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Acknowledgments

The Japan Society and Xerox Corporation are proud to sponsor the *Distinguished Lecturer Series*, presenting recognized leaders of thought and opinion in the United States and Japan addressing issues of substantial interest to both countries and the world. This unique forum allows these important individuals to explore and explain their view on topics of social, cultural, economic, political, intellectual and artistic importance to the U.S.-Japan relationship and global affairs. Inaugurated in 1987, the *Distinguished Lecturer Series* featured Ralph Nader on October 18, 1990 and Dr. Henry A. Kissinger on December 4, 1990 at the Japan Society.

The *Distinguished Lecturer Series* would not be possible without the support of Xerox Corporation, and we would like to express our appreciation for their support and generosity.

The opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of either the Japan Society or Xerox Corporation.

William H. Gleysteen, Jr.
*President*
*Japan Society*

iii

AN EVENING WITH
RALPH NADER

October 18, 1990

Each time I go to Japan, which is about every
ten years, I sense a considerable change in the
magnitude of the expectations that we have
toward that country. Early on, our expectations
centered on the recovery from the devastation of
World War II; then on the establishment of cer-
tain basic industries, like textiles, in order to
secure a foreign trading position; then on the
challenge to the U.S. auto industry at the time of
the rise of the energy crisis in 1979; and, of
course, last year the magnitude of expectation
widened to include how this economy, which is
now number two in the world in formal GNP, is
treating its own people as consumers.

Japan presents some real challenges to free
trade theory. The way we look at foreign trade
is archaic and colored by our interests, especially
when compared to the far more intricate manner
in which the Japanese economy is run. For
example, I was told by a former foreign service
officer in this country, an ambassador, that about
five years ago he had arranged what he thought
was a fairly lucrative market for towels to be
exported to Japan. They were obtained from
Central America and were going to be exported
by a U.S. trading company of which he was a
part. He had arranged for a retail chain in Japan
to purchase them. Everything was in order, but
the towels had to be reviewed by certain govern-
ment officials, who prohibited the importation of
the towels on the grounds that when the corners

1

were rolled up, they were too large for Japanese ears. I am convinced he was telling the truth; he went so far as to state that he could withstand any challenge from the Japanese press on this matter.

Whenever we look at an economic system from a consumer point of view, we do not just simply take GNP measurements and say, “What’s steel production? What’s the capital investment? What’s the savings rate?” All of these are means, and conventional business economists tend to mix means with ends. They are always generating indices of economic measurement that philosophically should be viewed as means to a better life for everyday people, but they never seem to arrive at that end. They seem to decide whether something is good or bad in an economic system in terms of certain seller-side or production indices. They do not consider, “What is the impact on the consumer?”

Clearly, a good deal of GNP in industrial countries proceeds from having to expend money, capital and equipment for needs that arise out of preventable harms. For instance, there are epidemics of injury and death on highways in our country that generate $75 billion a year in GNP due to repair costs, health care costs, funeral expenses, legal costs, insurance costs and the like. Our economies are increasingly reflecting these kinds of expenditures, which I call involuntary expenditures—that is, we would rather not spend them if we had our druthers. If you look at the overall expenditures of an economy, you ask yourself how much of it now is involuntary? Voluntary expenditures include those for food, shelter and transportation. There is also a murky gray area where it’s not quite clear whether the expenditure is voluntary or involuntary, but these are important distinctions in determining the quality of any economic system. For example, pollution corrodes and requires

2

frequent repainting or replacement of rusted
equipment. Pollution also damages health, and
thus creates economic demands for all kinds of
health care services. Badly structured bumpers
on cars generate billions of dollars in expendi-
tures; fender benders keep a lot of garage repair
shops busy and a lot of people busy writing
checks. Street and corporate crime generate eco-
nomic responses which produce billions of dol-
lars in sales and profits. Just look at the
"industry" that is handling the savings and loan
wreckage. How many of these expenditures are
involuntary and how many are voluntary?

We've just learned how the CIA and
economists in government dramatically overesti-
mated the GNP of the Soviet Union. I believe that
part of the reason for this miscalculation is that
they did not have the consumer measurement of
that economy. As a result, the traditional GNP
measurements made them vulnerable to official
statistics of the Soviet government.

It was with this understanding that we traveled
to Japan at the invitation of some consumer/envi-
ronmental groups over a year ago, in order to
look at what effect this enormous and fast grow-
ing economy really has had in terms of improv-
ing the quality of life of Japanese consumers.
We wanted to know what rights and remedies,
both political and economic, Japanese con-
sumers have or do not have to better their condi-
tion. My observations should not be interpreted
in an ethnocentric way. Needless to say, the
U.S. has very serious consumer problems, and
we have a whole agenda of new rights and
remedies that we need to advance consumer
progress here. Nonetheless, the first thing I
noticed when I arrived in Japan and began
speaking with people involved in consumer
advocacy, was that they almost never said, "We
are going to get the Diet to do this," or "We are
going to get the political party to do that." They

3

almost never said they were going to petition the courts; nor did they say they were going to enlist newspapers to expose this or that, although the press is discussed in terms of potential coverage or as an information outlet for certain vehicle defects. Consumer advocates don't seem to hold much hope out for the parliament or for the political parties—except for Mrs. Doi who was then very much in the news because of an upset in the Upper Chamber. The courts aren't very good outlets; the press is viewed as very centralized and beholden to some powerful advertising agencies, one of which is the largest in the world. This was not what I had hoped to see. I thought I detected a loosening of the process in the late 1970s in some of these areas and saw some excitement about class actions, whistleblower rights, product liability and lawsuits. There has not been much progress, apart from the growth of consumer cooperatives.

The currency of democracy is freedom of information, and so I promptly memorized my only Japanese sentence: There should be a Freedom of Information Act in Japan. I repeated the phrase everywhere, like I was on automatic pilot, to emphasize it. Everything starts with that principle, everything starts with the ability to get information about products, services, defects, kinds of tests and inspection reports that are in government files.

I addressed the Japanese bar association. Ten percent of the entire number of lawyers in Japan fitting into one room for the speech, raised another warning flag for me: How can you have a legal system—which the Japanese certainly do have—in which imbalances of power leading to conflict are to be resolved and not have any lawyers? There are 30,000 lawyers in Japan. One area in western Japan with 780,000 people has only 23 licensed lawyers. Even for domestic disputes that's not enough, and when I said

4

(L.C)

there is a need for great expansion in the num-
ber of lawyers in Japan, that was music to some
of their ears. I made it clear that I wasn't talking
about lawyers specializing in mergers and acqui-
sitions; not only would that have been an
unfriendly suggestion, but I know of no faster
way to undermine the Japanese economy than to
export to Japan investment bankers and corpo-
rate lawyers specializing in mergers and acquisi-
tions. I was talking about lawyers representing
injured people against manufacturers of haz-
ardous products, or those who have suffered
from exposure to toxic elements like asbestos;
lawyers organizing or representing consumers in
class actions and economic disputes with distrib-
utors, retailers and manufacturers. There is a
handful of medical malpractice lawyers, a hand-
ful of product liability lawyers, and "handful" is
not an understatement.

While well-read and eager, these lawyers are
up against very powerful odds. For example,
suppose a lawyer specializing in medical mal-
practice wants information about pharmaceuti-
cals, such as labeling and side effects, which his
clients were exposed to. Such information is
very difficult to obtain. Doctors own a good
many of these pharmacies, which is one reason
why the Japanese have the highest per capita
consumption of pharmaceuticals in the world.
In addition, doctors in Japan have a medical cus-
tom wherein they don't reveal to a patient that
an illness is terminal, especially cancer. While
there are certain hints if one has cancer, certain
hints if one is terminal, nothing is definitive
enough to send alarms to cancer insurance com-
panies. Cancer insurance sells very well in
Japan, and yet the doctors don't tell patients that
they have cancer. In addition, many patients
don't want to know if they have cancer, which
makes the ratio of payouts to premiums very
advantageous for cancer insurance companies.

5

The discovery procedure is very primitive in terms of law suits against doctors, and it's very hard to get expert witnesses. In short, I would say medical malpractice litigation in Japan is where it was in the United States before World War II, when a conspiracy of silence existed among medical professionals who would never testify against one another. Data was very difficult to find. The discovery procedures, the depositional rights, were very elementary.

In this country, one recent study for New York state by the Harvard School of Public Health indicated over 8,000 deaths in 1985 from medical malpractice in hospitals in that state—more than double the number killed on the highways. Japanese researchers have great difficulty getting elementary statistics such as these in order to make a case against the performance of some physicians, which in turn could lead to higher standards of care in Japan.

Product liability, warranty back-up and claims in consumer area after consumer area are 20, 30 even 40 years behind the United States. Japan has the highest consumption of asbestos of any country in the world. Our asbestos consumption is moving towards zero because of litigation which has resulted in several asbestos manufacturers choosing voluntary bankruptcy and because of some action, lamentably late, by the federal government. The Japanese government, however, is lenient toward the use of asbestos, which is consumed at a level three times greater per capita than in the U.S. The big new City Hall in Tokyo is being built with asbestos. Asbestos litigation is minimal; though there are some cases of compensation, these are scattered and inadequate.

Tobacco is probably the biggest killer in Japan, as in our country. Sixty-two percent of Japanese males smoke; as of 1985, 29 percent of American males smoked, and it might be even

6

lower now. A further cause for concern in Japan
is that the biggest manufacturer of cigarettes is a
government-owned company, Japan Tobacco
Inc., which is under the Ministry of Finance.

Until recently the Japanese were told that
smoking was connected with a higher degree of
mental concentration; to be more productive at
work, you puffed away. This was not all that
long ago. The Ministry of Health took until 1987
to point out, for the first time, the connection
between smoking and lung cancer, heart and
respiratory disease and damage to fetuses. A
year earlier, Kozo Watanabe, the former Minister
of Health said, "Smoking is the basis of health."
Japan Tobacco produced $13 billion in revenues
for the government in a recent year. The
spokesman for the tobacco company, Mr. Kudo,
is quoted as saying, "Our position is that there is
no pathological evidence definitely establishing
smoking as a health hazard." They are still talk-
ing that way in U.S. tobacco circles, although
they don't use such categorical phrases. But the
Philip Morris Company is not run by the Depart-
ment of the Treasury. In Japan, tobacco smok-
ing is advertised on television, warning labels are
weak, and the popular view that smoking helps
workers to concentrate, while less widely held, is
still prevalent.

The one bright spot is a very active consumer
group against smoking which is gaining more
and more adherence and engaging in direct
action—picketing and demonstrating. This
group is becoming uncharacteristically vigorous
in terms of the Japanese way of protesting in the
consumer area. If you extrapolate it from the
U.S., there are about 200,000 people a year in
Japan dying from smoking-related diseases. One
has to extrapolate because there are no statistical
estimates to provide us with a better quantitative
appreciation of this incredible human destruction.
Smoking also causes fires, stains everything it

7

comes in contact with and costs consumers a lot of money. One night, we drove by a place that was all lit up and I asked my Japanese colleague, a young lawyer working in the free information area, what it was. He told me it was a pachinko parlor, that they are all over Japan, and that a lot of Japanese, men in particular, stop in on their way home. He seemed hesitant to tell me any more than that so I asked him if we could go in. It was lit up enormously and the din was unbelievable; a sure violation of any OSHA-type noise standard. The smoke was colossal; you could hardly see the people sitting in front of the machines.

Japan has very good press here. Americans don't know about pachinko parlors in Japan, and that the Japanese sitting there hour after hour, totally overwhelmed by smoke, would make perfect material for statistical studies on the dangers of second-hand smoke. These are almost laboratory conditions, that is, if you could find anyone in the pachinko parlor who didn't smoke. That is the problem, and it is a problem that the U.S. has contributed to. For example, since we're buying too many Japanese cars and Sony electronic equipment, the Reagan Administration had a smoking-hot idea for balancing out the trade a little better. It was to get the 20 percent tariff on imported cigarettes abolished so that U.S. tobacco companies could get a share of this lucrative market. They succeeded, I believe in 1987, and now are increasing their market share for Marlboro and other brands. Japan sells us cars and televisions, and we sell Japan cancer sticks to balance out the trade, something we're also trying to do in Thailand by fighting any effort to ban tobacco advertising from television there and working to open up the market for tobacco.

The third leg of this lethal triangle is the heavy promotion and sales of cancer insurance. Our book called, *Winning the Insurance Game*,

8

[L.C]

has a section on the kinds of insurance you should never buy—*never* buy, not just buy astutely or buy less of—and cancer insurance is one of them. If they have health insurance, and Japanese have universal health insurance, why do they need cancer insurance which is sold at an exorbitant premium with a *very* favorable payout ratio for the company? Cancer insurance is being sold in a country where tobacco consumption is rampant, where the cancer rate, and other morbidity rates, are going up, but where doctors routinely do not notify their patients when they have cancer.

Smoking cigarettes and breathing asbestos particles are a particularly deadly combination. The bright spot is Watanabe's "Bungaku's Group," called Action on Smoking and Health, which is making more headway than any single Japanese consumer group that we were able to observe. This is likely to be a most effective group in terms of changing public opinion and in initiating some of the policies that we have in our country, such as non-smoking sections in many buildings and other public areas.

I think there's more and more pressure in Japan for enacting a freedom of information act. The majority party is, of course, against it; the Socialists are in favor of it. But there are draft bills in the works, and I am told that next year a draft bill will be considered in the Diet. Some advances have been made at the local level as well. A very few municipalities have passed freedom of information acts. Laws exist in areas such as Kanagawa prefecture, which includes Yokohama, but some of the court interpretations curtailed the access that freedom of information laws have offered citizens. In Osaka, there was a conflicting judicial interpretation about expense accounts of prefectural governors. The Osaka courts said yes, they can be made public, but another court in another prefecture said no.

9

All the opposition coalition parties, except the Communist party, will go before the Diet next year with a freedom of information law. But, the proposal in this current draft does have the merit of requiring all "information, disclosure of which is deemed necessary to protect human life, limb or health from danger that results or is feared to result from the activity of an enterprise, or to protect people's property or livelihood from damage or interference that results or is feared to result from illegal or wrongful activity of an enterprise." Why did I say "but," since that's a good piece of drafting? Because it will dramatically change the public dialogue and the media coverage of what is going on in the consumer/environmental area in Japan, and it is quite clear to observers in Japan that the Prime Minister is going to oppose this proposal on the grounds that an administrative procedure act should be enacted first.

Moving on to health care, we are doing a comparative study with consumer/environmental groups in Japan on the rights of Americans and Japanese in the marketplace. We want to draw some good lessons, learning from each other as well as seeing how the lagging society in Sector A, B or C can rise up to the leading society. The difficulty in trying to develop estimates of the quality of health care in Japan has been formidable. We hear stories about people who bribe nurses and doctors in order not to wait four or five or six hours for treatment. Cross-ownership of the pharmacies is a problem, as is the lack of disclosure in labeling on drugs.

There is a practice of informed consent in our country which is entrenched in the law. We found that the standard practice in Japan has been to give patients experimental drugs without their consent or knowledge. In theory, this should begin to change with the recent adoption of the "good clinical practices" rules by the Min-

10

istry of Health and Welfare. However, physicians and drug companies' long-standing practices will not easily be dislodged, particularly since the new rules allow patients' "consent" to be oral. There's no guarantee that they would receive explanations of drug hazards or of alternative treatment choices. That's just part of the overall flagrant lack of informed consent in the Japanese medical establishment, whether for drug prescriptions, major surgery, invasive diagnostic techniques or any other aspect of health care. Physicians expect patients simply to do as they are told. And in the three- to five-minute exam which is typical in Japan, the patient is scarcely given time to ask anything at all. In our country, the doctors are upset because they think that more and more patients are uppity, that they are asking too many questions, that they want to have explanations, that they are too willing to sue. Unfortunately, they are not willing to sue enough in this country; only 1 out of every 20 victims of medical malpractice receives any money at all by verdict or settlement. Thirty years ago, it was 1 out of a 100. The ratio is much more severe in Japan. The Japanese Medical Society has begun issuing pronouncements in favor of the theory of informed consent in the last year or two.

Polls are showing more Japanese consumers want to participate in health care decision making. Consider how modest their expectations are—to be told if they have a terminal disease, for instance. There are occasions in this country when patients are not told if they have a terminal disease. Doctors tell the relatives; they do not want to shock the person who has terminal cancer. But this practice is not nearly so widespread here as it is in Japan. Patients' rights groups have started springing up around the country, but medical practices will be slow to change.

One of the interesting differences between

11

U.S. and Japanese consumer protests is that when Japanese consumers are upset, they are really upset. When we were in Japan, we were told that for several weeks, people in a western province were sitting in the mayor's office because of a proposal to build a nuclear plant. Minamata disease and other infamous tragedies elicited similar pervasive protests. This leads me to believe that there is not a lack of the articulated sense of consumer justice and injustice; the lack arises when you get into legal arenas which have not been developed in terms of consumer rights, as in the warranty (or applied warranty) area. When Japanese feel they have been subjected to a fraud or to harm, they express themselves with a refined sense of injustice. The challenge is to channel these feelings to devise ways to organize consumers, ways to address the convergence between environmental and consumer problems.

Of course, environmental and consumer concerns are often two sides of the same coin. We made some suggestions. The transfer of technical information operates not just in corporate technology: what we've done in the U.S., the Japanese might want to do in Japan. A delegation of Japanese lawyers visited the United States a number of months ago to learn about product liability law. It is wonderful to see among Japanese environmental and consumer groups such intensity and determination to take on the large corporations on consumer issues. We're very pleased to help them; it's the kind of balance of citizen trade we really like to engage in. Because of the freedom of information drive in this country, a lot of the cases here are studied by Japanese consumer groups and leaders. The Japanese have shown an interest in whistleblower rights. This is a very touchy thing for Japanese, given the loyalties that surround the corporate institutions in Japan. It takes a very

12

bold person to be a whistle blower. Mr. Matsu-
da, who used to work as an engineer with Nis-
san years ago, quit and blew the whistle; he is
now an advocate for auto safety and a repository
of all kinds of information on vehicle defects, as
well as a good source for many Japanese
newsletters. He went through some very diffi-
cult times, including a phony extortion accusa-
tion against him that landed him in jail for a few
days before he successfully protested his inno-
cence. Apparently, a negotiated session with
Honda representatives had been bugged under
the table and sent to the prosecutor in a selec-
tively edited manner.

Japanese are also showing interest in what we
call "check-offs," something we are advocating
here in the U.S. This is an insert in utility bills,
insurance premium bills, bank statements. Peo-
ple open their bills and out falls a small envelope
inviting them to join a nonprofit consumer group
in which they vote to elect their council directors.
The directors hire full-time consumer specialists
to deal with banking, insurance and utility issues.
This was accepted in Wisconsin, Illinois and in
San Diego, and the idea was ready to spread
around the country when the Supreme Court
ruled that requiring a utility monopoly to insert
this, even though no postage or printing costs
were involved, was a violation of the utility's
right to remain silent and not be provoked into
rebutting the context of this insert. That's our
Supreme Court in action, allocating legalistic ani-
mism to inanimate corporate entities that would
startle a native from New Guinea. The group in
Illinois, with 180,000 members, was able to per-
suade the Illinois legislature to pass a law requir-
ing state government mailings, such as motor
vehicle registrations, to carry this invitation.

Concerning food safety, I know there have
been some protests in Japan about not allowing
U.S. food imports because of contamination, pes-

13

ticides, coloring agents and so on. Some of the objections are well taken, although one wonders if quality is the real reason or whether it is reluctance to open up the Japanese market to imported food stuffs.

We are concerned about the pollution of shellfish and other products and lack of regular testing for heavy metals. Given what we know about pollution in Japan, regular testing for heavy metals in food stuffs would produce some very disturbing results. The results from recent testing in the Soviet Union are absolutely staggering in terms of levels of mercury, cadmium, lead and others. Children and infants in particular are extremely vulnerable to heavy metals.

A word on environment. The reports that we are getting back from Japanese environmental circles is that there is more and more activity in this area. Japanese environmentalists are going to Southeast Asia and taking pictures of the forest devastation. They are becoming more concerned about global effects, and the United States and Japan are more interested in collaboration. Here's where I think some of the Japanese foundations in this country could make a major contribution. This was suggested to me by some people in Japan as well as in the United States. What is needed is a well-conceived training program of American and Japanese experts in consumer and environmental matters. They would share their expertise, learn each other's language and study political strategies used in both countries, forming a core of specialists to work together rapidly as global leaders on behalf of the two largest economies in the world.

The trend of present-day corporate technology is homicidal. If the way motor vehicles are built, the way petrochemical companies operate, the way use of plastics is growing, the way nuclear power is expanding were extrapolated, this world could not survive another century.

14

Change must come and it will come. The only question is whether it will come in time to ensure the survival of millions of people, thousands of square miles of natural ecologies, millions of species and our very atmosphere and oceans. If every person in the world consumed the same kind of fossil and nuclear energy as Americans, the world would cease to be livable. Japanese energy efficiency is twice ours. Along with Canada, we are the most wasteful energy user in the world. We may look back and say Communism's greatest contribution to the world was making sure there was not a car in every Russian and Chinese garage.

The only way America is getting away with this is that 75 percent of the rest of the world doesn't come close to us in terms of per capita consumption. The idea of building up a technical core of advocates and researchers with technical materials would be attractive to the younger generations in Japan and the United States and would have far-reaching consequences. Even those who are part of the status quo and the establishment must realize that they are not going to be able to do it themselves. They are too comfortable with their profit modes and their technology appendages. They must expose themselves to provocation from the outside through well-trained people, aware of the options, conversant with and able to change public opinion, to persuade public agencies to adopt a different course of action. That is the ultimate statesmanship of a person in power; to be unthreatened by displacement of that power and to have foresight enough to know that they have to be provoked and challenged into action before it is too late for them as well as others in their society.

15

AN EVENING WITH
HENRY KISSINGER

December 4, 1990

The proposition I would like to advance tonight is that in their totality of performance, the two strongest nations in the world today are probably the United States and Japan. I would argue that in terms of their historic views, neither of these countries is all that well qualified to deal with the new international environment that is emerging. I would argue further that their interaction is complicated by the fact that they are starting at opposite ends of the spectrum: the United States is a nation of universalists, believing in principles that are applicable to all mankind; Japan is emerging from an insular condition having historically focused on its immediate environment without producing a general theory of international relations or cooperation. What has happened in the last year—from Eastern Europe to the Middle East—was not predicted by any student of international affairs, although I’m sure if you invite me back here in a year or two, I will have convinced myself that I saw it all.

In fact I know of no one who foresaw the huge transformations in Eastern Europe, the collapse of Communism, the sudden emergence of a major military crisis involving a vast American deployment in the Persian Gulf, or indeed a present in which Asia has become the relatively calmest part of the globe. All of these changes have produced a truly major alteration in the international situation.

We begin with Europe. For 300 years a pow-

17

erful Russia has been a central feature of Euro-
pean politics. In the 18th century, Russian
armies took Berlin in the Seven Years' War and
they've never been very far away ever since. It
now appears that for the next five to ten years,
Russia is likely to be heavily preoccupied with its
domestic affairs. It is even conceivable that so
many republics will defect from the Soviet Union
that a belt of medium and small-sized states will
emerge between the center of Russian power
and the center of European power. And that
would create a totally different situation not only
for the Europeans, but also for the United States
in terms of its post-World War II experience. It
further would mean that NATO as we have
known it would either wither or require funda-
mental alteration. I say this as someone whose
entire intellectual formative experience has
revolved around the North Atlantic relationship.

The changes in the Soviet Union may bring
about a state of affairs whereby the Soviet
Union, with 60 million Muslims either directly in
the country or semi-independent at the periph-
eries, will have to become a more active day-to-
day player in the Middle East. Ironically, the
part of the Soviet Union where government con-
trol is most firm is in Siberia: in Asia. At the
beginning of this century, that region was the
site of the Russo-Japanese War precisely because
at the time Russia, frustrated in Europe, began to
be very active in Asia. We also have to
remember that between 1905 and 1910 one
could have said about Imperial Russia many of
the things that are today being said about the
Soviet Union—that it is in a state of semi-chaos
and serious domestic upheaval. Yet, by 1913, the
German General Staff had become convinced
that Russia was progressing so rapidly that by
1917 it would be able to defend itself without
allies against Germany and, therefore, could
defeat it in conjunction with other countries. This

18

was one of the reasons for accelerating the war.
In my fitful research on Japan, I have come
across certain documents of the same period in
which the Japanese as well came to the conclu-
sion that the development of Russian railways,
despite Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War
and its subsequent weakness, was creating a
new element of potential instability. I'm not
arguing that either the Japanese or the Germans
were right, but simply pointing out that Russia's
capacity for recovery has been amply demon-
strated in the past.

In any event, I am not here to discuss what
might happen in the future. The point I wish to
make simply is that even the few fragments I
have described indicate that old power centers
are shifting and new ones emerging all over the
world: Japan, the United States, Western Europe,
the Soviet Union and China; and that the
approaches used by the United States and Japan
in the early post-World War II period really no
longer apply.

Let me make a few comments about the Unit-
ed States. The American view on foreign policy,
if one can make such a generalization, has been
as follows: other nations have interests but
Americans have principles; other nations are
concerned with the balance of power, we are
concerned with collective security; other nations
adjudicate—they calculate penalties and
rewards—while we focus on legal principles. In
the American conception, peace is the normal
state of affairs amongst people. Therefore, when
there is aggression or war or tension, it is the
doing of evil men who must either be destroyed
or converted, or both. That, essentially, has
been the theme of the American conception of
most of the conflicts of this century.

There is no American tradition of foreign poli-
cy as an ongoing process of the adjustment of
risks. Rather we have had a distinct reluctance

19

(LC)

to think in terms of equilibrium or a balance of power. In 1936, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, President Roosevelt asked the State Department what this meant. What it meant was that the small countries of Eastern Europe were at the mercy of Germany as soon as Germany was able to fortify the Rhineland and prevent France from coming to their assistance in a timespan relevant to their survival. But that was not part of the State Department's reply to the question. Instead, the State Department's reply consisted of a listing of all the treaties Germany had violated in taking the Rhineland and, since the United States had not signed any of them, Germany's action was not perceived as involving any American interests. This tendency always to call our legal advisors first to see what our formal obligations are recurs in a given crisis again and again.

In the post-World War II period this approach worked tolerably well because the United States had such a huge percentage of the world's GNP that it represented a balance of power all by itself; we could overwhelm our problems once we recognized them by the sheer strength of our resources. Moreover, the experience of the post-war period seemed to fit America's historical experience. There was the persistent overwhelming, or seemingly overwhelming, sense of ongoing danger throughout the cold war. It was not hard to organize many of the nations of the world against it; there were enough clear dividing lines. Both the experiences of World War II and the New Deal could be applied: from World War II we learned how to amass overwhelming power; from the New Deal we learned that domestic stability comes about from bridging the gap between expectation and realization.

In the 1960s and '70s this began to disintegrate; in the '80s and now in the '90s it is gone. We no longer have overwhelming power,

20

although we are still the single strongest nation. There are no longer two set powers; there are many, and we are faced with the perennial foreign policy problem: peace by domination or peace by equilibrium. If you are not strong enough to dominate, you must balance. But in order to balance you must have some sense of where the process is heading—and here we come to the great American trauma. We see it now again, in part, in the Gulf where one of the big debates is whether it is enough to restore the status quo, or whether we want to fix the situation that produced it by creating a new balance of power in the area.

This universalist conception is at the heart of much of American domestic policy. It has led us, for example, to view Gorbachev—whose whole career has been within the Communist party and whose reflex action to any domestic crisis is to ask for additional power for himself—as a sort of folk hero. The reason is that he so neatly fulfills the traditional American dream of what I call conversion: on seeing any people, even the Russians, as misguided Americans who finally see the light. This also applies to Japan, although it is a nation with a long tradition of conducting its own foreign policy, certainly throughout its recorded history which is well over a thousand years. Yet in 1945, Americans did not think it at all unusual that that nation should become democratic from one day to the next, and they expected the new Japan to be another version of America.

Now let me give you my perception of the Japanese approach to foreign policy, though I do not claim to be a scholar of Japan. Indeed, the extent of my knowledge of Asia was apparent in 1950, when I was sent by our military to Korea to study the impact of the army on Korean life. My first stop was Japan. As it was also my first visit, I thought it would be better if I got myself

21

[10]

introduced in Korea by another Asian, and I asked a number of my Japanese acquaintances to give me letters of introduction. In Japan, they were too polite to tell me that this was insane. So, I arrived in Korea with a batch of Japanese letters of introduction. That I survived was a miracle; the Commander of our army had to go to President Rhee to get permission for me to remain in the country. Thus, I started from an unpromising beginning.

And so it was when I entered government in 1969. I had barely heard of the factions in the Liberal Democratic Party, nor did I understand the enormous subtleties of the consensus system by which the Japanese painstakingly reach a decision. When Japanese ministers first appeared at my White House office, I followed the hallowed tradition of overt pressure to achieve a meaningful solution to whatever issue was under consideration—at the time it was a dispute over textile quotas, which President Nixon had vowed in his campaign to resolve. But I did not understand that when a Japanese minister says "yes," it only means, "I have understood what you said," and not "I will do what you have requested." Ultimately we became involved in a protracted textile negotiation which was resolved in the context of forces bigger than the issue itself. With these caveats, I make the following statements with some hesitation.

My perception is that Japan's dominant approach to foreign policy is based on a conviction on the part of both the Japanese leadership and the people that they are unique, and that Japan could adjust to changes in the balance of power of the world and still retain its Japanese essence. So, while Japanese actions are, naturally, the results of Japanese decisions, they are also a result of the Japanese view that their country can join dominant currents of any period while at the same time remaining impervious to

22

those currents.

In the 19th century, China and Japan faced a similar problem. Westerners arrived by force, established extra-territorial privileges and attempted to open up these countries for unilateral commerce. At first, both countries responded in the same way: namely, to overcome the indignity by modernizing their societies. Somewhere along the road, however, China decided that it could not risk its essence by instituting Western ways, thus the process of modernization which had begun never proceeded all the way to its end. Chinese governments found they could manipulate foreign ministers by playing them off against each other. Japan opted to go through to the end of the road, believing that its Japanese essence would be preserved even while its army was copied from Germany's and its parliamentary institutions, to some extent, from Great Britain's. This was a great act of faith because Japan could not know its outcome in advance. Later, in 1945, Japan was also able to adjust to new circumstances without altering many of the essential features of Japanese society. In the process, Japan seems to have passed through certain stages: first, an attempt to free itself of foreign domination; next, an attempt, once it had developed a certain amount of strength, to maintain a balance of power in Asia that would contribute to Japanese security. At this stage, Japan was following European models. But Japan faced unique problems on the Asian landmass—the enormity of China and the fact that England was expanding in the region from the south, and Russia was expanding from the north. In Europe, the geographic location of Great Britain is most similar to Japan's in Asia, and it has sought to maintain a balance of power. And Britain could do that because there were many smaller, weaker states it could support against the stronger states. In Asia, the

23

Japanese dilemma was that it faced encroachment from two imperial powers, a situation it chose to handle in the traditional way: by making an alliance with one against the other—the so-called Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The problem with respect to the size of China was that it was a single state. My impression is that Japan did not want China united and strong but at the same time was also afraid of having a China that was too divided, lest foreigners exploit the division. Put another way, Japan felt that as long as China was weak it had to make sure that foreigners did not gain a dominant position.

At the start of the postwar period, Japan thought it could be neutral; soon it had decided it could avoid the consequences of the punitive peace by making a separate arrangement with the United States, which in turn necessitated a security treaty to protect it against the Soviet Union. The recounting of this superficial history is only by way of an attempt to show you that in my view at least, Japanese foreign policy is deeply rooted in tradition, and was not somehow spontaneously generated in 1945.

America now faces a new situation in Europe, in the Middle East and elsewhere. And Japan faces a new situation with a Russia that is temporarily weaker, with a China that will become stronger, and with a Korea where any change has strategic consequences for Japan. America and Japan have the problem of how to interpret this new environment, complicated by an atmosphere in which the United States has lost its economic predominance and in which at least some Americans blame the Japanese for taking advantage of our economic troubles, if not even causing them.

There are nationalistic undertones emerging in the discussions on both sides. And yet, whenever Japan has needed an ally, it has historically looked to a distant country with the least imme-

24

diate interest in Asia (which was the reason behind the Anglo-Japanese Alliance). In terms of geography and the traditional power of politics, there are no clashing interests between the United States and Japan. Our differences are in the field of economics and in the perception of international affairs.

Not long ago, America made an effort to get some sort of Japanese military contribution to the Persian Gulf conflict. The reasons for this effort were that it would be very impressive to our Congress, and would at the same time fulfill American expectations that a nation with the economic strength of Japan was carrying its weight in international affairs. I told a highly educated and sophisticated friend that I could not imagine any American rationale that would encourage Japan to place its forces at a great distance from its home islands when there was no Japanese urgency to do so. He didn't understand. He said that any nation as powerful economically as Japan had a duty to participate, otherwise it is taking a free ride. Now that is an approach to foreign policy that might work if everybody had the same interests, but it is also historically unsound.

So, our problem is how these two nations, each with its own different history, are going to cooperate. I don't know the answer. I know what must not continue—the kind of miscommunication based on the American refusal to understand that a Japanese prime minister is not like an American president in that he does not have the same degree of executive authority. On the other hand, Japan cannot go on using its domestic institutions to remain impervious to outside arguments only to emerge from its shell with marvellous discipline whenever it focuses on a certain target and decides to proceed to overrun it.

How we can have a dialogue when neither nation has yet clarified its own thinking on the

25

changing international situation is to me an
unsolved question. We in the United States have
to develop an approach to foreign policy rele-
vant to the transformations taking place. Japan,
in those portions of its history with which I have
some limited acquaintance, has never had a gen-
eral approach to foreign policy. It has had a
very specific approach to very limited circum-
stances; even in its Imperial period it was very
specifically oriented toward precise objectives
that were not related to an international consen-
sus. Yet, we now live in a world which is at
once universal and fragmented; in which we are
economic competitors, and yet, in terms of for-
eign policy objectives, we have at least a nega-
tive incentive to avoid conflicts with each other.
I don't mean military conflict—or even political
conflict. There is a multitude of problems around
the world that are not soluble unless we cooper-
ate. But how do we do this? It is one of the
unsolved problems to which the Japan Society is
dedicated, and to which I do not pretend to have
the answer.

26

PRESS PHOTO/T. J. HAMILTON

Ex-President Ford and Henry Kissinger share the podium during a news conference at the Ford Museum.

# U.S. should not attach its policy to Gorbachev's fortunes: Kissinger

By Ted Roelofs
The Grand Rapids Press

Given his shaky standing at home, the United States should not rely on Mikhail Gorbachev as the lone sevior of his nation's future, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said here Wednesday.

"We should not make ourselves

so emotionally dependent" on one leader, Kissinger said at a joint news conference at the Gerald R. Ford Museum with his one-time boss, former President Gerald R. Ford.

American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union should be based on "our self-interest" rather than any policy wedded to the political

future of Gorbachev, Kissinger stated.

Speculation about Gorbachev's standing intensified Tuesday when Cable News Network, quoting an unidentified party source, reported Gorbachev had spent eight days holed up at his country house out-

see KISSINGER, B2

## KISSINGER

CONTINUED FROM B1

side Moscow with top advisers, where he was considering resigning his leadership of the Communist Party.

Gorbachev promptly denied the report, labeling its premise as "groundless."

Gorbachev has been under increasing pressure lately, fueled by the drive for independence of the Baltic states and bloody strife in the warring southern republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, where Gorbachev was forced to send troops to restore order and crush an effort by Azerbaijani nationalists to seize power in Baku.

"Undoubtedly there is a fair amount of agitation going on in the Soviet Union," said Kissinger, in Grand Rapids to deliver an address sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford Foundation. Gorbachev may indeed be caught "between a group that thinks he is going too slow and a group that thinks he is going too fast," he said.

Despite the Soviet leader's mounting woes, Kissinger said it's unlikely he'll resign.

"There has never been a resignation (of a communist leader) in the whole history of the Soviet Union," he said.

Kissinger, who rose to diplomat, is prominence as national security adviser under President Nixon, also spoke to a black-tie audience

of prominent Republicans and community leaders at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, where he underscored his thesis that the United States must not hitch its foreign policy to Gorbachev's political star. He also cautioned that the Russian empire has a 400-year history of expansionism.

"Gorbachev is mortal," said Kissinger, 66. "States and permanent interests do not change with personalities."

Kissinger also asserted that reunification, of East and West Germany, "is inevitable."

For that to happen, he said, economic conditions in East Germany must be equalized to stem the migration of working East Germans into West Germany.

"I believe there will be a common currency very soon, and I expect that after they have their free elections, their two parliaments will get together and will achieve some kind of unification," he said.

Throughout Eastern Europe, said Kissinger, "Communist ideology has collapsed beyond any redemption."

But he said democratic movements — particularly Romania and Bulgaria — have a long way to go. The bureaucracies spawned by communism remain entrenched in much of Easter Europe, Kissinger said, and will be hard to dislodge.

Romania — where communists who opposed dictator Nicolae Cenescu now hold the upper hand — is "most worrisome," said

Kissinger. The present leadership of Bulgaria is "almost 100 percent communist," he said.

For the rest of Eastern Europe, Kissinger said prospects for democracy are much better, even though budding democratic parties have neither the experience nor the structure to help them mobilize a campaign.

He claimed that the groundwork for much of what transpired in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was laid during the Ford administration, particularly its negotiation of the 1975 Helsinki Agreements, which raised human rights issues in European communist nations.

Kissinger said he supported the U.S. invasion of Panama to oust Manuel Noriega.

"What troubles me is the idea of trying a de facto head of a government before an American court for acts he committed in his own country, even though I think he's a thug," Kissinger said.

Both Kissinger and Ford gave President Bush high marks on his handling of events in Eastern Europe.

"I think George Bush has done a very, very fine job as president in the first 12 months, especially in the area of foreign policy," Ford said.

Despite what he termed the "monumental problems" faced by Gorbachev, Ford said he "looks like our best bet" for continued reform of the Soviet system.

OCT 16 '90 17:34 212-759-0042

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October 29, 1990 $1.75 U.S./$2.25 Canada

EDITORIAL

SAME OLD
SNOOPS

Last week, forty-five years late, Japanese-Americans interned during World War II received their first compensation checks. Years from now will the government owe similar checks to Arab-Americans and Middle Eastern immigrants? A new General Accounting Office report on the F.B.I. hints that the bureau is keeping the U.S. Arab community under exactly the kind of surveillance that for a decade before Pearl Harbor prepared the way for the Japanese internment.

Arabs in this country aren't the only target. The G.A.O. report on the F.B.I.'s "international terrorist" program shows that although the cold war is over our all-American secret police persist, immune from Congressional scrutiny.

Representative Don Edwards first ordered the review in 1988, after revelations of extensive F.B.I. snooping directed at the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador. On October 9 an exasperated Edwards declared that his inquiry had been "seriously hampered" by bureau officials, noting incredulously that even Congressional auditors with top-secret clearances were denied access to crucial records.

The G.A.O.'s circumspect revelations are chilling: 19,500 investigations under the largely phony rubric of "terrorism" between January 1982 and June 1988, nearly half involving people suspected only of tenuous association with a broad range of groups; 2,080 undercover investigations; names, sometimes dozens of them, added to the F.B.I. permanent index in every case.

F.B.I. director William Sessions responded to the G.A.O.'s disclosures with bland bureauspeak.

Indexing such names, he insisted, is simply "a basic management concept of information retrieval." Hold that thought.

SJSOD

44

0 377535 0

STATE/LOCAL
FISCAL CRISES
Robert Fitch

CUBA AND
SOVIET AID
Samuel Farber

MURDER IN
VIRGINIA
Stephen Hooker

BUYING A CAR
IN HUNGARY
Miklós Vámos

TOUGH JEWS
Michael
Rosenthal

SEXUAL DESTINY
Paul Mattick Jr.

MINUTES OF THE MEETING

THE SECRET
LIFE OF HENRY
KISSINGER

The Nation has obtained confidential minutes of a sensitive 1975 meeting of senior State Department officials, presided over by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and attended by Lawrence Eagleburger, currently President Bush's Deputy Secretary of State. The minutes, printed on page 492, offer a revealing glimpse of the attitudes of these men regarding the public's right to know about policies undertaken in its name, and of the accountability of government officials within a democracy. These minutes seem particularly noteworthy today, as the United States prepares for war in the Middle East.

— The Editors

MARK HERTSGAARD

Nothing, it seems, succeeds like failure. How else to explain the media visibility of Henry Kissinger during the Persian Gulf crisis? After all, the former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser's record of achievement in that part of the world has been checkered at best. Not only did he help to make the Middle East war of 1973 inevitable by "his need to dominate [then-Secretary of State William] Rogers and his willful misunderstanding of the limits of Soviet influence inside Egypt," as Seymour Hersh argued in *The Price of Power*, but he was also the man

who pressured President Carter into allowing the deposed Shah of Iran into the United States in 1979, thus precipitating the calamitous and entirely predictable seizure of the

(Cont. on p. 488)

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Now you have to wait in the second office for a few hours, and the room is smelly and crowded. The other customers are angry and sweating and cursing. They all have suitcases with them. Czechoslovak and Polish tourists are lining up to buy forints, which for them is almost a hard currency, since theirs are even softer.

Later, you'll realize that even the bank was preferable to the aluminum bunkhouse-like building of Merkur, which is in an industrial suburb. When you arrive there are already 600 people sitting in and standing around fifty plastic-covered armchairs. The first thing you do is hand over the papers you have. Then you wait for an hour or two. Then you can choose the color of your future car—from the three colors available. Sometimes it's only two. On some days there is only one. (This may really remind us of capitalism: The car is available in every color, but you want black.)

Now you wait another two or three hours. It is very hot under the aluminum ceiling—no air-conditioning or windows. Capitalism is present only on the screen of two TV sets. MTV can be seen via satellite, but fortunately the sound is turned off; people are angry enough without it. Everywhere there are exhausted little children asleep on their parents' laps and shoulders.

Next you can enter the car showroom and choose your car. "Choose" may not be the proper word. Usually, the salesperson has only one car to show you. The seats are dirty, the chassis is scratched, one of the doors is jammed and there are signs of a fuel leak. Still, as you'll soon realize, this is the best car available. So you sigh and take it.

Now you have only another three hours to wait before the car is yours. You are so tired that there is the risk you'll be in an accident on the way home. Statistics prove that lots of people wreck their cars on the first day they get them. No wonder.

The gas tank is almost empty (Merkur employees can do with the free gasoline). You have to buy some at the first filling station. Here there's capitalism—the amount you pay is one-tenth the monthly salary of an engineer. If you give up your apartment, don't eat, don't buy any clothes and don't raise your children, you can buy gasoline nine more times this month.

That is how Kapitalism,siegt in Eastern Europe up to now. The Berlin wall is down, but there are lots of other walls that have to be destroyed. Shortages, stupidity and

disorder rule the industry, agriculture and commerce of the ex-Communist countries, and the newly elected governments and parliaments haven't done much yet. Democracy is a time-consuming sport even if you already know the rules. Eastern Europe is just studying those rules. Customers are still treated as hirelings by lots of companies, and shortages don't let competition come into play.

We should be patient and not lose our tempers. Socialism, which never worked, needed half a century to fail. Capitalism will also need some time before its victory—or failure—in Eastern Europe. ☐

## Kissinger

(Continued From Front Cover)

American Embassy and hostages in Teheran.

Nevertheless, in the weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Kissinger was a ubiquitous presence on the nation's airwaves and in newspaper columns. He was interviewed on ABC's *This Week With David Brinkley*, published at great length on the opinion page of *The Washington Post* (and, through the *Post-Los Angeles Times* syndication service, in newspapers across the country) and respectfully quoted in *The New York Times*. He was, as they say, a player again.

Not that he ever truly lost access to ruling circles. Since leaving government in 1977, Kissinger has maintained a lucrative global network of business and political contacts and has made a special point of cultivating influence in the news media. Besides circulating opinion columns through the *Post-Times* syndicate, he has served on the board of CBS Inc. and has been a paid consultant to both NBC News and ABC News.

Whatever one thinks of Kissinger's deeds on a substantive level, the "most favored expert" status that the U.S. media have bestowed on him is odd, if only because of his demonstrated record of contempt for an independent press and the free flow of information upon which it depends. Kissinger has admitted to wiretapping reporters and his own aides during his years as Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser. Kissinger requested the wiretaps (which were handled by former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover and by Alexander Haig, then the White House Chief of Staff) in order to find out who was leaking information to the press about American policy toward Vietnam. Kissinger, of course, was hardly opposed to leaks in principle; he spent a good portion of his working days spoon-feeding such influential denizens of the Washington press corps as *Time's* Hugh Sidey and CBS's Marvin Kalb. But Kissinger trusted no one else with this delicate task, which is perhaps understandable, given the considerable distance between his private version of events and the reality of his policies. Indeed, his wiretaps can be seen as part of a multifaceted White House campaign

Mark Hertsgaard is the author, most recently, of On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. He is the media critic for Rolling Stone and National Public Radio and is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

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to keep the nation ignorant of the true nature of his and Nixon's foreign policy.

Kissinger's obsession with keeping everyone—the citizenry, the Congress, even his own Administration colleagues—in the dark about his actions is displayed in all its banal iniquity in the State Department document printed on page 492. So are his casual disdain for law and constitutional procedure, his disregard for the human consequences of his policies, his bizarre personal paranoia and his petulant sense of self-importance. "You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary situation," he admonishes aides at one point, adding ominously, "Everything on paper will be used against me."

What provoked this particular outburst on Kissinger's part was the State Department's dispatch of the "cable on [East] Timor" that he refers to in the third sentence of the minutes. As Secretary of State, Kissinger had just returned from a tour of Asia with President Gerald Ford. One objective of this tour seems to have been psychological. Saigon had fallen to North Vietnamese forces that April, and Kissinger apparently thought it urgent to send a message to friends and foes alike that the United States remained a power to be reckoned with and would not retreat an inch in the global struggle against Soviet and Chinese "adventurism."

The two hot spots most vexing to Kissinger at the moment were East Timor and Angola. Both were former Portuguese colonies; both had been promised independence by the democratic government that had taken over following the overthrow of Lisbon's right-wing dictatorship in 1974. As Kissinger met with his colleagues in December 1975, however, this independence still seemed a long and bloody way off, and not least because of policies Kissinger himself had implemented. East Timor is situated on the eastern end of

the Indonesian archipelago; Angola, on the southwest coast of Africa. Although located half a world away from each other, both shared the common cold war misfortune of being regarded primarily as pawns in a global chess game. In July 1975 Kissinger had obtained President Ford's approval for a covert military program designed to install a pro-U.S. government in Angola. And in August, he had signaled Jakarta that the United States would not object if the Indonesians invaded East Timor, which by then was controlled by the leftist Fretilin movement.

The Indonesians invaded on December 7, one day after Ford and Kissinger left Jakarta. It was a punishing assault, and the result was mass slaughter. According to church sources, an estimated 100,000 people—one of every seven Timorese—were killed over the next twelve months. The Indonesians did comply with an American request to delay their attack until Air Force One was well clear of Jakarta, but they alarmed State Department officials by making extensive use of U.S.-supplied military equipment. This violated American law, which mandated that such equipment be employed only in self-defense, and triggered one of the controversies detailed in the minutes printed below.

Kissinger was upset with his subordinates on two counts: first, with their conclusion that the Indonesians had broken the law (and thereby made suspension of additional aid politically necessary on Capitol Hill); second, and most important, that they had dared notify Kissinger of this in a cable sent before his return to Washington.

Kissinger's great fear, of course, is that the American public might eventually discover the truth about his policy on East Timor. He wants "to stop it [the aid] quietly," and dismisses Assistant Secretary Philip Habib's assurance that the cable "will not leak." Kissinger becomes nearly apoplectic when he learns that actually "there are two cables! And that means twenty guys have seen it." This naturally raises the odds that a reporter will eventually get wind of it.

Near the end of the meeting, Kissinger decides to finesse the legal problem by telling Congress that aid will be cut off "while we are studying" the issue. But the aid will secretly "start again in January." And so it came to pass. A "modified suspension of military aid" to Indonesia was imposed for six months, but in name only; as Noam Chomsky later testified to the United Nations, "the flow of arms [was] uninterrupted, including attack helicopters and other equipment required to wipe hundreds of villages off the face of the earth, destroy crops, and herd the remnants of the population into internment centers."

**W**hy publish this fifteen-year-old document now? That Henry Kissinger has lied, circumvented the law and blasphemed democratic principles is, after all, hardly late-breaking news. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to fill in another small portion of the public record. And the special advantage of this document is that it cannot be discounted in the way that some of Kissinger's friends tried to undermine Hersh's *The Price of Power*, a work that relied in part on the recollections of Kissinger's associates. No one can dispute the memory or accuracy of the sources quoted here,

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for they are Kissinger and company themselves, as recorded
by the State Department's own notetaker.

But the larger reason for calling attention to these minutes
of a long-ago conversation is that Kissinger is still managing
to escape his past. Readers of *The Nation* may not need a
refresher course in the mendacity and personal unpleasant-
ness of Henry Kissinger, but the executive producers of this
country's television talk shows and the editors of its news-
paper opinion pages evidently do. For they have enthusi-
astically welcomed Kissinger back onto the public stage
during the Persian Gulf crisis, just as they cooperated earlier
this year in the most recent resuscitation of Richard Nixon.
One may doubt that these media gatekeepers will now some-
how be swayed by the addition of yet another brick in the
bloody wall. But one can always hope.

SECRET/SENSITIVE
MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION

Participants:
The Secretary
Deputy Secretary [Robert] Ingersoll
Under Secretary [for Political Affairs Joseph]
Sisco
Under Secretary [Carlyle] Maw
Deputy Under Secretary [Lawrence] Eagleburger
Assistant Secretary [Philip] Habib
Monroe Leigh, Legal Advisor
Jerry Bremer, Notetaker

Date: December 18, 1975
Subject: Department Policy

The Secretary: I want to raise a little bit of hell about the Depart-
ment's conduct in my absence. Until last week I thought we had a
disciplined group; now we've gone to pieces completely. Take this
cable on [East] Timor. You know my attitude and anyone who
knows my position as you do must know that I would not have ap-
proved it. The only consequence is to put yourself on record. It is a
disgrace to treat the Secretary of State this way....

What possible explanation is there for it? I had told you to stop it quietly. What is your place doing, Phil, to let this happen? It is incomprehensible. It is wrong in substance and in procedure. It is a disgrace. Were you here?

Habib: No.

Habib: Our assessment was that if it was going to be trouble, it would come up before your return. And I was told they decided it was desirable to go ahead with the cable.

The Secretary: Nonsense. I said do it for a few weeks and then open up again.

Habib: The cable will not leak.

The Secretary: Yes it will and it will go to Congress too and then we will have hearings on it.

Habib: I was away. I was told by cable that it had come up.

The Secretary: That means that there are two cables! And that means twenty guys have seen it.

Habib: No, I got it back channel—it was just one paragraph double talk and cryptic so I knew what it was talking about. I was told that Leigh thought that there was a legal requirement to do it.

Leigh: No, I said it could be done administratively. It was not in our interest to do it on legal grounds.

Sisco: We were told that you had decided we had to stop.

The Secretary: Just a minute, just a minute. You all know my view on this. You must have an FSO-8 [Foreign Service officer, class eight] who knows it well. It will have a devastating impact on Indonesia. There's this masochism in the extreme here. No one has complained that it was aggression.

Leigh: The Indonesians were violating an agreement with us.

The Secretary: The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?

Leigh: That's a different situation.

Maw: It is self-defense.

The Secretary: And we can't construe a Communist government in the middle of Indonesia as self-defense?

Leigh: Well...

The Secretary: Then you're saying that arms can't be used for defense.

Habib: No, they can be used for the defense of Indonesia.

The Secretary: Now take a look at this basic theme that is coming out on Angola. These SOBs are leaking all of this stuff to [New York Times reporter] Les Gelb.

Sisco: I can tell you who.

The Secretary: Who?

Sisco: [National Security Council staff member William] Hyland spoke to him.

The Secretary: Wait a minute—Hyland said...

Sisco: He said he briefed Gelb.

The Secretary: I want these people to know that our concern in Angola is not the economic wealth or a naval base. It has to do with the USSR operating 8,000 miles from home when all the surrounding states are asking for our help. This will affect the Europeans, the Soviets, and China.

On the Timor thing, that will leak in three months and it will come out that Kissinger overruled his pristine bureaucrats and violated the law. How many people in L [the legal adviser's office] know about this?

Leigh: Three.

Habib: There are at least two in my office.

The Secretary: Plus everybody in the meeting so you're talking about not less than 15 or 20.

You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary situation. Everything on paper will be used against me.

Habib: We do that and take account of that all the time.

The Secretary: Every day some SOB in the Department is carrying on about Angola but no one is defending Angola. Find me one quote in the Gelb article defending our policy in Angola.

Habib: I think the leaks and dissent are the burden you have to bear.

The Secretary: But the people in charge of this Department could have lacerated AF [Bureau for African Affairs].

Ingersoll: I was told it came from up the river.

Eagleburger: No way.

The Secretary: Don't be ridiculous. It's quoted there. Read Gelb. Was [Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs William] Schaufele called in and told to get his house under control? This is not minor league stuff. We are going to lose big. The President says to the Chinese that we're going to stand firm in Angola and two weeks later we get out. I go to a NATO meeting and meanwhile the Department leaks that we're worried about a naval base and says it's an exaggeration or aberration of Kissinger's. I don't care about the oil or the base but I do care about the African reaction when they see the Soviets pull it off and we don't do anything. If the Europeans then say to themselves if they can't hold Luanda, how can they defend Europe? The Chinese will say we're a country that was run out of Indochina for 50,000 men and is now being run out

OCT-16 '90 17:42 212-759-0042

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October 29, 1990

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of Angola for less than $50 million. Where were the meetings here yesterday? Were there any?

*The Secretary:* It cannot be that our agreement with Indonesia says that the arms are for internal purposes only. I think you will find that it says that they are legitimately used for self-defense.

There are two problems. The merits of the case which you have a duty to raise with me. The second is how to put these to me. But to put it into a cable 30 hours before I return, knowing how cables are handled in this building, guarantees that it will be a national disaster and that transcends whatever [Deputy Legal Adviser George Aldrich has in his feverish mind.

I took care of it with the administrative thing by ordering Carlyle [Maw] to not make any new sales.

How will the situation get better in six weeks?

*Habib:* They may get it cleaned up by then.

*The Secretary:* The Department is falling apart and has reached the point where it disobeys clear-cut orders.

*Habib:* We sent the cable because we thought it was needed and we thought it needed your attention. This was ten days ago.

*The Secretary:* Nonsense. When did I get the cable, Jerry?

*Bremer:* Not before the weekend. I think perhaps on Sunday.

*The Secretary:* You had to know what my view on this was. No one who has worked with me in the last two years could not know what my view would be on Timor.

*Habib:* Well, let us look at it—talk to Leigh. There are still some legal requirements. I can't understand why it went out if it was not legally required.

*The Secretary:* Am I wrong in assuming that the Indonesians will go up in smoke if they hear about this?

*Habib:* Well, it's better than a cutoff. It could be done at a low level.

*The Secretary:* We have four weeks before Congress comes back. That's plenty of time.

*Leigh:* The way to handle the administrative cutoff would be that we are studying the situation.

*The Secretary:* And 36 hours was going to be a major problem?

*Leigh:* We had a meeting in Sisco's office and decided to send the message.

*The Secretary:* I know what the law is but how can it be in the US national interest for us to give up on Angola and kick the Indonesians in the teeth? Once it is on paper, there will be a lot of FSO-6's who can make themselves feel good who can write for the Open Forum Panel on the thing even though I will turn out to be right in the end.

*Habib:* The second problem on leaking of cables is different.

*The Secretary:* No, it's an empirical fact.

*Eagleburger:* Phil, it's a fact. You can't say that any NODIS [most restricted distribution] cable will leak but you can't count on three to six months later someone asking for it [sic] in Congress. If it's part of the written record, it will be dragged out eventually.

*The Secretary:* You have an obligation to the national interest. I don't care if we sell equipment to Indonesia or not. I get nothing from it. I get no rakeoff. But you have an obligation to figure out how to serve your country. The Foreign Service is not to serve itself. The Service stands for service to the United States and not service to the Foreign Service.

*Habib:* I understand that that's what this cable would do.

*The Secretary:* The minute you put this into the system you cannot resolve it without a finding.

*Leigh:* There's only one question. What do we say to Congress if we're asked?

*The Secretary:* We cut it off while we are studying it. We intend to start again in January. ☐

## EDITORIALS.

*(Continued From Page 477)*

however, are economic and social; dire poverty undermines life expectancy. Add to this the ravages of AIDS.

To put teeth into the provisions, the framers drew up an accompanying World Declaration on the Survival, Protection, and Development of Children and Plan of Action for Implementing the World Declaration, which sets specific goals for the 1990s. Built into the convention are monitoring provisions that cover, among other things, the right to adequate housing, health services, child care, education and recreational and cultural activities. The very existence of the convention creates a standard against which to measure the treatment of children everywhere. It is enshrined in international law, whether or not the children's governments ratify the convention. All seventy-one of the nations that attended the summit, including the United States, have signed the declaration, thereby pledging to work for ratification and implementation of the convention.

The U.S. press was late turning its attention to the summit. Few among the U.S. mass media reported that, as agreement neared on the final draft, the proceedings hit a roadblock when the United States and Britain killed a provision that would have established a minimum age of 18 for military conscription [see "All Our Children," December 18, 1989].

In this country African-Americans will surely look upon the enactment of the convention as the hand of God intervening again when all seemed dark. The plight of the masses of black children and others of color in America represents in microcosm the crisis afflicting children in the most desperately poor countries. The potential power of this new instrument should not be underestimated. Just as the American Declaration of Independence, despite its failure to protect the rights of blacks, Native Americans and women, held up a model that made the struggle for justice in the United States possible, and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights proved to be a powerful weapon in the hands of the people of many nations, so with the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

When new instruments for advancement are placed in human hands, the possibilities for running—and winning—the race increase. Extraordinarily, almost incomprehensively, the U.N. has just handed children and all who love them a magnificent one. JEWELL HANDY GRESHAM

Jewell Handy Gresham was co-editor of The Nation's special issue on the black family.

### COMING UP

* Virginia N. Sherry on Kuwaiti Non-Democracy
* Eric Alterman on the Rosenthal/Buchanan Imbroglio
* Daniel Singer on The New Holy Alliance

CHATTER

BY PETER CASTRO

MOMMY NEAREST:

"The best present I ever got for Valentine's Day," says Miami Sound Machine's GLORIA ESTEFAN, whose latest album is titled *Cuts Both Ways*, "is the engagement ring [husband] EMILIO gave me. But he was so impatient, he gave it to me on Feb.

12 in front of his mother, which I could've killed him for because how do you react to something like that in front of someone's mother, for God's sake? I was so embarrassed, I didn't know what to do. Emilio's mother, who I get along with very well, was the one that wanted to be there to see my face. I guess he also needed the moral support. Maybe he figured, 'Well, if my mom is there, she won't say no.' "

MARK ANDERSON/CAMERA PRESS/GLOBE PHOTOS

HER PRESENT POSITION:

Just because she chooses not to exchange Valentine's Day gifts with her steady, MICK JAGGER, doesn't give model-actress JERRY HALL a heart of stone. "I never

buy him a present for Valentine's Day," says Hall, who is currently hawking Diet Coke in TV ads. "I think that's something the stores invented. Usually, I just send a card. I never received a Valentine's Day gift in my whole life more than just flowers and a card—maybe I'm missing out on an opportunity here." Hall, who has had two children (ELIZABETH and JAMES) with Jagger, says, "Yeah, I'd love some more children, maybe in a year or so. Mick and I have talked about it in a 'maybe' kind of way."

JOE DILLMANN/GLOBE PHOTOS

SHOW ME THE WAY:

Comedian GARRY SHANDLING isn't as single-minded as he used to be. This Friday (Feb. 9), the bachelor he plays on Showtime's *It's Garry Shandling's Show* marries his girlfriend, Phoebe (JESSICA HARPER). "I think it confuses people as to how similar the show is to my real life," says Shandling, who has never been married. "And I think that this show will be a good test to find out if I

JOE DILLMANN/GLOBE PHOTOS

really ever want to get married in real life. I think anyone contemplating marriage should get their own series and try it out first on television—it'll save a lot of problems later." And what are his Valentine's Day plans? "I don't look forward to any holidays unless I get them off from work. I haven't made plans yet. It falls on Feb. 14 this year, doesn't it?"

OH, HENRY:

NANCY KISSINGER says if she receives anything for Valentine's Day from her husband, HENRY, to whom she has been married for 15 years, it will be flowers. But, Nancy warns, "We're both very absentminded. We've gotten our anniversary right only once and that was because the office reminded us." And what has she learned in the 15 years? "I learned to pack fast. We've moved eight times, and I can pack in a day."

F. CONNOR BRETALTO

SCHOOL OF HEART KNOCKS:

ROBERT ENGLUND, the Freddy Krueger of your dreams in the *Nightmare on Elm Street* films, discovered the ugly truth about Valentine's Day early. "It was my first lesson in life about the popular versus unpopular kids," says Englund (with wife Nancy, above). "I got a modicum of valentines, but I remember seeing the 'homely' girl—in the third grade you can be homely and you can turn into Kim Basinger by the time you're in high school—across from me who got no valentines and realizing how traumatic it must have been. I've tried to get it up, so to speak, on a romantic level for Valentine's Day now, but I still remember those terrible days in the third grade."

ROB BASS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

118

gas are quite another, and it touched one of the most sensitive nerves in Israeli society. In tough language never before heard from the Israeli left, Sarid wrote: "For the first time, Daraoushe and Mi'ari have called into question their own civic loyalties. They will pay dearly for this mistake."

Sarid's party was not happy with his intemperate rhetorical outburst. Its executive committee gathered to hear its leader, Shulamit Aloni, rebuke Sarid for the damage he caused the Movement's moral and intellectual stands. "What does that mean, 'compared to the crimes of Saddam Hussein, the sins of the government of Israel are as pure as the driven snow'?'" wondered Aloni, the elder stateswoman of the Israeli left, quoting from Sarid's celebrated piece in *Ha'aretz*. "Are those our standards for morality? for humanity? Because [Saddam] is a butcher, we have the right to rule over another people? to oppress? to deport? to destroy?"

Sarid defended himself, arguing that his reaction had in fact helped maintain the credibility of the Israeli left. "Absent my response, the left would be seen as dogmatic—deaf, blind, and dumb—incapable of soul-searching or re-evaluation; an entity that molds the world to fit its point of view, rather than adapting its views to conform to reality."

Sarid's words, whether intended or not, amounted to a sweeping indictment of his colleagues on the left. Have they really been so self-indulgent as to "mold the world to fit their point of view"? Have they really failed to recognize the nature of Arab intentions, as suggested so often by their right-wing critics?

For most Israeli doves this debate is not so much about repenting past sins as about present credibility: How do you talk an essentially hawkish majority into major territorial and political concessions without appearing to be a sellout? Israeli leftists have been increasingly compromised in the eyes of those who are sometimes described as "second Israel," an equivalent, say, of blue-collar workers in Queens or Chicago. To them, the left has remained socially aloof, secluded in the Ashkenazi middle-class neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa; self-righteous in its eagerness to "blame Israel first," to paraphrase Jeane Kirkpatrick; intellectually patronizing in its poorly disguised contempt for the cultural traditions of North African and Middle Eastern Jews.

The left did not realize how alienated it had become from a majority of the population until the 1981 election. Ever since then it has attempted to shift its political message from the high ground of moralism to the pragmatic level of Israel's self-interest. Leftist tacticians have suggested that emphasis should no longer be put on the virtue of Palestinian self-determination (since, after all, elections are rarely won on the basis of unadulterated altruism) but rather on how perpetual occupation would be self-defeating for Israel.

In Israel being a dove requires more than marching in demonstrations or taking a political stand on op-ed pages. Given the country's small size and the almost

insecurities nature of Israeli society, liberals have to confront their critics also in the supermarket, in the workplace, and even in the military reserve—a most demoralizing experience in a culture not noted for its political tolerance. Leftists have to bear the political cross of alleged "appeasement" (toward greedy Arab nationalism) and pay the social price extracted by the stigma of being labeled "Arab lovers."

One ought not to underestimate the psychological dimension. Virtual political pariahs such as Yossi Sarid may well begin to enjoy receiving fan mail extolling their patriotism instead of hate mail questioning their mother's decency. This newfound acceptance could encourage second thoughts, beyond the Persian Gulf and perhaps over much broader agendas of Israeli political culture.

If Hussein is finally routed and Palestinian extremists, who endorsed him, are dealt a severe blow, Israeli doves may feel that their message has become relevant again, and a reassured Israeli public may be willing to consider it. But if Hussein remains in power in Baghdad and radicalism in the Arab world emerges from this crisis intact, the Middle East should brace itself for a new Israel, one in which sworn doves will join the NRA, and declared hawks will be transformed into full-time vultures.

YO'AV KARNY is chief foreign correspondent of the Israeli newspaper *Ha'aretz*, and is based in Washington.

Kissinger, the Business Forum, and Co.

## THE IRAQ LOBBY

By Joe Conason

No advocate of military force in the Persian Gulf has been more widely quoted in recent weeks than Henry A. Kissinger. In op-ed articles and television appearances, he has offered his antiseptic-sounding prescription of "surgical and progressive" air strikes against Iraqi targets and has urged the destruction of the Iraqi regime. These views have been cited repeatedly by hawkish editorialists and were treated as front-page news by *The New York Times*. None of this is startling—until one considers that the former secretary of state's consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, under the auspices of a pro-Iraq interest group, was not so long ago offering economic advice to Saddam Hussein.

Of course, Henry Kissinger isn't the only American businessman who has abruptly changed his view of Iraq. Before the current crisis erupted, dozens of major U.S. and multinational corporations—nearly all of them members of a little-known trade association called the

14 THE NEW REPUBLIC OCTOBER 1, 1990

U.S.-Iraq Business Forum—eagerly supplied the Hussein regime with everything from rice to computers to helicopters, and anticipated that Hussein would spend billions more. But because Kissinger and his associates straddle the worlds of business and diplomacy, they offer a particularly striking example of how U.S. policy elites virtually ignored the threat to regional (and global) security and to human rights posed by Iraq until the invasion of Kuwait made that threat too obvious to overlook.

Though Kissinger now says that Hussein should be deposed because he "used poison gas against his own dissident population," that did not prevent his consulting firm—or other corporate powers—from continuing to do business in Baghdad for years after Iraq's chemical warfare capability had been unleashed against Iraqi minorities (and Iranian soldiers). If anything, Hussein was coddled by government officialdom at the urging of his U.S. business partners. The companies seeking Iraq's petrodollars arranged for U.S. taxpayers to assume the risk of doing business with Hussein through commodity credits and loan guarantees underwritten by the federal government.

Keeping these subsidies in place wasn't easy, given the nature of the Iraqi regime. Safeguarding them from congressional sanctions and the federal bureaucracy was, from 1982 until last month, the raison d'être of the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum. Based in Washington, where it worked closely with the Iraqi Embassy, over the past few years the Forum and its powerful members have quietly kept the U.S. credits and loans pouring into Baghdad. By June 1989 these efforts raised the Forum in Hussein's estimation so high that he invited a number of the group's leading members—accompanied by a representative of the legendary Dr. Kissinger—to Baghdad for a four-day program of meetings and banquets with Cabinet officials and other top members of his government, and he himself granted them a highly unusual two-hour audience.

The Forum's membership, currently more than fifty firms, has expanded as rapidly as the growth in trade between the United States and Iraq. (Annual sales grew from about $400 million in 1985 to $1.5 billion in 1989, and had been expected to double again this year.) Its board of directors includes officials of Amoco, Mobil, Westinghouse, Caterpillar, and the First City Corporation of Texas (whose chairman and CEO, A. Robert Abboud, also chairs the Forum). Its daily affairs in Washington are overseen by Forum president Marshall W. Wiley, a lawyer at the huge lobbying law firm of Sidley & Austin and a former U.S. ambassador to Oman. (He also ran the U.S. interest section in Baghdad before full diplomatic relations resumed in 1984.) The bland, reassuring Wiley is assisted by executive director Mary E. King, a pioneering civil rights activist who served as associate director of ACTION, the umbrella agency for the Peace Corps and its domestic offshoots, during the Carter administration.

Neither the Forum nor any of its officers or members

is registered with the Justice Department as an agent for Iraq, although they have spent much of the past five years seeking to promote that nation's interests in Washington. "We're not putting out propaganda about Iraq to the general public," Wiley told me in an interview last May, while admitting that his mission of advocating more trade "does have a public relations aspect to it." He draws a fine line, arguing that the Forum doesn't lobby, leaving that task to its constituents. "We keep our members informed," he explained, "so they can then pursue their own interests as they see them."

But in fact the Forum has insistently put out a soft line on Iraq that goes well beyond Wiley's occasional appearances on TV programs like "This Week with David Brinkley," or his letters opposing sanctions that appear in *The Washington Post* and *The Washington Times*. In May 1988, while Hussein was wiping out thousands of Kurdish civilians, the Forum sponsored a Washington symposium on Iraq that was wholly dominated by apologists for the regime. The keynote speakers were Nizar Hamdoon, then Iraq's ambassador to the United States, and Abdul Rahim al-Chalabi, Iraq's oil minister, and much of the discussion was given over to their country's rapid growth and the enormous market it would create for imported capital and consumer goods. A. Peter Burleigh, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, closed his remarks by cheerfully noting that the administration looked "to those in the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum to help preserve—and expand—the overall U.S.-Iraqi relationship through its commercial side, as only the private sector can do."

Several months later Wiley prevailed upon his friends in the Reagan administration to oppose economic sanctions, which were under consideration after Hussein's use of poison gas against the Kurds was revealed. In an October 1988 letter to President Reagan on Forum stationery—which lists such corporate affiliates as Mobil, Amoco, and GM—Wiley wrote, "We fully understand and agree with your desire to limit the use of chemical weapons," but he insisted that imposing sanctions on Iraq "would have the opposite effect." Sanctions were never imposed, and have been consistently opposed, until now, by the Reagan and Bush administrations. It is worth considering the possibility that had sanctions been imposed two years ago, the present crisis might never have begun.

The Forum's pro-Iraq activities in Washington have been financed by dues of member companies, not by the Iraqi treasury. But as early as May 1985, before the Forum even opened its doors, Ambassador Hamdoon gave Wiley a letter on embassy letterhead. It bluntly advised "any United States company interested in doing business with Iraq" that it "would do well to join the Forum." Several months later the Hussein regime announced publicly that for companies wishing to do business in Iraq membership in the Forum was practically mandatory. Flanked by Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, Hamdoon told a Washington audience: "Our people in Baghdad will

OCTOBER 1, 1990 THE NEW REPUBLIC 15

give priority—when there is competition between two companies—to the one that is a member of the Forum." A directory of Forum members was later issued to officials of every ministry in Baghdad, with instructions to use it when awarding contracts or procuring supplies.

By directing contributions to Iraq's friend in Washington, Iraq's foreign ministry took advantage of what many regard as a loophole in the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which mandates a detailed report of agent activities every six months. Because it was not registered as an official agent of the Iraqi regime, the Forum was able to operate far more freely in Washington and maintained credibility as an advocate of American interests, rather than a mouthpiece for a discredited tyranny.

The ultimate sign of appreciation for services rendered came in the spring of 1989, when the Iraqi government invited the Forum's "blue ribbon" trade delegation to Baghdad. Present in addition to Abboud, Wiley, and King were CEOs or senior executives of Amoco, Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, Westinghouse, General Motors, Xerox, Bell Helicopter Textron, and several other Fortune 500 companies. Invitations were extended only to member companies with annual sales in excess of $500 million, but an exception was made for Alan Stoga, an economist specializing in international finance and oil markets who is Kissinger's senior associate.

True to the secrecy that is his boss's obsession, Stoga has refused to discuss his visit to Baghdad, or any interests the Kissinger firm and its clients may have in Iraq. According to Wiley, Stoga "was asked to accompany us, although Kissinger Associates is not officially part of the Forum, because of his general knowledge of international finance and banking problems." At the time, as the Forum's newsletter pointed out, Iraq's massive debt was "the principal constraint" on U.S. trade, and Stoga's job was to explain how Hussein could restructure his debt and obtain loans from U.S. commercial banks and other lenders.

Private financing would have meant bigger profits, not only for financial institutions like Chase Manhattan that have long retained Kissinger, but for other Kissinger clients doing deals in Iraq. Although Kissinger Associates closely guards the identities of its clientele, the list of acknowledged clients includes several firms that have won large contracts from the Hussein regime in the past few years: Volvo, whose chairman, Pehr Gyllenhammer, sits on Kissinger's own board; Hunt Oil, which also sent an executive on the Baghdad trip; Fiat, whose subsidiary has been implicated in weapons sales to Iraq; Coca-Cola; and the Yugoslav construction giant Energopromekt. At least one other Kissinger client, Britain's Midland Bank, is one of a small group of commercial houses already holding large amounts of Iraqi paper, so it too would have benefited from fresh loans by other lenders.

The nature and substance of the Kissinger firm's advice to its clients is another closely guarded secret. But given Kissinger's own Middle East expertise and that of many of his employees and ex-employees (nota-

bly Lawrence Eagleburger, now deputy secretary of state, and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, a prominent pre-Kuwait advocate of cooperation with Saddam Hussein), it is reasonable to assume that the firm's advice on Iraq was sought and given.

The former secretary of state's business interests in the Middle East (and around the world) pose an ethical problem for journalists when they seek him out as the nation's most prominent foreign policy expert. When Kissinger appears in the media to comment upon the Gulf crisis, reporters and editors have refrained from questioning him about his interests in Iraq (or Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for that matter). They made the same omission last year when he took to the airwaves to discuss China, a country where he has substantial commercial interests. In the China case the omission was more egregious, since Kissinger was defending the Chinese government and arguing that the United States should "not do any sanctions" in response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. But even though Kissinger's post-Kuwait message on Iraq was very different, it might have been worth asking him if he thought his firm's previous activities had in any way contributed to the Iraqi arrogance that produced the present crisis.

Kissinger too has declined all requests to be interviewed about the June 1989 trade delegation. Explaining its activities has been left to Wiley. "Iraq plays an important role now in bringing about stability in the Gulf region as an offset to Iran," Wiley told me after the Baghdad visit. "This balance of power is important to us because of our interest further down the Gulf in the countries that are friendly to us and where we have substantial energy reserves that must be protected. So Iraq plays an important political and geopolitical role in addition to being an important trading partner for us, and we can't push all these considerations to the side and shut our eyes to them because of some perceived human rights violations." Wiley added piously: "We should work with the Iraqi government to try to improve their human rights behavior, in whatever ways we can. [But] we will not achieve that if we cut off our ties with Iraq."

That view prevailed in the State Department until Hussein invaded Kuwait, although other Mideast experts disagreed. In a 200-page report on Iraq issued last February, the human rights group Middle East Watch exhaustively documented Iraq's record of brutality. It recommended that the United States terminate all credits and loans to Baghdad—effectively ending most trade—"until such time as the Iraqi government dramatically curbs abuses." Many of the same media outlets now decrying Hussein's atrocities and repression ignored the Middle East Watch report when it was published.

And almost no one noticed the report's footnote about the June 1989 trade delegation, which mentioned Kissinger Associates. There was a touch of morbid irony in the fact that Stoga arrived in Baghdad on June 4—the day Kissinger's old friends in Beijing sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square. Meanwhile, the U.S.-Iraqi Busi-

16 THE NEW REPUBLIC OCTOBER 1, 1990

ness Forum is effectively out of business. But when the crisis recedes, no matter what tyrant rules in Baghdad, it seems safe to predict that Marshall Wiley and his corporate allies will be back, insisting that it is in our interest to help them make money.

JOE CONASON is editor-at-large of Details magazine.

America's obscenity test lacks serious value.

'MILLER' TIME

By Jeff Rosen

This fall a Cincinnati curator is facing a federal judge for having displayed the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Luther Cambell of 2 Live Crew will appeal his Florida conviction for having produced *As Nasty As They Wanna Be*. And Karen Finley may challenge her grant denial from the National Endowment for the Arts. All three will use the Supreme Court's obscenity test to defend their work as "serious" art. But in a perverse betrayal of its purpose, the Supreme Court's test, properly applied, may threaten naughty artists more than it protects them.

When the test was announced in Miller v. California in 1973, it promised to distinguish art from obscenity by protecting sexually explicit work that had "serious" artistic value. (The more lenient previous test said obscenity had to be "utterly without redeeming social value.") But over the years, art has become more sexually explicit, the line between high art and low has been increasingly blurred, and artists have come to question the idea of artistic "seriousness." Now the Miller test measures art by a standard that many artists are unwilling to meet and that jurors are unable to identify. For different reasons, unlikely allies such as William Brennan, Antonin Scalia, and movie czar Jack Valenti agree that it's time to take aesthetic decisions out of the courtrooms.

In Miller the Court said that judges and juries should ask themselves three questions when attempting to distinguish between art and obscenity: first, "whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest"; second, "whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law"; and, third, "whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." If the answer to all three questions is yes, then the work can be banned; if not, then the work must be protected.

From the moment it was conceived, the test seemed

ambiguous. "To be prurient and offensive, a work has to turn you on and gross you out at the same time," says Kathleen Sullivan of Harvard Law School. But during the 1980s the ambiguous test became unintelligible as changes in art and law eliminated "serious" artistic value as a viable distinction between art and obscenity. First, artistic goals changed. As Amy Adler argues in a student note in a recent issue of *The Yale Law Journal*, postmodernism rebelled against the modernist demand that art should be "serious," or that it should have any traditional "value" at all. "Bad" painters like David Salle juxtaposed images from art history and pornography. Sculptors like Jeff Koons created what *New York Times* critic Michael Brenson called "art that looks like trash and trashes high art," including a porcelain bust of Italian porn star Ciccolina. And rappers like 2 Live Crew mixed scatology with Muddy Waters. As a result, the *Miller* test has come to evaluate postmodern art by the very standard that postmodern art seeks to defy.

Second, the Miller test itself changed. Three years ago, in *Pope v. Illinois*, the Supreme Court decided that courts should ask whether a "reasonable person" would find serious value in the suspect art. It is hard to imagine a more philistine and less appropriate test for artistic value than the aesthetic sensibility of the "reasonable person." Reasonable people attacked Manet's *Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe* and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as indecent. And reasonable people are even less likely to find serious value in artists like Mapplethorpe and Finley, who go out of their way to offend reasonable tastes. When the "reasonable person" standard was announced, liberals like Brennan cringed at the bewildering union of law and aesthetics. But they were joined by the conservative Scalia, who is wary of judicial subjectivity wherever it occurs. "[I]t is quite impossible," wrote Scalia, "to come to an objective assessment of (at least) literary or artistic value. . . . Since ratiocination has little to do with esthetics, the fabled 'reasonable man' is of little help in the inquiry. . . . For the law courts to decide 'What is Beauty' is a novelty even by today's standards."

The changes in art and law left artists vulnerable to prosecution when local authorities decided to crack down in 1990. As a result, the artists who face federal judges this fall have no way of predicting with confidence whether they have broken the law. To appreciate their predicament, pretend you are a juror at an obscenity trial and try to apply the Miller test to the work of Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, and Finley.

Start with Mapplethorpe's photograph of the man with the bullwhip up his ass. Would an average person in your community find that it appeals to the prurient interest? The Supreme Court complicates matters by defining "prurient" not only as "material having a tendency to excite lustful thoughts," but also as material that shows a "shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion." An expert witness may be helpful. "The male genitals are often presented . . . as surrogates for the face," writes the poet Richard Howard in a tribute to Mapplethorpe. Sounds like an interest in

OCTOBER 1, 1990 THE NEW REPUBLIC 17

THE NEW YORK TIMES **WEATHER** FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1990

Chronicle

■ Kissinger quits intelligence board, taciturnly

■ Poker face vs. stiff upper lip ■ Are you, or have you ever been, a member of this birthday party?

HENRY A. KISSINGER has resigned quietly from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a hush-hush group with access to the nation's most sensitive intelligence. Last year, when questioned about possible conflicts arising from his membership on the board and his role as head of a private consulting company, he denied that there were any.

It was disclosed during Senate hearings that Mr. Kissinger had advised President Ronald Reagan on arms control while working for clients involved in missile systems as the head of Kissinger Associates, which he established in 1982.

Now the White House says his schedule did not permit him to participate fully in meetings. The board has been moribund lately.

The membership of the board remains weighty. It includes William French Smith, the former Attorney General, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter Administration. President Bush appointed JOHN TOWER to it after Mr. Tower's nomination for Sec-

retary of Defense went down in flames.

High-flying American financiers meet members of a British Parliamentary team next week in a megabridge game in London. The American players include ALAN C. (ACE) GREENBERG and JAMES E. CAYNE, the chairman and the president, respectively, of the Bear Stearns Companies. The two play in a regular big-money game at the Regency Club in New York with MILTON J. PETRIE, the chairman of Petrie Stores, and LAURENCE A. TISCH, the chairman of CBS, who are also to play against the British.

On the British side will be SIR PETER EMERY; the DUKE OF ATHOLL; KENNETH W. BAKER, a senior Cabinet member; JOHN MAREK, a Labor M.P.; LORD LEVER; LORD SMITH, and SALLY OPPENHEIM-BARNES, a former Cabinet member. The game will be next Friday at the Battersea home of MALCOLM S. FORBES, who is on the American team, as are WARREN E.

BUFFETT, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and GEORGE J. GILLESPIE 3D, a partner in the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

Mr. Cayne, a top-ranked player, said the five-hour match would be tricky, since "the Brits play some unusual systems." Mr. Greenberg called it a match of historical honor: "the Colonials versus the Crown."

ALGER HISS celebrated his 85th birthday the same way he has for 15 years, with a party at the Manhattan apartment of his old friend JOSEPH MACHLIS.

Many guests had been celebrating with him for a lot longer than 15 years. Some supported Mr. Hiss during the sensational trials, in the late 1940's and in 1950, that led to his conviction on perjury for denying that he gave classified State Department documents to a Soviet agent. Others supported him because of his fall from a golden career as a clerk to Associate Justice Oliver Wendell

Henry A.
Kissinger

Alan C.
Greenberg

THE WASHINGTON POST

THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 1990 E13

JACK ANDERSON and DALE VAN ATTA

# Bush's China Policy to Face Hill Scrutiny

The Panama invasion is yesterday's news, and President Bush, defender of democracy, won't be able to milk it for much more. When Congress returns to work later this month, it will turn attention back to Bush's lovefest with China.

Senate investigators want to get to the bottom of the administration's overtures toward China. Is Bush motivated by sound foreign policy or are people with business interests in China pulling his chain?

The United States imposed sanctions against China last June after the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators. But that didn't stop Bush from sending national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger to meet with Chinese leaders in December.

They also made a secret trip to China just one month after the massacre, ostensibly to deliver Bush's message of outrage in person. Apparently Bush didn't trust the mails with the message, nor did he trust the American people enough to tell them.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will schedule a hearing next month on developments in Eastern Europe, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III is expected to testify. While he's there, some committee members plan to ask him about China, sources told our associate Scott Sleek.

Eagleburger is expected to be summoned after Baker and, as in his confirmation hearing, he will be asked about his past business dealings with China.

The big fish in this case is former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, but since the senators have neither the will nor the excuse to summon him, they will reel in Eagleburger instead.

Before they joined the Bush team, Eagleburger and Scowcroft were top officials at Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger Associates. The business specializes in telling corporate clients how to deal with governments, here and overseas. Some of those clients do business in China, and hope to count on continued friendly relations.

Congress would love to know whether Bush has taken any cues directly from Kissinger or indirectly through Eagleburger and Scowcroft or, at the very least, whether the U.S. reaction to events in China is driven by some sentimental attachment Eagleburger and Scowcroft have to old friends.

Kissinger has denied any role in the administration's decision to kowtow to China so soon after the massacre. But his denials haven't put an end to the questions, mainly because of the secrecy surrounding Kissinger Associates. Kissinger refuses to disclose the names of his clients.

As part of his confirmation hearings for the State Department job, Eagleburger revealed his personal clients while he worked for Kissinger, some of whom had ties to China. But Kissinger has not allowed the complete client list to be given to the Foreign Relations Committee, even confidentially.

Scowcroft and Eagleburger both promise to excuse themselves from any matters involving their former clients. That pledge is hard to police when only they know who those clients were.

**UPDATE:** We reported last week on a junket to the Orient by some members of the House Select Committee on Narcotics and their wives. The wife of Rep. Wally Herger (R-Calif.) did not make the trip, although Herger's staff had told us she was going.

ROOM HILDA RUSSELL MYERS

WTON POST

Helms Got Kissinger Ousted From Board

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) got Henry A. Kissinger bounced from a presidential panel and may do the same for John G. Tower.

The panel is the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). It advises the president on whether he is getting quality, reliable information from his spy agencies. The panel members don't oversee those agencies, but they have security clearances. If they are close enough to the president, they can influence how he sets the national intelligence agenda.

Kissinger was on that panel until last February, when he resigned without explanation. We have learned that Helms led the secret opposition to Kissinger's place on the board and pressured President Bush to remove him. Helms did not like the fact that Kissinger, a paid Washington consultant for several countries and international corporations, had his fingers in the business world and the White House at the same time.

No one has proved, or even publicly alleged, that Kissinger used inside information from PFIAB to help clients. But Helms didn't like how things looked.

Kissinger has had a long association with Chinese business and government leaders. After the brutal Chinese suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstration last June, Kissinger took a soft public stance on the issue. Worse, when Bush sent secret envoys to China, he chose two former employees of Kissinger's consulting firm—national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger.

One PFIAB member, who is also a friend of Kissinger's, told us that PFIAB never advised Bush

on Tiananmen Square because the issue there involved foreign policy, not intelligence. "So, whatever information Henry secured, he did not get it from PFIAB."

Such assurances did not convince Helms and others who wanted Kissinger off the board.

Helms's concentration on Kissinger temporarily deflected his interest from Tower. As we reported earlier, Bush put Tower on PFIAB as a consolation prize after the former senator from Texas couldn't get confirmed as secretary of defense.

Tower's confirmation hearings focused on allegations of womanizing, drinking and conflicts of interest because he served as a consultant to defense contractors. But behind the scenes, some members of Congress worried that Tower was a security risk. The Senate Armed Services Committee and a House panel secretly looked into allegations, for instance, that he had consorted with a Soviet KGB spy posing as a prostitute while serving as an arms control negotiator in Geneva.

We have learned that several GOP senators, Helms included, were so concerned that Tower had been compromised that they would likely have bucked Bush and voted against Tower's nomination for defense secretary if they hadn't been sure the Democrats would block the confirmation.

Helms was able to stick with the party line and vote for Tower's confirmation because the Democrats had the majority against Tower. But Bush is about to restructure the PFIAB, make Tower chairman and give every current member except Tower walking papers. Our sources say that if Bush tries to give Tower the job, Helms will protest.

TON POST

Wash. Post

At the state dinner,
red tie for Gorbachev

DINNER, from 1-C

by Ronald and Nancy Reagan. That evening set a high standard for superpower chumminess, ending with Gorbachev and pianist Van Cliburn singing verse after verse of "Moscow Nights." Gorbachev seemed unlikely to offer an encore this year. The evening's entertainment was opera singer Frederica von Stade.

In another departure, the State Dining Room was swept clean of any hint of Nancy Reagan, whose bristling summit experiences with Raisa Gorbachev are legendary. Nancy Reagan's famous red china stayed in the cupboard; Barbara Bush chose the flowered Johnson china, because "she likes to garden," her staff said.

Also unlike the Reagan years, when Nancy Reagan wielded the hostess powers, President Bush chose the guests.

Washington's power couple of the 1980s, Sen. Bob Dole (R., Kan.) and Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole, were both there, having glided into the '90s with connections intact. Earlier this week, the Republican senator was wisecracking about Gorbachev's troubles back home, joking that "if he gets off with more than three bags, he's staying."

After being formally received, the Bushes and Gorbachevs went to the family quarters on the second floor of the White House before making their grand, if dour-looking, entrance to music from the U.S. Marine Orchestra.

No wonder the Soviet leader appeared world-weary; earlier yesterday, his schedule included, among other events, two news conferences, a traffic-stopping meet-and-greet and an impromptu 45-minute luncheon address.

Gorbachev was full of surprises. He surprised Jane Fonda, Jesse Jackson and sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov with his comments at an odd-lot gathering of celebrated Americans put together for lunch at the Soviet Embassy. There, he wondered out loud where *perestroika*, or restructuring, was taking his troubled land.

He shocked reporters when he stopped, twice, to patiently and enthusiastically answer their questions in the White House driveway. In fact, he talked so long and with such animation in Russian that his translator could barely get a word in edge-wise.

And he just about blew away a pretty young woman in polka dots when he pulled her out of the crowd and posed fetchingly after stopping his limo to shake hands a block from the White House — during evening rush hour.

It was near madness at a downtown street corner when Gorbachev ordered his limousine to a halt, popped out and waded into a crowd of about 500 homebound Washingtonians, tourists and passersby hoping for a look at the Soviet leader.

Proximity might breed contempt and Gorbachev may be in major

trouble at home, but on the corner of 15th Street and New York Avenue on a sunny Thursday at 6 p.m., he heard strangers holler, "We love you."

Gorbachev told his street-corner admirers: "People want to be confident of their tomorrow."

Inquirer Washington Bureau correspondents Ellen Warren and Christopher Scanlan contributed to this article.

Here, for all of those who weren't invited to the Bushes' dinner last night, is a selective list of those who were, minus the Soviet delega-
tion and officers of the United States govern-
ment.

James H. Billington, librarian of Congress, and his wife, Marjorie; Tom Brokaw, NBC Nightly News anchorman, and his wife, Meredith; A.W. Clausen, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Bank of America Corp.; and his wife, Mary; actors Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy; actor Morgan Freeman and his wife, Myrna; the Rev. Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth; Donald Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, and his wife, Mary; Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve System; Andrea Mitchell, NBC White House correspondent; Armand Hammer, chairman and chief executive officer of Occidental Petroleum Corp.; John E. Jacob, chief executive officer of the National Urban League, and his wife, Barbara; Donald M. Kendall, chairman of the executive committee, PepsiCo, and his wife, Bim; George F. Kennan, of the Institute for Advanced Study, and his wife, Annelise; Henry A. Kissinger of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; John J. Murphy, chief executive officer of Dresser Industries, and his wife, Louise; Harold Poling, chief executive officer of Ford Motor Co., and his wife, Marian; Walter V. Shipley, chairman of Chemical Bank, and his wife, Judith; Hugh S. Sidey, writer for Time, and his wife, Anne; Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr., chairman of the New York Times, and his wife, Carol; singer Frederica Von Stade, and pianist Philip Fortenberry.

EXCERPT

# I Could See No Reason to Live

In an emotional and extraordinarily candid memoir, the former President describes the agony of his exile and his struggle for renewal

By Richard Nixon

FAREWELL

"My enemies wanted to make sure I did not rise again, in view of my past record of comebacks."

BILL PENCE

Haig reported to me that based on his conversation, he did not believe we would continue to suffer harassment by the special prosecutor. He had not reckoned with the young activists on Jaworski's staff.

Far from being satisfied by the resignation, their appeasement for finishing the injured victim were whetted. When my daughter Tricia's husband Ed Cox urged me not to resign, he warned me that this might happen. He had known several of Jaworski's staff at Harvard Law School and had served with some in the U.S. Attorney's office in New York City. He said, "I know these people. They are smart and ruthless. They hate you. They will harass you and hound you in civil and criminal actions across the country for the rest of your life." He was right.

They were following the dictum of the 19th century Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechayev: "It is not enough to kill an adversary. He must first be dishonored."

One after another, the blows rained down.

I resigned from the Supreme Court and the California and New York bars. The Supreme Court and California accepted my resignation. The New York Bar Association refused to do so and instituted disbarment proceedings.

Scores of lawsuits were filed against me by individuals seeking damages for assorted Government actions. Few involved presidential decisions. Most were dismissed, but all had to be defended.

The cost was staggering. In the 16 years since I resigned the presidency, I have spent more than $1.8 million in attorneys' fees to defend myself against such suits and to protect my rights that were threatened by Government action.

The Supreme Court ruled against me on my suit to gain possession of my papers and tapes, including those that were private.

A scandal magazine printed letters that I was supposed to have written to a countess in Spain whom I had never met. They were obvious forgeries, but the story was never retracted.

## San Clemente, 1974

As our plane circled the El Toro Marine Air Base on the afternoon of Aug. 9, I could see hundreds of cars lined up trying to get into the already overflowing parking area. I had not thought I could find the energy to make another speech that day, but I managed to thank them for welcoming us home, and I vowed to continue to fight for the great causes of peace, freedom and opportunity that had been my motivating principles from the time I first ran for Congress in 1946. As we walked toward the helicopter, I heard someone from the crowd shout out, "Whittier is still for you, Dick!"

Thanks to Gavin Herbert and a group of volunteers from U.S.C., La Casa Pacifica's grounds were beautiful almost beyond description. I said to Gavin, "It is good to be back in a house of peace." But it was only a lull before a storm.

The following day, the blows began to fall again. The special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, had been delighted when my chief of staff, Al Haig, informed him of my decision to resign. He thought it would be in the best interests of the country.

34

©1990 Richard Nixon. From *In the Arena*, to be published in April by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

NIXON E

WITH JULIE

> "In many ways it was worse for my family than for me. They had to suffer in silence."

GARY AFTON/THE WHITE HOUSE

The pounding continued unrelentingly. I was the favorite butt of jokes on the talk shows. Hundreds of columns attacked me. A number of anti-Nixon books were published. Those by critics I understood. Those by friends I found a bit hard to take.

The Rose Bowl game in 1975 was interrupted on television by an announcement of the conviction of John Mitchell and my other top aides. I could no longer even take refuge in my favorite avocation, watching sports on television.

It was not enough for my critics to say that I had made terrible mistakes. They seemed driven to prove that I represented the epitome of evil itself.

## My Second Most Painful Decision

I will never forget the moment that Jack Miller, my attorney from Washington, came into my office in San Clemente on Sept. 4, 1974, to inform me of President Ford's decision to stop the hemorrhaging by issuing a presidential pardon. Now I had to decide whether or not to accept it.

I told Miller I was worried the pardon would hurt Ford politically. He said that in the short run, it would. But he added that if the country continued to be obsessed by Watergate, Ford and others would suffer even more from being unable to devote their attention to urgent problems.

Miller also knew my desperate financial situation. He pointed out that the costs of defending actions against me would bankrupt me. In view of what happened soon thereafter, he was remarkably perceptive when he added that he thought that I had taken as much physically, mentally and emotionally as I could and that I should accept the pardon for my own well-being and my family's. His strongest argument was that because of the publicity over the past year and a half, there was no way I could get a fair trial in Washington.

Next to the resignation, accepting the pardon was the most painful decision of my political career. The statement I issued at the time accurately describes my feelings then and now:

> "I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy.

> "No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency—a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect."

The pardon was granted on Sept. 8. The predictable occurred. Ford went down in the polls, and I was subjected to a whole new round of attacks in the media.

## Nothing Left to Fight For

I have always believed that there is a direct relationship between mental and physical health. Events in the aftermath of the pardon proved it, as far as I am concerned. Twenty years had passed since I had last suffered from phlebitis, blood clots that usually occur in the legs. Just before my trip to the Mideast in June 1974, my left leg began to swell. Hot and cold compresses reduced the swelling, but it increased alarmingly again when I had to stand too long at various ceremonies. It became

even more aggravated when I went to the Soviet Union in July. In Minsk I had to walk for almost a mile and a half over cobblestone paths, and the pain was excruciating.

When I returned to Washington, the pain subsided, and I was so busy in the weeks before the resignation that I forgot about it completely. A few days after the pardon, the swelling recurred. My family doctor, Dr. John Lungren, urged me to go to the hospital, warning that if a clot should break loose and go to the lungs, it would be fatal. That got my attention. I went to the hospital.

For almost two weeks, I slept very little because the nurse had to come in every hour to refill the intravenous heparin medication to dissolve the blood clot. It was a miserable experience. When I returned home, I told Pat that I would never go to the hospital again.

Within three weeks, I was back. Lungren had warned me that sharp pains in the abdomen would be a danger signal. After X rays, the doctors decided that an operation should be performed immediately. I remember the pinprick of the anesthetist's needle and being wheeled down to the operating room, but for six days thereafter I was in and out of consciousness.

My first recollection was of a nurse slapping my face and calling me. "Richard, wake up," she said. "Richard, wake up." I knew it was not Pat or Lungren. In fact, only my mother called me Richard. When I woke up again, Lungren was taking my pulse. I told him that I was anxious to go home. He said, "Listen, Dick, we almost lost you last night. You are not going to go home for quite a while."

He told me I had gone into shock after the operation. My blood pressure had gone down to 60 over 0. Only after four transfusions over three hours were the doctors able to push it back to normal. I learned later that Pat, Tricia and Julie had been standing by me in the room for most of the night. When I woke up again, I asked Pat to come in. I now knew that I was in pretty desperate shape. Pat and I have seldom revealed our physical disabilities to each other. This time, I couldn't help it. I said that I didn't think I was going to make it.

She gripped my hand and said almost fiercely, "Don't talk that way. You have got to make it. You must not give up." As she spoke, my thoughts went back again to the Fund crisis in 1952. Just before we went onstage for the broadcast, when I was trying to get all of my thoughts together for the most important speech of my life, I told her, "I just don't think I can go through with this one." She grasped me firmly by the hand and said, "Of course you can." The words were the same, but now there was a difference. Then I had something larger than myself to fight for. Now it seemed that I had nothing left to fight for except my own life.

Among my first visitors was Jerry Ford, who was in California campaigning for congressional candidates. I must have looked like hell, because he blurted out, "Oh, Mr. President!," despite the fact that since my resignation we had been on a first-name basis. He did his best to give me a lift, but I knew that the pardon had hurt him and that the campaign was not going well.

Shortly afterward, a nurse wheeled me into another room, with a window. She pointed to a small plane with a sign trailing behind: GOD LOVES YOU AND SO DO WE. I learned that the Rev. Billy Graham's wife Ruth and some of her friends had arranged it. I am convinced now that but for the support of my family and the thoughts and prayers of countless people I have never met and would never have a chance to thank, I

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

35

EXCERPT

would not have made it.

There was still bad news to come. A few days later someone brought the results of the 1974 off-year elections to my hospital room. The Republican Party was in even worse shape than I was. I knew that from that time on, the Democrats who won would be called Watergate Democrats and the Republicans who lost would be called Watergate Republicans. After the millions of miles I had logged and the thousands of speeches I

ly. You tap strength you didn't know you had when you have to cope with adversity.

My six years in the wilderness in the 1960s helped me survive the crisis I confronted in 1974. But residing in the deepest valley is far different from passing through the wilderness. Historical precedents existed for what I went through in the 1960s. Others lost major elections, yet came back to win later. But there was no precedent for what faced me in the 1970s. No one had ever been so high and fallen so low. No one before had ever resigned the presidency.

I was down but not out. My enemies wanted to make sure I did not rise again in view of my past record of comebacks. They tried to discredit everything I had done, to blame me for my Administration's failures and to credit others for its successes. Newspaper articles invariably referred to me as the "disgraced former President." I was hated by some, ignored by others. It became unfashionable for even my friends to say anything positive about the Nixon era. While in the wilderness, De Gaulle once sardonically remarked, "Insults would have been more tolerable than indifference." I didn't have that problem—my enemies berated me, and many of my friends maintained a discreet distance.

LA CASA PACIFICA

"The grounds were beautiful almost beyond description. I said to a friend, 'It is good to be back in a house of peace.'"

PHOTO BY R. M. SCHULTZ

had made for Republican candidates over the years, I knew that this was my final legacy to the party. It would be a heavy burden for the rest of my life.

When I left the hospital and returned home to La Casa Pacifica, I thought that now, at least, I might get a little relief. It was not to be. Judge Sirica wanted me in this courtroom to testify against John Mitchell and the other defendants. He ordered three doctors to examine me to see if the reports on the seriousness of my illness were true. Even now, so-called biographers and journalists blithely inform their readers that I cynically arranged my near fatal illness to quell public opposition to the pardon.

So Sirica's three doctors came to San Clemente. Each took turns poking and pinching and pulling. One was obviously a little embarrassed by the exercise, but the other two seemed to enjoy their work. They were at least professional enough to report that I could under no circumstances travel to Washington and testify.

I did not get the lift that I should have from the news that I would not have to go to Washington. I was a physical wreck; I was emotionally drained; I was mentally burned out. This time, as compared with the other crises I had endured, I could see no reason to live, no cause to fight for. Unless a person has a reason to live for other than himself, he will die—first mentally, then emotionally, then physically.

At low points in the past, I have been sustained by recalling a note Clare Boothe Luce handed to me right after Watergate first broke, when she was sitting next to me at a meeting of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. It was St. Barton's Ode. "I am hurt but I am not slain! I will lie me down and bleed awhile—then I'll rise and fight again." This time it did not work. I did not have anything to fight for.

Three lessons stood out from my years in the wilderness after I lost the 1962 California Governor's race.

* Defeat is never fatal unless you give up.

* When you go through defeat, you are able to put your weaknesses in perspective and to develop an immune system to deal with them in the future.

* You never know how strong you are when things go smooth-

Getting Back to Par

My immediate priority was to recover my health. I needed to do this to have the energy to engage again in creative activities. To my great surprise, golf became my lifesaver. I was fortunate to have Colonel Jack Brennan, my top military aide during my last two years in the White House, as my administrative assistant in San Clemente. He was an excellent golfer, but even more important, a patient and understanding partner.

Combined with occasional swims in the cold water of the Pacific and a few laps in a heated pool, the golf routine did the trick. Within a year, I was shooting a few pars on the golf course and was back to par physically.

I also had to recover my financial health. All of my assets were invested in real estate. My presidential and congressional pensions took care of ordinary expenses. But I had to find a way to pay my attorneys' fees. In addition, the Government allowance for office expenses was inadequate to cover the staff I needed to answer my huge volume of mail. I needed extra income. I ruled out one potentially lucrative source: honoraria for speeches. It was not the right time for me to begin to speak out. But even more important, I had had a policy of not accepting honoraria for speeches ever since I had been elected Vice President in 1952. Presidents Hoover, Truman. Eisenhower and Johnson all refused honoraria, and I did not want to be the first former President to start the practice. I therefore decided to find some other source of income.

My physical recovery, while important, was not enough. A healthy vegetable is still a vegetable. As I recovered physically, I was able to tackle the more important but more difficult challenge of spiritual recovery. To recover physically involves regaining the ability to get up in the morning; to recover spiritual-ly requires restoring the will and desire to do so.

No one can recover spiritually from a major loss without the help of others. While a political figure depends on others in many ways, he ultimately rises and falls as a result of his own decisions and actions. A personal defeat therefore is an isolating experience. Spiritual recovery is hastened by overcoming the sense of isolation, by recognizing the fact that your family, friends and supporters still stand with you, and by putting the defeat in perspective.

My first line of support was my family. No man has ever had

36

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

NIXON E

a stronger family than I have had. In the weeks, months and years of slow recovery, a day never passed without their support. Never once did they moan about the disastrous impact of my shattering defeat on their lives. In many ways, it was worse for them than for me. When they read or saw the latest attack, their instinct was to refute the distortions and falsehoods. But they had to suffer in silence. They could not fight back.

I also relied on support from my friends. When you win in politics, you hear from everyone. When you lose, you hear from your friends. After Watergate, it was a miracle that I had as many as I did. Some came to see me, some telephoned, others wrote encouraging letters. As good friends they did not dwell on the tragedy of the past. Thankfully, they did not express sympathy, for the only thing worse than self-pity is to be the object of pity from others. And finally, the letters from tens of thousands of people from all over the world whom I had never met played an indispensable role in bucking up my spirits. It was heartwarming to know that while there was no longer a Silent Majority, at the least the minority that remained was not silent.

With the wounds of body and spirit healed, I was now prepared to deal with my greatest challenge—mental recovery. This was the decisive factor in my decision to write my memoirs. When I finished *Six Crises* after losing in 1960, I observed that writing the book was my seventh crisis, and I vowed that I would never write another. But writing my memoirs now served several purposes. It provided part of the income that I needed. It was an enormous mental challenge requiring full use of all my creative abilities. Writing a book is the most intensive exercise anyone can give his brain. Most important, it provided the therapy needed for a full spiritual recovery by enabling me to put Watergate behind me.

## The Myths of Watergate

Reliving those days in cold print was not easy, but I tried to close the book on that episode. In the three years I spent writing my memoirs. I addressed every facet of the crisis my excellent editorial staff, under the leadership of Frank Gannon, could uncover. I learned a number of things I had not known as the events of Watergate unfolded. I was able to put all the events of that time in perspective—to learn not only what happened but why, and to provide some guidance so that others could avoid a repetition of those problems.

As I wrote, I was able to look back at Watergate and separate myth from fact. At the core of the scandal was the fact that individuals associated with my re-election campaign were caught breaking into and installing telephone wiretaps at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. After their arrest, others in my campaign and in my Administration attempted to cover up this connection to minimize the political damage. I failed to take matters firmly into my own hands and discover the facts and to fire any and all people involved or implicated in the break-in. I was also accused of taking part in the cover-up by trying to obstruct the FBI's criminal investigation.

Alone, that would probably not have been enough to bring down my Administration. But the term "Watergate" has come to include a wide

range of other charges that my adversaries used to try to paint my Administration as, in their words, "the most corrupt in American history." Together, these accusations represented the myths of Watergate, the smoke screen of false charges that ultimately undercut my Administration's ability to govern effectively.

The most blatantly false myth was that I ordered the break-in at the Democratic headquarters. Millions of dollars were spent by the Executive Branch, the Congress and the office of the special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. Not one piece of evidence was discovered indicating that I ordered the break-in, knew about the plans for the wiretapping or received any information from it.

The most politically damaging myth was that I personally ordered the payment of money to Howard Hunt and the other original Watergate defendants to keep them silent. I did discuss this possibility during a meeting with John Dean and Bob Haldeman on March 21, 1973. In the tape recording of this meeting, it is clear that I considered paying the money. I should not have even considered this option, but the key facts were that I rejected offering clemency to the defendants as "wrong" and at the end of the conversation ruled out any White House payment of money to the defendants. Moreover, those who made this accusation ignored the even more crucial fact that no payments were made as a result of that conversation.

The most serious myth—the one that ultimately forced me to resign—was that, on my specific orders, the CIA obstructed the FBI from pursuing its criminal investigation of the Watergate break-in. I discussed this possible course of action with Bob Haldeman in the famous "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972. At that time, I thought that since some former CIA operatives had participated in the break-in, the CIA would be concerned that their exposure would reveal other, legitimate operations and operatives and that the agency would therefore welcome a chance to avoid that outcome. I thought that would also prevent the FBI from going into areas that would be politically embarrassing to us.

In my talk with Haldeman, I made the inexcusable error of following the recommendation from some members of my staff—some of whom, I later learned, had a personal stake in covering up the facts—and requesting that the CIA intervene. But that mistake was mitigated by two facts. First, the director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, and his deputy, Vernon Walters, ignored the White House request and refused to intervene with the FBI, despite the pressure from members of my staff. Second, when FBI director Pat Gray complained to me in a telephone call three weeks later, on July 12, about at-

### NEAR DEATH

> "When I woke up, I asked Pat to come in. I was in pretty desperate shape. I said that I didn't think I was going to make it."

TONY KORBY—REUTERS

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

37

EXCERPT

tempts to suppress his investigation. I told him
emphatically to go forward with it, and I in-
structed Haldeman and John Ehrlichman to
make sure the campaign and the Administra-
tion cooperated with the investigation "all
the way down the line." No obstruction of jus-
tice took place as a result of the June 23
conversation.

The most widely believed myth was that I
ordered massive illegal wiretapping and sur-
veillance of political opponents, members of
the House and Senate, and news media report-
ers. All of these charges were false, and no evi-
dence was presented to substantiate them.

The most ridiculous myth was that I was the first President to tape some of my conversations. F.D.R. was the first to do so. Scores of tapes are kept in the Eisenhower Library. Several thousand hours of tapes are stored in the Johnson Library, none of which will be available until the year 2023. Of the several hundred hours of tapes in the Kennedy Library, only 12% have so far been made public. The rest, according to the Kennedy Library officials, will be kept secret indefinitely.

What, then, was Watergate? When the
break-in first hit the news, my press secretary,
Ron Ziegler, aptly called it a third-rate bur-
glary. To compare Watergate with Teapot Dome, the Truman
five-percenter scandals and the Grant whiskey scandals misses
the point totally. No one in the Nixon Administration profited
from Watergate. No one ripped off the Government, as in pre-
vious scandals. Wrongdoing took place, but not for personal
gain. All Administrations have sought to protect themselves
from the political fallout of scandals. In retrospect, I would say
that Watergate was one part wrongdoing, one part blundering
and one part political vendetta by my enemies.

The Watergate break-in and cover-up greatly damaged the American political process. While not unusual in political campaigns, these actions were clearly illegal. Over the years, I had been the victim of dirty tricks and other kinds of vicious tactics in the cut and thrust of political warfare. What happened in Watergate—the facts, not the myths—was wrong. In retrospect, while I was not involved in the decision to conduct the break-in. I should have set a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and Administration. I should have established a moral tone that would have made such actions unthinkable. I did not. I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking a higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake. For that reason, I long ago accepted overall responsibility for the Watergate affair. What's more, I have paid, and am still paying, the price for it.

Apart from its illegality, Watergate was a tragedy of errors. Whoever ordered the break-in evidently knew little about politics. If the purpose was to gather political intelligence, the Democratic National Committee was a pathetic target. Strategy and tactics are set by the candidate and his staff, not the party bureaucracy. I also contributed to the errors. As a student of history, I should have known that leaders who do big things well must be on guard against stumbling on the little things. To paraphrase Talleyrand, Watergate was worse than a crime—it was a blunder.

When first informed about the break-in, I did not give it
sufficient attention, partly because I was preoccupied with my
China and Soviet initiatives and with my efforts to end the war
in Viet Nam and partly because I feared that some of my col-
leagues might be somehow involved. Some have said that my

GOLF

"To my great surprise,
golf became my
lifesaver."

JOHN COOPER - DICK'S CHAIRMAN OF THE FIRM

major mistake was to protect my subordinates.
They may be partly right. In any organization,
loyalty must run down, as well as up. I knew
those who were involved acted not for personal
gain but out of their deep belief in our cause.
That knowledge may have contributed to my
hesitation in tackling the question. I should
have focused on the issue immediately, dug out
the truth, fired everyone involved and taken
the political heat.

But what we remember as the Watergate
period was also a concerted political vendetta
by my opponents. Anyone who knows the
workings of hardball politics knows that the
smoke screen of false accusations—the myths
of Watergate—was not at all accidental. In this
respect, Watergate was not a morality play but
rather a political struggle. The basciess and
highly sensationalistic charges, the blatant dou-
ble standards, the party-line votes in congres-
sional investigating committees and the unwilling-
ingness of my adversaries and the media to
look into parallel wrongdoing within Demo-
cratic campaigns, all should tip off even the ca-
sual observer that the opposition was pursuing
not only justice but also political advantage.

The Final Comeback?

On Nov. 30, 1978, as I walked into the hall where I was to address the Oxford Union, the crowd greeted me with a standing ovation. I had received a very different reception outside. Several hundred demonstrators, many of them American students attending Oxford, surrounded my car as we entered the grounds. It was an ugly crowd. We could hear them chanting "Nixon go home!" as the president of the Union introduced me. I could see he was somewhat embarrassed, but I put him at ease when I opened my remarks by observing that the demonstrators made me feel very much at home.

The students particularly liked the question-and-answer
session. They were respectful, but they pulled no punches. The
most intriguing question was what my plans were for a role in
politics or foreign affairs. I responded that my political career
was over but that while I had retired from politics, I had not re-
tired from life. "So long as I have a breath in my body," I said,
"I am going to talk about the great issues that affect the world.
I am not going to keep my mouth shut. I am going to speak out
for peace and freedom." The question was unexpected, but the
off-the-cuff answer set forth exactly the guidelines I was to fol-
low in the years ahead through meetings with leaders around
the world, writing books and articles, and giving speeches and
off-the-record backgrounders for journalists.

What positive effect, if any, all this activity has had I do not
know. I do know that it had one negative fallout. My critics saw
what they considered to be a sinister purpose—that I was “or-
chestrating yet another comeback.” If this is so, my “orchestra”
is really a one-man band, because I do not have any control
over what anyone else thinks, says or writes.

Besides, as I said on *Meet the Press* in 1988, if I am trying to
make a comeback, “what am I going to come back to? We al-
ready have a very good mayor in Saddle River, and we have a
very good Governor in the state of New Jersey. It isn’t a come-
back. It isn’t to be well thought of. The purpose is to get a mes-
sage across, and then let history judge.” When John Chancellor
asked me how history would remember me, I predicted, “His-
tory will treat me fairly. Historians probably won’t, because
most historians are on the left.”

38

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

NIXON E

I shall continue to speak up for the policies that will lead to peace and freedom as long as I live. If people are interested in what I have to say, they can tune in. If they aren't, they do not have to. I intend to continue to speak out on the important issues for those who do want to hear my views.

## Searching for Recreation

People sometimes ask what a 77-year-old former President does for exercise and recreation. Unfortunately, I do not set a very good example. I have never gone hunting, and fishing just isn't my bag. I tried deep-sea fishing once as a teenager and gave it up because I used to get seasick. In 1952 Eisenhower tried to teach me how to cast for trout. It was a disaster. After hooking a limb the first three times, I caught his shirt on my fourth try. The lesson ended abruptly.

I don't ski or play tennis. People often ask me whether I play chess. I don't, but my grandson Christopher, 11, plays well enough already to give his father a run for his money. The only time I played gin rummy was in 1944, on a twelve-hour flight from Guadalcanal to Hawaii in the belly of a C-54 transport. The learning process was so expensive that I decided to stick to poker, which I still play once a year with Ambassador Walter Annenberg and other members of the Benevolent Marching and Philosophical Society of Philadelphia.

I go to an occasional baseball, football or basketball game. My most vivid memory of a sports event was seeing my first major league baseball game on July 4, 1936. The Yankees crushed the Senators in a doubleheader. A rookie outfielder for New York, Joe DiMaggio, hit a home run into the sun bleachers at Griffith Stadium where I was sitting. The next time I saw the Yankees play on the Fourth of July was on a blisteringly hot Monday afternoon in New York 47 years later. Dave Righetti threw a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox—his first, and mine as well. I shall never forget when he struck out Wade Boggs, the best hitter in baseball, with a high inside fastball for the final out.

I quit golf ten years ago, though I enjoyed the game. There were two reasons. One day in late 1978, I broke 80. It was on a relatively easy course in San Clemente, but for me it was like climbing Mount Everest. I knew I could never get better, and

so the competitive challenge was gone. Breaking 80 was an even greater thrill than getting a hole in one. I did get a hole in one once, but I don't remember much about it, except that it was on the third hole at Bel Air on Labor Day 1961, I used a MacGregor six-iron and a Spalding Dot ball, and my partner Randolph Scott birdied the hole.

The other reason I quit golf was the decisive one. I had to meet a deadline for my third book, *The Real War*. I simply could not do it and also find four hours a day to play golf. This time, however, I found a substitute. In 1969 I asked President de Gaulle what he did for exercise. He told me that he believed that walking was the best thing a leader could do for his mental, physical and emotional health. I now follow his advice and walk four miles a day. While I miss the competition and fellowship, I get three times as much exercise as I would playing a round of golf and riding between holes in a cart.

## The Press and Privacy

Although I had always had a lively interest in public affairs, I was not aware until after his death that Franklin D. Roosevelt was crippled by polio. I vividly recall seeing newsreels that showed him in Washington and abroad. They never showed a wheelchair or crutches, nor did newspaper accounts mention his disability. The media actively kept the secret for him. Some may disagree, but I believe the press deserve great credit for not disclosing his condition. Today they could not do so because of the television cameras that follow a President everywhere.

More to the point, they would not want to do so. You don't have to point to the Gary Hart exposé to find examples where investigative reporters have made public figures, and their families and friends, fair game for disclosure of every detail of their private lives. Highly qualified people are becoming increasingly reluctant to take Government positions in Washington because they don't want to expose their families to this merciless scrutiny. We can't go back to the pre-television standards of the F.D.R. days, but the media, in the interest of fairness and responsibility, might well consider reappraisuing some of their practices and eliminating some of the abuses.

Based on 44 years of dealing with members of the media on

the national level, I can say they are above average in intelligence. Most are liberal politically. Virtually all are ambitious, not so much for money as for status. A Pulitzer Prize means far more to them than a six-figure salary. They are proud of their profession and sometimes find it difficult to hide their contempt for the less well-educated politicians and businessmen they cover. Many, in my view justifiably, believe they are underpaid compared with the lobbyists and p.r. flacks who rip off their employers so shamefully. Finally, most are interesting people. An off-the-record session with a group of top-notch reporters can be far more stimulating and informative than a meeting with a group of Senators or Congressmen.

I have some other observations that will probably be more controversial.

Reporters from the print press, generally, although not always, are more intelligent and thoughtful than TV reporters. Photographers tend to be more sympathetic to conservatives than reporters, possibly because there appears to be an adversarial relationship between these two groups of journalists. A poli-

## MEMOIRS

> "Writing a book is the most intensive exercise anyone can give his brain. It provided the therapy... to put Watergate behind me."

OLLEKATING

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

43

E EXCERPT

tician will get a better shake from reporters outside of Wash-
ington than in Washington. Publishers have become virtual
political eunuchs: they still sign the checks, but the day is long
gone when they had much control over reporters. Often a can-
didate is endorsed on the editorial page and cut up in the news
stories, which gives many newspapers a schizophrenic quality.
Even the paper I read most regularly, the *Wall Street Journal*,
suffers from that syndrome. This is not necessarily bad, but
those who deal with the press should know what they are up
against.

Another observation, which I admit may result only from
my own experience, is that members of the press hate to be
proved wrong. I was warned about this after the Alger Hiss

case. Most reporters covering the case had thought Whittaker
Chambers was lying and Hiss was telling the truth, and they did
not appreciate being shown that they had been wrong. There
was an understandable tendency among some in the months
and years afterward to try to justify their original position, at
my expense.

Superficial observers are wrong when they attribute all of
my problems with the media to Watergate. They overlook the
seminal issue of Viet Nam. The war changed Lyndon Johnson's
press from highly positive to overwhelmingly negative, and poi-
soned my own relations with the press throughout my presi-
dency. I respected the right of press people as well as politi-
cians to disagree with me about the morality of our cause in

PLASTIC IS
TOUGHER
THAN
STEEL

OLIVER ATKINS PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION - GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

P
at was one of our greatest First Ladies. She was a superb and dignified good-will ambassador who deeply believed in the importance of personal diplomacy. She championed the cause of volunteerism, especially the Right to Read program. Through her leadership, the Parks to the People program built parks that poor people could visit. She established special tours of the White House for the handicapped and personally raised the money to light the mansion at night.

In spite of these accomplishments and countless more, I think she would prefer
to be remembered for another reason. It was hard for young people to grow up dur-
ing the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly children of celebrities. With their
father subject to massive attack. Tricia and Julie survived it all thanks to the strength
and serenity of their mother. They couldn't have done it without her.

Since we left the White House, Pat has never made a speech, accepted an award or been interviewed. We entertain friends and family at home but turn down the invitations we receive to highly publicized events. But despite being out of public view for 16 years, she has been on *Good Housekeeping's* ten-most-admired-women list: every year. I know why. Most people, even if they are basically happy, do not have an easy life. Some have had disappointments, others have suffered defeats. Many have experienced tragedy. Pat relates to these people, and they to her.

The resignation was harder on her than on me because she thought it was a mis-
take to resign. I still marvel at how she was able to go 48 hours without sleep while
she supervised the packing of all our personal belongings for the move to San Cle-
mente. My near fatal illness in California was also a greater burden on her. I was
physically, mentally and emotionally drained, so in addition to keeping up her own
spirits, she had to sustain mine.

After we left the White House, it did not seem possible that she could bear any
more. I followed my usual practice of not reading the criticism being heaped on me.
But she insisted on keeping informed. One day a well-meaning member of our staff
sent her a particularly vicious book written by two Washington Post staff members. It
was the last thing she read before tragedy struck.

On the morning of July 8, 1976, I went into the kitchen at Casa Pacifica to get some coffee. I noticed that Pat seemed to be unsteady and that the cup and saucer were shaking in her hand. The left side of her mouth was drooping. I hoped it might have been caused by an insect sting, but I knew better. It was a stroke. As we rode together in the ambulance to the hospital, her left side became paralyzed. Her speech was slurred and her mouth contorted.

Bouquets of flowers and get-well messages poured in from all over the world. But
only she could handle this crisis. No one else could help her. Before she left the hos-
pital, her speech difficulty had disappeared. But her left arm hung limply by her side.

Our home in San Clemente had a beautiful Spanish inner patio. She had an exer-
cise wheel installed on one of the walls. Day after day as I left to go over to the office,
I saw her standing there, turning the wheel around and around again. At times she
was disappointed because there seemed to be no visible improvement. But she never
gave up. Before the year was out, her recovery was complete. Doctors did not do it
for her. Her family did not do it for her. She did it by herself, which is characteristic of
her whole life. My critics in the media called her "Plastic Pat." What they did not
know was that her plastic was tougher than the finest steel.

When I make appearances these days. I am most often asked, "How is Pat?"
Considering what she has been through, she is remarkably well. You would never
know that she had suffered a stroke. She no longer participates in public events but
devotes all of her time and energy to her children and grandchildren.

44

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

NIXON E

Viet Nam, our conduct of the war and my efforts to win an honorable peace. But again, the events that followed our withdrawal from Viet Nam, including the plight of the boat people and the more than 1 million slaughtered by the new communist rulers of Cambodia, showed that media critics who said we were on the wrong side were mistaken.

The press and the politicians they cover are frequently at odds, but they have one thing in common: a very low rating in the public opinion polls. Most people believe that the press is biased toward liberal causes, and I would agree. But charges that the press is generally inaccurate in its reporting are frequently unfair. Generally, I have been impressed by how accurately reporters who reach the national level cover their stories. The contention that reporters have bad manners is also usually a bad rap. While reporters are always persistent, they are usually courteous. The antics of a few oddballs who stamp their feet and holler like children to get attention should not be held against the entire group.

Here are my rules for dealing with the press:

■ Don't play favorites. Doing so gives a short-term advantage but does more harm than good in the long run. I often asked Henry Kissinger to give interviews not just to the select élite in the Washington press corps but to some of the fine reporters from the less well-known papers around the country. If for some reason you are de-serted by your tiny circle of beltway bigwigs, you might wish you had cultivated some friends in the hinterlands.

■ Don't cancel a subscription, but don't be afraid to cancel an unfriendly reporter's ticket on some plum presidential trip. There is no law that says if a reporter has a habit of giving you the shaft, you have to continue to give him privileged treatment.

■ Wining and dining the press should generally be avoided except on an arm's-length basis. The best reporters resent being wooed in such a superficial way, and no reporter will sit on a negative story because you gave him brunch last week.

■ One tactic that should be used only sparingly is for a public official who has been attacked by the press to counterattack. He may win in the short run. But in the long run the press has the last word, and they

will never forgive him for taking them on. This does not mean that he should take their barbs lying down or that he should go crawling after them to try to win their support. It does mean that he should give as good as he receives, but in a manner that will not expose him to the charge that he is taking on the press to divert attention from his own vulnerabilities.

■ A President's ultimate weapon is to go over the heads of the press to the country, as I did in the so-called "Checkers Speech" in 1952 and the "Silent Majority" address in 1969 to mobilize public opinion. But you cannot go to the well too often. Only on a major issue of universal concern should a President try to reach the people directly to avoid having his views filtered through the press.

## Into the Twilight

As I look back to the time I made the decision to enter politics more than 40 years ago, three goals motivated me: peace abroad, a better life for people at home and the victory of freedom over tyranny throughout the world. I have taken some great risks and have fought many battles in attempting to serve

those goals. By exposing Alger Hiss. I earned the undying enmity of many powerful people who might otherwise have at worst taken a neutral view of me. I do not regret losing these people's support. But by going to China, I lost the support of many fellow conservatives who believed we should not have normal relations with any communist power, even if it was unfriendly toward the Soviet Union. By refusing to accept any but the most honorable and equitable peace in Viet Nam, I lost the support of many liberals, conservatives and moderates who felt that supporting me was just too risky politically. These are examples of the perils of purpose.

While it has been a rough game, it has been worth it. I might not want to do it again, but I would not have missed it. I know I have lived for a purpose, and I have at least in part achieved it. You must live your life for something more important than your life alone. One who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only by losing yourself in this way can you really find yourself.

My most vivid memory of the dark days after my resignation is a conversation with Walter Annenberg shortly after I re-

turned to San Clemente. He knew I was discouraged. He tried to buck up my spirits. He said, "Whether you have been knocked down or are on the ropes, always remember that life is 99 rounds." Today, the battle I started to wage in 1946 when I first ran for Congress is not over. I still have a few rounds to go.

Two thousand years ago, Sophocles wrote, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been." There is still some time before the sun goes down, but even now, I can look back and say that the day has indeed been splendid. In view of the ordeals I have endured, this may strike some as an incredible conclusion. I believe, however, that the richness of life is measured by its breadth, its height and its depth. It has been my good fortune to have lived a very long and a very full life, one in which I have been at the heights but also at the depths.

I shall always remember my first visit to the Grand Canyon 65 years ago. I did not believe any view could be more spectacular than the one from the heights of the South Rim until I hiked seven miles down to the river below and looked back up. Only then did I fully appreciate the true majesty of one of nature's seven wonders of the world. Only when you have been in the depths can you truly appreciate the heights.

DAVID GRAF

SPORTS FAN

"I shall never forget when Dave Righetti struck out Wade Boggs, the best hitter in baseball, with a high inside fastball for the final out."

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

45

INTERVIEW

# Paying The Price

RICHARD NIXON believes he will always be known as the “Watergate man,” the President who resigned the office, and expects little charity from history

By JOHN STACKS and STROBE TALBOTT

**Q. How do you expect the Watergate affair to be judged in the future?**

A. Clare Boothe Luce once said that each person in history can be summed up in one sentence. This was after I had gone to China. She said, "You will be summed up, 'He went to China.'" Historians are more likely to lead with "He resigned the office."

The jury has already come in, and there's nothing that's going to change it. There's no appeal. Historians will judge it harshly. That's what I would say on that.

**Q. Why did you write this book?**

A. I really wrote this book for those who have suffered losses or defeats and so forth, and who think that life is over. I felt that if I could share with them my own experiences, it might help.

The problem with that, of course, is that resigning the presidency is something that is beyond their imagination. And so, consequently, that's why throughout the book I tried to put it in a context that they could understand. But I felt that if I could let them see what I went through, and how I at least recovered in part, that that might tell them that life wasn't over.

**Q. You say in your new book that you recovered in part. You also say that you have paid, and in fact are still paying, the price for it.**

A. By paying the price, I mean in terms of being able to influence the course of events. I mean, every time I make a speech, or every time I write a book, inevitably the reviewers refer to the "disgraced former President."

And I consider, for whatever time I have left, that what is most important is to be able to affect the course of events. My experience has been somewhat unique. I am probably wrong on a number of things, but at least it's a point of view.

The difficulty is that getting that point of view across is compromised by the fact that they say, Oh, this is the Watergate man, so we're not going to pay any attention to what he

does. Now that attitude has receded substantially, and over a period of time it may recede more, but that's what I meant by that.

**Q. Do you think the price you paid was fair, or do you think it was disproportionate to what happened?**

A. I don't think I'm the best judge of that. It was a price that was inevitable, and I accepted the fact that it had to be paid. I must say that many of my friends and my family think it was very unfair and disproportionate, but I'm not going to even comment about if it was fair or disproportionate.

**Q. I want to ask you a Watergate trivia question or two.**

A. There's nothing trivial about Watergate.

**Q. Do you have any reflections on the somewhat ambiguous role that was played by your White House chief of staff Al Haig?**

A. I have never shared the mistrust that many have about Haig.

Al Haig was a consummate bureaucrat, and that's said with admiration rather than condemnation. You can't get up that high in the Army without being a consummate bureaucrat. Eisenhower was a consummate bureaucrat too.

I think in A's case, he would engage in activities that might have a double meaning. But I think as far as his goal was concerned, it was always one of loyalty to the office, loyalty to me, and I think it was almost as hard on him as on me when he came to the conclusion that I should resign. That's my view about Al.

**Q. Some say he is probably the best candidate for Deep Throat.**

**Do you believe that?**

A. I can't believe that's the case. It is possible. I mean, anything is possible.

**Q. Had you planned, if the Supreme Court was less than unanimous, at 6-2 or 5-3, on the tapes question to contest or to resist?**

A. No. I had that as a possible option, but I hadn't planned it in advance, saying if we get one or two votes, that then we will resist it. No.

**Q. One of the things Watergate derailed was your planned New American Revolution. Instead we got the Reagan revolution. How would you draw the contrast between the two?**

A. I won't say anything in this interview that is critical of him and the Reagan revolution, but basically we had different approaches.

I think in his case, he had very little confidence in what Government could do in some of these areas because he thought Government could screw it up. He looked at the Great Society programs, and because they failed, he thought all Government action failed.

In my case, I just looked at the Great Society programs, and I said, Well, they failed, but they were aimed at real problems. And now I want to find some answers.

**Q. How do you measure George Bush?**

A. I consider him to be a progressive Republican. He is highly intelligent. He is hands-on. He's not a bomb thrower, but because he isn't a bomb thrower he doesn't have any interceptions. That's one of the reasons he's doing as well as he has. Bush—I ought to leave it in football terms—

46

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

NIXON I

"Had I survived, I think South Viet Nam would still be a viable non-Communist enclave."

he's the Joe Montana. The short, sure pass. He has a very high percentage.

**Q.** You wrote that Gorbachev may turn out to be not only the man of the decade—

A. But man of the century.

**Q.** In the short time since you finished your book a great deal has happened in the Soviet Union. What do you make of events there in the past few weeks?

A. I look at Gorbachev somewhat this way: I see him as a troika. I seem him first as a communist. Second, he's a Russian nationalist. Maybe we should say he's proud of his country; he's a patriot. His purpose is not to abandon communism but to save it. But he also has another facet, which at times overrides the other two, that he is a great, pragmatic politician. And as a pragmatic politician, he sometimes will overrule even his basic communist instincts, or even his national instincts, in the event that his political survival requires it.

But also he's a great gambler. He's a great actor. He has decided that he would risk his power in order to save his reforms, rather than risk his reforms in order to save his power.

Now that was a mountaintop decision. And that's what Gorbachev has done. It was a gutsy decision. And he also believes, because he's so self-confident, that he'll win. Five years from now, he believes that reforms will work, and that if he goes before the people, he will not have lost his power.

One more point about Gorbachev. I compare him to Khrushchev. Khrushchev was not well educated, but he was smarter than Gorbachev and quicker than Gorbachev. But Khrushchev had a fatal weakness. He was rash. Gorbachev is not rash, but he does have a temper.

We have some who say that the changes in the Soviet Union happened because the U.S. under Reagan had a booming economy and a stronger military; it had SDI [the Strategic Defense Initiative], which the Soviet Union would have to spend billions of dollars to compete with, and had a firm foreign policy.

On the other side, some argue—and I agree—that the primary factor was internal. Communism didn't work: it didn't work there, it didn't work in Eastern Europe, it didn't work in the Third World. What we did may have accelerated the process.

But even had the U.S. not taken the line it did, this would have happened.

TIME APRIL 2, 1990

47

E INTERVIEW

**Q. If your policy of détente had continued, might it too have created the circumstances that we now see?**

**A.** In my view, yes. Of course, I'm a prejudiced witness on that. Now, détente practiced with linkage would have worked. What has happened now might have happened sooner.

**Q. Is the cold war really over?**

**A.** The Soviets have lost the cold war, but the West has not won it. It is not enough to say now that people have rejected communism, that we're home free. Waging a revolution is difficult, but not nearly as difficult as governing. That is the problem in all the countries of Eastern Europe. I'm not enthused about this idea of sending our political experts over and telling these poor people how to win an election. I think it's a little silly and even insulting. What they need is economic experts from the private sector, and maybe some from the Government.

**Q. Looking back on the Viet Nam War, what second thoughts do you have?**

**A.** I was asked that about [the invasion of] Cambodia once after a speech at Oxford. I said, "Yes, I wish I'd done it sooner." That was a shocker. And going further, Why didn't you do the May 8 bombing and mining sooner? Why didn't you do the December bombing sooner? And the point was, it should have been done sooner, but for one thing, I didn't feel first that the traffic would bear it within the Administration.

We might have lost half the Cabinet, certainly. Neither [Secretary of State William] Rogers nor [Secretary of Defense Melvin] Laird—not because they were doves, but because they just thought it was the wrong decision—would have supported an all-out attack in order to bring the war to a conclusion.

Eisenhower and I were once talking in 1967; Eisenhower felt we should declare war. He said, "You can declare war, then you can handle all these debaters and the bomb throwers." But the problem with declaring war was that the Russians and the Chinese both had treaties with North Viet Nam.

So the declaration of war didn't appeal. But I was also thinking of what we could do after Viet Nam. It was essential to have a new relationship with the Russians, have a new relationship with the Chinese, and I felt that at that time, early on, it would have made it difficult, almost impossible, to develop that new relationship had we declared war. It would have broken it off. In retrospect, I don't think so. In retrospect, I think we could have done it. And it may have been a mistake of judgment, but at the time, that's the reason I didn't do it.

**Q.** Some people say that when all was finally said and done you—

**A.** Didn't get any more than we would have gotten earlier?

**Q.** That in 1969 you could have gotten just about what you got in the end—a kind of a decent interval, the North Viet Nam

army's forces in place in the South, POWs—and that therefore the price in American lives was way too high.

**A.** I know that argument, and I don't agree with it. Kissinger and I have often talked about that. And there, we have to look at the intricacies of the peace agreement of '73. Had that agreement been implemented as it was, it would be a very different situation than it is at the present time.

But as you know, there were two aspects of the agreement. One has been totally forgotten. The two aspects were: one, that the U.S. would continue to support South Viet Nam, just as the Soviets would be expected to be supporting North Viet Nam. The other was that the U.S., in the event that the North Vietnamese complied with the terms, would also support them economically. In other words, there was the economic package.

Naturally, this is self-serving, but everything I say is self-serving. But had I survived, I think that it would have been possible to have implemented the agreement. South Viet Nam would still be a viable non-Communist enclave or whatever you want to call it. But because I think that I had enormous credibility with the North—because of what I'd

done on May 8 [ordering the mining of North Vietnamese ports], because of what I'd done in December [ordering the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong]—they thought, Well, this unpredictable so-and-so, we can't be sure if we attack. You've got to remember, too, that the peace agreement worked for two years.

**Q.** If you'll pardon me, this is the theory according to which you were a madman acting, or gambling, or whatever you want to call it.

**A.** You know, they all talk about the difference between Eisenhower and Dulles and Nixon and Kissinger. Eisenhower was the very reasonable fellow, he loved peace and all the rest, and

Dulles was a hawk who was talking about the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe.

And then the point is that they say that in Nixon's case and Kissinger's case, it is just the other way around. Kissinger is the reasonable fellow, he's from Harvard and all the rest, he'll be reasonable working these things out. But he's got this guy back there in Washington whom he just has to control. And if his warlike instincts prevail here, you'd better watch out. You see?

Now as a matter of fact, let me tell you, Dulles didn't do anything without Eisenhower's support. Eisenhower was really a hands-on President, particularly in foreign policy. And Eisenhower, he could be very curt at times. He'd just cut them short, his Cabinet members. He said, "Listen, I'll make the decisions regarding what the defense budget is going to be." He could be so genial, yet so cold.

And I would say the same was true with me and Kissinger. We would disagree politically at times. For example, a major disagreement we had was with regard to the war, but it was before the elections, you remember, in 1972. And Kissinger politically felt very strongly that it was important to get an agreement before the elections.

I knew that politically it was not a liability, particularly

"Every time I make a speech, or every time I write a book, inevitably the reviewers refer to the 'disgraced former President.'"

48

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

NIXONE

in view of the irresponsibility of the antiwar crowd. So we had a difference politically, and that's when Henry made his famous "Peace is at hand" statement, and I had to back off of it. Henry had greater confidence in the efficacy of negotiations than I had. I think that is the difference. He thought that even fanatics would be reasonable insular as negotiating is concerned. He could not accept the fact of all of the forces going against him. I used to say, "Henry, I'll take care of the politics."

Henry is a world-class strategist. He has incredible stamina, which makes him a great negotiator. He'll wear you out. How he does it, I don't know. He has an insatiable appetite for all the treats they put on the table. Henry would sit there in negotiations, he'd have the peanuts out and the rest, and he'd be talking between mouthfuls. But on the other hand, that gave him the energy to keep going. But Henry needed it.

**Q. I wanted to ask you again about '72, the fall period when Kissinger declares, "Peace is at hand." And you at that point are unsure. He feels it's necessary for the election, and you feel it's not a liability. Did you feel it was actually detrimental politically to arrive at a settlement?**

**A.** Oh, no. I felt it would have been very helpful politically if we could have a settlement before the election. But I felt that until it was nailed, we should not even breathe a word about it, because I thought that then it put the responsibility on us to make the concessions.

The second point was, I felt we would be in a much stronger position after the election, after a tremendous mandate, after the antiwar crowd had been totally defeated. I thought that then we could really get these people to, shall we say, cry uncle.

**Q. One could argue that during the last two years of your presidency, Kissinger was somewhat out of your control.**

**A.** No. Kissinger never took a step without informing me. He was always very circumspect. Kissinger is a great bureaucrat.

**Q. He makes quite a point in his memoirs of where he went off the reservation and did what he thought was right, making his own political judgment or his own strategic judgment or his own moral judgment.**

**A.** That he does. I have heard that. I haven't read it. I don't read books about myself. I have read reviews of the books. I'm saying that as far as I'm concerned, I have never felt that he was out of control, that he was doing something he thought I would disapprove. And for example, I've noticed some columns indicating that he was really opposed to the so-called Christmas bombing. . . That's nonsense. He was for it, all the way. And so was I.

**Q. But you were never crazy about the idea of making him Secretary of State, were you?**

**A.** It was a difficult time, because Bill Rogers was my friend. And Rogers I think had done, really, under the circumstances, a very credible job as Secretary of State. But

Kissinger at that point I considered indispensable. With the Watergate problem, we didn't have any choices.

**Q. There are no regrets on that score.**

**A.** If I had them, I wouldn't tell you. Put it that way.

**Q. You have conjured up the danger that Japan and China will get together in the next century.**

**A.** It would be a very natural thing to happen. You look at what China has and what Japan has. China has resources: it has a potentially highly qualified, intelligent people. And here's Japan, with less arable land than the state of California and no oil reserve. So it's a natural. It's a marriage made in heaven, economically. And that could happen.

Let's look at it from China's standpoint. Let's assume the U.S. isolates them because of our concern about human rights. Where do the Chinese look?

They're not going to look to the Soviet Union because it's a failure, and even these latest announcements all indicate that the Chinese are all for economic reforms. And they're going to try to goose them up. Even [Premier] Li Peng [favors that], because I've talked to him. All the Chinese leaders, from the extreme reactionaries to the more progressive ones, are for economic reforms. Japan is an economic miracle, an economic success story. So they turn to Japan.

The U.S. needs to be in north Asia as a major player along with the Chinese, the Japanese and the Soviet Union.

**Q. And one should not expect a flowering of democracy anytime soon?**

**A.** Not soon, no. I don't mean the Chinese people do not have a potential interest in and, frankly, respect for and probably desire to have so-called democracy. But if you look at the country today and how far it is in its educational standards, it's a long way off before that seeps down. I think, without question, our strategic interests require that we re-establish a constructive relationship with China. Human rights requires it too, because Li Peng is not totally in control. There are others who will be contesting with him for power. The U.S. will always come down on the side of the progressives and the reformers, rather than the reactionaries.

**Q. Have you set any specific goals for yourself?**

**A.** No, not at this point. I see some of my contemporaries on television these days. I don't intend to reach that point. I haven't quite reached it yet. It's very important for somebody not to try to stay too long in the public life, particularly in the television age. Some people are surprised at me that I'm ambulatory.

**Q. You've made so much of the importance to you of the struggle itself. Not just victory but, more important, the struggle. Do you feel that now the struggle's over for you?**

**A.** No. I must find new challenges. Because the moment that you think the struggle is over, when you have nothing to live for other than yourself, you're finished.

> **"I must find new challenges... the moment that you think the struggle is over, when you have nothing to live for other than yourself, you're finished."**

TIME, APRIL 2, 1990

49

Cesare Sclarandis, right, and above, serving Indira Gandhi and George Shultz.

Chronicles

Wash. Post
Sun. Aug. 26,
1990

# Witness With
Diplomatic
Amenity

## Secrets of State's Chiefs,
From Their Longtime Maitre d'

By Sarah Booth Conroy
Washington Post Staff Writer

... Next to the Secretary, you are probably the most important person at State. Without you to preside over the 8th Floor Dining Room tempers would undoubtedly fray and war would surely break out.

Of course, I hold you personally responsible for the 30 pounds I put on during my term of office. But I am willing to overlook that because there are very few things on which present and former Secretaries of State are in total agreement. Our affection and regard for you is one of them...

—[signed] Henry Kissinger

"They also serve who only stand and wait" can truly be said of Washington's maitres d', butlers and waiters. They stand in the background of great events. And they wait on those who move multitudes and shake continents. Theirs are the faces in the shadow of news photographs, the hands whose bodies are cut out of the picture.

In such a career, maitre d' Cesare Sclarandis stood at the pinnacle. In his 53-year career, he learned to be in the right place at the right time, speak five languages, master at least five elaborate table services, recognize—and please—crowned heads and elected officials, and suppress secrets and opinions.

Dean Rusk, secretary of state during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, who hired Sclarandis in 1962 to serve the secretary and his principal guests, once wrote the best description of Sclarandis's service:

> Big things are made up out of a lot of little things and unless the little things go just right, the big things may not succeed. Your dedicated service... has made a genuine contribution to the leadership of the Department of State, and we are all grateful for the efficiency, courtesy and good cheer which you have always shown.

At 78, 38 years after he and his wife, Ida, immigrated to Washington, the Italian-born Sclarandis has reached the time of life when he can sit with his wife at their dining room table with espresso and panettone—and put together his scrapbooks of photographs and letters. He's started a spiral-bound notebook with the title "A Lifetime of Service." You could call it "What the Maitre d' Knew."

Sclarandis has counted the great ones he has served at castles and chateaus in his native Italy, Bulgaria and Switzerland, at the State Department in Foggy Bottom, in private houses on the Potomac and in embassies on 16th

> Street. If he hasn't forgotten anyone, the total is 24 kings and queens; 36 presidents of foreign countries, plus six presidents of Italy and eight of the United States; and seven U.S. secretaries of state. An Italian president honored him with a medal.

## On Henry Kissinger

"Everybody was scared of Secretary Kissinger," said Sclarandis. "He gave us a hard time, because he wanted to eat what he wanted, but his doctor insisted we serve him a strict no-cholesterol diet."

Once, despite Kissinger's orders for real eggs, Sclarandis was constrained by the medical dictum to serve him the imitation variety at a breakfast for Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Dobrynin. Kissinger got even by telling Dobrynin—for whom Sclarandis sometimes moonlighted—that Sclarandis was a spy.

When Sclarandis served Elizabeth Taylor at lunch with Kissinger, the secretary warned him that the presence of his guest was a state secret and Sclarandis was under oath not to tell. "And then he told everybody else in the department about his guest," said the waiter. "And accused me of not letting him be alone with her." Gna Lollobrigida (whose Italian looks Sclarandis preferred) was also invited to lunch at State in 1977—but she arrived an hour late, and Kissinger had his lunch without her.

2

Sclarandis attending to William Rogers and the wife of Eisenhower Secretary of State Christian Herter and, at right, on the cover of a magazine, waiting on Henry Kissinger and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin.

On King Faisal

The only dignitary to bring his own dinner was the late Saudi king. Faisal visited the State Department several times on Sclarandis's watch, and "ate only the meals prepared by his own cooks, who came with a small electric stove and prepared his food on a con- sole next to the head table."

On John F. Kennedy

One Washington maxim warns: Be polite to a congressman because he may be elected president.

Sclarandis first met John F. Kennedy, a young bachelor congressman, in 1952, when hostess Marie Beale summoned Kennedy to a black-tie dinner with 20 other members of Congress at Decatur House, where Sclarandis was a butler. Such an invitation in those days had the power of a royal command. Mrs. Beale was a legend: Presidents had come and gone from the White House down the street, but Beale stayed on in the last private residence on Lafayette Square, at the corner of Jackson Place and H Street.

The day, the hour, the minute

came, and the party was preparing to go in to dinner—but no Kennedy. Sclarandis was ordered by the mistress of the house to telephone the congressman. Feet up at home, Kennedy confessed he'd written down the wrong date, but he'd be right over.

"When Kennedy arrived—in a brown business suit and red tie—the dinner was half over," said Sclarandis. Mrs. Beale gave Kennedy a public scolding for being late and not changing his clothes. "He blushed," remembered Sclarandis.

On another occasion, Sclarandis was hired for a day to serve at Merrywood, the Potomac Palisades estate of Hugh Auchincloss, stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier. Kennedy was the first to arrive, and he asked for a Bloody Mary. At Decatur House doubtless no one had ever asked Sclarandis for anything stronger than sherry. "Kennedy realized quickly that I didn't know how to mix that drink, so he showed me."

The Kennedy recipe, still followed by Sclarandis: a squeeze of lemon, two drops of Worcestershire sauce, two drops of angostura bitters and two ounces of vodka, topped with tomato juice.

The last time Sclarandis saw Kennedy was at the Bolivian Embassy on Oct. 22, 1963, at a luncheon in his honor, given by the Bolivian president. "I remember President Kennedy used a special chair to ease his back pain. The Secret Service gave me a bottle of special water to open only after the president was seated at the table. He drank the full quart."

A month later, Sclarandis was serving lunch at the Chilean Embassy for the president of Chile, 28 ambassadors and Sen. Hubert Humphrey. "I was given a message for Humphrey that the White House was calling. He took the call in the pantry and came back to tell us that the president had been shot and was in the hospital, with no explanation of his condition. Fifteen minutes later, the White House called Humphrey again. And he gravely announced to us that the president was dead."

Most of the leaders of the world came to the Kennedy funeral and afterward to a buffet meal at the State Department. Not all of them, by Sclarandis's standards, conducted themselves as such dignitaries should. "The last personage to come to the eighth-floor dining room was General de Gaulle, accompanied by Secretary Rusk. When [Rusk] tried to escort him to the French Embassy's table, de Gaulle refused, saying, 'I have no time.' Rusk asked de Gaulle to stay at least five minutes, but he repeated, he had no time. He made himself a little

3

sandwich of turkey breast and then
left the room."

But de Gaulle's undiplomatic man-
ners were punished, Sclarandis re-
calls, when Rusk courteously escorted
de Gaulle to the Citroen that the
Frenchman had specified in place of
an American limousine. "When the tall
general tried to get in the Citroen, he
had to do almost acrobatic maneuvers
to fold in his long body. His military
cap fell off, and the people watching
laughed."

On the Soviets

In 1973, at the signing of a treaty
with the Soviets, Sclarandis served
champagne to President Nixon and
Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev shook his
glass and spilled the champagne. "Lat-
er, Secretary [of State] William Rog-
ers told me that Brezhnev was just be-
ing funny and he had done the same
thing in Moscow—and he'd pushed
the waiters and made them spill the
beverages." Sclarandis was horrified.

Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, bumped into Sclarandis himself, when the maitre d' was serving a Campari soda to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands—and Sclarandis spilled the drink. They laughed and told him not to worry. “For them it was a funny thing, but I was very humiliated.”

On Dean Rusk

In 1964, a diplomatic dinner began for Rusk in a receiving line at 7:30 p.m. in the State Department Diplomatic Reception Rooms. The dinner ended but the dean of the diplomatic corps, Nicaraguan Ambassador Guillermo Sevilla-Sacasa, delivered an after-dinner speech; such speeches by the ambassador were famous for their length. The Swedish ambassador went to sleep. The antique clock in the hall marked 1:30 a.m. by the time Rusk, as protocol prescribes, could finally escort Sevilla-Sacasa and his wife to the elevator. "Secretary Rusk came back to the dining room, where the waiters, without their jackets, were taking down the table," recalled Sclarandis. "By then it was 2 a.m." But the secretary called the photographer and had him take a picture of himself with the waiters—to express his gratitude for their long day. It still seems to worry Sclarandis a bit that Rusk was in black tie and the waiters didn't have time to put their coats back on.

On George Shultz

Though Sclarandis has double dis-
cretion, as a butler and a State De-
partment employee, it's easy to sus-
pect that George Shultz, the last
secretary of state whom Sclarandis

served, is his favorite. In 1984, at the
75th-birthday dinner for Dean Rusk at
the State Department, Shultz honored
Rusk, among other things, for being
the first secretary of state to be
served by Sclarandis.

When the waiter temporarily left
the department that same year to
have a cataract operation, Shultz
asked all the secretaries Sclarandis
had served in his 22 years to write
him. And they did.

A Lifetime of Discretion

Sclarandis was born in the Italian
Piedmont. His father was a tailor. The
son worked from the age of 9 until he
was 20 as a farmer. (In Washington,
he's always had a vegetable garden.
No doubt, part of his popularity comes
from his discreet gifts of fresh vegeta-
bles to important desks and ritzy ad-
dresses.)

When he was 20, he was hired to be
a member of the household staff of a
daughter of the king of Italy; from
there, he became a butler in the Ital-
ian Embassy in Bulgaria. During
World War II, his ambassador, seeing
Italy's defeat coming, left for Switzer-
land, and convinced Sclarandis of the
wisdom of coming with him.

Many the titled Italians were refu-
gees there. Every week, Sclarandis,
with the Italian Embassy's gasoline al-
lotment, would drive the limousine
around to collect the nobility to play
cards at the ambassador's residence.
One of the players was Allen Dulles,
who became CIA director. Dulles be-
friended Sclarandis and found him a
job with the U.S. ambassador, who
was on his way back to Washington.

Shortly after they arrived in 1952,
the ambassador's ill health caused the
curtailment of their entertaining and
his wife found jobs with Marie Beale
for Sclarandis and his wife, Ida, whom
Sclarandis had met and married when
he was living in Switzerland. "My wife
had the worst job as Mrs. Beale's per-
sonal maid," said Sclarandis. "She
worked 18 hours a day."

At one of the Beale dinners for
22—with guests including presiden-
tial candidate Adlai Stevenson—the
ceiling fell in on the dining table. Only
one guest, a diplomatic wife, was
slightly injured. But Beale's sensibili-
ties were hard hit, and she packed up
the household and moved to Europe
until all was repaired.

After her death—she'd left instruc-
tions with Sclarandis as to who was

(4)

Cesare Sclarandis in the Thomas Jefferson Room at the State Department.

not to be invited to her funeral—the couple and their family stayed on as caretakers and curators of the house, bequeathed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And in the 1960s, Sclarandis, in his early fifties, began his State Department career, first part-time and then full-time, though he always served at embassies and private houses as well. He'd be at State still, had not his Mercedes-Benz been struck by a speeding bus in Rock Creek Park five years ago, resulting in injuries that ended his career. The first flowers he received came from the Shultzes.

Today, Cesare and Ida Sclarandis live in Arlington. Thanks, in part, to their real estate investments, he's provided houses for his two sons, two daughters and his 17 grandchildren. Next month, they go to Italy for a few weeks to visit his relatives.

It all proves that if you work hard, are good at what you do and are a friend to fortune, then you can say, as Cesare Sclarandis once wrote to George Shultz: "I tried-to do my best job and was more than rewarded by all the leaders whom I have been fortunate to serve."

THE WASHINGTON POST

SOCCER

...R1

SATURDAY, JULY 7, 1990 D3

# Kissinger, Fricker Assure
'First-Rate Show' in U.S.

By William Gildea

Washington Post Staff Writer

ROME, July 6—Henry Kissinger, vice chairman of the World Cup '94 Organizing Committee, predicted at a news conference today that the United States would put on “a first-rate show” when the Cup finals are played there in 1994.

The former Secretary of State promised the event would be “something to be proud of” and would contribute to the “growth of the sport we’re all interested in.”

Werner Fricker, chairman of the organizing committee, gave what he termed “a vote of confidence” to U.S. Coach Bob Gansler, who came under verbal attack during a crowded session in the Olympic Stadium media room.

A foreign journalist derided Gansler as “a college coach.” Another journalist said the committee should try to hire Franz Beckenbauer, who is retiring as West Germany’s coach following Sunday’s World Cup final between his team and Argentina.

Kissinger said he did not know Gansler, but Fricker heartily defended the coach.

“Building from here, you will see that the coaching staff has the ability to take the team to another level of development,” Fricker said. “This is a vote of confidence.”

Kissinger, who made a statement and took questions for the first half of the conference before departing, lacked specific answers to many for-

eign journalists' questions about how the United States would handle the 1994 Cup.

Kissinger said it was too early to give specifics but that he was confident corporate sponsors would support the event, saying, “I know a number of CEOs and I’m confident we can get advertisers.”

He also said he was hopeful that some satisfactory television arrangement would be worked out. The major U.S. networks have expressed skepticism about the World Cup because of low ratings by TNT, the cable network showing a portion of this year’s tournament.

“I’m on the board of CBS,” Kissinger said. “They will certainly hear from me for four years. I am not saying they are showing any interest. I am hopeful we will get respectable television coverage.”

“You can’t judge it by TNT. TNT is a cable network.”

Attending his fifth World Cup, Kissinger said he joined the organizing committee as part of a “missionary enterprise to make the sport we all love as popular in the United States as it deserves to be.”

Scott LeTellier, president of the organizing committee who has established its office in Washington, said that 25 delegations from the 27 communities seeking to be host sites made inspection tours of Italy to see how these games were put on. He called the approximately 250 people who made up the delegations an “unprecedented” number for a country planning to host the World Cup.

Kissinger lauds
‘new world order’

BAY CITY NEWS SERVICE
SANTA ROSA

OCT 16 1990

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told an audience at the Luther Burbank Center of a “new world order” emerging from a year of changes that he believes are without parallel in human history.

"Rarely has a nation so completely achieved its objectives as the United States and its allies have in the past 12 months," Kissinger said during an appearance Monday night.

During his speech, Kissinger commented on a number of issues related to the realignment of Eastern Europe and changes within the Soveit Union, including the replacement of communism by alternate systems, Germany's reunification, and economic crises in communist states, as well as political crises in the Soviet Union and the disintegration of its empire into separate nations.

The former secretary of state and national security adviser under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford predicted the Soviet Union will not represent a military threat for some years to come as it struggles to deal with internal problems.

Kissinger addresses
changing foreign policy
during Oakland forum

ASSOCIATED PRESS

OAKLAND

JUL 1 7 1990

A civil war of sorts already is
under way in the Soviet Union, but
the United States should not step
in yet with economic aid, said for-
mer Secretary of State Henry Kis-
singer.

Kissinger expressed these views
during a wide-ranging talk on for-
eign issues Monday night, before
more than 1,400 people at the Ci-
vicBank of Commerce's Fifth An-
niversary Celebration.

Focusing on tumultuous changes
in the Soviet Union, Kissinger said
Soviet President Mikhail Gorba-
chev "is a different kind of lead-
er" than the Soviet Union has had.
Kissinger has met with every So-
viet leader beginning with Nikita
Krushchev.

Asked whether civil war was im-
minent in the Soviet Union, Kis-
singer said the nation was already
"in the middle of a kind of revolu-

tion right now."

This revolution was sparked by
Gorbachev, a man he character-
ized as having held only one job all
his life: that of being a communist
leader at some level.

"Then (Gorbachev) realized
communism was the problem and
started to weaken it," Kissinger
said. However, Gorbachev's re-
forms had unintentional effects.

"I don't think he intended li-
berating the republics," Kissinger
said. "He wanted little Gorba-
chev's installed in leadership, but
when it happened, he had the
sense not to use force."

Although Kissinger praised Gor-
bachev, he warned against the
United States putting full political
faith in him.

"We cannot gear policy to one man," he said. "We cannot put ourselves in a position that if Gorbachev has a heart attack, despair fails over the world."

He also warned of extending ec-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger addresses an
Oakland business forum sponsored by the CivicBank of Com-
merce on Monday.

onomic aid to the Soviet Union.

"We were burned in the '70s when we put a lot of money into Latin America before they were ready," Kissinger said. "We shouldn't do that now with the Soviet Union."

Kissinger also addressed the
changing situation in Eastern Eu-
rope, including German reunifica-

tion — an event he predicted will
happen by January 1, 1991.

Kissinger, who noted that he
was raised in Germany as "a
member of a persecuted minori-
ty," was guarded in his comments
on Germany reunification.

"If Germany had not been uni-
fied in my lifetime, I would not
have died unfulfilled," he said.

committee deliberations that are
likely to begin Wednesday.

Bennett concluded that the full
Senate should vote to denounce
Durenberger for financial miscon-
duct that violated Senate rules.

If the committee finds that
Durenberger broke Senate rules
or federal law, it could rebuke
him in a letter or recommend that
the full Senate vote to condemn
him.

Such a move would have no ef-
fect on a senator's duties, but
could generate severe political
damage back home. The Senate
also could vote to strip Duren-
berger of key committee assign-
ments.

According to sources who have
seen the lengthy report, state-
ments cited by Bennett include
those of: Charles Kahn III, Duren-
berger's legislative assistant for
health policy; Anne Kelly Plan-
ning, the former personal secre-
tary and scheduler; Michael Ma-
honey, his personal attorney; and
Paul Overgaard, his onetime cam-
paign manager.

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# Kissinger: Reunification must be backed by U.S.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON

JAN 28 1990

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger says the United States will have to support reunification of the two Germanys, despite hopes to the contrary on the part of Soviet leaders.

"The secret dream of the Soviet Union is that we will prevent the reunification of Germany," Kissinger said in an interview taped for airing Sunday on NBC television's "John McLaughlin's One on One."

The German-born Kissinger said he personally would have been satisfied if the reunification issue "had not come up in my lifetime."

"But it has come up, and it has come up in a way that makes it unavoidable, and it makes it important for the United States to get behind it, or else German nationalism is going to turn against the United States," he said.

Kissinger said "visible major steps will be taken within two years" toward German unification.

After upcoming elections, East Germany is likely to follow Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland in requesting withdrawal of Soviet forces from its territory, Kissinger said.

He urged demilitarizing East Germany and creating a nonaligned military status like that of

Henry Kissinger ... "steps" will be taken.

Austria for "former satellite states."

He said East Germany will come under intense pressure to raise its economic level to that of West Germany or lose much of its population through the open border. This will mean forming a "common economic unit" with West Germany, Kissinger said.

Kissinger predicted that a unified Germany "economically ... will tilt West," while militarily the new situation will require complex arms talks.

"I do not agree that you can demilitarize a whole country of the size and economic potential of the Federal Republic — of all of Germany, of some 80 million people," he said.

tions might have to convert to "peaceful, productive purposes," the initiative states.

"The battle of the bay was not the World Series. This is the battle. It's a battle for people's health and safety," said Oakland Councilman Wilson Riles Jr., a longtime supporter of nuclear-free zones.

No one would comment on the initiative at either Lawrence Livermore or the Department of Energy on Friday.

"We've been told from the beginning not to discuss nuclear-free zone issues," said Carol Powell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Energy. "It doesn't look good for a government agency to come out in a confrontational manner against people exercising free speech."

The initial zone approval in Oakland was not the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services threat to nuclear-free zones.

If approved, the initiative would chase goodons makers, active members of a 15-member free zone coalition.

Opponents of the initiative say the coalition can't organize the

zone petition signatures

The Bay Area Council, a non-profit organization, has been calling for nuclear-free zones for the mea-30 days to

the mea- work at U.S. Lawrence Livermore

Iopose opera-

ons CSU's vote during closed-

President of the California First Amendment Coalition, in a letter sent this week to Board of Trustees Chairman Marianthi Lansdale.

The complaining group may ask a court to invalidate the board's vote if the board does not void the decision itself, the letter stated.

Mayer Chapman, CSU vice chancellor and general counsel, denied any wrongdoing on the part of the Long Beach-based

board.

"The board did not act improperly. The action was not taken in closed session," Chapman said Friday. He declined to elaborate.

The board voted a 43 percent salary hike for Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds, bringing her salary to $195,000, while campus presidents received raises that boosted their salaries from approximately $112,000 to $130,000.

In his Jan. 22 letter, Opotowsky

CHOLESTEROL RESEARCH STUDY

The Cholesterol Foundation in Redwood High cholesterol to help test a diet high in fat and cholesterol in the medication and free medical care when you complete the call for help at 364-4165.

Homosexuals prote-

ASSOCIATED PRESS
IRVINE

Gay and lesbian organizations are protesting a policy change that now prevents homosexual couples from living together in married-student housing at the University of California, Irvine.

The university insists the policy has nothing to do with homosexu-