temptation." Communism in Western Europe has gained ground
if not in the popular vote, surely by many political tests.
Our nations are assailed in international forums for colonial
guilt, economic rape and underwater plunder.

Challenged militarily, ideologically and economically,
the nations of the West seem to respond reluctantly and with
a noticeable lack of passion. Ironically, most observers
are convinced that if the Western nations would choose to
muster their forces, most of these threats would diminish,
in degree if not in kind. The flesh is willing, the spirit
is weak.

Dr. Kissinger, you have said that the Western world
suffers from an "inner uncertainty" and that "the aspect
of contemporary life that worries me most is the lack of
purpose and direction in so much of the Western world."

Senator Moynihan you have talked of a "failure of nerve"
on the part of the West.

In the past, you gentlemen have agreed on many questions
pertaining to these issues and you have disagreed on others.
Today we would like to explore your current feelings in the
context of a free-flowing conversation.

Senator Moynihan, perhaps you could begin. You have spoken of a
failure of nerve in the past. Do you still see a failure of nerve and is
it currently affecting our foreign policy?

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Oh, very much -- even more so now than a few years ago when I first sensed it.

First, we had the enormous failure of Vietnam, which was an enterprise begun by an extraordinarily confident and powerful foreign policy establishment -- a bi-partisan establishment -- which had run affairs for a quarter century. That establishment may have been performing with diminishing degrees of success, but overall it had done a brilliant job and it had never had a failure.

But then along came Vietnam, and when it failed, something much more important than that happened. The kind of social base on which that elite rested turned against its own policies. The great symbolic moment, at least in my mind, occurred at the Kennedy Institute of Politics one evening in the fall of 1966 when Robert McNamara came and suddenly found himself and his car surrounded by protesting students. I was in Cambridge at the time, and we were dazed, uncertain of what was happening. After all, McNamara was President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, and his visit symbolized many things. He was coming to an Institute of Politics, Kennedy's university, his own graduate school, to talk about the war -- and suddenly he found that the very base of the establishment had turned. That had to be an unnerving experience, and it was.

Let me say one other thing: most elites that lose wars lose their heads in the process. That has happened in this country in a way, and it has meant great internal change. I have this joke -- which Henry may or may not appreciate -- about the people who sort of started the war and ran it and are still working here in Washington. Their excuse today is that "I was only giving orders." (Laughter.)

5

were misunderstood, and that there is a hardline group in the Kremlin opposing
a softline group. In their perspective, the softline group always turns out
to be the incumbent. The incumbent becomes a hardliner only in retrospect.
As they saw it, Stalin was a softliner when he was in office, and Harry
Hopkins was writing that, "Of course, we can trust Stalin, but we do not know
what sinister forces are lurking in the dark recesses of the Kremlin." But
what you have now -- through the demoralization of the establishment -- is that
this third group, which had always believed that there was no geopolitical
problem and that there was no ideological problem, is much more unopposed today
than it was in the past.

To summarize, I do not believe — in this country, at least — that there
is a public problem. In this country we have a leadership problem. The public
camental
has a rather healthy perception, / perhaps, but fundamentally sound.
SENATOR MOYNIHAN: I would like very much to confirm my sense of the reality
of that third group, that third phenomenon you describe. It's a phenomenon
that is not normally absent from western countries, but that frequently appears
under auspices that deprive it of some legitimacy, having said that as indirectly
as I can. In recent years, that group appears to have been legitimized by
having been right about the foreign policy in the last decade.

Henry, you mentioned Ledeen's article about the enemy is us, Walt
Kelley's line. I'll never forget another incident from the Vietnam period.
We're sitting today not very far from the Peace Corps headquarters. We
developed the poverty program, OEO, in that building in 1963. I remember in
Washington in 1969 there was an anti-war demonstration of some kind, and a
group of returned Peace Corps volunteers took over that building and flew the
Vietcong flag from the flagpole of the Peace Corps. At that moment, it

6

suddenly came to me -- it may have been Freudian in some sense, I suppose,
but I'm not sure of that -- that these young people had adopted an identification
with the agressor.

I'll tell you a quick story. Fifteen years ago I was in Washington.
Our children were young, and there was a movie made called "The Swiss Family
Robinson" which was an old sort of bowdlerized Robinson Crusoe. The Swiss
Family gets shipwrecked and they have wonderful times. They do very clever
things, and they get rescued finally. You had to take all the children to
see this movie on Saturday. One Saturday afternoon, we did, and everything
was going nicely in this little movie house chirping with young children.

And suddenly the snake scene began, and the little boy is playing
around in the stream or probably doing something useful, gathering mussels or
something, and the music begins to change, and the camera moves up above him
to a tree.

And suddenly there it is -- the snake! And the snake starts moving down
slowly. The music gets very somber, and the theater falls absolutely silent.
And in the middle of that silence, my five-year old daughter is heard to say,
"That snake likes me." (laughter)

Now, that's normal in a five-year old, but abnormal in a 35-year old,
when, in fact, the snake wants to eat you. And I think we have some of that
phenomenon in our country, too.

But I much agree with the Secretary that it's a phenomenon, in a curious
way, of leadership cadres and elites. The public is still very silent about it..
DR. KISSINGER: To take this point of Pat's, I think, for example, I can
understand that people can come to the conclusion that a war is lost and that

it has to be liquidated on the best terms available. This is a sad event, because no one can want his country to lose a war. What I have difficulty understanding is the relish in that event.

When I see, for example, the head of ACTION going to a meeting where the North Vietnamese ambassador upon joining the UN castigates the US and this American official says, "This is the proudest day of my life. This is what we've been working for all these years," that raises to me really profound questions about the fundamental motivation from the beginning.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: That scene where the Vietcong flag was flown from the Peace Corps headquarters took place during a demonstration which that particular man organized.

DR. KISSINGER: Exactly.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: But I suggest to you that fear may be much more of an explanation of the problems we have been discussing than any perversity of mind, and that our difficulties would be even larger if, in fact, we had all become fearful.

DR. KISSINGER: We also have to remember that we are talking about decent people. We are not talking about a conspiracy.

MR. WATTENBERG: I understand. But you are describing a mentality that you have seen developing in our country. Let me ask if that mentality is at work today in the State Department, in the White House, in the National Security Council, the Department of Defense.

8

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: I'll tell you where it is at work -- and this will neither surprise nor please the former Secretary -- but that sort of mentality is at work now in our debates over Africa. We are continually told today that we have to do this or that, accept this or that very unattractive situation because if we do not, the Russians will send in the Cubans. And this settles an argument! That is the end of an argument. Well, you can see where that kind of situation will get you eventually.

DR. KISSINGER: I think there are two problems with respect to your question, Ben. One, I believe that on the foreign policy side, at the second and third levels of this Administration, many people came in who are "graduates" of this Vietnam period, some of whom, in fact, supported the war at the beginning and are now working their way back by sometimes rewriting their own history. They have some convictions that if America is not to be punished for its presumption, then at least we must be sure that the country is never presumptuous enough to undertake any more distant enterprises.

Now, with respect to the point that Pat made, yes, we hear that, if we don't do this or that, the Cubans will come in. I would say there will be no constructive policy in Africa until we make it clear that, however issues are settled, it will not be by the threat of Cuban/ After that point is established, we can have some sensible discussions. But if we are forever blackmailed by the Cubans -- a country of 9 million off our shores -- no constructive policy is possible. What has become of our country when we explain foreign policy by the myth of invincible Cubans?

9

MR. WATTENBERG: As we have talked of this crisis of the spirit, you have both alluded to Vietnam, which was largely an American phenomenon. Yet this so-called malaise is apparently found throughout the western world. Western Europe did not have that particular Vietnam problem, and yet this malaise seems to extend to there. Is that correct? Is that sort of spiritual disillusionment present on the continent as well as in the United States?

DR. KISSINGER: I think there are a number of forces at work. One is the tendency to escape current dilemmas by making the most favorable assumption about the future. This temptation is overwhelming in societies on the whole satisfied with their lot, and it is one reason why the communist challenge has been interpreted in the most benign fashion in every decade in the existence of communism.

Second, there is the phenomenon that the modern bureaucratic state does not give the idealists among the younger generation an outlet for actions that they think might be relevant.

Thirdly, there is the problem that as the pressures of their electoral process have increased, governments have become more and more tactically oriented. The more tactically oriented they are, the more short-term their policies. The more short-term their policies, the less successful they are. So we have the paradox that governments following public opinion polls begin to look more and more incompetent. And as they look incompetent, confidence in government begins to disintegrate, so that the rebels, or the radicals, or those who challenge the society, can get at least enough support for conspicuous terrorism or for the growth of the communist parties in Western Europe.

I don't know what Pat thinks about that.

10

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: That's a marvelous idea. The closer a government tries to get to opinion, the more confidence declines and the government feels that it must get even closer yet.

DR. KISSINGER: You see, I think what the public wants from its government is a solution of its problems. The public's perception of the solution may be very nebulous, and the public judges its leaders by the results, not by whether its policies follow every fad.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: But could I suggest that behind some of the psychological and political difficulties of today, there is a certain kind of objective reality -- the extraordinary success of Soviet policy.

Our former colleague, Adam Ulam, in an article in the *New Republic* in the spring of 1975, wrote that the Soviet Union under Brezhnev had achieved -- and he said it would be both dangerous and ungenerous for us to deny it -- the leading, if not yet the dominant position in world politics.

And that dominance is so curiously obvious in Western Europe, and it is beginning to show up here. I don't think anybody knows very much about how external politics affect mood and so forth; some people do, I don't anyway.

I said in a speech last weekend that it seemed to me that much of the difficulty we have understanding our Middle East situation is that for the first time, American policy is beginning to accommodate to the assumption that the Soviets are now, or soon will be, the superior military power.

Remarkably, we now have senior officials of this administration coming around to us in the Senate and saying we must have a SALT treaty soon because if we do not, by the mid 1980s the Soviets will have surpassed us in strategic power.

12

would be their successes if they could ever get to our situation. Furthermore, they have not solved the problem of succession. In no communist country has their even been a legitimate succession. Their foreign policy is basically unimaginative. The outstanding quality of the Soviet foreign policy is enormous persistence in whatever course they are pursuing, and this tends to play into our impatience. In a negotiation, if we haven't made a new proposal for three months, we start getting restless. And potentially, we are militarily stronger.

Therefore, I think, in terms of assets, as you said in the beginning, Ben, it is an absolute absurdity to say that the Soviets are stronger than we.

The Soviets have a bureaucratic, unimaginative society, in which all the leaders get old simultaneously and it ought to be possible to manage whatever challenge they pose.

In every confrontation, we could have had the upper hand. We had them then defeated in Angola, and/we defeated ourselves. I don't know what the possibilities were in Ethiopia. I cannot believe that a country of nine million can conduct a global policy, and the greatest industrial state in the world cannot find a means of stopping it; I just can't believe that. So all I'm saying is that while the phenomenon is described correctly by Pat, there is no reason why this sense of inferiority or retreat has to happen here.

MR. WATTENBERG: *But our dilemma is that it is happening. Now both of you seem to be pointing to a lack of passion, of conviction in the essential idea of freedom and human liberty, which at one time was the greatest of rallying cries.*

Dr. Kissinger, in a recent paper of yours, you quoted Archibald MacLeish who said that "Freedom is still the last great revolutionary cause." Is the

14

in the world, which is maintaining the perimeters of freedom and expanding them as we can, and being a self-confident and vibrant alternative to the totalitarianism around the world.'"

Now that's what we need, but instead we have a spectacle; I'm afraid it is a spectacle of a _fearful_ Senate -- fearful of giving up the Panama Canal.

Well, if you're fearful of that, think how much else you really are fearful about, in terms of what the world is really like.

Somewhere we are going to have to generate a larger confidence, not just in the satisfactory condition of our circumstances, but in the essential purpose of the country. In the end, you have to have a purpose to inform your policy. And our purpose has to be to see that free societies survive the mortmain of the Soviet Union -- a dead, dreary culture, which nonetheless has advantages in its encounter with us. It does have advantages, Henry, you've experienced them.

DR. KISSINGER: Oh, yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: _How do we go about rallying the public toward the issue of freedom that both of you have spoken so eloquently about in the past? What is the agenda? What comes first? What should we do?_

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Presidents do it, and they do it by taking a stand. And they say, "Here we are and we will not move, that's all; while I'm here, we won't move." The trouble is, the last President who did that was Lyndon Johnson, and that's the misery of it all.

What do you think, Henry, now that you have a perspective of thirteen, fourteen months out of office?

15

DR. KISSINGER: I think it cannot be done without the President.

The President has to explain, and he has to be willing to explain even if it runs counter to elite views. And he has to keep explaining it.

Secondly, the traditional establishment isn't going to help much in this effort. But I think there are leaders around this country -- in business, in labor, in law and maybe even in universities -- who are not part of a defeatist consensus and who could be mobilized, who could be given confidence and who could inspire confidence. The problem is that our country is so amorphous that no one is organizing them, and when I say organize, I mean things like discussion groups.

In the 1950s, we had discussion groups on arms control at Harvard and MIT, at a time when one thought serious thinking made a difference and before intellectuals became totally power mad and tried to affect tomorrow's policy.

MR. WATTENBERG: As you look back now over the two administrations that you served, Dr. Kissinger, do you think that those administrations did a good enough job at raising the passionate standard of freedom?

DR. KISSINGER: You have to remember what we were up against. We found 550,000 troops abroad, and the very people who had put them there were purging their souls by depriving us of any possibility of negotiating their withdrawal. Whatever position was being adopted by our government, they went three steps further, so that

16

all the Vietnamese had to do was to wait. So this country was
being torn apart. Every defense program was being challenged;
the view of American overextension was widespread.

At that time, it was difficult to maintain the defense
budget against the constant assault. It was difficult to move
out of Vietnam under some controlled plan -- which was, after all,
all we wanted; we above all did not want to tempt the Soviets into
any adventures. That was the context in which we had to operate.
And I think we managed to preserve the American honor and to main-
tain a strong foreign policy within this context. Throughout we
stood for human rights quietly. We managed to increase Jewish
emigration from the Soviet Union from four hundred a year to 35
thousand.

Then came 1974. The first time we had a chance, after
Watergate, to do the positive thing was in that year. Maybe we
were still so shell-shocked by the events that we didn't seize the
moment early enough.

But you have to remember, leaders have to conduct the policies
that the circumstances make possible for them. And at the time of
the war, the universities were rioting, every day there were people
walking around with coffins in front of the White House, people
were signing books of the war dead -- as if we were not conscious
of the fact that people were dying. In that period, there would
have been no support for <u>raising a standard of freedom</u>, as you
have suggested; our worry was that the assault on our foreign policy
would collapse <u>all</u> our commitments.

17

When we appointed Pat to the UN, we showed an understanding, at least, of what was needed. He was appointed because I read an article of his in *Commentary*, which made exactly your point. But whether the turnaround in our policy happened quickly enough or not, I'll leave that open.

MR. WATTENBERG: Dr. Kissinger, did the policy of detente -- in
declaring a relaxation of tensions -- let us lower our guard?
You're familiar with that argument.

DR. KISSINGER: I'm familiar with that argument. But if you look at the internal discussions, you will see that we *never* unilaterally gave up a weapons system during this period; we resisted -- or sought to resist -- every Communist geopolitical maneuver.

In 1972, as a result of decisions made in the 1960s, and as a result of budgets imposed on us by the Congress in the '70s, we had no strategic weapons program that could be produced for five years. We speeded up our programs after the SALT agreement in 1972. I think if you look at the record, you will find that the White House always chose the highest defense option that came over from the Pentagon. There was no illusion on our part that we could deal with the Soviet Union from a position of weakness. There was no illusion that we could win the hearts and minds of men as a substitute for a foreign policy, though we didn't reject winning the hearts and minds of men.

The problem we had was that we had to demonstrate we were not an obstacle to peace, and we also had to show that we could conduct a strong foreign policy. To mesh these two in the "civil war" atmosphere that existed proved not always easy.

18

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask this, Dr. Kissinger: you talked about a "civil war" in the country and people with coffins, and gory things like that did, in fact, go on. Yet those were, I believe, activities of the elites. But as you've said today, and as I believed then, the public was still behind the President. You know, Nixon beat McGovern, and everybody forgot that LBJ had beaten Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary without even going up there. Is it possible, with 20 20 hindsight, that the Nixon Administration perhaps overreacted to the elites and didn't rally public opinion when it was, in fact, ralliable? Was this a misperception by the administration?

DR. KISSINGER: Well, Nixon did make that speech on November 3, 1969. But Nixon did not have the grace of reaching out. It was one of his great weaknesses.

You must also recognize that when you have the elites against you, even if you have the mass of the population for you, the constant drum fire of elite opinion creates significant doubt. Washington is a curious city in the sense that the one thing you can be sure everybody reads is columnists who may not be read outside of Washington in any significant numbers. It may be that there is an element of auto-suggestion here.

But again, I would say we actually did succeed in the objectives we set for ourselves in Vietnam. We had only one objective: that we would not end the war in which 50,000 Americans had been killed by installing a communist government. This was the one demand that we could not accept; And we achieved this objective. The fact that it then failed was due more to Watergate -- which was totally unpredictable -- than to the policy.

19

The fact that South Vietnam collapsed was due to the fact that -- as a result of Watergate -- the Congress in two successive years cut aid to South Vietnam by 50 percent and that the Congress passed a law that prohibited any action in and around Vietnam to maintain the agreement.

MR. WATTENBERG: Senator Moynihan, let me ask you about your UN experience? Your position then, as I recall it, was criticized on grounds that perhaps it represented a new moral crusade and a falling into the "Wilsonian trap." In view of that experience, what ought to be our method of rallying public opinion which, as I gather from this conversation, is really the central problem in the West?

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Let me first say very explicitly that when I spoke out at the United Nations, I was carrying out the policies of the Secretary of State and the President.

We were criticized by people whose basic attitude was fearful. You cannot explain why they said "never anger a Russian," except for their fear that he would gobble us up in consequence.

I will always remember the last day of the General Assembly that I was there for. The United States, as the host country, gives the penultimate speech at the General Assembly. Then the President of the Assembly speaks.

My speech was not very friendly. As a General Assembly, I said, we hadn't done anything to distinguish ourselves. But there woulcl be another one, and our delegation would be here. And don't anybody doubt it, we'll be just as hard to live with if you're going to behave the way everyone wants to behave toward us. And then I proceeded to quote Sakharov.

Well, half an hour before I was to give the speech, Soviet

20

Ambassador Malik asked me out to come to the back and meet with him. He sat down and he said, "You have this quote from Mr. Sakharov." I said, "Yes." He said, "He is an enemy of the Soviet People." I said, "Oh, surely not. He's a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, your most distinguished scientist. He helped build your hydrogen bomb."

"He is an enemy of the Soviet people. You must not do it."

I said, "Well, I surely can't accept that thought."

And so when I got up and got to this little passage of Sakharov, up gets Malik and out he walks. I stopped for a long time and let everybody turn around and see this representative of a great powerful country incapable of hearing a paragraph from a Nobel Peace Laureate.

Now, look at the advantage we have, because we are politically and psychologically the more powerful of these two cultures. It would come with our asserting it once again.

I don't know what the dynamic is but it needs to be asserted. Right now you've got an elite which is rather *behind* the country.

I might add that a curious thing is now happening in Washington. Probably you have not had that much notice of this, but if you live up on Capitol Hill, you know. Anyway it is astonishing who is demonstrating there today: the VFW and the farmers and the anti-ERA persons. It is a very different political climate up there.

Now, if I had one fear for the future, it would be that a kind of a reaction on the right could be coming -- the kind you used to talk about, Henry. And it would come with the left in no mood to do any battle -- as if there were ashamed of what they had done.

21

DR. KISSINGER: I agree. I don't think you can attack the values of a middle-class society systematically without getting some reaction.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me come back to an earlier point. What should the President of the United States do? We've said that he's the man who's got to rally the country. But what should he actually do? Is it a public relations campaign?

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Dr. Kissinger, as a distinguished member of the opposition, here is your chance,

DR. KISSINGER: I think the President has to define the issues and stick with it -- not just put forward some proposals and then let them drop like a stone in the water -- and become an educator of the public.

Then he has to mobilize that part of the elite opinion -- or create a new elite -- that can help him get the word around the country. All of this is "do-able."

I also believe that the success of this President is really quite important for the country. We haven't had a successful two-term administration since the 50s.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Dwight Eisenhower.

DR. KISSINGER: So that anyone who is younger than 40 will probably not remember what it was like to have a more or less normal government.

But I think the President has to convey the impression that he is in command of events, not that he succeeds all the time, but that he seeks to dominate events.

For example, on the issue of communism in Europe, I do not understand how an administration dedicated to human rights can say, as was said for a year, "We can work with any party. Of course, we prefer if another one, but/they come to power, we can work with them."

22

We have to make agreements with the Soviets on a number of issues, but we also have to make clear to the public that we are facing a profound geopolitical and ideological challenge. This is especially true if there is a SALT agreement this year.

And if the President and his people do not do it, then it leads to confusion.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: It leads to fear at home of an order that makes any finally concluded SALT agreement impossible. We are going to have to go through this thing or we're going to be overwhelmed by fear.

PROCEEDINGS

MR. WATTENBURG: Gentlemen, in order to begin this discussion, we have prepared a short, preliminary statement for your consideration:

> The central question that I wish to pose to both of you today is whether there is a "crisis of spirit" in the West, and if so, what should be done about it.

> It has seemed to many observers in recent years that the core of the Western dilemma is indeed in the realm of spirit -- that we face a profound problem of public opinion, or perhaps more specifically, of elite opinion.

> Consider the situation: a collection of nations -- successful beyond belief, industrially dominant, technologically potent, responding demonstrably to time-honored human desires -- is found to be under both physical and ideological threat.

> Militarily, our primary challenger has mounted a massive build-up or arms, and even though a plurality of Americans now say for the first time that the Soviet Union -- not the United States -- is the most powerful military force in the world, our leadership seems to shirk from building new weapons systems. In various trouble spots around the world -- Angola, Ethiopia, Indochina and others -- the public seems unwilling to support strong Western initiatives and the Communist side has advanced. Intellectually, our values are under seige from what has been called "the totalitarian

_temptation._" Communism in Western Europe has gained ground if not in the popular vote, surely by many political tests. Our nations are assailed in international forums for colonial guilt, economic rape and underwater plunder.

_Challenged militarily, ideologically and economically, the nations of the West seem to respond reluctantly and with a noticeable lack of passion._ Ironically, most observers are convinced that if the Western nations would choose to muster their forces, most of these threats would diminish, in degree if not in kind. The flesh is willing, the spirit is weak.

_Dr. Kissinger, you have said that the Western world suffers from an "inner uncertainty" and that "the aspect of contemporary life that worries me most is the lack of purpose and direction in so much of the Western world."_

_Senator Moynihan you have talked of a "failure of nerve" on the part of the West._

_In the past, you gentlemen have agreed on many questions pertaining to these issues and you have disagreed on others._

_Today we would like to explore your current feelings in the context of a free-flowing conversation._

3

4

MR. WATTENBERG: Dr. Kissinger, do you agree that this failure of spirit, this crisis of spirit -- if that is the correct phrase -- is a phenomenon of elites, or is it of the public or both?

DR. KISSINGER: I think there are three phenomena.

The first is the one that Pat described, the loss of nerve of the establishment that ran foreign policy in the post-war period and then conspicuously failed in Vietnam. Failure is always painful, and therefore, there is lacking now that supporting group which gives leaders in complicated situations self-confidence by conferring on them the approbation of people of prestige.

The second phenomenon is that partly among that group and partly among the intellectuals who grew up in that period -- people of the ages, say, between 35 and 40 and 50 -- there has developed not just a disappointment with a lost war but almost a desire to lose.

When we left Vietnam, it wasn't enough that we got out. Vietnam had to be cut off from supplies. Our country was not permitted to have one vestige of possible success, lest we do it again. An attitude developed that we must not conduct any policy at all anywhere in the world that might possibly succeed. This feeling goes beyond disillusionment with the war. It turns into a self-hatred in which, as Michael Ledeen said the other day in the New Republic, the myth is that "The enemy is us."

Then a third problem going beyond Vietnam is that during the entire post-war period, there have been groups in the political establishment-- mostly among intellectuals -- who have maintained that the whole cold war and the whole international enterprise were unnecessary, that the Soviets

5

To summarize, I do not believe -- in this country, at least -- that there
is a *public* problem. In this country we have a *leadership* problem. The public
has a rather healthy perception, perhaps, but fundamentally sound.

6

it has to be liquidated on the best terms available. This is a sad event,
because no one can want <u>this</u> country to lose a war. What I have difficulty
understanding is the <u>relish</u> in that event.

When I see, for example, the head of ACTION going to a meeting where the
North Vietnamese ambassador (joining the UN and saying, "This is the proudest
day of my life. This is what we've been working for all these years, ")
"when that happens" and when he has been kept in his job on top of it --
that raises to me really profound questions about the fundamental motivation
from the beginning.

DR. KISSINGER: Exactly.

MR. WATTENBERG: I understand. But you are describing a mentality that
<u>you</u> have seen developing in our country. Let me ask if that mentality
<u>is</u> at work today in the State Department, in the White House, in the
<u>National Security Council</u>, the Department of Defense.

8

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: I'll tell you where it is at work -- and this will neither surprise nor please the former Secretary -- but that sort of mentality is at work now in our debates over Africa. We are continually told today that we *have* to do this or that, *accept* this or that very unattractive situation because if we do not, the Russians will send in the Cubans. And this *settles* an argument! That is the *end* of an argument. Well, you can see where that kind of situation will get you eventually.

DR. KISSINGER: I think there are two problems with respect to your question, Ben. One, I believe that on the foreign policy side, at the second and third levels of this Administration, many people came in who are "graduates" of this Vietnam period, some of whom, in fact, supported it at the beginning and are now working their way back by demonstrating guilt feelings and sometimes rewriting history of their own history. They have some convictions that if America is not to be punished for its presumption, then at least we must be sure that the country is never presumptuous enough to undertake any more enterprises.

Now, with respect to the point that Pat made, yes, the argument is made that, if we don't do this or that, the Cubans will come in. I would say there will be no constructive policy in Africa until we make it clear that, as I understand it is settled, it will not be tolerated that the Cubans come in. After that point is established, we can have some sensible discussions. But if we are forever blackmailed by the Cubans -- a country of 8 million off our shores -- no constructive policy is possible.

9

DR. KISSINGER: I think there are a number of forces at work. One is the tendency to escape current dilemmas by making the most favorable assumption about trends. This temptation is overwhelming in middle-class societies, and it is one reason why the communist challenge has been interpreted in the most benign fashion in every decade in the existence of communism. It is not true that there was over a period where the communists were considered an overwhelming threat, except for a very brief period after the Korean War.

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DR. KISSINGER: You see, I think what the public wants from its government is a solution of its problems. The public's perception of the solution may be very nebulous, and the public judges its leaders by the results, not by the correspondence of its policies to every fad.

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I can imagine what you, Henry, would think about what kind of a negotiation you could get in a situation where the other side had only to wait 2,000 days and they would be where they wanted to get. You just have to be able to say to them, "Now look, you better deal with us now, or we will go back and raise such hell, we will double the budget, we will quadruple the budget; we can outspend you into bankruptcy and we'll still be rich, and so you might as well negotiate with us." If you psychologically discarded that bargaining technique, then, in fact, you are a little disarmed.

I think this assumption about Soviet power is becoming an objective reality, and if it does, it'll begin to show up in ways that will baffle us because we have never, as a people, had the experience of being militarily inferior to anybody since about 1830. I should think Henry Clay would be the last man who would even give any thought to the idea.

MR. WATTENBERG: We are running in the next issue of Public Opinion magazine the first poll that I have ever seen that shows a plurality of the American people believing that the Soviet Union is stronger than the United States militarily.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: You mentioned that in your opening statement, and I was going to ask where you got that.

MR. WATTENBERG: It's a new poll. (See page of this issue of Public Opinion for the results of the poll.)

DR. KISSINGER: I think one ought to get this question of Soviet strength into a proper perspective. The Soviets have a stagnant system; they have not solved the problem of the modern economy and they cannot possibly solve it. We have problems with the economy, but we know ways of dealing with it, and our problems

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them.

whatever challenge they pose.

In every confrontation, we could have had the upper hand. We had them defeated in Angola, and we defeated ourselves. I don't know what the possibilities were in Ethiopia. I cannot believe that a country of eight million can conduct a global policy, and the greatest industrial state in the world cannot find a means of stopping them. I just can't believe that. So all I'm saying is that while the phenomenon is described correctly by Pat, there is no reason why this sense of inferiority or retreat has to happen here.

MR. WATTENBERG: But our dilemma is that it is happening. Now both of you seem to be pointing to a lack of passion, of conviction in the essential idea of freedom and human liberty, which at one time was the greatest of rallying cries.

problem that the elites are unable to communicate to the voters in Western societies that freedom is still a cause of passion and ardor?

DR. KISSINGER: One other thing is missing. In addition to a belief in freedom, you must have a geopolitical theory or view. You have to know how to go from your values to your security, your world structure, or whatever it is you are aiming for. You cannot simply do it in a fit of moral enthusiasm.

Without the enthusiasm you will not have the fortitude to do what is necessary. But without some conception of what security is, of what it is that you cannot permit and what it is you are to try for, you really will be constantly confronted with a series of confusing situations through which you cannot find your way.

And there we come back to our tradition of isolationism and the reluctance of our elites. Even in the great periods of the Marshall Plan and so forth, we were institution-building, we were applying the New Deal globally. We were not thinking of a world structure in which there are certain things that had to be resisted no matter how they happen. And this, I think, is a big lack, if we want to be resistant to all manner of foreign policies.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: I could point to a specific here of the Panama Canal treaties. Let me start by saying that President Carter has taken the issue of human rights and made it a central element in his foreign policy -- for which all praise. However, it too often comes out as a doctrine directed against Nicaragua...

DR. KISSINGER: (nodding) Against weak allies.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Against weak allies.

But now if ever there was a situation where you would want a confident elite to be able to come down to the United States Senate and say, "Look, let's sign these Panama Canal treaties. All right? This is a small country; it's been a good friend. The Canal is perhaps a wasting asset, but it's the right thing to do. And we the people who spend most of our time thinking about these matters, say to you, 'Let's do this, so we can get on with our real business'

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Now that's what we need, but instead we have a spectacle; I'm afraid it is a spectacle of a *fearful* Senate -- fearful of giving up the Panama Canal.

DR. KISSINGER: Oh, yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: *How do we go about rallying the public toward the issue of freedom that both of you have spoken so eloquently about in the past? What is the agenda? What comes first? What should we do?*

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In 1972, as a result of decisions made in the 1960s, and as a result of budgets imposed on us by the Congress in the '70s, we had no strategic weapons program that could be produced for five years. We speeded [all of this up] after the SALT agreement in 1972. I think if you look at the record, you will find that the White House always chose the highest defense option that came over from the Pentagon. There was no illusion on our part that we could deal with the Soviet Union from a position of weakness. There was no illusion that we could win the hearts and minds of men as a substitute for a foreign policy, though we didn't reject winning the hearts and minds of men.

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know, Nixon beat McGovern, everybody forgot that LBJ had beaten Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary without even going up there. Is it possible, with 20 20 hindsight, that the Nixon Administration perhaps overreacted to the elites and didn't rally public opinion when it was, in fact, ralliable? Was this a misperception by the administration?

DR. KISSINGER: Well, Nixon did make that speech on November 9. But Nixon did not have the grace of reaching out. It was one of his great weaknesses.

You must also recognize that when you have the elites against you, even if you have the mass of the population for you, the constant drum fire of elite opinion creates significant doubt. Washington is a curious city in the sense that the one thing you can be sure everybody reads is columnists who may not be read by ~~anybody~~ outside of Washington in any significant numbers. It may be that there is an element of auto-suggestion here.

But again, I would say we actually did succeed in the objectives we set for ourselves in Vietnam. We had only one objective: that we would not end the war in which 50,000 Americans had been killed by installing a communist government. And we achieved this objective. The fact that it then failed was due more to Watergate -- which was totally unpredictable -- than to the policy.

The fact that Vietnam collapsed was due to the fact that -- as a result of Watergate -- the Congress in two successive years cut aid to Vietnam by 50 percent/ that the Congress passed a law that prohibited any military action in and around Vietnam to sustain the agreement.

Under those conditions, you couldn't maintain the agreement, and you had the weakening of executive authority that resulted from Watergate without which these decisions wouldn't have been taken.

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Senator Moynihan

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask about your UN experience? Your position then, as I recall it, was criticized on the grounds that perhaps it represented a new moral crusade and a falling into the "Wilsonian trap." In view of that experience, what ought to be our method of rallying public opinion which, as I gather from this conversation, is really the central problem in the West?

My speech was not very friendly. As a General Assembly, I said, we hadn't done anything to distinguish ourselves. But there would be another one, and our delegation would be here. And don't anybody doubt it, we'll be just as hard to live with if you're going to behave the way everyone wants to behave toward us. And then I preoceeded to quote Sakharov.

Well, half an hour before I was to give the speech, Soviet Ambassador Malik asked me out to come to the back and meet with him. He sat down and he said, "You have thie quote from Mr. Sakharov." I said, "Yes." He said, "He is an enemy of the Soviet People." I said, "Oh, surely not. He's a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, your most distinguished scientist. He helped build your hydrogen bomb."

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Now, if I had one fear for the future, it would be that a kind of a reaction on the right could be coming -- the kind you used to talk about, Henry. And it would come with the left in no mood to do any battle -- as if they were ashamed of what they had done.

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Dr. Kissinger, as a distinguished member of the opposition, here is your chance.

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DR. KISSINGER: I was going to say he is your President. (Laughter.)

Then he has to mobilize that part of elite opinion -- or create a new elite -- that can help him get the word around the country. Incidentally, all of this is "do-able."

For example, on the issue of communism in Europe, I do not understand how an administration dedicated to human rights can say, as was said for a year, "We can work with any party. Of course, we prefer another one, but they come to power, we can work with them."

No, we can't work with them as part of NATO. It cannot be. We may have to do something when they get into office. I think it ought to be clearly understood where we stand on those issues.

I think we have to make agreements with the Soviets on a number of issues, but we also have to make clear to the public, especially if there is a SALT agreement this year, that we are facing a profound geopolitical and ideological challenge.

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## PROCEEDINGS

DR. WATTENBERG: Pat, perhaps you could begin. You have spoken of a failure of nerve in the past. Do you still see a failure of nerve and has it affected our foreign policy?

SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Oh, very much more than when I first sensed it, and there was no great perception. You had the enormous failure of Vietnam, which was an enterprise begun by an extraordinarily confident and powerful foreign policy establishment, a bi-partisan establishment, which had run affairs for a quarter century, had done brilliant with, perhaps, diminishing degrees of success but without any failure.

Alone came this event. It failed, and then something much more important than that happened, that the policy just failed, but the kind of social base on which that elite rested, turned against its own policies; I mean, to wit: the great symbolic moment, at least in my thought, I was at the Kennedy Institute of Politics one evening in 1966 when Robert McNamara came -- no, I have to correct that; it was fall of '67 -- forgive me again, the fall of 1966, Robert McNamara came up to speak to the Institute of Politics, and suddenly found himself, his car, surrounded by students protesting him.

Everybody dazed and really understanding that something had happened but of the most unexpected kind and as yet

METROPOLITAN REPORTING SERVICE, INC.

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1 to them, to all of us involved, not understood, because
2 McNamara was President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense.

3 He symbolized all those things. He was coming to
4 an Institute of Politics, Kennedy's university, his own
5 graduate school, to talk about -- they seemed to suddenly
6 find that very basic turned. That's has to be an unnerving
7 experience, and it was.

8 Just then to say one other thing, however, most
9 elites that lose wars lose their heads in the process. I
10 mean, there has been much more of an internal change. In an
11 odd way, if all the people involved had lost their work,
12 they wouldn't now be still in Washington doing what I -- I
13 have this joke which Henry may or may not appreciate of the
14 view of the people who sort of started the war and ran it
15 who say, "I was only giving orders." (Laughter.)
16 DR. WATTENBERG: Dr. Kissinger, do you agree that this
17 failure of spirit, this crisis of spirit, if that is the
18 correct word, is a phenomenon of elites or is it of the
19 public or both?

20 SECRETARY KISSINGER: I think there are three phenomenon. One,
21 the one that Pat described, the lose of nerve of the establish-
22 ment that ran foreign policy in the post-war period, and then
23 conspicuously failed in Vietnam.

24 Now, you have -- failure is always painful, and
25 therefore, there is lacking now that supporting group which

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The second phenomenon is that beyond the disappointment of losing there has developed partly among that group and partly among the intellectuals who grew up in that period, that is, the people between 30 and 40 -- between 35 and 40 and 50, say, not just a disappointment with a lost war, but almost a desire to lose.

When we got out of Vietnam, it wasn't enough that we got out. Vietnam had to be cut off from supplies. There was -- one was not permitted to -- there was not permitted to be a vested of possible success, lest we do it again.

And therefore, we must not conduct any policy at all anywhere in the world that might possibly succeed, and this goes beyond disillusionment with the war. It turns into a self-hatred in which, as Michael Ledeen said the other day in the New Republic, the myth is the enemy is us.

Then the third problem that goes beyond Vietnam is that, during the entire post-war period, there have been groups in the political establishment, and mostly among intellectuals, that maintain that the whole cold war and the whole international enterprise was unnecessary, that the Soviets were misunderstood, that the changes had already taken place, that there is a hardline group in the Kremlin that was opposing a softline group.