I think the most useful thing Reasan could do in his last
two years would be to start a fundamental discussion with the
Soviets making exactly this point. Instead of fraying the
edges of every agreement and seeing what we can stretch, we
would be better off if we would put a resmen in place that we
really want to live with and that does some concrete good, and
my objection to the current arms controls negotiations is that
they're either disadvantageous to us or meaningless. I do not
see anything that actually, significantly improves the
situation. If somebody came along and said let's abolish MIRVs
[multiple warhead missiles], that I would consider an exciting
project. That would also immediately affect the type of SDI
you need. But a 50 percent reduction of strategic forces is
partly a bow to those who opposed arms control on the grounds
that no treaty has reduced missiles, but it is not a
significant change in the situation. And, many of the other
agreements, as I've said before, really give the Soviets
advantages.

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HENRY KISSINGER INTERVIEW

March 9, 1987

Q: Do we root for Gorbachev to succeed? If he is successful, especially domestically, does that pose a greater threat or a lesser threat to us?

A: It's characteristically American to believe that when your adversary becomes stronger the prospects for peace increase. I would say that if Gorbachev succeeds in his domestic program and does not change his foreign policy, he will be much more formidable. Indeed, it would be a paradox: The Soviet reform program unaccompanied by foreign policy adjustments, can be a greater threat to us whether it succeeds or fails. If it succeeds, the Soviet Union will be stronger and in a position to be much more insistent. If it fails, they may have to decide before they slip into a position of relative underdevelopment whether they should not use the capacities in which they are best, namely their military strength; not so much to attack us, but to create security belts around them—in China, the Middle East, and elsewhere. So, the Gorbachev revolution is a major challenge to us and the major challenge is to define what we mean by peaceful order and to try to negotiate it now and not slide along on the old and well-worn grooves.

Q: Was life was easier for us when we were dealing with old Chernenko or old Brezhnev than it is at the moment?

A: Life is more complicated for us now, but it also has more opportunities. Gorbachev has a more interesting mind than his predecessors. It is more fascinating to deal with him. It would have been inconceivable that Gromyko would run around the South Pacific as Shevarnadze has been doing. I have just returned from Asia, and I found a combination of worry and fascination with Soviet activity in those countries. That would have been nearly inconceivable under Gromyko. So, there is a bigger challenge, but if Gorbachev would put that interesting mind to work on foreign policy programs, it might be possible to arrange with him a code of coexistence that would last a decade or two. I do not believe that any of the issues now being negotiated will lead in that direction. That is my worry.

Q: Is your code of coexistence something that Shultz should raise when he goes to Moscow next month?

A: Soviet leaders have to balance conflicting bureaucratic considerations, and you cannot automatically assume that domestic reform is equated with a peaceful foreign policy. Nor can you assume that they have a very long range foreign policy. They run a bureaucracy that is even more high-powered than our own. They have to deal with that bureaucracy, you see, as issues come up to the leadership, deal with questions of bureaucratic survival. Questions of balancing administrations must weigh at least as heavily as substantive ones.

So I have always felt, even with Brezhnev, that a dialogue with the Soviets should begin on the philosophical level. You tell the Soviets what it is you're trying to accomplish and why and that enables their leader to go to the Politburo and say, ""this is what the Americans say they are trying to achieve. Why don't we at least examine it?"" The other way, when you kick up numbers on nuclear weapons, first through our bureaucracy, and then through theirs, what starts out as an American compromise goes over to their side where all their sharpshooters set a crack at it. And by the time it reaches Gorbachev or whoever, he will find it difficult to determine what the purpose is. So to answer your question, yes, we could have a really confidential level of conversation maybe during the time that Shultz is there. I think the most useful thing he could do is say, ""Yes, I acknowledge that you are concerned with your domestic situation and that's your problem. As to common problems, here is our analysis of the situation. This is where we think we ought to try to go in the next 10 to 15 years. Obviously, whatever is done has to be in the common interest."" And I would conduct the conversation on that level.

Q: Are we correct in perceiving that perhaps the Eastern satellite nations are feeling more reluctant than Gorbachev's own Politburo about his reforms?

A: He has a massive problem. The inherent dilemma of Communism is that the Communist Party is a great instrument for seizing power; but, not a good instrument for exercising power in the sense that it establishes a monopoly of power but has no function. It spends most of its energy stavins in power once power has been seized. The second dilemma of Communism is that it may not be possible to run a modern state by central plan. But it also may not be possible to run a Communist state without central planning, so somewhere along the line they face the question of what you do with a Communist Party in a Communist state. What is its function? How do you avoid party leaders becoming like the Buddhist monks in Tibet, a sort of a supernumerary class that has prerogatives but no role.

2

Gorbachev is showing great courage in handling that problem in the Soviet Union. One of the most striking aspects of my visit to the Soviet Union was to find leading Soviets avowing that they didn't know the answer to the problems they themselves had posed. So, if you asked them how are you going to do this, whatever it was that they were describing, they would quite frankly tell you, ""We don't know."' That problem is serious enough in the Soviet Union, but it's nearly insoluble in Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, at least, there's no visible alternative to the Communist Party at this moment because they've been in power so long and have suppressed their opposition so effectively. But in Eastern Europe there's the nationalist alternative and the Communist Party is still drafted onto the system and probably could not win an election in any East European country with the conceivable exception of Bulgaria. For them to go down that route that Gorbachev has sketched would pose a real threat to party preeminence. And if they don't have party preeminence, what happens to all these leaders? The East German press reported the visit of Shevarnadze to explain the program, but they never endorsed it even though the East German leadership made generally friendly statements to Shevarnadze. Apparently the same happened in Czechoslovakia.

A: Let me say here that I think Gorbachev is a considerable man, so whatever comments I make about our challenge are not produced by trivialities. I think Gorbachev understands this problem: With a Communist system, and with great sufferings, you can produce a 19th-century and early 20th-century type of industrial state—heavy industry, steel, tractors, things of this kind. But the system cannot go from there to high-tech, information-sharing and those elements that make the difference in modern industry, because for that you need a level of initiative and imagination that central planning has not been able to generate anywhere. So, if he continues along orthodox lines, the gap between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, Japan and the United States will widen. The rate of growth of the Soviet Union will be even less than that of Brazil, India and, maybe, China. This could lead to an historic joke, that 300 years after Peter the Great, after untold sufferings of czars and commissars, the Soviets will be right back where they started, a huge country, relatively backward compared to its neighbors. He wants to avoid that. He wants to become relatively even with us or Japan or Western Europe. But to do that, he's jeopardizing the existing system of control and he's launching himself onto uncharted seas. I would not be amazed if he didn't last, if somewhere along the line he was turned out of office.

Q: There is usually an exodus in the last two years of any Administration and, clearly some of the National Security Council's problems come from a lack of institutional memory because every President comes in with new people. Is there something an intelligent democracy could do to rectify this loss of memory?

A: Each Administration also starts with empty file cabinets, because the previous President takes all the files with him.

4

A: I could resort to platitudes, but I really don't know how to change it. Obviously at some point we ought to get some biopartisan perception of what our national objectives are so we don't begin each administration with a complete reexamination of every foreign policy, an act which is itself unsettling for all the people who deal with us. But that's theory. The need is great. Probably the most useful thing that Reagan could do in the last two years is try to establish some relationship with senior Democrats that would permit continuity no matter who is the next President.

Q: Doesn't the election campaign itself almost thwart that? They must become enemies during that period?

A: Americans believe that every problem has a solution, so campaigns are conducted by people offering final solutions to existing problems. But in foreign policy, you're engaged in an endless process that you can ameliorate, that you can perhaps perhaps channel in a constructive direction, like a stream, but each so-called solution is the admissions price to a new set of problems. That has to be understood by a nation and it requires an educational process. It would be interesting to see what would happen if a candidate came up and spoke the truth. Is it possible that at some point the American people will decide that they've heard all the slib answers? I don't know.

Forty years ago, at the end of World War II, a politician didn't have to be an expert on such things, but he had to have some relationship with substance: he wasn't a creature of public relations machines, and he had to take a basic position. Then, too, as long as party bosses picked the candidate, they might not pick the best one, but they at least picked someone they thought could run the country because their survival depended on it. Now you have people running for office whose principal motivation is that they look at the competition and they think they're as good as the others. You have a whole slew of candidates who never ran anything and whose first job in life would be president. And they run by taking careful public opinion polls, so their relation to substance is very tenuous and very fleetings.

When I was asked to run for governor of New York last year, the people who were urging me to do it seemed to have no doubt whatever that in two or three months they could get me ready to fight and campaign on issues, and I had never claimed that I had given any systematic attention to the problems of New York State.

Q: If Gorbachev is not ousted early, he's likely to be there for maybe two decades, during which we could have as many as five presidents. Would that make our world posture worse because of this loss of memory?

A: They have their own problem, of course. Every Soviet dynasty, which is what you really have to call these, besins with a purse and ends in stagnation. Somewhere along that curve of Gorbachev, if he maintains his job, his imminent decline will affect the conduct of their policy and they will become more and more ossified. When that will occur, of course, it's impossible to predict. The loss of memory on our side has two aspects: When people with technical qualifications leave the Administration, all you lose is a lot of short-term memory. The more serious problem is that there is no settled view of what it is we're supposed to do in the world, so that inherently every time we change the secretary of state or a chief of staff, we can get a totally new approach to an issue and that settled view is never analyzed in terms of its essence.

5

[LCS]

Q: Is the rush at the Pentagon to get any kind of a
contraption into space as soon as possible the kind of SDI
program you signed up for?

At No. I'm for an SDI program because I believe that
unopposed offensive forces as the principal element of the
mutual assured destruction [MAD] strategy will lead to
pacifism and unilateral disarmament. That is not a new view
for me, but SDI is a new view for me. The Pentagon is trying
to force the decision by setting something into place and it
is driven to do that because the opponents, somewhat
disinsenuously, are putting what is an opposition in principle
in terms of feasibility studies. Most of the significant
opponents of SDI are against SDI because they think it is not
a good idea, not because they think it won't work. So, in
order to overcome the feasibility argument, the Pentagon wants
to put some contraption into space. What we really need is a
concept of the relationship between offense and defense.

Reagan confused the issue by speaking of a leak-proof
defense as a way of abolishing nuclear weapons. I don't
believe nuclear weapons can be abolished. Their effect can be
mitigated and resort to them can be made more and more
difficult. If defenses complicate the calculations of an
attacker, they force the attacker into a scale of attack that
he is reluctant to undertake. If they can absorb accidental
attacks, they make limited blackmail more difficult, if not
impossible. These are all useful objectives and if, then,
defense is related in scale to offense so that it can be
scaled down in arms control negotiations as offense is scaled
down. I think all of these are important objectives. I don't
think that the issue can be solved by throwing something into
space and forcing the issue technologically. I also think,
however, that the distinction between research and deployment
is disinsenuous and that the people, most of the people who
advocate it, do so because they think they can then protract
research indefinitely. So right now we have a dialogue of the
deaf. I'm against early deployment. I'm against making a
distinction between research and deployment and I would
proceed at a measured pace, offering at all times to negotiate
the scale of deployment. I am even willing to negotiate the
scale of research; that is to say, I would not approve
qualitative limitations on research, but if one could come up
with a number of tests to be conducted in space in any one
year so that you would have progress but not the kind of
acceleration that would foreclose the issue.

Q: SALT II is done, the ABM Treaty may be soins, and SDI
research chugs along. How long can we go on that way?

A: SALT II is something of an absurdity. Where is the
restraint in an unratified treaty that would have lapsed if it
had been ratified? The irony is that the United States, by not
ratifying the treaty, save the Soviets 300 extra missiles
because they were not required to scrap missiles as they would
have if the treaty had been in effect. So they're selling us
those 300 missiles a second time in their 50 percent cut
proposal.

I think the most useful thing Reasan could do in his last
two years would be to start a fundamental discussion with the
Soviets making exactly this point. Instead of fraying the
edges of every agreement and seeing what we can stretch, we
would be better off if we would put a resmen in place that we
really want to live with and that does some concrete good, and
my objection to the current arms controls negotiations is that
they're either disadvantageous to us or meaningless. I do not
see anything that actually, significantly improves the
situation. If somebody came along and said let's abolish MIRVs
[multiple warhead missiles], that I would consider an excitin
project. That would also immediately affect the type of SDI
you need. But a 50 percent reduction of strate tic forces is
partly a bow to those who opposed arms control on the grounds
that no treaty has reduced missiles, but it is not a
significant change in the situation. And, many of the other
agreements, as I've said before, really give the Soviets
advantages.

PROOF of Story '#3670' Requested by ANDREWES ($B109) on 3/11/87 16:21:42

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rw

(CAUTION: This material is strictly embargoed. Its use is authorized only by subscribers of the HENRY KISSINGER column. With the exception of these paid subscribers, its contents must not under any circumstances be quoted, excerpted, summarized, paraphrased, or in any way published, in whole or in part. Precautions should be taken to prevent the disclosure of the contents of this material to third parties prior to publication.)

HENRY KISSINGER INTERVIEW

For release Sunday, March 15, 1987
(c) 1987, Los Angeles Times Syndicate

This interview was conducted by Art Seidenbaum, editor of the Opinion section, and Jack Burby, assistant editor of the editorial pages, of the Los Angeles Times.

A: In principle, an improvement in Soviet living standards and human rights reflects American aspirations. But for world peace, the issue is whether domestic reform automatically leads to a conciliatory foreign policy. The experience with Khrushchev suggests not.

It's characteristically American to believe that when your adversary becomes stronger the prospects for peace increase. I would say that if Gorbachev succeeds in his domestic program and does not change his foreign policy, he will be much more formidable. Indeed, it would be a paradox: The Soviet reform program, unaccompanied by foreign policy adjustments, can be a greater threat to us whether it succeeds or fails. If it succeeds, the Soviet Union will be stronger and in a position to be much more insistent. If it fails, they may have to decide before they slip into a position of relative underdevelopment whether they should not use the capacities in which they are best, namely their military strength; not so much to attack us, but to create security belts around them — in China, the Middle East and elsewhere. So, the Gorbachev revolution is a major challenge to us, and the major challenge is to define what we mean by peaceful order and to try to negotiate it now and not slide along on the old and well-worn grooves.

Q: Was life easier for us when we were dealing with old Chernenko or old Brezhnev than it is at the moment?

A: Life is more complicated for us now, but it also has more opportunities. Gorbachev has a more interesting mind than his predecessors. It is more fascinating to deal with him. It would have been inconceivable that Gromyko would run around the South Pacific as Shevardnadze has been doing. I have just returned from Asia, and I found a combination of worry and fascination with Soviet activity in those countries. So, there is a bigger challenge, but if Gorbachev would put that interesting mind to work on foreign policy programs, it might be possible to arrange with him a code of coexistence that would last a decade or two. I do not believe that any of the issues now being negotiated will lead in that direction. That is my worry.

A: Soviet leaders have to balance conflicting bureaucratic considerations, and you cannot automatically assume that domestic reform is equated with a peaceful foreign policy. Nor can you assume that they have a very long range foreign policy. They run a bureaucracy that is even more complex than our own. They have to deal with that bureaucracy, not only to solve specific problems but as an issue of political survival. Questions of balancing administrations must weigh at least as heavily as substantive ones.

So I have always felt, even with Brezhnev, that a dialogue with the Soviets should begin on the philosophical level. You tell the Soviets what it is you're trying to accomplish and why and that enables their leader to go to the Politburo and say, ""This is what the Americans say they are trying to achieve. Why don't we at least examine it?"" The other way, numbers on nuclear weapons are strained, first through our bureaucracy, and then through theirs. What starts out as an American bureaucratic compromise goes over to their side, where all their sharpshooters get a crack at it. And by the time it reaches Gorbachev or whoever, he will find it difficult to determine what the purpose is. He will spend his energies reconciling his bureaucracy. So to answer your question, yes, we could have a really confidential level of conversation, maybe during the time that Shultz is there. I think the most useful thing he could do is say, ""Yes, I acknowledge that you are concerned with your domestic situation and that's your problem. As to common problems, here is our analysis of the situation. This is where we think we ought to try to go in the next 10 to 15 years. Obviously, whatever is done has to be in the common interest."" Neither side will be able to sustain a unilateral advantage.

A: He has a massive problem. The inherent dilemma of communism is that the Communist Party is a great instrument for seizing power, but not a good instrument for exercising power. It establishes a monopoly of power but has no governmental function. It spends most of its energy staying in power once power has been seized. The second dilemma of communism is that it may not be possible to run a modern state by central planning. But it also may not be possible to run a Communist state without central planning. Somewhere along the line all Communist states face the question of what you do with a Communist Party in a Communist state. What is its function? How do you avoid party leaders becoming like the Buddhist monks in Tibet, a sort of a supernumerary class that has prerogatives but no role.

Gorbachev is showing great courage in handling that problem in the Soviet Union. One of the most striking aspects of my visit to the Soviet Union was to find leading Soviets avowins that they didn't know the answer to the problems they themselves had posed. So, if you asked them how they were going to do whatever it was that they were describing, they would quite frankly tell you, ""We don't know."" That problem is serious enough in the Soviet Union, but it is nearly insoluble in Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, at least, there's no visible alternative to the Communist Party at this moment because they've been in power so long and have suppressed their opposition so effectively. But in Eastern Europe there's the nationalist alternative, and the Communist Party is still grafted onto the system and probably could not win an election in any East European country with the conceivable exception of Bulgaria. For them to go down that route that Gorbachev has sketched would pose a real threat to party preeminence. And if they don't have party preeminence, what happens to all these leaders? The East German press reported the visit of Shevardnadze to explain the program, but they never endorsed it. Apparently the same happened in Czechoslovakia.

Let me say here that I think Gorbachev is a considerable man, so whatever comments I make about our challenge are not produced by trivialities. I think Gorbachev understands this problem: With a Communist system, and with great sufferings, you can produce a 19th-Century and early 20th-Century type of industrial state — heavy industry, steel, tractors, things of this kind. But the system cannot go from there to high-tech, information-sharing and those elements that make the difference in modern industry. For that you need a level of initiative and imagination that central planning has not been able to generate anywhere. So, if he continues along orthodox lines, the gap between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, Japan and the United States will widen. The rate of growth of the Soviet Union will be less than that of even Brazil, India and, maybe, China. This could lead to an historic joke, that 300 years after Peter the Great, after untold sufferings at the hands of czars and commissars, the Soviets will be right back where they started, a huge country, relatively backward compared to its neighbors. Gorbachev wants to avoid that. He wants to become relatively even with us or Japan or Western Europe. But to do that, he's jeopardizing the existing system of control and he's launching himself onto uncharted seas. I would not be amazed if he didn't last, if somewhere along the line he was turned out of office. But whatever his fate, I want to warn against equating Soviet domestic change with improved foreign policy prospects. These depend on concrete changes in Soviet foreign policy.

Q: There is usually an exodus in the last two years of any Administration and, clearly, some of the National Security Council's problems come from a lack of institutional memory because every President comes in with new people. Is there something an intelligent democracy could do to rectify this loss of memory?

I could resort to platitudes, but I really don't know how to change it. Obviously at some point we ought to set some bipartisan perception of what our national objectives are so we don't begin each Administration with a complete reexamination of every foreign policy, an act which is deeply unsettling for all the people who deal with us — especially for allies. But that's theory. The need is great. Probably the most useful thing that Reagan could do in the last two years is try to establish some relationship with senior Democrats that would permit continuity no matter who is the next President.

A: Americans believe that every problem has a solution, so campaigns are conducted by candidates offering final solutions to existing problems. But in foreign policy, you're engaged in an endless process that you can ameliorate, that you can perhaps channel in a constructive direction, but in the end each so-called solution is the admissions price to a new set of problems. That has to be understood by our people and it requires an educational process, a process that no candidate has been willing to undertake. It would be interesting to see what would happen if a candidate came up and spoke the truth. Is it possible that at some point the American people will decide that they've heard all the slib answers? I don't know.

Forty years ago, at the end of World War II, a politician didn't have to be an expert on such things, but he had to have some relationship with substance; he wasn't a creature of public relations machines, and he had to have a basic position. Then, too, as long as party bosses picked the candidate, they might not pick the best one, but they at least picked someone they thought could run the country because their survival depended on it. Now you have people running for office whose principal motivation is that they look at the competition and they think they're as good as the others. You have a whole slew of candidates who never ran anything and whose first job in life would be President. And they run by taking careful public opinion polls, so their relation to substance is very tenuous and very fleetful.

When I was asked to run for governor of New York last year, the people who were urging me to do it seemed to have no doubt whatever that in two or three months they could set me ready to fight and campaign on issues I had never considered.

Q: If Gorbachev is not ousted early, he's likely to be there for maybe two decades, during which we could have as many as five Presidents. Would that make our world posture worse because of this loss of memory?

A: They have their own problem, of course. Every Soviet dynasty, which is what you really have to call the reign of each party chairman, besins with a purse and ends in stagnation. Somewhere along that curve of Gorbachev, if he maintains his job, his imminent decline will affect the conduct of their policy and they will become more and more ossified. When that will occur, of course, it's impossible to predict. The loss of memory on our side has two aspects: When people with technical qualifications leave the Administration, all you lose is a lot of short-term memory. The more serious problem is that there is no settled national view of what it is we're supposed to do in the world, so that inherently every time we change the secretary of state or a chief of staff, we can set a totally new approach to an issue and that settled view is never analyzed in terms of its essence.

Q: Is the rush at the Pentagon to get any kind of a contraction into space as soon as possible the kind of SDI program you signed up for?

A: No. I'm for an SDI program because I believe that unopposed offensive forces as the principal element of the mutual assured destruction (MAD) strategy will lead inevitably to pacifism and unilateral disarmament. That is not a new view for me, but SDI (ital) is (unital) a new view for me. The Pentagon is trying to force the decision by getting something into place and it is driven to do that because the opponents, somewhat disingenuously, are putting what is an opposition in principle in terms of feasibility studies. Most of the significant opponents of SDI are against SDI because they think it is not a good idea, not because they think it won't work. So, in order to overcome the feasibility argument, the Pentagon wants to put some contraption into space. What we really need is a concept of the relationship between offense and defense.

Reason confused the issue by speaking of a leak-proof defense as a way of abolishing nuclear weapons. I don't believe nuclear weapons can be abolished. Their effect can be mitigated and resort to them can be made more and more difficult. If defenses complicate the calculations of an attacker, if they force the attacker into a scale of attack that he is reluctant to undertake, if they can absorb accidental attacks, they make limited blackmail more difficult, if not impossible. These are all useful objectives and if, then, defense is related to offense so that it can be scaled down in arms control negotiations as offense is scaled down. I think all of these are important objectives. I don't think that the issue can be solved by forcing the issue technologically. I also think, however, that the distinction between research and deployment is disingenuous and that most of the people who advocate it do so because they think they can then protract research indefinitely. So right now we have a dialogue of the deaf. I'm against making a distinction between research and deployment and I would proceed at a measured pace, offering at all times to negotiate the scale of deployment. I am even willing to negotiate the scale of research; that is to say, I would not approve qualitative limitations on research, but if one could come up with a limit on the number of tests to be conducted in space in any one year so that you would have progress but not the kind of acceleration that would foreclose the issue.

Q: SALT II is gone, the ABM Treaty may be going, and SDI research chugs along. How long can we go on that way?

I think the most useful thing Reagan could do in his last two years would be to start a fundamental discussion with the Soviets making exactly this point. Instead of fraying the edges of every agreement and seeing what we can stretch, we would be better off if we would put a resmen in place that we really want to live with and that does some concrete good, and my objection to the current arms controls negotiations is that they're either disadvantageous to us or meaninsless. I do not see anything that actually, significantly improves the situation. If somebody came along and said let's abolish MIRVs (multiple warhead missiles), that I would consider an exciting project. That would also immediately affect the type of SDI you need. But a 50 percent reduction of stratesic forces is partly a bow to those who opposed arms control on the grounds that no treaty has reduced missiles, but it is not a significant change in the situation. And many of the other agreements, as I've said before, really give the Soviets advantages.

03-10-87

Q: One thing I wonder is whether, in the time since you went to the Soviet Union, the things that (Mikhail) Gorbachev had done before you talked to him and has done since, whether any of it has changed any of the views you came away from there with?

A: No, I expected Gorbachev to proceed on his domestic reform. In fact, having stated his objectives he has no longer any choice except to proceed along that route. Uh, in foreign policy, what he ... he took ... he has acted the way I thought he would act before I went to the Soviet Union. Um, we did not, in fact, learn in the Soviet Union anything along the lines of what has since happened. In fact, they told us that they would not separate the medium-range missiles from the package this year, but they might do it next year. I was always convinced, and said so in an interview, that they would begin with splitting off the INF because that would ... first of all, it was the easiest to do and, secondly, it is inherently very advantageous to them; and soon it would start a process that would bring great pressure on SDI and strategic

03-10-87

forces. So, on the whole, it has developed as I expected.

Q: Do we root for his success? Uh, Jack and I were talking this morning ... If Gorbachev, especially domestically, is successful, does that pose a greater threat or a lesser threat to us?

A: Of course, it's an interesting American ... it's characteristically American phenomenon to believe that when your adversary becomes stronger the prospects for peace increase. I would say that if Gorbachev succeeds in his domestic program and does not change his foreign policy, he will be much more formidable. Indeed, I would say (it would be a) paradox: The Soviet reform program unaccompanied by foreign policy adjustments, can be a greater threat to us whether it succeeds or fails. If it succeeds, it will, of course, be stronger and in a position to be much more insistent. If it fails, they may have to make a decision whether before they slip into a position of relative underdevelopment towards us. Whether they should not use the capacities in which they are best, namely their military strength; not so much to attack

03-10-87

us, but to create security belts around them -- in China,
Middle East, and so forth. So, the Gorbachev revolution is a
major challenge to us and the major challenge is to define
what we mean by peaceful order and to try to negotiate it now
and not slide along on well-worn grooves.

Q: Is it fair to infer then that life was easier for us when we were dealing with old Chernenko or old Brezhnev than it is at the moment?

A: Life is more complicated for us now. And, it also has more opportunities. I did not think ... I thought that dealing with Brezhnev and Gromyko had certain advantages. One, they were focused entirely on the United States or largely on the United States. Secondly, they had that latent sense of insecurity. Third, they were rather clumsy in their public relations. And, fourth, I thought that in the early '70s, contrary to what is now being alleged in mythology, Brezhnev genuinely wanted an accommodation with the United States. We could never pursue it to a logical conclusion because of the collapse of executive authority. Gorbachev is a more interesting mind. It is more

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fascinating to deal with him; it would have been inconceivable
that Gromyko would run around the South Pacific as Shevarnadze
is doing now and just returning from the South Pacific or from
Southeast Asia, I found a combination of fascination and worry
in those countries with Soviet activity. That would have been
nearly inconceivable under Gromyko. So, I think there is a
bigger challenge . . . maybe if Gorbachev would put that
interesting mind to work on foreign policy programs, it might
be possible to arrange with him a code of coexistence that
would last a decade or two. I do not believe that any of the
issues now being negotiated will lead in that direction. That
is my worry.

Q: Are we correct in perceiving that perhaps the Eastern
satellite nations are feeling more reluctant than Gorbachev's
own Politburo to his reforms?

A: He has a massive problem. Um . . . the inherent dilemma of
Communism is . . . it is a good instrument for seizing power,
the Communist Party is a great instrument for seizing power;
but, not a good instrument for exercising power in the sense

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It is a ... in that it spends most of its energy staying in power once it has seized power. Secondly, it ... the second dilemma of Communism is that it may not be possible to run a modern state by central plan. But it also may not be possible to run a Communist state without central planning, so somewhere along the line they face a dilemma what do you do with a Communist Party in a Communist state -- what is its function? How do you avoid that they become like the Buddhist monks in Tibet, a sort of a supernumerary class that has prerogatives but no role and now Gorbachev is showing great courage in handling that problem in the Soviet Union. To me one of the most striking aspects of my visit to the Soviet Union was to find leading Soviets avowing that they didn't know the answer to the problems they themselves had posed. So, if you asked them how are you going to do this, whatever it was that they were describing, they would quite frankly tell you we don't know. Uh, now, that problem is serious enough in the Soviet Union, it's nearly insoluble in Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union at least there's no visible alternative to the Communist Party at this moment -- they've been in power so long

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and have suppressed their opposition so effectively. But, in Eastern Europe there's the nationalist alternative and the Communist Party is still a graft on the system and probably could not win an election in any East European country with the conceivable exception of Bulgaria. Uh, for them to go down that route that Gorbachev has sketched, is a real threat to party preeminence. And if you don't have party preeminence, what happens to all these leaders? So, there's no doubt that the East Europeans watch the East German press after Shevarnadze was sent there to explain the program, and they never endorsed it and they made generally friendly statements to Shevarnadze. Apparently the same happened in Czechoslovakia.

A: Do you mind if I warm this room up a little bit?

Q: That raises one question: Doesn't Gorbachev understand how at what risk the Communist Party is?

A: Nope. I think Gorbachev has this problem. Uh, let me say I think Gorbachev is a considerable man, so whatever comments I

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make about our challenge are not produced by trivialities. I
think Gorbachev has understood this problem. You can with a
Communist system canvass (cause?) great suffering, produce a
19th-century, early 20th-century type of industrial state --
heavy industry, steel, tractor, things of this kind, it cannot
go from there to high tech information sharing and those
elements that make the difference in modern industry, because
for that you need a level of initiative and imagination that a
central planning has, at least, not been able to generate
anywhere. So, they face, he faces this the problem that if he
continues along the orthodox line, the gap between the Soviet
Union and Western Europe, Japan and the United States will
widen. It will ... the rate of growth of the Soviet Union will
be less than that of even Brazil, India and, maybe, China.
This could lead to the historic joke put 300 years after Peter
the Great. After untold sufferings of czars and commissars,
the Soviets are right back to where they were at the time of
Peter the Great, a huge country, backward, relatively backward
compared to its neighbors, so he wants to avoid (?) this and
wants to become relatively even with us or Japan or Western
Europe. Uh, but to do that, he's jeopardizing the system of

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control that has existed before and he's launching himself onto
uncharted seas. I would not be amazed if he didn't last. If
somewhere along the line ... somewhere along the line he would
get turned out...

Q: Is it possible that the Eastern European countries are
reacting the way they are because they would agree with you
that they don't think he'll make it?

A: No, I think they have a real problem of the survival of
their leadership. Their leadership is old and they have seen
that whenever they have begun liberalizing it couldn't be
stopped. And, they also may question whether he can make it.

Q: My memory is that Crane Brinton wrote the book ("The Anatomy
of a Revolution") that said that revolutions happen at times of
rising expectations. Do we still subscribe to that notion?

A: I think the history of revolution is that they usually
appear when things are getting better. France was the richest
country in Western Europe at the time of the French

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Revolution. I don't expect a revolution in the Soviet Union; I think the public will probably find that life is getting somewhat better. Uh, but I do expect that the party apparatus will be unhappy, the managerial class will be unhappy. And I don't see the constituency that will go in the barricades to fight them or the organization. The mere fact that a Communist General Secretary is relying on general popularity in a way against the party is against Communist philosophy because the Party understands the truth better than the public, they're the grandchild of history so that will put Gorbachev into a very strange position.

Q: Is your uh, I think code of ethical behavior, you said that is it possible that this country could raise that now with Gorbachev. Say Shultz when he goes to Moscow next month and say well, look, we can do a lot of business here.

A: You know, but I have had hoped ... I, I believe in any event that we do not always understand how the Soviets operate in this sense: Other groups have a tendency to believe in coversion (?) and, therefore, any time there is improvement of

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living standards or any such effort, those whom that the
Soviets have changed (?) that peace is just around the corner.
If you read what Averill Harriman and others said about
Khrushchev in the '50s it is almost verbatim the same as what
people are now saying about Gorbachev in the '80s, namely that
he's interested in pulling up his country that the problem of
tension has been solved. They forget! Khrushchev pursued the
most adventurous foreign policy of any of the Soviet leaders,
partly because of temperament but also partly because if you
do major reforms domestically, you don't also want to
antagonize the military and the secret police, and therefore
you tend to want to show your virility in the foreign policy
field. That's one problem. The second problem is that Soviet
leaders have to balance conflicting bureaucratic
considerations, and you cannot automatically assume that
domestic reform equated into peaceful foreign policy.

Secondly, you cannot assume that they gave a very long range
foreign policy. They run a bureaucracy that is even more high
powered than our own, they are even more countries (?) of the
various interplays of their poses because their survival
depends on it. The President, confronted by conflicts between

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Weinberger and Shultz and others, find it difficult but
nothing depends on it for him, he can settle it if he wants
to, but Gorbachev or any Soviet General Secretary has to weigh
it against the lineup in the Politburo that can, after all,
remove him. So, one always has to look at the bureaucratic
lineup. Therefore, it seems to me, it's always seemed to me,
that (telephone ring, Kissinger answered, finished, kidding
around, laughed with others present -- now back to interview)

But, to get back to where I think I was. They have to deal
with their own bureaucracy, you see, as issues come up through
their own bureaucracy, questions of bureaucratic survival,
questions of balancing administrations must weigh at least as
heavily as substantive ones. So I have always felt that even
when Brezhnev was there, to begin a dialogue with the Soviets
first on the philosophical level in which you tell the Soviets
what it is you're trying to accomplish and why and then enable
their leader to go to the Politburo and say this is what the
Americans say they are trying to achieve. Why don't we at least
examine it? The other way, when you kick numbers up, first
through our bureaucracy, and then through theirs what is an

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American compromise without comes over to their side where all
their sharpshooters get a crack at it, by the time it reaches
Gorbachev or whoever, he will find it as difficult as
(inaudible) as if not more so to determine what the purpose
is. So to answer your question, yes, we could have a really
confidential level of conversation maybe the time Shultz is
there. I think the most useful thing Shultz can do is to say
yes (inaudible) I acknowledge ... (inaudible) ... domestic
situation ... that's your problem. Here is our analysis of the
following situation. This is where we think we ought to try to
go in the next 10 to 15 years. Obviously, it has to be
something in the common interest because we can't take
advantage of you even if we could in one negotiation we'd
figure it out after a while and not keep dickering and I would
conduct the conversation on that level.

Q: Can we move for a moment to what I was calling a loss of
memory to Jack this morning. We have been reading a lot about
two things that are really the same thing. One is that in the
last two years of any administration, people depart for
selfish but understandable reasons and not limiting it to this

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administration's problem, but just the usual exodus in the last
two years. Then we hear about the NSC and all its problems
because it has no institutional memory because each
administration comes in with a new wave of people...

A: And with empty files, because the previous President takes
all the files with him.

Q: Sir, the question is, is there something an intelligent
democracy could do to rectify this problem of loss of memory?

A: Well, you know, it's easy to utter a platitude at it but I
don't know how to do it. Obviously at some point we ought to
get some bipartisan perception of what our national objectives
are so you don't begin each administration with a complete
reexamination of every foreign policy, an act which is itself
unsettling for all the people who dealt with us or who are
dealing with us. But that's theory, uh, it, uh, I don't how to
do it, it's a great need, the most useful thing that Reagan
could do in the last two years is try to establish some
relationship with senior Democrats that would permit

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continuity no matter who ... (interrupted by interviewer)

A: Well, the campaigns (inaudible) ... The Americans believe
that every problem has a solution, so the campaign is
conducted in terms of people who offer final solutions to
existing problems, the beginning of (inaudible) foreign policy
is that you're engaged in an endless process that you can
ameliorate, that you can, like a stream, perhaps channel in a
constructive direction, but you never end it and each
so-called solution is the admissions price to a new set of
problems. That has to be understood by a nation and it
requires an educational process, but even without a campaign,
we don't admit it, in the campaign, even less so. Although it
would be interesting what would happen if a candidate came up
and spoke the truth. Is it possible that at some point the
American people feel they've heard all the glib answers? I don't
know.

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Q: Should the term of the presidency be elongated, that is, was Mr. Nixon's notion of the six-year presidency any cure for this problem?

A: I used to think so until (inaudible) then I could hardly wait to get out of there. When you look at the issue of Mexican presidents, you can't, but six years is such a nightmare that I'm not sure that that's a solution.

Q: I suppose one of the reasons I'm thinking of ...
(interruption)

A: I'll tell you what would be a, what is, one of the biggest problems is that 40 years ago, the end of World War II, a politician wasn't necessarily an expert on such things, but he had to have some relationship with substance, he wasn't a creature of PR machines, uh, and he thought he had to take a basic position, and secondly, as long as party bosses pick the candidate, they might not pick the best one, they pick at least someone they thought could run the country because their survival depended on it, now you have people running for

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office whose principal motivation is that looking at their
competitors they think they're as good at these people are. You
have a whole slew of candidates whose first job, the first job
they're looking for in life is president and they never ran
anything and who then run by taking careful public opinion
polls so their relation to substance is very tenuous and very
fleeting.

Q: It would be unfair to ask you to name a few...

A: I would say that bipartisan, I would say that it's on both sides of the aisle. I wouldn't say this about (Sen. Louie)

Nunn, I wouldn't say it about Bush although the pressures of public relations people is very great even for any serious candidate.

Q: Let me live with this just a moment longer and then we'll go
to things (inaudible, interrupted by Kissinger)

A: When I was asked to run for governor of New York last year,
the people who were urging me to do it seemed to have no doubt

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PAGE 26

Q: Is the problem we're talking about exacerbated by Gorbachev's youth? Let's assume for the moment that predictions of his early ouster don't come true, he's likely to be there for maybe two decades. We, in the meantime, in two decades may have as many as five presidents. Does this make our world posture worse -- this loss of memory we have?

A: Of course, the problem in the Soviet Union is that (inaudible) he's about the same age as Brezhnev was when he came in. Every Soviet dynasty, which is what you really have to call these, begins with a purge and ends in stagnation. Somewhere along that curve of Gorbachev, if he maintains his job, his imminent decline will affect the conduct of their policy and they will become more and more ossified. When that occurs, of course, it's impossible to predict ... The loss of memory on our side has two aspects: one is technical

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PAGE 27

(inaudible) people leaving the administration and you just lose a lot of short-term memory, but the worst is there is no settled view of what it is we're supposed to do in the world, so that inherently every time we change the secretary of state or a chief of staff, you can get a totally new approach to an issue and you never analyze it in terms of its essence.

Q: I suppose to give you credit, my memory says that you did leave behind some people in government who at least shared a portion of your views and skills.

A: No. For better or worse, I was an unusual phenomenon in the sense that I has spent all my life thinking about foreign policy, it was my hobby in addition to my job, I didn't have to be briefed about all the key elements. Secondly, I made a systematic effort to get the very best younger people in the government regardless of ideology. And, thirdly, in the period I was there, I had tried to get an analysis of the national interest of the United States as a key element of our foreign policy. The result, however, was that I was attacked by both liberals and conservatives. For the liberals, I was the power

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oriented, for the conservatives, I was the conciliatory. And, it showed the difficulties but it also shows, hopefully, that if one worked at it, if one had worked at it say for two administrations, one would have created quite a body of people who could have done it. It doesn't matter whether they agree with my conclusion, it's the method of thinking that matters.

Q: I'd like to go back to arms. Is the rush at the Pentagon to get any kind of a contraption into space as soon as possible the kind of SDI program you signed up for?

A: No, I think, I'm for an SDI program because I believe that unopposed offensive forces as the principal element of madness strategy will lead to passivism and unilateral disarmament; this is not a new view for me, SDI is a new view for me, but the impossibility of massive retaliation, mutually assured destruction, so forth, is not new, uh, the Pentagon is trying to force the decision by getting something into place and it is driven towards that impasse because the opponent, somewhat disingenuously, is putting what is in opposition in principle in terms of feasibility studies. Most of the significant

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opponents of SDI are against SDI because they think it is not a good idea, not opposed to it because they think it won't work. So, in order to overcome the feasibility argument, the Pentagon wants to put some contraption into space. What we really need is a concept of the relationship between offense and defense. (Phone call -- interruption...)

Q: You were linking offense and defense.

A: I think Reagan confused the issue by speaking of a leak-proof defense as a way of abolishing nuclear weapons. I don't believe nuclear weapons can be abolished. Their effect can be mitigated and resort to them can be made more and more difficult. I think if defense complicates the calculations of an attacker, if it forces the attacker into a scale of attack that he is reluctant to undertake. If it can absorb accidental attacks, if it makes limited blackmail more difficult, if not impossible, these are all honorable and useful objectives and if then defense is then related in scale to offense so that it can be scaled down in arms control negotiations as offense is scaled down, I think all of these are important objectives, I

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don't think that issue can be solved by throwing something into
space and forcing the issue technologically. I also think,
however, that the distinction between research and deployment
is disingenuous and that the people, most of the people
advocate it do so because they think they can then protract
research indefinitely and so right now we have a dialogue of
the deaf. So, to sum it up, I'm against having deployment, I'm
against making a distinction between research and deployment
and I would proceed at a pace to be determined, offering at
all times to negotiate scale of deployment. I am even willing
to negotiate the scale of research; that is to say, I would
not approve qualitative limitations on research, but if one
could come up with a number of tests to be conducted in space
in anyone year so that there is no rush towards precluding
consideration that would permit progress but at the same time,
not accelerate it in a way that forecloses the issue. I would
be happy to see that, too.

Q: One more question. SALT II is gone, the ABM Treaty may be
going, you have the SDI research going, how long can we go on
the way we are?

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A: You know, SALT II is sort of an absurdity. What is the restraint of a non-ratified (treaty?) that you're observing and that would have lapsed if it had been ratified and the irony is that this administration, by not ratifying the treaty, has given the Soviets 300 more missiles than they would have had because the scrapping of missiles did not take place because there was no ratification. So they're selling us those 300 missiles a second time in their 50 percent cut proposal. I think the most useful thing we could do, the most useful thing Reagan could do in his last two years, is to start a fundamental discussion with the Soviets making exactly this point. Instead of fraying the edges of every agreement and seeing what we can stretch, we would be better off if we would put a regimen in place that we really want to live with and that does some concrete good, and my objection to the current arms controls negotiations is that they're either disadvantageous to use or meaningless. I do not see anything that actually, significantly improves the situation. Somebody came and said let's abolish MERVs. That I would consider an exciting project. That would also immediately affect the type

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of SDI you need. But a 50 percent reduction of strategic
forces is partly a bow to those who opposed arms control on
the ground, that it didn't have reduction, it is not a
significant change in the situation. And, many of the other
agreements, as I've said before, really free Soviet advantages.

Q: The Pollard case is in the headlines these days. I wondered if that, maybe in combination with other things, whether you think that's affecting our relations with Israel, and if that's the case, how that's going to affect events in the Middle East in the next couple of years?

A: I don't think it affects government-to-government relations
with Israel at this point, but it certainly leaves a bad taste
and, since Israel peculiarly depends on many intangibles in
the relationship, it's not (phone interruption)...

Q: You started to talk about Israel.

A: Really, I'm not all that eager to get into Israel in any
detail. I think the prices one may pay is in the intangibles

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of confidence that develops on the middle levels and they have
to ... I think the imperatives that bring our two nations
together do not change but the intangibles by which they're
interpreted from case to case must be affected by the
confidence people have in that relationship and I think the
Israelis should really reexamine whether they should press for
every benefit, or whether they shouldn't establish priorities
among their objectives.

Q: Extending Jack's question to the Arabs, when the Arabs come
to visit us, they complain continuously that not in the last
five or six years has the United States made any initiative,
done anything, to improve the situation from their point of
view. Does this give them an entree to telling the United
States, "See what your bad behavior toward us has done."
Shouldn't we reopen our friendships to the Arabs?

A: Fundamentally, our relationship should be based not on
irritation with particular actions, but on analysis on what is
achieveable and what our interest is in the Middle East. I
thought we invested much too much into Lebanon and much too

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little in the West Bank at a time when there was great fluidity in the situation and I do not think in the rest of the Reagan administration a major initiative on Arab-Israeli relations is going top be very fruitful. I do not think much of that international conference that is being talked about. That's motion without substance. Anything else?

Q: You've been gracious as usual. Thank you.

A: No, I hope this will turn into something.

Q: I think it will. There is some good stuff in it.

A: I know you will manage to get the most use out of it.

Q: Will it be in the Times on Sunday?

A: I guess it will. I had told Jack that I had quite forgotten that we would have Henry Kissinger two weeks running, but I think we will because I know that the Syndicate wants to use it for this week so we can't be behind them.

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PAGE 35

Q: Gen. (Ariel) Sharon is saying this morning that the problem is here not the spying but the fact that the United States has been too stingy with its intelligence.

A: This is like these characters who say when the chiefs of staff are spying on the White House, I read an article in the New York Times that said that the guy who was rifling my files for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was driven to it because I didn't give him enough information. It's a nice feeling that you can steal documents from the President of the United States.

A: Because he isn't giving you enough?

A: Because he isn't giving you enough.

Q: I found Mrs. Pollard's "60 Minutes" justification for her behavior on moral grounds to be absolutely fascinating.

A: I didn't see it, I was away. What did she say?

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PAGE 36

Q: She said that my husband and I did this because it was the right thing to do. And, no, we should not be punished for it because nobody wants to be punished. Their highest loyalty was to Israel.

A: I find it painful here, it's um, too many of them think that.

Q: Yes, I think the most painful thing is I believe she believed it.

A: Oh, I have no doubt she believed it. I have ... there hasn't ever been fully published what they gave away has it?

Q: No, we were talking about that this morning.

A: It must be pretty grim.

Q: The Justice Department has said they gave away more serious (material) than any spy in American history, but nobody knows

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what that means. What kind of materials...

A: I thought Tony's question was interesting, whether it was more a matter of ego, outrage, or substance outrage that the government's feeling ... I ought to be able to find out being on that advisory board.

Q: It would be interesting, maybe just as a curiosity.

A: I know, I'm going to be there on Wednesday, I'm going to ask the question and I really don't know from the intensity with which we react to it you would assume that it's more than ego. And also from the passion with which the Israelis defend their people, you would have to assume that they did some good with them.

Q: I'm not sure that promotions were wise on the part of the Israelis. That just seems to be salt in the wound.

A: This Israeli government is a disaster, in my view, Peres is a clever maneuverer, he has no strategy, he has a publicity

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PAGE 38

strategy, and Shamir is rigid and they're all out for their ...
I asked one of Peres's top aides why the hell did you have to
get involved in Iran, what possible benefit was it? He said it
would be great public relations for us.

Q: So, it wasn't just spare the hundred or so Israelis who
still live in Iran?

A: Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, but that's the PR thing that they get 50
of them out or ... and, of course, what he didn't say, but they
must have had in the back of their mind, it was a no-lose
proposition, doing it through Khashoggi, guaranteed that the
Arabs found out about it. The man (?) of the moderate Arabs
(inaudible) the less likely we are to press Israel to make
concessions to moderate and the more the Arabs see that Israel
can wield American power, the more intimidated they become, so
their interests in it was (sort of?) clear.

Q: Do you have a clear feeling for whether Iran's going to win
that war?

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A: I think they're going to win it by attrition. And, my impression is the day you think Basra (?) the Germans used (inaudible) in World War I to have an objective, the Iraqis must defend (inaudible) bleeding them. And, if the British hadn't been in the war, France practically lost the war (inaudible). The British some offensive (inaudible) that saved them and then our coming in. But I'm afraid they're gradually going to wear them down.

Q: Interestingly, I think it interested Dr. Kissinger, that (Medvedev?) is going to sort of sign up to do a couple of pieces a year on a sort of contractual basis...

A: For the Syndicate?

Q: For us and the Syndicate. It will be through us rather than the other way around, but, yes. So, maybe if you sometimes you have an idea when you talk to Jack or Tony about what you'd like to read (Medvedev) on you could give him a suggestion because I'm afraid that we're going to have to do that to be his kind of literary agents, which is OK. I don't understand his

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relationship to the hierarchy. He seems to be sometimes a
dissident and sometimes a spokesperson.

A: It's a very ... you know when we met with Sakharov, of course, it sort of astonishing, I assume the apartment he has in Moscow is the Academicians Department, but he's entitled to, I assure you, none of (you) would want to live in such an apartment -- tiny, badly furnished, run-down house, and, secondly, he had that problem. Of course, he's a hero in prison but you had the ... he didn't quite become a spokesman for him, but you could see that he wasn't eager to go back to Gorky and that's no criticism of him. These totalitarian states ... when I came to Germany at the end of the war and I talked to anti-Nazis, it was clear that the categories of thought, for example, they always spoke, when they spoke of bombing attacks, they spoke of terror attacks. The term of art (?) for a bombing attack in Germany was terror attack, and it just came out with anti-Nazis. And, so it should be interesting to see. I think your whole editorial page (inaudible)....Is Iacocca still writing for you?

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Q: Periodically, but at best once a month. I think the arrangement is once a month and I don't think we as a newspaper use that much. In other words, the Syndicate has him once a month and I think we may run him half that time. Commercially, he's a success as a columnist. People buy it. I got have even more papers by (?) Dear Abby, you can't really go by popularity.

A: How about Jeane? Are you using...?

Q: We're using her more often than we had been and Bob Berger who runs the Op-Ed page says that she's getting better as a journalist. Just between us, we did not think that was going to happen.

A: That she was getting better?

Q: That she would get better.

A: Yeah, at first, I haven't seen her lately. I, for a while I was, did not see much of her.