OLEDO, OHIO, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1979

LC

# Books in Review

## A Pithy Chronicle

## Kissinger's Memoirs

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

By JOHN LEONARD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the vagaries of Nixon — courageous, Kissinger tells us, "secretive and devious," lacking "in self-confidence or largeness of spirit," and

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

And he loved it — the helicopters and the motorcycle escorts, the sunglasses and the fake stomach aches, the handwritten messages carried by personal pouch from China through Pakistan to Washington, the conversations with Andre Malraux, if not with Oriana Fallaci. As a kind of Julien Sorel who went to Washington, he was Nixon's own Harvard professor, snatched away from Nelson A. Rockefeller. He tells us that the only time while he was in office that he couldn't sleep was on the eve of his flight to China.

Mr. Leonard writes for the New York Times.

William F. Buckley

# Kissinger
Recalls Years
Of Power

NEW YORK — "We met for the first time at a reception given by the president for heads of delegations at the United Nations in September, 1969.

"Gromyko walked up to me and said: 'You look just like Henry Kissinger.' And I replied: 'You look just like Richard Nixon.' — This took him a few seconds to hoist aboard, especially as his entourage was reluctant to laugh until he had given the signal. By the next year he had absorbed the style. When we discussed which entrance he should use for his White House meeting with Nixon, Gromyko said it did not make any difference; the guards would salute and let him through wherever he presented himself; who would stop the president?

"To make sure that everyone — especially his associates — understood that it was playtime, he gave a hearty laugh reminiscent of a street corner Santa Clause."

## Gromyko Expedited Policy

That was, as Kissinger writes, in 1969. After that he saw a good deal of Gromyko. In the interval between 1969 and 1972, Gromyko, as Soviet foreign minister, expedited Soviet policy which included sending vast material to Southeast Asia to underwrite a war of aggression against South Vietnam and to kill 50,000 Americans.

In the Middle East, the Soviets came close to triggering an explosion through the stimulation of Iraqi appetites. In South America, the Soviet Union did its best to satellize Chile. In Cuba, the Soviet Union triggered a crisis over Cienfuegos. And, of course, there were the routine things.

Then there was the summit in Moscow, in June of 1972. "During (that summit meeting) one of our Xerox machines broke down. Knowing the KGB's reputation for Orwellian ubiquity, I asked Gromyko during a meeting in the elegant St. Catherine's Hall in the Kremlin whether he could have some copies made for us if we held certain documents up to the chandelier. Gromyko replied, without missing a beat, that unfortunately the cameras were installed by the tsars; they were adequate for... photographing people, but not documents."

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

## Diplomat and Historian

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

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

## Henry's Self-Criticism

Although one can hardly have expected a book by Henry Kissinger denouncing the career of Henry Kissinger, his critics will be astonished at the frequency with which he criticizes his own judgment, or the frankness with which he reveals his own uses of guile.

But when he believes he was correct (Cambodia, for instance), one comes upon a juggernaut. His handling of the Vietnam quagmire, the pressures on the White House, the tergiversations of Nixon's aides — and indeed of Nixon himself — the erosion of authority, the cowardice of so many academic "leaders," — he writes about the operations of government of the people by the people and for the people in language which has an eternal meaning for those who wish to meditate on the prospects of democracy.

On completing the Vietnam chapters, one is left with the feeling that, in fact, one never wants, ever again, to discuss Vietnam with anyone who has not read this book. One might as well discuss a rainbow with the colorblind.

ST. GEORGE'S CATHEDRAL
NEW YORK
N.Y.

OCT 22 1979

Dated
Nepenthes

[LC]

CINCINNATI, OHIO
NEWS
11.10.1979 VOL. 13 NO. 1292

GREENSBURG, PA
TRIBUNE REVIEW
D & SUNDAY 13,1979

[L.C]

OCT 25 1979

OCT 14 1979

Galloni

# Kissinger's book expensive

In the grand sweep of history, as viewed from, say, the year 2025, how will Henry Kissinger fare? Will he be characterized as a noble figure, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and diplomat extraordinaire? Or will he be labeled as a neurotic, egomaniacal con man whose drive for international status negated humanitarian considerations, as in Cambodia?

Both kinds of characterizations are being put forth these days, by authors and commen-tators. Now Kissinger himself is joining the fray with his autobiography, all 1,521 pages of it. The book will be available in bookstores next week for anyone who wants to pay $22.50 for it. Members of the Book of the Month Club may buy it for $17.95, the club's highest price ever for a single-volume main selection.

Kissinger's financial gain will be enormous. One estimate places his eventual income from the book at $5 million. He owns the worldwide book and serialization rights; the book is scheduled to be printed in 17 languages.

Of course, there's always the possibility that few persons anywhere actually will shell out those outrageous prices. If that happens, the book could be a gargantuan failure. And Time Inc., which has risked some $3 million on the book through three subsidiaries — Time Magazine, publisher Little, Brown and Co., and the Book of the Month Club — could find itself losing money.

That would be a fitting result for this overblown "literary" episode.

For our part, we intend to wait until the book is at the public library or it appears on the bargain stands for $1.95 in a few months.

There's no great ideological meaning to the shake-up in the Washington bureau of *The New York Times*, says an insider. It was just a matter of making reporters happier with their beats last month when bureau chief Bill Kovach announced that two investigative reporters, Jo Thomas and Wendall Rawls Jr., would go to the Miami and Atlanta bureaus, respectively.

Kovach will be hiring two more reporters to replace Thomas and Rawls... Six years ago her by-line appeared in *The Washington Star's* sports section as Kiki Levathes, because her full Name was longer than 14 characters—a fact editors didn't like. Now she's back in town, having left a general feature writing job at *The New York Daily News* to become a writer at *The National Geographic*. There she is allowed to use her full name, Louise Levathes and she just returned from spending the summer working on her first assignment: a profile of the city of Milwaukee.... If Time Inc. and Henry Kissinger have become synonymous these days, it's no wonder. In addition to *Time's* excerpting the first volume of Kissinger's memoirs, the book is published by a branch of Time Inc., Little, Brown & Co. Another subsidiary, Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., chose the tome as a main selection... Hypochondriacs can rejoice in the publication of a new book by Washington writer John Pekkanen that lists the best physicians in every specialty and sub-specialty in the United States, as evaluated by 550 of their peers. "The Best Doctors in the U.S.," published by Seaview Books, reports that most of the best are on the two coasts, with the Northeast leading in numbers of well-regarded specialists.

ORLANDO, FLA.
CENTRAL STAR
SUN-COMMUNITY

OCT 25 1979

"It was a seller's market from the start," one publisher said of Kissinger, left, and his manuscript.

# Kissinger may get $5 million for memoirs

Washington Post

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

The memoirs, which formally go on sale in book stores Tuesday, represent one of the most lucrative properties in publishing history.

To the giant media conglomerate Time Inc., however, the venture repre-sents one of the largest amounts risked by an American publisher. Three Time subsidiaries — Time magazine, publish-er Little, Brown and Co. and Book of the Month Club — bought up all impor-

tant North American rights. All told, sources estimate, the three Time sub-sidieties spent close to $3 million.

To recoup their investments, both Book of the Month and Little's, Brown are putting high price tags on the 1,521-page volume, which must become a huge best seller to make money. Pub-lishing sources said that at the least, all of the books now in print would have to be sold for there to be a profit.

Kissinger owns the worldwide book and serialization rights, and the mem-oirs will appear in 17 languages. For-eign publication will bring the former secretary of state another $2 million or more, it is estimated.

All contracts in the United States

were signed before Kissinger had put so much as a word on paper, according to his agent, Marvin Josephson. Neither Josephson, nor any other principals, will confirm exactly the amounts Kissinger is getting.

Little, Brown has priced the volume at $22.50.

Book of the Month, which acquired rights to the book before the club was bought by Time in late 1977, will charge its 1.75 million members $17.95 for the book, the highest price it ever has set for a single-volume main selection.

The club far exceeded the $85,000 it usually guarantees an author and pub-lisher for a main selection but it is not

known by how much.

More than a dozen publishers wanted the Kissinger book. Both Newsweek and Time sought serialization rights and Book of the Month Club and Liter-ary Guild wanted the volume.

"Let's face it," said one publishing source. "Kissinger is charming, contro-versial and brilliant and was at the cen-tar of one of the most controversial ad-ministrations in American history. It was a seller's market from the start."

Josephson, who heads up one of the largest talent agencies in the nation, personally handles only two clients: Steve McQueen, the actor, and Kissinger.

[LC]

lowers. The author's descriptions of his feelings toward Moon are revealing: "I felt a great warmth when my eyes rested on Moon. I regarded him as my spiritual father.... I was sitting at his feet, and he seemed to me the epitome of powerful masculinity. At moments like this the Belvedere living room was like a locker room, with Moon the coach who owned his players heart and soul.... Here... was the warrior-hero who would lead the last battle.... As I watched Moon I felt the absolute conviction that he was theiah.... It all made perfect sense. I felt that I was part of a young, growing movement and that we were the soul of righteousness, the hope of the world."

Moonstruck is not a theological treatise. The reader is

introduced in layman's terms to the basic belief system of Moon's *Divine Principle* and to the psychic/occult preoccupation of the membership. The book's primary value is found in the insights provided of life in an absolutist, encapsulating cult. It is, the author states, "the perfect religion for those who wished to escape from themselves."

The book concludes with a too brief discussion of the author's gradual drift toward severing all ties with the Moonies. Wood was "deprogrammed" by reading C.S. Lewis's *That Hideous Strength*. "The book struck a deep emotional chord. . . . the spell was utterly and finally lifted from my shoulders. . . . When I finished the book I knew I was out of the Moonies."

## briefly reviewed

Whatever Happened to the Human Race? By Francis A. Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop, M.D. *Revell. 256 pages.* $13.95.

People are special and human life is sacred, whether or not we admit it. Every life is precious and worthwhile in itself – not only to us human beings but also to God. Every person is worth fighting for, regardless of whether he is young or old, sick or well, child or adult, born or unborn, or brown, red, yellow, black, or white.

— Schaeffer and Koop

In Prof. Francis A. Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop we finally have men willing to be shocked by the rampant destruction of human beings taking place in abortion clinics with court approval, and willing to be driven to clarify the underlying theological and philosophical reasons for such practices among mothers and doctors, those most responsible for life itself. But behind the mothers and doctors lie the thinkers, usually with divinity or doctoral degrees, who justify what

cannot be justified. The final war is always of the spirit.

This story of our abuse of our kind needs to be told again and again. I tried to tell it in my *Human Dignity and Human Numbers* (Alba House, 1971). This retelling by Schaeffer and Koop has additional force because it comes from the Protestant tradition, and from a clear and scientific awareness of the facts of what we are doing. No illusion of goodness is left if we look coldly at what we are doing. Moreover, this is a welcome effort to "rescue" the abortion/life issue from the Roman Catholics, where it is so vulnerable to the charge that only one church is involved.

This book, too, is a model of what it means to be "ecumenical." That is, the facts and arguments are stated in their own terms. Protestants should argue like Protestants. As a Roman Catholic, I regret the lack of any consideration of Church authority here, and yet there is nothing here any orthodox Catholic would object to.

There is rhetoric and passion here. Indeed, this is a book of apologetics, the kind we need so much, the kind that never forgets that there are arguments for the truths of Christianity that cannot be and are not "refuted" by anything in the modern philosophical or scientific arsenal.

The book is accompanied by numerous photos of Schaeffer and Koop, and is intended to be followed by an educational movie depicting the carnage we have done to our kind in the name of promoting "humanitarianism." The first section is a graphic

narrative account of the evidence about euthanasia, abortion, child abuse, and human experimentation. The second section is a philosophic reflection on the truth of the Christian world view in contrast to Western theistic humanism and Eastern pantheism, and on the causes of the attacks on human life. Much of this second part reminded me in a way of Chesterton's *Everlasting Man* and *Orthodoxy*, though the authors did not cite him.

The final questions are poignant: "Will future generations look back and remember that – even if the twentieth century *did* end with a great surge of inhumanity – at least there was one group who stood consistently, whatever the price, for the value of the individual, thus passing on some hope to future generations? Or are we Christians going to be merely swept along with the trends – our own moral values becoming increasingly befuddled, our own apathy reflecting the apathy of the world around us, our own inactivity sharing the inertia of the masses around us, our own leadership becoming soft?"

JAMES V. SCHALL

White House Years. By Henry Kissinger. *Little, Brown. 1521 pages.* $22.50.

Neither Nelson Rockefeller nor his protégé and foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger had any liking or re-

26

NEW OXFORD REVIEW

respect for Richard Nixon prior to 1969. In the opening pages of this the first volume of memoirs (which cover "the first four years" to 1973), Kissinger tells of his early contacts with Nixon and initial resistance to accepting the latter's offer of the position of Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Kissinger says their relationship was always wary; though close on substance, they were personally aloof.

Much more important, of course, is the world view that Kissinger brought to the White House. In his third chapter Kissinger purports to describe his perspective on history and American foreign policy. Astonishingly, he essentially limits himself to saying, "If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint," and to recounting the oft-noted American pattern of oscillation between over-involvement and withdrawal in foreign affairs. He and Nixon attempted to develop a "structure of peace" which would enable the United States to hold a steady course in world affairs after Vietnam.

It is possible that a chastened Kissinger is too embarrassed to spell out the view he brought to the White House. At the outset I published an essay, "Kissinger's Approach to Foreign Policy" (March 1979 *Worldview*), in which I recalled his doctoral thesis ideas, published as *A World Restored*. That account of the Congress of Vienna and its establishment of the Certificates of Europe suggested that global stability requires agreement among the leading nations on "permissible aims and methods of foreign policy." And such an agreement can only be arrived at if the major countries accept the legitimacy of each other's domestic systems and of the prevailing international order. In my *Worldview* piece, I wrote, "Despite the U.S. and Soviet interest in avoiding a nuclear war, it is hard to see how such an agreed system can be achieved given the gulf in their 'self-evident truths' and their clashing interests, particularly in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East."

The disillusionment with detente

JUNE 1980

[LC]

Why the director of the world's largest abortion clinic changed his mind about abortion

# Aborting America

By Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D.
with Richard N. Ostling

During the 1960's, Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson was a co-founder of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws. In 1971 and 1972, he directed the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, which treated some 700 women a week. But, by 1974, he wrote in the *New England Journal of Medicine* of his "increasing certainty that I had in fact presided over 60,000 deaths."

In ABORTING AMERICA, Dr. Nathanson explains how he became convinced that human life exists in the womb from the onset of pregnancy. He takes readers inside the pro-abortion movement and shows its political workings. And he shares the philosophical and moral struggle which finally led him to conclude that "the abortion ethic is an invitation to irresponsibility."

Already triggering a wave of debate and controversy on television, radio, and in the press, ABORTING AMERICA is also enormously enlightening. Dr. Nathanson demonstrates that the real thinking and serious discussion on the issue of abortion have only just begun.

$10.00 at all booksellers now

• **DOUBLEDAY**

27

is today so widespread in America that some may have forgotten how Nixon and Kissinger were hailed as miracle-workers during "the first four years." Kissinger continues to claim that de-tente with the Soviet Union involved mutual concessions. He even goes so far as to argue that he and Nixon al-ways put relations with Western Eu-rope and Japan ahead of pursuit of better relations with both the USSR and China. It is hardly necessary even to argue the contrary among informed people today.

Since Kissinger had always con-
centrated on U.S.-West European rela-
tions and on military strategy as an
academic, it is not surprising that he

naively expresses wonderment about
the Soviet fear of China. Moreover, al-
though Kissinger at one point reaf-
firms the conventional wisdom of tilt-
ing toward the weaker power in a dis-
pute to maintain the global balance,
he also endorses an even-handed ap-
proach to the USSR and China as op-
posed to "playing the China card."
Unlike many enthusiasts, on the other
hand, Kissinger sees the developing
U.S.-China relationship as purely a
marriage of convenience based on
mutual fear of Russia.

I agreed at the time and general-
ly agree now with the Vietnamization
program and with Kissinger's account

of the effort (unlike most reviewers). It is hard to fault Kissinger's position that Watergate and exhaustion, plus Congress and a jaundiced media undermined Vietnamization and led to the debacle of the spring of 1975 (to be covered in the second volume no doubt). It is also in my opinion true that the failure of Congress and the American people to see it through in Indochina, to make "peace with honor" stick, led directly to the "peace with humiliation" for the U.S., and much more disastrously to the "peace with horror," indeed to the Holocaust of Indochina which is still not over.

DONALD BRANDON

in the nfcos

Pope Meets with and
Encourages Leaders of
Catholic Charismatic Renewal

On Dec. 11, 1979, Pope John
Paul II had an informal one-and-a-half-
hour meeting in the Vatican with 13
leaders of the international Catholic
charismatic renewal (from such far-
away places as Colombia, India, the
Philippines, Australia, and Ireland).
The meeting was arranged by Leo
Joseph Cardinal Suenens of Brussels.

According to a report by Kevin
Ranaghan, one of the 13, in the March
issue of *New Covenant* magazine, the
Pope was shown a 40-minute video-
tape on the charismatic renewal. "The
Pope watched it intently, tapped his
foot to the music, and sang along
several times. . . . He seemed to light
up at the scene of parents and children
joyfully worshiping the Lord together
as families. . . ." At the end of the
videotape, the Pope clapped in appre-
ciation, stood up, and spoke informal-
ly to his guests of how this expressive,

uninhibited dimension of the faith is
needed to complement faith which is
otherwise grounded in the intellect or
the heart.

When Ralph Martin of Belgium gave a report on the charismatic communities throughout the world, Martin reportedly spoke with a fervor that cannot be captured in the printed text, but which brought many close to tears. Said he in part: "we really hear in you the voice of Jesus Christ. When we hear you speak to bishops as they come to visit you and we hear you tell

NEW OXFORD REVIEW

welcomes short Letters to the
Editor on any subject treated in
its pages as well as on issues of
general interest to its readers. All
letters are subject to editing and
possible abridgment.

them that the first thing in their lives
is preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ
and guarding the truths and deposit of
the faith, we really sense in you in a
special way the work of the Holy
Spirit....

"We rejoice, Holy Father, as the disciples rejoiced on the way to Emmaus, when we hear you talking to theologians and telling them not to destroy the faith but to build it up; when we hear you telling them that the scientific method is not enough, but that faith and loyalty to and commitment to Jesus Christ, and to the magisterium, are necessary....

"We offer ourselves to you . . .
and ask you to let us know what we
can do . . . to support you, to work
with you."

Responding, the Pope said: "Let me first explain my own charismatic way. I have always been in this renewal in the Holy Spirit. My own way is very interesting. When I was a schoolboy about 12 or 13 years old . . . my father gave me a prayer book, opening it to a [particular] page and saying to me: 'You have here the prayer of the Holy Spirit. You must say this prayer every day of your life.' I am still obedient to this command my father gave me, and have been so now for nearly 50 years. . . . It was my own spiritual initiation, so I can understand all these different charisms. They are all part of

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new oxford review

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.
MINNESOTA DAILY
UNIV. OF MINNESOTA
DAILY

[L]

JUL 7 1980

APR 1 4 1980

Politics

White
House
Years

Henry A. Kissinger
Little, Brown, 1496 pp.
Clothbound, $12.95

Reviewed by Grant Aldonas

hey should sell this book by the pound. It is overwhelming. Kissinger's memoirs are really several books in one. Part memoir, part diplomatic primer, and most of all a skilled defense of American foreign policy during his years as Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser. It must be read with the same care the author has devoted to it.

There is really too much in the book to touch on all of it but the central theme is very clear. Kissinger's entire policy is based on preserving America's freedom of action despite the decline in American power and prestige that accompanied our withdrawal from Vietnam.

Kissinger argues persuasively that American foreign policy, based on geographical isolation and overwhelming strength, had been mere reaction to a succession of crises. In an era of diminished power and increased Soviet expansionism, Kissinger felt America could not revert to isolationism. It would also need a coherent set of policy goals to permit planned, multi-lateral advances. Needless to say, it also needed Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger's approach was based on a global balance of power in which a nation's actions are measured by their effect on the alignment of power distributed among the major actors. The concept was popularized by another German of epic proportion, Otto von Bismarck, in the late nineteenth century. A very good example of how the balancing works is Nixon and Kissinger's dealings with China. By opening relations with China, the United States said, in effect, it would no longer allow the Soviet Union unilateral freedom of action with China. Any threat to China would be perceived as a threat to American interests. This innovation limited the Soviet Union's ability to exercise its power, shifting the balance toward the United States.

This illustrates several points of Kissinger's foreign policy. First, the balance of power displays ideology, thereby making for some very strange bedfellows. You will note how this makes America's past support of the Shah of Iran much more plausible and defensible because of Iran's strategic position on Russia's southern border. Secondly, the most highly

prized commodity in this market is the freedom to act unilaterally. Policy is directed at broadening the area in which that freedom can be exercised. Finally, no policy is credible unless backed by power and the perceived will to use it. Thus, the greatest threat to America was the erosion of the will to use its power due to the war in Vietnam and domestic reaction to it.

Against this backdrop, Kissinger unfolds the his grand design. Possibly the most interesting part of the entire book is watching how the seeds of Nixon and Kissinger's initial successes and ultimate tragedies were sown.

Anyone who has waded through one of Kissinger's

scholarly works will be surprised at how well written his memoirs are. His style and insight are most evident in his brief descriptions of the players in this drama. Richard Nixon is pictured as an intensely shy, withdrawn man equally capable of courage or petty vindictiveness. Nixon, throughout the book, needs constant reassurance and even in moments of triumph is haunted by the sense that history will betray him in the end. Even more interesting are Kissinger's sketches of the foreign leaders of the time. They range from Charles DeGaulle, who remained dominating even in his declining years, to Leonid Brezhnev, who fidgets nervously through negotiating but struts like a prizefighter after minor triumphs.

These descriptions tell as much about Kissinger as they do about their subjects. Nixon, for instance, is never so highly praised for his courage and intelligence as when he agrees with his National Security Adviser. The author also indulges in a little pettiness of his own, settling old scores with McGeorge Bundy, Melvin Laird, and former Harvard colleagues.

Kissinger's reflections provide the book's charm. Particularly striking is his description of the frustrating secret peace talks with Le Duc Tho and an unsettling inner emptiness when the talks succeeded. The sentiment is wistful, romantic. Kissinger says more in that passage about his heroic self-image than he has admitted since the famous interview with

Oriana Fallaci where he portrayed himself as a lonely gunslinger. Small wonder Nixon was concerned about Henry taking all the credit.

The book does not suffer from this self-portrait, however. Kissinger's pointed humor is most often turned on himself. He knows his own foibles very well and his gentle self-mockery adds to his reputation for wit and charm. It is only when the action begins that the book begins to falter. The degree of detail is excessive, even crushing. Many passages add nothing and do the author a disservice; they seem little more than an attempt to make the book appear historically objective—something that few expected from Kissinger's memoirs. Humorously enough, he actually tells the readers at one point to skip several paragraphs unless they are very interested in the technical aspects of the SALT negotiations. I wish he would have been as gracious throughout the book. Even here the reprieve is brief. Kissinger repeats the technical material in a later passage without the warning this time.

If the detail serves any purpose, it is to give readers some sense of the time, effort, and frustration that diplomacy is made of. And the story builds convincingly despite its ponderous moments. Kissinger's grand design gradually takes shape and readers risk being caught up in the author's delicate diplomatic interweaving. Moreover, Kissinger's perceptions seem to have been vindicated by recent events. The Vietnamese do seem bent on hegemony in Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union did prove willing to use military force when American resolve weakened.

However, what is so easy to overlook is the extent to which Kissinger's policies fostered the atmosphere in which current events take place. The balance of power is an amoral view of international relations. It allowed the United States to help subvert a popularly elected government in Chile by illegal means. It made America an accomplice in the destruction of Cambodia. It allowed the United States to support brutal dictatorships like that of the Shah even while the Shah pushed the price of oil higher: an act which has gradually undercut the economic viability of the West. And, more importantly for the nation's future, Kissinger's policies ignored the developing world. Economics, development, and deprivation do not fit well in balance of power equations.

What is crucial to understand is that Kissinger does not offer a vision of what the world should be or what this nation should represent. America is peculiarly moral as regards its foreign relations. Without some vision to guide it, American society will not maintain its resolve nor stand behind its government's policies. Kissinger's lip service to the moral imperative of maintaining American power will not suffice and his thesis ultimately fails on this point. He may have preserved America's power but he cannot say to what purpose. As such, Kissinger's memoir provides an absorbing history but a strangely incomplete one.

[LC]

Mixed Media

Jane Perlez

LC

# KISSINGER'S CAMBODIA ITCH

"Cambodia was not a moral issue; neither Nixon nor his opponents should ever have presented it in those terms." Henry Kissinger in *White House Years*.

"In Cambodia, the imperatives of a small and vulnerable people were consciously sacrificed to the interests of strategic design... Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime." William Shawcross in *Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia*.

No two sentences delineate so clearly the stark debate between two books that deal with American policy in Cambodia. One is written by the former Secretary of State and architect of American foreign policy, the other by a journalist and critic. Both men are foreigners for this country, one a German refugee, the other an Englishman whose father was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. Kissinger blames the genocide in Cambodia on Hanoi's "quest for hegemony." Shawcross sees the atrocities by the Khmer Rouge — and the famine being reported daily on the front pages — as the result of American bombing of Cambodia.

Kissinger's 1521-page tome, the occasion of a three-part excerpt in *Time* magazine, a celebrated but lightly watched David Frost interview last week and the making of Kissinger the millionaire, landed in reviewers' laps last Tuesday. It will be next month before the major opinions are in, guaranteeing a carefully timed, drawn out schedule of publicity. The daily *New York Times* reviewer John Leonard started the ball rolling yesterday with a benign review that noted, perhaps tongue in cheek, that Kissinger had produced something bigger than *War and Peace*, *Little, Brown and Co.*, publishers of *White House Years* ($22.50 and $75.00 for a deluxe, limited signed edition*) sent the book out with an elaborate glossy promotion package: four-color portrait of Kissinger; four black-and-whites of Kissinger alone and with Nixon, Anatoly Dobrynin and Indira Ghandi; and a biographical summary.

It is clear that Kissinger has added to and rewritten portions of his account on Cambodia in the light of Shawcross' work, which was published in May. Winston Lord, formerly on Kissinger's staff and now president of the Council on Foreign Affairs, read the Kissinger book chapter by chapter as it was written. Lord said yesterday that Kissinger "tried to hit on the main points he thought unfair" in Shawcross' argument. While Kissinger refuses to name Shawcross in the text — Shawcross is referred to as "revisionist history" or "implacable critic" — there are footnotes citing *Sideshow*. Kissinger is highly emotional when he refers in his indirect way to Shawcross:

> "The bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation except apologists for the murderous Khmer Rouge." Kissinger then goes on to make his nominally sympathetic, but backhanded, reference to Cambodia: "Poor Cambodia," he writes, "gradually turned into the butt of our national frustrations." A page earlier, he says: "The ultimate victims of our domestic anguish were the gentle people of Cambodia."

## 'Significance Escapes Me'

Kissinger's refusal to see any moral problem with the bombing of Cambodia and its consequences for the country is revealed in his description of discussions with three of his staff, Winston Lord, Tony Lake and Roger Morris. (The latter two resigned in protest against American bombing of the Fishhook and Parrot's Beak areas of Cambodia.) Writes Kissinger: "My three young friends and associates regarded continuation of the secret bombing of Cambodia and shallow cross-border penetration of a few miles as essential, but deep penetrations as indefensible — a distinction whose moral significance continues to escape me."

A first glance at Kissinger's work throws up these quick pointers:

* The volume is dedicated to Nelson Rockefeller, who hired Kissinger to his first high policy-making job — when Kissinger was a Harvard academic and Rockefeller was Eisenhower's special assistant for national security affairs. The first pages of the book cast Rockefeller as the golden politician, too good to succeed, as against Nixon the crafty manipulator.

* Even in the first sentence of the foreword, Kissinger takes a defensive tone: "For better or worse," he starts, "I was called upon to play a prominent role in the making and execution of United States foreign policy." The defensiveness later became staggeringly apparent during the Frost interview.

The manuscript was read before publication, at Kissinger's request, by a divergent group of people.

Winston Lord read the manuscript for "substantive comment," along with William D. Rogers. Not the Secretary of State, whom Kissinger treats with disdain, but the former undersecretary for economic affairs in Kissinger's State Dept. "Kissinger had files assembled and a chronology assembled," Lord said in a telephone interview. "He'd write the damn thing in longhand. It was then typed out by one of his staff, who did a little smoothing out, and then it was sent to Rogers and me for substantive comment. I had been with him throughout the period. He was bouncing the thrust off me. I would say: 'You ought to be more self critical, this is too long, policy should be explained here, this should be treated at greater length.' I was writing in the margin on how to adjust the tone and did some light editing where the prose was getting particularly cumbersome. I would send in my comments and Rogers would send in his and then he'd go to a third draft with his staff [at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington]." Lord wouldn't say where Kissinger had accepted or refused his advice. It was a mistake, he added, to look for news in the *White House Years*. More valuable, said Lord, was "the revelation of the texture of the time, the nuances, the motives, the portraits. There are no major revelations I can point to. It's not that kind of book."

Among others Kissinger asked for advice were Jessica Catto, the wife of a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and now publisher of the *Washington Journalism Review*, who is not known for her foreign policy brief, Harold Evans, editor of the *London Sunday Times*, and ironically Shawcross' newspaper editor, polished up Kissinger's prose. Sealed packages of Kissinger's manuscript flowed in and out of the *London Times* office in New York en route to Evans in London.

* Kissinger, who was to become a master manipulator of the press — flattering correspondents with enough leaks and glamor to feed their egos — professes in the beginning of his book to be “ignorant of the ways of Washington or government when I proclaimed at the press conference announcing my new position that I would have no dealings with the press.” But Kissinger learned:

> "I soon found how naive my attitude was. One of the most important functions of the Presidential Assistant is to explain the President's policies and purposes. I learned that I could not ignore the media and I began to see journalists, though at first almost always at their initiative. I experienced the symbiotic relationship in Washington between media and government. Much as the journalist may resent it, he performs a partly governmental function." Kissinger says that if both journalists and government officials are realistic, "mutual respect" can be established.

Interestingly, one of the first comments on the Kissinger book was in Sunday's *Washington Post*, a paper that is serializing the book and has a long record of admiration for the former Secretary of State. The *Post* comments were written by Chalmers Roberts, whom Kissinger quotes approvingly in his own book. Kissinger praises Chalmers as the "distinguished diplomatic correspondent."

Roberts goes overboard in returning Kissinger's praise. On Sunday Roberts described *White House Years* as "a volume exquisite in the writing and leavened with humor" — words some of us would find impossible to apply to the former Secretary of State's account of his years 1969-1973.

NEW YORK, N.Y.
STUDY WEEKLY NEWS
WEEKLY MEETING

OCT 1 8 1979

provoke anger rather than compliance.

On a recent visit to UNRWA's headquarters in Vienna, one US Congressman expressed surprise that Palestinian refugees he had met, in the camps had not been grateful for his government's generosity to the refugees over the last thirty years. The refugees in question had apparently made less than courteous remarks about American Middle East policy, and one may assume they knew that the US government currently gives over $1.8 billion annually to Israel, compared with which its contribution through UNRWA to the Palestine refugees seems puny indeed.

Mr Carter's administration should long ago have persuaded Congress that UNRWA's humanitarian work has an important political implication: the effectiveness of UNRWA's work is not merely in the interests of the refugees, nor only in the interests of the Arab host governments which already bear such a heavy burden of hospitality. It is also in the interest of Israel, which naturally prefers a quiescent population to a restive one in the occupied territories. Most of all, the continued effectiveness of UNRWA's work serves US government policy in helping to preserve stability following the Camp David Agreement.

The issue is clear. If the international community is no longer willing or able to respond adequately to the humanitarian call to assist the Palestinian refugees, then those governments which have an important stake in the stability of the Middle East should carefully consider whether they can afford to let UNRWA die. If it does die, they will soon see how small a price they were being asked for to keep it alive.

## On the Record

"If the United States or any other country wishes to invoke our policy of settlements as a pretext for trying to modify resolution 242 of trying to bring the PLO into the negotiations, this will be a destructive element in the peace-making process."

Dr Eliahu Ben-Elissar, Israel's ambassador-designate to Egypt, quoted in *The Times*, 16 February

"... the proposed changes to resolution 242 would recognise Palestinian political rights and involve recognition of the PLO as representing the Palestinians.

For its part, the PLO would be required to accept the amended resolution, meaning that for the first time they would publicly have to recognise Israel's rights as a state."

Sir John Mason, departing British Ambassador to Israel, quoted in *The Times*, 20 February

"The new and assertive [Israeli] policy at Hebron is one more act to slow down the peace process, which has reconciled the two meanings of the word Israel. It cannot be both the territory of the sovereign state before 1967 and the land bestowed 'on Abraham and his seed for ever'. The Arabs of Hebron are equally his seed."

Editorial comment in *The Guardian*, 15 February

## Middle East Books

### The White House Years

by Henry Kissinger

Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Michael Joseph, London, 1979, £14.95

In the light of the time it has taken me to read, the speed with which this book was written seems little short of miraculous. Of course Dr Kissinger employed research assistants, and there are passages which bear their traces. But these are remarkably limited, and the whole vast work is permeated by its author's powerful, lucid, prescient and exceptionally detached intelligence. By a somewhat sardonic humour too, as in his comment on negotiating with Israel: "In the combination of single-minded persistence and convoluted tactics the Israelis preserve in their interlocutor only those last vestiges of sanity and coherence needed to sign the final document".

Two factors in particular contributed to his detachment: he was not born an American, and he had had a distinguished career as an academic historian before he was offered political responsibility. His parents did not leave Germany until after Hitler came to power. He recalls that when he first walked the streets of New York, "seeing a group of boys, I began to cross to the other side to avoid being beaten up". As a historian he was fascinated by European power politics, by the diplomacy of Metternich and Bismarck, and when he came to practise their craft he showed an understanding which is rare in Washington for European attitudes

and preoccupations. He writes of Pompidou, for instance, with notable warmth.

Indeed, the generosity with which he appraises foreign statesmen effectively undermines his self-disparaging observation that "the capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait". If the book has a hero (aside from the author) it is Chou En-lai, his partner in what was probably the most significant achievement of his years in the White House — the opening to China. Others for whose qualities he expresses high esteem include Andrei Gromyko, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Anwar Sadat.

His most complex human problem, however, was that presented by President Nixon, "this lonely, tortured and insecure man" with whom he established "a wary relationship — close on substance, aloof personally". The Chief's defects of character were balanced for Kissinger by the similarity of their outlook on international politics. They shared a profound distrust of the emotional impulses which in their view had caused American policy to oscillate between tendencies on the one hand to idealistic global overcommitment, and on the other to isolationist withdrawal. "Nixon and I wanted to found American foreign policy on a sober perception of permanent national interest". All issues, however specific and regional they might be, were carefully weighed for their potential influence on the overall balance of power. Kissinger's favourite word is "geopolitical".

Kissinger's appreciation of the president's unsentimental approach to world politics, and the "kind of joyless,

[L]

File: Reviews

12 Middle East International - 29 February 1980 (London)

[LC]

desperate courage" with which he was prepared to take
major decisions, and no doubt Nixon's reciprocal apprecia-
tion of his national security adviser's solid realism and
self-confidence, led them to operate without undue reference
to the Department of State and at times in complete and
deliberate concealment from it. "Let's try to get it done",
was Nixon's observation on one decision they faced, "and
not fool around with the State Department". It was perhaps
a little naive of them both to be "thunderstruck" when, after
their preparations for Kissinger's secret journey to Peking
were already far advanced, the unfortunate Secretary of
State Rogers appeared on television to express disbelief in
the seriousness of a reported Chinese overture.

Not that the president himself was always allowed his own
way. "In serving Nixon one owed it to him to discriminate
among the orders he issued and to give him another chance at
those that were unfulfillable or dangerous".

One area which at the outset of Nixon's presidency was
left as an almost exclusive preserve of the State Department
was the Middle East. Both Nixon and Kissinger believed that
an active policy in that region would almost certainly fail.
and Nixon consequently saw no point in risking a confronta-
tion with the Israeli lobby. He "considered himself less
obligated to the Jewish constituency than any of his
predecessors had been"; nevertheless at the beginning of
1970 he took the precaution of sending word to the Jewish
community that the "Rogers plan" was aptly named and
had not originated in the White House. As for Kissinger, he

doubted the advisability of US pressure on Israel "until
those who would benefit from it would be America's friends,
not Soviet clients".

It was a state of mind made for Sadat. Whether or not the
Egyptian president sensed this, we learn here that he made
his first overture to Washington in April 1972, more than
two months before his explusion of the Soviet military
advisers and experts from Egypt, and that his proposal was
to establish a direct channel of communication between the
two presidencies, bypassing the foreign ministries. By this
time Kissinger had become involved in Middle Eastern affairs,
mainly because Nixon was nervous lest any embarrassing
crisis should develop on that front during the run-up to the
presidential election in November. Kissinger's first reaction
to the expulsion of the Russians was that of some of Sadat's
Egyptian critics, that the president had been reckless in for-
feiting an important negotiating asset without bargaining for
any quid pro quo from Washington. Kissinger tells us that he
came later to realise that this was "vintage Sadat. His
negotiating tactic was never to haggle over detail but to
create an atmosphere that made disagreement psychologically
difficult".

For the time being the story ends there. We must wait for
the second volume of these memoirs to follow the develop-
ment of Kissinger's relationship with "one of the few truly
outstanding leaders I have met", and of the disengagement in
Sinai.

Harold Beeley

Democracy and Development in Turkey

by C. H. Dodd

Eothen Press, Northumberland. 1978. £4.95

Pleas for aid to Turkey have become more insistent since
the fall of the Shah of Iran and, particularly, since the
Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The Turks
like to remind us that Turkey is the only Muslim country
to be a formal ally of the West in NATO. It is moreover the
only Muslim country which is governed as a parliamentary
democracy. But that democracy is fragile. It faces external
and internal threats, in particular from political violence and
economic straits. And it needs and deserves western aid to
overcome them.

This formulation prompts a number of questions. How
democratic is Turkey? To the extent that it is a democracy,
why have the Turks succeeded in operating this western
system of government, where other Muslim nations have
failed; and why should this success require continued
western aid, which has, after all, been provided without
interruption since the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine
in 1947?

Professor Clement Dodd's excellent brief handbook of
Turkish politics, *Democracy and Development in Turkey*,
is rich in facts and opinions which help us to answer these
questions. For Professor Dodd, the importance of Turkish
politics "lies in the struggle of a state with a long and varied
political tradition to combine social development with a
democratic political system . . . to reconcile what are often
regarded as irreconcilables".

The author shows that there are genuine political parties
in Turkey, which compete in free elections and are
represented in a sovereign parliament, and that the latter
confers power on a government which rules the country
within the framework of a liberal constitution. Turkey is to
this extent a democracy, but, inevitably, one with its special
characteristics and limitations. The roots of Turkish

democracy go back to the Ottoman reforms of the last
century, and, in particular, to the first constitution of, 1876.
The ideal of a western polity found favour in the first place
among the civil and military servants of the state, and these
two groups' still both influence and serve Turkish democracy.
However, there have been two radical changes. First, from
being a multinational or rather multiconfessional state ruled,
under God, by a Muslim Sultan, Turkey became under
Ataturk a homogeneously Muslim, but secularised, state.
Secondly, after the Second World War the officers (and
consequently the policies) of the state came under the
influence of the electorate.

Not surprisingly, Professor Dodd finds that the Turkish
voter "tends to vote and exert influence with an eye chiefly
on personal and local benefits". One dangerous result has
been the politicisation of the civil service and the decline of
governmental and administrative coherence. Another has
been the replacement of thoughtful policy-making by "ideo-
logical dispute or extravagant attention to group demands,
not to mention the temptation of short-term party gains".
Yet, however demagogically a government behaves in dis-
pensing benefits beyond the capacity of the public purse,
it cannot satisfy all aspirations, particularly among students
who are prey to "relative deprivation", defined as "the
negative feeling engendered by contemplating the sad
differences between reality and potential, whether one's
own or one's country's". In these conditions, "nothing seems
to excite active resentment as much as the belief that
oneself or one's nation is being exploited". These observa-
tions help to explain some of Turkey's troubles, such as
inflation or the distracting search for foreign scapegoats.

Professor Dodd advises: "What a responsible democratic
leadership must do is to produce realistic but creative policies
and put them firmly into effect whilst paying due, but not
excessive attention to the interests involved". This is perhaps
what the Prime Minister, Mr Suleyman Demirel, had in mind
when he introduced his latest package of cuts and devalu-
ation

February 1980 - Middle East International 13

[L]

Source: U.S. Trade Commission, U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce.

French and are backed up in contract awards—such as the $120 million job given to two French concerns in March for offshore drilling platform equipment in the Caspian Sea. Thus it was no surprise to Europeans that Germany signed a 25-year economic assistance pact with the Soviet Union even with Russian troops still in Afghanistan.

**Third World markets.** Similar economic dependence on oil-exporting countries has sent Europe's leaders scrambling to snuggle up with even the most unstable Third World nations. Earlier this year, while Italy was allowing the U. S. to establish missile bases, it was also selling arms and technology to the most hawkish of the oil producers: Iran, Iraq, and Libya. With $6 billion in Iranian contracts outstanding, Italian companies eagerly embraced the European Community's watered-down boycott policy that contracts signed before Nov. 4, 1979—the day the U. S. Embassy was attacked—could be fulfilled. Over U. S. objections, Italy also sold $1.5 billion worth of frigates to Iraq. The ships would normally be powered by General Electric engines, but, if the U. S. blocks their use, the Italians are expected to replace them with British turbines and go ahead with the sale anyway. What outweighed U. S. objections, confirms one Italian official, was the fact that Iraq will pay for the ships with oil.

In the nuclear area, Europe's independence of U. S. policies is equally pronounced. Iraq, which supplies 20% of Italy's oil, was able to buy not only natural uranium but four Italian nuclear laboratories along with technology for a hot cell that can be used to reprocess spent fuel into weapons-grade plutonium.

Although Italian officials claim they got U. S. approval for the sale, U. S. Embassy officials in Rome now say that was not the case. Germany is selling up to $10 billion worth of nuclear equipment to Brazil, including reprocessing facilities.

Such arms and nuclear transactions, together with government-to-government deals for energy, are concomitants of Europe's new neutralism. "Europeans would have been more hesitant about making direct oil deals with the Middle," notes Peters, "had they not been willing to secede from U. S. leadership." The deals are also examples of competition that U. S. companies are increasingly likely to see in Third World markets in the 1980s. The U. S. tends to see conflicts in the Third World in terms of East-West conflict, while Europe tends to see them as local or regional problems, notes Gregory F. Treverton of Britain's International Institute for Strategic Studies. To many European analysts, this means European concerns will increasingly step into trade with countries that U. S. companies will find politically off limits.

Europe's drift toward neutralism has already influenced the policies of many U. S. multinational corporations, and the betting is that the changing structure of the alliance will make the 1980s a far more difficult period for U. S. companies competing not only in Europe but also against European companies in the developing markets of the Far East, Latin America, and Africa. Further, as the U. S. leads the other major industrial economies into what looks increasingly like a global recession, protectionist pressures to insulate European economies

will grow, making it even harder for U. S. multinationals to maintain their market shares. Some may get out. "It is undoubtedly true that for the companies who will remain here, the strategy will be to become more European," predicts Francis J. Fitzgerald, group vice-president of European operations for Monsanto in Brussels. Add Glasgow University economists Steve Young and Neil Hood in a forthcoming book on multinationals in Europe: "A large proportion of firms have yet to respond or to respond fully to the pressures of the 1970s. This indicates that the shake-out of American multinationals in Europe is far from at an end."

Even thoroughly Europeanized multinationals are not immune. Monsanto dropped out of the European nylon business last year—closing plants in Luxembourg and Scotland—after a Common Market decision to create a producers’ cartel to relieve the huge overcapacity in the synthetic fibers industry.

**European protectionism.** In fact, the Common Market has charged U. S. concerns exporting fibers to Europe with unfair dumping on the grounds that lower, controlled oil and gas prices in the U. S. allow them to charge a lot less for fibers overseas. In early July, moreover, this European attack on U. S. exports was reinforced by a second charge of dumping—this one directed at the chemical industry as a whole. The European Council of Chemical Manufacturers Federation (CEFIC) filed complaints charging 12 U. S. companies with selling vinyl acetate monomer in the Common Market at 19% to 39% less than U. S. domestic prices.

This trend toward protection in Europe is putting a tight squeeze on many high-technology U. S. corporations. Many European countries are setting up government policies designed to promote and protect national high-tech corporations until they become big enough to compete on the global markets against U. S. and Japanese firms. Entire markets—such as industrial robots and biotechnology—are being reserved for national companies. In France, the government has been putting a controlled squeeze on International Business Machines Corp. for years. The perception in Paris is that if there is to be a viable French computer manufacturer, it will be at the cost of IBM's market share. It is often difficult, if not impossible, for government agencies and nationalized companies (which form 21% of French industry) to buy IBM equipment.

The changing relationship between Europe and the U. S. promises also to have a far-reaching impact on the U. S. style economic and financial institutions that have governed and often set policy for economic behavior in Europe for the

58 BUSINESS WEEK: July 28, 1980

FOREIGN

last 35 years. Strains in the monetary system resulting from the combination of U. S. dollar weakness and Europe's growing economic strength spawned the European Monetary System (EMS) two years ago. Now European officials are considering plans to use that system to their collective advantage with OPEC. They hope to set up a European-style petrodollar recycling system based on

## The drift into neutrality is threatening the U. S. trade balance with Europe

the EMS and its currency unit, the ECU, that would rival the global system favored by the U. S.

At the crossroads. Such a plan would be only one more development in Europe's effort to distance itself from the dollar. International monetary difficulties have, of course, plagued U. S.-European relations for more than a decade. But many European and U. S. officials failed to recognize until recently that these difficulties had their roots in the U. S.-directed financial system that was created for Europe. Because that system failed to appreciate Europe's rising economic power, argues Lord Lever, former British Financial Secretary of the Treasury, the patchwork reforms that were made by well-meaning U. S. and European financial leaders to try to save the Bretton Woods system were bound to fail. The relationships set up in organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade were based on U. S. hegemony, and did not take into account the changed power relationships between the U. S. and Europe, he says.

Lever and other analysts think the U. S. and European economic systems are now at a crossroads, with time running out for decisions on which way to go. "If we don't achieve an enhanced level of cooperation, the world will have economic and financial upheaval in the years ahead and differences among the countries will get worse," he predicts. What many U. S. officials now foresee is an outcome also envisaged by many foreigners—a further drift by Europe toward political neutralism and to an activist business policy with the East bloc, even while European leaders rhetorically reaffirm their commitment to America. There is a clear danger for U. S. trade in the trend: fewer opportunities for markets in Europe, and more cutthroat competition for markets and raw materials in the rest of the world. Unless Washington can again show the strength that brought America the leadership of the alliance in the first place, an increasing neutralism in Europe is likely to do for U. S. business what it has already done for U. S. prestige.

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FOREIGN

BUSINESS WEEK: July 28, 1980

59

THE JERUSALEM POST INTERNATIONAL EDITION

July 20-26, 1980

The Post's David Landau talks to former foreign minister Abba Eban, MK

ABBA EBAN has been at the centre of our public stage for longer than most people remember. But, like Moses, "his eye was not dim nor his natural force abated." Here are some of the throw-away lines with which he laced a lengthy interview.

* On the Zionist Organization: "It is of great theological interest — the first living proof that there is life after death."

* On Dr. Burg as chief autonomy negotiator: "In purely philanthropic terms — it's so nice to see a man enjoying himself."

* On his relations with Yitzhak Rabin: "They're not hostile; we debate in committees, we exchange a greeting, that's about all — I don't think he has different relations with most of the human race."

* On Moshe Dayan, who justified bolting from Labour, and taking his Knesset seat with him, on the grounds that he could have won the seat had he run as an independent: "Yes, but the Israeli voter wanted us to have 32 seats, not 31. He might have got his seat at somebody else's expense."

* On how to 'explain Rabin's popularity in the opinion polls: "I'm baffled! But I don't like to say that polls don't matter — because I do very well in them myself."

* On Rabin's 'legitimate right' to compete for the leadership: "The existence of a right includes the right not to exercise it. I don't doubt the legitimacy of his competing: I doubt the wisdom."

* On Education Minister Zevulun Hammer: "A very rare case in this government of a minister who is actually interested in his ministry."

A door for the PLO

[L]

DESPITE this "series of complex-
es," which Eban does not minimize,
there is real hope for the "Jorda-
nian option."

A Labour government, moreover,
would acknowledge "that the
destiny of the West Bank and Gaza
affects the Palestinian inhabitants,
and not just Jordan and Israel. To
go back to a bilateral encounter
between Israel and Jordan is not
realistic — because Jordan won't
come except in some kind of con-
cert with some Palestinians. Jor-
dan won't impose itself on the
Palestinians."

The main reason for hope,
however, is based not so much on a
radical Israeli change as on a possi-
ble Jordanian change in light of the
peace with Egypt. In the earlier
negotiations, Hussein "was called
upon to change the course and
direction of Arab history. That was
beyond his competence; beyond his
stature and dimension in the Arab
world." Now, the ideological
breakthrough has been achieved —
by Egypt. The challenge to Hussein
is less cataclysmic. Perhaps he can
meet it, especially since he, unlike
the rejectionists, has always
accepted the concept of peace with
Israel.

"We have got to understand where such a negotiation may lead," Eban warns. While Israel will begin by proposing a full peace, Hussein's likely response would be that full peace must entail full withdrawal, — which is unacceptable to Israel. The upshot could therefore be an interim or partial agreement, — "less than 100 per cent of peace for less than 100 per cent of withdrawal. In any event, a one-stage transition from belligerency to peace is unlikely."

ABOVE ALL, says Eban, Israel's
purpose in pursuing the "Jordanian
option" would be "to create a
dilemma" for Hussein — and for
the Palestinians. "We would say:
Let us negotiate on the basis of 242.
We invite you to help get a Palesti-
nian component into the negotia-
tion. We draw your attention to
some of our principles, which differ
from those of our predecessors: we
do not want to rule over 1.2m.
Palestinians. But none of us is
ready to give a single grain of sand
to an organization pledged to li-
quidate us.

"He would be put in a position

where not to explore our overture
would make him almost responsi-
ble for perpetuating Israeli rule."

Conceivably, the "isolationists"
might win the upper hand in Am-
man, and Hussein, confronted with
the Israeli overture, will divest
himself of all responsibility for the
West Bank. "But that would be very
hard to defend before world op-
nion. It would invite the tactless
reminder that it was he who created
the problem by attacking us in 1967.

EBAN STRESSES that for all his
"dovishness" he wholeheartedly
supports the tough Israeli position
against the PLO. "You don't
change extreme opinion except by
rigorous resistance," he says.
"There has to be an element of steel
in the most moderate Israeli
stance. With all one's criticism of
the Begin government, one can
hardly say that there are no Arab
obstacles to peace — especially on
the Palestinian side. But we are
more responsible for correcting our
position, so we tend to focus on it
more. What is needed is a converg-
ing of change from both sides."

Obduracy is sometimes a produc-
tive element of policy. It was
Israel's steadfast insistence on
peace, recognition and negotiations
— coupled with its martial victories
— that brought Egypt to abandon
war.

"It is a universal problem for
liberals," Eban observes
philosophically, "that objectives
which ought to be obtainable by
human grace and understanding.
are usually obtainable, if at all, by
methods which liberals would
prefer to avoid."

Vis-a-vis the PLO there has got to
be a strong Israeli wall — "but it
must be a wall with a door in it: The
Likud built a wall without a door.
The Europeans are frivolously
squandering what could be an in-
centive for moderation."

Even if both Hussein and the
Palestinians remain recalcitrant,
Israel will have done itself a major
moral and tactical service by mak-
ing the "Jordanian option" over-
ture. "We shall have liberated
ourselves from the suspicion of rul-
ing (the Palestinians) for
avaricious reasons. For most of the
world, it is the willingness to return
these people to the Arab world that
counts rather than the insistence on
where in the Arab world they
should find their place. The issue is
Israel's ruling a foreign people."

THAT IS THE issue, too, for signifi-
cant sections of world Jewry which
the Begin government has succeed-
ed in alienating from Israel. Pur-
suing the "Jordanian option,"
whether it succeeds or fails, would
recapture waning sympathy among
Jews. It would also "restore the
partitionist philosophy on the basis
of which we did win international
recognition."

If there were a favourable
response from the Arab side, Eban
does not doubt that the Labour-led
government could push its policy
through, despite vociferous minori-
ty opposition. The history of the
peace talks with Egypt teaches us,
he says, how difficult it is to predict
public reactions in advance of a
revolutionary change in the situa-
tion. The public — even many of the
"hawks" — might well take a
different attitude to territorial con-
cessions on the West Bank, as they
did in Sinai, if the prospect of real
peace suddenly became real and
immediate.

But the government, at any rate,
would have to lead — not wait to be
led by the public. "It is a general
feature of decision-making," says
Eban, "that the difficult ones must
be taken by a government, not its
public." He cites Britain's decision
to join the EC. The polls were heav-
ly against it — until Premier
Edward Heath signed the treaty,
from which point in time they
began to swing around in favour.

## Books

### What top executives are reading this summer

Asked what he is reading this summer, Gordon E. Moore, chairman of Intel Corp., replied at first, "my mail." Most busy top executives would understand Moore's answer, but on reflection, Moore admitted that he does read other things and has just started *Energy Future*, edited by Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin (Random House).

As this suggests, important business executives, however pressed for time at the office, do read widely beyond strictly company matters. A completely non-scientific random survey of what some of the country's top businessmen are reading shows that they read a broad variety of books, current and old, serious and frivolous, academic and best-sellers. Among the latter, *The Bourne Identity* by Robert Ludlum (Richard Marek) was mentioned most often.

But while many executives read thrillers and mysteries, the dominant tone, at least of the books they prefer to mention, is serious. For example, Charles B. "Tex" Thornton, chairman of Litton Industries Inc., preparing for a recent trip to Rome, skimmed through Gibbon's monumental *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire* (E. F. Dutton). He also read three current political volumes, *Sincerely, Ronald Reagan* by Helene Von Damm (Green Hill), *A Time to Heal* by Gerald R. Ford (Harper & Row), and *A Time for Truth* by William Simon (McGraw-Hill).

Felix G. Rohatyn, general partner of Lazard Frères & Co. and chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corp., likes to read "several books at once." His current reading includes *White House Years* by Henry Kissinger (Little, Brown), the biography of General Douglas MacArthur, *American Caesar*, by William Manchester (Little, Brown), and *Without Fear or Favor* (Times Books), Harrison Salisbury's account of *The New York Times*. Philip Caldwell, chairman of Ford Motor Co., is going on "an ore-boat trip" soon and plans to take both the Kissinger and Manchester books along. Willard Butcher, president of Chase Manhattan Bank, has read Kissinger, and is now reading Irving Kristol's *Two Cheers for Capitalism* (Basic Books). Also popular among executives is *Managing in Turbulent Times* by Peter F. Drucker (Harper & Row), which Robert Anderson, chairman of Rockwell International Corp., and Donald R. Melville, chief executive officer of

Norton Co., are both reading. Reginald H. Jones, chairman of General Electric Co., not only read the Drucker book but also reviewed it for a newspaper (favorably). Anderson has also read *The Right Stuff* by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and *War and Remembrance* by Herman Wouk (Little, Brown). Rawleigh Warner Jr., chairman of Mobil Corp., has read several best-sellers, including *The Spike* by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moses (Crown) and *The Devil's Alternative* by Frederick Forsyth (Viking), Jerry McAfee, chairman of Gulf Oil Corp., has most recently read *Of Blood and Hope* by Samuel Pisar (Little, Brown).

Mysteries and thrillers find their way into a lot of executive briefcases. Walter B. Wriston, chairman of Citicorp, for example, has just read *The Green Ripper* by John D. MacDonald (Lippincott), a Travis McGee detective story that he calls "a zinger." Wriston has also just read *Free to Choose* by Milton and Rose Friedman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) and *The Economy in the 1980s*, edited by Michael J. Boskin (Institute for Contemporary Studies). John H. Gutfreund, managing partner of Salomon Bros., also reads several books at a time. One is by an acquaintance of his, Michael M. Thomas, an investment banker, who wrote the current thriller *Green Monday* (Wyndham Books) with what Gutfreund calls some "thinly veiled caricatures" of Wall Street personalities. Gutfreund is also reading *China Men* by Maxine Hong Kingston (Alfred A. Knopf), which he terms "a fascinating book about a totally different world." Norton's Melville has read *Mao* by Ross Terrill (Harper & Row). "If you want to understand what happened in China in

the last 40 years, this is one book you have to read," he says. His next book will be the P. D. James mystery *Innocent Blood* (Scribner's). In the biography line, Frederick Heldring, deputy chairman of Philadelphia National Corp., has read *Khrushchev Remembers*, edited by Strobe Talbot (Little, Brown).

Thomas V. Jones, chairman of Northrop Corp., reached back a ways for his thriller, *The Sea-Wolf* by Jack London. He just read Washington Irving's classic *The Alhambra* (Gordon Press).

Among executives who prefer a highly intellectual bill of fare are Donald N. Frey, chairman of Bell & Howell Co., who has read *Against the Current* by Sir Isaiah Berlin (Viking Press), *Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics* by Nobel Laureate conservative economist Friedrich A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press), *Managerial Hierarchies*, edited by Alfred D. Chandler and Herman Daems (Harvard University Press), and *Structure of Scientific Revolutions* by Thomas S. Kuhn (University of Chicago Press). In addition, his wife just got him to read the best-selling *The Ninja* by Eric Van Lustbader (M. Evans).

Another steadfastly serious reader is Donald Rumsfeld, chairman of G. D. Searle & Co., who just read a biography of Abraham Lincoln by Benjamin Platt Thomas (Alfred A. Knopf), *The Glory and the Dream* by William Manchester (Little, Brown), and the classic *The Seven Pillars of Wisdom* by T. E. Lawrence (Penguin Books).

And the summer is only half over.

—Jack Patterson

Jack Patterson, Senior Writer, edits the books department.

*"By God, this year on my vacation I'm going to read a book!"*

Drawing by E. Cobey © 1977 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

BOOKS

BUSINESS WEEK: August 4, 1980 7

FOREIGN

How Europe's neutralism harms U. S. business

The gradual secession of Europe from the U. S.-dominated Atlantic Alliance is under way. In June the French and German heads of government both risked Washington's wrath by independently deciding to meet with Leonid Brezhnev—thus breathing new life into détente. And on July 11 they met in Bonn to proclaim that Europe would be playing a new, bigger role on the world stage. French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing joined with German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in pledging the "restoration to Europe of its influence in the world." Its faith in the alliance shaken by the lack of leadership from President Jimmy Carter's U. S., Europe increasingly sees its political—and especially its economic—interests as apart from, if not directly opposed to, those of the U. S.

While European leaders are loath to criticize Carter in public, most of them criticize him bitterly in private. Many, in fact, despise him—for his incompetence, for the frequency with which he changes his mind, and for the way in which some

of his actions appear aimed less at the good of America or the alliance than at getting himself reelected.

‘Why should we follow?’ Europeans have observed Carter’s flip-flops with bewilderment. On the U. S. President’s proposals for trade sanctions against the Soviets following their invasion of Afghanistan, one French official commented, “Why should we follow a policy initiative which might be abandoned in six months’ time?” And Carter’s characterization of the attack as “the most serious crisis since World War II” aroused derision among European opinion-makers, many of whom suggest that he misused this issue—and the issue of the American hostages in Iran—to rally support in the Democratic primaries. Now many Europeans see Carter capable of clutching at almost any straw to revive his popularity—and they resent his doing so at their expense. Commenting on Carter’s criticism of the German Chancellor’s intention to visit Moscow, the *Sunday Times* of London editorialized: “He was as right to go as President

Carter was wrong (either through ignorance or electioneering) to question his intelligence and integrity.”

Europe's new aloofness has consequences that go far beyond obvious military concerns. The U. S. consistently runs a huge balance-of-trade surplus with Europe, and this surplus is becoming increasingly crucial in offsetting the chronic American trade deficit with Japan and OPEC nations. In 1980 alone, if trade follows the pattern of the first quarter, the surplus will run to $24.5 billion, which more than compensates for the $8.6 billion deficit with Japan and goes a good way toward covering the gigantic deficit with OPEC countries. Without this European surplus, the dollar would be far weaker than it is today.

Just as important, the U. S. has a $150 billion corporate-investment stake in Europe that remits tens of billions of dollars in critically needed dividend and royalty payments to parent companies every year. Any move by Europe toward economic neutralism that throws up na-

The winds of change driving Europe away from the U. S.

tionalistic barriers to trade and investment or any turning away from the U. S. as an economic partner threatens these crucial economic ties. The Soviet Union, of course, realizes this and is using the promise of oil, gas, and industrial markets to lure Europe eastward, away from the U. S.

**Losing confidence.** Yet there are plenty of political signs that the European drift away from U. S. policy is more than a cyclical aberration. In the last year alone, Europe refused to go along with Washington's hard-line, post-Afghanistan policy against the Soviet Union, it dragged its feet on an economic boycott of Iran, and it deliberately opposed Washington's wishes in the negotiations over a Palestinian settlement. To an ever-greater degree, moreover, European leaders are losing confidence that the U. S. will shield them with its "nuclear umbrella" against Soviet attack. In Brussels last September, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger bluntly warned Europeans against counting on this defense. "If the Soviets march on Berlin, would the U. S. launch a nuclear attack on Russia?" asks geopolitician Walter Peters, president of New York's Unicorn Fund. "Categorically, no."

The U. S., in fact, is now perceived in Europe as only a first among equals, rather than as a superpower-architect of Western policy. In early July, Kissinger warned of the dangers—predicting that

unless this new perception is changed, "we will see a de facto growth of the neutralism of our allies." Kissinger sees the current distancing of Europe from the U. S. as "one of the greatest foreign policy crises in our history—probably the greatest."

But beneath the political strains, changes in economic conditions also are pushing Europe away from the U. S. The soaring price of energy and OPEC attempts to limit oil production are sending Europeans scurrying to Russia to lock in additional supplies. Russian sales of oil to Europe are rising despite growing British North Sea production. West Germany increased its purchases of Russian oil products to 9.3 million tons last year, compared with 8.8 million in 1978. France, Belgium, and even Norway are buying more Soviet oil than ever. And neutral Switzerland imports half of its oil from Russia.

**Oil deficits.** The Kremlin's main thrust, however, is to expand its exports of gas. European imports of this Russian energy source have tripled—to nearly 17 million ton-equivalents of oil—since 1975, and Germany is getting ready, through its banks, to finance and build new pipelines that will increase even further Soviet gas supplies to Europe. The $11 billion project is expected to bring 40 billion to 50 billion cubic meters of West Siberian gas to the West each year. While the

economic effect of this deal on the countries that will consume the gas (Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark) will clearly be beneficial, the political consequences—from the viewpoint of the Western alliance—are cloudy. Germany is already dependent on Russia for 16% of its gas imports, and its dependence could rise to 30% in the years ahead. That sort of economic dependence could mean greater political leverage for Russia.

The oil crisis is also dividing Europe and the U. S. in another deeply significant way. The French, Germans, Italians, and others increasingly see trade and investment ties to the East as essential for the survival of their economies against their enormous oil deficits.

Last year, Germany sold $8.7 billion in exports to the Eastern bloc, a hefty 76% of the total it sold to the U. S. France sold $2.9 billion, Italy $2.4 billion. The significance of East bloc markets, as well as of raw materials, is now a regular feature of the Soviet propaganda campaign to drive a wedge between the U. S. and its allies. Russia trumpets the fact that 25% of Germany's nonferrous metals are Russian exports and that—by Soviet estimates—300,000 workers and 1,800 companies in West Germany depend on Soviet trade. Similar arguments are made to the

LC

More trade with the East bloc

Victor Juhasz

[L]

Sampson Hargreave

Even thoroughly Europeanized multinationals are not immune. Monsanto dropped out of the European nylon business last year—closing plants in Luxembourg and Scotland—after a Common Market decision to create a producers' cartel to relieve the huge overcapacity in the synthetic fibers industry.

The changing relationship between Europe and the U. S. promises also to have a far-reaching impact on the U. S.-style economic and financial institutions that have governed and often set policy for economic behavior in Europe for the

FOREIGN

last 35 years. Strains in the monetary system resulting from the combination of U.S. dollar weakness and Europe's growing economic strength spawned the European Monetary System (EMS) two years ago. Now European officials are considering plans to use that system to their collective advantage with OPEC. They hope to set up a European-style petrodollar recycling system based on

## The drift into neutralism is threatening the U. S. trade balance with Europe

Volume II: Japan (1979)

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... and every chapter is preceded by equally valuable, concisely written interpretive data.

Vol. I—USA: $35.00

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Vol. II—Japan: $50.00

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FOREIGN

BUSINESS WEEK: July 28, 1980

[LC]

59

From THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Volume 49, Number 3, Summer, 1980.
Copyright © 1980 by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa.

[LC]

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

honesty and personal integrity. He didn't bother to say it; he lived his life that way, and this may be why his former students continued to love him. He knew that philosophy could not save his soul and that the foundations of orthodox Judaism had not withstood the assaults by his mind. The tableau and comment with which Scholem ends his review are virtually a confrontation between the Litvak and the Yekke: both failed to understand one another, since the one was being witty and the other did not have a sense of humor.

To sum up: this review is not intended as a defense of Wolfson, which would be impertinent. The Schwarz biography is indeed a biography written about a scholar, and scholars don't provide what we generally identify with thrills. But the Schwarz book is a clean and intelligent account. It is a record of the deep admiration of a student for a great scholar and a tribute, therefore, to both of them—to the student who was drawn to such a master and to the master (of whom nothing flamboyant is reported, unless you want to describe his cerebral performances by that term) who could inspire such devotion in one of his students; and the story is of a scholar who was truly extraordinary, even in greatness. As Milton Anastos put it when he began his address on Wolfson's eighty-fifth birthday celebration in the Rare Book Room of the Widener Library, he was "Magister Noster." There aren't that many around in the halls of ivy or on adjacent greenswards. And in its own way Scholem's review also attests to this.

Frontshow

THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS. By Henry Kissinger.
Little, Brown. $20.

Reviewed by MARTIN MAYER

When the accusation arose that researchers had written Jack Kennedy's *Profiles in Courage*, a man at Harper who had worked on the book commented mildly that there was no

real reason to doubt the then senator's authorship. "It isn't," he said, "a very good book." The same defense could not be used for Henry Kissinger's *White House Years*, which is a very good book indeed, much better than anything he has previously written. These many pages are sustained by a narrative drive quite missing in the good doctor's (or, if you insist, the bad doctor's) studies of Metternich and Castlereagh, uses of nuclear weaponry, the Atlantic alliance. A big staff was involved in the preparation, but friends, enemies, and editors all insist that the book is this one man's creation and I believe them. He himself has said it, and it is greatly—but not, as we shall see, entirely—to his credit.

The narrative pulse is made stronger, of course, by the fact that Kissinger is telling a story, his own story too—statecraft with a human face, beauty marks and all. But beyond that, there is the growth of his ability to communicate during his eight years before the public. He is used to the sound of his own voice; if anyone in our time can afford now to relax, to unbutton a button, it's Henry Kissinger. He has established his persona. Finally, the book is not aimed, like its predecessors, at the community of scholars or at, as they are now called, "decision makers," but rather at the literate fraction of his established television audience.

By and large, the book has been reviewed on that level, with much rooting about for controversy. Providentially, William Shawcross's *Sideshow* appeared just before Kissinger's book and an enterprising reporter was able to dig up evidence that Kissinger made some minor changes in his own proof, almost certainly in response to *Sideshow*. It was in Shawcross's interest, both professionally and politically, to set up his book as a counterweight, and quite a lot of the press went along.

Interestingly, there is very little disagreement between Shawcross and Kissinger. Shawcross claims Kissinger and Nixon didn't care what happened to the Cambodians, and Kissinger contends only that the North Vietnamese cared even less. "It was they, not we, who decided to fight to the finish on the bleeding body of a small neutralist kingdom which wanted only to be left alone." (Note that it is the kingdom that bleeds, not people.) Kissinger is probably right in his claim

◎ MARTIN MAYER, whose most recent book is *The Fate of the Dollar*, is now at work on a book about diplomacy, to be published next year.

404

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

[LC]

that the United States meant its offer of complete neutralization of Cambodia, while the Vietnamese insisted on their right to use another country's soil in prosecuting their war.

Conversely, Kissinger argues that the 1970 attack on Cambodia was required in order to prevent the establishment of a "single large base area" for the North Vietnamese on the Cambodian side of the border, and to stop the flow of matériel to the Vietcong through the port of Sihanoukville. Shawcross never denies the large-scale use of Cambodian sanctuaries by forces who were, after all, killing Americans as well as South Vietnamese, and finds the attack reprehensible mostly because it was counterproductive, driving the trained Communist forces deeper into Cambodia, where they would do even more mischief. Shawcross would like to find evidence of American involvement in the plot that overthrew Sihanouk, but can't. Kissinger would like to claim that toward the end he solicited the help of Sihanouk in forming a government of national union that might be effective against the Khmer Rouge, but is compelled to admit that at best he was too grudging and too late. Essentially the argument between the two is whether the Vietnam war itself should have been pursued—and Shawcross has done well with the critics because very few people will say they thought that war was worth anything like what it cost.

There is remarkably little in White House Years of what Kissinger, speaking of the habits of Russian diplomats, calls "petty chiseling." (McGeorge Bundy, who gets even with Kissinger precisely in tempo with some comments on himself, has pointed out one interesting but not very important fudge—his saying different things to Thieu and to the American public at the time of the ceasefire.) The treatment of Nixon especially seems to me consistent with what Kissinger was saying privately at the time, and with the facts to the extent that we know them: that the President was extremely intelligent, capable of formulating large (but rarely sophisticated) views, personally insecure to an astonishing degree, and fundamentally indecisive until pushed to the wall, when his decisions went completely out of scale with the situations that had provoked them.

The vast bulk of the judgments that Kissinger

passes on friend and foe are relatively charitable, and the only person he really seeks to leave for dead is William Rogers, whom he reduces from the status of Secretary of State to the position of Nixon's old friend. (He omits, however, a fact he liked to stress at the time to explain why he didn't and couldn't hope to cut Rogers out: "Remember, Rogers was at Tricia's wedding." He also fails to mention the fact, undoubtedly important to Nixon, that Rogers had been Kay Graham's lawyer and, in every sense, counselor—giving reason to hope that the antagonism of the Washington Post could be muted.) From the collection of thumbnail sketches—some brilliant, some just showy—one does miss any portrait of Bob Haldeman, whose never-ending suspicion of him was forever a spider in the Adviser's soup.

What is wrong with the book cuts a great deal deeper, however, than such questions as whether Kissinger told the whole truth about Cambodia or went in the tank for John Connally because, at the time he was writing, Connally seemed a reasonable guess for the next President. What is missing here is precisely what one would have hoped Henry Kissinger could have brought to an account of his experiences in office: a sense of historical origins, of his place in the mosaic of events in which he was privileged to participate. The travelogue treatment of China has already been noted by others. The Vietnam discussion begins essentially with Kennedy's decision to send American forces—a starting point chosen, obviously, with malice aforethought. Neither the years of French colonization nor the horrors of the pre-French era on that killing-ground are even mentioned; nor, perhaps even more important, is the background of Japanese occupation and of collaboration between Japan and Vichy France. Shawcross is sketchy on this material, but at least he recognizes its existence and importance. Kissinger the historian quite aggressively takes the world as he has found it.

Worse yet, the discussion of the division of Europe, and especially of Germany, is conducted in the vacuum of daily press reporting. Here, after all, is a subject which Kissinger, by both training and background, must see in deeper focus than concerns about German "nationalism" or East Bloc v. West Bloc. One of the Nixon administration's triumphs

406

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

was the wooing of Rumania—as one of the Carter administration's triumphs was the wooing of Hungary, though it is by no means clear whether Washington understands the depths of hostility that persist between Hungary and Rumania. Surely a trained European historian should not treat as identical entities the restive satellites, each with its own history, its backgrounds of Turkish occupation, Austrian suzerainty, Russian and German conflict, and ethnic divisiveness that gave us the word “balkanization.”

Kissinger's time in Washington was during the period when the great European historical trend of this century—the domination of the heartland by Germany—recovered from its devastation by Hitler. West Germany emerged as the strongest nation on one side of the Elbe, East Germany as the strongest economy (if not nation) on the other side. Budapest, Bucharest, even Prague now look to East Berlin with the same mixture of admiration, distrust, and fear that is felt in Paris, Brussels, and London when eyes turn to Bonn. Among the Germans themselves is a buried consciousness that the permanent link between the United States and the Soviet Union, the complicating consonance in their clashing tonalities, is a shared need for Germany to remain divided.

Against the background of a restored sense of Volk, of renewed romanticism, of the competing roles of Bavaria, Rhineland, the Hanse, Prussia, and of a renewed presence in East Africa, Brazil, even Melanesia, Willy Brandt came to office with Ostpolitik. Kissinger tells us he didn't like it off the top and never felt comfortable with Brandt personally (an oddity, given Brandt's uniquely clean record among contemporary German politicians vis-à-vis the Nazis). There must have been some process by which Kissinger came to terms with the beginnings of reconciliation between the two Germanys, put up with the naive anti-Americanism of Brandt's sidekick, Egon Bahr, and devoted his considerable skills to the service of the interminable negotiations that achieved the Berlin treaty. Of this internal process he tells us nothing—perhaps (and if so, it is the heart of what makes this book troubling) because he did not have the time to think through in any depth what he was doing and why. A strategic view of the world is doubtless better than a tactical view,

but neither substitutes for a historical view.

Kissinger is aware of the problem. In his foreword he suggests that something has been lost by the arrival of "instantaneous communication": that the instructions formerly given to a negotiator, because they "had to be conceptual,... gave an insight into the thinking of statesmen," while today "they are usually tactical or technical and therefore are silent about larger purposes and premises." Moreover, he adds in his first chapter, "a period in high office consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it." Anyone who spends time around the State Department must note, with growing horror, the overloading burden of information under which not just the leaders but the troops must labor. Decisions on which questions really require an answer, which should be permitted to absorb the time, become monstrously difficult once it is assumed (as everyone does assume) that not a sparrow thuds to earth anywhere in the world but the United States must be involved. A last stimulus to pity and terror is the bureaucratic coordination system that requires many departments and bureaus and subbureaus to "sign off" virtually every work product, which must therefore be phrased in terms acceptable to—at the worst, recognizable by—all available perspectives on the situation.

The way out, all but inescapable, is to follow the lead of the newspapers. The President reads the newspapers, and so does the Secretary of State, who finds a digest of the press on the seat of his limousine when he leaves for the office; the summary of the cable traffic can wait until his arrival. The newspapers provide a phraseology and a remote wide angle that can be universal among the bureaus. Anyway, if the *New York Times* and the *Washington Post* are taking something seriously, then surely the myrmidons of State must take it seriously.

But the essence of the newspaper is that it is a historical. It bakes the world fresh today, and wraps fish tomorrow. After a while, the decision maker who starts his day with the newspaper begins to see the world as composed of these low-energy quanta. The use of "back channels" to get around the foreign policy bureaucracy is seen as advantageous, in large part because it avoids the need to present proposals and their logic in terms dictated from outside the transaction—although,

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as Kissinger's long and wearisome recounting of North Vietnamese bargaining tactics demonstrates, until both sides know that they want the results they can get they tend to say the same things to each other that they say to the press.

The higher criticism of *The White House Years* is that the whole book is couched in terms which will be entirely recognizable to newspaper readers with moderate memories. One suspects that his years in office conditioned Kissinger actually to think in those terms. The ultimate defect of centralization in our time is its creation of the insistent trope toward seeing the world in a focus blurred by today's words. (The advantage of decentralization is that it permits mistakes to be made at levels where they can be relatively easily rectified, but that is matter for another piece.) Kissinger's decision to identify himself with political authority, rather than with the experts, leaves him in the end vulnerable to an accusation, not that he is mendacious or careerist (for he is neither, I think, any more than is the rest of Washington), but that he is intellectually a little vulgar.

## Quite Batty

BATS OF AMERICA. By Roger W. Barbour and Wayne H. Davis. University Press of Kentucky. $22.50.

Reviewed by PAUL A. ZAHL

Bats belong to the zoological subclass Chiroptera. Greek for "hand wings," the word embraces all mammals that have matched birds and insects in utilizing the air's density for achieving flight. To be sure, there are "flying" lemurs and "flying" squirrels, but these are wingless—merely gliders.

Questions about the habits, peculiarities, and taxonomy of our chiropteran natives are likely to be answered in *Bats of America*, whose authors make good their promise to

supply "... information enabling one to identify bats from the United States... information on their life history."

Many years ago, in the late Professor G. M. Allen's mammalogy class at Harvard, I learned that the chiropterans' fragile skeletons left only faint paleontological impressions, but enough to identify the group as of very ancient lineage, with a history dating back at least into the Eocene period of fifty to seventy million years ago. In those cradle times, factors of mutation and selective survival induced certain small tree-living mammals to glide, lemurlike, branch to branch. Evolution continued its play, ever pressured by the bat's varying environmental needs, until true flight was finally achieved along with correlative, often bizarre, variations in form and habit—variations whose common names tell more than paragraphs: leaf-chinned bat and hog-nosed, lump-nosed, mustached, small-footed, big-eared, and mastiff bats.

But for all the diversity shown by the forty known American species, bats worldwide are related by one striking feature: a dramatic lengthening of the arm bones and fingers to provide the framework for a flappable membranous web which endows its possessor with the Icarian gifts of lift and propulsion, just as feathered or veined wings empower birds and insects to master space. A massive thoracic musculature supplies motor energy. When at rest, the bat retracts its long fingers and web somewhat like an umbrella closing.

Caves, abandoned mines, belfries, trees, audits are the usual daytime habitats of bats. Why they choose the dark for feeding relates obviously to the abundance of night-flying insects, possibly also to freedom from most bird competition. Bats generally capture their prey by means of echo location—bat sonar. Here again bats are uniquely gifted. Their vocal cords produce high-frequency sound pulses which, when reflected by any object, moving or stationary, are received and assessed by an ultrasensitive aural mechanism and amplified, in some species, by huge sound-gathering ear shells. Sonar-derived information enables the bat, during flight and in total darkness, to determine its victim's speed, course, and position, then to sweep in for the killing bite. The bat's mouth is often formidably fanged. Ponderous insects are sometimes scooped into the maw by the

● PAUL A. ZAHL is the author of numerous scientific research papers as well as essays and reviews in *THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR*. Before his recent retirement he was a senior scientist on the staff of the *National Geographic*.

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is generally the aim the authors emphasize in their interpretations, but decentralization there in order to restrict the interventionism abroad to which modern strong executives have been prone. This has been a more crucial part of the total pattern of motivation than Franck and Weisband indicate. And this, I fear, is why the "revolution" may be less durable than they imagine.

The pendulum swing from interventionism to noninterventionism and back again, roughly generation by generation—a shifting willingness to use forceful intrusive instruments abroad—has been a conspicuous feature of our diplomatic history. Congressional activism tends to peak along with the noninterventionism (for example, the 1930s), and later to subside as a revitalized interventionism comes to welcome executive assertiveness. Nixon tried to cling to executive power and to a policy of interventionism, but the tide (as he knew) was running against him in both respects. Ford yielded fairly gracefully in both respects. But Carter (at least until November 1979) was the first American president since Herbert Hoover for whom noninterventionism (relatively speaking) was a positive virtue in American foreign policy. No wonder his administration could adjust without great discomfort to the surge of congressional assertiveness, as Franck and Weisband indicate. But Americans now seem to be "recovering their nerve," as the reemerging interventionists like to put it; and nostalgia for forceful presidents is also rising. To be sure, as the authors show, some hawks as well as doves have thrust Congress forward in various instances during the past decade. In the long run, however, if hawkish policies continue to grow popular again, they are likely as in the past to be much more compatible with executive than with legislative ascendancy. Supposing such a changed set of policy imperatives, I would be apprehensive that "untying the hands of the president" will have wider appeal than Franck and Weisband envisage from their narrower perspective.

Their "revolution" considerably restrains the executive and the nation in foreign affairs; if it is to last, the public must continue to be willing to have it restrain both. It is hard to have confidence that such a mood will prevail very long.

H. BRADFORD WESTERFIELD
Yale University

The White House Years by Henry Kissinger. Boston, Mass., Little, Brown and Company, 1979. 1521 pp. $22.50.

Richard Nixon's first appearance in this volume is marked by Henry Kissinger's observation that at the 1969 inaugural "he seemed uncertain" and "his pant legs as always [were] a trifle short" (p. 3). Nearly 1500 pages later Nixon is desperately searching for a new crisis to bolster his always beleaguered self-esteem and is about to find a crisis of a quite different kind in Watergate. This progression from superficial innocence to calculated corruption shapes these memoirs. At the beginning, Kissinger is surprised and elated at becoming national security adviser; by the end he is manipulating the media (only Oriana Fallaci's deviousness can match his own), piously acting as if he disagreed with Nixon's Christmas bombing of North Vietnam when in fact he agreed, and so carefully distancing

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himself from the president that Kissinger seems to be preparing us for declarations of in-
nocence in the forthcoming volume two.

Kissinger's view of American history helps shape this progression. Before 1969 he had studied mostly the European past, not the American. The imbalance has not been corrected. His brilliant descriptions of Italian politics, Paris streets, Russia's traditional insecurity, even South Asian religions have no counterparts in analyses of any American scene beyond the District of Columbia's boundaries. Thus he begins by picturing an innocent United States, ignorant of "issues of strategy" and "physical power" (p. 195), entering "the twentieth century largely unprepared for the part it would be called upon to play" (p. 59). (Picturing earlier Americans as naive in the ways of "physical power" and "strategy" would have surprised the British, French, Spanish, Russians, Mexicans, Native Americans, and many Southerners who were driven out of North America, conquered, or exterminated by the United States.) He ends by noting the discredited if not corrupted foreign-policy establishment of the 1970s—a political system that can best be operated by its Richard Nixons—and academic institutions that are morally bankrupt. A superb tactician, Kissinger's own innocence of the American past may be one reason why his strategic concepts (détente, Iran, "decent intervals" in Vietnam) have never matched his tactical brilliance.

But the volume is a training manual in technique for aspiring diplomats. It teaches them how to deal with unstable leaders ("as was his habit when extremely agitated [Nixon] would bark an order and immediately hang up the phone" [p. 495], so Kissinger often simply ignored the order); uncooperative bureaucracies (three times in three months during 1971 Kissinger completed major negotiations of which "the regular bureaucracy . . . was unaware" [p. 831]); past insults (especially those from Kennedys); and future presidential contenders (John Connally is pictured as a sage in economics, the sharpest politician in town, and even Kissinger's tutor in how to deal tactically with the Soviets).

Above all, the volume is a lesson in adjustment. Kissinger fully understands that Americans entered a new era after 1968. Drastically changed power alignments required different bases "on which coexistence between the democracies and the Soviet system must be based" (p. 1253). Nixon believed the first steps were neutralizing the Vietnam issue and isolating congressional and bureaucratic opposition. The analysis was accurate but the prescription was not entirely correct. Vietnamese revolutionaries could not be neutralized politically or militarily. The world could not be as neatly divided between pro-Russian and anti-Russian forces as Nixon and Kissinger believed. When they attempted such simplistic divisions in complex situations, the results could be tragic—as in Allende's Chile, or in Egyptian relations where Kissinger admits he was so transfixed by the Soviet presence he did not understand the significance of Sadat's and Fawzi's efforts to work with Washington. The administration was at its best in pushing Americans toward necessary adjustments with China. But such an opportunity occurred only once. After that high point, Kissinger and Nixon had to deal with bullying Russians, obstinate North and South Vietnamese, an angry Congress, and a declining economy. These problems refused to give way to mere tactics and style, no matter how brilliant.

The failure to adjust to the new world of the 1970s goes deeper than the lack of public consensus that Kissinger continually blames for his and Nixon's policy failures. It reaches

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down to an innocence of American history and the premonitions of political corruption that open and close this volume.

WALTER LAFEBER

Cornell University

The Crises of Power: An Interpretation of United States Foreign Policy During the Kissinger Years by Seyom Brown. New York, Columbia University Press, 1979. 170 pp. $10.95.

Seyom Brown wrote this book "while waiting for Henry Kissinger's memoirs" because he wanted to work out his own appraisal of U.S. foreign policy during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford "unaffected by the storm of pro- and anti-Kissinger polemics" that the memoirs would unleash. That seemingly risky step may have been prudent: Brown thereby spared himself the task of taking Kissinger's monumental tome into account. And he got his own brief volume into print in time to serve as a useful guide through the labyrinths of the Gospel according to St. Henry.

Brown's title recalls (surely intentionally) his earlier book, *The Faces of Power* (Columbia University Press, 1968), a critique of American foreign policy from Truman to Johnson. That gloomy assessment was rendered even gloomier by the note on which Brown concluded an epilogue he wrote for the paperback edition just as Nixon and Kissinger took office: "On January 20, 1969, there was no basic foreign policy to be handed over intact to the Nixon Administration" (p. 378). A decade later Brown is more optimistic. His recent book ends: "Kissinger on balance played a weighty and constructive role in the necessary adaptation of U.S. policy to a world more complex and less responsive to simple exertions of American power than the one his predecessors had inherited after World War II" (pp. 152-53). There was, indeed, a Kissinger legacy to hand over: new attention to the global balance and an effort "toward positively relating to, rather than pushing away, the new forces in world politics"(p. 153).

Kissinger's policy toward the new forces in world politics Brown sees as ironic. For the most of his eight years in office Kissinger did not take seriously issues off the beaten big-power track, such as appeals for a "new international economic order" or for majority rule in Southern Africa. But in 1975 and 1976 he had what Brown plainly regards as the courage to reverse himself on these issues. Perhaps, Brown suggests, they formed for Kissinger "a higher realpolitik," one premised on notions of world order that en-compassed much more than a stable American-Soviet balance.

As these lines imply, Brown's is on the whole an admirer's account. Only regarding Kissinger's handling of the Vietnam peace negotiations is he bluntly censorious. "Kissinger's attempt to dignify as a 'tragedy' his and Nixon's prolongation of the bloodshed to gain an honorable peace in Indochina was transparent charlatanism," he writes, the work of "stubbornly proud men" who would not admit they were mistaken (p. 54). Most policies, however—the opening toward China, the handling of the Soviet relationship, the efforts toward a Middle East settlement, the move toward closing the breach with the Third World in 1975-76—get generally high marks.

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Yet Brown is ultimately ambivalent about Kissinger's achievements as philosopher-statesman. Passages of guarded reservation follow paragraphs of handsome praise. What disappoints Brown the most is that Kissinger never fully articulated the premises of the "larger concept behind the hyperactive diplomacy." It was both a personal and a national misfortune, Brown says, that Kissinger "had correctly diagnosed the need for conceptual clarification but was unable to supply the remedy" (p. 16). Others, too, have commented on the absence of a clear conceptual underpinning to Kissinger's diplomacy.

But when statecraft is reduced to maxims it must invariably seem rigid and simplistic. Kissinger's conduct of office was anything but that. Moreover, the world view that infused it is scarcely difficult to uncover. It infuses all of Kissinger's published works, including his memoirs. Taken out of context it is disarmingly simple. But as Kissinger so often demonstrated in his academic writings on other statesmen, it is one thing to articulate a world view and something quite different to base "real" decisions on it. Kissinger's reputation as a conceptualizer was secure before he left the academy for Richard Nixon's White House. Posterity will evaluate his stewardship on the basis of the results. All things considered, Brown is a very kind expositor-critic. Others may be less charitable.

RICHARD H. ULLMAN
Princeton University

Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II by Strobe Talbott. New York, Harper & Row, 1979. 319 pp. $15.00.

Strobe Talbott, the diplomatic correspondent of Time magazine, has written an impressive account of the evolution of the SALT II agreement that should be equally fascinating to lay persons interested in SALT and specialists in arms control. After briefly sketching the background of SALT I and the early negotiations on SALT II under Secretary of State Kissinger, Talbott proceeds chronologically, describing the events leading up to the Carter-Brezhnev summit in Vienna in 1979. (The text of the treaty is included in an appendix.)

He deals with the major U.S.-Soviet meetings of the Carter administration, beginning with the abortive March 1977 meeting in which Secretary of State Vance, departing from the approach of the Kissinger period, made a "comprehensive proposal" for deep cuts in the arsenals of both sides. After describing the American regrouping necessitated by the Soviet rejection of this initial thrust, Talbott clearly sets forth the U.S. preparations for and participation in subsequent negotiations over the next two years. He keeps the negotiations in context by touching on events that affected the climate of SALT II (for example, the U.S. human rights campaign, the cancellation of the B-1 bomber, the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China, and the loss of Iranian listening posts for verification of the treaty).

Talbott skillfully interweaves the many diverse threads of the personalities, politics, and technical issues of SALT II. In describing the formulation of American positions and setting forth differences among the National Security Council, the Defense Department,

THE GEORGIA REVIEW, Volume 34, #2, Summer 1980

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Richard Stern

*Missingeria and Literary Health*

missingeria, n. [from works by H. Kissinger and N. Mailer] literary edema; an abnormal swelling of books caused by confusion of size and strength.

"Now Gary was trapped in fame, and
it gave him a crazy strength."

—Mailer, *The Executioner's Song*

"You're the top
You're a Waldorf Salad
You're the top
You're a Berlin ballad..."

—Cole Porter

In the fall of 1979, Little Brown published over 2500 pages on the contemporary world—its seamy topside and its seamy rear—by two of the world's most famous fifty-six-year-olds, Henry Kissinger and Norman Mailer. Kissinger's fifteen-hundred pages commemorate his four years as Richard Nixon's foreign policy advisor; Mailer's thousand record the transformation of the murderer Gary Gilmore under the pressures of a bold decision and the celebrity which resulted from it.

Kissinger's book is intended to be a record for the use of "future historians," although he asserts that they have a "nearly impossible" job: In a time of "compulsive record-keeping," when "almost all" the records are "self-justifications," on what can the historian rely? Even the accounts of prominent participants are stained by bias: "the impulse to explain merges with the impulse to defend." The participant has but one "vital contribution"

* An essay-review of

THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG. By Norman Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. 1056 pp.
$16.95.

WHITE HOUSE YEARS. By Henry Kissinger. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. xxiv, 1521 pp.
$22.50.

LETTERS. By John Barth. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1979. xv, 772 pp. $8.95.

IT LOOKED LIKE FOR EVER. By Mark Harris. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. 276 pp.
$9.95.

TETHERED. By David Martin. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979. 265 pp. $9.95.

DAYS. By Mary Robison. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. 180 pp. $8.95.

THE GHOST WRITER. By Philip Roth. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. 180 pp.
$8.95.

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to make to "the writing of history: He will *know* which ... considerations in fact influenced the decisions in which he was involved...." Kissinger assumes that the participant will *tell* what he knows, an assumption his critics will not readily make. I cannot debate Kissinger's versions of the historical record; I want to examine his book as book, as the work of literature he intends it to be (at least to the degree that its charm enables it to displace or survive competing versions of the period). *White House Years* is conscientiously literary. Here and there, in fact, it resembles books of Norman Mailer.

For years, Mailer has written brilliantly about public events and personalities, moon flights and astronauts, conventions and politicians, prize fighters, protest marches, movie stars. Mailer's accounts were usually such splendid fusions of narrative, scene, portraiture, and comment that it becomes increasingly difficult for readers to separate the actualities from Mailer's versions of them.¹ In these books, Mailer employed his version of a Henry Adamsian Mailer who jogged beside and sometimes provoked the protagonists.

*The Executioner's Song* lacks the Mailerian jogger. In fact, Mailer's absence is so pronounced that it dominates the book like an empty chair at a family dinner. Where is that self-mocked literary imp? Where is his glittering intelligence, flashing judgment, half-mad, but enchanting comparisons?

Nowhere.

*The Executioner's Song* is so unremittingly un-Mailerian, it is almost anti-Mailerian: an act of literary suicide analogous to the legal suicide which is the book's core. As Gary Gilmore's refusal to appeal the death sentence resolved the confusion of his fantasies and his morose and vicious existence, so Mailer attempted to resolve the literary dilemma of his life: how to write a great imaginative work when one is trapped by one's own great gifts as an observer and transmuter of public events.²

*The Executioner's Song* breaks into two parts: the first is a low-keyed, ventriloqual recital of several months in the life of Gilmore, his relatives, friends, and victims; the second records the transformation of these events by professionals of various sorts, policemen, lawyers, and—in particular—two journalists whose job (Mailer's own) is to transform the interesting into the sensational, to make the media event a commercial legend or best-selling work of literature. These journalists are not only self-conscious themselves, they evoke in the book's protagonists a self-consciousness which transforms character. The killer-executioner Gilmore, partly under the pressure of his decision, partly under that of awareness roused by professional interrogation, begins his song. A longtime prison reader, Gilmore turns into a letter-writer, speaker, and Byronic figure of poetry. And his poetry ignites poetry in others. The self-crippled style limps now and then in beautiful cadence.

Mailer is not aiming for stylistic beauty. His eye is on the power of nar-

¹What, one wonders, would a Christianity recorded in the Gospel According to Norman have become?

²Mailer allows the publisher to call this book "a true life novel," though he himself, knowing that novels have to be essentially free from the obligations of actual fact and actual chronology, limits himself to calling it novelistic.

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rative. He works for the selection of taped speech which can be composed into a grand, even a tragic pattern. He does not altogether fail. If the book had not been bled almost to death by its first few hundred pages,³ one would not only be gripped but overcome by the last few hundred.

An edematous book, then, the edema caused by the conscious decision to "hide that talent which is death to hide"; the odd but logical consequence of something Mailer began to do when he started to write—at Harvard—under the literary signs of James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck. To write like these *American* writers, the nice little Brooklyn boy—who showed up dewy-eyed on the blurb of *The Naked and the Dead*⁴—had to strip the niceness from himself. He had to undo his tie, take off his suitcoat, deharvardise, dejewify, and desophisticate himself. He found his grapes of wrath in the Pacific, his *toreros* in prizefighters, his Weary O'Reilly in Sergeant Croft.

Until now, though, Mailer had not devoted a whole work to his finds, his "creations." Here's a sample. It's part of the ventriloqual paraphrase of Dennis Boaz, a lawyer who wants to write Gilmore's story.

Now, one week later, his life was on the brink of great change. He was going up the hill to the State Capitol with its beautiful dome that he had looked at so often, for it was visible just about anywhere below in Salt Lake. Dennis was certainly feeling up for the occasion. . . . He was trying to pick up the aura of these old Mormons. The piety in the air was like the heavy piety you could find in all courtrooms and governmental buildings. . . . It sure smelled of reverential air. Like we will all be present on Day One when the Lord makes his appearance.

All of *The Executioner's Song* is penned up in such paragraphs of parodie simplicity. Deprived of the brilliant juxtapositions, condensations, summaries, and assured emphases of Mailer's earlier books, the book has no choice but to plod, slog, and stammer along for hundreds of pages which are less telling than good newspaper stories or those overheard on a bus.⁵ Wanting to Balzacify the country, Mailer has let it flatten him. Down, down for the terrible long count.

If Mailer drove a homuncular Mailer out of his book, Henry Kissinger has, surprisingly, put a little Henry into his, a Maileresque self-caricature, full of self-deprecation and mockery who shadows the Bismarckian world-shaker. Little Henry Kissinger and his remarkable boss—the valorous but timid, intuitive, incompetent, elected hater of electorates, the half-mad

³ The blood is the cold blood of Capote's pioneering triumph.

⁴ Mailer once told me "I never looked like that."

⁵ Much less telling than powerful television documentary. *Inside San Quentin*, say (a film of Wayrauch, Heckman, Burris, et al.), is far more powerful than Mailer/Gilmore's version of prison life. And several of the prisoners—especially the twenty-seven-year-old “multiple murderer,” Smith—are at least as fascinating as Gilmore as they drive one into the depths where “th’ expense of spirit” pours into the “waste of shame.”

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dreamer and hater, Richard Nixon—journey like Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza through the world’s chancelleries. And time after time, they bring off
the stunning triumphs which, like Quixote’s, are so often illusory. The ter-
rible grain of the world, the endless “contingency” of things, the “wicked-
ness of objects” (which always rolls coins under bureaus), the pathetic limits
of human foresight and human organization, or just the twists of human
character reduce the triumphs to momentary lulls in the *haltungslose Un-
ruhe* (“untamed restlessness”) which, wrote Hegel, only occasionally “co-
alesces into a result that rests.”⁶ The great men all know this executioner’s
song. So Mao, the “colossus,” words ripped in gusts from his propped body,
tells Nixon, who salutes him as one who “changed the world,” that at most
he’s changed “a few places in Peking.” This buffeted world is somehow held
together by its worldly-wise Sancho Panzas, the Chou-En-Lais, Dean Ache-
sons, and Henry Kissingers. These men follow after the obsessed dreamers,
managing whatever part of their dreams is manageable. But catastrophe is in-
evitable. *White House Years* ends with its perverse icon, Richard Nixon,
“in his moment of triumph on a pinnacle, that was soon to turn into a preci-
pice.” So all the labor, all the money, all the blood, and all the death add up
to little more than the few extraordinary moments “when dreams and possi-
bilities conjoined.”

A great story. Yes, if it did not lie asleep inside the commemorative
marble.

Henry Kissinger knows what great books are, and there is every evi-
dence he tried to write one. The generosity of the portraiture and anecdotes,
the varieties of wit (including Stalininien rakings of Haldeman and his cre-
tinous Myrmidons of publicity), the juxtaposition of the playful and the
deadly—Nixon and Brezhnev, tripping on the technicalities of weaponry,
arguing each other’s positions—vest-pocket essays on negotiating styles, crisis
management and bureaucracy, the disastrous, bathetic lyricism (“the aircraft
crossed the snowcapped Himalayas, thrusting toward the heavens in the
roseate glow of a rising sun”), the soggy, Proustian teabags,⁷ and above all,
I think, the consistent application of an analysis which—despite those critics
who claim that this book is the world’s longest job application—neither spares
anyone⁸ he wishes to criticize, nor refrains from praising those—like the Shah
of Iran—he wishes to praise.

⁶ The Hegel of *The Philosophy of History* is, I think, the intellectual ancestor of this work. Compare, for instance, Kissinger's constant alignment of personal and national styles with Hegel's remarks in "The Dialectic of National Principles."

⁷ "It is not often that one can recapture as an adult the quality that in one's youth made time seem to stand still; that gave every event the mystery of novelty; that enabled each experience to be relished because of its singularity. As we grow older we comfort ourselves with the familiar for which we have developed rote responses. . . . Only some truly extraordinary event, both novel and moving, both unusual and overwhelming, restores the innocence of the years when each day was a precious adventure in defining the meaning of life" (White House Years, p. 742).

⁸ Except perhaps John B. Connally. Professor Stanley Hoffman reported (in *The New York Review of Books*, 6 Dec. 1979) that Kissinger said harsh things about him. In 1971!

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It's not enough. Filigree is not texture. Kissinger's energy has gone into assemblage rather than composition, into massive accumulation instead of an orderly, cumulative retrospection. There is too much "roseate glow," much too much superficial comment. The book heaves itself into literary orbit, but falls again and again under its frightful bulk. It's as if Kissinger's literary style were a piece not with the foreign policy of "geopolitical nuance" (which it celebrates), but of sheer mass and throw-weight, its own difficult ambition mangled by haste, carelessness and—ultimately—vanity.

Haste. Literary endeavor, unlike worldly achievement, throws away the alarm clock. It requires an even longer patience than that required in protracted negotiations. Its aim is perfection, not solution (though almost every author will say he finally abandoned rather than perfected a fine book). Henry Kissinger was not trained for such patience; Norman Mailer lost the habit of it (and so wrote *An American Dream* under a self-imposed serial schedule which would have undone a better-prepared and much greater writer).

This season has seen the publication of other books which are the work of more patient writers, writers who may be as hungry for success as Kissinger and Mailer, but who do not spend as much time working the angles of sensationalism. They have the longer patience, perhaps because they are not "trapped by fame." For now, Mailer and Kissinger make more noise, take up more room on the bookshelves, infect the public with their own sensational infection. They are this season's Waldorf Salads, Berlin ballads, "old Dutch Masters . . . Mrs. Astor . . . Pepsodent." They're "the top."

A word here for some of the season's other books. Mary Robison's *Days* consists of twenty-odd bare, beautiful stories which express even more than they report of the "day's" neurasthenic edginess. David Martin's awkward but beautiful first novel, *Tethered*, brings us a thousand miles deeper into rural America than Mailer's book. In a few pages about a farmer named Banes Johnson who torments a fifteen-year-old girl he then rapes, there is more about the infuriated sexuality behind the other Johnson's war than anything in the almost 2600 pages of missingeria. Mark Harris' *It Looked Like For Ever* is "about" the loss of fame, but this is work of narrative perfection. So delightful is its Lardnerian surface (though three other Henry Wiggin baseball novels entitle Harris to a large share of the Lardner throne) that this perfection may be missed (especially by those graduate students who work on books which display their art to disguise their insubstantiality). Like Robison and Martin, Harris' power of observation radiates a precision and depth of knowledge far beyond the declamations of missingeria.

A longer word about John Barth's *Letters* and Philip Roth's *The Ghost Writer*, two novels which have received more attention. Both deal with missingerian questions: What is the relationship between writer and writing? How do history and fiction turn into each other? How does the mixture become legend, myth, gospel?

Barth's novel is a series of immensely ingenious variations on these themes. Through the letters of seven correspondents, five of whom are char-

[LC]

BOOK REVIEWS

427

acters from Barth's earlier books and one of whom is the "author himself,"
the book spins off seven stories which converge on each other in space and
time. The book shuttles between early nineteenth-century American history
and wild bicentennial "revisions" of it. Like the Missinger and Harris books,
it makes much of a middle-aged man's desire to remember, relive, trum-
pet, and advance old triumphs. As Mailer uses the journalists to ferret out
the facts of his history, and as Kissinger uses his researchers, Barth uses his
characters "to play the role of the Author who solicits and organizes com-
munications from and between his characters, and embroils himself in their
imbroglios."

The art of *Letters* is conspicuous, its virtuosity constant. If its inexorable
scheme—the fixed order of the correspondence, the pressure of fusing stories
with heavy coincidence—might better serve a more abstract art (as, say,
twelve-tone composition) and pushes the book toward missingeria, its stylis-
tic power, wild humor, and unrelenting art keep sending in the marines.

Still, after reading the weighty novel, one is relieved to read a small and
perfect book. Roth's *The Ghost Writer* is his literary alter ego, Nathan
Zuckerman, here visiting the middle-aged writer Lonoff in his country re-
treat. Lonoff confirms the young writer's vocation, and then, without mean-
ing to, offers him his own life as a subject. Its chief ingredient is a strange
girl whom the young writer "realizes" is the most powerful of all modern
Jewish writers, Anne Frank. The brilliant conversion of "Amy Bellette" into
the Jewish "saint" and then back again into the fictionalized expression of
Zuckerman's needs (sexual, imaginative, and "political": that is, his need to
"defend and explain" his life to his philistine parents) is one of the beautiful
accomplishments of recent fiction. There is no strain, no compulsory virtu-
osity. The book is modest, delightful, amusing; and if *ars* is truly *longa*, it
will be read both now and long after Mailer and Kissinger's books are
forgotten.

*Epilogue*, 15 April 1980. *The Executioner's Song* has just been awarded the Pulitzer prize in-fiction! *The New York Times* says that the judges recommended three books to the Awarding Board. Their first choice was *The Ghost Writer*, their third, William Wharton's *Birdy*. In their wisdom, the Award Committee compounded the judges' absurdity by awarding the prize to Mailer. Life's little ironies. The book that brilliantly deals with the creation of a fiction by fictionalizing the post-humous life of a modern saint is passed over in favor of a book that is a monument to the author's scrupulous refusal to invent.

v

[L.C]

Globa! Trade -! 1970

French and are backed up in contract
awards—such as the $120 million job
given to two French concerns in March
for offshore drilling platform equipment
in the Caspian Sea. Thus it was no sur-
prise to Europeans that Germany signed
a 25-year economic assistance pact with
the Soviet Union even with Russian
troops still in Afghanistan.

In the nuclear area, Europe's indepen-
dence of U. S. policies is equally pro-
nounced. Iraq, which supplies 20% of
Italy's oil, was able to buy not only natu-
ral uranium but four Italian nuclear
laboratories along with technology for a
hot cell that can be used to reprocess
spent fuel into weapons-grade plutoni-

um. Although Italian officials claim they
got U. S. approval for the sale, U.S.
Embassy officials in Rome now say that
was not the case. Germany is selling up
to $10 billion worth of nuclear equip-
ment to Brazil, including reprocessing
facilities.

Such arms and nuclear transactions,
together with government-to-govern-
ment deals for energy, are concomitants
of Europe's new neutralism. "Europeans
would have been more hesitant about
making direct oil deals with the Mid-
east," notes Peters, "had they not been
willing to secede from U. S. leadership."
The deals are also examples of competi-
tion that U. S. companies are increasingly
likely to see in Third World markets
in the 1980s. The U. S. tends to see con-
flicts in the Third World in terms of
East-West conflict, while Europe tends
to see them as local or regional prob-
lems, notes Gregory F. Treverton of
Britain's International Institute for
Strategic Studies. To many European
analysts, this means European concerns
will increasingly step into trade with
countries that U. S. companies will find
politically off limits.

Europe's drift toward neutralism has
already influenced the policies of many
U. S. multinational corporations, and the
betting is that the changing structure of
the alliance will make the 1980s a far
more difficult period for U. S. companies
competing not only in Europe but also
against European companies in the de-
veloping markets of the Far East, Latin
America, and Africa. Further, as the
U. S. leads the other major industrial
economies into what looks increasingly
like a global recession, protectionist
pressures to insulate European econo-

mies will grow, making it even harder
for U. S. multinationals to maintain
their market shares. Some may get out.
"It is undoubtedly true that for the com-
panies who will remain here, the strate-
gy will be to become more European,"
predicts Francis J. Fitzgerald, group
vice-president of European operations
for Monsanto in Brussels. Add Glasgow
University economists Steve Young and
Neil Hood in a forthcoming book on mul-
tinationals in Europe: "A large propor-
tion of firms have yet to respond or to
respond fully to the pressures of the
1970s. This indicates that the shake-out
of American multinationals in Europe is
far from at an end."

Even thoroughly Europeanized multi-
nationals are not immune. Monsanto
dropped out of the European nylon busi-
ness last year—closing plants in Luxem-
bourg and Scotland—after a Common
Market decision to create a producers'
cartel to relieve the huge overcapacity in
the synthetic fibers industry.

This trend toward protection in Eu-
rope is putting a tight squeeze on many
high-technology U. S. corporations.
Many European countries are setting up
government policies designed to promote
and protect national high-tech corpora-
tions until they become big enough to
compete on the global markets against
U. S. and Japanese firms. Entire mar-
kets—such as industrial robots and bio-
technology—are being reserved for na-
tional companies. In France, the govern-
ment has been putting a controlled
squeeze on International Business Ma-
chines Corp. for years. The perception in
Paris is that if there is to be a viable
French computer manufacturer, it will
be at the cost of IBM's market share. It is
often difficult, if not impossible, for gov-
ernment agencies and nationalized com-
panies (which form 21% of French in-
dustry) to buy IBM equipment.

The changing relationship between
Europe and the U. S. promises also to
have a far-reaching impact on the U. S.-
style economic and financial institutions
that have governed and often set policy
for economic behavior in Europe for the

FOREIGN

Lever and other analysts think the U. S. and European economic systems are now at a crossroads, with time running out for decisions on which way to go. "If we don't achieve an enhanced level of cooperation, the world will have economic and financial upheaval in the years ahead and differences among the countries will get worse," he predicts. What many U. S. officials now foresee is an outcome also envisaged by many foreigners—a further drift by Europe toward political neutralism and to an activist business policy with the East bloc, even while European leaders rhetorically reaffirm their commitment to America. There is a clear danger for U. S. trade in the trend: fewer opportunities for markets in Europe, and more cutthroat competition for markets and raw materials in the rest of the world. Unless Washington can again show the strength that brought America the leadership of the alliance in the first place, an increasing neutralism in Europe is likely to do for U. S. business what it has already done for U. S. prestige. ■

Volume II: Japan (1979)

* Sinter Plants

* Pelletizing

* Coke Ovens

* Blast Furnaces

* Direct Reduction

* BOF

* Open Hearths

* Electric Furnaces

* AOD

* Electro Slag Remelt

* Vacuum Arc Remelt

* Continuous Casting

* Vacuum Degassing

* Process Computers

* Sendzimir Mills

* Plate Mills

* Piping and Tubing

* Rod Mills

* Continuous Galvanizing

* Hot Strip Mills

* Cold Strip Mills

* Continuous Pickling

* Continuous Annealing

* Mini Mills

Vol. I—USA: $35.00

Vols. I & II: $70.00

Vol. II—Japan: $50.00

Vols. I & III: $85.00

33 Metal Producing

# DON'T KID YOURSELF!

Name

Address

City State Zip

Home Phone Business Phone

NEWPORT
TRADING
COMPANY

4041 MacArthur Blvd., Newport Beach, CA. 92660

BW728ME

FOREIGN

BUSINESS WEEK: July 28, 1980 59

9

July 20-26, 1980

* On how to explain Rabin's popularity in the opinion polls: "I'm baffled! But I don't like to say that polls don't matter — because I do very well in them myself."

A door for the PLO

DERBY EVENING TELEGRAPH

DERBY,
DERBYSHIRE

ISSUE
DATED

29 NOV 1979

BOOKSHELF

by John Roberts

# How nervous Nixon confused Kissinger

Kissinger tells of incredible way he became a top diplomat

RICHARD NIXON, always nervous when meeting new people, was certainly ill at ease when as President-elect he invited Henry Kissinger to serve as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

They talked for some time, but, having noticed that the conversation had grown less precise, Kissinger had no more than a general impression that he was being asked whether in principle he was prepared to join the administration in some planning capacity. So he said that in the event that Governor Rockefeller was offered a Cabinet post, he would be happy to serve on his staff.

And that, Kissinger has had time to reflect, put paid to whatever minimal prospects existed for a Rockefeller appointment.

Two days after the interview with Nixon, Kissinger went to see John Mitchell. "What," Mitchell asked, "have you decided about the National Security job?" Kissinger said he did not know he had been offered it.

## Modern diplomacy

"Oh, Jesus Christ," said Mitchell, "he has screwed it up again," and off he went.

A few minutes later Kissinger was back with Nixon and this time he was offered the job in terms he understood. Two days later he accepted.

That, incredibly, is the way Kissinger was launched on the world, to become one of the most-travelled, best known men of modern diplomacy.

Kissinger tells the story in The White House Years (Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Michael Joseph, £14.95), his monumental first volume of memoirs.

It runs to more than 1,500 pages and covers his first four years (January 1969-January 1973) in office.

It is heavy going, but not half so dull as it looks on first glance. The leavening of anecdotes and observations on other leading players in some of the greatest dramas of modern times adds greatly to the general interest. For instance, it is a joy to find a reference to Harold Wilson greeting Nixon 'with the avuncular goodwill of the head of an ancient family that has seen better times but is still able to evoke memories of the wisdom, dignity and power that had established the family name in the first place'.

MAR 9 1990

[L]

nd indicated could easily be explained
forgiven, even if the conduct to which
they refer could not. It is on the larger
ies, of overall policy and of interpreta-
tion, that these memoirs are most vulner-
able.

On the Indochina war, which the Nixon
time inherited from its predecessors, Kiss-
inger is alternately profound and shallow.
It was, of course, right to perceive that the
orth Vietnamese were essentially interested
victory, not in a compromise solution. But
was surely wrong to cling so much to a
conception of the war as a case of com-
mon aggression, pure and simple. Even
now, in these pages, he claims that North
Vietnam had invaded South Vietnam "with-
out provocation," and fails to discuss at
all the many provocations the North Viet-
nese had faced over the years, not least
the failure of the 1954 Geneva provisions
for elections to reunify the country.

Kissinger's coverage of the Vietnam
gottings is detailed and fascinating, but
is also unintentionally revealing of the
imitations of his own approach. He shows
itself offering cease-fires, elections
throughout South Vietnam, withdrawals
and concessions of various kinds, one-track
approaches and two-track approaches.
The North Vietnamese were not interested.
He seems to attribute this to communist intran-
space. He nowhere systematically dis-
loses the actual past experience of Hanoi's
leaders in the matter of negotiations: an
experience which seemed to them to consist
of the disappointment after mother, and had

left them profoundly suspicious not just of
their adversaries, but also of their allies and
even of negotiated agreements as such.

There is one revealing omission in the long
account of the Vietnam negotiations. Kiss-
singer hardly mentions the 1954 Geneva
agreements on Vietnam, which linked to-
gether the various political and military
issues in an imperfect but at least coherent
way. It required no great foresight to see
that they provided the only sensible starting
point for negotiating the new settlement. But
was a variant of the 1954 settlement that
was eventually adopted by the various
parties at Paris in 1973, and in the event
it turned out to provide for exactly the
outcome provided for in Geneva 19 violent
years earlier: face-saving withdrawal by the
outside power (in 1954, of course, it was
France), and reunification under the com-
munists two years later. Could such a
Geneva-type settlement have been achieved
by the remarkable Dr K sooner, perhaps in
1969, thus saving four years of bombing
and blood-letting? It is impossible to know,
but these memoirs suggest that that par-
ticular approach was not even properly
tried out.

At times Kissinger seems to have over-
estimated the use of force as a means of
achieving change. He seems naively to have
overestimated the capacity of ground troops
and air power to prevent guerrilla activities
in and from Cambodia. Thus in March
1970, he says, "Our only realistic option
was to destroy the sanctuaries." He nowhere
states, unless there was a real
desire to achieve this, that the
prospect of achieving this object.

On Cambodia, Kissinger deals with some
—but only some—of the accusations levelled
against him by William Shawcross in *Side-
show*. He does make some telling points;
but Shawcross's argument that Kissinger
showed no hint of knowledge of the limits
of air power seems to be confirmed, rather
than otherwise, by these pages.

On many other matters, besides Indo-
china, Kissinger's account seems curiously
lacking in perspective. On Chile's 1970 elec-
tion, and Allende's programme, he says,
"By definition his would be the last demo-
cratic election." It was not so: further
elections were held *after* he became President.
On crises, Kissinger's claims that "boldness
is the safest course." Always? For both
sides? It is a dangerous lesson to bequeath
without any allowance for exceptions.

Because some of its analysis is simplistic
and its lessons crude, this book may have
an influence that is baneful as well as bene-
ficial. It informs vastly, but it also con-
ceals. If this seems a contradictory verdict,
it is perhaps only a mirror of the man. He
showed extraordinary insight in his opening
to China, yet his interpretation of events in
Chile still seems crude. These pages only
confirm the Clausewitzian complexity of the
character of this jet-age man: both a shuttle
diplomatist and a secret bomber. Many of
the flying doctor's questionable missions
debatable diagnoses and emergency opera-
tions are illuminated by this flight report.
But awkward questions remain unanswered,
and some apparently even unheard.

Autobiography

*Richard Nixon: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon* (Arrow Books, £4,95). Henry Kissinger: The White House Years' (Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Michael Joseph, £14,95).

Politi press are usually exercises in self-congratulation and self-justification. The Nixon and Kissinger memoirs conform perfectly to that standard. Both authors (with the assistance of their ghosts) promote their records and images with great ingenuity, and their objectivity is selective.

Nixon's book is a readable not
unintelligent record of his life
from when he was with political
guys, born in a house my father
built, until he left office in dis-
grace in 1973. Nixon's early
years were filled with moral
guides: an Indian chief who
taught him the value of com-
petition at Whittier College; and
his remarkable and sainted
mother who, incredibly left the
adolescent 'Tolstoy' a legacy
of 'quiet, inner peace'

Nixon's memoir is both a
solemn, self-conscious paean to
the doctrine of self-help, and a
rewriting of history. He sanc-
timoniously criticizes Senator
McCarthy ('It is despicable to
make a racket of anti-commun-
ism'); views the invasion of
Cambodia as a complete suc-
cess; and claims that his admin-
station brought tranquility to
America's cities. Nixon also
exhibits his great gift for self-
deception, blindly holding to
the notion that the impeachment pro-
ceedings were purely politically
motivated, and remaining un-
willingly to assume any respons-
ibility for Watergate.

Kissinger's gargantuan first
volume of his memoirs is more
stylish and psychologically
sophisticated than Nixon's, but
is suffused with an even more
inflated form of egocentrism.
Kissinger is charming and subtle,
and can be shrewdly perceptive
about men like Rockefeller and
Nixon. Rockefeller 'wanted as-
surance that he had transcended
what was inherently ambiguous:
that his career was due to merit
and not wealth'. And Nixon had
a 'talistic instinct that nothing
he touched would ever be
crowned with ultimate 'success'.
However, it is no surprise to dis-
cover that he rarely allows that
insightfulness to dissect his own
political ruthlessness, arrogance,
and ambition.

Throughout the memoir Kiss-
inger uses his analytic skills to
provide intricate and manipulative
rationalizations for his policy
decisions. Writing on American
policy in Chile, he defends in-
tervention by speciously des-
cribing Allende as totalitarian
Marxist who had no popular
mandate. And on wiretapping,
Kissinger (who is being sued for
wiretapping subordinates) hypo-
critically assumes an ambiguous
position, declaring that there is
a need for more stringent safe-
guards while expressing con-
tempt for those who would be-
tray national policies. In both
these instances, Nixon's res-
ponses are simpler and more
direct—maintaining that Allende

had to be undermined so an-
Cuba didn't occur, and that
taps were necessary to preven-
t security leaks.

Kissinger's memoir is a con-
placent work. He eschews the
supposed simple-mindedness
a foreign policy built on em-
pathy and morality for the hard-he-
derelations and strategies
realpolitik, but papers overs
failures (in his own terms) of
his policies in the Middle E.
Nixon's shuttle diplomacy achiev-
ing no settlement; the continued
support of the Shah has led
the current take-over of the
American Embassy in Iran; a
the war in Vietnam could ha-
been ended four years earlie-
er with less murderous destruct-
ion and probably better political
suits for America.

Despite the distortions and
evasions, these well-scrubbin-
monuments to posterity are
valuable sources for their con-
scious and unconscious rev-
ions about the character and
politics of Kissinger, Nixon,
America. (Leonard Quart)

BOOKSHELF

by John Roberts

Two days after the interview with Nixon, Kissinger went to see John Mitchell. "What," Mitchell asked. "have you decided about the National Security job?" Kissinger said he did not know he had been offered it.

## Modern diplomacy

"Oh, Jesus Christ," said Mitchell, "he has screwed it up again." and off he went.

Kissinger tells the story in The White House Years (Weldenfeld and Nicolson, Michael Joseph, £14.95), his monumental first volume of memoirs.

It is heavy going, but not half so dull as it locks on first glance The leavening of anecdotes and observations on other leading players in some of the greatest dramas of modern times adds greatly to the general interest. For instance, it is a joy to find a reference to Harold Wilson greeting Nixon "with the avuncular goodwill of the head of an ancient family that has seen better times but is still able to evoke memories of the wisdom, dignity and power that had established the family name in the first place."

[L]

Kissinger with Chou En-lai: A rare moment of boyish awe

UPI

BOOKS

NEWSWEEK 26-11-79

## KISSINGER'S MEMOIRS

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

"Among Kissinger's qualities are charm and persuasiveness," one of his harshest critics, William Shawcross, has written. "Kissinger is a true diplomat; he can make anyone feel grateful and flattered." The first volume of his memoirs confirms this. It covers the period from 1969, when he joined Richard Nixon's White House staff as national-security adviser, to the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement in January 1973. One approaches it as a chore, like most tomes by statesmen. But "White House Years," immensely long and detailed, is quite remarkably readable—even, or perhaps especially, in those passages (about Cambodia, about the covert U.S. intervention in Chile, about the character of protesters against the Vietnam War) where one most strongly doubts or disassesures with the author's version of events.

Anyone has to feel grateful for a book that sounds as if it may have been written by an individual—vain, more than a little malicious, contemptuous of his colleagues (including his President)—instead of by a committee of speechwriters and concocters of position papers. And we are flattered by glimpses of friction among the great—at the negotiating table in Paris, at the Moscow summit, at the drafting of a joint statement announcing Nixon's visit to China and, not least, in the White House itself.

Nixon and Kissinger were determined that foreign policy should be run from the White House, bypassing Secretary of State William Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. Rogers was a pushover. Always sarcastic about Laird. Kissinger never fails to pay him tribute as a master maneuverer.

Kissinger writes best about his specialty, negotiating—whether with Le Duc Tho in Paris or with our unexpectedly refractory ally, Nguyen Van Thieu, in Saigon, when a peace settlement that had seemed “at hand” nearly collapsed. Unquestionably his best chapter, however, has less to do with hard bargaining than with a Marco Polo-like adventure. On the eve of his first secret trip to China to prepare a diplomatic opening between the two countries, Kissinger records, he had difficulty sleeping—the only time this happened to him during the years of power he so thoroughly enjoyed. His first meeting with Chou En-lai, “urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinarily intelligent, subtle,” is unusually moving. One can’t help liking Kissinger at this moment when he is so clearly, almost boyishly, in awe of a superior personality.

**PETTINESS:** He is, in contrast, lethal on the subject of his boss. He repeatedly pays ritual tribute to Nixon's courage before highlighting his pettiness. On the China trip: "Having made the decisions without executive or Congressional consultation, Nixon had left himself quite naked should anything go wrong; in such lonely decisions he was extremely courageous. But in his complicated personality high motives ... warred with less lofty considerations. He was eager to be known as the first American leader to visit Peking; he therefore requested me periodically to change the venue of my own visit to any other place in China."

Nixon is sometimes portrayed as bad-tempered to the point of near-craziness, "given to grandiloquent statements on which he did not insist once their implications became clear to him. The fear that unwary visitors would take the President literally was, indeed, one of the reasons why

Haldeman controlled access to him so solicitously." It was routine, according to Kissinger, to wait at least 24 hours before carrying out one of Nixon's directives delivered in anger. We are told that Nixon behaved in China less suavely than the author of this book. "This is a great wall," said Nixon at the Great Wall of China. Marco Polo, visiting Hangchow in the thirteenth century, considered it the most beautiful city in the world: "One fancies oneself to be in Paradise." Nixon told Chou En-lai that it "looks like a postcard."

**REFUGEE:** This first volume of Kissinger's memoirs gives me an uneasy feeling. I get a strong impression that he feels the democratic process doesn't work and must be circumvented if international order is to be achieved and maintained. To be sure, he says otherwise. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, he is indignant at the "self-doubt and self-distrust" shown by the protesters against the Vietnam War in the late '60s. They didn't realize how lucky they were to be a part of this country, as Kissinger assures us he did.

But he records with satisfaction the receipt of a Dag Hammarskjöld quotation from William Safire: "The most dangerous of all moral dilemmas: When we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth be victorious." Secretary of State Rogers, intrusive senators, bureaucrats in general, organizers of public protests—all of these recognizable members of the American democracy are enemies who get in Kissinger's way when he is trying to do his job. He may be right. Democracy is messy and inefficient. But before we sign him on again we should be clear about what he stands for: he believes in secret government, and he was enormously successful at it.

**INFURIATING BOOK:** Kissinger's certainty about the correctness of his decisions amounts to hubris. It is unlucky for him that at this moment in the tragic history of Cambodia, he should be publishing a volume of memoirs containing the sentence, "Cambodia was not a moral issue." He insists that there were no Cambodians in or near the "sanctuaries" he bombed, and so, in effect, he never bombed Cambodia at all. This argument was always weirdly implausible, and Kissinger's washing his hands of post-1970 developments in that country is abhorrent. The veiled references to "revisionist" history and "malicious lore" refer to William Shawcross's "Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia."

"White House Years" is an infuriating, absolutely necessary book. "I was at peace with myself, neither elated nor sad," says its author in conclusion. I would like to read a review of it by Joseph Heller's Dr. Bruce Gold, infatuated with hatred of Kissinger; and we must await the corrections of historians. For the time being, I sit fooled, entertained, happy. Dr. Henry Kissinger seems to me to have told something that fairly closely resembles the truth.

WALTER CLEMONS

NEWSWEEK/NOVEMBER 26, 1979

LC

BOOKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ECONOMIST NOVEMBER 24, 1979

127

LC

Another of these insights is occasioned by Nixon's reaction to the national uproar over Vietnam:

'breath-taking effrontery' of lower-level civil servants who used their professional skill to frustrate Presidential directives of which they disapproved: since he was, as often as not, the real author of those directives, his resentment is understandable. The solution encouraged by Nixon and welcomed by his Assistant was the use of 'backchannels'. Kissinger explains this device:

Essentially a backchannel is a communications system that seeks to circumvent normal procedures; it requires, however, somebody's facilities. Usually the excluded party was the State Department which had victimised itself by technology and habit: by technology because its computers automatically distribute even the most sensitive cables through the building by pre-established criteria: by habit, because diplomats live on trading information and are infinitely ingenious in getting round formal restrictions. This is why even the State Department has set up its own system of internal backchannels, and why almost every modern President has sought to evade State's formal communications machinery.

There is one more aspect of *The White House Years* of consuming interest: Kissinger's own relationship with and understanding of Richard Nixon. Obviously the time limits of this volume preclude any anticipation of Watergate, apart from one or two hindsighted hints. But Kissinger makes no secret of his awareness, from the start of their association, of the President's psychological disabilities. There is a revealing description of Nixon at his first Inauguration:

> He was dressed in a morning coat, his pant legs as always a trifle short. His jaw jutted defiantly and yet he seemed uncertain, as if unsure that he was really there. He exuded at once relief and disbelief. He had arrived at last after the most improbable of careers and one of the most extraordinary feats of self-discipline in American political history. He seemed exultant, as if he could hardly wait for the ceremony to be over, so that he could begin to implement the dream of a lifetime. Yet he also appeared somewhat spent, even fragile, like a marathon runner who has exhausted himself in a great race. As ever, it was difficult to tell whether it was the occasion or his previous image of it that Nixon actually enjoyed.

He had taken initiatives that reversed the course of his predecessor; he had withdrawn troops and de-escalated the war – all steps urged on him by the Establishment groups whom he simultaneously distrusted and envied. And instead of being acclaimed, he was being castigated for not moving more rapidly on the path on which they had not even dared to take the first step. It was not a big leap to the view that what he really faced was not a policy difference but the same liberal conspiracy that had sought to destroy him ever since the Alger Hiss case. Here were all the old enemies in the press and in the Establishment uniting once again; they would even accept, if not urge, the military defeat of their country to carry out the vendetta of a generation.

At close quarters with this complex man, Kissinger could still give him credit for his abilities, and above all for an intuitive apprehension of a line of policy. On the opening to Peking, he writes:

> I doubt whether the rapprochement could have occurred with the same decisiveness in any other Presidency. Nixon had an extraordinary instinct for the jugular. He was less interested in tactics or the meticulous accumulation of nuance; too much discussion of details of implementation, indeed, made him nervous. Once he had set a policy direction, he almost invariably left it to me to implement the strategy and manage the bureaucracy. But though I had independently come to the same judgment as Nixon, and though I designed many of the moves, I did not have the political strength or bureaucratic clout to pursue such a fundamental shift of policy on my own. Nixon viscerally understood the essence of the opportunity and pushed for it consistently.

Perhaps it was because Kissinger was himself a newcomer to the United States and a mere novice in American politics that Nixon trusted him and generally accepted his advice. At times their relationship reads like that between a manic-depressive patient and a sympathetic male-nurse.

The book includes several set-piece studies

of personalities which will certainly be quoted by historians. Both Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung are sensitively and convincingly depicted. The study of Mao, involving both the powerful aura of the man himself and an analysis of the inner conflict which beset him, is too long to quote. But there is an entertaining snapshot of President Brezhnev:

> His hands were perpetually in motion: twisting his watch; flicking ashes from his ever-present cigarette; clanging his cigarette-holder against an ash-tray. He could not keep still. While his remarks were being translated he would restlessly bound up from his chair, walk around the room, engage in loud conversation with his colleagues, or even leave the room without explanation and then return. Negotiations with Brezhnev thus included the bizarre feature that he might disappear at any moment, or while you were being most persuasive he could be concentrating not on your remarks but on forcing food on you. On one occasion he brought along a toy cannon to the conference-room normally used for meetings of the Politburo. It refused to fire. Making it work preoccupied him far more than whatever profundities I might be uttering at the moment. Finally the contraption went off with a roar. Brezhnev strutted round the room like a prizefighter who has knocked out his opponent.

One cannot help wondering, however, whether the imperturbable Dr Kissinger was not being subjected to gamesmanship tactics of a subtlety with which he did not credit the Russians.

Sometimes he betrays a notable lack of sensitivity in special areas. There is no recognition or acknowledgment of the Palestinian case in the Middle East. In the chapter on Chile, there seems to be total unawareness of the counterproductive effects of the so-called 'covert operations' with which the United States Government has sought to protect its interests in Latin America. Occasionally there are inconsistencies: on one page he writes, 'There does not seem to be any unifying thread to Soviet policy'; on another he speaks of 'the durable impulses of nationalism and ideology that lie behind Soviet policy'. But these are minor flaws in a remarkable book. ☐

[Lc]

# Kissinger's Crises
Christopher Serpell

## The White House Years

by Henry Kissinger.

Weidenfeld/Michael Joseph, 1,476 pp.,
£14.95

In spite of its length – 1,476 pages of text, concerning only the first four years of Dr Kissinger's life inside US government – and the immensely detailed coverage of events which that length implies, *The White House Years* is hard to lay aside. This quality of readability will come as a surprise to those who have tackled the turgid prose of some of Dr Kissinger's earlier works, which combined the worst excesses of the American academic style with an uncertain approach to the English language. These defects provided an almost impenetrable disguise for the personality of a man who has now revealed himself to be not only an intelligent interpreter of events but also humorous and sympathetic, and an excellent raconteur. It is possible that Dr Kissinger has found more fulfilment as a reporter of events than as a theoretician; it is also possible that the years of attempting to write confidential briefs which would make those events intelligible to the mind of President Nixon have been a valuable discipline. But at least part of the explanation for this metamorphosis from professorial exposition to lucid narration lies in a sentence found in the foreword to the present book: 'Harold Evans, assisted by Oscar Turnill, read through the entire volume with a brilliant editorial eye; they taught me what skilled and intelligent editing can contribute to organisation and to lightening prose.'

Obviously the book's main claim to attention must be based on the importance of the events and the personalities which it describes, and on the value of having a detailed account

of them from a man who was both a trained analyst and a participant. For later historians it will be like having Clarendon's *History of the Great Rebellion* transposed to the 20th-century scale of world politics. And until you look at the table of contents, it is difficult to recall how many and how portentous were the international developments unfolding between January 1969 and January 1973. The main theme is inevitably the painful and laborious effort of the United States to extricate itself from the war'in Vietnam, if possible in a way that would save the national face and avoid compromising the electoral prospects of the Nixon Administration. Since the book ends with the second Nixon Inauguration and the initialling by Kissinger of the ironically named 'Paris Agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam', those aims can be said to have been achieved at a heavy cost not only in human lives but also in national self-esteem. But the Vietnam War, while it overshadowed American politics and diplomacy during those four years, by no means limited the vast field through which Dr Kissinger, as Presidential Assistant for National Security, had to range.

There was the continuous and hazardous dialogue which he had to maintain, on the President's behalf, with the Soviet Union, involving, on the one hand, Moscow's desire for a summit agreement on the limitation of strategic nuclear armaments and, on the other, Washington's determination to make the Russians pay for it by using their influence with their clients in Hanoi to put an end to hostilities. Underlying these exchanges was Kissinger's own 'doctrine of linkages' – an attempt to convince the Russians that all issues of policy between the two super-powers were interconnected. There was at the same time the exciting and eventually rewarding adventure of re-opening United States relations with the People's Republic of China. There was the fidgety fence-mending to be done inside the NATO alliance with West European governments united only in their

demand for a continued American military presence in Europe and in their insistence on their right to be consulted over United States dealings with the Soviet Union. There was the labyrinthine tangle of the Middle East, with its perpetual threat of war. And during what he calls 'the Autumn of Crises' of 1970, Dr Kissinger had to advise his President on three explosive issues almost simultaneously. There was the situation in Jordan, where King Hussein was confronting not only the rebellious Palestinian element in his own country but also the threats of his bellicose neighbours, Iraq and Syria. There was the clumsily surreptitious attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a nuclear subcontinent in Cuba. There was the coming to power in Chile of what was seen as the radical and anti-American government of President Allende.

But the major events it describes do not by themselves account for the fascination of Dr Kissinger's book. It is the story of how a first-generation German-Jewish immigrant found himself taken up into the inner sanctum of American power with full opporunities to shape the destiny of the nation that had received him. It is an account of how an academic specialist in international affairs found himself confronted with the practical day-to-day conduct of those affairs. Although his emphasis is naturally enough on his successes, he does acknowledge his fallibility and does not always place the blame for mistakes on colleagues. *The White House Years* is also an illuminating description of the byzantine complexities of modern United States government, and, above all, of the elaborate rivalry between the executive staff of the President and the professional bureaucracy of government departments headed by the secretaries appointed by the President. The bureaucracy with which Kissinger found himself constantly at odds was, of course, that of the State Department, headed by William Rogers, though he had his occasional brushes with Melvin Laird, who controlled the Pentagon hierarchy. And he is sharply critical of the

AMERICAN SPECTATOR
BLOOMINGDALE, IND
10 TO A YR

JUN 1981

FOR THE RECORD:
SELECTED STATEMENTS, 1977-1980

Henry Kissinger / Little, Brown & Co. / $12.95

by Eliot Cohen

It is unfair, perhaps, to expect this volume of Henry Kissinger's speeches and articles to match his brilliant memoirs, but even so, we must admit that *For the Record* is a haphazard and tedious collection. The author juxtaposes eulogies to Golda Meir and Nelson Rockefeller with pronouncements on SALT, the future of international business, and the Iranian revolution. Chronological order, not coherence, is the organizing principle, a fact that reflects ill on a man who rightly prides himself on his

Eliot Cohen is a teaching fellow in the Department of Government of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

conceptual understanding of policy problems. Many of the articles are repetitious, which is perhaps not surprising: Anyone who lectures or orates as much as Kissinger must of necessity use stock paragraphs to make the same point to successive audiences. Collections like these of miscellaneous utterances and articles can still repay a skimming, at least, if there are nuggets of insight to be found by an alert reader—think of a volume in *The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell*, for example. Unfortunately, however, *For the Record* is no such book. Kissinger's views often make a good deal of sense, as when he urges Western rearmament and a policy of containment vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, but the heavy sobriety which pervades the book means that there is little to disagree with, and equally little to stimulate thought.

Kissinger self-consciously wears and refuses to doff the mantle of the

elder statesman. Even his denunciation of the Carter administration's foolish and craven treatment of the Shah begins on an incongruously Olympian note of injured innocence. Kissinger's sense of responsibility—which I do not wish to impugn—induces him to introduce his arguments with many a ponderous “on the one hand, on the other hand.” At times this leads to such analyses as the following:

> Nobody should deny the Soviet Union its legitimate security concerns.

> but:

> We cannot accept a definition of security for the Soviet Union that makes everybody else absolutely insecure.

There is a contradiction here, for the nature of the Soviet regime is such that to survive it must expand or threaten to do so: The loss of Poland (or at this point, Afghanistan) would fatally endanger the Soviet state, as indeed in the long run does the very existence of a free, prosperous, and self-confident West. In practice the West must allow such evils as the subordination of Eastern Europe to continue—but why give them the sanction of legitimacy?

For the most part these speeches and articles deal with current policy problems: They contain little historical or philosophical reflection, and certainly none that we have not read of elsewhere (for example, Kissinger's admiration for Bismarck). In fact, a number of historical references are embarrassingly faulty—Kissinger incorrectly asserts that the United States "accounted for very little in world economics during the nineteenth century," and claims that eighteenth-century European rulers could not conscript their subjects. There is not even much of an effort to defend the Kissinger record against attack from either Right (e.g., on the overselling of détente) or Left (e.g., Vietnam). The speeches about statesmen—Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, Nelson Rockefeller—lack the penetration and charm of the character sketches in *White House Years*. In general, where the memoirs are often impassioned or humorous these speeches are stolid and stupefyingly serious.

To repeat, there are no new themes in this book: As in *White House Years* Kissinger condemns America's historical oscillation "between brooding isolation and crusading intervention" and again, as in the memoirs, he promulgates a doctrine of geopolitics or balance of power, which

publicly bet a British television interviewer that the Wisconsin senator would be the next president, Truman, again quoting Scripture, told a visiting Bishop "that Stalin and his crowd had no moral code . . . and that all I wanted to do was to organize Exodus XX, Matthew V, VI & VII to save morals in the world." He was a Kissinger from Missouri.

And now the Democratic party's image again needs refurbishing. Trumanism is dead, destroyed by the fact that its agenda has been imple-

## PSYCHOLOGY CAN JUSTICE SURVIVE THE

Daniel N. Robinson / Oxford

Walter B.

The author of this book belongs to no familiar school and the book itself is not readily categorized. He is a psychologist, even a professor of psychology, but the book could not have been written by someone who is only a psychologist. Its perspective is that of legal philosophy, sometimes called jurisprudence, but, again, not the sort of legal philosophy taught in the law schools or characteristic of the work of our jurists. Daniel Robinson is both old-fashioned and thoroughly modern: old-fashioned insofar as he unabashedly discourses on the relation between law and morality, and modern insofar as he knows modern psychology and its works. This combination of talents proves to be formidable; it enables him to understand and to persuade us of the perils involved in allowing the law to be invaded by what he calls "the psychosocial point of view."

Although Robinson, so far as I can recall, never provides an explicit definition of this term, the reader is left in no doubt as to its meaning or, at least, its characteristics. It is the perspective of social science, which claims to be a science but is not (as Robinson demonstrates in his first chapter), but which is nevertheless accepted as science by the law. The psychosocial perspective is a form of reductionism, the attempt made by psychologists and sociologists to reduce individuals to the characteristics of the groups to which they belong and to explain their words and

because they are seen as, mere opinions whose causes are psychological or sociological but never moral. In these respects, the psychosocial perspective differs fundamentally from the human perspective. As Robinson also makes clear in his first chapter, the moral response, of which only human beings are capable, is inherent in the concept of justice and in its instrument, the law. As he says, the law is just "when it obliges us to do what we would genuinely desire to do were we to perform the rational analysis that stands behind every genuinely moral wish." But social science denies the existence of rationality in this sense; human beings look for and give reasons, but social science looks for causes and would if it could culminate in neurophysiology or neurology. Such a perspective is a denial of the purpose of law because it is a denial of human freedom.

Robinson traces the effects of the law's adoption of the psychosocial point of view in successive chapters devoted to the criminal law, the right of a testator to dispose of his property as he sees fit, commitments to mental institutions, educational testing, and, in a chapter entitled "Persons: Their Nature and Their Rights," to abortion, the Karen Quinlan problem, and psychosurgery.

The influence of this psychosocial perspective has been greatest in the criminal law, and especially at the

Walter Berns is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Muggeridge, Boris Grumbach, Colin维
Buckley, Jr., Ben Wattenberg, Gen. A.C.
Stein, Roger Starr, Neal Kozodoy, Alan F.
Jaffa, William Safire, Charles Peters, Je-
Packard, Henry Fairlie, Jean-François R.
Leonard Garment, Norman Maller, Fran-
Melvin Lasky, Norman Podhoretz, Anne
Richard Whalen, Dana Andrews, Midge
den Haag, James Q. Wilson, Laurence S.
Fred Silverman, Thomas Murphy, Willi-
Gen. George S. Patton III, Elliott Abrams
John Lofton, Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Eva
James Jackson Kilpatrick, Tom Wolfe, W.
Kinsley, Tom Winter, Gerald R. Ford, Ho-
Rosenblatt, Richard Lugar, Anthony Har-
kawa, Luigi Barzini, Nelson Polsby, Jose
Charles Huston, Gertrude Himmelfarb, C.
Roger Milliken, Edward Banfield, Victor
Joseph Hazan, Eugene V. Rostow, Mich-
ander Haig, Randolph Richardson, Georg
James Hitchcock, Philip Crane, Shmuel M.
Stoppard, Charlton Heston, Jim Fallows,
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Jake G.
Jack Paar, Charles Horner, George Gilden
Fritchery, Henry Kissinger, and many o

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, P.O. B

Please enter a

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Name

attributes not often associated with
professors. His memoirs uncon-
sciously reveal his feline sensitivity to
the weaknesses and desires of those
he worked with—from Ehrlichman’s
“public relations experts” to journal-
ists bewitched by the prospect of
being in the confidence of a genius.
His personal charm served his needs
but did not attenuate his ruthlessness
or diminish his guile: Men as differ-
ent as William Rogers and Daniel
Patrick Moynihan fell victim to his
bureaucratic ambushes.
[LC]

Kissinger's eight years in Wash-
ington have not slaked his thirst for
power, and he admits as much. This
collection contributes to the image of
a tried and steady statesman that
Kissinger obviously wishes to culti-
vate. The speeches appear at first
glance not only prudent and wide-
ranging, but reassuringly compli-
cated and dull, for this is a book
meant to be purchased, not read. One
should therefore pass by this work of
Kissinger the politician, and await a
second volume from Kissinger the
memoirist. ☐

a) Two things equal to a third are equal to one another.

b) Two sides of a triangle are equal to MN.

c) The two sides of this triangle are equal to one another.

The tortoise accepts a and b, "but denies that they justify the conclusion. He has Achilles interpolate a hypothetical propositon":

c) If a and b are valid, z is valid.

z) The two sides of the triangle are equal to one another.

Needless to say, the tortoise then insists that Achilles add:

d) If a, b, and c are valid, z is valid.

and so on. Conclusion: The possibilities for ignorance are infinite; certainly not so the possibilities for knowledge. Thankfully, however, not all human endeavor is terminable when finite knowledge meets infinite

"has always been unfashionable in America." These indictments, though they have some merit, gain nothing from mere reassertion. The burden of fact remains that since the time of our emergence as a great power in 1945, our foreign policy has been fundamentally consistent. American policy changes far more in speech than action: To take one recent example, it was the Carter administration which created the Rapid Deployment Force and began obtaining bases for it near the Persian Gulf. This is not to defend the past administration or downplay the disasters it facilitated, but merely to note a continuity of policy that Kissinger's easy denunciation—typical of many academic critics of American foreign policy—ignores. On the second point, Kissinger fails to elaborate his conception of geopolitics, or reconcile it with the differences between the relatively homogeneous European world system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the fractured world of today. Bismarck did not have to tame one totalitarian power, let alone several. Kissinger's criticisms of American foreign policy may contain some portion of the truth, but they require argument, not mere pronouncement.

[Lc]

There is no small irony in the story of Henry Kissinger's rise. His accession to the unofficial vice-presidency for foreign policy owed much to his indubitable academic brilliance, but owed even more, I think, to skills and

Either way, this is history for a Borges, a fox, not a Teller.

So there is a war on all fronts between the forces of complexity and the forces of simplicity, the unlimited mind combining the limited constituents of human knowledge in myriad forms versus the limited mind reducing endless knowledge into simple, digestible form. Jorge Luis Borges is in a unique position to answer Teller, not just because his own system of metaphor points out the follies of the hedgehog school, but because he also possesses an answer to the inevitable comeback of the simplicity theorist that even if the complexity-unpredictability school is correct, it is dangerous (that is, the nutrients of complexity are poisonous, whereas the nutrients of simplicity are not). First, let's see how Borges would show Teller to be wrong, before we go on to consider how Borges is also beneficial to our health.

Borges is well known for his musings that one day the number of possible musical combinations will be exhausted; that one day there could exist a "universal library which would register all the variations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols, in other words, all that is given to express in all languages," and so on. The possibilities for human knowledge are finite for Borges, or, when there is a passageway to the infinite, it is to an infinity of ignorance. For example, in "Avatars of the Tortoise," Achilles and the tortoise study this lucid reasoning.

MORNING ADVOCATE

BATON ROUGE, LA.

n. 65,256 SUN. 102,347

MAY 24 1981

Death of Karen Silkwood

[c]

America's first nuclear martyr

25

The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story Behind The Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case by Richard Rashke. (Houghton-Mifflin Co., $11.95)

Karen Silkwood, who has been called "America's first nuclear martyr," died in November of 1974 when her car swerved from a lonely stretch of highway near Crescent, Okla. Her death was listed by the Highway Patrol as just another traffic fatality.

There was some evidence, however, that her car had been forced from the road, and the circumstances surrounding her death were indeed mysterious. Silkwood, a controversial employee of the Kerr-McGee plant, at the time of the crash was on her way to meet a New York Times reporter, and she had said she was bringing him documents to show that her employer was manufacturing defective nuclear fuel rods.

No documents were found.

And a week before her death, Silkwood, a 28-year-old divor-

cee and a mother of three, was contaminated in a bizarre incident by eating and inhaling plutonium. The Atomic Energy Commission traced the source to her bathroom and refrigerator and concluded the contamination was probably deliberate. Two months earlier, Silkwood and two other members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union had given the AEC a list of health and safety violations at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant.

Silkwood's death and subsequent developments attracted widespread attention. There are those who believe she was killed by sinister forces that wanted to silence her. Her cause was espoused by the National Organization for Women and others, and this led to an inconclusive congressional investigation.

Richard Rashke, the author of this highly detailed book, first became interested in the Silkwood case in 1977 when he was the Washington correspondent for the National Catholic Review. He spent

months investigating the case but was hampered when several key figures refused to talk to him.

His book, however, is filled with dialogue, and Rashke emphasizes that none of it was "created," but instead came from numerous interviews and from more than 25,000 pages of documents in the public record.

"There has been so much emotional ink spilled over the memory of Karen Silkwood that the facts surrounding her contamination and death have been lost in speculation and specious argument," Rashke writes. "Aware of that, I have tried to present a straightforward answer."

Whether Silkwood's violent death was accidental or otherwise is debatable, but her charges against Kerr-McGee of

## Varied essays

For the Record: Selected Statements 1977-1980 by Henry Kissinger. (Little, Brown and Company, $12.95)

It will come as no surprise to most readers that Henry Kissinger's selected statements make for interesting (if occasionally controversial) reading. This is especially apparent when his statements are taken out of the context of their times and displayed as individual essays, just as if there was no real relationship between the words and the times they were meant to deal with.

With his usual verve and aplomb, Kissinger deals here with subjects as diverse as "The Future of Business and the International Environment," "The Energy Crisis and World Order," "Golda Meir: An Appreciation" and "Salt II" — to name but a few.

While there will may be some justification for having these particular Kissinger statements on record, much of what he has to say is automatically dated by the changing events of the past few years, rendering them little more than of historical interest.

As a reviewer who has always been fond of Henry Kissinger — and in agreement with a great deal of what he has to say — it pains me to be forced to say that I cannot recommend the expenditure of $12.95 for this particular bit of Kissinger. But if you are planning to wait for the movie, don't because there isn't likely to be one.

toward the end of the Chou Dyasty, inlain bronze work emerged with stiff figures participating in dancing, battles and arythm.

Archaeologists have uncovered vast quantities of pictorial art pertaining to the Han Dynasty, mostly funerary and depicting the power of heavenly spirits controlling the cosmic forces; in other words, the art form practiced at this time guaranteed the rotation of the seasons and warded off natural disasters.

Descriptions of the art forms that evolved through the dynasties include techniques in figure representation and landscape painting. Charts of the dynasties and the types of paintings found help evaluate the proportion of one type of painting to another.

As could be expected, the volume is richly enhanced with engravings of paintings from each dynasty discussed. The delicate brush strokes and vivid colors are breathtaking; the only complaint might be the minimal use of color: only eight color plates in this 400-page book. The paintings of birds, flowers, mountains and elaborately garbed people — though unquestionably exquisite — lose much of their effect in black and white. An art book in this price range could be expected to contain more color.

Sarah Sue Thorpe

negligence have been upheld by a court of law. A federal court jury in Oklahoma in 1979 awarded her family $10.5 million in damages for negligence that resulted in her contamination.

## Savage survival

Valhalla by Newton Thornburg. (Little, Brown, $11.95)

Economic chaos and savage survival confront the reader of Newton Thornburg's latest novel Valhalla.

As the nation reaches total moral collapse, a handful of survivalists seeks one of the last elements of past civilization, a fortified resort in the Ozarks called Valhalla. A band of terrorists, disregarding human life to satisfy their barbaric pleasures, overtakes the refuge. As an encounter between the two occurs, the once-moral survivalists attain savage traits and the book soon dissolves into an array of senseless and gruesome murders.

Thornburg's novel develops slowly and his inconsistent characters deliver a disappointing story. Through the contradicting actions and apathetic attitudes of the characters, the author surfaces his pessimistic, almost loathsome, view of impending doom.

— Mickey Neal

## Fabulous heritage

Our City: The Jews of San Francisco by Irena Narell. (Howell-North Books, $25)

Our City is a beautiful excursion into a fabulous heritage. Unlike many standard genealogical publications, Irena Narell has fashioned a masterful chronicle of the pioneer Jewish families and their descendants and tells how they have enriched the commercial, cultural and civic life of San Francisco.

A large portion of the book revolves around two families, the Gerstels and Slosses. Their legacy is traced to the present day.

Fully illustrated with pictures and charts, this large, hardcover book is well documented, indexed for easy perusal and is written with a loving touch of pride — a pride for a great heritage.

— N. Kent Goldsmith

— Damon Veach

In death, Karen Silkwood had been both glorified and vilified. "Like a cardboard effigy her reputation had swung in an effigy of innuendo," Rashke writes. "She was so unreliable, the story went, so emotionally disturbed and hooked on drugs that she had contaminated herself to embarrass Kerr-McGee. She couldn't defend herself, so the jury did it for her. After examining the evidence, it said unanimously that she did not contaminate herself."

The author writes that he has simply tried to give readers the facts so they can draw their own conclusions, but it is obvious that he suspects the worst.

— Jim Featherston

## Nuclear blackmail

The Scorpion Sanction by Gordon Pape and Tony Appler. (Viking Press, $13.95)

The President of the United States is scheduled for a very important state visit to Egypt. All is in readiness, accommodations squared away, security in place, and the maximum propaganda blitz in full swing. Suddenly, the body of a Palestinian terrorist is discovered in the Nile River — cause of death, radiation poisoning.

As the plot of this novel set in modern times begins to unfold, it is clear that there is a strong possibility that a terrorist group is in possession of atomic materials and therefore the strong supposition that the group may well have a nuclear weapon.

Will they use it? If just for blackmail, what will be their demands?

To find the answers and avert a potential disaster, the Egyptian police are placed in the uncomfortable position of having to turn to Israel for assistance in the investigation. Much of the story revolves around the inherent conflict between the Egyptian constitutional and the aging but brilliant Israeli who is sent to Cairo to help foil the villains.

The characters never quite become believable and, although the plot is not too far-fetched, the development is sometimes sketchy, leaving the reader too often dubious for real enjoyment.

These same two authors have collaborated once before — a book called "Chain Reaction." The Scorpion Sanction is an improvement over their earlier work, and it can be expected that they will improve with age and experience.

— N. Kent Goldsmith