found itself in an unprecedentedly uncertain position in the post-war
period. Our relations with our European allies had been marked
by disputes for a decade. With respect to the Soviet Union, we
had next to no serious negotiations, in fact, we had no serious
negotiations and moreover the summer of 1968 witnessed the Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia. We had no contact whatever with the
Peoples' Republic of China. We didn't even know how to get in
contact with the Peoples' Republic of China. And I think our relations
with the developing world were at best quiescent. The fundamental
reason for this was not any particular mistake by our predecessors.
It was rather that the United States was coming to the end of the
period of its physical predominance. In the 1950's we represented
something like 53% of the world's gross national product. By the
end of the 1960's it was 35%. It was clearly going down. So therefore
we would have to conduct foreign policy the way other nations had
conducted it through much of the history of Britain, through all
of its history, with relatively limited resources, based on some
assessment of the international environment we wanted to bring about.
For this, however, there is no American experience on which to
draw and I visualised that it was our pre-eminent task to guide
the transformation of America from a nation that really could wait
for problems to become nearly overwhelming before reacting to
conducting foreign policy in an attempt to anticipate problems
and acting when the margin of decision was still rather greater and
to move from a position of being the senior partner to something
closer to equality with relations to other societies.

INT

Why do you think Nixon was so closely involved in foreign
policy, so interested in it? Was it because he saw himself as a
statesman on the world stage, or do you think there was an element
of fascination with communism and how to joust with communism?

[c]

- 3 -

DR.K. Well, I think the latter certainly played a role. Nixon started in life as a, on the anti-communist wing of the Republican Party. On the other hand, by the time I met him and I had, you must remember, never met him really until 1968. I had had one three minute conversation with him, I think, a year earlier, but my first serious conversation with him took place after he had already won the election. By that time his interest in foreign affairs had gone far beyond anti-communism. At that point he was genuinely concerned with America's role in the world and he had travelled a great deal, so that for him foreign countries were not just theoretical obstructions and he has a very good mind, so the combination of all of these factors tended to produce a, an interest in foreign policy that went far beyond the origins that had propelled him into it. And I think there was the additional factor that domestic politics always seemed to him like a dirty business, in which all methods were permitted and had been practised, as he saw it, by his opponents, as well as by him. Foreign policy was what getting to power was all about and it is where one could exercise one's patriotism and one's concern for the future of, of humanity and he was really quite serious about this.

INT The period covered by your book embraces the negotiations and the transaction of SALT 1. Looking back, is it your impression that the Russians were, in fact, playing a deep game in these negotiations, making long-range claculations in their relations with America or were they, in a sense, feeling their way into the SALT process?

DR.K. I think both were probably true. I think the Russians were certainly feeling their way in the relations, in relation to the SALT process and they were also playing a deep game and then one has to ask oneself what was the deep game, and probably there were two

strands of Soviet policy going on simultaneously. On the one hand, an attempt to see what the terms for genuine co-existence might be and on the other, using detante as a means of, of splitting the West and of inducing the West to lower its, its guard.

I have never considered that Soviet motive to be an argument against detante, because I hate to think that the West must create artificial crises in order to keep its guard up. At the same time they were also really feeling their way. In 1967, for example, before I was in office when the SALT process started, the Soviets totally rejected any limitations on defensive weapons, like anti-ballistic missiles. As the negotiations developed, their interests changed and they seemed to be concerned only with the limitation of anti-ballistic missiles. So, while their general strategy may have been long-range, their particular tactics depended very much on the circumstances of the moment.

**INT** While diplomacy continued, so did their defence build-up?

What is your estimate today of why they continued this build-up?

Was it rooted essentially in fear and of what the West might do or was it more a desire to achieve dominance in this field of arms preparation?

**DR.K.** I think it is in general a mistake to believe that the motivations of any government are homogeneous and simple. And it is also, it very often happens that something that starts with one motivation develops another. First one must never overlook that within the Soviet decision-making process, which is essentially that of massive bureaucracies competing with each other, there is always an element in which the military play a decisive role and therefore there is a tendency to play off the military for their support of other bureaucratic positions, positions by improving or approving their claims. This has the tendency of producing a bias within

the Soviet system towards higher military expenditures that may
be totally unrelated to any specific plan. Secondly, I suspect
that the Soviet build-up started in reaction to the Soviet missile
crisis when, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Soviets
suddenly realised in the management of a crisis the enormous
disadvantage at which they were in as a result of their strategic
inferiority. And in which they must have been extremely worried
that we would use this as a pretext to destroy the Soviet retaliatory
forces we had within our capability at the time. They then started
a build-up in which they increased their strategic forces at the
rate of 5 per cent a year, which has now been going on for 17
years and you compound interest at 5 per cent for 17 years, and you
develop a very substantial military capability. Somewhere along
that curve what started out as an initial determination never to be
caught again in the 1962 position, produced a prospect of a substantial
military superiority and there is no question in my mind that whatever
their original motive, that this is what they are now heading towards,
or trying to head towards.

INT

Many people looking back and reading your book would say that your most striking initiative in that period was your first visit to Peking and what followed, the opening up. What was China's view of the world at that time and how did the Chinese perceive the West in particular?

DR.K. Well, you have to remember I, when I, the reason perhaps
why in my book this appears as the most striking chapter is because
it has the quality of perhaps, youthful innocence. I knew nothing
about China. I could not prepare myself since our bureaucracy
didn't know I was going', so I was going with as close to a blank
mind as it is possible to achieve at a relatively mature age,
and therefore the impressions were more immediate than they are when

- 6 -

they have to filter through a whole set of, of pre-conceptions.
I had no idea what I would find in China. I had no idea of their
leaders. I was struck - I, of course, suspected that the reason
the Chinese had invited us to begin with was because of their
fear of the Soviet Union and we had been led into looking for
overtures towards, for opening towards China by the ominous
concentration of Soviet forces on the Chinese border and I believe
that a Soviet attack on China was at least not to be excluded.

So, their perception of the West at that time was largely in terms
of their fear of the Soviet Union and I had to admire the enormous
subtlety with which they conducted themselves without admitting
to the fact that they were concerned and making it appear that they
were doing us a favour by establishing relationships, and since we
had not had serious conversations with the Chinese in the whole
history of the Chinese Communist movement, and none whatever since
the Chinese had come to, since, since the Chinese Communists
had come to power. We had to feel our way along these explorations
in a very subtle and indirect way, in which it became gradually more
explicit that the Chinese were students of the balance of power
in a way that has almost been forgotten in the West.

INT
Were they also students of their own regional role?
I am thinking not so much their looking westward and northward to
the Soviet Union, but looking eastward into the Pacific, towards
Japan.

DR.K. Well, when we first met the Chinese, they were very hostile to Japan and they gave us many lectures about the dangers of Chi..., of Japanese militarism. As our relationship developed I think they changed their perception, both of us and the Japanese, and they certainly relegated us to the category of a much lesser threat and where, initially they had done their best to weaken our

- 7 -

relationship with the Japanese, and to profess to be threatened
by our relationship with the Japanese, after a year or two they
reached the point where they supported our relationship with the
Japanese and indeed, since then have taken every occasion to tell
both the Japanese and us that they want us to have the closest
possible relationship with the Japanese, to a point where Mao
Tse Tung on one of my visits urged me to make sure never to come
to East Asia without spending as much time in Tokyo as in Peking,
because he did not want to offend the sensibilities and he did not
think we should want to offend the sensibilities of the Japanese.

INT When you were opening up relations with Peking, how conscious were you that you were, as it were, raising the temperature between China and Russia by the process of developing contacts with China itself?

DR.K. Well, I doubt that we were raising the temperatures between China, the temperature between China and Russia. You must remember that in 1969, before we had our opening with China, two years before our opening towards China, there were, there was a whole summer of massive border clashes spreading from the Usuri River near Vladivostok to Sin Kiang 2,000 miles away. The Soviet Union had already concentrated something like 45 divisions on the Chinese border. There was one three week period in the summer of '69, where the Soviet Union stood down every aeroplane in Siberia, which is usually a very ominous sign that they are being made ready to do something. None of this happened after our opening to China, so I think that the overt Soviet threats to China have diminished. Now you could argue that the Soviet support of Indian attacks on Pakistan were, were a counter to our move towards China, but even that I am not so sure.

INT Did your decision to play the China card help or hinder

the process of advancing detante with the Russians?

DR.K. Well, empirically it certainly advanced it until my trip to China and the Soviet Union was playing cat and mouse with us on the attempt to establish detante to have a summit between President Nixon and the Soviet leaders. Every time we approached the culmination of these efforts, the Soviets came up with yet another condition and indeed, they had strung us along from the fall of 1970 to the fall of 1971. In the last three months of that period, actually playing into our hands, because it would have been highly embarrassing to us if we had been forced to announce a Moscow summit while we were preparing a Peking summit.
As soon as my trip to Moscow, to Peking, had been announced, all these conditions were dropped and the Soviet Union moved with enormous rapidity to a settlement of the Berlin negotiations, to negotiations for the prevention of accidental war that had been going on for a year, and for setting a date for Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union.

INT Much of the success of your diplomacy in relations with the Russians, was linked to the personalities you were dealing with. I am thinking of people like Breshnev, Gromeko, Dobrinin.
These people, however, must pass from the scene. Is it your feeling that when they do pass from the scene, the continuity which you began to create will be lost?

DR.K. Of course, any negotiation is always tied to the personalities that conduct it, to that extent. Now, will, your question was a very acute one. I suspect that not even Breshnev knows who will ultimately succeed him. He may know who will succeed him in the first round, but the history of Communist parties and Communist successions is that the person who emerges is almost invariably somebody that at least the outsiders and I suspect, the insiders, did not, did not think. Therefore, it is very hard to tell what

- 9 -

their, what their reaction will be. My judgement of Breshnev
was that he was a man of elemental qualities, very Russian and
very communist, impulsive, gregarious, suspicious, bullying,
squeezing the last drop of blood out of every negotiation, and yet
oddly exhausted by the exertions of a lifetime and therefore
if the right balance of incentives and penalties could be created,
perhaps genuinely prepared to envisage a period of co-existence.

I am not sure whether his successors might not be more confident
about Soviet strength than Breshnev, who after all, was brought
up in a period when Soviet and Russian weakness was endemic, could
ever, could ever muster. Gromeko with all his dour persistence
nevertheless was a man of, or is a man of tremendous experience.

He is also approaching 70 now. Dobrinin is about 10 years younger
and therefore he is likely to be around for, for quite a while.

I found him extremely flexible, of course, we are dealing here in
each case with dedicated Communists who are dedicated to an ideology
basically unfriendly to us.

INT
You devote a great deal of space in the book to Vietnam,
which others have called a quagmire.

DR.K. It was a quagmire.

INT And it was, of course, perhaps your deepest pre-occupation
for a number of years. Looking at the outcome in very broad and
general terms, today, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos, could the United
States, in fact, ever have achieved a solution that would not have
tipped the balance ultimately to the Communists?

DR.K. Well, of course, I think we had achieved such a solution
in 1972. And I thought it was a matter of no minor significance
to the rest of the world whether the United States simply turned
over millions of people' who had relied on it to Communist rule.

We inherited a war which our predecessors had started and we attempted

on us. I remember on one occasion I said to President Nixon,
why don't you just say however we got in here, now we are there
and we have the following obligations. He said, when I came in
32,000 Americans had already died. I cannot, as President,
say to their mothers, that I don't know how we got in there. And
while it is easy enough to argue with it, that was not an ignoble
motive. So our pre-occupation with Viet ... with Indo-China
was imposed on us by events and was complicated in part by our
domestic opponents and those who opposed every honourable means
of extricating ourselves, have an obligation to face up to their
responsibility as well.

INT What about the position of Iran though?

DR.K. Now, let me go to Iran. In Iran the problem was quite
different from the problem of Africa. In Iran we were dealing
with a country which really de-stabilised itself through the process
of modernisation and I think a good case can be made for the
proposition that the overthrow of the Shah was importantly due to
the fact that he was a reformer, more than to the fact that he was
simply an oppressive, authoritarian ruler, but he accepted
readily, as perhaps too many people did in the West, that the process
of economic development would automatically produce political
stability, without understanding that this was true in developed
countries where political institutions already existed, while
in developing countries the process of economic modernisation
requires the concurrent creation of political institutions which
can give expression to the new forces that are created through the
process of industrialisation. The Shah did not see this and I think
it is fair to say that no American administration involved saw this,
including the present administration whose President, after all,

has laid extra spring to this, New Year's Day of 1978, said,
that there was no man in the whole world with whom he'd rather
spend New Year's Day than the Shah of Iran. This was undoubtedly
an American failing and also something in which we failed in,
while I was in office. On the other hand, supposing we had had
this insight, would we have known what to say to the Shah. Do
we really know in the West, I don't mean our governments, do even
our professors know what they would tell a foreign ruler who
tells them that he is developing economically and who asks them
what political institutions he should create. I think we face here
a lack of pol..., of intellectual perception even more than of
political perception and finally, one has to recognise that British
withdrawal from the Persian Gulf upset the balance of power
in that area and forced us to re-arm Iran and to, to substitute
for British power and therefore created a rigidity in the perception
of, and, of the Iranian role and perhaps an excessive way to be
given to Iran.

INT Inevitably, your diplomacy became highly personalised
and reading your book, it does seem that a highly personal profile
was very necessary at times, to establish the relationships that
you were seeking to establish, but is there a case for saying that
as events move into a deeper perspective and perhaps things that
were solved, begin to unravel, that your personal involvement will
perhaps be something of a handicap in the assessment of your role
in the eyes of history and historians?

DR.K. Well, of course, it is almost impossible in that respect
to determine what might have been otherwise and whether my personal
involvement will be, will be a handicap. I do not believe that
the changes that were necessary in American foreign policy at that

- 14 -

period were achievable without some dramatic, symbolic events,
and those tend to concentrate on personalities. It would be a
mistake, however, to believe that the style that was appropriate
to the early 70's and which then became even more necessary during
Watergate, when it was essential that the American people be
given a visible demonstration that with all our domestic anguish,
we could still act effectively in the world, that this style should,
could be, should be institutionalised as the permanent pattern of
our conduct of foreign policy. That would be a mistake.

INT Early in your book you say, I was con.......
(TONE)

INT Early in your book you say, I was convinced that the deepest cause of our, meaning America's unease, was the rel... was the realisation that we were becoming like other nations in the need to recognise that our power, while vast, had limits. Has that point of recognition been reached, do you imagine, or is the process continuing even now?

DR.K. I believe that the process has gone much too far and that one of the results of our Indo-China experience coupled with the Watergate experience was an excessive reluctance to undertake international involvements, which in turn contributed to the greater readiness of our adversaries to run risks. I have the impression that in our public, the process has been arrested, and has, in fact, been reversed, and that the reaction to events in Iran, for example, have imposed on the government a necessity for a stern-ness which was not apparent in the first few days of the taking of the hostages. In our intellectual community, division is still somewhat even, and there are still the residues of the Vietnam experience, side by side with a newer approach, but I think America is on the mend and on the way back towards a re-assertion

of its international responsibility.

INT To what extent is that the result of popular reaction
to events and to what extent is it perhaps the handling at the
executive level of affairs by the President and his officers?

DR.K. I believe that the American people in 1976 thought they wanted a less assertive leadership and now that they have it, find that they really want to play a more positive role in the world than in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam. Now, it was apparent. There's no question that the popular mood in America is for a re-assumption of responsibilities which many intellectuals were eager to jettison.