives and neoconservatives were metamorphosing into Wilsonian crusaders and damning the administration for not being anti-communist *enough*. Yet Ford never wavered from his mission to heal the nation's wounds. Kissinger confesses that at times he thought Ford's equanimity excessive, but he now appreciates how his restraint lanced the poison from the American body politic and hastened its convalescence.

Kissinger is probably right about that.

Just as Nixon's Southern strategy and appeal to blue-collar Democrats helped make possible the later "Reagan coalition", so did Ford's willingness to absorb the angry darts of the Left and Right dissipate the passions aroused by Vietnam and Watergate until (with assists from his successor's "malaise" and the Ayatollah) the nation was ready to get back into the ring with its geopolitical opponent.

But the anticipatory question many of us had about Kissinger's final volume of memoirs was whether he would put a new spin on the era of détente in light of the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Would he deny the charge that he was a pessimistic declinist, and insist that he, too, had been working toward an eventual victory in the Cold War, rather than a long-term accommodation with Moscow? The answer is yes, though his claims are modest and his arguments subtle. Thus he and Nixon did not discount the Soviets' ideology, but did conclude:

> that the Soviets' ideological reach was collapsing. . . . Once our opening to China was completed, the Soviet Union faced a coalition of all the industrial nations in the world in tacit alliance with the most populous nation. Sooner or later this equation would work in favor of the democracies, provided they could contain Soviet adventures by deterrence and give the Soviets a chance to reduce confrontation by opportunities for cooperation.

To be sure, Vietnam had severely wounded American prestige and self-confidence, but Nixon and Kissinger believed that whereas détente would buy time for America to recover, Brezhnev's embrace of détente was a "gamble" that "as these policies gather momentum and longevity, their effects will not undermine the very system from which Brezhnev draws his power and legitimacy. Our goal on the other hand is to achieve precisely such effects over the long run." Kissinger came to know the Soviet rulers intimately, and judged that their obsession with political survival in the Byzantine nomenklatura gave them little incen-

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tive to exercise strategic imagination. Hence, "the Soviet Union in the 1970s accumulated military and geopolitical power less as an expression of long-range geopolitical aims than as a substitute for them." He did not doubt that time was on the side of the West, and says he is still unable to identify any of the alleged "give-aways" that his critics said made détente a "one-way street."

Likewise, the 1975 Helsinki Accords denounced by the American Right as a reprise of Yalta have come "to be appreciated as a political and moral landmark that contributed to the progressive decline and eventual collapse of the Soviet system." Kissinger does not claim to have had any premonition of that at the time, but he does note that the Soviets themselves were worried enough about the human rights guarantees in "Basket Three" that they lobbied (unsuccessfully) for a pream-ble forbidding their use as a pretext to inter-fere in the domestic affairs of states. Indeed, the East Europeans were avid supporters of the Final Act because (or in spite) of the fact that it amounted to a repeal of the Brezhnev Doctrine under which the Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. But when it came to selling Helsinki at home, President Ford was trapped. He could hardly brag publicly that Helsinki was really a secret ploy to encourage dissent in the Soviet bloc, but he could not win conservative support at home unless he did precisely that. It was this Catch-22 that engendered Ford's "Poland" gaffe in the 1976 debate with Carter, and perhaps his loss of the White House.

Likewise, the Vladivostok agreement on nuclear arms was rejected by the American Right for allegedly ratifying Soviet strategic parity, if not superiority, and by the Left for not cutting nuclear arsenals. But the only way the United States could have leveraged Moscow into lower levels of arms was by increasing, or threatening to increase, the American arsenal. Thus, the "dilemma faced by Ford was that the senators supporting Vladivostok were generally in favor of cutting the defense budget, while those who favored an increase in defense also

opposed Vladivostok." In time, Reagan was able to launch the defense build-up needed to nudge the Soviets into reductions, but in 1976 that was a utopian option.

HISTORIANS gaining access to new documentation, especially from the communist side, and pundits pursuing their domestic political agendas will debate whether or not the Ford administration did the best it could under the circumstances, but none can deny its energy. Kissinger is sure to be ribbed for penning another 1119 pages covering the truncated Ford presidency. But the truth is that the Ford years were packed with crises and contingencies that might have spawned disaster had Ford and Kissinger bowed to the "Come Home, America" mood. Describing the situation in the fall of 1974, Kissinger alludes to "the strategy by which a non-elected President, saddled with a McGovernite Congress, trying to rebuild a discredited presidency, and dealing with ethnic conflict on Cyprus and the threat of war in the Middle East, sought to pursue the part adversarial, part cooperative relationship with the other nuclear power." That was only the beginning.

Over the next eighteen months came the congressional assault on covert action and the evisceration of the CIA; a series of exhausting shuttles to persuade Anwar Sadat and the Israelis to disengage in the Sinai; the congressional cutoff of funds for the defense of Cambodia and the fall of that country to the genocidal Khmer Rouge; the North Vietnamese offensive of 1975 and the futile fight in Congress for material help for the South; the final evacuation from Saigon and the Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez; the crushing of Kurdish autonomy and danger of another genocidal conflict; and efforts to rally Europeans to surmount the ongoing energy crisis and forestall the Euro-communists' bid for power in several NATO governments. Then add to all that the decolonization of Portuguese Africa; Soviet and Cuban intervention in Angola, and the subsequent danger of radicalization and even race war in south-

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ern Africa; the collapse of Lebanon into civil war and foreign occupation; the Panama Canal treaty; and continuing negotiations with the Soviet Union and China.

What is more, given that the Ford administration was constantly "whipsawed" at home by the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate Left and the neoconservative Right, it is remarkable that its setbacks were so few and achievements so many. In one sense, of course, the mid-1970s were years of cloture, as illustrated by Kissinger's excruciating accounts of former Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak, pleading vainly for help as the Khmer Rouge approached, then dying in agony in Phnom Penh; or U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, who had lost a son in the Vietnam War, bravely and bitterly directing the airlift out of Saigon and leaving on the last helicopter; or black African leaders begging in vain for the United States not to desert the Angolan resistance lest the Soviet-armed "boys with the guns" be emboldened all over Africa.

But in another sense those were years of gestation when new constellations of power emerged that would shape the next fifteen years. In the Middle East, Kissinger doggedly explored the Syrian and Jordanian dead ends until he discovered the high road to bilateral Egyptian-Israeli agreement. He and Ford rallied the oil-consuming industrial states to coordinate their response to the energy crisis, institutionalizing what would become the "G-7" summits. Kissinger and the British worked to prevent a Greek-Turkish war over Cyprus, thus shoring up NATO's southern flank for the duration of the Cold War. And while Congress undercut CIA efforts to prevent a Marxist takeover in Angola, Kissinger and the British, again, shuttled among a dozen African capitals to win white and black Africans alike to a plan for majority rule in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Namibia, thereby frustrating Soviet and Cuban plans to exploit racial tensions on the continent. Finally, of course, the much maligned Helsinki Accords would encourage the Polish Solidarity Movement and Helsinki Watches

that cracked the Soviet bloc—whether or not the drafters expected such results, or expected them so soon.

THE BIGGEST coup of the Kissinger years was the "tacit alliance" with China. And only Nixon could have pulled it off, not only because of his anti-communist credentials, but because Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai—unlike moralistic Americans of all persuasions—thought primarily in geopolitical terms, the only terms under which the United States and China could make common cause. As well, it had to be Nixon because he remained determined to frustrate Hanoi's campaign to unify Vietnam, and to keep U.S. power in Southeast Asia. It should be obvious by now that while China supported North Vietnam for ideological reasons, it did not want the Vietnamese (who hate the Chinese) to unite under a tough pro-Soviet regime on China's southern flank. An American president who went to Beijing with apologies and promises to abandon South Vietnam would have been shown the door. To be bündnisfähig—that excellent German word meaning "worthy of being courted as an ally"—the United States had to be of strategic use to China, which meant balancing Soviet influence in Asia while deterring Soviet use of its nuclear arsenal. As Kissinger notes, "Though Brezhnev occasionally implied (if not very forcefully) that America's conduct of the war in Vietnam might impair Soviet-American relations, Zhou never even hinted at such a prospect." What cooled Sino-American relations in 1975-76 was precisely U.S. acquiescence in the fall of Saigon, Soviet nuclear parity, and what Chinese Ambassador Huang Zhen called "Munich thinking in Western Europe."

In 1972 Mao told Nixon, "I like rightists." Will the American Right ever come to admire Kissinger? It is a conservative principle that people ought to be judged not by what they accomplish, but by what they accomplish with what they are given. Ford and Kissinger were dealt very weak hands, and deserve credit for winning as many tricks as

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they did. But if the tone and content of these
literate, thoughtful memoirs win grudging
appreciation in some quarters, the book may
annoy neoconservatives all over again. As a
refugee from totalitarianism, Kissinger states
that he could only agree with the neoconserv-
atives' values and ultimate goals, but he
blames their tactical blindness and ideological
fervor for undercutting those who were
engaged in fighting communism on the
ground in those years. Neoconservatives may
have had their consciousness raised by the
Yom Kippur War and the excesses of the New
Left, but they still despised Nixon and pro-
moted a "militant, muscular Wilsonianism" at
a time when domestic and geopolitical con-
straints made it impossible.

Thus, where the administration had made
quiet and significant progress on emigration
of Jews from the Soviet Union, Senator
Henry Jackson's loud ultimatum to the
Soviets on the issue only provoked a pre-
dictable *nyer*. And when the administration
was fighting to prevent communist victories
in Southeast Asia and Africa, it was Senator
Jackson who said *nyer*. Neoconservatives
might rebut these complaints with references
to wheat deals and guaranteed loans that only
subsidized the Soviet system; technological
"partnerships" that amounted to giveaways;
repeated Soviet violations of the spirit of
détente, especially in the Middle East;
Kissinger's obsession with Third World com-
plications when the real front lines of the
Cold War remained Europe and the nuclear
balance; and their own role in preparing the
pitch for Reagan. Still, their Leninist "worse
is better" approach c. 1975 was cold comfort
to those responsible for, or dependent upon,
American engagement in the meantime.

ASKED ONCE by Barbara Walters to describe himself in a word, Kissinger cleared his throat and replied, in his sonorous accent, "Complicated." By my count the words "complicated" and "complex" appear over seventy-five times in this book, not to mention variations of "ambiguous",

"nuanced", "perplexing", "convoluted", "elaborate" and "intricate." And by impressing upon us the complexity of international relations Kissinger warns us against all who would simplify. His chosen trope in such cases is to employ disparaging terms drawn from religion, as when the North Vietnamese employ "sacramental phraseology", writing about Cambodia's genocide has a "near liturgical quality", the bureaucracy delivers "homilies" and its "standard litany" on Africa, the CIA mouths "orthodoxy" and the arms control community "theology" on nuclear weapons, and liberals quest for "a nirvana combining principle and low risk." During the Carter administration Zbigniew Brzezinski grunted that world politics is not a kindergarten. Neither, Kissinger would add, is it a Sunday school. But he laments at the end that the very success of Ford and Reagan (I would add Bush) in healing the nation and winning the Cold War "has been so extraordinary as to tempt the United States again into a missionary version of Wilsonian enthusiasm . . . and to conduct foreign policy as a permanent crusade for apocalyptic outcomes against all regimes that offend our sensibilities." Is he, therefore, the amoral realpolitiker after all, always preferring order to justice? The question is ill-framed, Kissinger tells us, and replies that his true commitment is "to evolution over revolution."

Beyond that, we learn no more here about
Henry Kissinger the man than we have from
his other books. Even the concluding page and
a half, entitled "A Personal Note", is really
about his father's charity and Jewish piety—
both of which, his biographers say, Henry
abandoned early in life. But the message of the
"personal note" is clear: it is that Henry did his
father proud, and is proud of having made his
father proud. And that sort of pride is no sin. ☐

Walter A. McDougall is professor of history and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, and editor of *Orbis*. He won a Pulitzer Prize for *The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age* (1997).

Books

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The National Interest
Summer 1999

Books

Henry, Act III

Walter A. McDougall

ACCORDING TO Walter Isaacson's *Kissinger: A Biography*, the consulting firm of Kissinger Associates became active in 1987, when the firm's chief 

One may add that if charges of willful hypocrisy are to be hurled about, the veterans of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who designed, then deserted, the Vietnam War amidst yawning "credibility gaps" are ill-advised to cast the first stones. As for the transcripts of taped conversations, avidly peddled as the unvarnished truth by those who would profit from them, Kissinger warns that they are "flotsam and jetsam" of little historical use because it is impossible to gauge the moods, motives and contexts of remarks made in private. Nixon in particular was prone to venting his deepest insecurities about people not present, while at the same was "obsessively incausable" of disagreeing with people who were present. Kissinger grants that Nixon's language was at times inexcusable, but denies ever seeing him intoxicated during working hours,

Book

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212 753 7248

P.06

Contrary to his bumbling media image, Ford was just such a hero in Kissinger's eyes. He took office at a moment when most of the old establishment, not to mention the antiwar movement and the "McGovernite Congress", had turned isolationist in the belief that anti-communism had corrupted America, and that American Cold War exertions had polluted the world. At the same time, conservatives and neoconservatives were metamorphosing into Wilsonian crusaders and damning the administration for not being anti-communist enough. Yet Ford never wavered from his mission to heal the nation's wounds. Kissinger confesses that at times he thought Ford's equanimity excessive, but he now appreciates how his restraint lanced the poison from the American body politic and hastened its convalescence.

122

nuclear war, parallel invasion, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Watergate cover-up.

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P.08

What is more, given that the Ford admin-
istration was constantly "whipsawed" at home
by the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate Left
and the neoconservative Right, it is remark-
able that its setbacks were so few and achieve-
ments so many. In one sense, of course, the
mid-1970s were years of cloture, as illustrated
by Kissinger's excruciating accounts of former
Cambodian Prime Minister Sirik Matak,
pleading vainly for help as the Khmer Rouge
approached, then dying in agony in Phnom
Penh; or U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin,
who had lost a son in the Vietnam War, brave-
ly and bitterly directing the airlift out of
Saigon and leaving on the last helicopter; or
black African leaders begging in vain for the
United States not to desert the Angolan resis-
tance lest the Soviet-armed "boys with the
guns" be emboldened all over Africa.

But in another sense those were years of gestation when new constellations of power emerged that would shape the next fifteen years. In the Middle East, Kissinger doggedly explored the Syrian and Jordanian dead ends until he discovered the high road to bilateral Egyptian-Israeli agreement. He and Ford ralied the oil-consuming industrial states to coordinate their response to the energy crisis, institutionalizing what would become the "G-7" summits. Kissinger and the British worked to prevent a Greek-Turkish war over Cyprus, thus shoring up NATO's southern flank for the duration of the Cold War. And while Congress undercut CIA efforts to prevent a Marxist takeover in Angola, Kissinger and the British, again, shuttled among a dozen African capitals to win white and black Africans alike to a plan for majority rule in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Namibia, thereby frustrating Soviet and Cuban plans to exploit racial tensions on the continent. Finally, of course, the much maligned Helsinki Accords would encourage the Polish Solidarity Movement and Helsinki Watches

THE BIGGEST coup of the Kissinger years was the "tacit alliance" with China. And only Nixon could have pulled it off, not only because of his anti-communist credentials, but because Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai—unlike moralistic Americans of all persuasions—thought primarily in geopolitical terms, the only terms under which the United States and China could make common cause. As well, it had to be Nixon because he remained determined to frustrate Hanoi's campaign to unify Vietnam, and to keep U.S. power in Southeast Asia. It should be obvious by now that while China supported North Vietnam for ideological reasons, it did not want the Vietnamese (who hate the Chinese) to unite under a tough pro-Soviet regime on China's southern flank. An American president who went to Beijing with apologies and promises to abandon South Vietnam would have been shown the door. To be bündnis-fähig—that excellent German word meaning "worthy of being courted as an ally"—the United States had to be of strategic use to China, which meant balancing Soviet influence in Asia while deterring Soviet use of its nuclear arsenal. As Kissinger notes, "Though Brezhnev occasionally implied (if not very forcefully) that America's conduct of the war in Vietnam might impair Soviet-American relations, Zhou never even hinted at such a prospect." What cooled Sino-American relations in 1975-76 was precisely U.S. acquiescence in the fall of Saigon, Soviet nuclear parity, and what Chinese Ambassador Huang Zhen called "Munich thinking in Western Europe."

In 1972 Mao told Nixon, "I like right-
ists." Will the American Right ever come to
admire Kissinger? It is a conservative princi-
ple that people ought to be judged not by
what they accomplish, but by what they
accomplish with what they are given. Ford
and Kissinger were dealt very weak hands, and
deserve credit for winning as many tricks as

124.

The National Interest — Summer 1999

JUN-30-1999 16:05

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212 753 7248 P.09

Thus, where the administration had made
quiet and significant progress on emigration
of Jews from the Soviet Union, Senator
Henry Jackson's loud ultimatum to the
Soviets on the issue only provoked a pre-
dictable *nyet*. And when the administration
was fighting to prevent communist victories
in Southeast Asia and Africa, it was Senator
Jackson who said *nyet*. Neoconservatives
might rebut these complaints with references
to wheat deals and guaranteed loans that only
subsidized the Soviet system; technological
"partnerships" that amounted to giveaways;
repeated Soviet violations of the spirit of
détente, especially in the Middle East;
Kissinger's obsession with Third World com-
plications when the real front lines of the
Cold War remained Europe and the nuclear
balance; and their own role in preparing the
pitch for Reagan. Still, their Leninist "worse
is better" approach c. 1975 was cold comfort
to those responsible for, or dependent upon,
American engagement in the meantime.

Books

125

TOTAL P.09

[L]

MEMOIRS

PAUL JOHNSON

Wish He was Still Here
to Save the Balkans

YEARS OF RENEWAL: THE CONCLUDING
VOLUME OF HIS MEMOIRS

By Henry Kissinger

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1,150pp £30)

THIS FINAL PART of Henry Kissinger's memoirs begins after the Watergate crisis led to the resignation of President Nixon, and takes us through the years of Gerald Ford's presidency. As Secretary of State, Kissinger exchanged a master who was even more experienced and decisive than himself in foreign affairs for one who lacked knowledge and whose natural diffidence was reinforced by his consciousness that he had never been elected to supreme office. So Kissinger was very much the moving spirit in American foreign policy during the middle 1970s, and this is his detailed report, running (including notes and index) to 1,150 pages, on exactly what he did and why he did it.

Compared to the present day, when the United States
is the sole superpower and the threat of a worldwide
intermational fear conflict can be almost discounted, the
1970s were difficult and sometimes frightening years.
Kissinger begins with a 120-page analysis of the Nixon
legacy, which was in many ways a remarkable one.
Nixon was skilled and astute in playing the superpower
game. By establishing good relations with China he
deepened the division between the two great
Communist powers, which enabled him to begin the
process of disengaging in
Vietnam with seemly honour.
But the Watergate disaster,
and the temporary position of
predominance which this gave
to an irresponsible and reckless
Democratic Congress, undid
all Nixon's (and Kissinger's)
careful work. Worse, Congress
passed legislation which upset
the constitutional balance
designed by the Founding
Fathers, and made it exceed-
ingly difficult for the executive
branch to conduct foreign and
defence policy in the best
interests of the United States.
The limitations on the
President's freedom of action

meant that Vietnam was rapidly overrun by the
Communist North, Cambodia was left to its dreadful
fate under Pol Pot, and large parts of the world,
especially in Africa, were exposed to Communist
infiltration, notably on the part of Cuba, which was
operating as Russia's surrogate. At the time, one felt a
sense of doom, not unlike that of the late 1930s, with
totalitarianism seemingly on the march and the United
States retreating into a paralysed isolationism.

In retrospect, the dangers were never as great as they
then seemed, and with a resourceful and ingenious
operator like Kissinger in charge of the West's defence,
the Russians did not get away with much of substance.
Even at the time, as Kissinger's narrative shows, the
Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung, increasingly infirm but
still as sharp as a razor, scoffed at notions of Soviet invin-
cibility and the steady advance of its influence. He
described Soviet 'expansionism' as 'pitiful', adding 'You
should not be afraid of them.' When Kissinger said, 'The
problem in the Middle East is to prevent it now from
being dominated by the Soviet Union', Mao replied
sharply: 'They can't possibly dominate the Middle East
because, although their ambition is great, their capacities
are meagre.' Mao had his own reasons, based on long
experience, for doubting the physical resources of the
blundering Soviet giant and the strength of its willpower.

Kissinger did not make the mistake of overestimating
the Soviet Union. He was inclined, rather, to adopt
Metternich's double maxim: 'Russia is never as strong as
it looks — Russia is never as weak as it looks.' He always
felt that the apparent solidity of the Soviet system was
wafer-thin, and that ominous cracks, presaging total
collapse, might appear at any moment. One of the most
aresting passages in his book describes the personality
and rule of Brezhnev. He seemed at the time, to out-
siders at least, a formidable tyrant and a global predatory
monster, whose ambitions and attitude were reflected in
the 'Brezhnev Doctrine',
whereby the Communist
world, once it had secured a
position anywhere, would
never abandon it, and the
only acceptable change was
further advance.

The Brezhnev Kissinger
presents is much more hesi-
tant, unsure of himself, full of
doubts and fears, fully aware
of the limitations of Soviet
power, and indeed of his own,
constantly looking over his
shoulder at his colleagues and
often unwilling to take a
decision without further con-
sultations with them. By this
account, Brezhnev was more

Kissinger and make up

LITERARY REVIEW June 1999

10

MEMOIRS

interested in the status quo than in grabbing more. But at the same time, if any door was left unlocked and proved to swing open at a touch, the Soviet Union, like a hungry bear on the prowl, would always go through it. The trouble with the middle and later 1970s, up to the time Ronald Reagan took over, was that too many doors were left not merely unlocked but manifestly unguarded. Kissinger lacked the authority to watch all the doors, but what he could do — by cunning, bluff and finesse — he did.

Readers should not be daunted by the size of this book; it is well put together and written, and always lively. It contains fascinating extracts from unpublished documents, verbatim conversation and phone-logs, and will prove a valuable source-book for future historians, as well as a useful guide through the complexities of the problems of those years. Kissinger takes the reader on a conducted tour of the world: not just of great-power politics and arms negotiations, but of Cyprus and Rhodesia, Jordan and Egypt and Israel; the collapse of Indochina and the tragedy of the Kurds; the energy crisis and the restoration of unity in the Atlantic Alliance; Panama, Mexico, Chile; the breakthrough to majority rule in southern Africa; the civil war in the Lebanon; and many other issues, some forgotten, others still with us.

Kissinger's account is enlivened by telling pen portraits. If he is particularly illuminating about Mao and Brezhnev, he is also good on the haughty but intelligent Anthony Crosland (whom he came to like), on wily Jim Callaghan, on Jomo Kenyatta, 'the extinct volcano', on Sadat and Rabin, on gruesome Latin-American politicians and primitive but devious African tyrants. There are some hair-raising accounts of internal rows with the US military and with CIA officials during a bad period when the American intelligence community was under destructive fire from Congress and demoralised. There are also moments of pathos and pity — for the once powerful Mikoyan, for instance, lonely and ostracised by former colleagues at a Moscow reception. Kissinger is always sharp-eyed and observant.

He is also humane, someone who believes that war is never inevitable, that the resources of diplomacy are never quite exhausted, that human lives are precious and worth striving to protect. His energy is overwhelming. He must have flown more air miles than any other public man in history. He has his critics, some of them ferocious, but my impression is that his influence on events has been in general benign and constructive, and that the world is a better place for his efforts. I wish he were still in authority today, to help unscramble some of the mess in the Balkans. Meanwhile, here is his end-of-term debriefing, for our instruction and — surprisingly often — our entertainment.

To order 'Years of Renewal' at the special price of £26 with free UK p&p call Literary Review Bookshop on 0181 324 5510 or use our form on page 55.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

# Despite Those Eyelashes, He Blew It

SOME TIMES IN AMERICA

By Alexander Chancellor

(Bloomsbury 288pp £16.99)

SOMETIME IN THE mid-1970s, I went to a party in Tina Brown's rooms in Bloomsbury, and was introduced to Alexander Chancellor. I was then working for the *New Statesman*, correctly recollected in this book as 'the left-wing equivalent of the *Spectator* and, at that time, a much better and more popular magazine.'

Those words in themselves tell you how long ago this was, but I can remember my first chat with Chancellor as if it took place yesterday. To all appearances a spluttering masterpiece of self-deprecation and Wodehouscan disarray, he nonetheless loosed, between spilled cocktails and scattered ashes, some random but unmistakable shafts of shrewd and beady penetration.

It wasn't long before he had salvaged the bulk of Doughty Street and become the toast of journalistic London. His eclectic politics, his Tuscan tastes and his

LITERARY REVIEW June 1999

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SIPHON MURRAY & CO CONSULTANTS 98012121350042

NO. 501

504

[illegible]

## Review
Books

THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH JUNE 13, 1999

# Henry Kissinger
Oirs of a politician with a coherent view of foreign policy

Illustrated by a freewheeling Congress bent on pursuing its own fragmented foreign policy

for conservative ideologues, it conceded parity to the Soviets when dominance should have been the goal. The central purpose of stable relations in unstable times was lost in a welter of congressional interventions.

Moreover, at the instigation of Senator Henry Jackson, who managed to straddle both camps of

political opposition, the award of Most Favoured Nation Status to the Soviet Union became irretrievably tied to the counterproductive issue of Jewish emigration. This, says Kissinger, was "linkage with a vengeance". In the tangle of Washington wrangling, it proved impossible to advance relations with Moscow.

Kissinger was, he records, con-

sistently frustrated by a freewheeling Congress bent on pursuing its own fragmented foreign policy. The refusal to grant any aid to the collapsing regime in Saigon constituted a signal preference for humiliation over honour (his pages on the end of America's role in Vietnam are gripping). Critics attacked the Helsinki Final Act

from both directions. Congressional committees gutted America's intelligence community, and two legislated amendments, which Kissinger calls a "flight from responsibility", pulled the rug from under America's efforts to resist Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola: Washington was not a happy place for making foreign policy.

Still, it is remarkable to survey what the Ford/Kissinger combination managed to achieve in such circumstances. The negotiations on Rhodesian majority rule and the shuttle expeditions which led to Sinai II, were diplomatic classics.

In fact, the author suggests rather immodestly, many of the policies which governed America to the end of the Cold War, and which continue to direct much of the decision-making today, were formulated during those 30 turbulent months. Reagan and Bush pursued détente by another name; the relationship with China is still based on "parallel interests"; the Group of Seven (now Eight) continues to be the supreme forum for international economic co-ordination; and the Oslo Accords on the Middle East were not much more than an elaboration of an earlier framework. Immodest, perhaps, but not far off the mark.

As always, Kissinger's prose is clear, declarative and epigrammatic. His pen portraits of scores of political leaders at home and overseas are brilliantly and often generously wrought, and his fidelity to President Ford as the unrecognised hero of the era is unqualified and just.

Bound to be controversial — as is the man — Kissinger's trilogy on United States foreign policy is both a magnificent record of events and a provocative, stimulating exposition of America at the end of the American Century.

R. G. H. Seitz was American Ambassador to the UK from 1991 to 1994.

BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

What Makes
God Laugh?

JOHN O'SULLIVAN

*Years of Renewal*, by Henry Kissinger
(Simon & Schuster, 1,151 pp., $35)

William Coupon

TOWARDS the end of his third volume of memoirs, Henry Kissinger indulges in some reflections on the changing nature of statesmanship. These are characteristically shrewd until he reaches the argument that information has largely removed the need for style as an instrument of diplomacy. Where once the statesman absorbed history and a sense of perspective by reading well-constructed and precisely phrased diplomatic analyses, runs the argument, he can now retrieve all the information on any given topic at the touch of a button on a computer keyboard.

At this point, the reader has just completed 1,078 pages of Kissinger's stylish prose. Would he have plowed happily through the same volume of words, culled by an Internet search engine, to learn about the Cyprus crisis of 1974, the "new dialogue" (also of 1974) with Latin America, the "breakthrough" to majority rule in Rhodesia, and many other now-distant controversies? The question answers itself. History recreates the dilemmas that faced the statesman at the time in all their painful, absorbing complexity; the computer merely tells that he took Course A rather than Course B. It is style, clarifying choices and helping the past to live again, that makes the difference between the two types of information.

But then Kissinger has always been his own best historian, for the unflattering reason that he is actually less biased about his own diplomatic career than have been certain critics who are moved by an almost superhuman animus to-

wards him. *Years of Renewal* is unlikely to remove that hostility. As other reviewers have noted, however, it sheds as much light on the author as it does on the events he describes. Threaded through the details of diplomatic negotiations is a melancholy story of personal honor preserved amid the self-destruction of America's honor.

This third volume describes the fate of the foreign policy that the author, as national security advisor or secretary of state, helped Richard Nixon to shape and Gerald Ford to sustain from, roughly, the 1972 presidential election to Ford's defeat in 1976. As Kissinger points out, the main lines of that foreign policy—the strategic alliance with China, the Middle East peace process, the arms-control process with the Soviet Union, even a version of détente—were all continued by the administrations that followed Nixon-Ford. Yet when he handed over the reins to Cyrus Vance in 1977, it was the common view that his foreign policy had fallen apart, with the collapse of détente, the rise of a new adventurism in Soviet policy, and the crippling of American initiative by the "Vietnam syndrome" occasioned by the fall of Saigon in 1975. And Left and Right, which agreed on so little else, were agreed that perhaps his policy deserved to fail because it was a Mach-

iavellian realpolitik detached from the idealism of the American people.

If anything of that caricature still remains, it should finally be eradicated by this account. Diplomatic history is, of course, an education in the vanity of human wishes. Many of the attempts to solve ancient disputes here chronicled—in which so much intellectual effort and, yes, idealism were invested—either went nowhere or ended in tears. The Middle East peace process is still with us, of course; but then so is the Arab–Israeli conflict to which it is a seemingly permanent response. The Cyprus dispute, featuring some of the original disputants, is still on the international agenda. And Rhodesia has become majority-rule Zimbabwe, but is today a ruined country. As a character says in Hugh Whittemore's recent play about the Profumo affair: “What makes God laugh? People making plans.”

Most of this final volume, however, is concerned with two questions that had momentous consequences and continue to agitate us still—the policy of détente with the Soviet Union and the fall of Vietnam. On the former, Kissinger takes considerable pains to respond to the neoconservative critique of détente: namely, that by treating the Soviet Union as a legitimate partner in world order, he was unable to call on the idealism of the American people to resist Soviet ambitions, weakening the U.S. in negotiations and compelling undue concessions in trade, arms control, and human rights. When Ronald Reagan sounded the ideological trumpet, directly challenging Soviet legitimacy, the walls of Jericho promptly collapsed.

Kissinger concedes that Reagan was right to wage this rhetorical war. He points out, however, that it was an accompaniment to—not a substitute for—containment, arms control, and superpower summits. The author him-

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56

NATIONAL REVIEW/MAY 17, 1999

self could not have carried out the same fruitful combination of kicks and kindnesses, in part because the Soviet Union was at an earlier stage of decay, but mainly because he was operating in more hostile domestic political circumstances.

Almost all of the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford foreign policy was conducted against the background of a moral civil war in America in which the liberal establishment had embraced the radical view of “Amerika” as a domineering and

> President Ford and his secretary of state struggled hard to save their ally, but also to retrieve America's honor.

aggressive hegemon. The period described in *Years of Renewal* was darkened still more by the shadow of Watergate, which gravely weakened the executive branch in its relations with Congress. As a result, there was almost no political support available for consistent policies either of strong resistance to the Soviet Union or of prudent mutual bargains with it. The former were seen as aggressive, the latter as unprincipled, and both were seen as expressions of an amoral realpolitik incarnated in the secretary of state. Speculatively but persuasively, Kissinger argues that it would have been Utopian to attempt a Reaganite foreign policy when all the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were doves at best.

What eventually happened, of course, was that the Soviets realized the paralysis of their adversary (by then adopted as high policy in the Carter administration) and overreached in Afghanistan, southern Africa, and even Central America. This adventurism discredited the post Vietnam appeasements of Vance and Carter and paved the way for Reagan's ideological crusade. As Kissinger puts it: "Reagan's eventual ascendancy was the American people's delayed reaction to the largely

self-imposed humiliation in Vietnam."

It was, however, Watergate that had ensured that humiliation. Again speculatively, and again persuasively, the former secretary of state argues that South Vietnam could have survived if America had fulfilled its moral obligation to assist its ally with military material when it came under North Vietnamese attack. Even Vietnam doves like senators Frank Church, Clifford Case, and Mike Mansfield had given unambiguous backing to such support in the debates leading up to the Paris peace accords. Once the accords had been signed, however, they gradually backed away from their commitments. The leading media encouraged such backsliding with their fantasies of a "political settlement" supposedly obstructed by the "Thieu regime." (If there was a Pulitzer for journalism that facilitated genocide, the *New York Times* would now have at least two.) And when the North Vietnamese attack came in 1975, Congress cut off all aid to the South, dooming its ally and thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians who had trusted America to death, torture, and imprisonment.

Kissinger's gripping account of the final days of Cambodia and Vietnam as seen from Washington evokes tears of sorrow and bitterness. President Ford and his secretary of state struggled hard to sustain military aid, not only to save their ally but also to retrieve America's honor. But a terrible disease of moral masochism had seized the nation—or at least the political establishment. Senators, bureaucrats, and pundits seemed actually to want the destruction of their ally as a vicarious punishment for America's supposed sins of overweening power. Crippled by Watergate, opposed even in its inmost councils, the Ford administration was reduced to watching helplessly as Saigon and Pnom Penh fell—and the bloodbath was set in train.

The secretary of state retrieved his own honor in those days of the locust. America's honor is still in pawn. Those who urged and engineered the abandonment of the nation's honor have yet to be called to account.

NR

58

NATIONAL REVIEW/MAY 17, 1999

# Poet of Peril

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

*Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World's Most Dangerous Water*, by Derek Lundy (Algonquin, 312 pp., $22.95)

THIS is the story of a single-handed sailboat race sponsored by the French. In 1996, 16 racers (14 men, 2 women) set out on the biennial race organized by Vendée Globe, but tracked, this time out, by Canadian journalist Derek Lundy. The distance to go, 27,000 miles, time at sea, approximately 15 weeks. The course: From the starting line (at Les Sables-d'Olonne), head south, go around Antarctica clockwise, then head back to Les Sables to the finish line.

There are considerable technological amenities on board each boat. A geographical Positioning Systems unit, of course. ("Sextant navigation is as obsolete today as the astrolabe, except for antiquarian enthusiasts who keep it up as a hobby, like riding on steam trains.") A radar, especially useful for detecting "bergs" (icebergs) and "growlers" (small icebergs), on those reassuring occasions when they actually show up on the screen. A fax gives the racers continual weather maps and permits outgoing and incoming communication, when it is working. A radio allows communication to Vendée Globe headquarters, to the boats' commercial sponsors, and to home and friends. The EPIRBs (two are required) are emergency radio devices that disclose the geographical position of a doomed vessel. By definition, there has to be enough food on board for four or five months; as for water, the sailors anticipate enough rainwater to eke out life from what they brought aboard from Les Sables. ("The sea's saltiness makes its water as undrinkable as sand. Saint-Exupéry describes how, in the desert, the

Mr. Buckley's new novel, *The Redhunter: A Novel based on the Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy*, will be published in June.

THE ECONOMIST REVIEW

more sophisticated and sensitive. Both strongly suggest that, in large part, Mrs Albright was an affirmative-action appointee. It is unlikely that a male academic without tenure, with no particular intellectual distinction and limited policy-making experience would have been picked. Given her determination and persona, it is far too soon to say whether she will be one of the better secretaries of state or whether Kosovo will prove not just a test, but a failed test.

Warmakers 2

Right to the end

YEARS OF RENEWAL. By Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster. 1,152 pages. $35. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £30

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES are not biographies, which is one of the reasons why they can be so interesting. Henry Kissinger goes one step further. Like Winston Churchill, he sidesteps simple autobiography, choosing instead to impose his view of his role in history

by acting as his own historian. "Years of Renewal", which covers the 30 months of the Ford administration, completes Mr Kissinger's three-volume account of his eight years of high office. This book is an apology—not an apology but a defence in depth against his critics.

Mr Kissinger continues to turn the tables on those who criticised his continuation of the Vietnam war for seven years by charging that the critics' final success in cutting off increased funding for the South Vietnamese

government in 1975 was the real betrayal of American ideals. Mr Kissinger, appealing to what he asserts were such "unfashionable concepts" as "honour" and "moral obligation", argued against "simply jettisoning an entire people to which we were allied."

Here his notion of morality overcomes his realism. While Mr Kissinger is certain that increased American aid would have staved off the South Vietnamese collapse during 1975, he is unable to assert or to find any intelligence estimate suggesting that, with any level of American aid short of combat involvement, the south could have ultimately prevailed. Indeed, it defies common sense to imagine that a government, both corrupt and ineffectual, could have accomplished without American troops what it did not achieve with more than 500,000 American soldiers at hand. Mr Kissinger's position might have prolonged the war, perhaps until after the 1976 presidential election, but the price would have been further loss of Vietnamese lives and greater devastation without any change in outcome.

Mr Kissinger regards the need to define the relationship between the pragmatic and the moral as the key task of American foreign policy, something with which Madeleine Albright might well agree. He quotes a moving letter his father wrote him in 1946, when he thought he might die: "a human being must always fulfil his moral obligations."

Having set himself the task, Mr Kissinger makes a valiant attempt at being faithful, reliable and selfless. The self-portrait is that of a highly moral man of gravitas, but his actual morality is quite peculiar. The reader of this volume would not understand why a top historian, John Lewis Gaddis, could conclude that "it is becoming clear that Mr Kissinger relied unusually heavily upon bending the truth, not just in his dealings with foreign statesmen but also with his own friends, associates, and at times even presidents for whom he worked." Yet he remains convinced he was right. To this day, Mr Kissinger has not apologised to his colleagues or their families for his complicity in the wiretaps placed on their home telephones.

A reviewer of another of Mr Kissinger's works once remarked that whether or not he was a great writer, anyone who finished was a great reader. The comment is tempting but unfair. The arguments over Henry Kissinger's character and accomplishments will intrigue generations of historians. But his thoroughness, even if occasionally tedious, is a service to history. He often writes with pithy elegance, and the intellectual force displayed in his memoirs should place them among the few current foreign-affairs books which will be noteworthy 50 years hence.

4

Peacemakers 1

Round the Irish table

MAKING PEACE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MAKING OF THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT. By George Mitchell. Knopf; 224 pages; $24. Heinemann; £17.99

THE gradual involvement of George Mitchell in the Northern Ireland peace process reflects the internationalisation of the conflict. Senator Mitchell brought with him his considerable experience of American politics. This may not seem helpful in a

crisis which comes nearest to European, and specifically Balkan, conditions than even inter-ethnic relations in the United States. But his memoir of the making of the Good Friday agreement reveals that at least certain characteristics of the American political system—the need for senators to act as brokers between contending interests, the patient acceptance of the slowness of the system to achieve a desired result—were valuable, especially when allied to Mr Mitchell's ability to cut through a mass of detail and identify the key issues in a complex negotiation.

The senator is also a man of honesty and purpose. When the British and Irish governments insisted the comprehensive settlement plan be presented to the Northern Ireland parties without "strand two" (the establishment of North-South institutions) included, Mr Mitchell was less than frank with the media. He confesses now that he was troubled by this, although he had acted with the best of intentions.

Mr Mitchell's account of the peace process is essentially that of the chairman; he says little or nothing about the intensive discussions that went on within, rather than between, the parties that were meanwhile engaged in hard bargaining. But his brief (and shrewd) assessments of the individuals involved indicate why and how he managed to gain the trust of people who previously could hardly bear to sit in the same room as each other.

Two particular strengths were that he understood the intense pressures on Northern Ireland politicians and the way in which a murder or a bombing could jeopardise the negotiations. Mr Mitchell appreciated how far the parties could go, and the constraints on their freedom of choice. He was a calm, often unobtrusive chairman, allowing the politicians to get their grievances off their chests; he was good at putting himself in their shoes. Yet he also un-

MAY 15TH 1999

The
Economist

25 ST JAMES'S STREET, LONDON SW1A 1HG
TELEPHONE: 0171 830 7000
FACSIMILE: 0171 839 2968
E-MAIL: be@economist.com

FROM THE EDITOR

JUN 15 1999

June 3rd 1999

Mr Henry A Kissinger
350 Park Avenue
New York NY 10022
USA

Thank you for your letter of May 25th about our review of "Years of Renewal".

I am sorry that you felt a review that described your memoirs as "among the few current foreign-affairs books which will be noteworthy 50 years hence" was an attack on your character. Clearly, it included criticism, and as a short article could not hope to be comprehensive. It reflected, I believe, that as well as being a remarkable actor and thinker on foreign affairs, you are, and always have been, a controversial one. The John Lewis Gaddis quote was not a "stratagem" but a reflection of that point.

On the issue of the apology, the point our reviewer was trying to make, but insufficiently clearly, was that, whatever expressions of regret you have made, you think you were right. An apology, surely, implies that someone thinks they were wrong. Regret does not, rather as in my "I am sorry" formulation in the previous paragraph. On that basis, I think the point stands despite your quotation from "Years of Upheaval".

Bill Emmott

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Not For Publication

May 25, 1999

Dear Mr. Emmott:

The review of *Years of Renewal* published in *The Economist* substitutes an attack on my character for analysis. It quotes a statement to the effect that I relied upon bending the truth towards foreign statesmen, my friends and even Presidents. While the stratagem of a quote may avoid a libel suit, I would have thought that a charge like this would not be repeated in a journal of your stature without checking. President Ford would not support it; nor would any of the British Ministers and officials I dealt with who would have been within easy reach; not any of the statesmen who have remained lifelong friends; not to speak of other friends. Reprinting that quote is not an occasion of which *The Economist* can be proud.

Your writer's objectivity is shown by the statement that I have never apologized for the wiretaps placed on their home telephones. In *Years of Upheaval*, published in 1982, I wrote: "In retrospect it is also clear to me that while electronic surveillance is a widely used method of investigation in democracies, the wiretapping of one's associates presents an especially painful human problem. I was never at ease about it; it is the part of my public service about which I am most ambivalent. At the time, I simply preferred it to the alternative, which was to separate from their posts those who were suspected of unauthorized disclosures of information. No doubt Nixon and his inner circle savored the notion that some colleagues of the Harvard outsider and Rockefeller associate were suspected leakers. And some officials of the FBI used the opportunity to vindicate their judgment in cases where their reservations about security clearances for my staff had been ignored. For these reasons I may well have subconsciously learned over backward in resolving my ambivalence about the program. It does not change the fundamental fact that, as far as I knew, the only motive was to protect classified information against unauthorized disclosure in the middle of

Not For Publication

a complicated war. I had no reason to challenge the claim
of the Attorney General that the program was legal and
proper. Still, I want to express my regret at the anguish
that may have been caused to any individual by a procedure
that has since been modified by court decision.

"Having said that, I feel entitled to record my dismay at
the harassment in lawsuits and print ever since by some who
knew very well that I was torn between doing my duty as I
saw it and sparing them personally. I even warned some of
them about the suspicions of my superiors and cautioned them
that they were under scrutiny. By the same token I am
grateful to those who were tapped but have remained or
become close friends, reconciling their sense of grievance
with understanding of the practices, motives, and
circumstances of the time." (pp. 121-122)

Mr. William Emmott
Editor-in-Chief
The Economist
111 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

THE NEW REPUBLIC

assertion that Stirling "was interested in my architecture and my sensibility about architecture"? Girouard even records the embarrassing come-on line that a bibulous Stirling once murmured to the author's startled wife over dinner. This is not exactly a contribution to knowledge. It only reinforces the popular canard that

in order to make architecture more interesting to the general public, it must be made more entertaining, preferably through the cult of personality.

As the boundaries between public and private continue to dissolve all around us, the publication of *Big Jim*—a work by an otherwise respected architectural histo-

rian that would have been unthinkable a generation ago—gives pause as to how we assess the lives of modern architects. If ripping apart celebrities is indeed the Dionysiac rite of our age, will it end in even more destructive tendencies when it is unleashed on the most socially constructive of the arts? ■

## How Henry Kissinger won the Cold War, or so he thinks.

# The Revisionist

By ROBERT KAGAN

Years of Renewal
by Henry Kissinger

(Simon and Schuster, 1,151 pp., $35)

### I.

OF THE HANDFUL of American diplomats who achieved any real fame, Henry Kissinger may be unique in having earned renown for presiding over a period in American foreign policy widely regarded as disastrous. Especially miserable were the latter years of Kissinger's government career, from 1974 through 1976, which is the period that he covers in *Years of Renewal*, his third and concluding volume of memoirs. Before 1973, there had been some modest successes, and the promise, at least, of dramatic breakthroughs: the peace agreement that ended the Vietnam War, the opening to China, the expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt, and two successful American-Soviet summits that opened the possibility, or so Kissinger and Richard Nixon believed, of an improved relationship with a more restrained Soviet Union.

After 1973, however, the pillars that held up Nixon's and Kissinger's "new structure of peace" collapsed. Scandal at home helped to precipitate failure abroad; the Soviet Union entered a new phase of adventure and aggressiveness; and American foreign policy began a downward spiral, reaching bottom by the mid-1970s. Here is how Kissinger described this period in his second volume of memoirs, *Years of Upheaval*, which appeared in 1982:

> Congressional assaults on a weakened President robbed him of both the means

ROBERT KAGAN is Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

of containment and the incentives for Soviet moderation... [P]rogressive restrictions on executive authority from 1973 to 1976... doomed Indochina to destruction... [and] blocked military assistance to key allies. In time the Soviets could not resist the opportunity presented by a weakened President and a divided America abdicating from foreign responsibilities. By 1975 Soviet adven- turism had returned, reinforced by an unprecedented panoply of modern arms.

In *Years of Upheaval*, the most that Kissinger was prepared to say about the years after 1973 was that he and Ford had held the fort. The country and its Constitution survived. Beyond noting this *de minimis* accomplishment, however, Kissinger advanced only modest claims on behalf of his policies in the Ford years. He took some intellectual satisfaction from the fact that "the basic categories of our public discourse on international affairs—China, the Mideast, SALT and the strategic balance, energy policy, new initiatives with allies—[were] still those established during the years of upheaval now coming to an end." (The italics are mine.) But Kissinger believed, and everyone believed, that America's "years of upheaval" had ended, and its "years of renewal" had begun, not during the presidency of Gerald Ford, but with the election of Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, Kissinger described the rout of American interests after 1973 in a later work, *Diplomacy*:

> The collapse of Indochina in 1975 [was] followed in America by a retreat from Angola and a deepening of domestic

divisions, and by an extraordinary surge in expansionism on the part of the Soviet Union. Cuban military forces had spread from Angola to Ethiopia in tandem with thousands of Soviet combat advisers. In Cambodia, Vietnamese troops backed and supplied by the Soviet Union were subjugating that tormented country. Afghanistan was occupied by over 100,000 Soviet troops. The government of the pro-Western Shah of Iran collapsed and was replaced by a radically anti-American fundamentalist regime which seized fifty-two Americans, almost all of whom were officials, as hostages. Whatever the causes, the dominos indeed appeared to be falling.

The mid- to late 1970s, he acknowledged, were the "seeming nadir of America's international position."

KISSINGER'S OWN POSITION as America's premier statesman also took a tumble after 1973. During Nixon's first term, Kissinger bestrode the world like a geopolitical colossus. As national security adviser, he leapt from one spectacular diplomatic feat to another, and he enjoyed a national and international celebrity hitherto unknown to American policy-makers. His fame was such that Oriana Fallacci could ask, in a famous interview, "How do you explain the incredible movie-star status you enjoy? How do you explain the fact that you are almost more famous and popular than the president?" To which Kissinger, giddy with success, apparently replied (he later denied using these words) that Americans admired him for achieving great things single-handedly: "Americans

38 : JUNE 21, 1999

like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town with his horse and nothing else."

After Nixon's resignation, however, Kissinger's influence inside the government, and his reputation outside it, declined precipitously. Without Nixon to back him—by 1973, even Nixon had grown jealous and resentful of Kissinger's fame—Kissinger's career as a virtuoso on the world stage ended. On the most important matters of arms control and détente with the Soviet Union, he faced sniping from within the Ford cabinet, and by the end he had to travel to Moscow in humiliation, without even the authority to close deals. Outside the administration, Kissinger became the prime target for conservatives and neo-conservatives (and a smattering of liberals) seeking an end to détente and a tougher line against the Soviets. Reagan practically made Kissinger a campaign issue in his challenge to Ford in 1976, and Ford was forced to clip Kissinger's wings, "demoting" him from national security adviser to Secretary of State and publicly promising never to use the word "détente" again.

For these reasons, perhaps, Kissinger for many years apparently felt no compelling need to produce a third volume of memoirs on those last, hapless years in office. His first two volumes came forth in an explosion of fevered industriousness. Kissinger left office in January 1977 and immediately began work on

*White House Years*, which came out two years later. Then he turned quickly to the second volume, *Years of Upheaval*, which was published in 1982. But Kissinger did not produce his next book until 1994, and it was *Diplomacy*—a historical treatise on the conduct of American foreign policy. When *Diplomacy* appeared, it was reasonable to assume that Kissinger might never produce a third volume of memoirs.

By the 1990s, indeed, the world was not exactly waiting with breathless anticipation for Kissinger's account of the Ford administration, which, to say the least, lacked the excitement of the Nixon years.

The conflict in Cyprus, the Sinai disengagement agreements, the ethnic turmoil in Lebanon, the summit between Ford and Mao in 1975, the Panama Canal treaty negotiations, the crisis in Angola, and the interim arms control agreement signed at Vladivostok in 1974: whatever significance one might attach to these events—and Kissinger in this volume has interesting things to say about all of them—they were not the stuff of high diplomatic drama. Who would have blamed Kissinger for quitting after the first two volumes, which were masterpieces in their genre?

Henry Kissinger by Vint Lawrence for The New Republic

In the foreword to his new book, Kissinger claims that he waited more than a decade to write about the Ford years in order "to permit the evaluation of the entire period of my government service from a philosophical perspective rather than according to the tactics of the moment." Whatever this may mean, the very title of Kissinger's third volume of memoirs shows that his aim in this massive tome is not merely to complete the dreary record of his last years in office. His goal is a good deal more ambitious: it is to salvage the glittering reputation that was tarnished by the Ford

years, and to do so by providing a grand revisionist account of those last years in office.

Some of this revisionism is merely a matter of tone. Did Kissinger emphasize rather darkly in *Years of Upheaval* that it was during the Ford years that Indochina was "doomed to destruction" by a feckless Congress and the breakdown of presidential authority? In *Years of Renewal* he paints those events in brighter colors, claiming as one of the achievements of the Ford administration the way it "managed the collapse of Indochina with dignity and restraint."

Other revisions are more substantive. Had Kissinger lamented, seventeen years ago, that the "interim" arms agreement struck at Vladivostok was drained of whatever importance it might have had by the fierce opposition it aroused in the United States? In the present volume Kissinger calls that agreement "a major breakthrough on strategic arms control."

Yet these are relatively minor emendations compared with Kissinger's broader assertion in *Years of Renewal*. For Kissinger now claims that, far from merely holding the fort in the mid-1970s against a storm of adverse domestic and global forces, he and Ford actually laid the foundations for America's eventual victory in the Cold War. They did so, moreover, consciously and deliberately, with a foresight and a confidence that has somehow been overlooked by most observers. This is a grand and startling claim.

## II.

AS KISSINGER NOW tells the story, the Ford administration achieved this triumph by challenging Moscow on the battleground of ideology, by bringing "human rights" and the issue of Soviet treatment of citizens in the Eastern bloc to the fore in U.S.-Soviet relations. A decisive moment, Kissinger now claims, came at the meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki in 1975, when the United States and its allies forced a reluctant Moscow leadership to accept two

THE NEW REPUBLIC : JUNE 21, 1999 : 39

THE NEW REPUBLIC

principles of behavior that would later
prove its undoing. One was the principle
of "peaceful change of borders," which in
some respects established the legal basis
on which Germany was eventually reunifi-
ded in 1991.

Of equal if not greater importance, Kissinger contends, was the enshrinement of human rights principles in the so-called "Basket III" of issues in the Helsinki Final Act. According to Kissinger's account, these "provisions for the free movement of peoples and ideas and for the protection of 'human rights and fundamental freedoms,' which the democracies insisted on including in the Final Act," were poison pills in the Helsinki agreement that eventually undid Communism and the Soviet Union. In the years to come, "visionary and courageous activists like Václav Havel and Lech Walesa turned these clauses of the Final Act into rallying cries for resisting totalitarianism in the Communist world and thereby ultimately brought about the liberation of Eastern Europe." Human rights advocates throughout the Soviet bloc, Kissinger argues, "interpreted the Helsinki Final Act as enshrining human rights in international law—a view we fully supported."

Kissinger asserts not only that he sup-
ported this elevation of human rights as
a matter of moral principle. He also
claims to have suspected, even in 1975,
that these human rights provisions in the
Helsinki Final Act would bring the Soviet
Union down. According to Kissinger, "the
Western democracies pushed Basket III
and peaceful change to exploit what we
had come to recognize as the latent vul-
nerabilities of the Soviet empire." Many of
his critics in the United States attacked
the Helsinki Final Act as a sell-out and
a "Super Yalta," because it appeared to
accept and to legitimize Soviet control
of Eastern Europe in a legally binding
international agreement; but Kissinger
argues that the critics were proved wrong,
shamefully wrong. "Rarely has a diplo-
matic process so illuminated the limita-
tions of human foresight." With the
passage of time, the Helsinki Final Act
"came to be appreciated as a political and
moral landmark that contributed to the
progressive decline and eventual collapse
of the Soviet system over the next decade
and a half."

IN THESE MEMOIRS, Kissinger de-
picts himself as something of a lonely
prophet of the end of the Cold War.
As he tells it, all too few had perceived
the opportunity at hand in the mid-1970s,
but Kissinger and Ford persisted, confi-
dent in their purposes and optimistic
about the ultimate triumph of the West

over an enemy whose imminent crack-up
was visible to those with vision, with spe-
cial insight. To be sure, Kissinger abjures
any pretense of clairvoyance: "statesmen
act on the basis of tendencies, not cer-
tainties." Nor does he pretend that he
expected the Soviet Union "to collapse so
quickly." Still, the tendencies—toward the
decline and the eventual dissolution of
the Soviet Union—were, he claims, both
visible and exploitable. True, "intelligence
reports conveyed fearsome images of a
vast military capacity in the service of an
implacable resolve," Kissinger writes. "But
anyone who had ever been on an official
visit to the Soviet Union . . . could not but
gain the impression that the whole elabo-
rately constructed stage set was precar-
ious and might collapse at any moment."
All that was needed, apparently, was the
right ideological thrust aimed at the chink
in the totalitarian Soviet armor.

Without expecting the immediate
collapse of the Soviet Empire, Kissinger
claims, "we were content to loosen its
bonds wherever possible and to push
the right of peaceful change while await-
ing the conditions that would enable
the democracies to pursue it." In the end,
and no thanks to its many liberal and
neo-conservative detractors, "the Ford
Administration achieved what turned
out to be a strategic victory" at Helsinki.
Others helped to achieve this victory, of
course, especially in the 1980s. Kissinger
does not wish to "tak[e] credit away from
great men like Havel [and] Walesa." But
he does wish to reapportion the credit
that has hitherto been distributed among
American leaders. "Other presidents were
to receive the credit for winning the Cold
War," Kissinger notes with a trace of re-
sentment at this historical injustice. But
he is "certain the time will come when it is
recognized that the Cold War could not
have been won" without Gerald Ford.

NOR, PRESUMABLY, without Henry Kissinger. Amid his many encomia to Gerald Ford as the savior of his country, Kissinger cannot help but point out that in matters of foreign policy Ford was an ill-informed novice without strategic understanding, a decent and modest man whom Nixon had made vice president precisely because "he had so little background in international affairs." (In fact, Kissinger notes, Nixon had hoped the selection of Ford would dissuade Congress, for this very reason, from proceeding toward impeachment.) Of course, Kissinger himself is too modest to claim openly that credit for engineering America's triumph in the Cold War really belongs to him. But the astute reader will perhaps understand that if the Ford administration cleverly

sowed the seeds of the Soviet Union's later
demise, then the mastermind behind that
strategy was probably someone other than
Gerald Ford.

For all his praise of Ford, in fact,
Kissinger's goal in these memoirs is not
primarily to resurrect Ford's reputation
but to repair his own, and Nixon's. He
does so by means of an extraordinary
assertion. Kissinger's account of the 1970s
is designed to establish an essential conti-
nuity between the policies of détente and
the policies of Ronald Reagan. "If Harry
Truman was the architect of the core
institutions that won the Cold War and
Ronald Reagan provided the impetus for
the end game, Richard Nixon was the
pivotal figure in the middle period." And
pivotal not just in the sense of keeping
America intact as a global power in the
disastrous final years of Vietnam. It was
during Nixon's presidency, Kissinger
claims, "that the main lines of Ameri-
can policy for the final two decades of the
Cold War were put in place."

KISSINGER'S REVISIONIST interpretation aims at refuting the common view that Reagan's policies were a sharp departure from the détente practiced by Nixon, Ford, and Carter. "Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve much credit for the denouement of the Cold War," Kissinger acknowledges, but not because they took a different course. "Reagan's policy," he claims, "was, in fact, a canny reassertion of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford Administrations clothed in the rhetoric of Wilsonianism." The "victories of the 1980s derived from a Reaganite variant—not a rejection—of the strategies of the 1970s."

This is a significant assertion, with
important implications, as Kissinger in-
tends, not only for our understanding of
the Cold War but also for the conduct of
American foreign policy more generally.
It is one thing if Reagan won the Cold
War by returning to the confrontational
and ideologically charged policies of the
Truman era, as most observers at the time
believed and as later historians have re-
affirmed. It is quite another thing if
Reagan's policies were little more than a
"variant" on Nixonian détente and Kiss-
singerian realism, merely dressed up in
ideological rhetoric. After all, there is a
rather important debate raging over the
proper place of morality and ideology in
American foreign policy today, on issues
ranging from the intervention in Kosovo
to the conduct of relations with China.
Whether or not Kissinger's revisionism
takes over as the common interpretation
of the last two decades of the Cold War
should have no small impact on that
debate.

40 : JUNE 21, 1999

IT SHOULD HAVE no small impact, that is, if anyone is paying attention. Judging from the reviews of *Years of Renewal*, however, one gets the impression that no one is paying attention. Not a single reviewer has even made reference to Kissinger's revisionist claims, much less tried to evaluate their merit. Perhaps this neglect is due to the fact that *Years of Renewal* is a very fat book, and there is only so much one can cover in a review. But there may also be a more disturbing explanation: that we remain in the midst of a historical process of smoothing over what were once titanic Cold War disputes, treating them as if they were mere differences of nuance among policy disputants who, for all their minor disagreements, nevertheless shared the same broad goals and the same general view of how those goals could be attained.

We commonly hear these days that the Cold War was a time of relatively simple strategic verities and, compared with our present era of uncertainty, confusion, and rancor, a period of bipartisanship and common agreement on the need to contain and to defeat the Soviet menace. Occasionally, someone such as William Bundy comes along to remind us rudely of the vicious personal, partisan, and ideological struggles that actually dominated the Cold War years. And Kissinger him-

self in these memoirs re-fights some of those old battles with a fresh bitterness that belies his assertion of seamless continuity (about which more later). But the tendency since 1989 has been toward forbidding and, more importantly, forgetting. The decade since the end of the Cold War has been an era of good feelings, a time of historiographical healing.

Kissinger is no doubt counting on this self-willed collective amnesia to bring about a general acceptance of the bold revisionist argument of his book. Before we slip permanently into our post-Cold-War coma, however, it may be worth returning to the record just for a moment to examine whether Kissinger's claim to a share of the Cold War victory has any merit.

### III.

THE RECORD IS not exactly thin. Kissinger is one of only a handful of American foreign policymakers in history whose very name has stood for a certain clear and well-defined theory of international relations, and for a distinct view of the way the United States should conduct itself in its dealings with the rest of the world. In the past century, one thinks of John Hay and the "Open Door," George Kennan and "con-

tainment," John Foster Dulles and "rollback." But even those precedents do not match the breadth and the depth of vision with which Kissinger's name is linked. There was more to Kissinger than détente. Both in office and in his voluminous writings, Kissinger elaborated broad theories of international politics, attempted to explain the way the world works, discussed in a general sense what was possible in foreign affairs and what was not, and attempted to fit the conduct of American foreign policy, and in particular the way it had to be managed during the turbulent 1970s, within these overarching constructs.

Détente was not just a tactic. If one takes Kissinger seriously as a strategic thinker, détente was the product of a consistent and well-constructed worldview applied to the trying circumstances of a specific era but theoretically applicable to all eras, including our own. And the principles upon which Kissinger based the policy of détente could not have been clearer. In order to evaluate his new claim that there was essential continuity between his policies and the "variant" pursued by Ronald Reagan, it is necessary to go back and examine those principles, and the manner in which Kissinger put them into practice in the 1970s.

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THE NEW REPUBLIC : JUNE 21, 1999 : 41

THE NEW REPUBLIC

to recall that first among these principles, and shaping all the others, was the reality and the necessity of coexistence with the Soviet Union and with Soviet Communism; and not as a temporary condition of international relations, but as a permanent one. The expectation of a Soviet collapse that Kissinger now retrospectively attributes to himself was nowhere apparent in his actions or in his statements as a policy-maker. Quite the contrary. The conflict with the Soviet Union, he admonished Americans throughout the 1970s, would simply "not admit of resolution by victory in the classical sense. We are compelled to coexist." To believe otherwise, Kissinger argued, to ignore what he called in 1974 the "imperative of coexistence," was to engage in self-delusion and, indeed, a dangerous self-delusion.

The misguided hope of American leaders in the early Cold War years, leaders such as Truman and Dean Acheson, was that "containment would transform the Soviet Union and that a changed Soviet society would then evolve inexorably into a compatible member of a harmonious international community." But this had proved a false dream. As late as 1976, Kissinger was urging Americans to confront the fact that, in the thirty years since the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had "recovered from the devastation of World War II and pressed vigorously ahead on the path of industrial growth." With the "acquisition of nuclear technology and the transformation of the international system through decolonization," the Soviet Union had emerged as a "first-class military power." Soviet "industrial, technological, and military power" had grown impressively, and by the 1970s it had developed "its economic strength and technology to a point where it can match the West in many sectors of industrial and military power."

KISSINGER NOW CLAIMS that he believed that the Soviet Union was teetering on the edge of collapse in the mid-1970s. But in 1976, even after what he now alleges was the "strategic victory" at Helsinki, he was arguing the opposite. It was precisely the enduring reality of Soviet power, he insisted, that made coexistence rather than confrontation the necessary goal of American foreign policy. Indeed, given the fact of Soviet power, and especially the mammoth nuclear arsenal that it had amassed since the 1960s, it was folly to pursue any goal other than coexistence. Any other goal risked catastrophe. Soviet power, Kissinger declared in a speech in 1973, had made it a "necessity" to shift "from confrontation to negotiation."

The second principle of détente was

more hopeful. Since each superpower had the capacity to destroy the other, Kissinger argued in the 1970s, this paradoxically gave them a shared interest in self-preservation, and it was upon this fundamental common interest that a structure of peaceful coexistence, and even cooperation, could be erected. Given the apocalyptic dangers of confrontation, each side had to act with restraint, each had to be conscious of the needs and the interests of its adversary, and each had to avoid taking opportunistic advantage of the other side's vulnerabilities lest even relatively minor crises escalate rapidly to nuclear confrontation.

Much to the dismay of liberal critics, then and now, Kissinger's détente did not aim at ending the Cold War competition. Hopes for such an outcome were utopian (and for that very reason, Kissinger believed, typically American). Kissinger himself entertained no such fancies. His efforts to forge closer ties with China were designed to unnerve the Soviets and to make them more pliable. His Middle East policies aimed at reducing Soviet influence in that vital region. As he tried to explain to liberal critics at the time, "the very concept of 'détente' was "applicable only to an adversary relationship." For Kissinger, the purpose of détente was not to end competition but to manage it, and to keep it from flaring into global confrontation. Even as the competition continued, Kissinger hoped that he could promote and codify some rules of the road, some "principles of responsible relations in the nuclear age." These rules would include "respect for the interests of all, restraint in the uses of power, and abstention from efforts to exploit instability or local conflicts for unilateral advantage."

KISSINGER EXPECTED NEITHER an end to competition nor an escape from coexistence. The outer limit of Kissinger's optimism in the 1970s was that "with patience, a pattern of restraints and a network of vested interests" could develop which might "give coexistence a more hopeful dimension and make both sides conscious of what they would stand to lose by reverting to the politics of pressure, confrontation, and crisis." Ultimately, in the best of circumstances, détente might advance beyond establishing a stable equilibrium between the two superpowers and promote "the habits of mutual restraint, coexistence, and, ultimately, cooperation."

Such confidence as Kissinger expressed in the 1970s, therefore, was not a confidence in the West's ultimate triumph—certainly not within a foreseeable future that could have any relevance for current policies—but in its ability to establish

to maintain a global equilibrium. "We cannot prevent the growth of Soviet power," he argued in a speech in 1976, but "the industrial democracies possess vast strengths," and if used with confidence and consistency those strengths could be used "to contain Soviet power and to channel that power in constructive directions." Still, far from envisioning an eventual Soviet collapse, Kissinger argued that these important, if limited, goals could be accomplished only if the American people did not "mesmerize themselves with the illusion of simple solutions"—solutions such as the transformation of Soviet society or the possibility of victory in the Cold War.

THESE PREMISES OF détente had clear implications for the way the United States had to deal with the Soviet Union in the contest of ideologies. In Kissinger's view, the American goal could not be the transformation of Soviet society—indeed, the United States could not even apply pressure for change—because the Communist leaders in Moscow would then have no incentive to cooperate in the peaceful structures of détente. "To combine détente with increasing pressure on the Soviet Union," he warned Congress in 1974, "would be disastrous. We would not accept it from Moscow; Moscow will not accept it from us."

Americans had to understand "what can and cannot be achieved in changing human conditions in the East." The United States could not demand "that the Soviet Union, in effect, suddenly reverse five decades of Soviet, and centuries of Russian, history. Such an attempt would be futile and at the same time hazard all that has already been achieved." If the United States tried to "transform the Soviet system by pressure," Kissinger argued in 1974, then "we would be reviving the doctrines of liberation and massive retaliation of the 1950s. And we would do so at a time when Soviet physical power and influence in the world are greater than a quarter-century ago when those policies were devised and failed. The futility of such a course is as certain as its danger."

Here again, Kissinger in the 1970s portrayed the Soviet Union not as a weak power susceptible to change, but as a strong power whose internal structures could not be forced to change without risking Armageddon. In response to critics who claimed that this policy lacked a moral core, Kissinger invoked the specter of nuclear war, and pointed out that "the preservation of human life and human society are moral values, too." The "moral" imperatives of peace and stability required the United States to abstain from ideological confrontation. How hard

42 : JUNE 21, 1999

could the United States press, Kissinger
asked in 1973, "without provoking the
Soviet leadership into returning to prac-
tices in its foreign policy that increase
international tensions?" Was the Ameri-
can public "ready to face the crises and
increased defense budgets that a return to
Cold War conditions would spawn?" And
would increased pressure from the West
"enhance the well-being or nourish the
hope for liberty of the peoples of Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union?" Kissinger
thought not.

KISSINGER'S WARINESS OF—indeed, his opposition to—a foreign policy shaped by ideology transcended the immediate circumstances of the détente era. Ideology, he believed, was not only the enemy of détente; it was also the enemy of a stable international order. And the problem was not just Communist ideology. America's universalist pretensions were also a danger. No matter what the source, Kissinger argued, as a general rule "ideological conflict" tended only to compound international instabilities, to "deepen international schisms."

Like Hans Morgenthau, the founder of
modern realism, Kissinger asserted that
"in the great periods of cabinet diplo-
macy," especially during the nineteenth
century, "diplomats spoke the same lan-
guage, not only in the sense that French
was the lingua franca, but more impor-

tantly because they tended to understand
intangibles in the same manner. A similar
outlook about aims and methods eases
the task of diplomacy—it may even be a
precondition for it." To establish and to
maintain international peace and stabil-
ity required setting ideological differences
aside and establishing a common under-
standing that transcended ideology, an
understanding based on the amoral
imperatives of geopolitics. "The greatest
need of the contemporary international
system," Kissinger insisted, was not an
agreed concept of right and wrong, which
was impossible, but "an agreed concept
of order."

As a matter of principle, Kissinger be-
lieved the United States had no more right
to impose its ideology on others than the
Soviet Union did. Exasperated by critics
who demanded that détente give way to
more pressure for change in the Soviet
Union, Kissinger noted in 1973 that "for
half a century we have objected to Com-
munist efforts to alter the domestic struc-
tures of other countries. For a generation
of Cold War we sought to ease the risks
produced by competing ideologies. Are
we now to come full circle and insist on
domestic compatibility as a condition of
progress?" As Kissinger saw it, the goal of
American foreign policy should not be to
wage the ideological struggle with Soviet
Communism, but to "manage" the "clash
of ideologies," to "transform ideological

conflict into constructive participation in
building a better world," to "harness the
rivalry of the nuclear superpowers, first
into coexistence and then mold coexis-
tence into a more positive and cooperative
future."

SUCH A NON-IDEOLOGICAL approach to foreign policy was alien to American sensibilities, and Kissinger was well aware of this. He conceived it as his great task during the Nixon and Ford years—it was a task worthy of a lone cowboy—to try to wean Americans away from their sentimental idealism, from their habitual fondness for ideological crusades, and to make them see the virtue and the necessity of pursuing the more modest aims of equilibrium and stability. Kissinger insisted in 1974 that Americans focus not on the Soviet Union's domestic behavior but use its international behavior as the "primary index of our relationship." Beyond this, Americans might "use our influence to the maximum to alleviate suffering and to respond to humane appeals." Above all, Americans had to accept reality. The Soviet Union was not going away, and its system was unlikely to change appreciably for many, many decades to come.

Insofar as Kissinger held out any hope
for internal change in the Soviet empire—
and on occasion even he felt compelled
to dangle some hope of an eventual

ASSOCIATION OF LITERARY SCHOLARS AND CRITICS

THE FIFTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Friday, 29 October

2:00-4:00 p.m. *World Literature*. Chair: *John Ellis* (UC Santa Cruz).

Sir Hugh Lloyd Jones (Oxford): "Goethe and the Greeks."

Michael Moses (Duke): "Magical Realism as a World Genre."

Gary Saul Morson (Northwestern): "Dostoevsky and the Literature of Process."

4:30-5:30 p.m. Poetry Reading by Charles Wright from his work in progress.

Saturday, 30 October

9:00-11:00 noon. *Cervantes in a World Context*. Chair: *Dario Fernandez-Morera* (Northwestern).

Diana Wilson (University of Denver): "Cervantes and the Indies."

Howard Young (Pomona): "Conversations between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza."

James Parr (UC Riverside): "Don Quixote: Translation and Interpretation."

2:00-4:00 p.m. *The Humanities in the Undergraduate Curriculum*. Chair: Mark Bauerlein (Emory).

Kathy Eden (Columbia University): "The Great Books in the Undergraduate Curriculum."

John Briggs (UC Riverside): "Composition and the Humanities."

Thomas F. Bertonneau (ALSC): "Orality, Literacy, and the Humanities."

8:00 p.m. Banquet, followed by an address by Sir *Ferdinand Mount*, Editor in Chief, *Times Literary Supplement*.

Sunday, 31 October (Concurrent Sessions)

9:00-11:00 a.m. *Charles Wright, Poet and Three Critics*. Chair: *Eleanor Cook* (University of Toronto).

Bonnie Costello (Boston University): "The Passions of Charles Wright."

James Longenbach (University of Rochester): "The Landscapes of Charles Wright."

Willard Spiegelman (Southern Methodist University): "On Charles Wright."

Romantic Poetry. Chair: Norman Fruman (University of Minnesota).

Robert Gleckner (Duke): "Humpty Dumpy Blake."

Jerome McGann (University of Virginia): "Millennial Romanticism."

James Engell (Harvard): "Romantic Poems and Ideas."

Drama: *Classic to Renaissance*. Chair: *Mary Lefkowitz* (Wellesley).

Charles Marowitz (Malibu Stage Company): "Shakespearean Acting - Clue to Action."

Tom Hester (North Carolina State): "Reading the 'Tale' in The Merchant of Venice."

Eric Gans (UCLA): "Aeschylus to Racine - Drama's Internal Scene."

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THE NEW REPUBLIC : JUNE 21, 1999 : 43

THE NEW REPUBLIC

respite before an American populace ever desirous of "simple solutions"—this change would come not through confrontation, and much less through ideological confrontation. It would come only through détente and the relaxation of tensions. "Changes in Soviet society have already occurred," Kissinger declared in 1974, at the height of the Brezhnev era, "and more will come." But such changes were "most likely to develop through an evolution that can best go forward in an environment of decreasing international tensions. A renewal of the Cold War will hardly encourage the Soviet Union to change its emigration policies or adopt a more benevolent attitude toward dissent." It was détente that had "generated the ferment and the demand for openness we are now witnessing."

Again, it would be through détente that such openness would be realized. Kissinger endorsed the argument advanced by Cold War liberals and doves "that the reason the Soviet system was able to maintain its authoritarian hold was because of its invocation of foreign danger, and that to the degree that the foreign danger diminished it would not be able to maintain the more repressive aspects of its system." In the long run, Kissinger told members of Congress in 1973, he believed that "this will turn out to be a correct judgment." By reducing the danger of war, by denying the Soviets an enemy, and by "forcing the Soviet system into a cooperative relationship with the rest of the world in the field of foreign policy," détente would "over a period of time mitigate their system."

IV.

THIS WAS KISSINGER'S strategy and philosophy in the 1970s. It was patiently elaborated in numerous speeches throughout his eight years in office, then expounded in the thoughtful prose of his first two volumes of memoirs. So what are we to make of his present claim that he and the Ford administration scored a "strategic victory" by exploiting, through the human rights and peaceful change provisions in the Helsinki Final Act, what "we had come to recognize as the latent vulnerabilities of the Soviet empire?" Are we to believe that in defiance of his own carefully constructed strategy and his own well-articulated philosophy, Kissinger sought to use the Helsinki process to strike at precisely those internal structures of the Soviet system which he had so persistently declared out-of-bounds according to the rules of détente? Are we to accept Kissinger's claim that he deliberately tried to exploit weaknesses in the Soviet system

and to hasten its demise, when we know that his foreign policy of the 1970s rested on the twin premises of Soviet strength and the unalterable reality of coexistence? And what exactly happened at Helsinki? In what way can the Helsinki Final Act be understood as a turning point in the Cold War?

To answer these questions requires putting the Helsinki conference back into its historical context. Kissinger would like us to forget that context, and to view Helsinki only from a post-1989 perspective, as an important and logical step on the path to our inevitable victory in the Cold War. But our victory was not inevitable. In 1975, indeed, it was virtually inconceivable. Kissinger's claims may appear plausible from a post-Cold-War perspective—they are plausible *only* from that misleading perspective—but when it comes to explaining the actions and the motives of participants in historical events, it is the historian's task to try to recreate "reality" as it appeared to contemporaries. Writing history backwards can often yield important ideas about the past; but in careless hands—or in the hands of an interested party—it can produce error and distortion.

To understand the Helsinki conference in its historical context is to understand why so many critics from the left and the right viewed it as a capitulation to the Soviet Union, as a defeat for the United States and the West, as holding little promise of a better future. The conference was the culmination of a process that Kissinger himself had long viewed with a varying mixture of skepticism, scorn, and concern. And with good reason: the initial impetus for a pan-European conference had come from Moscow. Soviet leaders, sensing the distress of Europe, and especially Germany, over the continuing tensions of the Cold War, and sensing also their unease with the policies of the United States, especially in its conduct of the war in Vietnam, had hoped to exploit this disquiet in the Western alliance by appealing to a vague but growing desire for some assertion of European independence.

ORIGINALLY, THE Soviet idea for a pan-European conference had excluded the United States, and although Washington convinced its NATO allies not to allow such a wedge to be driven through the trans-Atlantic partnership, the conference continued to have an anti-American flavor. The United States was finally allowed to participate, but the clear purpose of the planned Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was for the Europeans—that is, the West Europeans, the East Europeans,

and the Soviet Union—to take some control of their own common destiny and to establish a continental modus vivendi. For the Soviet Union, this meant above all the acceptance by Western Europe—the formal and legal acceptance—of the legitimacy and, therefore, the permanence of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, including, very importantly, East Germany.

Kissinger would later argue that the intense Soviet desire for the legitimization of its imperial position in Europe was a sign of weakness and insecurity. This may have been the case; but throughout the early and mid-1970s many Americans, especially conservatives but also many in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including Kissinger, viewed the conference with genuine trepidation. The West was insecure, too. Kissinger did his best to slow the process down, to burden it by linking it to other matters, and to make its accomplishment contingent on the satisfaction of American demands on other issues. He tried to counter the drift of Western allies toward accommodation with Moscow with his proclamation of an American-sponsored "Year of Europe" in 1973, and with an initiative for establishing a "new Atlantic charter." These efforts were major diplomatic failures. They had the opposite of their intended effect: they further revealed the determination of the European allies to display their independence from Washington.

EVENTUALLY, THROUGH assiduous work with the allies, but mostly thanks to residual allied fears of being left to confront the Soviets by themselves, the United States managed to corral the West Europeans and to prevent the worst manifestations of European neutralism. But Kissinger never really changed his sour view of the conference. In *White House Years*, published four years after what Kissinger now alleges was the West's great triumph at Helsinki, he disparaged the European conference as a Soviet ploy, championed in the West by that most untrustworthy of European leaders, Willy Brandt. In *Years of Upheaval*, published seven years after Helsinki, Kissinger makes a few references to the evolving European conference, but he gives no hint that he believes it had produced anything worth commenting on, and least of all in the area of human rights. The foresight that Kissinger retroactively attributes to himself today—that he both recognized and then exploited Soviet vulnerabilities in 1975—is nowhere to be found in Kissinger's writings of 1979 and 1982.

In fact, those memoirs reflected the mood and the reality of 1975 and subse-

44 : JUNE 21, 1999

quent years far more accurately than
Kissinger's post-1989 revisionist account.
At the time of the European conference,
few on either side of the Atlantic seri-
ously contemplated a loosening of Soviet
control in Eastern Europe, much less the
eventual collapse of Soviet Communism.
The "tendencies," to borrow Kissinger's
word, were all in the opposite direction.
The animating impulses behind the con-
ference were the insistence upon an ac-
ceptance of the division of Europe as an
enduring reality, in order to lessen the
tensions and the anxieties of the Cold
War, and then, on the basis of such a rec-
onciliation with reality, to make life as
bearable as possible for Europeans on
both sides of the divide.

IT HARDLY BEARS mentioning that,
notwithstanding his present claims,
Kissinger at the time took little if any
interest in the so-called "human rights"
issues of Basket III of the Helsinki Final
Act. It would have been out of character
for him to do so in any case, nor would
pressing for human rights have fit well
within his strategy of détente. In none of
his writings before this new volume of
memoirs did Kissinger ever pretend to
take those issues seriously. Even in his
account of the Helsinki conference in
*Diplomacy*, published just five years ago,
Kissinger claimed no role in pushing Bas-
ket III, stating only, and with perhaps
deliberate opacity, that "the American del-
egation contributed" to the final provi-
sions. In the present volume, Kissinger
in one place asserts that "the Western
democracies pushed Basket III and peace-
ful change to exploit what we had come
to recognize as the latent vulnerabilities of
the Soviet empire." That "we" is a clever
bit of legerdemain. Elsewhere he admits
that "I for one was initially skeptical about
the possibilities of Basket III." It is fair
to assume that Kissinger overcame his
initial skepticism only after 1989, when
the unintended consequences of Basket
III became manifest.

And the consequences *were* unin-
tended. Kissinger aside, even the propo-
nents of the provisions in Basket III did
not believe in 1975 that they were planting
the seeds of a future revolution in the
Soviet empire, for the simple reason that
in the mid-1970s no one inside or outside
the Soviet system believed that such a rev-
olution was possible. Just about everyone
shared the view, which Kissinger himself
at the time repeatedly advanced, that the
Soviet state, for all its weaknesses, was
strong enough to persist. As Martin Malia
has pointed out, not even Soviet dissi-
dents had "any clear idea of how advanced
the crisis of the system was, even as late as
the end of the 1970s."

FOR THE EUROPEANS who really pushed Basket III, the purpose of expanding East-West contacts, and of calling for an easing of repression in the Eastern bloc, was not to undermine the Soviet Empire. Their goals, too, were in keeping with the conference's broader purpose of accepting the legitimacy and the likely permanence of that empire. The idea was to alleviate the worst manifestations of the division of Europe, not to undo it. Kissinger himself in 1976 explained the purposes of Helsinki entirely within the familiar context of détente and the "imperative of coexistence." It was, he said, a Western European effort "to strengthen their bilateral and regional ties with the countries of Eastern Europe. We hope that this process will help heal the divisions of Europe.... We will continue to pursue measures to improve the lives of the people in Eastern Europe in basic human terms—such as freer emigration, the unification of families, greater flow of information, increased economic interchange, and more opportunities for travel." Kissinger rejected more revolutionary goals.

In *White House Years*, he recounted
how Willy Brandt, in trying to convince
the Americans to support the European
conference, had invoked “the standard

European argument that it was desired
precisely by the most independent coun-
tries of Eastern Europe as a means of but-
tressing their autonomy." But Kissinger at
the time saw through the hollowness of
this argument, and sneeringly dismissed
it. Brandt, he wrote, could never explain
"why the Soviets were pressing for a con-
ference that would loosen their hold on
the satellite orbit." Why, indeed.

BY 1975, like other leading Germans, Brandt had given up even on the dream of the reunification of West and East Germany. Brandt confessed "that I have stopped speaking about reunification." As Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice have pointed out, the unification of Germany "seemed an academic point in the world of 1975." In his pursuit of *Ostpolitik*, Brandt had come to accept "the original Eastern view that reunification should take a back seat to the relaxation of broader East-West tensions." The Helsinki Final Act's declaration concerning the "peaceful change of borders," therefore, was empty symbolism, and in its time it was understood to be such.

In reality, as Zelikow and Rice note, the
Act “came to stand for acceptance of the
postwar borders and the de facto settle-

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THE NEW REPUBLIC

ment imposed by the victors." The West Germans "believed that they had to accept the status quo in order to change it some-day." But as the years passed, the "West German timetable ... seemed to be measured on a time scale more familiar to geologists than to politicians." As late as 1988, Helmut Kohl, when asked whether Mikhail Gorbachev might someday agree to reunification, answered that "I do not write futuristic novels like [H.G.] Wells. What you ask now, that is in the realm of fantasy."

Kissinger was certainly no more zealous for reunification than the Germans, not in 1975 and not in 1990. As Zelikow and Rice point out, "Henry Kissinger had for many years thought the German question secondary to the overall management of the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union. Thus, for the United States détente and a modus vivendi with the Soviets on Germany went hand in hand." Brent Scowcroft, the long-time aide, associate, and friend of Kissinger, expressed a most Kissingerian view of reunification in the memoirs that he recently co-authored with George Bush. Even as late as 1990, Scowcroft recalls, "I was skeptical about the wisdom of pursuing German unification.... What was wrong with a divided Germany as long as the situation was stable? The very process of unification could be extremely destabilizing, and could even lead to conflict." Kissinger certainly held this view at the time of Helsinki, and for many years afterward. And so his present argument—that he favored the peaceful change provisions in the Final Act as laying the groundwork for a future reunification—is hard to take seriously.

Historians, as opposed to revisionist memoirists, have described Helsinki not as a "strategic victory" for a West determined to exploit alleged Soviet vulnerabilities, but as the "high point of détente." The most favorable interpretation of Helsinki at the time, and in the years that followed, was that the West had not given up anything of real importance. As A.W. DePorte put it in 1979, "The Soviet success in this drawn-out but essentially marginal policy was a gain for them by their lights but not a loss for the West, except for the loss of illusions. It changed nothing in the European status quo except to reveal more clearly—to any who could not see—what the status quo has been and is."

THIS WAS THE BEST that could be said about Helsinki. But there was also a darker interpretation. For in the years following the European conference, Soviet behavior went from bad to worse. In 1975, the very year in which Helsinki was signed, Moscow continued to arrest dissidents; and although

Helsinki theoretically provided the dissidents and their Western supporters a legalistic club with which to beat them, Soviet leaders were impervious to this pressure throughout the remainder of the 1970s. By 1980 they had just about stamped out the dissident movement. As Malia writes, the Soviets considered their human rights pledges "a mere formality ... a minor annoyance as against the great gain of international legitimization of their external empire."

In the context of the 1970s, which was the only context that mattered to both Kissinger and his many critics at the time, were the Soviets wrong? Kissinger now argues that the Soviet Union in "its desperate quest for legitimacy" had paid a fateful price for that legitimacy by agreeing to the human rights and peaceful change clauses of the Helsinki Final Act. But this is a complete distortion of the reality of 1975. There was nothing desperate about the Soviets' circumstances in the mid-1970s. Whatever their mounting internal difficulties, and even in reformist government circles these were thought to be solvable, in the global competition the Soviets were on a roll.

There are good grounds for believing that Helsinki, in fact, marked the inauguration of a new phase of Soviet aggressiveness. "In the 1960s and early 1970s, under Brezhnev," as Malia among others has noted, the Soviets "had built up their strength to the level of that of the United States and could therefore accept the negotiations leading to SALT I and détente. As the 1970s progressed, however, the 'correlation of forces' seemed to shift in favor of the Soviets, so toward the end of that decade they themselves took to acting 'from positions of strength.' The shift began with the fall of South Vietnam and the signing of the Helsinki agreements in 1975." Helsinki, the "high point of détente," was also the high point of Soviet confidence, and it helped set the stage for the more aggressive Soviet moves, in Angola, in the Horn of Africa, in Cambodia, and in Afghanistan, which led in the United States to the final renunciation of détente and the inauguration of the confrontational policies of the early Reagan years.

## V.

SO KISSINGER'S CLAIM that the West scored a "strategic victory" at Helsinki is unsupportable. His suggestion that he consciously intended to use the Helsinki provisions to exploit Soviet vulnerabilities and eventually to bring down the USSR is, at best, thoroughly misleading. For anyone trying to understand Kissinger's broad strategy, it is also

confusing. Had Kissinger actually possessed the intention that he now imputes to himself, it would have contradicted every major premise of his strategy in the 1970s.

Kissinger's purpose in *Years of Renewal* is precisely to blur the record, to cover up the traces of his failures for a generation of readers that has presumably forgotten them. His revisionist interpretation of Helsinki, and of his own role in shaping its provisions, is as artful as it is transparent. It is an attempt to create a link between Kissinger's actions in the 1970s and the events of the Reagan years, to draw a seamless connection between his policy of détente and the collapse of the Soviet empire and the unraveling of Soviet Communism a decade and a half later. It is an effort, above all, to distort the historical record, so that détente no longer appears to have been a failure at all—and, more importantly, so that Kissinger himself, as the primary author and practitioner of détente, need no longer bear the historical responsibility for that failure.

But détente was a failure, and it was only with the reversal of détente and the return to confrontation in the Reagan years—that is, it was only with the repudiation and the rejection of Kissinger's strategy—that the provisions of the Helsinki Final Act took on their unintended and unforeseen significance. And détente did not fail in the 1970s only because the Watergate scandal destroyed presidential authority and robbed Kissinger of the tools to resist Soviet encroachments in Angola and elsewhere. This had always been Kissinger's contention, and defense, before he decided to try the more daring approach of claiming credit for victory in the Cold War.

KISSINGER USED TO argue, and with some plausibility, that the foreign and defense policies that Reagan later carried out had been politically impossible in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. In earlier writings, Kissinger acknowledged that détente had failed, but he laid the blame on an irresponsible Congress, on back-stabbing colleagues, on McGovernite liberals, on conservatives, on neo-conservatives, on Nixon—on just about everyone in the world except himself. And in *Years of Renewal* he continues to blame everyone for destroying détente even as he advances his novel assertion that some “Reaganite variant” of détente actually succeeded.

But what was clear at the time, and what remains clear in retrospect, is that détente failed also on its own merits. The Soviets never accepted the logic of détente. They never accepted the new

46 : JUNE 21, 1999

rules of the road, the need for restraint, the need for cooperation for its own sake. Even in 1978 Stanley Hoffmann, not exactly a hawk, argued that it had become became "pretty hard" by the late 1970s "to find any evidence of Soviet moderation in conflicts in which Russia was directly or indirectly involved." There had been signs of moderation before 1973—before, that is, "the agreements that the Soviets needed were signed ... SALT I, with its recognition of parity; the trade and credit deals; Helsinki, with its acceptance of the division of Europe." But once the Soviets had gotten what they wanted from these deals with the West, they simply pocketed them and pressed ahead with their global ambitions. If Kissinger had bet that détente would tie the Soviets into an interdependent and, therefore, more restrained and cooperative relationship with the West, and Soviet leaders had bet that détente would demoralize the West and consolidate their own global position, then it appeared to Hoffmann in 1978 that the Soviet bet had "been more vindicated than America's."

The Soviets, it now seems clear, saw détente much as Kissinger's conservative and neo-conservative critics did: not as a mutual agreement for international restraint but as a Western retreat, as an acknowledgment by Washington that American power and American will were declining. As Ronald E. Powaski writes in his history of the Cold War published last year, "in the eyes of the Soviets, détente was a necessary accommodation by the West to a 'correlation of forces' that the Soviets viewed as increasingly favorable to the communist movement." Détente failed, moreover, not only in practice, but also in theory. As Martin Malia argues in *The Soviet Tragedy*, which appeared in 1994:

> the Cold War was not the product of rash policies or misunderstandings based on mutual ignorance that could be overcome by 'confidence-building measures,' as the philosophy of détente had it. It was, rather, the product of the genuine incompatibility of the interests and structures of the two 'camps,' as standard Soviet doctrine had it. In this perspective, the three or four years of détente were a kind of diplomatic NEP designed to build Soviet strength for a new offensive, and the ten years of renewed Soviet pressure after 1975 were a return to the system's norm.

This was precisely what conservatives and neo-conservatives charged during the Nixon and Ford years: that détente was sapping the West's will and allowing

the Soviets first to consolidate and then to extend their global power. And it is the continuing accuracy of this charge that no doubt explains why Kissinger's attack on neo-conservatives, some of whom he calls his friends, is even more vitriolic in *Years of Renewal* than in his previous volumes. Kissinger depicts the neo-conservatives of the 1970s as wildly-eyed Wilsonians, oblivious to geopolitics, who thought they could vanquish the Soviet Union overnight with a "burst of ideological élan."

But it was precisely the burst of ideological élan represented by the election of Ronald Reagan that began to turn the mounting disaster spawned by détente around. Reagan did so not by pursuing his own "variant" of détente—as Kissinger would now have us believe—but by pursuing in his first term the kinds of confrontational policies and ideological challenges that Kissinger had opposed so consistently and so vigorously in the 1970s. Was it a "variant" of détente to declare the Soviet Union an "evil empire," to accelerate the arms race and abjure for four years any serious effort at arms control? Was it a "variant" of détente to support "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and Cambodia? Were Reagan's policies nothing more than Nixonian détente dressed up in Wilsonian garb, as Kissinger now claims?

Remarkably, a mere five years ago, Kissinger had very different answers to these questions than he offers today. In *Diplomacy* Kissinger acknowledged that there had been an "enormous difference" between Reagan's tactics and those of Nixon and Ford. Reagan had presented the Soviets with a "a direct moral challenge from which all of his predecessors had recoiled." He was the first Cold War president "to take the offensive both ideologically and geopolitically." Under Reagan, "America's goal was no longer relaxation of tensions but crusade and conversion." Reagan's first term, therefore, had "marked the formal end of the period of détente." Reagan and his advisers "considered concern with the balance of power too confining and too pessimistic. They strove not for gradualism, but for a final outcome."

In *Years of Renewal*, Kissinger indicts the neo-conservatives for this kind of thinking, as hopelessly divorced from reality. But in *Diplomacy*, he argued that "this faith gave the Reagan team an extraordinary tactical flexibility." While Kissinger gave "considerable" credit for the Cold War victory to Reagan's predecessors and to George Bush, he was unequivocal in declaring that it was "Ronald Reagan's

presidency which marked the turning point." One can only guess what happened to Kissinger's interpretation between the publication of *Diplomacy* and his writing of *Years of Renewal*. Somehow, one suspects, the old neo-conservative criticism of détente had once again gotten under Kissinger's skin, and he determined to answer it very differently than he had in the past—by claiming, preposterously, that Reagan's policies were merely variants of his own policies, and that he and Nixon ought to share more equally in the credit for the Cold War victory.

We may never know exactly what role Reagan's policies played in the Soviet Union's downfall. Much of the credit for the undoing of Soviet Communism belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev, whose bumbling efforts to reform Communism led to consequences that could not be foreseen by him, much less by any Western observer. But we do know some of the ways in which Reagan's policies may have contributed to the chain of events that led to the upheavals of 1989. We know that Reagan's arms buildup, and especially Reagan's commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative, panicked Soviet leaders into believing, first, that a more rapid and radical economic restructuring would be necessary if the Soviet Union was to compete in the new arms race both quantitatively and qualitatively, and second, that the Soviet Union therefore needed a respite from the Cold War while it got its own house in order. The first judgment helped to convince Gorbachev to undertake the political and economic reforms that quickly flew beyond his control. The second judgment caused Gorbachev to carry out a deliberate strategy of retreat on the world stage, a tactical measure that Malia likens to Lenin's agreement to the Brest-Litovsk treaty in 1917, but which led, again, to the entirely unforeseen unraveling of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.

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It was Reagan's restoration of ideology to foreign policy, and the ideological challenge that he posed to Moscow, that to some extent sparked and to some extent encouraged dissident movements in the Soviet bloc. Since the end of the Cold War, more than one former dissident has pointed to Reagan's "evil empire" speech as an inspiration and a turning point in their struggle. Would the provisions of the Helsinki Final Act have acquired their historic significance in the absence of Reagan's challenge? Would they have provided a successful rallying point for dissidents if détente, with its rigid commitment to equilibrium and the status quo, had continued to be American policy on into the 1980s? Again, we will never know. What we do know, however, is that during the years of détente the dissident movements in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern bloc were going nowhere. But they erupted in the Reagan years, in the context of renewed confrontation. This was probably not a historical accident, and there is at least a plausible case for cause and effect.

WHY HAS KISSINGER taken the risk of advancing such transparently ludicrous claims? There is something dishonorable in his distortion of history. So what if he was wrong in the 1970s? America has long since forgiven and, indeed, forgotten. Today Kissinger's prestige may be almost as great as it was in his heyday during Nixon's first term. Republican congressmen consider themselves honored to be in his company. Just being seen with Henry Kissinger is a mark of seriousness and legitimacy. Politicians and policymakers of both parties continue to look to Kissinger for advice on subjects ranging from NATO to China. (I wonder how many are even aware that his prescriptions for American relations with China—denying Beijing an enemy, eschewing ideological confrontation, and trying to draw China into a web of interdependence—are exactly the prescriptions that he advanced for dealing with the Soviet Union in the era of détente.)

Kissinger, in short, is still a national and international celebrity. So whence comes this continuing need for vindication, this continuing bitterness at old enemies—now “friends”—who today no longer even remember what the battles were about? One should perhaps leave this to the psychologists, but Kissinger himself provides a clue. He seems to do so almost intentionally. In one of his many fascinating discussions of Richard Nixon's character, Kissinger notes that “Nixon's convictions, while firm and—in foreign policy—carefully thought out, did

not seem able to sustain him unless they resonated not just with public acclaim but with the approval of the classes he admired and despised at the same time. His actions were in the mold of heroes, but Nixon doomed them by a frantic quest for stardom shading into efforts to vindicate his perception of the ruthlessness of his rivals.”

And then, in one of the frankest

moments of his memoir, Kissinger makes a rather striking admission. “Ultimately,” he reflects, what “proved so unsettling, even threatening” about Nixon’s “obvious and unending struggle with himself” was that “deep down one could never be certain that what one found so disturbing in Nixon might not also be a reflection of some suppressed flaw within oneself.”

# The Unburied Life

By HELEN VENDLER

## A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold by Ian Hamilton

(Basic Books, 241 pp., $24)

THE PROVOCATIVE CASE OF Matthew Arnold is raised again in this new but truncated life of that extraordinary man. By entitling his account *A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life*, Ian Hamilton (a poet himself, and the author of the first full biography of Robert Lowell) gives short shrift to the last thirty-five years of his subject's life, during which Arnold's poetic composition declined while his writing of critical prose increased. Those latter three and a half decades of strenuous work occupy only the last fifth of Hamilton's book, which in effect ends when Arnold is thirty-one. One can imagine an antithetical twin to this new biography: it would be called *A Gift Released: The Critical Life of Matthew Arnold*, and it would go from strength to strength until Arnold's death from heart disease in 1888, at the age of sixty-six.

Is it plausible to split a man thus in two? Does Arnold the mature critic have nothing to do with Arnold the younger poet? Can we, in fact, understand the poetry adequately if we confine ourselves to its own chronological boundaries? Does anything of the later prose help us to understand the earlier poetry?

When I was a girl, I knew nothing of Matthew Arnold but his verse. Later I was surprised to find, when reading, the breadth and the wit of his prose—the submerged nine-tenths of the Arnoldian iceberg.

I was already aware of the iceberg's famous remark when he was thirty-one: "I am past thirty and three parts iced over, and my pen, it seems to me, is even stiffer and more cramped than my feeling." Arnold meant seriously this heartbreaking disclosure; and yet the energetic, even racy prose of the rest of his life was not that of a gelid soul.

How, then, are we to read Arnold's life? Is it—as Hamilton would suggest—a tragic one, in which an early poetic gift is “imprisoned” and stifled by a later married life of repressed romance and daily drudgery? Or is it—as one might counter—an imaginatively successful life, in which a great critic, having trained his taste by the study of poetry and the practice of it “from the inside,” decided to embark on a vigorous analysis of the state of his country? Arnold's ambition—which was nothing less than to reform English culture—is not the ambition of an “imprisoned” sensibility. Perhaps we should pay less attention to Arnold's own foreboding that he might not continue to write poetry, and pay more attention to the ardors released in his prose. After all, many writers (Joyce and Faulkner come to mind) began by thinking that they would be poets only to discover that they were cut out for something else.

We consider it disappointing, perhaps, when a young poet finds his eventual life-work in criticism (rather than in fiction or in drama). The gap between imaginative writing and critical writing is a real one, and Arnold mourned the departure of the wistful passion that had awakened his verse. Yet intellectual analysis and

HELEN VENDLER is the author, most recently, of *The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets* and *Seamus Heaney* (both published by Harvard University Press).

48 : JUNE 21, 1999

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 1999

A21

# Graham's Footsteps

the hope of fanning a flicker of life from the ashes of grandeur past. Compared, however, to previous Graham runs in theaters on Broadway or at Lincoln Center, the Joyce stint was not a triumphant return. Besides being relatively small and having no orchestra pit, the Joyce has an eccentrically proportioned stage that is far wider than it is deep or high. The 20 dances offered in these un-ideal surroundings came primarily from those made during the earlier decades of Graham's career. Works from the late '20s through to the late '40s dominated. (The more recent dances, including a decorative and meandering premiere by Broadway's Susan Stroman and a dry exercise by postmodernism's Lucina Childs, all commissioned by Mr. Protas, looked negligible at best.)

With former Graham performers Yuriko (who goes professionally by this one name) and Pearl Lang recently named as "consultants" to the repertory that they danced under Graham, a number of the older works held the stage with easy authority. "Primitive Mysteries," a 1931 modernist evocation of folkloric ritual from the American Southwest, throbbing with theatrical detail, especially in the pulse of the weighted tread and the starkly angled arm positions of the 13-woman ensemble. The group element in such works as "Heretic" (1929) and "Panorama" (1935) also bodied forth with a physical power befitting the marvelous, and often marvelously weird, geometry of Graham's artful designs in

## *s Count Them*

we checked into the local Best Western and headed for the gallery. Terry Tobin, a wildlife biologist and environmental interpreter from Vancouver, was conducting a nature walk. Although we could have taken a rafting trip or gone horseback riding in order to view the eagles, we opted for the walk. We thought that it would be the best way to truly learn about them. Sporting Goretex and carting binoculars as well as our two children, we joined the tour and headed for Eagle Run. A designated eagle viewing site, the dike sits across from the reserve and offers sheltered viewing areas. Immediately upon our arrival, Mr. Tobin counted 28 eagles in a single cottonwood tree. During that hour alone, 284 were counted in total.

As the birds soared overhead, Mr. Tobin quickly explained how they control their flight patterns by adjusting their primary feathers ever so slightly and using their large white tails as rudders. He also noted a brown eagle in a tree just overhead and explained that it was juvenile, because it lacked the characteristic white head, yellow beak and yellow feet. At the end of the day, Mr. Tobin explained that the birds wouldn't be sleeping in those trees for the evening, but would be heading to a nearby

space. To watch such groups arrange, shift, and rearrange themselves with the ease and inevitability of a clockwork mechanism, is to see choreographic art writ large and sublimely confident.

Like "Primitive Mysteries," "Heretic" features a central role once danced by Graham, and a framing female ensemble. Unlike "Primitive Mysteries," however, which had pale portrayals of its leading figure in these outings, "Heretic" had the great benefit of a performance by Fang Yi Sheu, the company's singular new star. The Taiwanese dancer is blessed with a remarkable physique, strikingly theatrical coloring and a face as beautifully detailed and rivetingly masklike as Graham's own. Indeed, the company has had nothing quite like her in the decades since its founder left the stage. Ms. Sheu danced "Heretic" with chilling invulnerability. Elsewhere, in "Satyric Festival Song," a pastiche of an early Graham solo, she performed with unalloyed sass; as the Bride in "Appalachian Spring," she was a woman penetrating the dark by her own inner light.

Almost as impressive was Katherine Crockett, another fairly new leading dancer. Statuesque and supple, Ms. Crockett made every appearance seem both personal to her and particular to the Graham legacy she played a part in. Of the veteran women, Christine Dakin managed best to evoke a presence and power worthy of the Graham lineage. The severe Terese Capuccini, however, continued to give one-note performances; Denise Vale, lumpish ones. With most of the men now fairly green, few made much impact, though Gary Galbraith gave reliable performances as the demonic preacher in "Appalachian Spring." Another newcomer, Daniel Cardoso, made a remarkably strong impression since he was hardly featured at all. Handsome of face, proportions and coloring, strong of posture and sure of step, the young dancer stood out in the smallest of roles.

In the end, the skinny Joyce stage made the Graham repertory appear like specimens on a microscope's slide. Some of the sights framed there were typical of the murk lately passed off as legitimate Graham theater. But there were also signs of fresh animation. I hesitate to hope, however, that the most positive of these examples will rule the day and secure the future for the Graham Company. Yuriko, for instance, is back in a consulting position for a second time; her first stay didn't last, so one can't assume this one will. While Ms. Sheu is without equal among the new dancers, variously talented women have preceded her, but few remained long enough to make their marks. If Ms. Sheu is given an opportunity to mature as a Graham dancer, she could well be a legitimate heir to Graham herself. But, if she doesn't remain in place, no one should be shocked.

# Détente Defended

By JOSEF JOFFE

"Why so short?" quipped a reporter, when Henry Kissinger introduced "Diplomacy" in 1994, a brilliant disquisition on the nature and history of statecraft. How could he squeeze four centuries into 900 pages when "Years of Upheaval," his book covering Richard Nixon's last 18 months in office, had ballooned to almost 1,300? "Easy," Henry replied, "I took out all the I's."

The I's are back—in the third and last volume of his memoirs, "Years of Renewal" (Simon & Schuster, $35), which spans the 2 1/5 years of the Ford presidency and weighs in at 1,151 pages. Why should we read it now, almost a quarter-century after the facts?

First, because this transplant from Bavaria (with a little help from Harvard) writes so well. Not "hip" or "breezy" well; indeed, the prose can become quite professional when Mr. Kissinger delivers one of his many obiter dicta, like: "A nation's for-

## Bookshelf

"Years of Renewal"
By Henry Kissinger

eign policy inevitably reflects an amalgam of the convictions of its leaders and the pressures of the environment."

"Well" attaches to a style that simply outclasses the normal fare served up by former people of power. With Mr. Kissinger, we return to an almost dead tradition, to Churchill, Disraeli and Bismarck, who wrote on a broad canvas of learnedness—and with a literary sensibility for the drama of men and nations.

With a few economical strokes, Mr. Kissinger paints people, policies and constellations—Brezhnev, Zhou, Rabin, Hussein, Giscard, Schmidt. Sometimes, a single sentence can say it all, as after an encounter with Mao: "He would fix upon me a smile both penetrating and mocking as if to warn that it would be futile to attempt to deceive this specialist in human duplicity."

"Years of Renewal" is an engrossing book, truly hard to put down, at least for aficionados of U.S. foreign policy. That is one excellent reason for reading it. The second is precisely the 25-year hiatus. Time has improved the product in subtle ways. Mr. Kissinger has resisted settling scores, especially with his neoclassical tormentors, who hounded him relentlessly for being too soft on the Soviets. At worst, he waxes ironical or tart when he reconstructs the 1970s battles over détente or arms control.

Maybe all memoirs ought to obey a 25-year rule. For time makes the heart grow wiser. Undoubtedly, Richard Nixon was a major preoccupation for Mr. Kissinger. And though the book is about the Ford presidency, a whole chapter belongs to Nixon,

who keeps haunting the rest of the book like a revenant.

How these two needed and disdained, attracted and repelled, each other is an almost Shakespearian plot, and Mr. Kissinger renders it with compassion for Nixon and insight into himself. "As an erstwhile refugee who was for decades self-conscious about my German accent," Mr. Kissinger confesses, "I had some understanding of Nixon's fear of rejection." The most moving part of Mr. Kissinger's eulogy (Nixon died in 1994) is reprinted here: "I felt a deep loss and a profound void.... He stood on pinnacles that dissolved into precipices. He achieved greatly and suffered deeply."

How much has Mr. Kissinger achieved? May the historians decide after yet another quarter-century. It is at least clear that he wanted to teach America a version of Realpolitik appropriate for this greatest of powers. "American policymakers," he proclaims, "oscillate between the pragmatic and the missionary, between the practical and the idealistic." And, we might add, between Wilsonianism and power politics, isolationism and interventionism.

Mr. Kissinger wanted something more stable and predictable for the world's anchor power. It is captured in his 1974 Senate testimony. While the neocons were pushing for an ideological crusade, and the liberals for more arms control, Mr. Kissinger preached a nicely balanced realism: "We seek, regardless of Soviet intentions, to serve peace through a systematic resistance to pressure and conciliatory responses to moderate behavior."

An obvious combination, isn't it? But not to Americans, whose founding faith is not balance and containment but the theory of transcendence, a story of evil overcome and salvation gained. Kissingerism has no place in that teleology, and this is why Harvard's liberals hated him with as much passion as New York's neocons. (The latter have made peace with Henry, but his former colleagues on the Charles are still doing their worst to deny him an honorary degree.)

The endless struggle to find a policy befitting an America that is No. 1 but not an empire is the leitmotiv of these memoirs. Mr. Kissinger's is a compelling argument. Has he actually brought a bit of Talleyrand and Bismarck to the land of Jefferson and Madison? Not really, but there is an ironical twist. As Europe has become more democratic, it has become more like America. The Continent that invented Realpolitik now debates human rights, international tribunals, humanitarian intervention—remaking rather than restraining the world—with the same passionate intensity as America has done ever since the Federalists. The problem, it turns out, is not America but democracy.

Mr. Joffe is editorial-page editor of the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Munich and associate of the Olin Center for Strategic Studies at Harvard.

Commentary

165 East 56 Street
New York, New York 10022
(212) 751-4000

APK 19 1999

April 19, 1999

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

I know you see Commentary in
the normal course of things,
but we wanted you to have
this advance copy of the May
issue, with Gabriel
Schoenfeld's review-essay on
your new volume of memoirs.

BB:jd

Enclosure

"Commentary" - May 1999

OBSERVATIONS

# Was Kissinger Right?

Gabriel Schoenfeld

SERVING AS National Security Adviser and Secretary of State to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger dazzled the world for eight years with his masterful performance on the diplomatic stage. Over the course of his term in office, every instrument of modern statecraft—shuttle diplomacy, crisis management, square-and round-table negotiations, global nuclear alerts—was employed to stunning effect, if not to approbation, in the world media and press.

Yet when American voters ejected the hapless Gerald Ford from office in 1976 and returned Kissinger to private life, many were left wondering whether what they had just witnessed was nothing more than a botched circus performance, a high-wire act conducted without a net. In every direction one looked, America's standing had plummeted to a new postwar low and the prospect was one of further disarray, chaos, and retreat.

Though the United States had entered the 1970's as the strongest industrial power in the world, be-

ginning with the OPEC embargo of October 1973 a handful of oil-rich but militarily insignificant states had managed to put the economies of the United States and its allies on the rack. Though Kissinger and Nixon had bent every effort to extricate the United States with honor from the war in Southeast Asia, in 1975 came ignominious and agonizing defeat. And though Kissinger, Nixon, and Ford had striven to forge a more constructive relationship with America's most dangerous adversary, by 1976 détente was in ruins as the USSR recklessly ignited brushfires in distant corners of the globe and raced ahead in a menacing arms build-up.

Victory, it is said, has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan. In *Years of Renewal*, the third volume of his monumental trilogy of memoirs,* Kissinger does not rush to claim paternity for the cascade of disasters that came to a culmination in the Ford presidency. In part, as his very title suggests, Kissinger denies that the period was a disaster at all: the Ford administration, he writes, "could take pride in a long list of foreign-policy accomplish-

ments.” Yet at the same time he hardly ignores the inescapable facts. Instead, while accepting responsibility for a number of misjudgments and missteps, he freely points a finger of blame: at the terrible cards the two administrations he served had been dealt by the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy; at the malignant political legacy left by Richard Nixon's personal flaws; at the isolationism that seized the American Left and Congress as Vietnam dragged on; at the betrayal of national security by the leadership of the CIA and its congressional overseers; at the ineptitude and weakness of key players on Ford's White House staff; and at the failure of American conservatives, especially including the neoconservatives around COMMENTARY, to rally to the flag of his embattled policies.

Some of the finger-pointing that one finds throughout Kissinger's book appears to be transparently self-serving, the wily Machiavellian now skillfully manipulating the past

GABRIEL SCHOENFELD is senior editor of COMMENTARY.

* Simon & Schuster, 1,151 pp., $35.00. The first volume, *White House Years*, appeared in 1979; the second, *Years of Upheaval*, in 1982.

[55]

COMMENTARY MAY 1999

in order to secure his own place in it. As his account is buttressed, however, by a wealth of documentation, one would do well to consider that much of it may be justified.

SORTING OUT the issues is no easy task. *Years of Renewal* ranges widely, stepping back to traverse ground already covered in the preceding volumes of the series while presenting in close but immensely readable detail every aspect of the Ford administration's diplomacy from its maneuvering through the labyrinth of the Cyprus crisis to its fumbling in the dark comedy of the *Mayaguez* affair.* Undoubtedly, however, two of the most important issues it takes up revolve around the war in Indochina and U.S. relations with the USSR.

Consider, to begin with, Kissinger's account of American policy toward Cambodia and Vietnam. When Gerald Ford assumed office following Richard Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, the Paris Peace Accords had already been on the books for a year and a half. Kissinger contends that he and Nixon had been clear from the start about the flaws in this settlement between North and South Vietnam. He never harbored any "illusions," he writes, that Hanoi's "dour, fanatical leaders had abandoned their lifetime struggle." As he warned Nixon in a memo at the time, only an American readiness to intervene could uphold the precarious ceasefire. But he also expected—"naively," he notes here—that the antiwar movement in the United States "would be able to find satisfaction in the ending of hostilities" and that its agitations against American assistance to Saigon would cease.

As Kissinger predicted, the North Vietnamese did flagrantly violate the 1973 agreement from day one. But as he failed to predict, the "peace movement" in the United States did not die out; as quickly became evident, it would settle for nothing less than a complete rout of

America's allies in Indochina. And by the time that rout did in fact begin, America's capacity to answer Hanoi with military power had been stripped away by events well beyond Kissinger's control.

One such event was Watergate, which by the autumn of 1973 had thoroughly undermined executive authority and poisoned the American body politic, destroying in the process the last vestiges of political will for further American exertions in Southeast Asia. Only six months after the Paris Accords were concluded, Congress barred the further use of American force "in or over Indochina," rendering the agreement impossible to uphold. Despite Ford and Kissinger's intensive lobbying, the provision of supplies that might have given South Vietnam a chance to defend itself on its own was progressively slashed by Congress, from $2.1 billion in 1973 to $1 billion in 1974 to a paltry $700 million in 1975 (not all of which was actually disbursed).

AS SOUTH VIETNAM, deprived of sustenance and support, began to crumble, even longtime congressional supporters of the war turned their backs. Although Kissinger finds villains across the political spectrum, he singles out for special censure the late Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, "scourge of détente and Ford administration critic for its alleged softness on Communism," who in early 1975 abandoned his perduring support for the war and, to "our immense surprise and huge disappointment," voted to throw South Vietnam to the wolves just as it entered a last desperate struggle to survive.

With the United States reduced to the role of bystander, the fall came swiftly. Cambodia succumbed first. As he does also with Vietnam, Kissinger retells the riveting tale, re-counting how, as the Khmer Rouge closed in on the capital city of Phnom Penh in early April 1975, the United States offered a number of

Cambodian officials a chance to escape. The reply addressed to the U.S. ambassador by Sirik Matak, a former Cambodian prime minister, and reprinted by Kissinger in full, is one of the more important documents of the entire Vietnam-war era.

Dear Excellency and Friend:

You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we are all born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].

Immediately after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, writes Kissinger, Sirik Matak was shot in the stomach and left to die over the course of three days from his untreated wounds.

In the beginning, middle, and end of this episode, Kissinger shows to telling effect, the barbaric nature of the Communist Khmer Rouge was painted over in soothing tones

* This latest volume is well supplemented by another new book, *The Kissinger Transcripts* (New Press, 515 pp., $30.00). Though marred by the tendentious commentary of its editor, William Burr, it provides the official memoranda of Kissinger's highly classified conversations with Leonid Brezhnev, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and other Communist leaders, offering an indelible picture of the virtuoso at work and an eye-opening glimpse of how diplomacy was actually carried out at the highest levels during some of the most dramatic moments of the nuclear age.

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OBSERVATIONS

by much of the American press. The *New York Times* was the most flagrant offender. In one dispatch, its correspondent Sydney Schanberg described a ranking Khmer Rouge leader as a "French-educated intellectual" who wanted nothing more than "to fight against feudal privileges and social inequities." A bloodbath was unlikely, Schanberg reported: "since all are Cambodians, an accommodation will be found." As the last Americans were withdrawn, another upbeat article by Schanberg appeared under the headline, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." In short order, the Khmer Rouge proceeded to march nearly two million of their fellow Cambodians to their deaths in the killing fields. Also in short order, Schanberg went on to greater glory and a Pulitzer prize.*

KISSINGER IS at his most bitter when judging those who contributed to the tragedy of Southeast Asia, writing that the period "still evokes a sinking feeling in me, composed in equal parts of sadness for the victims and shame for how they were abandoned." But if his most poignant regrets concern Vietnam, he also does not spare the lash when it comes to those whom he deems at fault for the collapse of détente, his grand strategic edifice aimed at a relaxation of tensions with the USSR and thus at easing the American burden not only in Vietnam but in the East-West struggle as a whole.

By the time Nixon took office in 1969, Kissinger maintains, the American public had been "drained by twenty years of cold-war exertions and the increasing frustrations with Vietnam." Under these circumstances, the challenge was to find a middle ground between two dangers: on the one hand, an abdication of the American responsibility for containing the Soviet bear and, on the other hand, a no less reckless decision to challenge it frontally. Instead, by means of a mixture of carrots and sticks, "we

intended," writes Kissinger, "to nudge the Soviet colossus into transforming itself from a cause into a state capable of being influenced by traditional calculations of reward and punishment, thereby at first easing the cold war and ultimately transcending it."

But as Kissinger also recounts, such a happy transcendence of the conflict was not to occur, at least not on his watch. Although in Nixon's first term relations with the USSR had been relatively smooth, starting in 1972, the year that marked the apogee of détente, things began to unravel. The problem, in Kissinger's retelling, was not so much the conduct of Leonid Brezhnev and company but the unholy alliance between the American Left and Right that impeded the administration's best efforts to keep the Soviet Union restrained.

Liberals, their program of propitiating the USSR having been stolen and embraced by their nemesis Richard Nixon, now began embracing causes like human rights and initiatives on arms control that were more radical than those the administration itself was advancing—with the aim, in Kissinger's words, of going "where they thought Nixon could not follow them." After their triumph at the polls in the first post-Watergate elections of 1974, congressional Democrats proceeded systematically to deprive the administration of the implements it needed to punish the Soviet Union for misbehavior. The defense budget was progressively slashed, and the administration was forbidden by law from aiding anti-Soviet forces in pivot points like Angola where the USSR was demonstrating unprecedented global reach.

Conservatives, for their part, perceived Nixon's conciliatory rhetoric toward the USSR as both a betrayal of the anti-Communist cause and an opportunistic effort to expand his domestic political base, and they undertook to check his

Soviet policy at every turn. On the Center-Right, Senator Jackson and his highly influential aide Richard Perle, in part out of an honest disagreement with policy and in part for crass political gain—Jackson planned to seek the presidential nomination of the Democratic party in 1976—appeared determined to throw one wrench after another into the works. In public and behind the scenes, these two men worked skillfully to deprive the administration of carrots, blocking the expansion of trade, derailing arms control through spurious and arcane objections to administration proposals, and demanding ever greater levels of Jewish emigration from the USSR (even as the Nixon and Ford administrations were making progress in this area behind the scenes).†

Particularly baneful, in Kissinger's telling, was the unrelenting hawkishness of Jackson's intellectual allies, the neoconservatives—here he singles out by name Irving Kristol, Midge Decter, and Norman Podhoretz. These figures, he writes, were zealots, whose own "defining"

* Although tucking them away in a footnote, Kissinger also provides the later and second thoughts of the journalist William Shawcross, whose highly influential book, *Side-show: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia*, had placed the blame for the Cambodian tragedy squarely on the United States. Wrote a repentant Shawcross in 1994: "[T]hose of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage for the [London] Sunday Times* of the South Vietnamese war effort of 1970-75, I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future."

† As *The Kissinger Transcripts* make clear, Jackson also served as a useful foil to Kissinger in carrying out his negotiations with the Kremlin. He was constantly warning the Soviet leaders not to engage in behavior that Jackson might exploit for political gain.

[57]

COMMENTARY MAY 1999

experience of moving from Left to
Right had colored their thinking in
destructive ways:

Tactics bored them; they dis-
cerned no worthy goals for
American foreign policy short of
total and immediate victory.
Their historical memory did not
include the battles they had re-
fused to join or the domestic
traumas to which they so often
contributed from the radical Left
side of the barricades.

To this reproach, Kissinger adds
the rueful observation that it was a
"pity" the neoconservatives cast
themselves in opposition to his So-
viet policies, since in many respects
his own analysis paralleled theirs:

I shared their distrust of Com-
munism and their apparent de-
termination to thwart its aims. I
thought once they realized that
our goal was not to placate but to
outmaneuver the Soviet Union,
we would be able to join forces
in a common cause.

Alas, it was not to be.

WHAT ARE we to make of this
lengthy and eloquent apologia pro
vita sua with its accompanying tua
culpa?

On some matters, Kissinger's ac-
count is not easily disposed of. His
description of President Ford's ef-
forts to save South Vietnam, for ex-
ample, efforts that continued right
up to the horrific end, is a portrait
of heroic perseverance unappreciat-
ed and unremarked. Upon assum-
ing office in August 1974, Ford
could easily have declared that
America was done with the In-
dochina conflict and let the chips
fall where they may; given the at-
mosphere at the time, in most quar-
ters he would have been not blamed
but praised. In this and other mat-
ters, Ford's image as a bumbler out
of his depth is dispelled by Kis-
singer's account of a decent man, a
straightshooter, "a Ford not a Lin-
colin" in Ford's own self-deprecat-
ing phrase, who chose the honor-

able course and paid a great per-
sonal and political price for his
pains.

As for those whom Kissinger
holds directly accountable for the
fall of South Vietnam and Cambo-
dia, his reckoning of their moral
failure is in many ways the most af-
fecting portion of this book. One
comes away with a distinct sense of
the agony involved in losing a war
that one had not chosen to start
while being hammered at home
from all sides. In this connection,
though, the fury Kissinger directs at
Henry Jackson seems seriously mis-
placed. Jackson, after all, had been
virtually alone among Democrats in
sticking with an unpopular war for
as long as he did. Whatever sins he
committed in the quest for the pres-
idential nomination of a party that
was turning leftward and away from
Democrats like himself, he cannot
fairly be compared with the liberals
who led the United States into the
Vietnam fiasco in the 1960's and
who then spent the 70's attacking
those bent on getting the U.S. out
without sacrificing every shred of
self-respect.

But neither can Jackson's role be
fairly compared to that of a player
like Richard Nixon, whose conduct
of foreign policy Kissinger here
continues to honor and defend. One
can debate endlessly whether or not
the entire Nixon policy from 1969
to 1974 represented an unnecessary
strategic retreat, or whether or not
the Paris Accords were irredeem-
ably flawed from the outset, de-
signed only to secure a "decent
interval" between the U.S. depar-
ture and South Vietnamese collapse.
Some of Kissinger's arguments in
refutation of this latter point, and in
particular the statement of this
supreme realist that he had "naive-
ly" failed to grasp the true aims of
the peace movement, are difficult to
credit. But wherever one comes
down on these matters, the issue of
Nixon's part in the tragic course of
events cannot be blinked.

However great his grasp of glob-

al affairs, however sound or un-
sound his geostrategic approach, it
cannot be emphasized enough that,
as Kissinger acknowledges only in
passing in this volume, any chance
the United States had to ensure the
survival of Cambodia and South
Vietnam was destroyed by the Wa-
tergate burglary and the subsequent
efforts to cover it up. Nixon's petty
decisions in the Watergate affair not
only lost him his own tenure in of-
fice and divided our own country
but ended up costing the lives of
millions in faraway lands, men and
women like Sirik Matak whose only
mistake had been to take America at
its word. Nixon may subsequently
have been rehabilitated in the eyes
of some, but if one is to take seri-
ously Kissinger's own vivid descrip-
tion of the far-flung and terrible
consequences of the President's ab-
dication of his basic responsibility
to observe the law, this rehabilita-
tion has come too soon.

NEXT, DÉTENTE. Kissinger makes
a very strong case for the proposi-
tion that his policies were not, in
fact, the accommodationist sellout
to the USSR that they seemed to
many on the Right at the time. It
cannot be denied that Kissinger and
Nixon's diplomacy in those years
did reap dividends in some regions
of the world, by, for example, en-
tering the U.S. variable into the
Sino-Soviet equation at a time when
the risk of a nuclear shooting war
between the two Communist rivals
was curving upward; shutting out
Soviet influence in the Middle East
after the October 1973 Yom Kippur
war; and going some distance to-
ward defanging the European Left
at a moment when it was infused
with maximum energy from its
campaign against the American
presence in Vietnam.

Kissinger also argues cogently
that, given the tremulous nature of
the times, with America embroiled
in a losing war, executive authority
in a state of collapse, and the Amer-
ican defense budget being axed even

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Dreams Die Hard

BENJAMIN SCHWARZ

YEARS OF RENEWAL

By Henry Kissinger

Simon and Schuster: 1,152 pp., $35

THE KISSINGER TRANSCRIPTS

Edited by William Burr

The New Press: 516 pp., $30

With "Years of Renewal," Henry Kissinger concludes his mountainous three-volume memoir of his years in power. Kissinger has never been at a loss for words (his behemoth senior thesis at Harvard—the subject of which was nothing less than "The Meaning of History"—famously prompted that university to institute the "Kissinger rule," limiting the number of pages that an undergraduate could write), and his need for an editor has never been more striking than in this book, which in its daunting length and Teutonic thoroughness lacks focus and penetration. For the reader willing to do far more work than should be asked, however, "Years of Renewal" is ultimately revealing, in spite of itself.

It's been 15 years since Kissinger finished the second volume. His hesitancy in surmounting the final hurdle is understandable. In the first two works, which covered the Nixon years, Kissinger was often writing of high drama—the Paris peace talks, the Watergate scandal, and of his own triumphant diplomatic initiatives—détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China. But in "Years of Renewal," he covers the Ford administration, which means that he owes his reader excruciatingly detailed discussions of longago arms-control issues (anyone remember the debate over the Backfire bomber?) and, far more important, a record of diplomatic disasters and defeats, running from the stalled Sino-American strategic relationship to the scuttling of détente to the humiliating fall of South Vietnam to the United States' unnecessary and self-inflicted defeat in Angola to the swelling opposition to himself and his policies, which contributed significantly to Gerald Ford's defeat in the 1976 election and Kissinger's (as it turned out) permanent banishment from power. Far from years of renewal, the Ford years were for Kissinger the time when things fell apart.

Throughout this volume he inadvertently reveals a profound inconsistency in his

Benjamin Schwarz is a correspondent for Atlantic Monthly and a contributing writer to Book Review.

illustration by NANCY OHANIAN / For The Times

thinking and policies. Skeptical of globalist rhetoric, sensitive to the limits of power and to the dangers of a conception of U.S. security that demanded that America remake the world in its own image and convinced that interests, not ideology, should govern foreign policy, Kissinger has nevertheless often advocated American intervention against ideological foes in situations in which no specific American interests have been at stake. Few U.S. statesmen since World War II have been as critical of America's missionary impulse, but few have been as governed by such apparently discredited notions as the domino theory.

The cool, dispassionate, sensible Kissinger is, of course, both applauded and condemned for détente. Formulated by Kissinger and Richard Nixon, détente was a significant departure from previous Cold War policies. Not since Franklin Roosevelt's had an American administration been willing explicitly to recognize the Soviet Union as a collaborator in, rather than a challenger to, the effort to maintain an international order. To appreciate this dramatic shift, it's helpful to contrast JFK's inaugural address, in which that paragon of Cold War liberalism advanced the stirring but rather dangerous notion that in the struggle with communism, the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden," with Nixon's first inaugural address, which promulgated the realistic but conciliatory message that "we cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but we can try to make no one our enemy." This was détente's animating sentiment.

Although at several points in "Years of Renewal" Kissinger attempts to rewrite history by claiming that at the time he, Nixon and Ford foresaw the Soviet collapse, détente was in fact based on the idea (hardly contested at the time) that the Soviet Union wouldn't go away. Since the superpower rivalry could destroy humanity, there was, as Kissinger declared, "no alternative to coexistence." Détente, then, was a strategy for managing a permanent relationship. In what Kissinger hoped would develop into a "nature" relationship, Moscow and Washington would each acknowledge the legitimate interests of the other and try not to let their inevitable disagreements poison their accommodations. As is clear in the transcripts of conversations and negotiations between Kissinger and the Soviets collected in "The

Kissinger Transcripts," détente was a shift in style as much as in substance—or rather, a shift in style that had substantive consequences: The Soviets (and, of course, the Chinese) were to be treated not as alien ideologues but as intelligent adults with whom a substantial area of common interest could be found. Kissinger was confident that through this change of approach and through an elaborate strategy of diplomatic and economic carrots and sticks ("linkage"), the Soviet Union could be induced to behave like a "normal" great power.

But, as Kissinger has asserted, "the acid test of a policy is its ability to gain domestic support." As "Years of Renewal" details, in the Ford years détente and its architect came under intensifying assault by an ad hoc coalition of neoconservative intellectuals, conservative Republicans (led by Ronald Reagan) and Cold War liberals (led by Sen. Henry Jackson). Blustering. In the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that "we stand for liberty, for the expansion of liberty," these foes of détente found its attempt to enter into a partnership with Moscow, its implied acceptance of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and its allegedly naive agreements on arms control morally unacceptable. In insisting that progress in superpower relations be made contingent on changes in Moscow's domestic affairs, they eventually succeeded in crippling that policy. Although Kissinger is obviously still bitter about this provocative and fatal attack on détente and charges that the neoconservatives advocated "unwarranted risks in the face of the consequences of nuclear war," he lacks the courage of his (at least erstwhile) convictions in his assessment of the opposition to the policy on which his historical reputation largely rests.

With the end of the Cold War and his increasingly close ties with his former neoconservative foes, Kissinger has sometimes been at pains, as he is in "Years of Renewal," to minimize his differences with them. But, in fact, those differences were substantial. Kissinger may now protest, for instance, that his State Department's so-called "Sonnefeldt doctrine," which called for the United States to help engender a more "organic relationship" between the Soviets and their satellites in Eastern Europe, was "a doctrine that never was," but clearly the thrust of Kissinger's policies was that the respect each

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Die Hard

Illustration by NANCY OHANIAN / For The Times

But, as Kissinger has asserted, "the acid test of a policy is its ability to gain domestic support." As "Years of Renewal" details, in the Ford years détente and its architect came under intensifying assault by an ad hoc coalition of neoconservative intellectuals, conservative Republicans (led by Ronald Reagan) and Cold War liberals (led by Sen. Henry Jackson). Blustering, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that "we stand for liberty, for the expansion of liberty," these foes of détente found its attempt to enter into a partnership with Moscow, its implied acceptance of a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and its allegedly naive agreements on arms control morally unacceptable. In insisting that progress in superpower relations be made contingent on changes in Moscow's domestic affairs, they eventually succeeded in crippling that policy. Although Kissinger is obviously still bitter about this provocative and fatal attack on détente and charges that the neoconservatives advocated "unwarranted risks in the face of the consequences of nuclear war," he lacks the courage of his (at least erstwhile) convictions in his assessment of the opposition to the policy on which his historical reputation largely rests.

superpower showed to the other's sphere helped maintain a stable international order. This position, while unsentimental, is entirely defensible, and Kissinger owes it to history to own up to it.

But if Kissinger could be the arch-pragmatist in his relations with Moscow and Beijing, he was, as this book repeatedly illuminates, reflexively intolerant of other Marxist regimes and movements. To be sure, he often declared that the United States shouldn't confuse a state's or movement's profession of ideology with its intention or ability to threaten U.S. interests and that containment had to be purged of the ideological distractions that had caused the United States to multiply profligately its "enemies." But in practice, Kissinger never accepted that Marxism could be an indiguous, popular and quite independent force in certain parts of the world. When confronted with such regimes and movements—in Chile, Angola and Portugal—Kissinger moved to crush them, even though no evidence at the time or in retrospect suggests that any of them had been instigated by the Kremlin or that Soviet leaders could have counted on controlling them.

Kissinger's yearning to intervene in a host of strategically peripheral areas was, as "Years of Renewal" makes clear, animated by his intense concern for "credibility," a common trait among postwar U.S. policymakers. Here Kissinger's grand strategic approach and embrace of what he likes to call "overarching concepts" got the better of his realism, for as he explained in the first volume of his memoirs, he believed that "displays of American impotence in one part of the world . . . would inevitably erode our credibility in other parts of the world." Viewing events as a seamless web, Kissinger thus argued that although he didn't see any intrinsic U.S. interests at stake in Angola, he nevertheless thought it vital to intervene (but not necessarily to win) there because he feared that if America failed to do so, the Western Europeans would question Washington's resolve to defend them. But this way of thinking dangerously enlarged the scope of American interventionism and was also unnecessary. When vital interests are at stake, demonstrations of resolve elsewhere are superfluous, and when those interests are absent, such demonstrations are meaningless.

Of course, this same thinking was largely responsible for getting the United States involved in the Vietnam War and was almost completely responsible for Kissinger's insistence that America not cut its losses there, which meant a slow and painful withdrawal. (It has never seemed to occur to Kissinger that whatever America might gain by establishing the steadfastness of its commitments, it could lose by an erosion of confidence in its judgment.) Thus, although when he became Nixon's national security advisor in 1969, Kissinger was convinced that the war was a terrible distraction from the diplomatic initiatives he wished to pursue, the war would haunt him and the administrations in which he served for six more years; his discussion of the end of that conflict forms the dramatic centerpiece of this volume. Again, what emerges from the historical record is Kissinger's near-obsessive concern for credibility. Although he recognized in the spring of 1975 that the situation in South Vietnam was beyond salvage, he nevertheless held that America had to aid Saigon because, as he put it in a message to Congress that he wrote for Ford, "U.S. unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to our allies fighting for their lives would seriously affect our credibility throughout the

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world as an ally. And this credibility is essen-
tial to our security."

At the time Kissinger stressed that the United States had to appear to put up a visible and valiant effort on behalf of its client in what was almost universally acknowledged to be a lost cause. In "Years of Renewal," however, Kissinger suggests that, had Congress not refused to aid Saigon in 1975, South Vietnam would not have fallen. This is a serious rewriting of history, which absolves Kissinger of his own sizable role in the "abandonment" of that regime. After all, after the Paris Peace Accords, negotiated by Kissinger, were signed, experienced observers and even the U.S. public overwhelmingly believed that South Vietnam—whose government and military had not been transformed into viable institutions despite the efforts of five successive U.S. administrations—would fail to hold out against even political pressure from North Vietnam. Kissinger himself notoriously told journalists Marvin and Bernard Kalb that all he expected was a "decent interval" (for the sake of Washington's credibility) between the U.S. pullout and a possible communist takeover. Although Kissinger's account is disingenuous—and in laying the blame on others not atypical—his contempt for, and sense of betrayal by, the liberal establishment, which in a remarkably short period went from pressing for American involvement to disdaining those who supported it, is entirely justifiable.

More than 20 years after the events described in "Years of Renewal, the United States finds itself once again involved in a conflict in which its direct interests aren't at stake. Clearly, this isn't the proper forum to debate U.S. intervention in the Balkans. But Americans could justifiably be wary of many of the arguments supporting that intervention. After all, the Clinton administration maintains that America must act to maintain its credibility and thus to deter future aggressors. But just as Slobodan Milosevic was not deterred by United States action against Iraq, Saddam Hussein was not deterred by U.S. action in Panama, Manuel Noriega was not deterred by U.S. action in Grenada, Lebanon and Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh was not deterred by U.S. action against North Korea and Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin were not deterred by United States action against Adolf Hitler. An obsession with credibility can easily doom America to a string of military interventions in strategically peripheral regions. It should, perhaps, also give Americans pause to learn that, although Kissinger was originally skeptical of intervention in Yugoslavia (his initial take on Kosovo was similar to his 1969 verdict on Vietnam—"a product of liberal doctrines of reformist intervention and academic theories of gradual escalation")—he now maintains that, once committed, to maintain its credibility, America must do whatever is necessary to prevail. This kind of thinking, in its single-minded focus on the ends, loses sight of the risks and costs of the means and is thus the antithesis of the cool "strategic" worldview that Kissinger prizes.

As more of the historical record is revealed, Kissinger will emerge in many ways a great diplomat. In "The Kissinger Transcripts," for instance, we see a charming and patient negotiator, skillfully coaxing China out of its self-imposed exile. It is that Kissinger, with his extraordinary ability to enter the mind of his rivals and counterparts, who reminds us at the close of his book that "we are tempted to view our power as a dispensation and to use it to impose our preferences. Such an attitude runs the risk of being viewed as hegemonic by the rest of the world and will gradually be opposed by it." America, the "sole remaining superpower," as our current secretary of state never tires of reminding us, would do well to heed his warning.

Incidentally yet appropriately, Robert McNamara's middle name is Strange. From 1961 to 1967, as defense secretary in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he was the chief architect and principal promoter of America's deepening involvement in Vietnam. He managed the war the way he had run the Ford Motor Co., his job before becoming a bureaucrat. Just as he had displayed balance sheets to demonstrate to his stockholders that the corporation was registering profits, he regularly exhibited maps, graphs, flip charts, assorted documents and reams of statistics to bolster his claim that we were making progress. But his performance was a sham. While publicly exuding optimism, he consistently warned in his private memos that the situation was deteriorating. Gradually, however, he started to express his pessimism publically, if informally.

I initially discerned the change in him in February 1966 at a conference in Honolulu, one of Lyndon Johnson's periodic conclaves on the war. Though most of his colleagues radiated confidence, he invited a few reporters to his hotel suite for a rare background briefing. I had observed him during his buoyant days in Washington and was shocked by the transformation in his appearance. His face was graver, his patent leather hair thinner and his voice lacked the strength it had when he had projected his rosy appraisals. The U.S. air offensive against North Vietnam launched the previous year would never succeed, he emphasized. An agrarian society could not be blasted into submission, he said with unaccustomed passion: 'No amount of bombing can end the war.' In August 1967, he reiterated the thesis in closed hearings before a Senate subcommittee. His testimony enraged the hawkish brass and braid. Worse still, it infuriated Johnson, who circulated the word that McNamara was suffering from a nervous breakdown and ignominiously shunted him shortly afterward to the World Bank.

Following the conflict, McNamara lapsed into silence. Again and again, he refused requests by me and others for interviews. He also rejected the suggestion from friends that he write a memoir, claiming that it might sound "vindictive and self-serving." Then, in 1995, he published "In Retrospect," in which he confessed in an emotional outburst that he and his associates had been misguided or, as he put it: "We were wrong, terribly wrong." Surprisingly, it was a best-seller. But apart from divulging his feelings, the cathartic *mea culpa* added virtually nothing of value to the vast body of Vietnam literature. It conspicuously omitted any apology for his duplicitous rhetoric during the war; far more important, his remorse offered cold consolation to the nearly 60,000 American and estimated 2 million Vietnamese families whose sons, brothers and husbands died in the conflagration. Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a severely wounded veteran, evoking a sarcastic GI phrase dating to Vietnam, commented that the book ought to have been captioned, "Sorry 'Bout That."

Still, Vietnam continued to obsess McNamara. He had organized a series of symposiums in Moscow and Havana in 1989 and 1992 to reexamine the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and calculated that a similar endeavor would shed new light on the Vietnam experience. I suspect that his goal was, once again, to cleanse his conscience by showing that both protagonists in the tragedy were responsible. But whatever his motive, he mobilized a team of American scholars and former civilian and military officials, and he brought them together with their Vietnamese and communist counterparts in an effort to reassess the war

Stanley Karnow, author of "Vietnam: A History," was awarded the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in History. His latest book is "Paris in the Fifties."

PAGE 4 / SUNDAY, MAY 16, 1999

MAY-18-99 12:35 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

THE WASHINGTON POST, April 30, 1999

BOOK WORLD

# A Savory Taste From Publishing's Crock-Pot

## ANOTHER LIFE

### A Memoir of Other People

By Michael Korda
Random House. 530 pp. $26.95

By CAROLYN SEE,
*Sense reviews appear in Style* on Fridays.

Michael Korda is devoted to the good life; he knows it when he sees it, he values it greatly, and he knows how to tell a wonderful story. Even if that good life is a little on the corrupt side, it doesn't matter greatly to him. His prodigious memory of events, his love of the eccentric and his pure glee about being alive are so engaging that it's impossible not to like this book. Korda is devastatingly rich, famous, thin, well and happy, but he's so disarming about the whole thing that sour, envious thoughts (It's true, some book critics and even readers might have some of those) go right out the window.

Korda has already mined the material of his life, more than once. One of his uncles was Alexander Korda, the famous movie mogul who bought a villa for Graham Greene to entice him to write the script for "The Third Man"). The extended Korda family, in all its varied splendor, was the subject of Michael's book "Charmed Lives." One of his aunts was the film star Merle Oberon, who—after she died—became the fictional heroine of his immensely readable "Queenie." God knows, Korda has had lots of power and success, and a keen appreciation of those attributes must have led to his books "Power" and "Success."

In his work life, his own adult life, the author was for years editor and then editor in chief of Simon & Schuster. This is a memoir about the publishing business and the people who swirl through it. For writers or serious readers or frivolous readers who just love books, this is a delicious find.

Some of the more general stories Korda tells are old and familiar, refrains that have been sing'd dolefully at writers' conferences, bookstores and literary lunches: They have to do with the decline of "culture" in the book business, the rise of chain stores (which have put so many independent bookstores out of business), the rise (and fall) of huge advances to celebrity authors, the evolution of a global economy as it pertains to publishing and so on.

But the strength of the book comes from tales of the authors and editors themselves. They live in such a hot little world! If you don't live in the Crock-Pot, New York, simmering and poaching in close quarters with the—what? several hundred?—personalities

who make up the publishing business, it is bound to be an impenetrable mystery. The rest of us see steam rising and notice a weird smell every once in a while; that would come from the making of 40,000 American books a year, the clunkers and the bestsellers and everything in between. But if you're outside the pot, you don't know what any of it means or how any of it works. This is perhaps not the glamorous metaphor that might go with Korda's yacht life or equestrian life or black-tie-event life, but he speaks to us about his world from inside the pot, recording almost 50 years in the publishing business.

It's a world where everyone has known everyone since the beginning of time. Where editors move up from sad little cubicles to windowless offices to another bigger office, and then perhaps another floor or over to another company, but the players stay forever the same. Where one or two divorces, one or two business betrayals, one or two grudges, resonate down through the years. If you want to stay in publishing, you can't get out of that closed world until you die—it's a soap opera that runs in perpetuity. It's not like politics, where they can vote you out, or Hollywood, where you can become an independent. It's singular and feverish and parochial and demented—or so it seems to someone outside the pot.

Korda wisely spends most of his time evoking his famous authors: Will and Ariel Durant, who presented themselves to their public as twin voices of sweet reason except that she was a furious, savage hell-raiser. Or Jacqueline Susann, who rules here in one of the finest, craziest chapters, unrepentantly, quintessentially vulgar down to the plastic slipcovers on her fairly ugly couches. Or Harold Robbins, or Irving Wallace, again vulgar but amiable, so off-the-wall, so locked into their worlds and personalities that you can only shake your head

or burst out laughing as you read. Maybe it's crackpot instead of Crock-Pot.

There isn't a shade of introspection in this account because introspection might lead to a troubling remorse. To have unleashed some of these writers on the world—might that not have been at least a venial sin? The pages on Korda and Joan Crawford are truly scary: She's one step away from the insane asylum at all times, but he's right there with her, literally, in the same room. There's such a cheerful lack of repentance here: If a book will sell, sell it! If the world is unredeemably corrupt, don't worry about it; it's too late now. Just remember Jacqueline Susann's husband and a drunk Peter Lawford taking off their shoes in a Broadway...

It's just too much, this publishing world, supposedly a bastion of culture but really something else. The stories of fabled editors, Robert Gottlieb or Dick Snyder, or an anonymous East Coast editor flinging a bowl of soup at a West Coast cinema mogul because he's grudge-holding and utterly cracked—all of these stories are horrifying, cautionary, amusing, just swell.

It strikes me that this review is all over the place, but so is the book. It's about business, betrayal, art, politics and money, in no particular order. It's ironic that this master editor could have used a firm editor himself in these pages. "Another Life" is too long and repetitive, and its structure (first I met that author, then I met this author) doesn't always work very well. But the voice here is so winning that, after all of these objections, nothing else matters.

## Upcoming in Book World

The following books are scheduled to be reviewed next week in Style:

* **ABIDE WITH ME**, by E. Lynn Harris. In this novel a gay African American lawyer is up for a judgeship and finds his life under examination: Reviewed by Brian Gilmore.

* **THE BROKEN HEARTS CLUB**, by Ethan Black. This thriller is a serial murderer may be connected with a group of men who meet weekly in a

New York bar. Reviewed by Ranald Totten.

* **AMERICAN BELIEFS: What Keeps a Big Country and a Diverse People United**, by John McElroy. Reviewed by Jonathan Yardie.

* **THE MAJORS: In Pursuit of Goff's Holy Grail**, by John Feinstein. Reviewed by Charles Wilson.

* **TRUFFAUT: A Biography**, by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana. Reviewed by Carolyn See

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Letters to the Editor

Henry A. Kissinger responds to Philip Zelikow;
Ernest W. Lefever praises nuclear peace; and others

NO TAPES, NO SECRETS

To the Editor:

In his review of *Years of Renewal*, Philip Zelikow indulges the fantasy that there is a treasure trove of documents available only to me that I am mining to the exclusion of other researchers ("The Statesman in Winter," May/June 1999). "Meticulous notes were made of his meetings, internal and external," he writes. "Kissinger eventually installed a taping system to relieve weary staffers and transfer the burden of drafting transcripts to a night shift. (This taping system, analogous to the one Lyndon Johnson used, was quite separate from Nixon's own, about which Kissinger says he was ignorant until shortly before it was disclosed to all in 1973.) The products of these extraordinary efforts—which extended beyond the usual official practice of tracking conversations with foreigners to include contacts with anyone, including government colleagues and the president— are quoted frequently in *Years of Renewal* but without any notation of the source."

Not a word of this passage is true.
There was no taping system of any kind
for meetings with officials, colleagues, or
the president. Notes were taken by visible
note-takers of meetings with foreign lead-
ers, staff meetings, and interdepartmental
meetings. For meetings with President

Ford, Brent Scowcroft acted as note-taker part of the time. These memoranda were deposited in the appropriate government files. I have duplicates in the Kissinger collection in the Library of Congress. Every conversation quoted in *Years of Renewal* is available under the date quoted in the departmental archives or presidential library files. Phone conversations are so identified with the appropriate date.

The principal difference between my
memoranda of conversations and those
of other former administration officials
is that my note-takers were instructed
to get the conversations down as close to
verbatim as possible. I did this because
Dean Acheson had warned me that he
had never seen a memorandum of a con-
versation in which the author had lost
the argument. Contrary to Zelikow's
innuendo, my purpose was not to shape
the interpretation of events but to leave
the most accurate record possible for
others to interpret.

The only tapes made were of phone
conversations while I was at the National
Security Council. These were transcribed,
and the tapes were destroyed. The tran-
scripts are available in the Kissinger
collection in the Library of Congress
and are being reviewed by State
Department historians for possible
inclusion in their publications.

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These
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reflect a

[152] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 78 No. 4

Letters to the Editor

In the same carping spirit, Zelikow argues that "little analysis of the American national interest in Vietnam and Cambodia can be found in *Years of Renewal*." The reason for this can be found explicitly on page 463, where I state that I would confine myself to the pain of the final three months of the Vietnam tragedy: "I will not review here the decisions which preceded the ultimate disaster; the literature regarding them covers shelves in libraries, and I have dealt with them elsewhere." A footnote then cites no fewer than 11 chapters in previous volumes dealing with precisely our perceptions regarding Vietnam strategy. When Zelikow gets around to reviewing the book I did write, he might address those chapters.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations and National Security Adviser to President Nixon

THE STURDY CHILD OF TERROR

To the Editor:

In May 1998, the United States and over a hundred other governments castigated India and Pakistan for conducting nuclear tests, accelerating an arms race, and jeopardizing peace on the Indian subcontinent. The Clinton administration in particular scolded them for flouting the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott characterized as "part of the bedrock of the international system" that had put "a brake on what would otherwise have been a juggernaut of nuclear proliferation" ("Dealing with the Bomb in South Asia," March/April 1999).

These and other administration statements on the India-Pakistan situation reflect a profound American ambiguity

over the morality, possession, and use of nuclear weapons that has been evident since their very inception. The common view that nuclear weapons represent a radically new and evil force in history, however, is only half right: the force was new but not evil. Early in the superpowers' nuclear confrontation, Winston Churchill correctly predicted that "safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation." His prescience may very well apply to South Asia as well.

The Cold War demonstrated that the moral and political consequences of nuclear arms—like any other military technology—cannot be separated from the purposes they serve. The two superpowers recognized, moreover, that they were simultaneously political adversaries and strategic allies who shared an interest in preventing nuclear war. U.S. presidents generally understood this and rejected the simple demonization of nuclear weapons in favor of deterrence and political prudence.

Talbott dismisses the contention, advanced by both India and Pakistan, that "their tests will usher in an extended period of nuclear stability in South Asia comparable to the one that preserved the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union." But in February, a scant seven months after the South Asian nuclear tests, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee traveled to Pakistan to discuss with his Pakistani counterpart Mohammad Nawaz Sharif the contentious issue of Kashmir—over which the two countries had fought two wars in their first, nonnuclear, quarter-century. The two leaders pledged to "intensify their efforts to resolve all issues" and take

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · July/August 1999

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Review Essay

May/June 1999

released 4/19/99

# The Statesman in Winter

## Kissinger on the Ford Years

Philip Zelikow

*Years of Renewal,* BY HENRY A. KISSINGER. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999, 1,119 pp. $35.00.

In 1979 Henry A. Kissinger published his memoir *White House Years*, dealing with the first term of the Nixon administration, in which he was the president's national security adviser. In 1982 came *Years of Upheaval*, dealing with the year and a half of Nixon's foreshortened second term, in which Kissinger was both national security adviser and, from *October 1973*, secretary of state. Now Kissinger has finally completed the trilogy with *Years of Renewal*, dealing with the two and a half years in which he served President Ford, first in the same two jobs and then, from November 1975, only as secretary of state. In this new volume Kissinger also reflects at length, and with more distance, on the time with Nixon that so deeply shadowed everything Kissinger would do afterward.

No American statesman has done
more to document and explain what he
did and why he did it. Not only has
he now produced nearly 4,000 pages of
memoirs, but Kissinger has also set the
standard for recording every policy-related
utterance while in office. His phone
conversations were monitored and meticulous
notes were made of his meetings,
internal and external. Kissinger eventually
installed a taping system to relieve weary
staffers and transfer the burden of drafting
transcripts to a night shift. (This taping
system, analogous to the one Lyndon
Johnson used, was quite separate from
Nixon's own, about which Kissinger says
he was ignorant until shortly before it
was disclosed to all in 1973.) The products
of these extraordinary efforts—which
extended beyond the usual official practice
of tracking conversations with foreigners
to include contacts with anyone, including
government colleagues and the president—

PHILIP ZELIKOW is Director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

[123]

Philip Zelikow

Kissinger argues, correctly, that for all its preoccupation with secrecy, the Nixon administration is the most thoroughly documented and recorded presidency in American history. But why did they do it? Kissinger writes:

> For Nixon, it was an extension of his permanent nightmare that, in the end, all his efforts—the self-discipline, the strong decisions wrung from nagging self-doubt—would vanish into thin air, defeated by the hostility of contemporaries and the indifference of historians. At regular intervals, Nixon would send me lengthy memoranda on how to interpret for posterity the various actions in which he had been involved. The purpose of these memoranda was less to affect immediate publicity—they were too complex for that—than to influence the judgment of history by becoming part of the permanent record.

So too for Kissinger's even lengthier memoranda, these memoirs.

## SELF-PORTRAIT OF A MIND

Every account of Kissinger allows that he is very intelligent. Those hostile to him then add other adjectives like vain or devious. His admirers use those adjectives too—but return to the intelligence.

What really were Kissinger's extraordinary gifts? Kissinger himself argues that he (and Nixon) stood out against a background of utopian zealots, both liberal and conservative, because of their realistic analysis of national interests. (Kissinger grants Nixon great strategic insight but portrays him here as given to constant mussing, throwing off sparks of brilliance and foolishness in almost equal measure. It was thus left to Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman,

the priests at the oracle, to interpret the rumblings and judge what should actually be done.)

In the author's preferred paradigm of intelligence—one of utopian crusaders vs. cool realists—Indochina is a prime example. Kissinger writes that he and Nixon “never blamed our predecessors for the mess” in Vietnam, but he certainly blames them now: “Wilsonianism had involved the United States in Indochina by means of universalist maxims which had proved successful in Europe and were now applied literally in Asia. . . . Wilsonianism rejects peace through balance of power in favor of peace through moral consensus. It sees foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil. . . .” Kissinger says that he and Nixon knew instead that these ideals were worthy but impractical and saw “foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point” in which they would be guided by “a concept of the national interest,” and a “realistic assessment of our own and others' interests.”

This self-portrait is largely false, however much Kissinger may believe in it. Yet its falsity actually makes Kissinger more interesting.

To begin with, the Wilsonianism he describes is a cartoon originally drawn by Wilson's popularizing worshipers and polemical detractors. Kissinger's use of this label blurs together Wilson and William Jennings Bryan, Harry S Truman and Henry Wallace, John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson. And it hardly seems to fit the principal architects of Indochina policy, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara. As the former said to the latter about Vietnam in October 1963, “You're going to have an authoritarian

regardless of what they say to you, courses properly conducted. Kissinger, in this foreign intere- rprise, is rather nowher than i consumer of a good deal than a and dr

[124] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 78 No. 3

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

The Advocator: Kissinger lectures in Manila, 1997

regime, and the question is whether they
make asses of themselves." Not terribly
Wilsonian—and not so objectionable to
the younger Kissinger, who privately wrote
to Bundy in 1965 that the administration's
course in Vietnam was "just right—the
proper mixture of firmness and flexibility."

Kissinger offers himself as a model
of cool analysis of the national interest.
In this book he proudly quotes his first
foreign policy report to Congress: "Our
interests must shape our commitments,
rather than the other way around." Yet
nowhere was this credo followed less
than in Indochina, the problem that
consumed more blood and treasure
than any other on Kissinger's watch
and drove so much of his agenda with

his main adversaries, Russia, China,
and Congress.

Little analysis of the American na-
tional interest in Vietnam and Cambodia
can be found in *Years of Renewal*. At the
time Kissinger frequently invoked fears
about the loss of American credibility. But
that argument's force has faded over the
years, as history has revealed few ripples
beyond the watershed of the Mekong,
and it is barely mentioned here. Vietnam
had its greatest effect on America not in
causing foreign dominoes to fall but in
changing the way Americans thought
of themselves.

Instead, Kissinger stresses again and
again the need to maintain the national
honor of the United States. Discussing

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS · May/June 1999

[125]

[10]

Philip Zelikow

the war's agonizing denouement, he emphasizes that "neither the Ford nor the Nixon administration ever invoked a legal obligation to assist Vietnam. What we insisted on was something deeper—a moral obligation."

This is not the rhetoric of a dispassionate geopolitical chess player. A chess player does not sacrifice half his pieces to defend a vulnerable rook out of moral obligation. But then, Kissinger never was an especially dispassionate person. As a supervisor and colleague he was hot-tempered; as a statesman and friend he was often sentimental, even if the sentiment was filtered through his usual sardonic mask.

Where his emotions are touched so deeply, Kissinger's memoir-writing is at its worst. His chapters on the fall of Cambodia and Vietnam are fierce indictments of those who opposed more U.S. intervention or aid. Yet these same chapters include practically no analysis of the violations by all sides of a 1973 peace accord that few thought would bring peace, of the internal pathologies that so limited the military effectiveness of the Thieu government in South Vietnam, and of the proposed aid's likely impact. The administration's requests for aid, therefore, look like palliatives for a bad conscience.

But Kissinger reminds readers that others should have bad consciences as well, and here his Cambodia chapter is especially wrenching. Some of his opponents in Congress and the media, for example, professed a belief that communist victories would bring a peaceful political settlement. *The New York Times* reported the approach of the Khmer Rouge to the gates of Phnom Penh under the headline, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." Those who check

Kissinger's footnote will learn that the author of the *Times* article was Sydney Schanberg, who would later come to prominence as a leading American witness to Cambodia's "killing fields."

REGARDING HENRY

Kissinger's great gifts as a statesman, at least from the evidence in these pages, lay less in analyzing the national interest—where he was neither particularly original nor innovative—than in two other spheres.

First, Kissinger had a great talent for cutting through reams of information to find the operational essence within. He could see the real issues in time, moving backward or forward, and envision the next sequence of bureaucratic and diplomatic moves. It was by harnessing this ability that Kissinger was able to turn abstract wishes into concrete policies. This was, for example, his singular achievement in the opening to China. He found a halting and ineffectual American policy driven mainly by shifts in Chinese politics. Urged on by Nixon's geopolitical musings, Kissinger crafted channels and opportunities for movement.

By the time of the events described in this memoir, however, the Sino-American relationship had been hollowed out by lack of substance and the turmoil of Chinese politics during Mao's last years. In this book the best illustration of Kissinger's operational skill comes in his chapter on the Cyprus crisis of 1974. The analysis of American interests is ordinary, but the analysis of how they could actually be advanced is illuminating, as Kissinger deals first with the Greek moves and then the Turkish response, all the while limiting damage and avoiding ill-considered commitments.

Kissinger's acumen, situational awareness, and if the play were ever to go anywhere, it had to be a capable player.

[126] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 78 No. 3

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The Statesman in Winter

Kissinger's chapter on the Angolan de-
bacle is also well done. He conscientiously
raises and addresses his critics' arguments
while tracing the destructive interaction
between his diplomatic strategy to restrain
Cuban and Soviet military intervention,
the congressional cutoff of U.S. covert
aid, and Soviet political and military
calculations. The memoir shows how
Kissinger's perceptiveness could lead to
frustration: he and Ford set a general
direction for U.S. policy—covert aid—but,
given the battered leadership at the CIA,
lacked subordinates capable of operational-
izing their abstract wishes and addressing
the policy's temporizing drift. Kissinger
had the insight to see it was not working
even before Congress killed the program,
but had no one with sufficient will or
capacity to fix it.

Kissinger's second great gift was an
acute intuitive ability to assess other people,
situate them in their political environment,
and adapt himself to their needs—at least
if they were foreigners. This gift is dis-
played best in the chapters on his Middle
East diplomacy, which are gems.

They are gems, it is worth pointing
out, not necessarily because the diplomatic
efforts they recount were especially suc-
cessful. It is a common fallacy to judge a
statesman by policy outcomes, which
are actually influenced by many variables,
rather than by the quality of thought
brought to bear on the circumstances he
could reasonably have understood. The
passage of time has helped Kissinger
become more detached, producing some
of his finest writing to date. He reflects
not only on his own constraints but on
those facing Egyptian President Anwar
al-Sadat. He shows exceptional sensitivity
to the situation of embattled Israeli

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And he
recounts the determined and courageous
struggle, with very narrow room for
maneuver and with his own star waning
in Washington, to achieve what became
the 1975 Sinai II accord.

Kissinger has empathy—yes, empathy,
however clinical—for his foreign inter-
locutors. It is finely displayed not only in
his chapters on the Middle East but also
in those on his diplomacy in southern
Africa, which describe his 1976 efforts to
work toward a settlement on the future
of Rhodesia. Setting the policy in context
as a successful adaptation to the failure in
Angola, describing a situation in which
he had practically no assets but his own
skill and celebrity, Kissinger charts the
maneuvers and shows a penetrating and
generous understanding of his African
and British counterparts.

YEARS OF DECLINE

The book is mistitled. The years
1974-76 were bad for America, and for
Henry Kissinger. The memoir is often
hard to read because it evokes so many
painful memories of retreat and ruin—
even putting aside the sagging,
inflation-ridden economy, which gets
little space here. Nixon's excesses and
the passions summoned by Vietnam
ushered in other excesses from Nixon's
victorious enemies, epitomized by the
infamous Pike Committee investigation
of the intelligence community.

The great issue in East-West relations
was the future of détente, the relaxation of
tensions and attempt to stabilize and reg-
ulate what both sides had thought to be an
enduring rivalry. The political base for the
Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente had
eroded badly during 1973-74 under the

[127]

Philip Zelikow

steady drip of events: Andrei Sakharov's support of trade sanctions, the scapegoating of Kissinger for lack of support to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's exile, Albert Wohlstetter's declaration that the United States was actually losing the arms race.

By mid-1974, when the respected strategic analyst Wohlstetter spoke out and Paul H. Nitze resigned from the SALT talks, domestic support for détente was all but gone. Liberal Democrats despised Kissinger for Vietnam and the Watergate-era abuses of power. Conservative Democrats like Senator Henry Jackson and AFL-CIO President George Meany considered him indifferent to human rights behind the Iron Curtain and were increasingly worried about the arms race. Reagan Republicans shared those concerns and were inflamed by Kissinger's stance on the Panama Canal and Taiwan. What was left was a slice of moderate Republicans so thin that they could barely secure the nomination of President Ford in 1976, a feat accomplished only by political legerdemain in which Kissinger was a liability, not an asset.

From mid-1974 onward any major policy initiative of Kissinger's was targeted as soon as it came into view, to be destroyed as quickly as his opponents could wheel their guns into position. In early 1976 they waited until he was actually negotiating in Moscow to cut the legs out from under him—and these were his colleagues within the administration! Kissinger quotes example after example of situations where everyone seemed to gang up against him whatever the issue, even contrary to their apparent interests (e.g., conservatives refusing to help on Indochina or Angola). As the lightning rod for criticism of a foreign

policy with no appreciable general backing, he might well have felt beleaguered.

Détente could have been saved only if Ford had recast the policy, coopting either centrist Democrats (difficult, since Jackson had presidential ambitions in 1976) or a significant portion of the emerging Reagan wing of the Republican Party. The ideal time for such a move would have been August 1974, when Ford replaced Nixon. But Kissinger's memoir offers no evidence of deep thinking, amid the turmoil of the succession, about a domestic political strategy to sustain Ford's foreign policy. Critical but little noticed, Ford had no real presidential transition, no comprehensive reappraisal of people and policies that would reposition and ostentatiously distinguish his administration from his predecessor's.

So Kissinger charged ahead, striving against all odds to hold détente together without a political base. Ford stood by him as best he could, a debt Kissinger repays with an extremely flattering portrait of Ford as president. But under these circumstances Kissinger's fight was not the policy of a master of realism. It was the policy of a Man of La Mancha. The best defense for it might be that it helped delay or mute the swelling forces of reaction, but that is a tough case to make and Kissinger does not try.

Still, once again this Kissinger seems more interesting than the one in his preferred self-portrait. This memoir is the story of a man trying, in his last years in office, to stand by a few ideals of statecraft and conceptions of national honor. To his foes he was benighted but to his friends he might, during these years, have seemed a bit, just a little bit, gallant.*

[128] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 78 No. 3

N

The best-selling foreign book of the year, by a man who now owns several major U.S. publishing companies, is Kissinger's new book,《The New York Times》's best-selling foreign policy guidebook,《The Art of Statecraft》.

APR-05-99 16:42 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE 1

Philadelphia Enquirer
The Minneapolis Journal
Books

SECTION II

SUNDAY, MARCH 28, 1999

www.phillynews.com

YEARS OF RENEWAL

By Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster, 1,119 pp. $35.

Reviewed by Craig Eisendrath

They were the quintessen-
tial odd couple: the bril-
liant, paranoiac president
and the refugee from Nazi
Germany who became an
Ivy League professor.

During the years 1969-74, the un-
likely pair of Richard M. Nixon and
Henry A. Kissinger directed U.S.
foreign policy. After Watergate and
Nixon's resignation, Kissinger domi-
nated our foreign affairs in Gerald
R. Ford's caretaker government.

In Years of Renewal, the third
and last volume of his memoirs,
Kissinger describes his complex re-
lations with Nixon, his mutually sup-
portive relations with Ford and the
"Realpolitic" diplomacy of the
Nixon and Ford years.

Kissinger's engagingly written
chronicle of these years is rich in
detail and insight, a "must read" for
foreign policy mavens. But it is
flawed by the man's unremitting
egotism, and his tendency to at-
tribute incompetence or shabby mo-
tives to anyone, on the left or the

right, who opposed him, including
the "intellectual Establishment," as
Kissinger calls it: the U.S. Foreign
Service; Nixon's secretary of state,
William P. Rogers; and Ford's secre-
tary of defense, James R. Schlesing-
er, among many others.

Nixon, Kissinger tells us, was a
brilliant practitioner of foreign af-
fairs, but after 5½ years, Kissinger
remained "mystified by the person-
ality of the perhaps most complex
President of the twentieth centu-
ry." Kissinger observes that Nixon
"was politically astute and highly
intelligent yet prone to self destruc-
tive acts." Nixon also "had the best
personal knowledge of contempo-
rary leaders around the world of
any American political figure I
have met."

Nixon's aides learned which of
his sometimes intemperate direc-
tions

Craig Eisendrath is a senior fellow with
the Center for International Policy in
Washington. A former U.S. Foreign
Service officer, he is the editor of
"National Insecurity. U.S. Intelligence
After the Cold War." to be published by
Temple University Press in December

MY
WAY

Henry Kissinger
chronicles the years
in which he dominated
American foreign
policy. While making
a case for his own
achievements, he has
little good to say
about all those who
opposed him.

Henry Kissinger (right) with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and President Ford in 1974. Kissinger has praise for Ford.

C. F. PAYNE / From the book jacket

Humorist
body-slams
wrestling
governor

ME

By Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente.
as told to Garrison Keillor.
Viking. 152 pp. $15.95

Reviewed by Robert Schmuhl

At a time when anything goes and
absurdity is ascendant, the mar-
riage of politics and pro wrestling
assumes a certain harmonic logic.

Nowadays both callings require asbes-
tos-lined egos, savvy handlers, the stom-
ach to take a punch, a flair for the dra-
matic and carefully scripted conduct.
Winning and losing take a backseat to
the continuing show and how it plays
with the crowd watching.

The election in November of Jesse
(The Body) Ventura as Minnesota's gov-
ernor consummated the union of politick
in" and rasslin' with a force that's kept
the body politic in that state and else-
where reeling. What does the future
hold, and (more grippingly) which hold
will the governor affect in achieve re-
sults?

With such local color in profusion, to
expect Minnesota's best-known humor-
ist, Garrison Keillor, to remain silent
would he as foolish as thinking Bill Clin-
ton will ever unburden his soul with a
tell-all autobiography.

In Me: By Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente
as told to Garrison Keillor, Ventura's
life (Navy SEAL, wrestler, truck group
bodyguard, radio host, mayor and gover-
nor) serves as the inspiration for a light
yet side-splitting satire that skewers not
only its self-absorbed subject but every-
thing else it singles out for sarcasm.
Keillor makes himself the butt of sever-
al jokes in this scattershot send-up, hav-
ing Valente at one point describe him as
"a tired old back with a gecko face and
See KEILLOR28 on 6

Robert Schmuhl, chairman of the
Department of American Studies at the
University of Notre Dame, is author of
"Statecraft and Stagecraft: American Political
Life in the Age of Personality." His collection
of essays, "Indecent Liberies," will be
published in the fall.

INTERNATIONAL

Dull Russians: In
1974 with Brezhnev
(right center)

THE GREEK DOORS

MEMOIRS

Kissinger, Part Three

In the concluding volume, a play-by-play of his clashes with absolutists on the left and the right

By MICHAEL ELLIOTT

SAY "THE FORD PRESIDENCY" AND what comes to mind? Neckties a mile wide: sideburns and bad hair years? Whip Inflation Now? Limit a book on the Ford administration to its foreign policy—to matters such as the Mayaguez incident and a civil war in Lebanon—and it sounds like a snooze. If you knew that such a book was 1,151 pages long, you might conclude that it would be unreadable.

It is a measure of Henry Kissinger's *Years of Renewal* (Simon & Schuster, $35) that it is anything but. Unsurprisingly, there are passages that challenge all but the utterly committed, like 48 pages on the Cyprus crisis of 1974. Yet the very comprehensiveness of this account—billed as “the concluding volume” of Kissinger's three-part memoir of his years serving Ford and Richard Nixon—is part of its appeal. Not that this is just a sourcebook; on the contrary, it has perhaps the clearest expression yet of what Kissinger believed he was doing, and why, during his time as secretary of State. And “Years of Renewal” fairly crackles with incisive character sketches of those who shaped an age. (Compare Kissinger's descriptions of Mao Zedong, which verge on hero-worship even when the Chinese leader was reduced to speaking in an incoherent dribble, with the ill-disguised contempt he reserves for the dull, unintelligent Russians he met.)

Moreover, Kissinger's book is, on more than one occasion, genuinely moving. All told, this is a stupendous achievement.

The strategic challenges that faced Kissinger and Ford after Nixon's resignation in August 1974 were immense. When Ford spoke of ending a long national nightmare, he referred only to Watergate.

But in truth, the United States had lived a nightmare since 1963, a time that had seen (among other horrors) one president assassinated and two forced from office, and a deadly, unpopular war in Vietnam. This fractured, unhappy country faced an apparently powerful adversary in the Soviet Union, secure in its domination of half of Europe, capable of much mischief in the Middle East and advancing its influence, through proxies, in Africa.

As if that were not enough, Kissinger had what might be called a philosophical problem. By his own account, he had rejected Wilsonianism—"foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil, in ... which it is America's mission to help defeat the evil foes"—in favor of a policy whose bedrock was the defense of American interests through the creation of a balance of power. He was not engaged in a "a quest for absolutes" but "the shaping of reality by means of nuances." Yet with Vietnam-scarred liberals determined to be righteous, and newly powerful neoconservatives opposed to all accommodation with communism, this was not a nuanced time.

In large measure, Kissinger's book is a tale of successive attempts to advance his policies in the teeth of domestic skepticism, most powerfully expressed by the post-Watergate Congress. He succeeded more often than he failed, securing the Helsinki Accords, engaging with the white-supremacist regimes of southern Africa, pressuring Israel to withdraw from the Sinai. There was, though, in Kissinger's eyes one great failure: the abandonment of South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975, when Congress failed to

supply the funding that Kissinger feels—passionately—the non-communist governments of Southeast Asia deserved. But here, surely, Kissinger's judgment goes awry; there is scant evidence that any plausible amount of outside intervention would have stopped Indochina's communists from achieving their destiny. Blaming a liberal, softeeded Congress for that fate makes little sense.

If Congress comes in for Kissinger's ire, his president es capes it utterly. In a book that is remarkably generous in tone, Ford wins more accolades than anyone. In his short presidency, Kissinger argues, the football star from Michigan showed courage and leadership, and "embodied our nation's deepest and simplest values." America. Kissinger concludes, was lucky to have such a president at such a time. History is likely to conclude that the president was no less lucky in his secretary of State.

42 NEWSWEEK MARCH 29, 1999

Books.

[ AT BARNES & NOBLE ]

# Power and Policy

## YEARS OF RENEWAL

by Henry Kissinger

Beginning with Nixon's resignation and taking us through the Ford administration, the third and final volume of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's memoirs assesses the major events and world leaders of that pivotal time. He describes in depth and in detail the American collapse in Indochina, the SALT talks curtailing nuclear proliferation, and his "shuttle" diplomacy in the Middle East. Kissinger also examines the public and private lives of Rabin, Sadat, Brezhnev, Mao and the two presidents under whom he served. Sharply intelligent and powerfully candid, *Years of Renewal* is a monumental work of contemporary history. (Simon & Schuster)

Publisher's Price: $35.00

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The New York Times

Book Review

March 21, 1999

Section 7 Copyright © 1999 The New York Times

Writing His
Own History

'Years of Renewal,' the
final volume of Henry
Kissinger's diplomatic
memoirs, makes a case
for his conduct of
foreign affairs as not
just intelligent but
moral as well.

Reviewed by
John Lewis Gaddis 6

'The Immaculate Invasion,' Bob Shacochis's account of the clueless 1994 American military expedition in Haiti.

Reviewed by
Amy Wilentz 10

'Single & Single,' the new thriller by John le Carré.

Reviewed by
Michael Lewis 12

pose its values on the rest of the world, he was surely correct. He seems not to have anticipated, though — as Reagan did — that much of the world might prefer American values over the other possibilities, so that imposition would not be necessary. Kissinger's preoccupation with keeping Marxism out of places like Chile and Angola reflects this inability to see that time was on the side of the West, that a more relaxed attitude might have yielded less violence and greater benefits.

Did Kissinger learn from his mistakes? One intriguing but neglected episode suggests that he did, and it is useful to have it discussed here in detail. After Congress ruled out further covert operations in Angola, Kissinger shifted to an overt policy of aligning the United States with the cause of black majority rule in southern Africa. The presence of adversaries would no longer determine how and where Washington acted in that part of the world; the requirements of democracy would. The effort occupied much of Kissinger's last year in office, and it is one of which he is justifiably proud.

It is often said of Kissinger that his view of the world was amoral, but this seems less than fair. He acknowledges here, more clearly than in the past, the influence of his upbringing in Nazi Germany, the examples set by his parents and the consequent impossibility, for him, of operating outside a moral framework. He calls for the United States "to remain the principal force for freedom and progress" even as it relies "on its head as well as its heart in defining its duty to the world."

Kissinger's accounts of his meetings with dictators do not exactly resonate, it is true, with moral authority. My students wonder how he could possibly have shaken the hand, much less enjoyed the company, of Mao Zedong, whose policies had caused the deaths of at least 30 million people. But Kissinger wonders, with equal puzzlement, how those Americans who demanded an unconditional withdrawal from Southeast Asia could so easily have anesthetized themselves to the fate of South Vietnamese and Cambodians whose only crime was to have sided with the United States. Both are excellent questions.

Morality in the world of diplomacy is a contingent quality: alternatives define it, and in both of these instances the alternatives seem worse. Should Nixon not have gone to China? Should the United States have continued the war in Vietnam? Statecraft defies simple solutions, and one of the merits of Kissinger's memoir — especially this somber and reflective third volume — is that he so rarely provides them.

It was Richard Nixon's "permanent nightmare," Kissinger recalls, in words that might apply to himself, to Churchill or to any formidable figure in history, "that, in the end, all his efforts . . . would vanish into thin air, defeated by the hostility of contemporaries and the indifference of historians." This great Dreadnought of a memoir seeks to overcome both adversaries. It may not achieve this with Kissinger's contemporaries, for those who survive are unlikely to change their minds. Against indifferent historians, though, it will surely accomplish its purposes. ☐

HENRY A. KISSINGER

March 23, 1999

Dear John:

No author being compared to Churchill has any reason to
complain. Therefore, allow me to point out only one
factual point.

You keep referring to documents unavailable to historians.
The facts have been outlined in my reply to Jonathan Spence
in the New York Review of Books of March 18:

"Every document in the Library of Congress is the copy of an original in the State Department, the Ford Library, or the National Archives. (The only exceptions are telephone conversations ruled by the US Supreme Court as private. However, in October 1998, I gave access to these conversations to the State Department historians so that they might extract portions relevant to foreign policy decisions for inclusion in their publications.) Every last document cited in _The Kissinger Transcripts_ has been available in governmental archives under the Freedom of Information Act on the basis of regulations established by the US Government. I have no voice in these decisions."

My impression is that the declassification of the documents
is no obstacle to historical research. The overwhelming
majority has already been declassified and the rest would
probably be made available to a Freedom of Information appeal.

Hope to see you soon,

Professor John Lewis Gaddis
Robert A. Lovett Professor of History
Yale University
P.O. Box 28206
New Haven, CT 06520-8206

TWENTY-SIXTH FLOOR • 350 PARK AVENUE • NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022 • (212) 759-7919

HENRY A. KISSINGER

March 26, 1999

Dear Mr. McGrath:

John Gaddis, in his thoughtful review of *Years of Renewal*, fell prey to the misconception that I disposed of my official papers in some ingenious and unique manner to spin history. This is not the case.

In 1977, the then Librarian of Congress, the eminent historian Daniel Boorstin, invited me to place my papers in the Library of Congress, which is the repository of the papers of eight Secretaries of State in this century alone and of others dating back to Thomas Jefferson, our first Secretary of State. A "Deed of Gift" including some restrictions on access during a donor's lifetime has become a standard format. The restrictions are no obstacle to traditional research because the classified papers in my collection are duplicates, and the originals remain in the appropriate governmental files. Specifically, all sensitive exchanges and other memoranda are in their original archives where scholars can use them, subject to government declassification procedures. I have no say in those procedures; I am neither consulted nor informed when papers dealing with my actions or conversations are released. By now a vast number have been declassified.

By the same token, any quotations I used from classified memoranda in *Years of Renewal*, as in the two previous volumes of my memoirs, had to be cleared by the administration--as the Foreword in each volume clearly spells out.

From left: Henry Kissinger with the actress Jill St John, 1972; with Elizabeth Taylor in 1980; Heinz Alfred Kissinger, as he was aged 11; with Raquel Welch in 1985; with Margaret Thatcher, 1983; with Jim Call

paranoia, Cambodia, balance of power, power the great aphrodisiac. Power. Power. Power. Five more minutes pass before Dr Kissinger bustles in, undoes his blue suit jacket and sits down. 'Is that damn thing on?' he says in an android monotone, pointing to a tape recorder which one of his staff has set up next to mine on the glass coffee table. 'I tell you. I have no technical skills whatsoever.' He almost allows himself a smile at this. It makes him seem, for a moment, grandfatherly.

We start with the news about the bombing of Iraq. No, he doesn't suppose the media will ever let him retire from commenting on such events. 'But, in fairness to the press, I'm not compelled to answer – so there must be some interaction.' He's been advocating bombing for a year now and says the coincidence of timing with Clinton's impeachment trial could have

been avoided if the President hadn't kept putting the problem off. 'It's an unfortunate moment for it to happen in terms of the domestic debate in the United States. Now the test is whether it is done primarily for symbolic reasons and, as we are talking, I can't tell this. What the President said in his speech was that he was trying to destroy the location of the weapons of mass destruction. That seems to me a very difficult assignment, especially with biological and chemical weapons which are so easy to make. So I have argued that the purpose of an attack should be to undermine the control system of Saddam, to go after the Republican Guard division and the institutions which sustain his rule. And to do that, any military vehicle that moves we should feel free to attack.'

As hawkish as ever, it seems, and just as diplomatic to his allies – he doesn't think the British involvement is mere tokenism. 'No, I give Britain huge credit for having redemphasized the special relationship and for having re-established itself in the American mind for a new generation as the most reliable ally we have. I think this is important for Britain, no matter what happens over Europe, because it gives her a special standing in Washington. Of all the Europeans, it is easiest for the Americans to deal with the British – you are pragmatic and you do not have the chip on your shoulders of the French, or their excessive rationalism.'

While Kissinger can see that Blair identifies with Clinton, he thinks this is to do with the Prime Minister's style – that he would be just as friendly with a Republican president. Surprisingly, the British government with which Kissinger found it easiest to work was that of Wilson and Callaghan.

The Wilson-Callaghan years fall into the period covered by *Years of Renewal*, the third volume of Kissinger's memoirs, (to be published in the US by Simon & Schuster on 29 March). The book begins with Nixon's

resignation in 1974 and concentrates on the two and a half years during which Ford was president. For Kissinger, this was the time of détente and SALT negotiations with the Soviets; of the disengagement treaty between Israel and Syria-Egypt; of majority rule in southern Africa; of civil unrest in Cyprus; of the oil crisis.

Kissinger's memoirs are a vast project. He began the first volume when he joined Georgetown University, shortly after leaving office in 1977. *The White House Years*, covering 1969-72, was published two years later and became a number-one bestseller. The second volume, *Years of Upheaval*, covered the year and a half of Nixon's truncated second term. Published in 1982, it sold just as well as the first. So why the 17-year gap between the second and third?

> 'Largely because I wanted to get more perspective on the debates. My first two volumes were analysed more in terms of the debate of the Seventies. Actually, when I look at the present debates, I must say things haven't changed that much – so that objective will never be achieved.' Kissinger thinks that history is a constantly evolving subject, on which there can be no definitive take. 'In the late Seventies and Eighties, for example, the Vietnam protest generation was still very active. A few months ago I was giving a talk at Yale University and, in the students' minds, I'm not sure if they knew whether the Vietnam War came before or after the Spanish American War. That's exaggerated, but the Vietnam War was not their concern.'

Kissinger's own formative experiences do not really feature in his memoirs. He doesn't like talking about himself. He minimises, for instance, the significance of his traumatic childhood and his Jewish heritage – he's not a practising Jew – and describes his upbringing as typical middle-class German. Even though he was banned as a child from playing soccer with non-Jewish boys (a game he loved then and is still fanatical about), he has said that he wasn't consciously unhappy – and not acutely aware of what was going on in Germany during his childhood. Yet when he arrived in New York in 1938 – and went to

work in a shaving brush factory during the day while continuing his studies at night school – his discovery that he did not have to cross the street to avoid being beaten up by non-Jewish boys made him long to become an American citizen.

He did not come to think of himself as a true American, though, until he joined the US Army as a private in 1943. He proved a valiant soldier at the Battle of the Bulge, volunteering for a small detachment that fought a delaying action when the Germans launched their counter-attack after D-day. (Later, as a sergeant in counter-intelligence, he won a Bronze Star.)

When, on a visit to Germany, the Bonn government announced that Kissinger might visit some of his relatives, he intoned darkly, 'My relatives are soap.' (At least 13 of them were sent to the gas chambers.) Walter Isaacson, one of his biographers, believes that nearly all Kissinger's personality traits – his philosophical pessimism, his confidence coexisting with his insecurities, his vanity with his vulnerability and his arrogance with his craving for approval – can be traced to the Holocaust.

Yet there are other sides to Kissinger's character which can't be squared with this. His deadpan sense of humour for one: 'The illegal we do immediately,' he once joked. 'The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.' When he had his heart attack, he quipped, 'Well, at least it proves I do have a heart.'

According to students of Kissinger, he cultivated a self-deprecating sense of humour when he entered politics. It was intended to defuse jealousy and counter his natural gravitas and arrogance. 'I have never met a man with greater powers of seduction,' recalled Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Kissinger first took office. 'He was not only charming and witty but he made me feel I was a person whose advice and assistance he uniquely sought.'

Kissinger's charm and powers of flattery weren't deployed on political colleagues only. 'Power is the great aphrodisiac,' he said just before a 1972 poll of *Playboy* Bunnies voted him 'the man I would most like

> 'Of all the Europeans, it is easiest for the Americans to deal with the British – you are pragmatic and do not have the chip on your shoulders of the French, or their excessive rationalism'

14 THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH MAGAZINE
21 JANUARY 1985

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Years of Renewal

Henry Kissinger

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Synopsis

The long-awaited third volume of Kissinger's monumental, bestselling memoirs includes his startling assessment of Richard Nixon's complex personality and completes an important and major work of contemporary history. Includes 48 photos.

Reviews and Commentary

From Publisher's Weekly:

Having aspired to be a modern-day Metternich, Kissinger has always placed great value on subtlety. Indeed, one of his favorite charges against his many political and bureaucratic adversaries is that they don't understand the nuances of policy, tactics or strategy. Throughout this final volume of his memoirs (after *White House Years* and *Years of Upheaval*), he takes pains — often unsubtle pains — to tell readers how subtle he is. Of the Middle East peace process, he writes: "If foreign policy were as simple as the study of it in academic seminars, Jordan would have been the logical candidate for the next step." The implication, of course, is that foreign policy is not so simple, and Kissinger takes pride in reminding readers that he always kept all the complexities in mind. And yet Kissinger remains so informative that readers will happily permit him this indulgence. The book starts with Nixon's resignation and continues through the two years of the Ford administration. One of the surprises is the high regard in which Kissinger holds Ford: "I am certain the time will come when it is recognized that the Cold War could not have been won had not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of America's history,

.../isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1PTSUKS5FE&mscssid=A5UBXG81TKS12L3W00L1RN6PL6J80E 3/15/99

Page 2 of 3

been there to keep us from losing it."

In his portrait of Nixon, Kissinger adopts the interpretation that seems to be hardening into conventional wisdom — that of a supremely gifted analytical mind tragically undone by paranoia and an existential discomfort with being alive. Ford, by contrast, emerges from these pages as a man whose admitted lack of flair is the flip side of an inner confidence that is, perhaps uniquely among politicians, unimpeded by egotism. As Kissinger explains China policy, Soviet policy, Middle East diplomacy and various crises (in Cyprus, Angola and elsewhere), his insight extends not only to explanations of policy but also to accounts of bureaucratic infighting and turf battles — as well as to relations between the executive branch and Congress. His account of how, regarding arms control and d tente, he and Ford tried to determine the national interest while being squeezed between a "McGovernite Congress" and the hard right will give readers a sophisticated political lesson. Kissinger was a shrewd courtier and ferocious infighter, and he takes a deadpan delight in showing readers just how adept he was. At the same time, he's magnanimous toward those with whom he once locked horns, throwing appreciative bouquets to such former adversaries as Senator Scoop Jackson and William Rogers ("I am not proud of the way I participated in Nixon's attempts to marginalize the man," he writes of the man he replaced as Nixon's secretary of state). Even readers predisposed to see Kissinger as a villain may come away from the book with at least grudging admiration for him and with a deeper — and, yes, more subtle — understanding of the complexities of foreign policy and its domestic political dimensions.

From Kirkus:

With this volume Kissinger concludes what may be the greatest memoir ever written by an American statesman (White House Years, 1979; Years of Upheaval, 1982). It is a tribute to the quality of his narrative that the reader is often entranced by the personalities and diplomatic maneuverings of the Ford administration, a quarter of a century ago. Of course, Kissinger does not always resist the temptation to be more prescient than he was at the time. Thus the statesman, who discerned in 1977 that we faced the "stark reality that the [communist] challenge is unending," reports on going to Moscow several years earlier that one "could not but gain the impression that the whole elaborately constructed stage set was precarious and might collapse at any moment." Not surprisingly, we also see more of the good Henry, charitable in his judgments, even of bureaucratic enemies, and open in his methods, than the bad Henry ("Trust does not come to me spontaneously"). But the performance is always a bravura one: there is hardly a page without a wise observation or maxim of statecraft, or a characterization full of insight, including masterful sketches of Nixon, Ford, Mao, Helmut Schmidt, and a host of other leaders. There is just one point at which the tone, wise, avuncular, witty, and epigrammatic changes dramatically, and that is on the withdrawal of the US from Vietnam. Kissinger argues with anguished passion that those in Congress who called for US withdrawal welshed on their commitment to provide aid to the South Vietnamese when the US left; that the US abandonment was shameful; that it led to genocide and tragedy in Vietnam and Cambodia; and that it deeply injured the reputation and the

MAR-12-1999 16:19

KHI DC

212 755 7248

7.01

FACSIMILE TRANSMISSION REPORT

DATE: March 12, 1999

TO: HAK via Theresa

FROM: Rose

RE: Kissinger Transcripts book that the Post will review

I sent you the other day the small article in the *Post* (attached) and we discussed it. Peter today faxed me the complete article containing the same quotes in a harsh review of *YOR*. It is by Tom Blanton who is director of the National Security Archives at GW, which published the above mentioned book.

We wanted you to be aware of the attached; surely, the *Post* has all this and more. We don't recommend anything at the moment - for one thing, I need to re-check our files. Maybe you want to call Peter. I will do whatever checking you want.

6 PAGE(S) FOLLOW THIS COVER SHEET

202-872-0300 TO CONFIRM RECEIPT OR REPORT PROBLEMS
212-753-7248 TO TRANSMIT DOCUMENTS

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0000

3

appears the soul of brevity when measured against the vast documentary record of his foreign policies, a record just now emerging from the shroud of national-security secrecy, no thanks to Kissinger (who has had until now exclusive access to the record for the purposes of memoir writing). Take the day of October 21, 1975, when Chair-

In one transcript, Kissinger half jokes as he passes Intelligence to a Chinese ambassador: "You don't need a master spy. We give you everything."

man Mao Zedong had Kissinger (and then ambassador George Bush) over to the house for an hour and forty minutes, producing a transcript, recently declassified, which runs 17 pages. Kissinger boils down to 5 memoir pages what he calls "the most interesting and also the most tense of my five meetings with him [Mao]."

Kissinger's editorial choices are revealing, to say the least. In fact, the most bizarre element of that tension on October 21 is completely missing from Kissinger's newly published account, but fairly leaps from the declassified transcript, when Chairman Mao inquires: "It is said that the *New York Times* is controlled by a Jewish family." The Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany answers, "That is true." Mao continues, "And also the *Washington Post*." Kissinger demurs, "The *Washington Post*—it is no longer true." The transcript notes that Kissinger "then conferred with Ambassador Bush who pointed out that Mrs. [Katharine] Graham was Jewish, the daughter of Mr. Meyer" and said to Mao, "You are right."

Why leave out this most provocative of salles? Kissinger speculated in a subsequent secret report to Gerald Ford that in making "cracks against Jewish influence in the American media," Mao might have been saying—in the context of Chinese criticism of U.S.-Soviet détente as appeasement—that "Jews are traditionally appeasers in history and are a major element in eroding American steadfastness..." On the other hand, Kissinger writes Ford that given Mao's frailty and advanced age (82), "Equally the passages may have had no deeper meaning whatsoever, despite the chairman's well-deserved reputation for the use of aphorism and symbolism."

Tom Blanson is director of the National Security Archive as George Washington University, an independent research institute and library of declassified documents, including the just-published book, The Kissinger Transcript, edited by the archives analyst William Burr.

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## Working Relationships

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All workshops are given in the greater Boston area. For complete brochure & schedule call 617-277-9876 or 800-419-8977.

Or visit our web site: www.workrel.com

DISTRIBUTION: 1.3 in. x 1.3 in. (skipping this page)

FROM THE NEWSPAPER: THE STATE OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY

TOM BLANSON, DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE, IS A PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY. IN 1974, HE BECAME THE FIRST AMERICAN PROFESSOR AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY TO BE Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, an honor he received in 1983. In 1985, he was named one of the "100 most influential people in the world" by Business Week. In 1987, he was named one of "The 100 most influential people in the world" by The Times, London, and in 1989, he was named one of "The 100 most influential people in the world" by The Times, New York.

THE NEWSPAPER, 1999-2000

IMAGES

BOSTON MAGAZINE • March 1999 176

MAR-12-1999 16:21

KHI DC

212 103 1248 M.05

ADVERTISEMENT

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Magazine

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UP

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1999 March 1999 • BOSTON MAGAZINE

ON THE TOWN BOOKS

4

Omitting Mao's Jewish "cracks" fits a pattern spanning all three volumes of Kissinger's memoirs, a pattern that includes Mao and Zhou Enlai, together with the narrator and occasionally the president, as the protagonists of history, in a word, heroes, but with carefully edited repartee. As small example: The memoir renders a Kissinger comment to Mao in that October 21, 1975 meeting as, "another reason for coming to Beijing had been to benefit from China's clear perception of world affairs." But the actual transcript betrays a certain sycophancy: "We come to Peking because we think you your perception of the world situation is the clearest of any country we deal with and with which we agree on some... many points."

The underlying documents, only now being pried from the clutches of securocrats, take the story much further than Kissinger's memoirs do, giving the verbatim speeches in all their embarrassing splendor, containing the fine print of what Kissinger offered the Chinese as he built them into "tacit allies." The process started with satellite photos in 1971 of Soviet troop movements, then full-length intelligence studies in 1973 of Soviet capabilities, and even an offer of a real-time

hot line to warn of a Soviet attack. In one top-secret 1971 transcript, Kissinger half jokes as he passes intelligence to the Chinese U.N. ambassador Huang Hua: "You don't need a master spy. We give you everything."

The saturation press coverage of the time, of course, portrayed the opening to China as clever triangular diplomacy, playing the two Communist gians against each other. Had the Soviets ever realized the degree of the U.S. tilt (when they asked, Kissinger lied), détente would surely have been at risk, and with it all of Kissinger's proud achievements in arms control and Soviet emigration. This may explain why only now, with the Soviet Union dead, Kissinger feels free to use words like "strategic partnership" to describe the relationship with China.

But even now, Kissinger leaves out the revealing particulars. Missing from Years of Renewal, for instance, is the following exchange with Deng Xiaoping during President Ford's Beijing visit in December 1975.

DENG: ... under the present situation, some things we are interested in perhaps you find it impossible to supply. Like for instance computers of a speed of 10 million times...

KISSINGER: Our problem is we have refused certain computers to the Soviet Union. (Deng spits into his spintoon.) I think we could approve computers to the People's Republic of China that would be of

considerable quality. As long as we can at the same time maintain our policy with the Soviet Union... If we can just find a model with technical differences to preserve the principle with the Soviet Union, then we can give it to you... It will be with the intention of approving it, not refusing it.

WITHIN THE YEAR, THE UNITED States signed off on two Control Data Cyber-172 computers for China, ostensibly for use in processing seismic data for oil drilling, but without the strict safeguards applied to the same computers sold to the Soviets. In 1975, it was computers; in 1995, it was missile guidance technology. The secret tilt put in place by Kissinger, Nixon, and Ford of military, technical, and intelligence cooperation between China and the U.S.

explains the baseline of U.S. policy to this day, notwithstanding human rights abuses and the Tiananmen massacre. Nowhere in the memoirs or the transcripts, of course, do we find Kissinger upbraiding the Chinese on human rights grounds. In fact, the reverse is true, when Zhou Enlai demands that Kissinger tell the Chilean dictator

Pinochet to stop the "slaughtering."

That Kissinger feels compelled to edit, elide, and revise the record of a policy widely perceived as successful might alert us to focus our attention on his version of the debacle. Take, for example, the congressional cutoff of military support to the South Vietnamese between 1973 and 1975, which Kissinger says undermined the Paris peace agreements and violated America's moral obligations to its allies. The dates are important, for Kissinger expends much effort to blame the "radical McGovernites" swept into office in 1974 in the wake of Watergate; yet the first votes to prohibit U.S. military action "in or over Vietnam" occurred in June 1973, after revelations of Nixon's secret war in Cambodia. Kissinger never deigns to consider that his own role in the Nixon administration's secrecy and duplicity helped feed congressional and public revulsion against the Vietnam policies, and thus contributed to their failure.

Of the debacle, Angola presents perhaps the clearest example of Kissinger's plan thwarted by his nemesis, that "McGovernio Congress"; his 1975 covert operations in Angola, ultimately canceled by Congressional vote, mark the beginning of nearly 2½ years of vicious civil war, which has left hundreds of thousands maimed or dead and continues to this day. In Kissinger's version,

Kissinger omits an
Incident In which
Chairman Mao
notes, "The New
York Times
is controlled by
a Jewish family."
The Jewish
refugee from Nazi
Germany answers,
"That is true."

MAR-12-1999 16:22

KHI DC

212 103 1248 P.01

Reporte

[c]

FAST FEUD: Dualing vendors of CousCous Kitchen, left, and Falafel King.

## 2 Minutes with
# MIT's Falafel Foes

Those lucky techno-geeks at MIT have not one, but two, battling metal trucks peddling falafel. Within 100 feet of each other, chickpea-loving students may choose between the appealingly shiny truck with the Lebanese-style falafel that Chef Boutros Youssef dishes from his Cous-Cous Kitchen, or the disturbingly well-worn truck with the Israeli-style falafel Bobby Estabrok serves from Falafel King. Youssef once fried side by side with the original owner of Falafel King, Moshe Katz, about a decade ago. Following a difference of opinion, however, Youssef opened his own business. Today there's no love lost between these crispy-critter caterers. Boston Magazine caught up with

Youssef and his wife at CousCous Kitchen, and Estabrok at Falafel King, to chew the fat.

What's the deal: Is it a chickpea or a garbanze bean? Youssef: Chickpea. You should only use chickpeas in the United States. They're white and light. Estabrok: It's like a pea, I don't know. We go by chickpea, but on the bag it says garbanze bean.

What's the best way to accessorize a falafel? Youssef: Hot sauce and any kind of grain alcohol. Estabrok: Anything is good with a falafel.

Which of you makes a better falafel and why? Youssef: I was a chef for 25 years. I make

authentic Lebanese-style falafel, fresh and never frozen. The other guy is not a professional. He's nobody. He's not a chef and that's not real food. I think he's an engineer. Estabrok: We do 'cause we have repeat customers. They have the cheap customers

Trick question: Ever been to an MIT frat party? Youssef: Huh? Estabrok: No.

Okay, 10 minutes, steel-cage matchup, CousCous Kitchen versus Falafel King. Who would win? Youssef: I don't know ... he is very skinny. He knows better than to touch my truck. Estabrok: The steel cage.

What effect do falafels have on your sex life? Youssef: Falafels are healthy, make you strong. Good for sex. Estabrok: It's like Viagra. You can look in a man's eye and tell he's eaten a falafel. Mothers tell their daughters to run.

—Jeff Anderson

## Red-faced Scare

## KISSINGER AND TELL

What with 1,152 pages, you'd think Henry Kissinger's third volume of memoirs, Years of Renewal (see "Books," page 174), would cover just about everything. But the National Security Archive, a Washington-based think tank, has passed along some recently declassified documents showing that Kissinger left out material proving that boys will be boys—even boys who run the most powerful countries in the world.

The documents recount a 1974 meeting in which a joking Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev stole Kissinger's briefing books. The incident took place during an arms-control meeting at Brezhnev's office in the Kremlin, when he "roughed up" the hair of National Security Council senior staff member Jan Lodal and said he needed a haircut. Kissinger agreed, but Soviet ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin pointed out that "Lodal's hair was not long by American standards."

Then, "Brezhnev picked up [NSC staff member Peter] Rodman's case containing Dr. Kissinger's briefing books and walked off into the next room." Brezhnev turned back and returned the case. "Mr. Gromyko [member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee and Minister of Foreign Affairs for the USSR] affirmed that it was a joke. The meeting then resumed."

What a bunch of kids.

## Barometer

<table><thead><tr><th>Falling</th><th>Rising</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Actual travel</td><td>Astronauts</td></tr><tr><td>Celine Dion</td><td>KISS</td></tr><tr><td>Warren Tavern</td><td>Sullivan's Pub</td></tr><tr><td>Church Binge</td><td>Thursday night polar</td></tr><tr><td>Robert Edwards</td><td>Evel Koolевel, Jr.</td></tr><tr><td>Psychoanalysis</td><td>Intimidation</td></tr><tr><td>Arena concerts</td><td>Except for Bruce</td></tr><tr><td>Adam Barte</td><td>Andru John</td></tr><tr><td>The GOP's famous hold on reality</td><td>Liddy Bale</td></tr></tbody></table>

18 March 1999 • BOSTON MAGAZINE

Top, DANA SMITH; below, BRIAN BIC

TOTAL P.07

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Simon & Schuster Consumer Group
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
212-698-7340

Michael Korda
Ceo de la Rue President
Editorial Chief
Editorial Division

March 8, 1999

Fax to: Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
759-7919

From: Michael Korda
698-7663

Dear Henry,

I think I should warn you before the fact that I was surprised—and disappointed—to learn that the *Washington Post* "Book World" was apparently unable to assign anyone to review your new book *Years of Renewal*, and decided to run a review of *The Kissinger Transcripts* to coincide with the publication of your book.

We usually call the major book review media prior to the publication of an important book, just to see if and when they will be running a review, so we can let bookstores know. We were told that the reviewer *Book World* had chosen preferred to review *The Kissinger Transcripts* instead, a book which most people would agree was written with a strong hostile bias towards you (and which was published several months ago, so it's old news).

I imagine *Book World* will eventually get around to reviewing *Years of Renewal*, perhaps some time after its publication, but I'm sure we both find it hard to understand why the editors of *Book World* would choose to review a book that is fiercely critical of you at the exact moment when your own book is being published.

Of course none of us here would question the right of the editors of *Book World* to do whatever they want to do, nor would any of us complain about honest criticism, but I can't help feeling that reviewing a book which is an outright attack on you and the policies you represented instead of your book suggests a certain predetermination to publish a hostile piece about you.

I don't think there's anything we can do about this, but I felt that I should let you know as soon as I heard, so you aren't taken by surprise.

Affectionately,

MVK:rjh

AVIACOM COMPANY

# A Realist Faces Reality

## The Ford years don't make a rollicking read, but Kissinger's memoirs draw some smart lessons

By WALTER ISAACSON

IT'S BEEN 17 YEARS SINCE HENRY KISSINGER published the second of his three volumes of memoirs, which took him through Richard Nixon's resignation, and some wondered whether he would ever really write this final volume. The Gerald Ford years, after all, were filled with events (communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, the end of détente with Russia, arms-control stalemates) that weren't exactly ripe for recounting with relish.

But here it is, yet another 1,000-plus pages, and in the end it was worth the wait. Kissinger again displays an intellectual ambition, provocative-ness and mix of sweep and detail that make other memoirs seem pale. Of course that doesn't mean *Years of Renewal* (Simon & Schuster; $35) is a relaxing beach read. The narratives and character sketches (including those of Nixon and Ford, excerpted in this issue) are often vivid delights, but they are leavened by meticulous trudges through old battlegrounds (some repetitive of previous volumes) that make up in defensiveness what they lack in concision. To paraphrase a reviewer of one of his first books, 40 years ago: Kissinger may be a great writer, but anyone who finishes his book is definitely a great reader.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me note that I once wrote a biography of Kissinger that, while attempting to convey his brilliance, criticized him for failing to fully appreciate the messy openness of America's democracy and the strength it derives from basing its foreign policy on moral ideals. He was not thrilled. In this volume he rather effectively debunks the notion, put forward by myself and others, that growing up as a Jew in Nazi Germany bred in him a reverence for order over ideology, and he ends with an eye-moistening 1946 letter his father wrote him about idealism. But his primary theme, now as in the past, is that in seeking a balance between realistic appraisals of our nation-

al interests and Wilsonian idealism, America tips too much toward the latter.

Kissinger's pragmatic, realpolitik approach may have made intellectual sense, but his lack of feel for America's idealistic impulses ultimately contributed to a string of failures: Congress's unwillingness to support South Vietnam after America's withdrawal; the controversy over "secret" assurances of support that Kissinger had given Saigon; the assault on détente with Russia

by both liberals and conservatives; and the crazed congressional probes of the CIA oddly abetted by its director, William Colby. Kissinger doesn't go so far as to admit he was wrong, but he does concede that "I underestimated the impact on the public psyche of the sharp difference between our approach to foreign policy and the Wilsonianism which had become dominant in the 20th century."

Kissinger is particularly baffled by neoconservatives such as James Schlesinger and Henry ("Scoop") Jackson. He thought they should have been his natural allies in pursuing anticommunist strategies, but he now realizes how deep the differences were between their uncompromising (and rather ambition-laden) moralism and his realism. Among Kissinger's great mistakes, for example, was thinking he could negotiate with Jackson a compromise level of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union that would convince the Senator to support détente,

or that he could convince Schlesinger to support an arms-limitation scheme based on realistic numbers. Kissinger also tacitly concedes that

the secretive methods he used in negotiating with Russia, China and Vietnam made it harder for him to win sustained support from the bureaucracy and Congress.

The most painful failure was the collapse of the Vietnam peace accord. Kissinger's outrage that Congress would not go to the aid of South Vietnam in 1975 when the North launched its final offensive is sincere and understandable. But he glosses over any differences he may have had with Ford, who

displayed a more sensitive feel for the wariness of Congress and the weariness of the public. And he never confronts the basic reality that his 1973 peace accord fudged rather than resolved the issue of whether the communists accepted South Vietnam as an independent country. He is right to be dismayed, but has little justification for being shocked, that neither the North nor the South ever worked hard at reaching a political rather than a military resolution—or that there was little appetite in the U.S. to reengage in the struggle.

From his earliest writings on Bismarck and Metternich to the final chapter of this final volume of his 3,769-page trilogy of memoirs, Kissinger has remained true to his realist tilt. "The United States," he concludes, "must temper its missionary spirit with a concept of the national interest and rely on its head as well as its heart in defining its duty to the world."

Yet the enduring successes of the Ford years came not from merely pursuing the pragmatic calculations of the Nixon years. The 1975 Helsinki accord, for example, including its *über*-idealistic declaration on human rights, will be "considered by posterity as a landmark in the West's victory over communism," as Kissinger points out. More broadly, the Ford years restored a sense of honesty, openness and morality to the conduct of foreign affairs. In portraying them as years of renewal, Kissinger conveys his appreciation of these values, perhaps even more fully than he did at the time. ■

DAVID HUME KENNERLY—THE WHITE HOUSE

APRIL 1975: AS VIETNAM WAS FALLING
He understood global balances better than American politics

LC

TIME, MARCH 15, 1999

FEB-23-99 19:46 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE 1

KIRKUS REVIEWS

In quoting or excerpting, please refer to
KIRKUS REVIEWS
Date of Issue: March 1, 1999

It is a tribute to the quality of his narrative that the reader is often entranced by the personalities and diplomatic maneuverings of the Ford administration, a quarter of a century ago. Of course, Kissinger does not always resist the temptation to be more prescient than he was at the time. Thus the statesman, who discerned in 1977 that we faced the "stark reality that the [communist] challenge is unending," reports on going to Moscow several years earlier that one "could not but gain the impression that the whole elaborately constructed stage set was precarious and might collapse at any moment." Not surprisingly, we also see more of the good Henry, charitable in his judgments, even of bureaucratic enemies, and open in his methods, than the bad Henry ("Trust does not come to me spontaneously"). But the performance is always a bravura one: there is hardly a page without a wise observation or maxim of statecraft, or a characterization full of insight, including masterful sketches of Nixon, Ford, Mao, Helmut Schmidt, and a host of other leaders. There is just one point at which the tone, wise, avuncular, witty, and epigrammatic changes dramatically, and that is on the withdrawal of the US from Vietnam. Kissinger argues with anguished passion that those in Congress who called for US withdrawal welished on their commitment to provide aid to the South Vietnamese when the US left; that the US abandonment was shameful; that it led to genocide and tragedy in Vietnam and Cambodia; and that it deeply injured the reputation and the interests of the US throughout the world. Enough time may now have elapsed for the truth of these observations to be more widely acknowledged.

A brilliant, masterly, even seminal book.

◆ Kissinger, Henry
YEARS OF RENEWAL

Simon & Schuster
(1168 pp.)

$35.00

Mar. 1999

ISBN: 0-684-85571-2

FEB-16-99 16:49 FROM: KURDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE

derismo is often regarded as witchcraft—a means for hex removals and love divinations. Avila was therefore surprised to learn in her masters program in psychiatric nursing at the University of Texas that *curanderismo* is a broad-based fusion of Aztec, Spanish and African traditional medicines with hundreds of useful applications. This discovery, coupled with her dissatisfaction with the limitations of conventional mental health practices, motivated Avila, who grew up in a first-generation Chicano family in El Paso, Tex., to apprentice with an Aztec master and eventually to become a full-time *curandera*. Her first book, co-written with Parker (co-author of *Maya Cosmos*), is a clear-sighted introduction to the fundamentals of this alternative healing practice. It describes the healers, who range from spiritual counselors to general practitioners and massage therapists; their counseling techniques, ritual purifications and soul retrievals; characteristics of common diseases; and formulas for achieving a balanced lifestyle, a rich spiritual life and good nutrition. The down-to earth explanations of such afflictions as *envidia* (envy), *susto* (fright or loss of soul) and *mal puesto* (bad luck) will help dispel misconceptions about these "folk" ailments that, in *curandero* terms, are common to all people. Particularly thought provoking is Avila's perspective on mainstream mental health and her preference for the holistic *curandero* approach to treating mental diseases, including psychosis and imbalances induced by severe trauma. "A good *curandera*," she writes, "can help us find the middle ground in a culture where balance, reality, and enlightened compromise are not always part of our support system." Agent, Elaine Markson, author tour. (Mar.)

## THE HOUSE OF JOSHUA:

### Meditations on Family and Place

Mindy Thompson Fullilove. Univ. of Nebraska, $20 (160p) ISBN 0-8032-2007-3

Psychologist Fullilove's poetic family remunerances form the core of her inquiry into the critical role of place and family in human psychology. She deftly draws on myths and folktales and on medical, sociological, cultural and religious insights to support her conclusion that political and economic displacement will be a central problem of the 21st century. Fullilove begins her consistently original and provocative study with a discussion of her father's hopes for inner-city ghetto communities. The first black paid organizer for the United Electric, Radio and Machine Workers Union of America, and

## ☆YEARS OF RENEWAL

Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster, $35 (1168p) ISBN 0-684-5571-2

Having aspired to be a modern-day Metternich, Kissinger has always placed great value on subtlety. Indeed, one of his favorite charges against his many political and bureaucratic adversaries is that they don't understand the nuances of policy, tactics or strategy. Throughout this final volume of his memoirs (after *White House Years* and *Years of Upheaval*), he takes pains—often unsubtle pains—to tell readers how subtle he is. Of the Middle East peace process, he writes: "If foreign policy were as simple as the study of it in academic seminars, Jordan would have been the logical candidate for the next step." The implication, of course, is that foreign policy is not so simple, and Kissinger takes pride in reminding readers that he always kept all the complexities in mind. And yet Kissinger remains so informative that readers will happily permit him this indulgence.

The book starts with Nixon's resignation and continues through the two years of the Ford administration. One of the surprises is the high regard in which Kissinger holds Ford: "I am certain the time will come when it is recognized that the Cold War could not have been won had not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of America's history, been there to keep us from losing it." In his portrait of Nixon, Kissinger adopts the interpretation that seems to be hardening into conventional wisdom—that of a supremely gifted analytical mind tragically undone by paranoia and an existential discomfort with

blacklisted in the McCarthy era, he believed that by "embracing" the places assigned to them by "power relations," oppressed populations could create a consciousness of community that would supersede the ghettos' intended purpose. In 1950, when Fullilove was born, her white mother "began her life as Persephone," living 51 weeks in Orange, N.J., with her black husband, and returning alone to her parents' all-white world in Ohio for one week of the year. In 1974, enthusiastic and idealistic, Fullilove entered Columbia Medical School and began the process of finding her place there, of connecting being a doctor to the business of hospitals that routinely put their growth ahead of the needs of surrounding neighborhoods. Her own medical credo includes belief in "the sanctity of the human spirit," and that "the business of medicine cannot snuff out the

deeper magic of doctoring." In recalling her teenage daughter's summers at camp, Fullilove shows their joined yet individual discoveries about the "need to nourish the spirit that keeps the body, the first place in which we live, moving." This insight into the inner places that define us illustrates the complexity of Fullilove's outlook, despite its seeming simplicity. (Mar.)

As Kissinger explains China policy, Soviet policy, Middle East diplomacy and various crises (in Cyprus, Angola and elsewhere), his insight extends not only to explanations of policy but also to accounts of bureaucratic infighting and turf battles—as well as to relations between the executive branch and Congress. His account of how, regarding arms control and détente, he and Ford tried to determine the national interest while being squeezed between a "McGovernite Congress" and the hard right will give readers a sophisticated political lesson. Kissinger was a shrewd courtier and ferocious infighter, and he takes a deadpan delight in showing readers just how adept he was. At the same time, he's magnanimous toward those with whom he once locked horns, throwing appreciative bouquets to such former adversaries as Senator Scoop Jackson and William Rogers ("I am not proud of the way I participated in Nixon's attempts to marginalize the man," he writes of the man he replaced as Nixon's secretary of state).

Even readers predisposed to see Kissinger as a villain may come away from the book with at least grudging admiration for him and with a deeper—and, yes, more subtle—understanding of the complexities of foreign policy and its domestic political dimensions. *First serial to Time.* (Mar.)

## ORDINARY GRACE: An Examination of the Roots of Compassion, Altruism, and Empathy, and the Ordinary Individuals Who Help Others in Extraordinary Ways

Kathleen A. Brehony. Riverhead, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 1-57322-108-2

In an attempt to discover what motivates and inspires altruism in some people, Hungarian-oriented clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Brehony (*Awakening at Midlife*) offers examples of human greatness in matters large and small. She

February 15, 1999 / PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 95 |

derismo is often regarded as witchcraft—a
means for hex removals and love divina-
tions. Avila was therefore surprised to
learn in her masters program in psychi-
atic nursing at the University of Texas
that *curanderismo* is a broad based fusion
of Aztec, Spanish and African traditional
medicines with hundreds of useful appli-
cations. This discovery, coupled with her
dissatisfaction with the limitations of con-
ventional mental health practices, moti-
vated Avila, who grew up in a first-genera-
tion Chicano family in El Paso, Tex., to ap-
prentice with an Aztec master and
eventually to become a full-time
*curandera*. Her first book, co-written with
Parker (coauthor of *Maya Cosmos*), is a
clear-sighted introduction to the funda-
mentals of this alternative healing prac-
tice. It describes the healers, who range
from spiritual counselors to general prac-
titioners and massage therapists; their
counseling techniques, ritual purifications
and soul retrievals; characteristics of com-
mon diseases; and formulas for achieving
a balanced lifestyle, a rich spiritual life and
good nutrition. The down-to earth expla-
nations of such afflictions as *envidia
(envy)*, *susto* (fright or loss of soul) and
*mal puesto* (bad luck) will help dispel mis-
conceptions about these "folk" ailments
that, in *curandero* terms, are common to
all people. Particularly thought-provoking
is Avila's perspective on mainstream men-
tal health and her preference for the holis-
tic *curandero* approach to treating mental
diseases, including psychosis and imbal-
ances induced by severe trauma. "A good
*curandera*," she writes, "can help us find
the middle ground in a culture where bal-
ance, reality, and enlightened compromise
are not always part of our support sys-
tem." Agent, Elaine Markson, author tour.
(Mar.)

☆ THE HOUSE OF JOSHUA:

Psychologist Fullilove's poetic family rem-
iniscences form the core of her inquiry
into the critical role of place and family in
human psychology. She deftly draws on
myths and folktales and on medical, soci-
ological, cultural and religious insights to
support her conclusion that political and
economic displacement will be a central
problem of the 21st century. Fullilove be-
gins her consistently original and provocative study with a discussion of her
father's hopes for inner-city ghetto com-
munities. The first black paid organizer
for the United Electric, Radio and Ma-
chine Workers Union of America, and

☆ YEARS OF RENEWAL

Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster,
$35 (1168p) ISBN 0-684-85571-2

Having aspired to be a modern-day Met-
ternich, Kissinger has always placed great
value on subtlety. Indeed, one of his fa-
vorite charges against his many political
and bureaucratic adversaries is that they
don't understand the nuances of policy,
tactics or strategy. Throughout this final
volume of his memoirs (after White
House Years and Years of Upheaval), he
takes pains—often unsubtle pains—to tell
readers how subtle he is. Of the Middle
East peace process, he writes: "If foreign
policy were as simple as the study of it in
academic seminars, Jordan would have
been the logical candidate for the next
step." The implication, of course, is that
foreign policy is not so simple, and
Kissinger takes pride in reminding readers
that he always kept all the complexities in
mind. And yet Kissinger remains so infor-
mative that readers will happily permit
him this indulgence.

The book starts with Nixon's resigna-
tion and continues through the two years
of the Ford administration. One of the
surprises is the high regard in which Kis-
singer holds Ford: "I am certain the time
will come when it is recognized that the
Cold War could not have been won had
not Gerald Ford, at a tragic point of
America's history, been there to keep us
from losing it." In his portrait of Nixon,
Kissinger adopts the interpretation that
seems to be hardening into conventional
wisdom—that of a supremely gifted ana-
lytical mind tragically undone by para-
noia and an existential discomfort with

blacklisted in the McCarthy era, he be-
lieved that by "embracing" the places as-
signed to them by "power relations," op-
pressed populations could create a con-
sciousness of community that would
supersede the ghettos' intended purpose.
In 1950, when Fullilove was born, her
white mother "began her life as Perse-
phone," living 51 weeks in Orange, N.J.,
with her black husband, and returning
alone to her parents' all-white world in
Ohio for one week of the year. In 1974,
enthusiastic and idealistic, Fullilove en-
tered Columbia Medical School and
began the process of finding her place
there, of connecting being a doctor to the
business of hospitals that routinely put
their growth ahead of the needs of sur-
rounding neighborhoods. Her own med-
ical credo includes belief in "the sanctity
of the human spirit," and that "the busi-
ness of medicine cannot snuff out the

being alive. Ford, by contrast, emerges
from these pages as a man whose admit-
ted lack of flair is the flip side of an inner
confidence that is, perhaps uniquely
among politicians, unimpeded by ego-
tism.

As Kissinger explains China policy, So-
viet policy, Middle East diplomacy and
various crises (in Cyprus, Angola and
elsewhere), his insight extends not only to
explanations of policy but also to ac-
counts of bureaucratic infighting and turf
battles—as well as to relations between
the executive branch and Congress. His
account of how, regarding arms control
and détente, he and Ford tried to deter-
mine the national interest while being
squeezed between a "McGovernite Con-
gress" and the hard right will give readers
a sophisticated political lesson. Kissinger
was a shrewd courtier and ferocious in-
fighter, and he takes a deadpan delight in
showing readers just how adept he was. At
the same time, he's magnanimous toward
those with whom he once locked horns,
throwing appreciative bouquets to such
former adversaries as Senator Scoop Jack-
son and William Rogers ("I am not proud
of the way I participated in Nixon's at-
tempts to marginalize the man," he writes
of the man he replaced as Nixon's secre-
tary of state).

Even readers predisposed to see
Kissinger as a villain may come away from
the book with at least grudging admir-
ation for him and with a deeper—and, yes,
more subtle—understanding of the com-
plexities of foreign policy and its domes-
tic political dimensions. *First serial to
Time.* (Mar.)

deeper magic of doctoring." In recalling
her teenage daughter's summers at camp,
Fullilove shows their joined yet individual
discoveries about the "need to nourish the
spirit that keeps the body, the first place in
which we live, moving." This insight into
the inner places that define us illustrates
the complexity of Fullilove's outlook, de-
spite its seeming simplicity. (Mar.)

Kathleen A. Brehony. Riverhead, $24.95
(256p) ISBN 1-57322 108-2

In an attempt to discover what motivates
and inspires altruism in some people, Jun-
gian-oriented clinical psychologist and
psychotherapist Brehony (*Awakening at
Midlife*) offers examples of human gra-
ciousness in matters large and small. She

MAR-22-1999 17:40

KAI DC

212 753 7248 P.

# A Master of the Great Game

## THE KISSINGER TRANSCRIPTS

### The Top Secret Talks With Beijing and Moscow

Edited by William Burr

New Press. 515 pp. $30

Reviewed by ROBERT G. KAISER

To be confronted again by Henry Kissinger In Full is to confront nostalgia. What a piece of work was this artful diplomat and artful dodger! We have not met his like since, and we can't expect to in the future. Henry Kissinger was a one-time deal.

Though he has made many substantial contributions to history, the merits of which will be debated for years to come, Kissinger has done history no favors with the handling of his official papers. Though he drew freely on the transcripts of his diplomatic meetings in writing his own memoirs (he has published two fat volumes and this week is publishing a third—Years of Renewal), much of the official record remains classified and/or locked up in the library of Congress. Kissinger put his papers in the brary with instructions that

they not be opened until five years after his death. Kissinger the control freak (vividly on display in this volume) has tried to control access to the record of his career. (So have government classifiers who still hold on to many of the records).

This is unfortunate on many counts, not least because so much of Kissinger's secret and compulsively secretive diplomacy remains hidden. And this volume demonstrates irrefutably that, alas, Kissinger's own version of the story is unreliable. William Burr and his colleagues at the National Security Archive, one of Washington's most useful unheralded institutions, have exploited both their archival wiles and the Freedom of information Act to acquire—and here to publish—transcripts of some of the key meetings between Kissinger and the leaders of the Soviet Union and China. (The National Security Archive has posted additional documents from the period on their website http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/.)

Burr has written careful and thoughtful commentary that makes the raw transcripts comprehensible to lay readers. This does not take *The Kissinger Transcripts* a gripping narrative, but it does create a useful volume that will be, for students of diplomacy and cent history, great fun to read—despite an

egregious number of typographical errors.

Burr has done some preliminary detective work, noting where appropriate how Kissinger ignored entire meetings or moments within meetings that didn't suit his narrative line as he wrote his inevitably self-serving memoirs. But there is room for more detailed detective work by future Kissinger biographers to see just how he distorted the record. Consider one example.

In February, 1973, Kissinger was in Beijing to see Mao Zedong. This was a year after Nixon and Kissinger made their historic visit to China. The Vietnam peace agreements had just been signed, and Kissinger wanted to re-invigorate the new relationship with China. At 11 on the night of Feb. 18, during a meeting with Premier Zhou Enlai, Zhou suddenly announced that Mao had invited them to his house. They got there at 11:30.

The meeting took place at a moment

when Soviet-American detente was blooming, and China was concerned that Moscow and Washington would improve their relations at China's expense. Kissinger's version of it in his memoir includes a recounting of how Mao teased Kissinger with references to earlier eras when the United States and China were at odds. Kissinger quoted from the transcript of the meeting:

> "You... opposed us. We also opposed you. So we are two enemies." He [Mao] laughed.

> "Two former enemies," I replied.

> "This was not enough for Mao. 'Now we call the relationship between ourselves a friendship,' he insisted."

Burr has the full transcript of this session, one of the most interesting in this new book. So we can compare Kissinger's account to what Mao and Kissinger actually said. As you read it, keep in mind the word "insisted" and the line "This was not enough for Mao" that Kissinger used above:

> Mao: You... opposed us. We also opposed you. So we are two enemies (laughter).

> Kissinger: Two former enemies.

> Mao: Now we call the relationship between ourselves a friendship.

> Kissinger: That's our sentiment.

> Mao: That's what I am saying.

Kissinger: I have told the Prime Minister [Zhou] that we speak to no other country as frankly and as openly as we do to you.

In fact, the transcript shows, Kissinger exerted great efforts during this conversation to flatter Mao and ingratiate himself with the Chinese. "There is a strong community of interest" already tying the United States to China, Kissinger said. In other words, where Kissinger wanted readers of his memoir to think it was Mao who "insisted" that China and the United States were becoming friends, the full transcript shows it was Kissinger who did the insisting. Indeed, Kissinger's relentless apple-polishing of the Chinese leaders is a recurring motif of the conversations recorded here.

Throughout one is reminded of the degree to which Kissinger's personal demons and idiosyncrasies infected so much of what he did. Perhaps the most powerful demon was his need to keep secrets—not from enemies

but from colleagues in the U.S. government. He never had any qualms about revealing this obsession to foreigners.

One who saw it vividly was Huang Zhen, the first Chinese envoy in Washington. Huang came to San Clemente, Nixon's western White House, for a briefing on Leonid I. Brezhnev's visit to the United States in June, 1973. Kissinger told Huang about a conversation during the summit involving just four people: Nixon, Kissinger, Brezhnev and a Soviet interpreter. In it, Brezhnev felt out the Americans on their willingness to exchange information about China's nuclear weapons program or on other matters relating to China—a crude Soviet attempt to match Kissinger's use of the triangular relationship to their advantage. The Americans, Kissinger reported to Huang, rejected such information-sharing. Brezhnev then warned that the Soviets would "take drastic measures" if the United States entered into any "military arrangements" with China.

Recounting this to the Chinese diplomat, Kissinger said: "We have told no one in our government of this conversation. It must be kept totally secret. We have not told Ambassador [David K.E.] Bruce [Huang's counterpart, the first American envoy in Beijing], but I would have no objection if, when you return

[to Beijing], you talk to Ambassador Bruce about it. But no one else should be present."

Huang declined to play Kissinger's secrecy game. "I won't say anything to Bruce," he responded. "You discuss it when you are there."

The book includes transcripts of conversations with both Chinese and Soviet officials. Those with the Chinese are more numerous, and more interesting. But some of the exchanges with Brezhnev printed here are also fascinating. Brezhnev comes across, in complex arms control negotiations with Kissinger, as brighter and more competent than his bumbling and mumbling public image would suggest. Their conversations in 1975 and 1976 nicely convey the unraveling of Kissinger's detente policy as his new boss in the White House, Gerald R. Ford, cringed before conservative Republican critics and undercut Kissinger's diplomacy.

These transcripts remind us of another

idosyncrasy of Kissinger's diplomacy that future historians will have to explore: his total reliance on Chinese and Soviet interpreters in all of these meetings. Anyone who tries to deal with matters of high politics in two different languages simultaneously quickly learns the dangers that lurk in the interpreter's art. Someday, one hopes, it will be possible to compare the original Chinese and Russian notes of the meetings recorded here in the English provided by Chinese and Russian linguists who did all the translating. We can predict confidently that Mao or Brezhnev didn't always say exactly what their interpreters interpreted.

Why didn't Kissinger use American interpreters? To avoid leaks, of course. The fewer the people on his side of the table who knew what was said, the greater the chance that Kissinger could remain in control of the record. Or so he seemed to think.

Nearly a quarter-century has passed since Kissinger left the State Department. None of his eight successors (Vance, Muskie, Haig, Shultz, Baker, Eagleburger, Christopher, Albright) has been as creative, as resourceful, or as duplicitous. This book is a reminder that diplomacy can actually be a grand game, played with panache for the highest stakes. There's that nostalgia again. ■

Robert G. Kaiser, associate editor of *The Post*, was the paper's Moscow correspondent for most of the period covered by this book.

> Kissinger ignored entire meetings... that didn't suit his narrative line as he wrote his inevitably self-serving memoirs. There is room for more detailed detective work...to see just how he distorted the record.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

March 26, 1999

Dear Ms. King:

Your edition of March 21, 1999 sought to discredit *Years of Renewal*, the recently published third volume of my memoirs, without, in fact, reviewing it. The device for this acrobatic enterprise was a so-called review of another book, published several months ago, containing transcripts of some of my conversations with Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev.

The reviewer used the occasion almost exclusively to question the motivation and scholarly integrity of *Years of Renewal*. He alleges that I somehow hijacked my official papers to the Library of Congress and that, as a result, researchers are precluded from dealing with my public record while I am at liberty to doctor it to my benefit. You emphasized these charges by putting them in a box. The claim that I disposed of my official papers in some ingenious and unique manner to spin history is malicious nonsense, as a minimum of checking would have revealed.

In 1977, the then Librarian of Congress, the eminent historian Daniel Boorstin, invited me to place my papers in the Library of Congress, which is the repository of the papers of eight Secretaries of State in this century alone and of others dating back to Thomas Jefferson, our first Secretary of State. A "Deed of Gift" including some restrictions on access during a donor's lifetime has become a standard format. The purpose of the exercise is to help future historians, not to impede them.

These restrictions do not, however, hinder any scholar's research. In falsely implying the contrary, your reviewer ignores the easily ascertainable fact that the classified papers in my collection are duplicates and that the originals remain in the appropriate governmental files. Specifically, all sensitive exchanges and other memoranda are in their original archives where scholars can use them, subject only to government declassification procedures. I have no say in those procedures; I am neither consulted nor informed when papers dealing with my actions or conversations are released.

2

Most of the conversations with Beijing and Moscow in the book purportedly under review were acquired in precisely that fashion: from declassified State Department files.

By the same token, any quotations I used from classified memoranda in *Years of Renewal*, as in the two previous volumes of my memoirs, were cleared by the incumbent administration-- as the Foreword in each volume clearly spells out.

The "Kissinger Collection" in the Library of Congress also contains rough transcripts of telephone conversations which the Supreme Court in 1980 ruled to be private and not official. I have made these available well before the present controversy developed to State Department historians so that they could determine which, if any, might be useful for the *Foreign Relations of the United States* series. In short, no historian has had access impaired by the location of duplicates of my papers in the Library of Congress.

The charge that I misrepresented the available documents is more complex though no less malicious and irresponsible. The Kissinger Collection contains tens of thousands of documents involving thousands of meetings. Any memoir or history is obliged to select among them, whoever the author. The test is whether the culling is responsible and truthful. I established meticulous procedures to that end, including several researchers whose primary task was to check accuracy and context of quotations. In addition, each chapter was reviewed by at least one outside expert (and usually more) familiar with the subject or by one participant (and usually more) in the policy under discussion. A list of them can be found in the Foreword of each volume of my memoirs. Even with this painstaking procedure, mistakes can occur. But surely common sense would suggest that no author would go to the trouble of amassing such an archive and then deliberately produce distortions which will be disproved from his own collection.

With this background, it is not surprising that your reviewer had trouble finding a significant misrepresentation. His only example is a quibble. He claims that, in an earlier volume, I described Mao--in a conversation I recounted primarily for atmosphere--as being more insistent than the reviewer himself gleaned from the record. I leave to the reader to make his own determination regarding this nitpick. I would simply point out that I, of course, was actually at the scene and