Kissinger
and the
Brothers Kalb

by Roger Morris

Our thanks go first to Henry A. Kissinger, who, as an historian as well as a statesman, understands the critical importance of primary sourcing. He appreciates the difference between journalism and history, as we do.

from the "Acknowledgements" of Kissinger*

Indeed. Written by two veteran diplomatic correspondents, obviously the stuff of "long interviews" with the subject and his few associates who also know the story, this is a vintage Washington insider's book on American foreign policy. And true to its genre, it is very disappointing.

There are occasional tidbits of novel information in Kissinger, but they are introduced only to be dropped

and left, maddeningly, without analysis or elaboration. More often its 549 pages are simply banal, strewn with the trivia of "Henry's" travelogs. The book is yet another symptom of the absence of investigative reporting in the most dangerous area of public policy. It even seems a disservice (no doubt inadvertent) to Kissinger himself, who is both more human and less disingenuous than the Kalbs portray him as being.

In a sense, the best passage in Kissinger is its brief introduction, a somewhat reflective overview of the remarkable man and his mixed record. The respite is short-lived. Too soon we plunge into that press corps naturalism that has so long passed for (in the words of the Book-of-the-Month Club's paean to Kissinger) "a rich knowledge of contemporary history." There are the endless comings and

Roger Morris worked on Henry Kissinger's NSC staff during 1969-1970 and now directs Humanitarian Policy Studies for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The views expressed in this article are his and not Carnegie's.

*Kissinger. Marvin Kalb, Bernard Kalb. Little, Brown. $12.50.

The Washington Monthly July/August 1974

51

goings of sleek blue and white jets, the inevitable speedings of black limousines, the knowing description of secret rendezvous points (oh, yes, the reader sees, *Henry* must have told them). And, of course, we hear the intimate words of the mighty—not to tell us much, but just to assure us that we did not miss anything. Did you know Brezhnev plucks his eyebrows? “Do I look brutal?” he asks, and we are witnesses to history. To make matters worse, most of this is written in a breathless, admiring narrative reminiscent of one’s first literary encounters with historic personalities: *Meriwether Lewis, Boy Explorer*.

But the major flaws of *Kissinger* lie in substance rather than style, in what the book might have been had the talent and experience of the Kalbs (both are veteran television correspondents) broken free of the conventions of diplomatic journalism. *Kissinger* observes one of the primary laws governing the media's coverage of “Henry”: ignore or dismiss what he ignores and dismisses. So while this book, ostensibly a “report on one man and his central role in the history of our time,” does follow Kissinger through his exploits in Paris, Hanoi, and Moscow, it says almost nothing about many of the other crucial and ominous foreign policy events of the past five years—the alienation of Japan, the collapse of the dollar and world inflation, or the development of the international food crisis that threatens unprecedented mass famine this autumn.

Then there are the *lesser* issues like the Nixon military assistance policies, the U. S. role in the overthrow of the Allende regime in Chile (“We can’t let a country go Marxist,” Kissinger reportedly told a secret White House meeting on clandestine operations, “just because its people are irresponsible”), or policies toward human rights outrages from Brazil to Burundi. These are not Kissinger stories, of course. No sleek jets or disarming jokes to the press here. But the other equally “inside” realities of world

politics in “our time” are involved —unemployment, hungry and sick children, tortured prisoners, and the corporate corruption of international relations. The Kalbs even spare us the seamier side of the items that Kissinger does talk about. We are told, in part, how Kissinger deals with General Thieu or Le Duc Tho, but are left to guess about how he reacted to the My Lai investigation or what he thought of the Tiger Cages.

## Quick Glimpses

If some subjects are unmentionable, many that *are* mentioned are tossed into *Kissinger* with cryptic brevity. And these almost stories, beginning to be told, could have been worth the price of passage. There is confirmation, for example, that Melvin Laird and Kissinger fought “like two tough tigers” over Vietnam, the cost of weapons, and the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. Yet, incredibly, there is no analysis by the Kalbs of the substance and course of that fateful debate, which, on those subjects alone, involved millions of lives and billions of dollars. Whatever the issues, it was a revealing relationship, redolent of the trust and honor among the nation’s highest officials now immortalized in the presidential tapes. The Kalbs do let us know that Henry’s “first reaction was to blame Laird for the leak” when the Pentagon Papers appeared.

But then one supposes the problems with Laird were minor compared to Kissinger's plight in Nixon's White House. One source tells the Kalbs that Kissinger's relations with the rest of the White House staff were "as intimate as Caesar and Brutus." After the collapse of Vietnam negotiations and the terror bombing of Hanoi in late 1972, Kissinger is reported to have said, "Haldeman nearly got me. He nearly got me." Still later, after his adversaries had been fired and he was appointed Secretary of State, Kissinger is quoted as saying Haldeman and Ehrlichman were "men with a

52

Gestapo mentality.” So much for fear and loathing in the West Wing. But the Kalbs never take us beyond these bizarre asides—to the pervasive impact of this atmosphere on foreign policy, to the implications of such characterizations for Kissinger personally and his sense of public service and responsibility, to what it can tell us and history about the “man” and “our time.” It is not only a matter of discovering how government really works behind the press briefings, though that is serious enough. We owe Kissinger, and especially those who come after him, a more candid understanding of these ethical tensions in democratic government, and what we expect of the men who deal with them.

White House ethics are scarcely the only intriguing subject the Kalbs run past us without the analysis it deserves. On page 300, as Henry and RN review the options for hitting the North Vietnamese in the spring of 1972, the list tersely includes “Nuclear weapons?” “Rejected,” says the next, and last, word on the subject. It must have been an interesting discussion—World War III and all that. But you won’t find out about it here.

Eleven pages later, Laird tells the Kalbs, “Henry always enjoyed those military briefings, and he tended to believe them—especially when they fit into his strategy.” Even considering the source, the remark raises the most serious questions of past and present policy by a man consistently portrayed by the press as a steadfast opponent of Pentagon excesses. Yet, again, the Kalbs’ report on “one man and his central role” gives only passing attention to the decisive elements of bias, temperament, and information in decision-making.

## Brushing Reality Aside

In *Kissinger*, between the jet flights, telephone calls, and press briefings, policy seems to be born whole, springing with magic coherence from the mouths of Nixon or Kissinger.

The reality, as the Kalbs surely know, is quite different. Foreign policy, like any other, comes howling into the world blind and bare, with painful and often brutal birth pangs in the bureaucratic process. Kissinger and Nixon sometimes evaded or dominated that process, sometimes compromised with it, sometimes surrendered to it. Each approach, for what it achieved and what it cost, is worth describing in a book that pretends to be serious about foreign policy. But *Kissinger* is astonishingly superficial in that respect.

Nowhere is that shallowness more striking that in the Kalbs' account of the 1972 SALT negotiations in Moscow, in which the national and bureaucratic stakes were so high. The Kalbs tell us that in the last hours of that bargaining on the momentous question of limiting offensive nuclear weapons the President made a final offer mainly because "he figured he could go no further if he hoped to retain JCS support for SALT." There,

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53

suddenly, amid the toasts and summit
gossip, the bureaucratic reality in-
trudes, and then disappears. Of all the
excruciating bargaining in Washington
before Moscow, of Kissinger's historic
victories and defeats in the White
House basement long before he got to
the Kremlin, there is hardly a glimpse.
"JCS support for SALT," men with
"Gestapo mentality," Henry and his
affinity for "military briefings"—all
belong to a world less dramatic per-
haps, but ultimately more important
in American foreign policy than any
secret flight to Paris or Peking. Until
we have understood that—and this
book is scarcely reassuring—the
bloody lessons of the last decade are
still unlearned.

This chronic failure to look be-
yond the surface of diplomacy also
puts the Kalbs at the mercy of their
subject in describing some of his less
glorious moments. Kissinger, we will
all be relieved to know, "did not have
time" to deal with the 1971 re-
pression in East Pakistan that mur-
dered thousands, drove ten million
into squalid exile in India, and led to
war on the subcontinent. The U. S.
just "found itself siding with a corrupt
Pakistani military dictatorship." It
was the impersonal "White House"
(not Henry, presumably) that reck-
lessly ordered the *Enterprise* into the
Bay of Bengal.

When it was all over, Kissinger
"seriously considered quitting his
job." For Henry, write the Kalbs, it
had been "a personal disaster." Not
because of the enormous human costs
of the policy, however (a cost not yet
fully paid, for the expulsion of U. S.
agricultural technicians in the 1971
crisis helped contribute to the mass
famine which is descending on India
this summer). The problem was that
he seemed to be "losing presidential
favor," suspecting that his White
House colleagues had arranged for the
leak of the embarrassing Anderson
Papers. The fears, it turned out, were
probably groundless. The President
had his own suspicions about the leak
and set the plumbers on a trail that

led to a navy yeoman and the Joint
Chiefs.

It is clear enough whose version
this is, but whether there is other,
conflicting evidence, or what the im-
plications of this extraordinary epi-
sode were, the Kalbs apparently "did
not have time" to investigate. Their
concluding paragraph on the Pakistani
tragedy captures the tone and depth
of this and much more in the nar-
rative: "Those were dark and gloomy
days for Kissinger. They began to
brighten up a bit only after the
India-Pakistan crisis had vanished
from the front page, and the President
presented him with new diplomatic
challenges."

Prisoners of the 'Primary Source'

At worst, the Kalbs bring Kissinger
through his "gloomy" times with this
subtle exoneration, basic motives in-
tact. The Soviet wheat fiasco? Henry
was "so eager to conclude the deal
that he ignored or didn't see intelli-
gence reports about the magnitude of
the Russian crop failure... neither
Nixon nor Kissinger appreciated the
economic ramifications of the deal.
They were concentrating on linkage...
and they never looked beyond that."
It was as simple as that, folks. Every-
thing you suspected about agri-
business, the Departments of Com-
merce and Agriculture, and the Ad-
ministration's manipulations of the
wheat sale in the hurried quest for
detente and reelection is all explained
away by the lofty nuances of one-man
diplomacy. And what about a foreign
policy conducted with this degree of
ignorance or neglect regarding eco-
nomic issues with profound domestic
impact? "Next," the Kalbs continue,
and we are soon back in the com-
fortable confines of Paris with Le Duc
Tho, free of those messy, unanswered
questions on undiplomatic subjects.
Nowhere in more than 500 pages and
the "record" of five years does Kis-
singer provide a thoughtful analysis
of international economic issues.

The book breaks some new ground

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