WM. F. BUCKLEY JR.

The 60-Minute Pressure

On
The Right

New York, May 9—On Saturday evening a week ago at the Waldorf-Astoria the Friars Club hosted a testimonial dinner for Henry Kissinger at which the luminaries were abundantly present, a jolly evening with, however, a note of strain. Because Mike Wallace was one of a dozen speakers, and on the following evening CBS's 60 Minutes would feature a segment on the "Shah-Kissinger Connection." Officials of all the networks were seated at the dais, and tribal loyalties are always an electrifying element even in circumstances primarily social. Bob Hope, who has recently been appearing with CBS, told the crowd: "I have a soft place in my heart for NBC. [Pause.] Who else would pay $80 million for exclusive rights to a presidential boycott?" That is not the kind of thing that passes for humor at NBC on the eve of the Olympics.

CBS's problem was imminent. The next
night, the guest of honor, Henry Kissin-
ger, would not appear on the 60 Minutes
show to which he had been invited, an
invitation which he had at first accepted.
When it came his turn to speak, he made
nice fun of the situation. When he learned
that the episode was to be entitled "The
Shah-Kissinger Connection," he said, "I
knew it would be a hatchet job: obviously
I was getting second billing." Roars from
the audience.

BUT THE contention between 60 Minutes and Kissinger was—is—serious. Here, highly compressed, is what happened:

1. Dan Rather put together a program the thesis of which was that Kissinger, while serving as Secretary of State, searched out means of financing one of his, and Nixon's, objectives: namely, to transform Iran into a first-class military power. To do this required the purchase of highly specialized and extremely expensive equipment, notably aircraft. Congress was not about to give the Shah free airplanes, and Iran didn't have the financial reserves to buy them. So? Why not suddenly encourage the Shah to raise the price of oil? That way, from increased revenues, the money would be there to buy the arms with. Dan Rather got together, to document the thesis: James Akins, who had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the period when the oil

prices first went up; George Ball, who
while doing special work on Iran for
President Carter got to review the old
cable traffic from 1973-74; and William
Simon, Secretary of the Treasury under
Nixon and Ford, who has always been an
implacable foe of the OPEC conspiracy.

2. CBS then asked Kissinger to appear on the program to defend himself. He agreed—but in due course modified his acceptance. He gave 60 Minutes the names of a dozen or so men who had official responsibilities at the time and would verify his disavowal of complicity in the OPEC price rise. CBS declined to invite any of them along to substantiate Kissinger's account; so he declined to appear, satisfying himself instead with writing a long letter to Dan Rather and conversing privately with him and the producer of 60 Minutes, Don Hewitt.

3. The segment shown on Sunday night included not a single sentence from Kissinger's five-page letter. Instead, Dan Rather quoted the off-the-record remarks by Kissinger in which Kissinger guessed at the motivations of his detractors. "Akins is lying," Kissinger reportedly said, "and [has] engaged in a personal vendetta against me. . . . [Ball] is a partisan political opponent . . . jealous of me, and long engaged in a personal campaign to destroy me." About Simon, Kissinger said merely that they had had "honest differences over policy, but that had nothing to do with financing the Shah's weapons with an oil price increase." Kissinger termed the entire production "malicious, ridiculous, and untrue."

In the 60 Minutes segment, Rather
asked Ball, "Do you have any indication,
have you ever seen any evidence that Dr.
Kissinger did try to use his influence with
the Shah to keep the prices down?"

Ball answered: "No."

From Kissinger's letter, in Rather's pos-
session when the above was broadcast:
"Immediately after the OPEC decision [to
raise the price of oil] on December 28 I
wrote a strong letter of protest to the
Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia and to
President Sadat. President Nixon, on the
basis of my recommendation and draft,
sent a strong letter of protest to the King
of Saudi Arabia. On December 29 I sent
an even stronger protest to the Shah. The

cable to the Shah included the following sentences: 'The President is greatly concerned over the destabilizing impact the price increases agreed to in Teheran for Persian Gulf crude will have on the world's economy and the catastrophic problems it could pose to the international monetary system. We believe this drastic price increase is particularly unreasonable coming as it does when supplies are being artificially restrained.' And a day later, Kissinger wrote to the British Foreign Secretary Alec Home proposing cooperative action by consumer nations to combat the price increase, and objecting that "the decisions [by OPEC] were taken of course unilaterally without even the semblance of negotiation with the international companies or consumer nations."

None of this, or other related materials,
was alluded to on 60 Minutes. None of
Kissinger's associates was called. Proving?

That the show must go on. ☐

CBS
CONFIDENTIAL

New York, May

14—One had en-
tertained the hope

that on Sunday (May 11) the producer of
60 Minutes would disavow the week-old
thesis that Kissinger egged on the Shah
to raise oil prices in order to subsidize the
purchase of U.S. arms, or present an
effective rebuttal. It would appear plain
that CBS intends to do nothing at all
about it. It is much easier just to let the
whole thing rest. To do so is a) to exhibit
an indifference to the truth that 60 Min-
utes ostensibly seeks to serve; and b) to
betray deep cynicism toward its obliga-
tions to the viewing public.

The facts stand out:

1. By 1973, the U.S. was using its oil at capacity production and our energy requirements were steadily increasing. When the Saudis, in reaction against U.S. backing of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, cut back production by two million barrels per day, causing a scarcity and an increase in the spot market price, the objective conditions were ripe for a general increase in price.

2. During the Yom Kippur War, the Iranians did not cut back production. In fact, the Shah continued to ship oil to

NATIONAL REVIEW / June 13, 1980

748

Israel as well as to the U.S., thus incur-
ing an enmity which the Ayatollah has
taken several opportunities to stress. When
the price increase of December 1973 was
promulgated, the spot price of oil had
reached $17, the OPEC price remaining at
$5.85. That Iran made the motion for an
increase (unanimously endorsed) is a da-
tum of purely parliamentary interest. The
warning given to Kissinger on December
21 by U.S. Ambassador Akins in Saudi
Arabia that an increase was imminent
prompted Kissinger to protest the increase
in various communications (known to
CBS at the time of the airing but never
alluded to).

3. The United States—CBS might have discovered—retaliated against Iran by increasing the cost of the arms Iran had set out to buy. However, most significant is the chronology. The remilitarization emphasized during the 60 Minutes program occurred during the first year of the Carter Administration. Dan Rather's sentence, introducing the program, alluded to the Shah's ordering "$5.7-billion worth of military hardware from this country between October 1976 and September 1977." Dr. Kissinger was a lame-duck Secretary of State during the last two months of 1976. Moreover, that heavy buying program came three to four years after the events described at the expense of Kissinger. When you add two factors—namely a) that in real terms the price of oil declined between the increase of 1973 and the increase of 1978 because of U.S. inflation; and b) that the overwhelming portion of the extra revenues brought into Iran from the price rise of 1973 were spent by the Shah on economic programs—you are left, really, with absolutely no evidence at all of the so-called Shah-Kissinger Connection to encourage a rise in the price of oil in order to finance the purchase of U.S. military equipment. A non-story.

NOW NON-STORIES happen all the time. But we have here a non-story sponsored by the head of CBS's news division, Bill Leonard, produced by CBS's Don Hewitt, narrated by CBS's Dan Rather—every fact contradicting which was known to the relevant parties before the program was screened. The brass at CBS has a single story to tell: Ah, but Henry Kissinger was invited on the program! Having said this, how can we then be accused of unfairness?

Any professional litigant or polemicist
knows the answer. Merely to invite some-
one on a program to state his own case,
in limited time, against a finely orches-
trated barrage, is less than adequate treat-
ment. The Sixth Amendment of the Con-
stitution of the United States recognized
this reality long before the age of tele-

vision when it stipulated that a defendant
has the right to subpoena witnesses on his
own behalf. Kissinger supplied a list of
ten expert witnesses qualified to speak on
the subject. Not one of them was invited.
Not one of them was even interviewed.
Given the legendary industry of CBS, the
reason why has got to be obvious: CBS is
not looking for evidence that would put
off the lynching. The nubile noose was
nicely hung over the limb, and a great
big audience was out there waiting, and
CBS aims to please. ☐

CASTRO
VERSUS
MIGUEL

New York, May 19—Miguel Romero (we'll call him) arrived in America four or five years after

Fidel Castro came to power. He had been a grocer; he was a bachelor, quiet, sensitive, who one day decided he couldn't take it any more, so he put together everything he could sell and contrived to get a ticket to Madrid-New York, because it was during the period when Castro pleased himself by forbidding refugees to fly ninety miles north to Florida, or a few hundred miles west to Mexico—let them spend $500 to reach the United States via Spain. Miguel arrived in Connecticut, where he went to work as a handyman, at $2.50 per hour. Within ten years he had accumulated the money to bring to America via the same route—Havana—Madrid-New York—two brothers, a sister, and his senile mother. He sent them money for the air fare by arrangement with a Canadian bank (sending U.S. dollars to Cuba was then embargoed).

Having set his brothers up running a
tiny grocery store, and located a Catholic
old people's home for his mother, Miguel
came unhappily to the conclusion that
whatever his other gifts, he would never
learn English—and so, with a few hundred
dollars saved, he set out for Puerto Rico.

There he went into the business of mak-
ing doughnuts, and soon he began to

prosper, investing finally in a big dough-
nut-making machine that tripled his pre-
vious capacity. Once a year he would
treat himself to a trip to Connecticut to
visit his family and bring gifts to his
friends. He was now almost fifty years old
and a man of parts, but his manner was
unchanged: quiet, deferential, doggedly in-
dustrious, frugal. He worried only about
two nephews and two nieces left behind in
Cuba. He had not been able to contrive
their emigration, not even via Madrid, be-
cause Castro had clamped down. Then
suddenly there came the massive invasion
of the Peruvian Embassy, following Cas-
tro's flip statement that anybody who
wished to leave Cuba could do so since
he didn't want such rifffraff around in any
event. Miguel took the next flight to Mi-
ami.

By the time he got to Key West, all the
small fishing boats were gone, but he lo-
cated the owner of a medium-sized vessel
who agreed to pilot Miguel to the port of
Mariel, which Castro had designated as
the staging area for the rifffraff who chose
freedom. The fee would be $1,000 per
day. Miguel's net worth at this point was
about $30,000 so he told the skipper to
speed off, having meanwhile got word to
his four nephews and nieces to stand by.

HE ARRIVED at Mariel. And waited. The emigration officials wouldn't process his application to board his family. One week went by, a second week; a third week. His turn then came, and Castro's officials informed Miguel of the following:

1. He was to board forty Cubans on his boat and take them off to Key West.

2. None of the forty would be members of his own family.

3. His family would subsequently be permitted to emigrate on some other boat—but only two of the four, and the Cuban authorities would in due course decide which would go, which stay.

Miguel had no alternative. He told the
skipper to head back, with the forty boat-
people. They were effusive in their thanks
to Miguel on reaching Key West. But they
could hardly offer to compensate him, be-
cause they had no money. They had been
limited to one briefcase-sized bag each,
with a few toiletries, a shirt, a blouse,
maybe slippers. The captain did the ac-
counting, and handed Miguel a bill for
$25,000, which he promptly paid (Miguel
always paid his bills promptly). At the
$2.50 per hour he earned when he arrived
in America, that represented ten thousand
hours of work. Well, he would go back to
Puerto Rico and sell more doughnuts.

Castro certainly got the last laugh on
Miguel. You've got to hand it to him. ☐

(Universal Press Syndicate)

June 13, 1980 / NATIONAL REVIEW

749

William F. Buckley Jr.

CLC

'60 Minutes,' minus a few

On Saturday evening a week ago at the Waldorf Astoria the Friars Club hosted a testimonial dinner for Henry Kissinger at which the luminaries were abundantly present.

It was a jolly evening with, however, a note of strain because Mike Wallace was one of a dozen speakers, and on the following evening CBS's "60 Minutes" would feature a segment on the "Kissinger-Shah Connection." Kissinger himself would not appear on the show.

He had been invited, an invitation which he had first accepted. But serious contention grew up between "60 Minutes" and Kissinger. Here, highly compressed, is what happened.

(1) Dan Rather put together a program the thesis of which was that Kissinger, while serving as secretary of state, searched out means of financing one of his, and Nixon's, objectives: namely, to transform Iran into a first-class military power. To do this required the purchase of highly specialized and extremely expensive equipment, notably aircraft. Congress was not about to give the shah free airplanes, and Iran didn't have the financial reserves to buy them. So? Why not suddenly encourage the shah to raise the price of oil? That way, from increased revenues, the money would be there to buy the arms with.

Rather got together, to document the thesis, James Akins, who had been ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the period when the oil prices first went up; George Ball, who while doing special work on Iran for President Carter got to review the cable traffic back in 1973 and 1974; and William Simon, former secretary of the treasury under Nixon and Ford who has always been an implacable foe of the OPEC conspiracy.

(2) CBS then asked Kissinger to appear on the program to defend himself. He agreed — but in due course modified his acceptance. He gave "60 Minutes" the names of a half dozen men who had official responsibilities at the time and would verify his disavowal of complicity in the OPEC price rise. CBS declined to invite any of them along to substantiate Kissinger's account. So he declined to appear, satisfying himself instead to write a long letter to Dan

Rather and to converse privately with him and the producer of "60 Minutes," Don Hewitt.

(3) The segment shown on Sunday night included not a single sentence from Kissinger's five-page letter. Instead, Rather quoted from the off-the-record remarks by Kissinger in which Kissinger guessed at the motivations of his detractors. "Akins is lying," Kissinger reportedly said, "and (has) engaged in a personal vendetta against me . . . (Ball) is a partisan political opponent . . . jealous of me, and long engaged in a personal campaign to destroy me." About Simon, Kissinger had said merely that they had "honest differences over policy, but that had nothing to do with financing the shah's weapons with an oil price increase." Kissinger termed the entire production "malicious, ridiculous, and untrue."

In the "60 Minutes" segment Rather asked Ball, "Do you have any indication, have you ever seen any evidence that Dr. Kissinger did try to use his influence with the shah to keep the prices down?"

Ball answered: "No."

From Kissinger's letter, in Rather's possession when the above was broadcast:

"Immediately after the OPEC decision (to raise the price of oil) on December 28, I wrote a strong letter of protest to the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia and to President Sadat. President Nixon on the basis of my recommendation and draft, sent a strong letter of protest to the king of Saudi Arabia. On December 29 I sent an even stronger protest to the shah. The cable to the shah included the following sentences: The president is greatly concerned over the destabilizing impact of the price increases agreed to in Tehran for Persian Gulf crude will have on the world's economy and the catastrophic problems it could pose to the international monetary system." And a day later, Kissinger wrote to British Foreign Secretary Alec Home proposing cooperative action by consumer nations to combat the price increase.

None of this, or other materials, was alluded to in "60 Minutes." None of Kissinger's associates was called. Proving?

That the show must go on.

Wash. Star

Sun. May 11

Robert Clark

direct nurturing of those multitudes
of the faithful King had left behind,
including most strategically Andrew
Young, King's widow Coretta, and
his father, "Daddy" King.

## Carter's Debt to Blacks

In the end, if any one component
of the electorate could be considered
as having made the difference in
Carter's perilously close-nipped
deliverance into the presidency, it
would have to be the black vote.

The mass enfranchisement of
blacks in the South eventually
accomplished by the civil rights
campaigns has worked yet more im-
mediate and striking transfigura-
tions there. In 1966 the white citi-
zens of Greene County, in northern
Alabama, found themselves con-
fronted for the first time with a
majority of black voters, and a slate
of five black candidates for county
office, including a lean and gangly
26-year-old Baptist preacher named
Thomas Gilmore, who was running
for sheriff.

In those days, it would have been
hard to exaggerate the traumatic
implications for the rural white
Southerner of the prospect of a black
sheriff presiding over his county.
The sheriff was a kind of totem-
image of absolute authority and
order out in the Southern country-
side.

But Gilmore proposed shortly be-
fore the voting, "This election's actu-
ally gonna help the white man as
much as us, because he's gonna find
out that Negroes don't have the auto-
matic fear of white folks like he's
been thinking for so long. And this
discovery's gonna be good for the
white man's soul, because he's
gonna realize a man is a man, black
or white, and that'll re-create and
make stronger than ever before his
own self-respect. When you start be-
lieving in the whole race of man,
that's when you can really start be-
lieving in yourself." Such were the
exhilarations of those brave vision-
ary days.

## Taking Power

In that race, though, Gilmore and
all other black candidates were de-
feated — in a count hectically com-
piled by white townsmen in the
probate judge's office in the court-
house through a long night watch
behind closed shutters and amid a
plentiful splashing of scotch. Four
years later Gilmore tried again —
and this time not only did he win,
but virtually all white officials in
the county were dislodged by blacks

Gilmore has remained sheriff

placably segregationist of all deep
Dixie states — Mississippi. Its house
and senate now hold more blacks,
proportionately, than those of any
other state in the Union.

On a recent spring day, the house,
having temporarily removed itself
during a renovation of the capital
into a converted high school audi-
torium in Jackson with oyster-white
walls and thin-slatted venetian
blinds, succeeded in occupying itself
for the better part of an afternoon —
one white legislator in country-cava-
lier sideburns strolling about in a
green jacket, Crayola-blue slacks,
red tie and white loafers — in a
strenuous and feverish debate over
whether to require color photo-
graphs on citizens' driver's licenses.

At one point, a proponent of the
measure was asked just how many
other states in the nation had a simi-
lar law, and he reported somewhat
plaintively, "About 46, I believe....
We'd like not to be the last in this
too, at least."

Sitting along the front row during
the long course of this forensic exer-
cise, wearing faintly glum expres-
sions, were six black legislators —
including the chairman of the legis-
lature's black caucus, Robert Clark,
from the outback county of Holmes,
site itself of many brutal melees dur-
ing the movement, who now had his
small son nestled in his lap.

## Change? 'O Lord, Yes!'

Clark arrived in the Mississippi
legislature in 1967 as the first black
there since Reconstruction, and was
alone in that body until 1977. A
large, slow, quiet man, he recalls
that at first, "it was terribly, terribly
hard to get recognition on the floor
to speak. And whenever I did man-
age to get recognition, when I
started to talk everybody would just
get up and take them a little walk, go
out and have a smoke, you know.
And they were all the time having
these secret committee meetings on
me and I mean even those commit-
tees I was a member of, including
the education committee — of which
I'm now chairman.

But like Sheriff Gilmore, Clark at-
tests that there has evolved a genu-
ine mellowing of white dispositions,
an expansiveness of spirit — this
final revolution of attitude in whites
probably the most uncanny and
meaningful to follow from all those
marches against the old political and
legal edifices of oppression.

William F. Buckley Jr.

'60 Minutes,' minus a few

It was a jolly evening with, however, a note of strain because Mike Wallace was one of a dozen speakers, and on the following evening CBS's "60 Minutes" would feature a segment on the: "Kissinger-Shah Connection." Kissinger himself would not appear on the show.

(2) CBS then asked Kissinger to appear on the program to defend himself. He agreed — but in due course modified his acceptance. He gave "60 Minutes" the names of a half dozen men who had official responsibilities at the time and would verify his disavowal of complicity in the OPEC price rise. CBS declined to invite any of them along to substantiate Kissinger's account. So he declined to appear, satisfying himself if instead to write a long letter to Dan

(3) The segment shown on Sunday night included not a single sentence from Kissinger's five-page letter. Instead, Rather quoted from the off-the-record remarks by Kissinger in which Kissinger guessed at the motivations of his detractors. "Akins is lying," Kissinger reportedly said, "and (has) engaged in a personal vendetta against me". (Ball) is a partisan political opponent... jealous of me, and long engaged in a personal campaign to destroy me." About Simon, Kissinger had said merely that they had "honest differences over policy, but that had nothing to do with financing the shah's weapons with an oil price increase." Kissinger termed the entire production "malicious, ridiculous, and untrue."

Ball answered: "No."

That the show must go on.