NEW YORK POST, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1994

# Bet on Betsy to turn N.Y. around

## GOP's No. 2 exposed
health-reform scam

ELIZABETH McCaughey, the constitutional scholar who turned the country on its ear with a devastating critique of the Clinton health plan, is running for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket with George Pataki.

Will she do for New York what she has done for America? Probably. She's already working on it.

Betsy — as family and friends call her — has applied sharp analytical skills to New York's tax and job crises and its health care. Now she's probing prisons and corrections. Whether she wins or loses in November, she's here to stay as a political force in public policy.

This 45-year-old single mother of three daughters, working in the relative obscurity of her apartment, exposed federal health reform for the calamity it was, then shaped the national debate that led to its shelving.

It's a genuine only-in-America tale.

She did it principally with one magazine article, and if Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on merit instead of politics and ideology, she would be the first one nominated and crowned.

Betsy's vault from aca-

demic anonymity to top-rung politics took only a year.

"It began when I read in the newspapers that the Democrats planned to insure the health of 38 million Americans with a tax on cigarettes," Betsy said.

"That troubled me. So I got a copy of the plan. That night, when I got into bed, I thought I'd read 20 pages or so before going to sleep. At 1:30 a.m. I got out of bed, went to the dining-room table and mapped it out. The plan was so different to what I had read in the papers, it was obvious the reporters had not read all 239 pages."

Betsy, whose last name is pronounced..., "McCoy."

wrote a critical evaluation of the plan for The Wall Street Journal. Later, when the bill itself came out with all 1,400 pages, she flew to Washington, picked up a copy and spent six days digesting it. Out of that came her famous article for The New Republic.

"It was clear to me that this might be the most intrusive piece of legislation since the New Deal," Betsy said. "It would touch the lives of almost all Americans and nobody knew what it really said."

Betsy approached the bill through her constitutional frame of reference. What powers would be invested in government and what choices would be left to the individual?

"The most dangerous position in the Clinton bill — and all the other bills — was that at the turn of the century, no more than 45 percent of young doctors graduating from medical

See KERRISON on Page 20.

New York Post: W. A. Funches Jr.

**DYNAMO:** Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey says, "The future will be even worse if we don't change course."

JUN 09 1994

ARCHDIOCESE OF PHILADELPHIA

222 North Seventeenth Street • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103-1299
Telephone (215) 587-3700 • Fax (215) 587-5644

THE DISTINGUISHED CATHOLIC SCHOOL GRADUATE AWARD

OFFICE OF CATHOLIC EDUCATION

June 3, 1994

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

Dear Mr. Kissinger,

The Catholic schools of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia have graduated thousands of academically, artistically and spiritually gifted students. In recognition of our long tradition of outstanding graduates, the Archdiocese established the Distinguished Catholic School Graduate Award. The award recognizes graduates of Philadelphia Archdiocesan Catholic schools who by their outstanding contributions, achievements and continuing commitment to a Catholic life, have inspired an appreciation for the values of the Catholic school tradition.

Robert J. McCloskey has been nominated by St. Thomas More High School as their distinguished Catholic school graduate. Each nominee was asked to submit a biography, a photo, and a written comment about the value of their Catholic school education. I also requested letters of support from those they have been associated with over the years. Many nominees are not comfortable requesting letters but they do provide names for reference. Bob McCloskey has submitted your name as a reference and one who would submit such a letter.

I am enclosing the criteria and requesting that you submit a letter of support for this fine graduate of our Archdiocese. A selection committee of educators, parents, church and community leaders will meet in August to choose the distinguished award winners for 1994. A dinner reception to honor the winners and induct them into the Hall of Fame is scheduled for November 17, 1994. Please set aside that date - what a privilege it would be to have you present.

Please be kind enough to send your letter by the week of June 26th to:

Sister K. Patricia Spingler, I.H.M.
Office of Catholic Education
222 N. 17th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103

Thank you very much for your response to this request. God bless you.

Sincerely,

Sister K. Patricia Spingler, I.H.M.
Director of Marketing/Public Relations

SKPS/sbm

Catholic schools of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia have enjoyed a tradition of excellence for more than 100 years. Each year, Catholic schools graduate thousands of academically, artistically, and spiritually gifted students. The values that our children learn in Catholic schools provide a foundation for a lifetime of achievement.

In recognition of our outstanding graduates, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Office of Catholic Education, has established the Distinguished Catholic School Graduate Award.

This award recognizes graduates of Philadelphia Archdiocesan Catholic Schools who, by their outstanding contributions, achievements, and continuing commitment to the values of a Catholic life, have inspired an appreciation for the values of the Catholic school tradition.

Nominations will be accepted annually. Winners will be selected by an appointed committee of clergy, school administrators, teachers, parents, as well as church and community leaders.

At an annual reception specially designed medals will be presented, after which the Distinguished Catholic Graduate will be inducted into the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Catholic School Hall of Fame.

The Philadelphia Archdiocese Hall of Fame exhibit, to showcase the award winners, through photos, biographies and testimonials, will visit various sites throughout the diocese.

Established in 1991

Review Essays

Oh Henry! Kissinger and His Critics

By Walter A. McDougall

*Diplomacy*. By Henry Kissinger. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 912 pp.
$35.00.)

"The cunning writer will choose an indefinable subject," wrote William Sydney Porter—*nom d'plume* O. Henry—"for he can then set down his theory of what it is; and next, at length, his conception of what it is not."¹ But Dr. Henry Kissinger, whose cunning no one disputes, lacks the freedom to define his own subject and expect his theories to be received dispassionately. It is not because Dr. Kissinger cannot write a normal book, but because he cannot be a normal author.

We all seem to *care* about Kissinger whether or not (as Walter Russell Mead has it) we all love or loathe him.² And there is no denying the grip that Kissinger still exerts, two decades after leaving government, on all Americans concerned with foreign policy. If you doubt that, consider the rapt attention accorded his testimony by Congressional committees, the presidential requests for consultations, the networks' open invitations for airtime, and the liverish reception his books unfailingly receive from the academic establishment to which he once belonged.

1 O. Henry, "The Country of Elusion," in *Selected Stories*, ed. Guy Davenport (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 58.

2 Walter Russell Mead, "Peace Keepers and Power Brokers," *The Washington Post Book World*, Apr. 3, 1994, pp. 3, 14.

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Perhaps Kissinger's notoriety is born of the fact that he is the only secretary of state to achieve not only fame, but "glamour."³ Perhaps it is because he offered us hope that America could cope during an era when everything, home and abroad, seemed to be spinning out of control. Perhaps it is because the man radiates an aura of secrecy and brilliance to some and Strangelovian devilry to others. But, no one suggests that Henry is passé. No one passé writes books that split the reviewers like a maul splits fresh oak.

That is why one cannot do justice to an event such as the publication of *Diplomacy*, except by reviewing the reviewers (predictably, the most distinguished lot of dons and pundits of international relations) as well as the book itself. A quarterly journal such as *Orbis* affords the chance to do just that. To be sure, reviewing the reviewers risks offending half a dozen senior colleagues in my own profession. But I take courage in the advice of Helmuth von Moltke, who instructed his Prussian lieutenants: First reckon, then risk.

## Henry's History

Some 5 percent of Kissinger's 835-page *Diplomacy* is devoted to current world affairs. Like Paul Kennedy in *The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers*,⁴ Kissinger obliges readers to wade through a long historical narrative before arriving at the contemporary payoff. Otherwise, the Kennedy and Kissinger books could not be more different. Whereas Kennedy explained the rise and fall of powers in terms of economic forces and an almost mechanical tendency of empires to overextend themselves, Kissinger accounts for the twists of time in terms of statesmen's personalities, ideas, and skills. So it is that Kissinger credits Cardinal Richelieu for discarding a European politics of universalism and religiosity in favor of *raison d'etat*, William III for promoting the concept of the balance of power, and Klemens Fürst von Metternich for understanding the need for a community of values to underpin (or overlay) the balance.

And so it is that Ernest R. May, Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard, has reviewed *Diplomacy* under the title "The 'Great Man' Theory of Foreign Policy." Not to put too fine a point on it, May tries to bury Kissinger. He begins by describing *Diplomacy* as "a book of maxims disguised as a history of statecraft. The maxims are often splendid. The history is not." He ends by expressing his disappointment that Kissinger, who once wrote "good professional history," has "little or no sense of how diplomacy and

³ Robert W. Tucker, "Masterwork," *The National Interest*, Summer 1994, pp. 78-87; "[Glamour's] one common denominator is the ability to evoke fascination. This Kissinger has done in abundance" (p. 78).

⁴ Paul Kennedy, *The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000* (New York: Random House, 1987).

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statecraft evolved." As a result, Kissinger's *Diplomacy* (if not his diplomacy) is
"amateurish."⁵

May is right that Kissinger ignores long-range forces in international affairs, but he does not suggest what those economic, technological, ideological, or social forces might be. Instead, he wastes valuable inches of ink in two vain pursuits. The first is to indict Kissinger for admiring every statesman who eschewed vain moralizing in favor of realpolitik, be they authoritarians like Metternich and Otto von Bismarck, or tyrants like Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. May's second pursuit is to tick off alleged factual errors, the sort, he says, "for which students fail to get pass degrees in history." But all that May offers are three allegations regarding who coined a campaign slogan from Britain's "khaki election" of 1918, which generals attended Hitler's harangue recounted in the Hossbach Memorandum, and whether or not Wilsonian self-determination put Europeans on "unfamiliar terrain."

Kissinger must have fumed at having to check such trivial points, but his letter of rebuttal to the *Times* not only parries May's "nitpicking," but exposes an embarrassing error on May's part. On the larger issue, Kissinger quotes himself to the effect that Stalin was a "monster" and Hitler's advent to power "one of the greatest calamities in world history," by way of refuting the charge that "I never met a dictator I did not like." Kissinger concludes in withering fashion: "Professor May has done significant historical research in the past; it is therefore not possible to consider his comments as inadvertent.⁶

May in turn dismisses the charge that his review was motivated by "personal animus" and lunges at Henry's open flank: his reputation for amoral diplomacy. What his review really stressed, writes May, is Kissinger's "new insistence that political leaders must respect values as well as power." And with this, we have leaped out of the pages of the book and into history. While this dig may be lost on youngsters, those who faced the Nixon administration from the other side of the barricades will say "touché." May then tries to turn Kissinger's prominence against him. Even minor errors are significant in a Kissinger book because, May argues, his name on the cover is equivalent to "a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval." How sad, therefore, that "Thousands of readers may think 'Diplomacy' an authoritative history. . . .⁹

What are we to make of this fur-fight in the pages of *The New York Times*? Is May one of Mead's Kissinger-loathers? Were they rivals years ago at Harvard? Or have certain of Kissinger's old colleagues never forgiven him for "selling out": for grasping power and glory beyond the dreams of any professor, siding with the likes of Nixon, approving of the invasion of Cambodia and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, ordering the wiretapping of

⁵ *The New York Times Book Review*, Apr. 3, 1994, pp. 3, 24. Newspapers today, led by the *The New York Times* and *The Washington Post*, shamelessly ignore official publication dates in an effort to scoop competitors with the first notice of major new releases. In this case, the *Times* and *Post* ran a dead heat.

⁶ Henry A. Kissinger, Letter to the Editor, *The New York Times Book Review*, Apr. 24, 1994, p. 31. May had faulted Kissinger for failing to mention Harold Nicolson's excellent book, also titled *Diplomacy*, whereas, in fact, Kissinger cites Nicolson in a footnote and on the copyright page.

⁷ Ernest R. May, Letter to the Editor, *The New York Times Book Review*, May 1, 1994, p. 35. Emphasis added.

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associates—and then cashing in on his infamy through a private consultancy that yields him an income estimated at $7.5 million per year?

Walter Isaacson's recent biography of Kissinger records that in May 1970, after the Cambodian incursion, a distinguished Harvard delegation visited Henry in Washington. May was among them; as dean of the college, he was a target of protesters. Nixon's policies were "tearing the country apart domestically," said May. Kissinger replied that Cambodia was a tactical, not a moral question; that, in effect, the administration had bigger fish to fry and a larger moral purpose in mind. "The meeting completed my transition from the academic world," said Kissinger; May and the others "left embittered."⁸

Whatever May's motives for panning *Diplomacy*, he missed the chance to make a constructive critique of Kissinger's history. Stanford University professor emeritus Gordon Craig missed his chance, too, but because he was too kind. Craig's main contention is that Kissinger's title is a misnomer. The book is not really about the practice of diplomacy as it evolved from fifteenth-century Venice to the present. Echoing the post-World War I generation of statesmen, he laments the decline of Europe's tradition of professional statecraft and decries "that worst of all diplomatic inventions, the summit conference." But, having unburdened himself, Craig forgives Kissinger for ignoring institutional history in order "to concentrate on the search for international order and upon the statesmen who, like himself, sought to establish systems that would preserve it, and he has accomplished this with great skill and shrewdness." Granting Henry the right to this delimited province, Craig concludes that "Kissinger's account leaves nothing to be desired...."⁹

At one level, therefore, professional judgments of Kissinger's history turn on the "great man" assumption that undergirds it. Simon Schama likes the assumption, but is bothered by its implementation. *Diplomacy* "is an unrepentantly old-fashioned book," he writes, "a narrative of great men and events, studded with epigrams and lapidary utterances on the practice of power."¹⁰ Such an approach "needs no apology" because peoples and ideas do matter, and politics is the stuff of irony, unintended consequences, and contingency. Moreover, history is the best school for contemporary statesmen, who would do well to recognize that realism without a moral compass, and moralizing in the absence of calculus, are equally vain.

The trouble, according to Schama, is that Kissinger doesn't always know his great men well enough. For instance, Richelieu, far from jettisoning Catholicism for an amoral *raison d'etat* (as Kissinger has it), believed that "what is done for the state is done for God." To be sure, he made alliances with Protestant princes and fought to maintain France against Catholic Hapsburg "hegemony," but Richelieu never stopped thinking of Protestants as

⁸ Walter Isaacson, *Kissinger. A Biography* (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 280–81.

⁹ Gordon Craig, "Looking for Order," *The New York Review of Books*, May 12, 1994, pp. 8–14.

¹⁰ Simon Schama, "The Games of Great Men," *The New Yorker*, May 2, 1994, pp. 92–97. See also Timothy Garton Ash, "The Rules of the Game," *The New Republic*, July 18, 1994, pp. 41–43.

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heretics, and he fashioned policy partly to enable the Bourbons to stamp out the Huguenots at home.

> Diplomacy tells us much not only about the past, but about history as a craft, about Kissinger himself, and (through our reactions to it) about ourselves.

Kissinger also errs, according to Schama, by contrasting Europe's power-political tradition to an idealistic American one. America, after all, was a creation of early modern Europe, and the notions we associate with American exclusivism trace their roots back to Europe's own quest for an alternative to balance of power—from the just war theory of the medieval church to Hugo Grotius's invention of international law in seventeenth-century Netherlands to the British promoters of a League to Enforce Peace. Michael Howard, the retired Robert A. Lovett Professor at Yale, also wonders how Kissinger can be so "curiously blind to what was happening in Britain in the nineteenth century. . . . Gladstone was the voice of the future . . . the true avatar of Woodrow Wilson."¹¹ But Kissinger says exactly that on page 161, and, as we shall see below, his sense of what is European by tradition and what is truly American is subtler than either Schama or Howard suggest.

So, is *Diplomacy* "good history" or not? That depends not on a few errors of fact—which any nine-hundred-page book is bound to contain—but on the strength of its interpretations in light of the facts. And there are at least some questionable interpretations.

I do not agree, for example, with Kissinger's twice-stated remark that the United States did not consider its westward expansion to be "foreign policy" at all. Manifest Destiny publicists may have believed as much, but Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Polk, and William Henry Seward knew better. I think Kissinger claims too much for *raison d'etat* as a cause for the Bourbon ascendancy, exaggerates the self-consciousness of Britain's balance-of-power policy, and ignores popular nationalism and the Zollverein (customs union) in his explanation of German unification.

Moving to the twentieth century, Kissinger's portrait of Stalin strikes me as too confident, given the mysteries that still surround that era, and he is too ready to believe that Stalin was "the supreme realist—patient, shrewd, and implacable" (p. 333). One can argue from the same evidence that Stalin was weak, paranoid, too clever by half, and lucky. After all, he botched Soviet policy in China, gave away Manchuria to Japan, helped fascists into power through his Comintern activities, turned too late to the Popular Front strategy, misread Hitler and became the greatest appeaser of all, and provoked the cold war with his needless, heedless impositions in occupied Europe.

¹¹ Michael Howard, "The World According to Henry. From Metternich to Me," *Foreign Affairs*, May/June 1994, pp. 132-40.

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Kissinger is also too kind to Franklin Roosevelt, in my judgment. He says nothing about U.S. policy toward the Chinese Civil War, and his account of the origins of the Korean War relies on the dubious old saw about Dean Acheson's oversight in a speech.

On the other hand, much else in Kissinger's book, especially his summary of the First World War era—from origins to peacemaking—is superb. So, too, is his insightful account of the origins and execution of the containment doctrine.¹²

So, with much justification, Robert Tucker finds *Diplomacy* "brilliant though thoroughly idiosyncratic,"¹³ and Schama "an oddly engaging Cracker Jack assortment of gems and howlers." He thinks (as do I) that the narrative improves mightily in style and insight as it reaches the nineteenth century, the pages sparkling "with intelligence and insight." Schama's real disappointment lies in the fact that Henry chose to write history at all instead of "an anatomy of the methods and stratagems of the [diplomatic] craft, written with the sharp analytical intelligence of a former Secretary of State who has been both an insider and an outsider and whose sensitivity to the nuances of diplomatic language is unmatched."¹⁴ Peter Grier put the same complaint pithily: "Cut out all the Metternich; leave in the tips."¹⁵

Good advice—for Kissinger's next book. But *Diplomacy* is like an oriental carpet, as interesting for its flaws as its brilliant patterns. For it tells us much not only about the past, but about history as a craft, about Kissinger himself, and (through our reactions to it) about ourselves. You can't ask much more of a history book.

## History's Henry

The reception given *Diplomacy* reveals as much about the historical construction of Henry Kissinger as it does about Kissinger's construction of history. For Henry, it seems, is a stranger in our midst. Or so the reviewers would have it.

"For more than 900 pages," writes Robert A. Divine, the George A. Littlefield Professor at the University of Texas and a dean of American diplomatic history, "Kissinger reveals a profound knowledge of world diplomacy and a nearly total ignorance of American culture." In Divine's view, "Kissinger preaches a sophisticated sermon on the virtues of realpolitik without ever acknowledging that the success of the United States in world affairs stems directly from a repudiation of this Old World concept." Kissinger

¹² See also, Henry Kissinger, "Reflections on Containment," *Foreign Affairs*, May/June 1994, pp. 113-30, which is adapted from Kissinger's *Diplomacy*.

¹³ Tucker, "Masterwork," p. 78.

¹⁴ Schama, "The Games of Great Men," p. 96.

¹⁵ Peter Grier, "Kissinger's Top Diplomatic Tips," *The Christian Science Monitor*, Apr. 27, 1994.

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remains a stranger in his adopted land; he "knows all the words, but never
learned the music."¹⁶

This is as neat a statement as one may ever find of the hoary
supposition that Kissinger is a nineteenth-century Central European plunked
down in the middle of twentieth-century America. Kissinger is indeed of
German origin and education (especially if one counts the reputed influence of
Fritz Kraemer, his "discoverer" and mentor). He appreciates balance, order,
and predictability of behavior, without which no ideals of any kind can be
advanced in domestic or international society. Some of his relatives died in the
Holocaust; he knows the danger of unrestrained ideology. And he knows from
experience the price paid by American soldiers to redeem the folly of
democratic politicians. His early writings explain, and to some extent extol,
the efforts of hard-headed "realists" like Metternich and Lord Castlereagh,
who built the most successful international system of modern times. Once in
office, he spoke of "a generation of peace," not peace for all time, and "an era
of negotiation," not a new world order. And he practiced what Divine says he
"preached" (a strange verb to choose under the circumstances).

But as we know, Kissinger was attacked from the American Left and
Right alike, each of which spied something alien in Nixon and Kissinger's
realpolitik. Now, Divine criticizes Kissinger for believing that a balance-of-
power approach might have won over the public were it not for Watergate. In
fact, writes Divine, it was not a president versed in geopolitical manipulation
but a confessed Wilsonian and critic of détente—Ronald Reagan—who
"finally achieved the long-sought goal of ending Soviet tyranny." Kissinger,
blind to the fact that "American idealism has been a powerful force," could
neither appease it at home nor wield it abroad, and so he was forced to explain
the end of the cold war as a matter of irony and timing. Divine asserts that
Wilsonianism, not realpolitik, won the cold war, and that our goal today
should be "based on fulfilling Jefferson's dream of an empire of liberty, not on
Richelieu's balance of power."¹⁷

Schama makes a similar point. According to Kissinger's argument,
Reagan's "addiction to demonizing rhetoric coupled with impulsive
negotiation ought to have represented a unique foreign policy nightmare,"
whereas in fact the progress he made in relations with Moscow would have
been beyond the means of either a liberal or a realpolitiker. Schama is even
impelled to ask: "Is an American realpolitik a contradiction in terms?"¹⁸

Paul Johnson's review of *Diplomacy* is decidedly favorable, but he,
too, interprets Kissinger's instincts as those of "a civilized European."¹⁹
Tucker says, "We are urged to heed the lessons of the [European] past in order
to meet the challenges of the [American] future."²⁰ According to Mead,

16 Robert A. Divine, "Diplomacy According to Kissinger," *The Philadelphia Inquirer*, Apr. 24, 1994.

17 Ibid.

18 Schama, "The Games of Great Men," p. 92.

19 Paul Johnson, "The World Stage," *Commentary*, Apr. 1994, pp. 55-56.

20 Tucker, "Masterwork," p. 81.

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"Kissinger believes that American diplomats and public opinion need to absorb European ideas about realism and balance of power politics.²¹ *The Economist* sees Kissinger trying "to reconcile his advocacy of the European approach of *Realpolitik*" with American exceptionalism.²² Howard suggests that Kissinger employs the neutral euphemism "geopolitics" so as not to offend his American audience with his real subject, "power politics." Howard points with irony to the fact that the American people, in the heat of Vietnam, elected a president "who, much as he admired Woodrow Wilson, shared few of his ideals, and Nixon selected as his adviser Henry Kissinger, who shared none of them."²³

> *The supposed dichotomy between a "realistic" European approach to foreign policy and an "idealistic" American one is simply false—and Henry knows it.*

Are we to accept as given this "European" Kissinger whose lifelong calling has been to educate naïve Americans about the realities of power? If so, what are we to make of the fact that *Diplomacy* contains high praise for Woodrow Wilson? (Craig read the book closely enough to see that "Kissinger's admiration of Wilson is undisguised" for he "grasped the mainsprings of American motivation."²⁴) What all this suggests to me is that the supposed dichotomy between a "realistic" European approach to foreign policy and an "idealistic" American one is simply false—and that Henry knows it. Certainly, Americans have always wanted to *believe* that they were more idealistic than other nations—which is not surprising since the *novo ordo seclorum* was a major plank in our revolutionary and national propaganda. But we have never fully lived our ideals—ask any foreigner—and in any case, our ideals were themselves inspired by Europeans. Thus, the brilliant contrarian Conor Cruise O'Brien suggests that it would be "nearer to the truth to say that the *rhetoric* of American foreign policy has been shaped by Wilsonian rhetoric, while the substance has been shaped mostly by considerations of national interest." Indeed, O'Brien (a biographer of Edmund Burke) faults Kissinger for making too *deep* a bow at the altar of American moralism.²⁵

So here we are again, hung up on the old dialectic of American idealism versus European realism. The argument always runs the same: nations must pursue ideals lest they succumb to Ozymandian pride and their majesty prove ephemeral; no, statesmen must be realistic lest they do more harm than

21 Mead, "Peace Keepers and Power Brokers," p. 3.

22 "Henry Kissinger Weighs In," *The Economist*, May 14, 1994, p. 93.

23 Howard, "The World According to Henry," pp. 136-37.

24 Craig, "Looking for Order," p. 10.

25 Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Realpolitik or Moral Values," *Insight*, May 16, 1994, p. 31. See also Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Kissinger Best on Diplomacy of Predecessors," *The Washington Times* (National Weekly Edition), June 6-12, 1994.

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good with their moralizing; no, history proves that idealism is in fact a higher realism—look at the fall of the Soviet empire; no, realism is really a higher idealism—even our victories in two, now three, world wars have not sufficed to fashion a new world order. And so to the synthesis: we must be idealistic as to our goals, and realistic as to our means, keeping always in mind the ethical principles governing the use of force. Choice cannot be avoided, balances must be struck. Does any serious observer disagree with any of this?

If not, then the critics all agree with Kissinger, and it is not a European or American thing at all but a function of geopolitical circumstance. The United States was blessed with advantages that allowed it to emphasize its idealism, making it seem more millenarian; Europeans rarely had such a luxury and generally suffered when they tried to claim it anyway.

This is neither more nor less than what Kissinger argues in *Diplomacy*. Of course one ought to serve values in one's foreign policy to the extent that circumstances permit. The statesman's essential task is to create circumstances propitious to the flowering of one's values—if he can. Kissinger admires Metternich not because he thought in terms of balance of power (Craig, a German historian, caught this), but because his Vienna system rested on "a sense of shared values. . . . There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice were in substantial harmony." Tell that to the Poles, or Italians, Hungarians, or Irish, an idealist might reply. Metternich's system may have been "just" as dynasts or local hegemons defined justice, but it was a prison of peoples no less than the Soviet empire. Ah, but there were no holocausts under the Vienna system, and the forces of democracy and nationalism were largely satisfied without cataclysmic eruptions thanks to the stability of the Vienna architecture. What Kissinger means when he deploys the word "balance" is not only balance of power, but balance between ends and means, aspirations and limits, ideals and realities, risks and rewards. It is another word for wisdom, and it has nothing to do with "European" or "American" states of mind.²⁶

To be sure, Kissinger is comfortable at the chessboard of world politics and manifestly uneasy in the arena of American politics. A Daniel Patrick Moynihan might have been a Kissinger, but Kissinger could never have been a Moynihan. Perhaps that is a function of his status as an "outsider," or simply his temperament. He may even envy the "great communicators" who can reach out and strum American heartstrings. But—pace Robert Divine—a lack of talent for the piano does not make one contemptuous of music.

26 A late reviewer came to the same conclusion as I, and cites a 1968 article, "Central Issues in American Foreign Policy," in which Kissinger argued that the United States had to strike a balance between American idealism and European realism. In effect, therefore, Kissinger "has done what immigrants to this country have always done: taken the best in their own tradition and blended it with the best in the American tradition to produce something . . . at once authentically American and genuinely cosmopolitan." See Joseph Strattan, "Diplomacy," *The American Spectator*, July 1994, pp. 68-70.

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There is another way to approach "history's Kissinger": the Kissinger created by his flight from Nazi Germany, by World War II, Harvard, Rockefeller, Nixon, Washington, and rarified consultancy. Kissinger says nothing of his own intellectual formation in *Diplomacy* (perhaps saving it for an autobiography) and almost nothing of ideology (perhaps because *A World Restored*, his classic on the Congress of Vienna, deals with little else). And since his mask is opaque, perhaps the American reader cannot quite believe that Kissinger has emotions to manage, or wrestles with moral dilemmas. If reviewing *Diplomacy* means (for most) reviewing Kissinger himself, then much vexation stems from the fact that Henry doesn't tell us about Henry in *Diplomacy*.

> What Kissinger means when he deploys the word "balance" is not only balance of power, but balance between ends and means, aspirations and limits, ideals and realities, risks and rewards.

More important, Kissinger's silence on ideology invites misunderstanding. That is because the *raison d'etat* approach identified with him commanded the historical stage only until the modern secular ideologies leapt from the Pandora's Box of the French Revolution: liberalism, socialism, nationalism. (Conservatism, by contrast, is an anti-ideology, a rejection of *any* ideological impress upon institutions.) Since Kissinger does not deal explicitly with the ideologization of world politics, certain questions persist about Kissinger's true beliefs, acts in office, personality, and comfort with America itself. Are Americans themselves ideological, and Kissinger a conservative, in which case a philosophical divide may well exist between him and our political culture? Or does Kissinger accept liberalism for purposes of domestic politics, but remain skeptical of attempts to promote it abroad? Or does he in fact believe that the United States ought positively to strive to "enlarge" the global realm in which popular sovereignty and free markets thrive?

One would expect a "European" Kissinger to eschew ideologies and values in his current policy prescriptions. And sure enough, his final chapter, "The New World Order Revisited," has much to say about geopolitics and little to say about values. The United States, he reminds us in terms reminiscent of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman, is "an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia" (p. 813), hence the prevention of any one power from dominating Europe or Asia remains the first task of American strategy.

In other words, the United States must play the role of the balancer, but not in the aloof manner of Britain, which tended to intervene on the continent only after a hegemonic threat arose and risk of war was the only recourse. Kissinger recommends to America the policy of constant engagement

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practiced by Bismarck: prophylactic diplomacy designed to stabilize Europe and Asia and nip potential conflicts in the bud. Thus, he urges the United States to retain close ties to Germany and Russia, lest those old rivals for hegemony either come to blows or join forces, and extend NATO's security umbrella to the new democracies of middle Europe.²⁷ The same goes for East Asia, where the United States must continue its military presence and never allow disputes over trade or human rights to interfere with constructive security relations.

Kissinger's realism also makes him impatient with talk of "new world orders." The end of the cold war, he writes, "has made it far more difficult to implement the Wilsonian dream of universal collective security. . . . The world community is willing enough to cooperate in 'peacekeeping'—that is, in policing an existing agreement not challenged by any of the parties—but it has been skittish about peacemaking—the suppression of actual challenges to world order" (p. 809). What is more, the major players today—the United States, united Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and India—have little in common except their *lack* of experience in cooperative, multipolar international systems. "Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale" (p. 26). He grants that American policy must "take into account" the core values of a nation forged in the name of liberty, but if it ignores contemporary realities, then our "foreign policy will turn into righteous posturing." In sum, whatever new order emerges will be decades in gestation, and the best the United States can hope for is "the patient accumulation of partial successes" (p. 835).

Most reviewers do not deny the wisdom of Kissinger's advice, but few are wholly comfortable with the notion that a "Bismarckian" diplomacy paying lip service to Wilsonianism should define America's role in the twenty-first century. Divine believes that Kissinger misses the lesson of the cold war. Mead slams him for his apparent failure to understand the importance of economics in "our homegrown American foreign policy tradition."²⁸ Howard objects to Kissinger's counsel because the spread of democracy and economic interdependence around the world make it "questionable whether the concept of a purely 'national' interest makes sense any longer."²⁹ Enoch Powell thinks that Kissinger's vocabulary is inadequate to the post-cold war world, "that just at this point his lights become dimmed."³⁰ The cleverest comment on Kissinger's *tour d'horizon* is Craig's: "He does not say that a prerequisite of success would be a negotiator as inventive, and as tireless as he was himself, but we are perhaps justified in believing that this is assumed."³¹

27 *The Economist* spies a problem with Kissinger's program that all other reviewers (including myself) missed. If the United States must resist domination of Europe by a single power, "cold war or no cold war," then what U.S. policy would he suggest "towards development of an enlarged European Union capable of acting as a single unit? Or towards a potential entente between the European Union and Russia?" Good question.

28 Mead, "Peace Keepers and Power Brokers," p. 14.

29 Howard, "The World According to Henry," pp. 139-40.

30 Enoch Powell, "How Nixon's Metternich Sees the World," *The Wall Street Journal*, Apr. 27, 1994.

31 Craig, "Looking for Order," p. 14.

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Kissinger's aversion to "taking a pledge" on issues of morality, political philosophy, trendy new subjects of international relations such as poverty, population, resources, and the environment, or indeed anything having to do with the ordering of domestic societies does not surprise anyone familiar with his past writings and career. But his reticence leaves room for the suspicion that Kissinger is an elitist preoccupied with power and impatient with the irrational play of mass politics. Schama gets off a nasty crack when he writes that "Kissinger has a peculiar way of averting his gaze from the ideological content of the regimes served by the diplomatic virtuosi he most admires. . . . G. Gordon Liddy and the rest of the gang would have felt right at home working for Richelieu or Metternich."³² Howard refers to "that *ancien regime* from which [Kissinger] derived his values and to which he now looks back with such understandable nostalgia."³³ And Timothy Garton Ash doubts that Kissinger's bows to Wilsonianism "will actually make his peace with America."³⁴

So even if Henry's alleged "European-ness" is a myth, as I suspect, it will apparently die hard, if only because Americans seem unable to live in an unideological world, a world with too much power and not enough virtue. But a far more important question is simply whether Kissinger is right when he concludes (as Margaret Thatcher's private secretary puts it) "that America will have to learn to operate in a balance-of-power system not a million miles removed from that of nineteenth-century Europe."⁵⁵

## Henry's Heresy

As Kissinger stood with his parents upon being named secretary of state, he observed with emotion that such a thing could only happen in America. Schama sees in this a "poignant irony. For all his sense that American democratic ideals have placed an unbearable burden on the free agency of our foreign policy, Kissinger would be the last to dispute their essential nobility."³⁶ The episode calls to mind Gustav Stresemann, who reconciled himself to the Weimar Republic only upon being made chancellor. Commoners like himself could never have achieved such rank in the Kaiser's day, and so they were called *Vernunftrepublikaner*: republicans of the head if not of the heart.

I cannot help but wonder how much of the angst expressed about Kissinger is born of wonderment over the contents of his heart. Is it in fact the apparent "heartlessness" of Kissinger's writings and doings that makes hearty Americans uneasy? Is his "heresy" a matter of sentiment as much as doctrine? I do not know the answer, but I know that the inquiry must begin with

³² Schama, "The Games of Great Men," p. 95.

³³ Howard, "The World According to Henry," p. 140.

³⁴ Ash, "The Rules of the Game," p. 43.

³⁵ Charles Powell, "No Diplomat," *National Review*, June 13, 1994, pp. 63–65 (quote on p. 63).

³⁶ Schama, "The Games of Great Men," p. 96.

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Kissinger's reading of the Vietnam War. For, as we have stressed, Kissinger's views do not separate well from his career, and the critics rarely try to keep them apart. Nowhere do theory and practice collide with a bigger bang than in Vietnam.

According to *Diplomacy*, the American debacle in Vietnam was implicit in the universalization of containment, itself a dubious imposition of American moralism on what was otherwise a sound geopolitical response to Stalinism. As early as 1950, the United States decided that Southeast Asia had to be defended, and the Domino Theory became conventional wisdom. But how could containment, which was meant to shelter democracies, be extended to the Mandarin polities emerging from colonialism? It could not be, but, says Kissinger, something about Vietnam "consistently blighted the reasoning power of foreigners who ventured into it" (p. 630). Hence, the U.S. military believed it could win where the French had lost, the Kennedy administration forgot what Korea had done to Truman just nine years before, and McNamara's whiz kids, far from believing that military might could solve a political problem, convinced themselves that political "nation-building" could solve what was really a military problem.

According to Kissinger, Eisenhower understood that Southeast Asia was a military problem and that its key was Laos. But the Kennedy people shrank from "so cold-blooded a strategic analysis" and deemed it "inappropriate for a conflict still perceived largely in ideological terms" (p. 647). So it bargained away Laos in 1961, providing Hanoi with a sanctuary and supply route to South Vietnam. Finally, in hopes of bringing the commitment to Saigon in line with American rhetoric, John F. Kennedy jettisoned the authoritarian Diem and Lyndon Johnson pronounced the real danger in Indochina to be hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease. "Ultimately, every revolutionary war is about governmental legitimacy; undermining it is the guerilla's principal aim. Diem's overthrow handed that objective to Hanoi for free" (p. 655). The U.S. military, barred from cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail, then proceeded to adopt the hopeless strategy of suppressing the insurgency throughout the entire length of South Vietnam, thereby ensuring a stalemate that could only benefit the enemy.

Critics soon blamed Johnson for an unwillingness to negotiate. In fact, says Kissinger, "Johnson's eagerness to start negotiations was so palpable as to be self-defeating" (p. 663). As the costs in Vietnam grew out of proportion to the geopolitical stakes, critics came to equate the North and South Vietnamese governments, obviating the American need to defend "democracy," and then concluded that the war must reflect a moral rot in the *American* government, in which case the North Vietnamese were the real good guys. Kissinger points more than once to poll data showing that the majority of Americans remained "hawks" on the war throughout, but the group that "lost its nerve represented the very Establishment figures who had backed intervention all along" (p. 671). Hence, Johnson threw away his chance to crush the enemy after its disastrous Tet Offensive of 1968, and took himself off the stage. That,

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Kissinger writes, was unconscionable. Johnson could have stood for re-election, thus creating a popular mandate either for winning or getting out. Or he could have stood down, but exerted maximum pressure on North Vietnam in order to expand the options for his successor. Instead, "by simultaneously de-escalating, renouncing his candidacy, and offering negotiations, Johnson combined every disadvantage" (p. 672).

Nixon and Kissinger were left to pick their way toward "peace with honor." Unilateral withdrawal was not an option: it would take fifteen months or more to extricate five hundred thousand men, might precipitate a rout, and could turn into "geopolitical disaster" if America's friends and enemies concluded that it no longer stood tall. But "the leaders of the Peace Movement considered the war so repugnant that an honorable extrication from Vietnam had come to sound like an absurdity" (p. 675). Indeed, having "transmuted the war into a domestic conflict between good and evil at home, the Peace Movement preferred—for reasons it viewed as highly moral—America's collapse in Vietnam to an outcome which, precisely because it might be considered 'honorable', might also whet its government's appetite for further foreign adventures" (p. 688). American idealism, far from getting lost during Vietnam, was never so in evidence. But the idealistic tradition had split, precipitating civil war in the streets, and was thus of *no use* to Nixon even if the president had had the charisma to invoke it.³⁷

Meanwhile, Nixon pursued détente with the Communist powers and Kissinger hammered out peace in Paris. He hoped "that it would enable America to start the process of national healing" (p. 692). But Congress refused to enforce the peace, Nixon became mired in Watergate, and the critics of the war refused to be reconciled. Kissinger holds to the view that the Paris Accords might have worked, and reserves the ultimate blame for America itself. "The test of a society is whether it can submerge its differences in pursuit of common objectives, and whether it can keep in mind that societies thrive on their reconciliations, not on their conflicts. America failed that test in Indochina" (p. 694).

Think for a moment about this account. It is objective, lucid, and devastating. No wonder Divine says that Kissinger remains a stranger in American hearts, for you simply cannot tell all factions in a country that suffered so much that all of them failed—even if they did. First, Kissinger indicts the "idealistic" cold war liberals for the misapprehensions and hubris that got us into Vietnam, then he blames the "idealistic" Vietnam protesters for contributing to the agony rather than a resolution, then he castigates the

³⁷ This decisive point was implicit in *Diplomacy*. But Kissinger was obliged to make it explicit as a result of the flap following publication of the Haldeman diaries. First, Albert Hunt (*The Wall Street Journal*, May 26, 1994), then Anthony Lewis (*The New York Times*, May 30, 1994) charged that Kissinger and Nixon made Vietnam policy on the basis of domestic political considerations, implying that they sacrificed the lives of thousands of soldiers in the interest of Nixon's re-election. Kissinger rebukes Lewis for levelling such a heinous accusation on the strength of "a single entry in 600 pages of the H.R. Haldeman diaries" ("Hanoi, Not Nixon, Set Pace of Vietnam Peace," *The New York Times*, June 3, 1994), and—in reply to Hunt—writes, "Vietnam was a tragedy because the commitment . . . grew out of America's idealistic tradition and the extrication became a nightmare because that idealism turned on itself" ("I Stand by My Eulogy to Nixon," *The Wall Street Journal*, June 3, 1994).

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whole country for cracking up when it needed to pull together. He may be right to indict *all* Americans for letting their moralism lead them astray. But it is heresy to say so.

## Heresy's Henry

How dare Kissinger criticize our moral tradition? Has it not been our badge of honor since 1776 *and* our best weapon in world affairs? Isn't the world today turning more and more to our ideals and institutions? Isn't it America's calling to lead the world into habits and institutions that will *liberate* nations from thralldom to geopolitics? If we believe that the answers are "Yes," whether or not we believe that America has always lived up to its calling, then we *must* ostracize Kissinger in our hearts, if not in print.

But what if Kissinger is orthodox and the Wilsonians are the real heretics? He surely bases his politics on the orthodox doctrine of human imperfectability, hence on the contingency of all human creations. Aristotle and the Greeks, and the Jewish and Christian scriptures all said the same. So did our own Founding Fathers, who designed their "more" perfect union on the principle that checks and balances are needed to contain the play of human corruption. The City on a Hill notwithstanding, no sensible American believed that his country would be free of vice or faction. From these first principles, the Founding Fathers deduced a foreign policy meant to shelter America, to the degree possible, from the dangers inherent in a wicked world: isolationism when possible, power politics when necessary, and balance of power once U.S. interests reached the coasts of Europe and Asia. What we now think of as hard-boiled "realism" is not some import carried to America by the likes of Hans Morgenthau or Henry Kissinger. It was fundamental to the classical wisdom on which the country was founded.

But gradually, over the course of the nineteenth century, Anglo-American Protestants reacted to the ills they perceived in the industrial, imperialist world by overestimating the power of law and good works to change human behavior, then transferred their private calling to public life, then exported it. So it was that an otherwise devout Christian like Woodrow Wilson began to sound like that old Enlightenment radical Tom Paine, blaming governments for the corruption of men instead of men for the corruption of governments. Wilson seduced Americans into believing that whole nations could be converted and that wars were just only if crusades. That millenarian heresy inspired everything from the botched peace at Versailles to the smug isolationism of the thirties to the "bear any burden" mentality that landed us in Vietnam. Could it be, therefore, that Kissinger more truly reflects the philosophical sobriety of our nation's founders? That Kissinger is more American than Wilson?

There is at least one undeniably un-American thing about Kissinger, and that is his pessimism. Americans may have been traditionally suspicious of men and of governments, but they were always bullish on America. Reagan

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LEVEL 1 - 1 OF 1 STORY

Copyright 1994 The Dallas Morning News
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

September 25, 1994, Sunday, HOME FINAL EDITION

SECTION: SUNDAY READER; INTERVIEW; Pg. 1J

LENGTH: 1866 words

HEADLINE: Robert C. McFarlane

BYLINE: Ann Scales, Dallas Morning News

BODY:

Robert C. McFarlane, the national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan, is known as one of the central figures in the Iran-contra scandal and the man who attempted suicide as the scandal began unfolding. He voluntarily testified to independent and congressional committees investigating the affair and pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress. He was later pardoned by President George Bush.

Mr. McFarlane worked 30 years in government, including nine years for three presidents - Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Mr. Reagan - and had been a key architect in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the early to mid-1980s.

He was the creator of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," which some have credited with ending the Cold War.

In his personal memoir, Special Trust, published this month by Cadell & Davies, he recalls his modest roots in Graham, Texas, his tours of duty in Vietnam and his rise to prominence in Washington.

Since his departure from government, Mr. McFarlane has begun assisting U.S. businesses in investing in energy projects in developing countries. He has also launched a crusade to encourage American youth to enter public service and a campaign to restore public trust in government.

In an interview with Dallas Morning News reporter Ann Scales, Mr. McFarlane discussed Iran-contra, the end of the Cold War and the U.S. occupation of Haiti. The following are excerpts:

Q: Let's start by looking at Haiti. What's your assessment of the situation there?

A: Well, I'm worried about the immediate outcome, that is that American lives are put at risk in circumstances that don't involve vital American interests. The welfare of Americans of Dallas or Des Moines is not affected by what happens in Haiti. This is not to say that I'm against there being a purely moral conviction to our foreign policy, and yet, as I say in the book, if you are going to launch the country on a moral crusade to build democracy in Haiti and elsewhere in the world, then you need to have the country behind you.

In short, as a precedent, going into Haiti, where we don't have important interests involved, could now engender a second Haiti in South America or Asia. There is really no end to it. There are a sufficient number of Bosnias and

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS, September 25, 1994

Somalias and Haitis on the horizon that could absorb a huge investment of U.S. prestige, political capital and lives.

Q: Are you worried that the occupation might lead to an all-out war?

A: It could, at worst, become quite violent. At best, it will require us to be there for months and years to build the institutions of a democracy. It's taken us 200 years to, and we're still not perfect. We are going to have to try to establish a viable Parliament, executive branch, court system and so forth to make that country stable. That could be a very, very long job, and a task for which our military really isn't trained.

Q: Do you trust President Clinton's handling of foreign policy?

A: I don't. I believe the president was elected because of the appeal of his domestic agenda to Americans. In the post-Cold War period, Americans were less concerned for a president's qualifications in foreign policy. It has turned out, however, that there are a number of problems overseas; some affect our interests and some don't.

But we surely need someone who understands these problems, and who can decide, wisely, when to become involved and when not to.

And President Clinton really doesn't bring to office a framework, a set of criteria for deciding what's important and what isn't in foreign affairs.

Q: If you were his national security adviser, what would be the goals that you would outline?

A: What worries me most in the world are the problems of drugs, and the effect they can have on damaging our society here.

Secondly, the potential for the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as has happened in Korea, and before long, in other places. The problem of poverty that over time leads to violence and can draw us into war.

I would urge that he engage his government - the State Department, Defense, the Treasury, the CIA, in focusing upon how we can relieve those problems of terrorism, drugs, and how to stimulate economic growth in developing countries. But I haven't yet seen the president identify just what his goals are and require his government to give him proposals for what we should be doing in the world, constructively. He's really been a very reactive president.

Q: You say it's time to put the Iran-contra scandal behind you. But haven't you opened it back up with your book?

A: It is fair that media should focus on that part of the book that deals with Iran-contra because it has a kind of sensational appeal to it. That was not my foremost reason for writing the book.

I wanted to point out one or two things we did right in government in the '80s.

If you stopped the first six people you saw outside and asked them what was the salient event of the 1980s in foreign policy, they would probably say the

collapse of the Soviet Union.

That was a big deal. And I thought it deserved to be acknowledged as a big
deal and for Reagan to get a little bit of credit for that. He deserves that.
And, frankly, I did have a self-serving reason. I wanted my kids to understand
a little better how our government functions and how good it is. I hope to give
them an incentive to serve others, a sense of responsibility to others in some
fashion, whether in Washington, or in state, local or community government. And
I don't know if I've done that or not. My kids say they liked the book.

Q: You certainly don't pull very many punches. You call Ollie North a liar and take aim at various others, including Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan. Aren't you walking on pretty thin ice by criticizing some of your former Republican colleagues and friends?

A: I didn't intend any meanness. I wanted to record a truthful history, and I believe I have.

In the case of North, I did want to draw a distinction between ends and means, and make it clear that there really are rules in politics and that North violated these, and as a consequence doesn't deserve to be in public life.

North and I probably agree on most goals in foreign policy; both of us wanted to support the contras. The difference was that he didn't care whether it was legal or not. And that's intolerable.

So I wanted to make that clear: that breaking the law, lying to the Congress, is unacceptable, and that the people of Virginia ought to think about that as they are getting ready to vote in November.

With regard to Cap Weinberger and George Shultz, I think these were solid citizens basically. The fact that they deceived the Congress about their awareness of the Iran initiative doesn't really bother me.

It ought to be understood that their own handwriting and their notes that were turned over finally made clear that they knew all about it. To their credit, they were against it, and that's fine.

They ought to get credit for that. So I didn't mean to be critical.

I do think that any public servant ought to be accountable and tell the truth. And they didn't measure up very well on that score. They thought the right things, but when the going got tough they let others take the rap and distorted their awareness of the situation.

Q: How do you explain Ollie North's popularity in Virginia?

A: I think he's kind of a metaphor for what's changed in politics in the past 30 years. One skilled at manipulating media has become more determining of a politicians' success than what he or she may say. The substance of a person has become less significant than whether they perform well.

North is a very good performer. He can control the legs off a brass bed. The loss in Virginia is the people who are his constituents.

They are very good solid, decent people. At a time when we've got problems with drugs and crime and teenage pregnancies, the values of those people really do need to be represented by somebody, and North is playing to that vulnerability.

The yearning of the Christian right (is) for somebody who seems to identify with their purposes. But they are being conned. Here's a guy who is saying what they want to hear. But there's no prospect that when he gets into office, if he should, that he's going to do the same thing or to do what he said he would do when he gets there. That's my point in the book. He could stand up to me and say "I am not fund raising," and go out the next day and do that very thing. It's a lack of integrity. And we don't need people like that in (public office).

Q: You also suggest that Vice President Bush knew a lot more than he claimed about Iran-contra. Were you also accusing him of lying?

A: I would distinguish between being aware, or witting, and he was from the beginning, aware of everything. Vice President Bush wasn't in a position to approve or disapprove this. He certainly was aware of it. And, as to whether or not he lied, I think you have to have kind of a different scale to weigh politicians on how they portray the truth.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I think he's up to about 8.5 when you compare him to President Johnson's distortion of the Gulf of Tonkin events that got us into a war and lost 55,000 American lives, and President Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's bombing of a sovereign country (Cambodia), killing thousands of innocent people and lying to the Congress about it. George Bush was vice president, and others were making the decision in Iran-contra.

I'm not defending him, but I'm not condemning him. He was getting ready to run for office, and I can't think of any living politician who would have portrayed matters any differently.

Q: How did Star Wars help to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union?

A: With SDI, we sought to impose such a burden on their defense establishment to spend beyond their means to cope with this American advantage, that it would stress the system to the breaking point and the economy would collapse. It was a fairly complex thing to do, because the SDI program wasn't presented that way.

It wasn't presented as an economic program to stress the Soviet system. It was presented as an Astrodome, we're going to build it.

We're going to keep the missiles off America. And the specifics of how that teamwork played out is a fascinating story that is partially told in the book, where Reagan was selling the Astrodome concept, and behind the scenes I was selling the arms control argument that the Russians to stop this would do almost anything, including reduce their nuclear weapons. And that in the bargain we might actually squeeze their economy beyond its limits. Well, at the end of the day, it worked. That's not my opinion, it's what you can find out from Russians nowadays. Reagan deserves the credit for that. That really justifies a place in history.

Q: What would be your bet for the Republican Party ticket in 1996?

A: I bet you that in 1996 the country is run by - I'm not sure if it's going to be - (Colin)Powell-(Dick) Cheney or Cheney-Powell.

That would be a good ticket.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO(S): (DMN: Carol T. Powers) Rodert C. McFarlane.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE-MDC: September 26, 1994