AUG-20-1998 10:33

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.02

1

2628 WORDS

DRAFT

8/19/98 12:00pm

To the Editor of The New York Review of Books:

I have read Tony Judt's review with some sadness.

It is over twenty years since I left government.

One would have thought that to be enough time to permit a calm discussion of the challenge America has faced since the Vietnam War destroyed the national consensus on foreign policy. The deeper meaning of the period is that it crystallized the inherent tension between America's idealism--the perception we have of ourselves as a nation with a special mission--and our growing involvement in a world of power, hence of relative judgments.

How to strike the balance between these competing realities is not a simple matter, and practitioners of foreign policy have struggled with that problem for most of our history. The reconciliation of ambivalent pulls is a task never likely to be completed, but we will not

AUG-20-1998 10:34

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.03

2

manage any progress unless we grant the good faith of the
principal participants in the debate and have sufficient
confidence in ourselves to risk a truthful definition of
the issues.

Both Bundy's book and Judt's review fail to meet
this test:

- Judt asserts that I have reclassified public
papers as "personal" in order to close them to "prying
eyes." This is flatly untrue. No public document has ever
been reclassified by me. The papers in my collection at
the Library of Congress are copies of originals in the
files of either the State Department or the Nixon and
Ford libraries. They are available to researchers on the
terms established by the originating departments.

The only unique papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations that a court of law--
not I--was confirmed to be personal papers and that never
were treated as public papers before that.

AUG-20-1998 10:34

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.04

3

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the truth. No administration recorded its deliberations, decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is in the official files a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier "nearly" only to protect against an inadvertent bureaucratic slip-up.) There is also a complete record of all my memoranda to the President prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining the proposed talking points and afterwards reporting the results. There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

- To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view, Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not reveal that he is fiddling with the quote which is from a paragraph comparing Metternich's greater emphasis on

AUG-20-1998 10:35

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.06

moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power
politics. Specifically, Judt is cutting the sentence in
half and omitting the next sentence: "...something akin
to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of
power is reinforced by a shared sense of values. And in
the modern age, these values would have to be
democratic."

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by
~~Bundy's~~ treatment
of Nixon and me as somehow illegitimate usurpers drives
him to abandon any perspective.

It proves him from doing justice to the unshakable
necessities reality imposes on policymakers' preferences
--a challenge for which he should have some compassion
from his own experience. Judt notes approvingly Bundy's
criticism of Nixon and me for failing to brief Japan in
advance about the opening to China in 1971, and the
European allies in 1973 almost
on the military alert in the

AUG-20-1998 10:35

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.07

5

Middle East crisis. As a former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy knows only too well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese government without a leak; it was a painful decision not to give advance warning, though all friends and allies--and especially Japan--were consulted to the utmost once the US-China dialogue began in earnest.

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a
Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into the
Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours away.
To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased the
readiness of our military forces and _simultaneously_
called a meeting of the NATO Council in Brussels. In
addition, we briefed our principal allies in detail in
their capitals.

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt
follows Bundy in treating the alleged penchant of Nixon

AUG-20-1998 10:36

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.09

The Cold War was not a tea party, and I do not pass judgment on complex decisions from the vantage point of thirty years. But I do say that Bundy is in no position to give moral lectures on covert operations to his successors whose use of that instrument both in scope and frequency was much more limited.

Judt (and Bundy) decry covert operations of the administration in which I served, but they suppress the context. They claim "misleading promises to the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations to them. The fact is that when the US decision to support the Kurds was made in July 1972, the Kurds had already been fighting Saddam's oppression for several years. They were supported by Britain, Iran, Israel and neighboring countries. Nixon was asked to support them in 1972 when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds' existing

AUG-20-1998 10:36

FROM

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sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have
been destroyed earlier--that was our real choice. Judt
next asserts that we "abandoned" the Kurds. The fact is
that in 1975 when the issue of expanded support came up,
it was for $300 million and two Iranian divisions at the
precise moment that Congress was cutting off all aid to
Vietnam and Cambodia. Does Judt believe such a request
would have succeeded? The Shah did not and threw in his
hand. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to
elevate it to a moral assault is at a minimum
inappropriate.

Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive response, and
assertions about Cambodian bombings have achieved a near
liturgical quality. If so, their advocates should be able
to risk stating the facts bearing on the decision without
invoking totally misleading forms of words. Instead, Judt
cites Bundy approvingly when he describes the secret

AUG-20-1998 10:36

FROM

TO

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9

bombing of Cambodia "as the military violation of a
neutral state."

Bundy given his previous position, knows the facts
well enough. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based
permanently in Cambodia, killing scores of Americans each
month in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the
safety of a specious neutrality they were violating
daily. The real question is why the Johnson
administration, of which Bundy was then the principal
staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade which
cost so many American lives, not why the Nixon
administration "violated" it. It is also relevant that
Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had all but
invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, both publicly and
in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the
Johnson administration). He implied that he would ignore
such attacks because the Cambodian population had been
expelled by the Communists.

AUG-20-1998 10:37

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.12

10

The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched an offensive (the mini-Tet) two weeks after Nixon assumed office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. After four weeks of this and suffering over 1,500 dead, Nixon retaliated by bombing a ten-kilometer-wide zone along the South Vietnamese border where the sanctuaries were located. Nor would it have been possible to keep the bombings secret without Sihanouk's cooperation. We had originally planned to react to a Sihanouk protest by asking for a UN investigation, thereby admitting the bombings and revealing the presence of the sanctuary. But Sihanouk did not protest and even invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, the Speaker, all of them Democrats, and other Congressional leaders. I

AUG-20-1998 10:37

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NEW YORK 1 P.13

11

recall no objections nor any urging to widen the circle

of those privy to the information.

After a year of secret bombing of the ten-kilometer
zone, Nixon ordered American forces into the sanctuaries
for two months. They destroyed some 20,000 tons of
supplies, yet Judt speaks <u>smokingly</u> of "undiscovered
base areas." From then on, for five years, American
military operations were in the open and fully reported.
American casualties were cut in half immediately and
dropped significantly from then on.

Bundy, endorsed by Judt, objects to the entire
military effort, because "the intensity of the
bombing...drove the Khmer Rouge to greater military
efforts. It also made them more self-reliant, more
alienated from Shihanouk..." In other words, basically
America was to blame for the murderous character of the
Khmer Rouge. This makes an much sense as blaming the
holocaust on the British bombing of Hamburg.

AUG-20-1998 10:37 FROM

TO

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Judt quotes with approval a Bundy argument that the bombing "made it more rather than less difficult to persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a political compromise." Are Bundy and Judt arguing that the best way to achieve a ceasefire, even with genocidal murderers like the Khmer Rouge, is to reduce military operations? Not even Bundy will go this far. Endorsed by Judt, he retreats to saying that "a much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat alive" would have done the trick. Shades of the "graduated escalation" which doomed the Johnson administration's effort in Vietnam and of which Bundy was a principal architect. Is it not much more likely that it was the Congressional cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for negotiations? And would it not be more honest to list among the causes of Cambodia's collapse the gradual strangulation of a friendly country by progressive Congressional restrictions?

AUG-20-1998 10:38 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 1 P.15

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The Vietnam experience was traumatic for all involved. We will never come to grips with it unless a serious effort is made to examine with some understanding the real choices and above all the fact that there were no good choices--something Bundy should have understood better than most, because he left us the dilemmas we were facing which involved 550,000 troops in Indochina without a plan for either victory or extrication.

The Nixon administration genuinely believed that, with adequate help, Cambodia could be saved. The Vietnamese invaders could not hide among the population; the Khmer Rouge forces were relatively small and difficult to supply. Our domestic opponents were determined to prevent a repetition of their version of the Vietnam experience and imposed crippling budgetary restrictions and severe operational limitations on the ground. This is turn left bombing as the sole recourse.

This is not the place to refight those arguments.

AUG-20-1998 10:38 FROM

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the beginning of a possible national German foreign policy. We shared that suspicion at first but, influenced by Helmut Schmidt and others, dealt with it by integrating Ostpolitik into an overall Atlantic approach.

Shortly after being sworn in as Chancellor, Brandt sent his closest aide on these matters, Egon Bahr, to Washington to work on coordinating our policies. Bahr and I worked closely together for the rest of the way, as his memoirs describe. Bahr and I conducted the backchannel negotiations with the Soviets that produced a guarantee for access to Berlin and for its status, without which Ostpolitik could never have succeeded and which remained in force until German unification.

And when Schmidt replaced Brandt and Hans-Dietrich Genscher became Foreign Minister, we succeeded (now in the Ford administration) in achieving in the Helsinki Final Act a provision allowing for the peaceful change of frontiers that became the basis for the unification of

AUG-20-1998 10:39

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Germany. Genscher has credited our policy for this in his
memoirs.

As for the charge that relations with Europe were
so bad when I left office that they took a decade to
repair, the surviving heads of government who have
remained warm friends will, I am confident, be as
astonished as I was to hear this. It surely was not the
view expressed by the German Foreign Minister and other
leading personalities of all German political parties
when I was made an honorary citizen of the town in which
I was born a few months ago and whose statements are in
the public record.

Bundy, scion of a distinguished family and with a
record of devoted service to our country, was in a
position to write knowledgeably about a period in which
he served and from which much could be learned. Instead
he chose to describe the record of the Nixon
administration, of which he was a remote and inherently

AUG-20-1998 10:39 FROM

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unsympathetic observer, not in terms of serious men trying to do the best for their country in a difficult situation, much of which they inherited, but as a <u>prosecuting attorney</u> for a tale of deceit, dissimulation and secrecy. And Judt endorses this collage of secondary <u>minuscules</u> sources and <u>interviews</u> with people of various <u>grievances</u>. <u>close up</u>, vs. --but not with me or my <u>associates</u>--as definitely and scrupulously fair.

When I was in office, there was a vigorous public debate in which I was an eager participant. As Secretary of State, I travelled to thirty-eight states, testified before scores of Congressional committees, and delivered over a hundred speeches and interviews. I supervised the drafting of four major annual reports to the Congress. I gave a full accounting for my tenure in office in my memoirs, including a forthcoming volume on the Ford period. There are the voluminous verbatim accounts of my

1

2628 WORDS

DRAFT

8/19/98 12:00pm

2

The only unique papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations that a court of law--
not I--confirmed to be personal papers and that never
were treated as public papers before that.

3

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the truth. No administration recorded its deliberations, decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is in the official files a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier "nearly" only to protect against an inadvertent bureaucratic slip-up.) There is also a complete record of all my memoranda to the President prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining the proposed talking points, and afterwards reporting the results. There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

4

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by
distortions of the underlying reality. Bundy's treatment
of Nixon and me as somehow illegitimate usurpers drives
him to abandon any perspective.

It prevents him from doing justice to the
necessities reality imposes on policymakers' preferences
--a challenge for which he should have some compassion
from his own experience. Judt notes approvingly Bundy's
criticism of Nixon and me for failing to brief Japan in
advance about the opening to China in 1971, and the
European allies in 1973 on the military alert in the

5

0

6

and me for covert operations as the ultimate cause of
Nixon's downfall. Phrases like "morally repugnant" for a
covert operation in Chile that was never carried out--
and was in many ways an extrapolation of the activities
of the administration in which Bundy served--drop lightly
from Bundy's pen and are duly repeated by Judt. One would
have thought that having served in one of the key
positions in two administrations truly profligate in the
use of covert operations, Bundy would not open up the
subject. Bundy served in high office in the Pentagon when
a coup was instigated by Washington against our South
Vietnamese ally, Ngo Dinh Diem, during the course of
which Diem and his brother were assassinated; in that
same administration the Phoenix Program in Vietnam took
place, the Bay of Pigs and the war in Laos were conducted
as CIA projects, and the only assassination plots of any
American administration were planned.

9

7

8

9

Bundy, given his previous position, knows the facts
well enough. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based
permanently in Cambodia, killing scores of Americans each
month in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the
safety of a specious neutrality they were violating
daily. The real question is why the Johnson
administration, of which Bundy was then the principal
staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade which
cost so many American lives, not why the Nixon
administration "violated" it. It is also relevant that
Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had all but
invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, both publicly and
in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the
Johnson administration). He implied that he would ignore
such attacks because the Cambodian population had been
expelled by the Communists.

10

11

After a year of secret bombing of the ten-kilometer
zone, Nixon ordered American forces into the sanctuaries
for two months. They destroyed some 20,000 tons of
supplies, yet Judt speaks smearingly of "undiscovered
base areas." From then on, for five years, American
military operations were in the open and fully reported.
American casualties were cut in half immediately and
dropped significantly from then on.

12

13

14

Both sides of the debate are convinced that the other is
responsible for the debacle in Cambodia. Either policy
might have succeeded, though I obviously favor the one
pursued by the administration in which I served. In the
process, Cambodia became a victim of our own internal
civil war. We will never learn the right lessons until we
can conduct a democratic discussion that begins with
granting the good faith of all parties. This is what
Bundy and Judt absolutely refuse to do.

Space does not permit dealing with the equally
distorted descriptions of the energy crisis and the
India/Pakistan war of 1971. I will confine myself to the
grotesque treatment of the Nixon administration's
European policy. Judt, following Bundy, alleges that our
initial coolness to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated
Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of
conversations with other European leaders make it clear
that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it

15

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16

17

unsympathetic observer, not in terms of serious men
trying to do the best for their country in a difficult
situation, much of which they inherited, but as a
prosecuting attorney for a tale of deceit, dissimulation
and secrecy. And Judt endorses this collage of secondary
sources and interviews with people of various grievances
--but not with me or my associates--as definitely and
scrupulously fair.

18

negotiations and the memos to and from the Presidents I
served. I will stand on that record.

It is a pity that the wounds of Vietnam are never
permitted to close. It is especially sad when they are
being ripped open by someone whose career was unjustly
blighted by the kind of assault being practiced in this
review.

1

2432 WORDS

DRAFT

8/17/98 2:00pm

How to strike the balance between these competing
realities is not a simple matter, and practitioners of
foreign policy are apt to get it wrong from time to time.
The reconciliation of ambivalent pulls is a task never
likely to be completed, but we will not manage any

2

The only unique papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations that a court of law--
not I--confirmed to be personal papers and that never
were treated as public papers.

3

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the truth. No administration recorded its deliberations, decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is in the official files a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier only to protect against unintended slip-ups.) There is also a complete record of all my memoranda to the President prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining the proposed talking points and afterwards reporting the results. There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

4

moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power
politics, specifically that he is cutting the sentence in
half and omitting the next sentence: "...something akin
to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of
power is reinforced by a shared sense of values. And in
the modern age, these values would have to be
democratic."

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by
distortions of the underlying reality. Bundy's tendency
to treat Nixon and me as somehow illegitimate usurpers
drives him into abandoning any perspective.

This is why Bundy is unable to overlook adaptations
to realities impinging on policymakers, which he should
know better than most from his own experience as being
necessary. He castigates Nixon and me for failing to
brief Japan about China in 1971, and the European allies
in 1973 on our alert in the Middle East crisis. As a
former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy

5

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a
Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into the
Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours away.
To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased the
readiness of our military forces and _simultaneously_
called a meeting of the NATO Council as well as briefed
in the capitals of our principal allies. Why this is
treated by Bundy and Judt as some kind of conspiracy
against Europe is beyond me.

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt
treats the alleged penchant of Nixon and me for covert
operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon's downfall and

6

cites Bundy approvingly to that effect. Phrases like
"morally repugnant" for a covert operation in Chile that
was never carried out--and was in many ways an
extrapolation of the activities of the administration in
which Bundy served--drop lightly from Bundy's pen. One
would have thought that having served in one of the key
positions in two administrations truly profligate in the
use of covert operations, Bundy would not open up the
subject. Bundy served in high office in the party? when a
coup was instigated against our South Vietnamese ally,
Ngo Dinh Diem, during the course of which Diem and his
brother were assassinated, in that same administration
the Phoenix Program in Vietnam took place, the Bay of
Pigs and the war in Laos were conducted as CIA projects,
and the only assassination plots of any American
administration were planned.

The Cold War was not a tea party, and I do not pass
judgment on complex decisions from this perspective of

7

thirty years, only that Bundy is in no position to give
moral lectures on covert operations to his successors
whose use of covert operations both in scope and
frequency was much more limited.

Judt (or Bundy) suppresses the context of covert
operations they cite as egregious. They claim "misleading
promises to the Kurds," as if that suffering people had
been triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations
to them. The fact is that when the US decision to support
the Kurds was made in July 1972, the Kurds had already
been fighting Saddam's oppression for several years. They
were supported by Britain, Iran, Israel, and other
neighboring countries. Nixon was asked to support them in
1972 when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began
to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds'
existing sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds
would have been destroyed earlier - that was our real
choice. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to

8

Similar distortions run through the entire review
and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive
response. This enables Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in
describing the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the
military violation of a neutral state."

I know that assertions about Cambodian bombings
have achieved a near liturgical quality. If so, their
advocates should be able to risk stating the facts
bearing on the decision without invoking totally
misleading forms of words.

Bundy, given his previous position, knows the facts
well enough. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based
permanently in Cambodia, killing Americans in South
Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a
specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real
question is why the Johnson administration, of which

9

Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade, not why we "violated" it. It is also relevant that Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had all but invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, including in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the Johnson administration) as well as publicly. He implied that he would ignore such attacks because the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists.

The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched an offensive (the mini-Tet) two weeks after Nixon assumed his office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. After four weeks of this and suffering over 1,500 dead, Nixon retaliated by bombing a ten-kilometer-wide zone along the South Vietnamese border where the sanctuaries were located. Nor would it have been possible to keep the bombings secret without Sihanouk's cooperation. We had originally

10

planned to react to a Sihanouk protest by asking for a UN
investigation, thereby revealing the presence of the
sanctuary. But Sihanouk did not protest and even invited
Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key
members of Congress had been briefed, including the
Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations
Committees, the Speaker, all Democrats, and about twenty
other Congressional leaders. None urged widening the
circle of those privy to the information.

After a year of secret bombing of the ten-kilometer
zone, Nixon ordered American forces into the sanctuaries
for two months. They destroyed some 20 thousand tons of
supplies, yet Judt speaks smearingly of "undiscovered
base areas." From then on, for five years, American
military? operations were in the open.