FEB - 3 1994

RICHARD NIXON

January 27, 1994

577 CHESTNUT RIDGE ROAD
WOODCLIFF LAKE, NEW JERSEY

This is just a note to tell you again how much I appreciate your very generous remarks at our 25th Anniversary celebration. With all the demands you have on your time, it was particularly good of you to come to California for the event.

Thanks to you, the media -- including particularly the _Los Angeles Times_ -- gave very extensive and positive coverage to the announcement with regard to the Center for Peace and Freedom. I hope we can develop a program which will contribute to an understanding of foreign policy different from that of the hundreds of think tanks already in existence.

I would deeply appreciate your wise counsel as we move on with the project.

With warm regards.

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger

OFFICE OF RICHARD NIXON

Dear Suzanne:

Enclosed you will find an original of
President Nixon's speech and several
copies of it for your use.

If you need anything further, please let
me know.

Many thanks and best regards,

Address by Former President Richard Nixon

Wednesday, March 11, 1992

THE PROMISE OF PEACE

We meet at a very challenging time in America's history -- a time when we have been through three years of events that have changed the world. I refer to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, and to our victory over aggression in the Gulf War. As a result of those events, we live in a new world, and the question now is: what should the leadership position of the United States be in that new world?

Other participants in this conference will address what the policy of the United States should be in this new world ideally.

I am going to direct my remarks in this political year not just to what our policy should be, but what is possible politically. If you follow political campaigns, it's rather standard practice for the candidate to get up and say, "This is the most important election in history." I know, I said it a lot of times. Of course every campaign is very important to the candidate. In this case it's very important to the nation.

Over the past 44 years I have had the opportunity to observe 12 presidential elections; I have been a candidate in five of them. In that period of time there has never been a campaign in which foreign policy was less discussed, and there has never been a time in which foreign policy was more important, because whomever is President in the next four years will provide the leadership that will make the difference as to whether peace and freedom survive in the world. Since that is the case, it is vitally important that foreign policy be front and center in our considerations.

We have been on a rollercoaster ride as far as foreign policy is concerned. After the Communist victory in Vietnam the attitude of most Americans was that there was nothing we could do in foreign policy. After our victory in the Gulf War, the conventional wisdom was that we could do anything. After the collapse of Communism, particularly in the Soviet Union, the conventional wisdom was that there was nothing left to do.

As a result of these events, we see developing a new isolationism in both political parties. The general theme which runs through the new isolationists is that the United States no longer should play or can play a leadership role in the world. There are some who say we can't afford to, there are others who say it is not necessary for us to play that role, and there are still others who say that others should play that role.

When we consider what they are saying, it reminds me of a pickup ragtime band. Some are marching to different drummers, some are singing off-key, but all of them have the same tune, the

1/2

same theme -- come home America.

Even some of those who have been the strongest supporters of a strong foreign policy role for the United States now say it is time to turn our efforts inward. We can't afford it, as far as foreign policy is concerned. Our domestic problems are so great that we should concentrate on them.

What they fail to realize is that foreign and domestic policy are like Siamese twins: neither can survive without the other. The American people will not support a strong foreign policy unless we have a strong policy dealing with problems at home. And what they fail to realize is that foreign policy has an impact on what we do at home. We can't be at peace in a world of wars, and we can't have a healthy American economy in a sick world economy. For example, we all can recall -- I can, at least, you've read about it, I lived through it -- the Great Depression. It began as a recession in 1931, became a depression in 1932 in great part because the United States adopted a protectionist policy under the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

We come now to the fundamental question: Is it necessary for the United States to play a role in this new world since all of these events have occurred? Those who answer 'no' begin with what I think is a false premise. It goes something like this: The Cold War is over, and we have won it. It is time to come home. That's only half true. It is true that the communists have lost the Cold War. It is not true, however, that the free world has won it.

What we have to realize is that the Cold War was not the traditional war over territory by great powers. It was a war of ideas, the ideas of communism versus the ideas of freedom. We can see that war most clearly in Russia where the seeds of the idea of communism were first planted. The Russian people reaped the bitter harvest from those seeds. As a result, the Russian people rejected communism. They rejected it because it didn't work.

But now, freedom is on trial, and if freedom does not work, the Russian people are not going to return to communism because it failed. But they will turn to a new despotism in which they trade their freedom for security and put their future in the hands of those who promise to make sure that they can have the necessities of life. This new despotism, shorn of the baggage of the dying faith of communism, but still committed to the imperialist Russian nationalism which has been traditional in Russian history, could be a far more dangerous threat to peace and freedom in the world, and particularly to peace, than was the old Soviet totalitarianism. And it is that, therefore, that we have to address today.

So let us turn to Russia. In turning to Russia, as I was saying to Dr. Brzezinski during lunch, that does not mean that I

13

believe we should ignore what is happening in Ukraine and other
former Soviet republics and the newly independent nations of
Eastern Europe. I use Russia only as the prime example of the
problem. What I say about Russia would apply to the others as
well.

As we look at Russia today, the question somebody asked me
at the table was, Is it going to work? Is freedom going to
survive? The answer is it is going to be a very close-run thing.

It is going to be close-run because there are many minus
factors at this time. Among them, as Dimitri Simes has pointed
out in a recent article, corruption is rampant. We have the
problem of ethnic quarrels. We have the problem of enormous
suffering because of the changes that have been made in the
attempt to build a free market society in Russia.

One of the major reasons that there is a serious question as
to whether freedom can succeed in Russia is the lack of a
management class. When I say the lack of a management class,
that indicates why the Marshall Plan analogy will not work,
because when we look at Russia and when we compare the situation
in Europe, and for that matter, in Japan at the end of World War
II, five years of war did not destroy the management class in
Western Europe or in Japan. Seventy years of totalitarian
communism did destroy the management class in Russia. And
therefore we have to have a different approach than the Marshall
Plan. Those are the negatives.

There are some positive factors which we sometimes overlook.
One is that Russia is a very rich country, rich in resources and
rich in its people. It is a highly industrialized society. The
Russian people are a great people, they are a strong people.
Ninety-five percent of the Russian people are literate. Ninety
percent have the equivalent of a high school education. Russia
produces some of the great scientists, the great engineers,
particularly in military activities. Some people forget that the
first man in space was not an American, it was a Russian.

There's another factor on the plus side, which is often
overlooked. Pushkin in the 19th century wrote that rebellions
in Russia tend to be senseless and violent. What is particularly
significant about this revolution is that it was neither violent
nor senseless. This is to the great credit of both Gorbachev and
Yeltsin.

The major factor on the plus side, however, is that Russia,
the new Russia, has a strong leader. There is a tendency to
underestimate Boris Yeltsin. Some say that politically, he isn't
democratic enough; and others say that intellectually he is not
smart enough; and that socially he is not smooth enough.

I have seen many great leaders over the past 44 years. I
would rate both Gorbachev and Yeltsin as political heavyweights.
Both were born as peasants. Gorbachev became a man of the world;

1/4

Yeltsin remained a man of the people. And Yeltsin right now must never forget that.

As he moves onto the world scene, he must always remember that if he is going to change the world, he first has to change Russia. He has to change it from dictatorship to democracy. He has to change it from a command economy to a free market economy. And if he is going to be able to do that, he is going to need help. The question is: should we provide that help?

Let's look at the positive factors as far as Yeltsin is concerned. Yeltsin has demonstrated his physical courage by standing on top of a tank and facing down a gang of card-carrying killers who were trying to run a Stalinist coup.

Even more important, he has political courage. He risked his immense popularity by adopting policies which let the ruble float. This led to astronomical inflation. This has caused enormous hardship, and has brought his popularity down. But it was a necessary first step in moving from a command to a free market economy.

He is one who, unlike Gorbachev, if you read Gorbachev's first column in the New York Times a few days ago, has repudiated not just communism but socialism as well. He has vetoed all of the foreign aid programs that he inherited from Gorbachev, which in the year 1990 took $15 billion from the Russian budget to provide aid to a number of countries including Cuba which were antagonistic to the West and to the United States. And we all know that in the field of arms control, he not only has matched President Bush's courageous initiatives; he exceeded them.

Yeltsin is the most pro-Western leader in Russian history. He deserves our help.

What does he need? He needs a number of things. Just to tick off a few of them, he needs help from the IMF and other sources, and that will take billions of dollars, to stabilize the ruble. He needs more open markets for the exports which Russia would want to make, the new Russia, to the West and to other parts of the world. He needs humanitarian aid. And there needs to be a single Western-led organization which would assess all of the needs and then would develop a program for working with private enterprise and with governments to meet those needs.

To summarize, it is important for us to recognize that Yeltsin is going to need very substantial economic aid from the West. Not just the United States, I emphasize, but from the West. The New York Times in its editorial today estimated that the cost of the aid to cover some of these items that I have mentioned and others would be approximately $20 billion a year over a period of five years. That's a great deal of money. However, the London Financial Times, in its report yesterday pointed out that $20 billion a year has to be compared with 20 times that much that the West spent last year, before the

75

collapse of communism, to defend against Soviet communism. This
puts it all in perspective.

Now we come to the hard political questions. What does the
United States do? How do we meet this problem, particularly when
we are in the midst of a presidential campaign and in the middle
of a recession? The first argument that is made, and it's one
that is well taken, is that the United States has carried this
burden long enough. It is time for others to carry it. After
World War II we provided aid to our allies and also to our
defeated enemies and enabled them to recover from World War II.
Now it is time for those that we helped then to assume the burden
of helping Russia, the other independent countries in the former
Soviet Union and those in Eastern Europe recover from the Cold
War. They are right.

The major burden for meeting the needs of Russia and the
other countries that need help must be carried by the nations
in Europe and in Japan that we helped after World War II. But
the United States is the richest and strongest nation in the
world and we must provide the leadership. We cannot provide the
leadership unless we have a seat at the table. To paraphrase Ben
Stein in another context, you can't have a seat at the table
unless you have chips to put in the pot. And we have to have
enough chips to be a serious contender for that leadership role.

Now we come to a fundamentally basic question in a campaign
year. What's in it for us? What's in it for us to help
Russia, Ukraine, the other independent nations in the Soviet
Union and the nations of Eastern Europe? The answer is that a
great deal is in it for us.

Charity, it is said, begins at home. I agree. But aid to
Russia is not charity. We have to realize that if Yeltsin fails
the alternative is not going to be somebody better, it is going
to be somebody infinitely worse. If Yeltsin fails, if freedom
fails, the new despotism which will take its place will mean that
the peace dividend is finished, we will have to rearm, and that's
going to cost infinitely more than would the aid that we provide
at the present time. It would also mean, if Yeltsin fails, if
freedom fails in Russia, that the great tide of freedom that has
been sweeping over the world in these last three years will begin
to ebb and that dictatorship, rather than democracy, will be the
wave of the future.

On the other hand, if freedom succeeds in Russia, Russia
will be an example for others, particularly in China, in the
other remaining communist countries and in the non-communist
dictatorships around the world -- an example for others to
follow, a powerful magnet drawing them to freedom.

It would mean too that with freedom succeeding in Russia, we
would live in a totally new world with all that could mean to all
the people of the world and particularly to us in the United
States. Just think. For seventy years, communist Russia has

/6

been trying to export communism around the world. If Yeltsin and
his reforms succeed, democratic free Russia will be exporting
the goods and the ideas of freedom around the world. And that
means that, in the years ahead, this will have an impact going
far beyond Russia, far beyond Europe, all over the world.
Economically speaking, it means that the new Russia, with all of
the production it will be able to have with a free economy, will
provide great new markets for the products of the United States.
That means billions of dollars in trade and potentially millions
of jobs.

It also means -- if Yeltsin succeeds, if democracy survives
-- that our children and grandchildren will be freed from the
fear of a possible world nuclear war that now haunts them,
because democracies do not begin wars.

We come now, however, to another political question, and I
understand that people are interested in politics these days.
The political question is this: All of the pollsters are telling
their candidates, don't tackle foreign policy, and particularly
not foreign aid, because foreign aid is poison as a political
issue. They're wrong and history proves it.

I recall vividly what Harry Truman did in 1947. Let me lay
the foundation of what he did and why. Harry Truman's popularity
in January of that year was 35 percent. The Congress was
overwhelmingly Republican. He had suffered an enormous defeat in
the election of the 80th Congress in the previous November. And
yet, I remember as if it were yesterday, Harry Truman -- jaunty,
some said a little cocky -- coming down before a joint session of
the Congress and asking for millions of dollars in aid to Greece
and Turkey to prevent communist subversion and possible communist
aggression. It was a very tough vote for two very young and
both, as history later indicated, rather ambitious young
congressmen.

The liberal Democrats in Jack Kennedy's Massachusetts
district were against military foreign aid. The conservative
Republicans in my California district were against all foreign
aid. However, after considering it, we both voted for it, and a
majority in the Republican House and Senate, voted for that
program and that was the program which later was developed into
the Marshall Plan and later into NATO, which not only contained
communism but bought the time that was essential for communism to
fail as it inevitably did fail last year in the Soviet Union as
well as in Eastern Europe two years before.

The following year, Harry Truman who had been at 35 percent
in January of 1947, won the election for President. What is more
important is that a Democratic President supported by a
Republican Congress provided aid to Greece and Turkey, which was
the indispensable step toward containing communism and that
eventually led to the victory of freedom in Russia and the rest
of the Soviet Union. Today a Republican President with a
Democratic Congress have the opportunity to provide aid to Russia

/7

which would assure the victory of freedom.

We responded magnanimously to the threat of war then. Can we not respond to the promise of peace now?

War brings out the worst and the best in men; real peace will bring out only the best.

In the Cold War, we united to prevent what was evil. Now we must unite to advance what is good.

That is the question, then, that Americans must face today, political Americans, all Americans, and I think we know what the answer should be.

As we look to the future it is important for us to recognize that we have this great responsibility but it is also a great opportunity. Consider this. The 20th century will be remembered as a century of war. By our leadership at this time, we can help make the 21st century a century of peace and freedom. That is our challenge.

In his Iron Curtain speech, Winston Churchill said, "America at this time stands at the pinnacle of world power. This is a solemn moment for the American democracy, because with primacy in power is joined an awe-inspiring accountability for the future."

Despite what the pessimists say, despite what the negativists say, those words are as true today as they were when he spoke them 45 years ago.

America today has that responsibility but some may ask, why not someone else? If America does not lead, who? The Japanese? The Chinese? The Russians? The Germans? They are the only nations in the world that have the potential economic and military power to lead in the next century. This is our moment of greatness. It is our moment of truth. We must seize this moment because we hold the future in our hands.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

NOT FOR PUBLICATION

February 27, 1992

Dear Mr. Muller:

Due to a visit to Mexico, I did not catch up with your issue of February 24 and the story, "The Long Shadow of Vietnam." I am therefore a little late in protesting in the strongest terms the phrase, "... Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger allowed 18,000 more Americans to be killed so that, bizarrely, the snarling and bleeding Americans could exit from Vietnam with sufficient style, an illusion of credibility."

I cannot remember having read anything more unfair and more unworthy of a major publication. There are many reasons for the loss of confidence your article seeks to describe, including importantly unwise government actions. But a contributing factor is the sneering, self-righteous, insensitive tone animating the quote.

You have available a superb research staff. Had you utilized it properly, it would have told you that, of the 16,000 casualties (not 18,000 as you allege), over 9,000 occured during the first year of President Nixon's term, 12,000 during the first 18 months (see attached Department of Defense table). I do not deprecate a single casualty. But a fair assessment would have shown drastic yearly reductions in casualties, have tried to establish whether a more rapid withdrawal than took place in these first 18 months (about 125,000) was possible, and have sought to determine whether the war could have been ended much more quickly.

Your snide comment totally misstates the issue as it presented itself to Nixon and his colleagues. When Nixon was inaugurated there were 525,000 Americans in Vietnam and the number was still increasing on the basis of plans established by our predecessors, finally