Last to the narcoleptic blandness of
*Eight Is Enough*. Along with their
noble-hillbilly cousins, these shows go
on their sentimental ways as if Robert
Altman had never made *A Wedding*.
Speaking of sacraments, the religious
talk shows are reaching viewers whose
names are legion. Observed with the
proper distance, they offer the most
compelling documentary on the air to-
day. They are, quite simply, a phenome-
non, and NBC's sleeper hit, *Real People*,
has been the first to cash in, albeit in a
secular vein.

Documentary (60 Minutes, Real People) has grown ominously successful, evidence perhaps of the fact that sitcoms can no longer obliterate an ever colder reality. Yes (the ritual yes) there are good shows on the air. *Dieppe 1942*, *Crossbar* and *The Music of Man* are reasons enough not to begrudge the $22 we each contribute annually to the CBC. Viewers with access to the American PBS stations or TV Ontario picked up the most exciting telecast of the season, a *Live From the Met* production of the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht opera *Mahagonny*, with our very own Teresa Stratas starring sultrily.

But to beat the drum for such ob-
viously high-minded shows is to fall
into that tiresome rhetoric that con-
fuses didacticism with quality. It's the
same attitude that causes awards and
mealy-mouthed praise to be lavished on
the likes of *Lou Grant*, a drama with the
slackest of mainsprings. What's being
saluted is the principled, moderate lib-
eralism that informs the show, leav-
ened with a touch of nostalgia for Mary
Richards' old boss, even now that he
sports tennis whites, sips white wine
and smiles like a jaded owl. The simple
truth is that what television does best—
blithe, comfortable entertainment—it
is doing abominably.

books

By Barbara Amiel

From an economic and ecological
perspective, 1979 was a book year
of unparalleled devastation. Price
tags of $10 to $20 for hardbound books
were as common as the $5.95 price tags
of less than a dozen years ago. The ex-
traordinary long-windedness of many
authors produced books that required
the rape and pillage of at least one vir-
gin forest to fill their 1,000-plus pages.
Still, when done well a book is the best
bargain around. For $15 a reader can

Mavis Gallant proved the
wisdom of buying Canadian;
TV was oatmeal porridge
and The Associates drowned

Mavis Gallant

From The
Fifteenth
District

A Novella
and Eight Short
Stories

buy years of entertainment and the en-
tree to new worlds. The following
roundup suggests a few of the books
that made 1979 one of the best years in a
long time.

**Nonfiction:** For years now writers have been perfecting the technique of combining the freedom and depth of fiction with the alluring immediacy and reality of the documentary. By 1979 writers of nonfiction had achieved true-fact books that not only read like novels but ranged much beyond the traditional confines of mere facts. In this genre we have Norman Mailer's 1,056-page *The Executioner's Song*, which told the story of executed murderer Gary Gilmore, and Tom Wolfe's *The Right Stuff*, a brilliant account of life among American astronauts which cast a merciless eye on American mores and manners. Henry Kissinger's *White House Years* revealed an elegance of style and wit not evidenced in the prose of his secretary-of-state years.

**Fiction:** Novelists achieved the same effect as nonfiction writers by mixing up real-life events and characters with the fictional. In 1979, a year in which all the best novelists seemed to have new books, William Styron's compelling *Sophie's Choice* combined an account of Auschwitz and its commandant, Höss, with the life of fictional heroine Sophie. Other novelists relied on a more-than-usually strong autobiographical component. The results were striking, from Phillip Roth's short novel *The Ghost Writer* to Bernard Malamud's superb *Dubin's Lives*. John Updike satirized Third World politics in *The Coup* and Joseph Heller took Washington hype to the inevitable reductio ad absurdum in *Good as Gold*. But for my money Canadians had the best-written books of the year. Mavis Gallant's *From the Fifteenth District* was her usual superb writing—if short on plot—with fabulous glimpses of the rich, not-so-rich and wish-we-were set. Margaret Atwood gave us *Life Before Man* and Gabrielle Roy delighted readers with touching moments in *Children of My Heart*.

**Poetry:** Dennis Lee has suffered the fate of all serious writers with an occasional mad streak in them: he is best known for his children's poems. Lee's forte has always been his adult poetry and with his latest volume, *The Gods*, he has matured into an exceptionally fine poet. Also one of the year's best is Ceylonese-born Michael Ondaatje's latest book *There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do*. Canadians may not be thought of as a very poetic people, but from the point of view of quality it has always been poetry that has dominated the Canadian literary scene—1979 is no exception. ✧

MACLEAN'S/DECEMBER 31, 1979

43

Don't
become
a missing
person

If you're moving,
let everyone know
your new address
and Postal Code.

The Easy Way!

Move your mail with you by fol-
lowing these easy steps:

1. Start by calling or visiting your local post office to get the important part of your new address... YOUR NEW POSTAL CODE. Your old Postal Code stays with your old address.

And the best time to do this is as
soon as you know your new
address.

2. Use Change of Address Announcement Cards to let friends, relatives, magazines, credit accounts, etc. know your new address, INCLUDING POSTAL CODE. ANNOUNCEMENT CARDS ARE AVAILABLE FREE of charge at your post office. Just ask for as many as you need... the earlier the better.

Ideas

Wit and law
expand to
fill the void

Eyebrows beetling benignly over a glass of Pimms No. 1 in a London hotel bar, Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson shook with quiet mirth as he recalled how, 22 years ago with the appearance of *Parkinson's Law*, he received a stream of letters—apprehensive or just plain curious—from businessmen asking how he came to know so much about their organizations. Parkinson, a Second World War staff officer and history professor, had, in fact, no direct business experience when he laid down his famous aphorism: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." His observation, which has become part of the language and an all-too-manifest reality in business, government and civil services around the world, was based on his experience in the army where administrative units reproduced like amoebas.

He followed up his successful 1957
publication with three other volumes of

barbed wisdom including such memora-
ble truisms as “expenditure rises to
meet income” (the second law), “the
time spent on any item of an agenda
will be in inverse proportion to the sum
involved” (the law of triviality) and “a
committee is organic rather than me-
chanical in nature; it is not a structure
but a plant” (first principle of “comitol-
ogy”). Now their sharp essence has been
distilled into his new book called simply
*The Law* (available in Canada this
spring) and a new and comprehensive
law: “Action expands to fill the void
created by human failure.” Ineptitude
and decay—whether in a business or a
country—create a vacuum, he says, into
which stronger forces are inevitably
drawn.

But his prime target remains the pub-
lic service. The first book homed in mer-
cially on the British Colonial Office as
a supreme example of officialdom pro-
liferating in inverse ratio to the amount
of work to be done. In 1954, with the
empire palpably dwindling, the Colonial
Office employed 4½ times more people
than in 1935. The new book cites the
devastating contrast between the Brit-
ish Admiralty of 1914, when 4,366 offi-
cials could administer the largest navy
in the world, and that of 1967, by which
time "over 33,000 civil servants are
barely sufficient to administer the navy
we no longer possess."

Ever one to offer advice, Parkinson
has a word for governments seeking to
cut expenditures: "It's very simple. Do
it through one permanent undersecre-
tary, and tell him that next year the
amount of money available will be 10
per cent less and the following year 10
per cent less again . . . and if they over-
spend, it'll be deducted from salaries."
Things can be made to go right, he says.
He learned the secret formula from a
guards officer on the parade ground:
"There is no excuse for anything."

Carol Kennedy

Parkinson: filling the vacuum of failure

BILL FRAMPTON

BOENZI/NYT PICTURES

44

[L]

yers chose to offer no defence at his tri-
al. This underlines what is common
knowledge among lawyers, judges and
interested laymen—though most will
publicly deny it—that half the legal
profession exhibits not varying degrees
of competence but varying degrees of
incompetence. Gilmore's case was also
compounded by the dreadful public de-
fender system which, as Gilmore him-
self pointed out, meant his defence
counsel was paid by the same state that
paid his prosecutors. If nothing else,
Gilmore's trial and conviction illustrate
how distorted justice becomes under a
scheme that all but destroys the ad-
versary system.

In the end what fascinates most is the
selling of Gary Gilmore—featuring vul-
tures of all networks. The old question
of whether the press reports or creates
the news is never more relevant than in
Gilmore's case, where he often made
interviews and photos conditional on
actions he wished the press to take on
his behalf. Still, Mailer's account rein-
forces the view that it is precisely be-
cause the media does create some events
that its freedom is ultimately a good
thing. Justice would not even be pur-
sued in certain important instances
were it not for the hope that the fight
would be publicized.

There is nothing heroic about Gil-
more. What is heroic is Mailer's own
backbreaking skill at rendering so vast
an amount of material into so accessible
and fascinating a form. The essential
things about life are often revealed in
its shabby edges and even an account of
petty evil fascinates when crafted by a
fine writer. You can so make a silk
purse out of a sow's ear. Barbara Amiel

Recollections
of rose-colored
revisionism

WHITE HOUSE YEARS

by Henry Kissinger

(McClelland and Stewart, $25)

"The capacity to admire others," admits Henry Kissinger well into his 1,476-page-long *White House Years*, "is not my most fully developed trait." Fortunately, not only does the former secretary of state to President Richard Nixon underestimate that capacity, he shows other talents—even literary—as well. In this work, covering Kissinger's first four years in the White House, ending with the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement in January, 1973, his view of world diplomacy is laid bare. Intricate detail and insightful anecdote perform a forced march through a rigorous daily schedule, creating memoirs that are at once exhaustive, exhausting and exhilarating. And all the while, Super-K car-

Direct Dial Car Phones
Have Finally Come of Age

Perhaps you've been hesitating about a car
phone. Worrying about cost. Concerned
about accessibility—busy channels,
mobile operators, all those hassles.

Now you can relax.

Direct dial car phones are not just *here*,
they're better and easier to use than ever
before.

An AMTS Direct Dial car phone gives
you

• touch tone dialing (no operator)

• compact Contempra® styling

• 10-memory feature to store fre-
quently dialed numbers

• compatibility with all direct dial sys-
tems on UHF frequency anywhere in North America

• complete privacy- no operator to go through

• easy-to-read L.E.D. display of number dialed

• direct access from regular phone to your car • choice of five colors

Best of all, AMTS can offer all this at low monthly prices on lease-
to-purchase or outright purchase plans. You *must* see this product to believe it,
so call us for no-obligation demonstration now!

amts

In Hamilton call:

Mr. B. Pasis 527-0551

*Contempra is the Registered Trade Mark of Northern Telecom Canada Ltd.

AMTS MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS INC.

1300 Bay Street, Suite 300,
Toronto, Ontario M5R 3K8

Phone: (416) 967-1776

A Canadian
Church Choir
Competition

Maclean-Hunter Cable TV Limited announces the third annual CANADIAN CHURCH CHOIR COMPETITION, designed to foster and encourage musical talent across Canada.

A total of $12,000.00 in prizes will be awarded to one Junior, three Senior and five Regional Honourable Mention categories. The Competition is open to all religious denominations. Each competing Choir is required to submit a videotape of their performance for judging by an independent panel of expert adjudicators.

Brochures containing full details and rules of the Competition are
available directly from:

C/O Maclean-Hunter Cable TV Limited
27 Fasken Drive
Rexdale, Ontario M9W 1K7

MACLEAN'S/DECEMBER 24, 1979

43

WE'RE LOOKING
FOR
UNIVERSITY
STUDENTS
WHO DON'T
HAVE
MUCH TIME

We know how demanding university is. Hard work just to make the grade. Not much time to earn any real money. And not much opportunity even if you find the time.

Enter Maclean-Hunter with Magazines on Campus. You earn commissions by offering their publications to fellow students at special campus rates. No hard sell. No long hours. Just let the people know Maclean-Hunter is around with lots of good reading.

Magazines like Maclean's, Canada's newsmagazine. A great source of information for students. The latest events in politics, business, science, sports, entertainment and the arts, with a uniquely Canadian slant.

If you become our campus rep, you'll earn our daily bread by distributing Student Discount cards around campus. The more you distribute, the more subscription sales, the better your commission cheque.

When cards are returned we issue a cheque for all paid subscriptions entered under your code number. Presto. You're in the money. In no time at all.

Interested? call us collect: (416) 596-5499 or write us at:
Magazines on Campus
Maclean-Hunter Limited
481 University Avenue
Toronto M5W 1A7

Kissinger: cases of selective amnesia

ries the bureaucratic burden of his state department like some cumbersome backpack on a high-flying mission.

For democracy, Kissinger has long ago concluded, is a confining place to conduct the ego-building negotiations for which he would like to remain famous. He approvingly quotes, for example, former United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld: "The most dangerous of all moral dilemmas: when we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth to be victorious." Even with the difficulties of democracy the successes abound: the Jordan crisis, the secret trip to Peking, Paris peace negotiations, Nixon in Moscow. They are successes, however, viewed from behind the spectacles of this media manipulator and world visionary.

Recollections of rose-colored revisionism: "The ultimate victims of our domestic anguish," he says, "were the gentle people of Cambodia." An incredible position after the unannounced offensive against sanctuaries in Cambodia when Hanoi needed to be convinced that the continuation of war was worse than settlement. Anything for the so-called "peace with honor" that was Kissinger's job to deliver to Nixon.

But if there is selective amnesia on some topics, there is clear recall on his boss. "Sooner or later," sighs Kissinger, "every president since Roosevelt has become convinced that he should take a personal hand in East-West relations through face-to-face meetings with the Soviet leaders." Not Nixon's forte, says Kissinger. He does allow Nixon "a great sense of timing; he instinctively knew when the moment for decision had arrived." But there was petty behavior, too, when Nixon punished Kissinger with poor seating locations for a day's events after Kissinger had exceeded his authority and cancelled a Sixth Fleet firepower display that Nixon had particularly wanted to see.

Kissinger is wise enough to avoid taking himself too seriously. He reports a conversation with Charles de Gaulle in which he was reduced to childish rattle. And Jordan's King Hussein had no idea how pliable the fear-stricken Kissinger was during a low-flying helicopter ride with Hussein at the controls. But he is at his best describing others, not himself. Some examples: the recently hanged Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was "elegant, eloquent [and] not above playing a demagogic anti-American tune when it served his domestic purposes"; Chairman Mao Tse-tung, who exuded "in almost tangible form the overwhelming drive to prevail"; Chou En-lai, who filled a room with "his air of controlled tension, steely discipline, and self-control, as if he were a coiled spring"; assassinated Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who "considered it a success to keep... awake."

And there's the magic word: "I." Of the 65 photographs selected to accompany the text, Kissinger appears in 61. The stage is large, but the player is larger. All the time, of course, he comes equipped with his historic view: "If history teaches us anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint." And little of that without Kissinger, he would have the world believe. For while this first of two volumes concludes with Vietnam peace, it is Kissinger's own peace that fills the final sentence: "I was at peace with myself, neither elated nor sad." He almost succeeds in making the world smaller than life. Almost, but not quite. And in that failure is the book's success. Roderick McQueen

## MACLEAN'S BEST-SELLER LIST

### FICTION

1. Life Before Man, Atwood (1)

2. The Devil's Alternative, Forsyth (2)

3. Ballis, Rohmer (4)

4. The Last Enchantment, Stewart (3)

5. Jailbird, Vonnegut (5)

6. Smiley's People, Le Carré (9)

7. The Matarese Circle, Ludlum (6)

8. The Dead Zone, King

9. Memories of Another Day, Robbins

10. The Establishment, Fast

### NONFICTION

1. And No Birds Sang, Mowat (1)

2. The Blue-Eyed Shelks, Foster (2)

3. The Art of Emily Carr, Shadbolt

4. Clementine Churchill, Soames (3)

5. Aunt Erma's Cope Book, Bombeck (5)

6. Who Killed Lynne Harper?, Truscott/Trent (9)

7. How to Invest Your Money and Profit From Inflation, Shulman (4)

8. Hurricane Hazel, Kennedy (10)

9. James Herriot's Yorkshire, Herriot (6)

10. White House Years, Kissinger (7)

( ) Position last week

44

Kissinger the raconteur

PETER JAY

[L.C.]

HENRY KISSINGER has manifestly been the most influential world statesman of the 1970s. His two and a half years out of office writing this account* of the foreign policy issues, personalities and operations of President Nixon's first term, when Kissinger served in the White House as Adviser on National Security, are by no means the least valuable of the contributions he has made to the theory of foreign affairs and the practice of diplomacy.

For a man who played a central part in so many of the key global events of the era to have such a highly developed habit of explicit thought, not only about the day-to-day tactics and aims of diplomacy, but also about the conceptual framework and the strategic purposes of what he did, is as rare as it is beneficial to students of the period and of the broader nature of statecraft in the late twentieth century. The book, indeed, is so superbly written that, despite its enormous bulk (1521 pages), the reader can hardly put it down and is left constantly with the feeling that the treatment has, if anything, been too racy, too anecdotal and too compressed to be in any way definitive. At times its very lightness makes it indigestible to the heedless glutton.

Anyone who has served in government will heartily concur with Kissinger's observation that 'one of the paradoxes of the age of the memorandum and the Xerox machine, of proliferating bureaucracies and compulsive record-keeping, is that the writing of history may have become nearly impossible'. Yet, if it is possible to escape that paradox, Kissinger has done so in the only sensible direction. He has written a fluent and consecutive narrative, firmly subordinating quotations from the written record to the essential minimum. The tribute in Kissinger's foreword to Harold Evans' 'brilliant editorial eye' and to 'what skilled and intelligent editing can contribute in organisation and to lightening prose', is obviously merited in full measure.

Kissinger would not be the towering figure that he is were he not condemned now and for a long time to be surrounded by controversy. His congenital sensitivity to it—whether because his pride will not tolerate criticism or, as I find more plausible, because the academic and the intellectual in him cannot let him leave a rebuttable attack unanswered merely on the grounds that it is not important—is a flaw, perhaps an attractive one, in so otherwise realistic a statesman. The don is constantly visible behind the mask of the shrewd operator.

Each reader will choose his own controversy. For those who have made the arguments over the Vietnam war a life-work, the book will provide limitless opportunities for raking over those coals. For it starts from the new Nixon administration's determination to end the war and ends with the Christmas bombing and the final peace agreement in January, 1973. Kissinger is adamant throughout that Nixon's and his aim was a genuine peace which would enable South Vietnam to survive as an independent country without American support. He rejects repeatedly the notion that he was merely seeking a 'decent interval' between American withdrawal and the collapse of Saigon and claims that, but for Watergate, the peace he finally negotiated would have enabled South Vietnam to survive.

I am prompted to wonder how much of this is hindsight by my clear recollection of a conversation with the late Stewart Alsop in the Spring of 1969. Alsop had just written a forceful column in *Newsweek* based on a private interview with the new President, the first which Nixon had given to any journalist since his in-

auguration. In his column Alsop portrayed Nixon as recalling Churchill's defiant statement that he had not become the King's first minister to preside over the destruction of the British Empire. Nixon's attitude to Vietnam was portrayed as being equally determined.

I pressed Alsop about why he had gone out of his way to put his own high reputation on the line by stating so emphatically, as he had, that he believed Nixon. It seemed so obvious that the new administration's aim—and the us's imperative need—was to get out of Vietnam by almost any means. Was it because Alsop saw it as his patriotic duty to corroborate the credibility of a President engaged in extremely difficult foreign negotiations or because he really believed that Nixon was that determined to win in Vietnam? And what did 'win' mean anyway? Alsop then explained that he certainly believed what he had written, but that to Nixon 'win' meant ending the war in a way which would prevent a right-wing backlash, probably led by George Wallace, and a McCarthy-style witch-hunt in the us, a possibility which Alsop took extremely seriously. And that, he concluded, means that Nixon thinks he has to ensure a decent interval of at least two years between American withdrawal and the fall of Saigon.

Such second-hand and hearsay evidence cannot, of course, be set against Kissinger's categorical account; but it remained in my mind ever after, seeming to explain very effectively almost everything that subsequently happened. It certainly prefigured with uncanny precision the eventual outcome, although it always struck me as exceptionally dumb of Hanoi not to have seized the countless earlier opportunities they were offered for starting the two-year clock.

It will, however, be a great pity if the book is seen mainly or exclusively as an occasion for rehashing the Vietnam debate. It will be a waste, too, if attention focuses just on the vivid portraits of leading personalities, which are perceptive if somewhat over-generous, and the hilarious anecdotes that have inevitably caught the eye of the serialisation editors. The above list, unlike the extracts, addresses the central conceptual and practical issues of the aims and methods of American foreign policy in the transformed world of the 1970s.

In the long view of history Kissinger may be seen to have failed, despite all his negotiating triumphs. If so, it will be because of the gulf between the conception of a new American foreign policy which he so brilliantly advocated in 1968 and the actual state of America's relations with most of the rest of the world which he bequeathed to the Carter administration. It has been struggling ever since to implement the change of stance that Kissinger urged so eloquently before the fateful 'phone call came from Nixon's transitional headquarters in December, 1968.

We know exactly what Kissinger thought in 1968 because he wrote it all in a seminal article, *Central Issues of American Foreign Policy*, in the Brookings Institution volume *Agenda for the Nation* published to coincide with the election that year. Nor has he sought to rewrite history in the present volume, since the article turns up again in almost identical wording as much of the key chapter (III *The Convictions of an Apprentice Statesman*), though rationing itself to only two direct quotations, self-plagiarisation being probably venial.

What Kissinger then understood was the eventual bankruptcy of a us geopolitical strategy of mere containment of communism. For it supplied the us with no positive political appeal in the overwhelming majority of areas where us-Soviet competition was played out, not directly and bilaterally, but across the terrain of other countries whose behaviour and responses would be determined by their own political and economic preoccupations rather

HENRY KISSINGER

*The White House Years

1521PP ILLUS WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON/MICHAEL JOSEPH £14.95

20

than by any matching enthusiasm for the ideological or geo-
political concerns of the military superpowers. He wrote in 1968:

The age of the superpowers . . . is nearing its end. The
current international environment is in turmoil because
its essential elements are all in flux simultaneously . . .

Our deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity
of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multi-
polarity even though overwhelming military strength will
remain with the two superpowers . . .

Atlantic relations, for all their seeming normalcy, thus
face a profound crisis . . . the present structure en-
courages American unilateralism and European irrespon-
sibility . . . If the United States remains the trustee of
every non-communist area, it will exhaust its psycho-
logical resources . . . Political multipolarity, while diffi-
cult to get used to, is the precondition of a new period
of creativity . . .

The forces unleashed in the emergence of so many
new states may well affect the moral balance of the
world—the convictions which form the structure for the
world of tomorrow. This adds a new dimension to the
problem of multipolarity . . .

The problem of political legitimacy is the key to
political stability in regions containing two-thirds of the
world's population . . . Nor should we define the problem
as how to prevent the spread of communism. Our goal
should be to build a moral consensus which can make
a pluralistic world creative rather than destructive.
Irrelevance to one of the great revolutions of our time
will mean that we will ultimately be engulfed by it.

A clearer understanding of America's interests and the
requirements of equilibrium can give perspective to our
idealismand lead to humane and moderate objectives,
especially in relation to political and social change. Thus
our conception of world order must have deeper pur-
poses than stability, but greater restraints on our be-
haviour than would result if it were approached only in
a fit of enthusiasm.

In other words, America must stop thinking that 'good geo-
politics' (preventing the spread of communism) is 'good region-
alism' (how to get on with a hundred-odd independent states).
It must start realising that good regionalism is good geopolitics
(ie the way to outflank the Russians is to build stronger, more
lasting and more legitimate multipolar relations based on regional
and local realities).

If Kissinger were a lesser man or if he had issued a less per-
ceptive and ambitious manifesto, it would indeed be unjust to
criticise one who achieved so much in propping up day-to-day
peace and stability for not having transformed the basis of
America's relations with the rest of the world. One man can only
do so much. But Kissinger saw the need so clearly and preferred
above all to deal in the conceptual and the strategic. Yet he
never managed to shift American policy to 'a deeper purpose than
stability', 'to build a moral consensus', at home even less than
abroad, to resolve the smouldering 'crisis' of Atlantic relations,
'to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world', to go beyond being
'trustee of every noncommunist area', to replenish the us'
'psychological resources' or to align us diplomacy with 'humane
and moderate objectives, especially in relation to political and
social change'.

The Carter administration has tried hard to put some flesh on
these bare bones through their new emphasis on 'human rights'
(criticised by Kissinger), through Andy Young's more mature
relationship with sovereign African nations, through Brzezinski's
dynamic concept of a 'framework for change' as a more realistic
and optimistic formula for world order than Kissinger's emphasis
on equilibrium and through Vance's masterful restraint in re-
acting to shocks in Indonesia, the Persian Gulf, the Horn of
Africa, Southern Africa and Central and South America.

Yet, the Havana conference of the nonaligned states in
September, 1979, for all of its bogus theatre and shameless cant,
showed that 'the moral balance of the world' had still not tilted
significantly from the old communist rationalisation of political
change to any creative and serviceable ideal emanating from the

us or the West.

[L](C)

So, as Kissinger well explains in the Brookings article
and again in the book, the Russians still bat on the
better wicket in their competition with the us: 'By an
historical jcke, a materialistic philosophy that has solved
no country's economic problems has spread because of its moral
claims, while the West, professing an idealistic philosophy, has
bemused itself with economic and technical remedies largely
irrelevant to the underlying political and spiritual problem',
namely that 'Marxism has proved attractive to developing nations
not because of the economic theory on which it prides itself but
because it has supplied an answer to the political problem of
legitimacy and authority', while 'democracy has less appeal, not
because of the West's sins but because leaders in most developing
countries did not undergo the risks of the anti-colonial struggle
in order to make themselves dispensable' (p 69).

It is an equal, if less global, irony of history that at the end of
the first half of Kissinger's high service (so far) to his country
(and at the end of the present volume), as he sat waiting for
Nixon to broadcast the news of the final Vietnam settlement and
as the Watergate timebomb was already ticking inaudibly but
inexorably away, Kissinger's own ruminations were all of new
opportunities and new optimism for tackling this broader agenda
of America's relations with the world:

We stood, I fervently hoped, at the threshold of a period
of national reconciliation that would be given impetus by
the unique opportunity for creativity I saw ahead.
Perhaps America had found the way to merge the
idealismand of the early Sixties with the sterner pragmatism
of the recent past. China was now an important friend;
we had built a new basis for stable relations with the
Soviet Union through a Berlin agreement, the first
strategic arms limitation treaty, and an agreed code of
international conduct. The diplomatic revolution that had
been brought about opened up an extraordinary oppor-
tunity for American diplomacy. This, in addition to the
dispelling of our Vietnam trauma, was a reason for
enormous hope. We had eased relations with adversaries;
It was now time to turn to reinvigorate relations with
friends, and to resolving unsolved problems. We had
decided to make 1973 the Year of Europe . . .

How the Year of Europe and these broader and more imagina-
tive aspirations for a more creative American role in world affairs
turned to ashes will doubtless be told in the next volume with
the same mixture of disarming candour, scholarly detail, personal
apologia, intellectual analysis, raconteurial skill and political
manifesto.

LC

# BOOKS

## Modern Guicciardini

### THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS

By Henry Kissinger

Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
*Michael Joseph*. 1,545 pages.

£14.95.

This is an extraordinary book, a continuation, for better or worse, of the Kissinger legend. Beguilingly written, massively constructed, sensitive and brutal by turns, funny one moment, forced the next, it is yet, one suspects, a gigantic publishing mistake by its American publisher, Little, Brown. Had the publisher realised what gems of description, analysis and blatant contention were coming his way he would surely have published Mr Kissinger's memoirs in four digestible—more profitable—gobbets rather than in this succulently indigestible pair (of which the tome under review is merely the first bite).

It reminds one of the massively elegant works of Guicciardini and Machiavelli. The scale of the literary and intellectual enterprise is dealt with in much the same way: "the flow of arguments and the author's mental concentration", as Professor Stanley Hoffmann admits in his review in the New York Review of Books, "are prodigious". Subjects are defined, distinctly, chapter by chapter. A few deft references relate the timing in one chapter (on, say, India and Pakistan) to the pressures at work in two others (say the opening to China and the closing doors to Vietnam). They are enough to reveal the pressures, the (famous Kissingerism) linkage. By this treatment each subject is rigorously scrutinised both in context and on its own.

The typical chapter opens with a broad account of the issues at stake and the story so far. In some instances the quality of evocation is tacky and contrived, a sentimental cover to the distinctly unsentimental (Kissinger's favourite word) policy revelations to come. But in others there is a sumptuous quality to Mr Kissinger's insights, for instance in the "mystical ambiguities" of the Middle East:

> What the parties to the Middle East conflict really want lies deep in an amalgam of convictions, resentments and dreams. Formal positions are like the shadows in Plato's cave—reflections of a transcendent reality almost impossible to encompass in the dry legalisms of a negotiating process (page 342).

There usually follows a staccato summary of immediate events of the day: often an amalgam of selective newspaper quotations intermingled with public statements on the record by Mr Kissinger, his president or one of their adversaries in Russia, Vietnam or the Washington bureaucracy. These, at a guess, are compiled by Mr Peter Rodman, Mr Bill Hyland or one of the committee of ex- and present helpers who have surrounded Mr Kissinger in compiling this book. But the prime author's hand is never absent. There is a tightness, a control and a self-indulgence that, mixed, are entirely his.

Then the fun begins. Nixon and Kissinger start to discuss, in gripping exchanges of notes, marginal comments and apparently minuted conversations, how to take control of policy from the massive departments of government that surround the White House. Each trusts the other's determination to prevail in this battle. By and large each supports the other's policy, with Kissinger the tougher (but deferring to a president's political needs) on Vietnam, Nixon the harder on Cambodia, on the short-term tactical use of the China card, on Mrs Gandhi and on Russia. Each, as the book progresses, starts to distrust and allow for, usually uncharitably, the other's personal fallibil-

ities. The common enemy is as much the state department, under the luckless Rogers, or the defence department, under the formidable Laird, as it is the antagonist abroad. A main gainer from this chaos was (another favourite word) "implacable" Hanoi:

> All this time Hanoi stood at the sidelines, coldly observing how America was negotiating not with its adversary but with itself (page 303).

Then the uplands are reached. The cut-and-thrust policy struggle is now set in its Kissingerian context: the strategy of "geopolitics", the ultimate reliance on American "credibility", no matter where. The author's clarity is, if not complete, devastating in its elegance and force. Uninformed critics of the secret Vietnam negotiation with Le Duc Tho are, on the strength of the analysis rather than their necessary ignorance, ruthlessly dumped for always advocating yet another concession. Those who fall for Mrs Gandhi's attempt to dismember Pakistan on the back of a convenient moral cause in Bangladesh are caned.

The rhythm is measured but never constant (the reader is quickly punished if he tries to skip): suddenly a quarter-hour by quarter-hour description of the Washington war over King Hussein of Jordan's war with his Palestinians erupts (pages 620-625) into the middle of a routine description of Middle Eastern affairs. And there, as always, is President Paradox in the middle of it:

> Once the point of decision was reached, Nixon acted with a kind of joyless, desperate courage—torn between his insights and understanding of the international reality and his fatalistic instinct that nothing he touched would ever be crowned with ultimate success (page 621).

At these moments, where hectic events unfold into reflection and exegesis, Mr Kissinger is at his self-justifying best. In the midst of a stupendous portrait of Mao Tse-tung ("I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated willpower"—page 1,058 passim), Mr Kissinger dares to interpolate his own essay on revolution—and gets away with it. "'I have not been able to change [the world]', replied Mao, not without pathos. 'I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking'."

> It was a modest claim after a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot the very essence of his society. In its matter-of-fact resignation it underlined the revolutionary dilemma. The qualities needed to destroy are usually not those needed to sustain: the greater the upheaval, the more it may lead to a new apparatus even more pervasive and usually much more efficient than the one replaced. Revolutions conducted in the name of liber-

126

THE ECONOMIST NOVEMBER 24, 1979

BUSINESS BRIEF

Source: EEC commission

years, the deficits being financed by capital inflows. Even so, there are limits to their size, and the 1979 deficit has stretched those limits further than the authorities would like. A deficit of up to £650m looks likely (see chart 3); that is about 9% of gnp, compared with 9.4% in 1974 and a long-term average of 2½%. This year's bad performance owed a lot to the postal strike, which cut receipts from tourism (though the Pope later helped) and generally reduced output more than demand.

Ireland is still uncomfortably dependent on slow-growing Britain, which took 48% of its exports last year (down from 60% in the early 1970s). And it imports 80% of its energy, with an oil bill of about £450m this year. Its gold and foreign currency reserves have fallen from a record $2.7 billion at the end of 1978 to $2.1 billion in September, 1979; that covers 5¼ months of imports, which is still a much plumper cushion than in 1974.

(b) Public finances. If you like worrying about the size of the public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR), you'll love Ireland. As a proportion of gnp, the PSBR was 17% in 1975, 12% in 1976 and 10¼% in 1977. Then it rose to 13% in 1978, with the government vowing that the boost was only temporary. Belt tightening was supposed to start this year, with a target 10¼%. But the postal strike intervened, and the outturn is likely to be another 13%.

The government repeatedly says that it wants to reduce the PSBR steadily over several years. But the difficulties of cutting back are considerable. There is an obvious need for more public capital spending (up by 10% in volume this year). The roads are increasingly congested, and the government is committed to an expensive 10-year programme; investment in telecom-

munication will be doubled by 1983; and there are warnings of power cuts next year (the electricity supply board is thinking of a cable-link to the British and French grids). And squeezing current spending is made more difficult by the fact that 23% of it goes to service the public debt.

On the revenue side, the government has few soft options. Ireland's tax base is strikingly narrow: corporation tax is tripling, domestic property taxes were abolished in 1978, there are no taxes on wealth, bequests or any but the largest motor cars. That leaves indirect taxes, which already average 15% of consumer spending, and carry the risk of fuelling wage demands, if raised any further; social insurance contributions, which add to labour costs; and income tax, which is proving a political minefield.

Until this year, less than one in 10 of all farmers paid any income tax. The government brought in a 2% levy on farm sales in its February, 1979, budget, but—because of the farmers' violent opposition—only as an experiment (the farmers have been invited to think up some alternative that will raise the same revenue, about £30m this year). That angered employed workers, taxed at source, who provide 87% of all income tax collected, compared with the farmers' 2%. Angry employees could take to the streets again if there is a tough budget next year. Meanwhile the taxman is being challenged in the courts—by a married couple claiming that joint taxation of husband and wife discriminates against the family. The High Court agreed with them—and said that tax rebates should be made retrospective. The government is appealing.

## New questions

Large PSBRs make monetary control difficult. The M3 version

of the money supply rose by 32.7% in the year to August, 1979; it was swollen at the beginning of the year when deposits held in Britain had to be repatriated, under new exchange controls. The central bank has no monetary growth target; rather it aims to control bank lending, by penalising banks which exceed its credit guidelines. For the 12 months to February, 1980, an 18% ceiling was placed on credit growth; by September the banks were bumping their heads. So credit is now very tight, and interest rates at record highs.

But not as high as in Britain—which raises the first of the two new questions about the Irish economy:

(c) The exchange rate and inflation. In March this year, the 150-year-old parity between the British and Irish currencies was broken. While Britain stayed outside the European Monetary System (EMS), Ireland went in—cannily claiming that it needed £275m over 2-5 years to compensate for the (widely assumed) fact that its pound would appreciate against sterling. Dublin got its £275m—and in barely three weeks the punt had depreciated against sterling. At one point the devaluation went as high as 10%; it is now about 3½%.

Managing an independent currency is a new experience. Ireland joined the EMS because the government reckoned it would help to counter inflation—badly needed, with consumer prices having risen by 18% (1976), 13½% (1977) and 7¼% (1978). That mirrored Britain's inflation: in such a small and open economy inflation is easily imported. By breaking the link with inflation-prone Britain, the government hoped to get down to the European average.

That means paying more attention to home-grown inflation. Ireland's attraction as an export base rested partly on sterling's

Sources: Central Statistics Office; ESRI

weakness in the early and middle 1970s; with much the same wage increases as in Britain, but better productivity growth, exporting was bound to be profitable. Linked to continental Europe's currencies, Ireland must now show continental Europe's wage restraint as well. If it does not, then export margins will shrink and/or the Irish pound will have to be devalued periodically inside the EMS.

The short-term wage signals are not encouraging. Government, employers and unions reached a formal “understanding” on wages and related matters in July. Wage increases are to be paid in two phases, partly tied to the cost of living. The ESRI reckons this will result in an increase next year of at least 15% in manufacturing, rather more than the likely outcome in 1979. That would mean consumer prices rising by about 11¼% next year, after 13% this.

(d) Skill shortages. After years of providing Britain with a steady stream of workers, Ireland this year started calling its sons and daughters home, with advertisements like the one we reproduce. It needs skilled workers—not desperately yet, but the shortages have appeared quickly and could grow. So more must be spent on industrial training and the school curriculum will need changing. The state training board plans to double the number of places it offers over the next two years; and firms can get grants from the government for any training they do.

None of these difficulties will be “solved” in any final sense. But they seem much more manageable than those that faced Ireland 20 and even 10 years ago. And there are plenty of countries which would gladly do a swap.

The highest growth rate in the E.E.C. progressive industrial development, expanding economy, and forty shades of green.

That's Ireland today. A new industrial nation emerging within the wealthy E.E.C. Yet still a haven of tranquillity, beauty and

A country of opportunity, with living standards comparable with those enjoyed by counterparts in the highly developed E.E.C.

Where you can get the

most out of work and even more out of

discuss resettlement assistance. Potential salaries. And details of living conditions in Ireland.

Call in or phone one of the centres below for an interview or just a chat.

The good life is here at

OPPORTUNITIES IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE IN IRELAND

Mechanical/Production Engineers
Electrical/Electronic Engineers
Chemical Technologists

Systems Analysts
Electronic Technicians

Mechanical/Electrical Draughtsmen
Toolmakers

Maintenance & Turner Fitters

Ireland...we're ready for you now.

125

BOOKS

ty more often than not refine new tools of authority (page 1,063).

In such passages, though the nostrums are Mr Kissinger's, they are embedded in the personality of those he is writing about. The book is spattered with major character portraits Jane Austen would be proud of (and with other minor ones—of old soldiers, mediocrities, defeated rivals, past and future political associates—gooeey enough to have been invented by Georgette Heyer). Chou En-lai is the hero, if there is a single one, of this book, courted and conversed with through a medium of secret signals and signs, special channels, chance remarks and the "firing of empty cannon" for months before the breakthrough was made. Chou said at the end of those hegemonic days of secret meeting in Peking in autumn 1971: "Come back soon for the joy of talking". Mr Kissinger did.

Even where analysis is routine and repetitive, as it often is on, for instance, the Nato alliance, the simplicity and clarity of expression rarely falters:

> Too large to be a tripwire, too small to resist an all-out Soviet onslaught, the allied military establishment was an accidental array of forces in search of a mission (page 83).

When the pace slackens, a footnote will surprisingly pick it up (James Callaghan, Edward Heath and other narrow losers might sample the picture of Georg Kie-

singer, on page 99, crossing that "thin dividing line between being hailed as a master politician and being scorned as the failed leader"). Ignore at your peril the notes printed at the back of this volume: they resemble in helpfulness those in Louise and Aylmer Maude's translations of Tolstoy (sample Kissinger's Vietnam memorandums to the president, notes 11 and 12 to chapter VIII, and Nixon egging on the pace in Cambodia, notes 9 and 10 to chapter XII).

If it is the concentration of mind which produces the simplicity, it is the subtlety and speed of instinct, the flash of political awareness, which were to make Mr Kissinger such a master bureaucrat in the service of a president he admired but didn't like—and which make this book, from the opening pages of its seductive foreword to the unconvincing glow of the second inauguration of Richard Nixon at its end, such a compellingly readable, if wrist-breaking, chore.

So much for its texture: what does Mr Kissinger's book say about his record?

Henry Kissinger was appointed national security adviser in 1968 by a man he disliked who had a few months earlier, at the Republican party convention in Miami, trounced Mr Kissinger's patron and closest political friend, Nelson Rockefeller. He brought to the White House a theory of world events that he has barely since modified, merely refined and polished by exposure to power:

> In foreign policy there is no escaping the need for an integrating conceptual framework... The test of domestic policy is the merit of a law; that of foreign policy, nuances and interrelations... A conceptual framework—which “links” events—is an essential tool. The absence of linkage produces exactly the opposite of freedom of action; policymakers are forced to respond to parochial interests, buffeted by pressures without a fixed compass (page 130).

The United States and the free world are confronted, according to Kissinger, by an implacable adversary, the Soviet Union, plus surrogates or followers round the globe who have, if Russia is not to press forward, always to be checked. The worst way to check them is by "sentimentality": "moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have choice" (page 225). Equally "liturgical belligerence" achieves little. If freedom is to be preserved, totalitarian aggressors have constantly to be shown the real "risks" attached to aggression, and the real security to be gained by "restraint". Cultivation of those elusive "moderates" in Moscow or Hanoi is usually pointless: if Moscow moderates do exist they are better strengthened by American "firmness, which demonstrates the risks of Soviet adventures, than by creating the impres-

sion that seemingly marginal moves are free of cost" (page 122).

Immense patience is required, as these carrots and sticks are applied to Russian behaviour in every nook of world politics. Policy is not created by theory or fiat; it will only "emerge when concept encounters opportunity" (page 171). The Russians made it brutally plain to President Nixon and Mr Kissinger that they simply disregarded linkage until they were confronted with its full effects in 1972 on the eve of Nixon's re-election: no pressure would they bring, for instance, on their implacable disciples in Hanoi. Besides, the state department, to Nixon's fury, so destroyed linkage by premature response that there was little reason early on for Russia to behave any other way than it did. But in the end, according to Kissinger, the treatment works: the time for progress in a Soviet negotiation, as the vulgar, barnyard Moscow summit in May, 1972, was at last to show, arrives only when "incentives and penalties of sufficient magnitude" have been generated to "impel decision".

By 1972 some of the incentives and penalties developed by Nixon and Kissinger were these: first, and far the most important, the meeting of geopolitical minds with Peking ("The leaders of China were beyond ideology in their dealings with us"—page 1,063); the rearguard refusal in the face of domestic pressure to cop out of Vietnam, backed by a willingness to bomb and bash the enemy even as American troops were withdrawn; the prevention, preferably accompanied by massive and observable sabre-rattling, of the break-up of Jordan by guerrillas and Syria, of West Pakistan by Mrs Gandhi, of Nato by congress ("One's actions must be sustained; they must appear relentless, inexorable"—page 604. "The time for conciliation is after the crisis is surmounted and a settlement or modus vivendi has been reached"—page 629); the refusal, notably in the Middle East, to pursue fashionable attempts to make peace in conjunction with Russia, thereby, over time, discrediting the value of Russia as an ally in the eyes of redeemable Arabs like President Sadat; the effort, despite domestic pressure, "to redress the strategic balance" of nuclear weaponry; the offering of arms limitation, commerce, grain, consultation and understanding only in return for Soviet help in maintaining stability wherever conflict occurs.

This strategy of multiple Lilliputian control of the lumbering giant is a cogent one—and one that has been frighteningly absent since Mr Nixon was hustled from power, and Mr Ford and Mr Kissinger left it. But in its exorcism of the sentimental, its alleged immorality, it has not made Mr Kissinger's policies in office

metra

ARGENTINA

A GROWING AND LIBERALISED MARKET

A thoroughly researched report by a major consultancy on how to trade, where to look for opportunities and how to invest in one of the world's newly freed and increasingly prosperous economies. Designed to save time and money before you go and look.

from: Metra Consulting Group
23 Lower Belgrave Street
London SW1W 0NS

Price: £112/$246 in Europe, £114/$251 elsewhere, post free.

350 pages.

Money back guarantee applies if expectations not met.
Other reports in the series: ASEAN, Brazil, China,
Colombia and the Caribbean, Gulf States, Mexico,
Nigeria, Romania, Venezuela, South Korea, Saudi
Arabia.

[L.C]

127

[LC]

BOOKS

popular.

That Mr Kissinger is hurt by this, and determined to hit back, is evident in every passage of his book: "the impulse to explain merges with the impulse to defend", he concedes in a foreword that calls on his readers to "transcend our divisions by recognising that serious people manned both sides" of the Vietnam barricades (a rule he subsequently finds it hard to keep as his own story unfolds). In the welter of documentation available in modern America, any version of events can be proved. He can only present "the myriad of possible considerations [that] in fact influenced the decisions in which he was involved. . . . None of this [will prove] that his judgment was right-only what it was based upon" (pages xxii-xxiii).

But here emerges the contradiction in Mr Kissinger's book. His concern, in office and since, has been to attack the sentimental as being the worst form of defence against communist advance. But sentiment and disagreement over policy are, as Mr Kissinger sees vividly at each stage in his account, facts of politics. They, as much as Russian implacability, are part of the balance of power. Mr Kissinger's president's eventual failure was born precisely of his inability to create the unsentimental consensus he and Mr Kissinger needed in order to prove their point. Strong leadership should not, of course, follow every opinion poll (besides, Mr Nixon in fact enjoyed majority support for some even of his most unpopular decisions in Cambodia and Vietnam). But, over a two-term presidency, opinion must be with a president if his foreign policy is to prevail.

Mr Kissinger sees this, and, not altogether artfully, he clears the way in this volume for the story of the next which will doubtless show how a splendid construction was to be battered by Watergate and the breakdown of congressional leadership. Undoubtedly, the Kissinger theory would have stood a better chance under a different president—a Rockefeller, say. Mr Nixon's strengths are here much admired. He was courageous and lonely in decision. He was "overwrought" but "right" when the Cambodian sanctuaries were attacked. He suspected, as Kissinger did not, that peace was not quite at hand in autumn 1972. At several stages he overruled his security adviser—"I now believe wisely". In crises, he had an unusual sort of sanity: in mid-Jordan-blow-up he is unearthed in a bowling alley in the basement of the Executive Office Building. His judgment of politics was usually good: few remained certain, as he did, that Edward Heath would win in June, 1970. He was worth working for: when presidents "at-

tempt the tactical implementation of their own strategy they court disaster. Nixon never made that mistake" (page 142). He was a "superb expositor of carefully prepared positions", as the Peking summit was to show. So far as the conduct of relations with foreign powers was concerned, even Nixon's "personal antipathy to personal negotiation was not a weakness. . . . but a strength".

But that antipathy was fatal at home:

> ... he was prepared to make decisions without illusion. Once convinced, he went ruthlessly and courageously to the heart of the matter; but each controversial decision drove him deeper into his all-enveloping solitude. He was almost physically unable to confront people who disagreed with him; and he shunned persuading or inspiring his subordinates. He would decide from inside his self-imposed cocoon, but he was unwilling to communicate with those who disagreed. It was the paradox of a president strong in his decisions but inconclusive in his leadership (page 482).

The accusation against Mr Kissinger's role in all this should not be of immorality. It should be twofold.

First, he failed to respond—and so helped blind his all-too-willingly-blinded president—to the internal weakness of some of the local regimes on which his would-be containment of Russia was based. This charge may or may not apply in the case of Vietnam (and on the fundamental decision to get out of Vietnam with honour and credibility intact rest the Cambodian decisions as well). *The Economist* believed it did not. Maybe nobody will ever know whether a credible America, unafflicted by Watergate, would in fact have been able to uphold a shaky government in South Vietnam and a distinctly shaky peace against North Vietnam's messianic mission and America's own "peace" lobby.

But the miscalculation permeates the rest of the book much less arguably. The "honest soldier" Yahya Khan, helpful as he was in opening the door to Peking, simply was not a sensible pillar on which to rest Mr Kissinger's correct subcontinental strategy. The Shah, rightly and ringingly though Mr Kissinger defends him (page 1,258 passim), was during these particular years grandly withdrawing from early reform into later dictatorship in ways that America could and should have discouraged. It is a revealing accident that, at the moment when Chou En-lai's invitation to Peking finally arrives, after weeks of nail-biting waiting for it, Mr Kissinger should have to fish America's president out of a dinner for a certain Anastasio Somoza. It illustrates something that, in a book devoted to the discouragement of Soviet meddling by linking every issue at stake, one of the

largest, southern Africa, is the subject of no comment at all. That Mr Kissinger vividly understood the local issues at stake, this book demonstrates without doubt. But that he subordinated them so remorselessly to geopolitics was bound, in the end, to disturb geopolitics as such.

Second, Mr Kissinger was sucked into the very Nixonian embattlements against American opinion that he so tellingly, often cattily, depicts. Indeed his own motives—love for his adopted country—somewhat oddly merge with his cold-eyed analyses to produce a furious display of that quality he most derides, sentimentality, in the fight with his critics over Vietnam, strategic arms and defence. He knew, after all, that Vietnamisation was unlikely to work. He points out to Nixon in 1969 that withdrawal of American troops

will become like salted peanuts to the American public: the more . . . come home, the more will be demanded . . . Han-oi's adoption of a strategy designed to wait us out fits both with its doctrine of how to fight a revolutionary war and with its expectations about increasingly significant problems for the US (pages 1,481-82).

Hence, in part, his negotiating theory of "pre-emptive concession" rather than negotiating by driblets. The critics, he argues, never saw the damage they did:

> . . . as the years went by, every concession produced demands for further concessions. In the face of media and congressional opposition, there never was any firm ground on which to stand (page 293).

And, over strategic arms,

As almost always, happens, retreat by the administration spurred, rather than stilled, critics (page 539).

That such a huge proportion of this huge book is devoted to the fight for a president's policy inside the government is merely the most vivid illustration of how tough it is to conduct a democracy's struggle to contain non-democracy. In several asides, Mr Kissinger hints at remorse. The backchannels of information and diplomacy of which he was the prime architect produced something which, he adjures, must not be repeated: the "compartmentalisation of knowledge which was such a bane of the Nixon administration" (page 448). But of course it will be repeated. And so will the competition for, and manipulation of, American public opinion be repeated, whether it is by the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Irish, the Vietnamese or the Russians themselves. That, in the end, is where American foreign policy has to be made: in a million men's minds. And that is where a Kissinger again in the White House, with a new president, would have to found his policy next time round if his construction was to survive.

128

In Paris in February 1969 on Nixon's first
visit to Europe, de Gaulle greeted Henry
Kissinger with the query "Why don't you
got out of Vietnam?" "Because, Kissinger
replied, "a sudden withdrawal might give
us a credibility problem", "Where is
salvation?"

Twice in this book, which covers his
years in the White House up to 1973 as
Assistant for National Security Affairs,
Kissinger argues that the basic challenge
for the Nixon Administration was similar
to de Gaulle's in Algeria, to withdraw as
an expression of policy not as a collapse.
Historical analogies are rarely applicable
and this is no exception. De Gaulle
faced over Algeria the acute danger of
coercing the French military to take over
and the constant knowledge that eventually
France would have to assimilate over one
million pied noirs. Nixon as a new President
had no such savage limitations in his room for
management of Vietnam.

In liquidating the Algerian war, de
Gaulle was criticised for going too slow and
too fast. Alistair Horne in *A Savage War of
Peace*, a brilliant book on the Algerian
war, says de Gaulle was suffered from the
leniency of Kissinger in the Vietnam
or perhaps by the Israelis vis-à-vis the
 Arab world—namely that peoples who have
 been waiting for their independence for a
century, fighting for it for a generation,
can afford to sit out a presidential term, or
a four or two in the life of an old man in a
hurry.

In 1969 President Nixon inherited over
half a million American troops in Vietnam
and 31,000 had died there. Kissinger writes
"It seemed to me important for America
to have a basic strategy of withdrawal
but to leave Vietnam in a manner that
even the protesters might later see as
reflecting an American choice made with
dignity and self respect". Yet by 1969 was
there no longer an effective American
choice over leaving Vietnam?

Henry Kissinger's book is sadly but
inevitably overshadowed by the United
States involvement in Vietnam and Cam-
bodia. It details the tortured decision
made by the French government with the
intalling just after President
Nixon's Second inaugural on January 23,
by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, of the
Paris Agreement ending the war and
restoring peace in Vietnam. But the book's
reality is that Kissinger in Vietnam
is a realist, and the realist press
enthusiasm for the agreement and
the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to
the two negotiators, came the resumed
bombing of Cambodia in February 1973, the
fall of Saigon, Lon Nol in April 1975 and
the entry of the Khmer Rouen
Penh. Then in December 1978 the invasion
of Kampuchea by the Vietnamese. In 1979
we see the terror and tragedy of a
devastated region. Words like honour,
dignity, self respect or even credibility
ring hollow when seen against the present
day destruction of what was Cambodia as
well as South Vietnam. To William Shaw-
cross in Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and
the Destruction of Cambodia, "Only the
United States has its friends who are
caught helplessly in its embrace are
well served when its leaders act, as Nixon
and Kissinger acted, without care. Cam-
bodia was not a mistake it was a crime.
This is the horror of Vietnam, is diminished
by the experience".

To Henry Kissinger by April 21, 1970
when Sihanouk's National Front of
Cambodia broadcast an appeal to over-
throw Lon Nol over the Viet Cong's clan-
drone rule, the basic issue had been
laid bare "it was whether Vietnam was
to be merely an alibi for an American
collapse or a serious strategy designed to
achieve an honourable peace. If the
former, neither the rate of withdrawal nor
dignity, self respect or even credibility
are important", he writes. "My intellectual
difficulties arose with those who pre-
tended that there was a middle course of
action that would avoid collapse in Viet-
nam and General Vo on the impending com-
munity takeover in Cambodia".
This is a fair summary of the position
and the critics are wrong to argue that
there was freedom of choice in reacting
to the events in Cambodia by that April. The
Administration was by then gravely cir-
cumsumed, floating 15 months into a
government which had as its central plan
the proposition that if the Vietnamese
would not negotiate seriously then the
United States would use maximum
pressure and wait for military progress to
force negotiations. It is fair to add,
Kissinger to point out as he does
repeatedly in the book that a negotiated
settlement in 1969 was the objective of
the vast majority of American opinion
both as measured in polls and among
politicians and pundits. Liberal America
had never faced up to the situation which
Nixon had to come to terms with when it
became clear from the secret negotiations
with Le Duc Tho that there was no chance

for balanced negotiations over Cambodia
or Vietnam. The Vietnam wanted vic-
tory and were determined to open up a
new front.

Some in the Administration recognizing
that the bombing of Cambodia was a
threshold decision urged that a distinc-
tion should be made between shallow cre-
border penetration and deep penetration
of Cambodia. Mel Laird, the Defence Sec-
retary who was consistently at odds with
Kissinger and was the only practising
politician apart from Nixon in the inner
circle, wanted only shallow cross border
operations and to use South Vietnamese
rather than American troops. Since Laird
was also the strongest supporter of Viet-
namization he must have known the risks
of not attacking deep into Cambodia in
opposition to that policy but he wanted above all
to come out of Vietnam fast, and foresee the
gathering domestic political storm.

The only different choice that could
have been made in April 1970 was
realized that the Vietnam was itself
fatally failed, that no negotiation could
be anything other than a short term fig
leaf to cover an American withdrawal and
the eventual collapse of South Vietnam.
Carrying out a neutral country was
a sufficiently brutal manifestation of
the hopeless nature of the struggle to
have stimulated a rethink.

But it would have required great
courage for Nixon in particular to have
reconciled himself in 1969 to a policy
of Vietnamization rather than to seek
an alibi for American withdrawal—by 1970
was almost impossible.

If Kissinger had aligned himself over
Cambodia with Laird and Rogers, Nixon
might have decided, but I doubt it.
Kissinger by supporting the policy won
the confidence of Nixon necessary to pur-
ue tirelessly a negotiating strategy, two
years later a settlement providing for a
ceasefire in the Vietnam, and the return
of prisoners. It provided for Nixon a poli-
cial exit but did little for American
credibility.

That credibility had for most countries
been steadily eroded over eight years and
had been enhanced by the spectre
of America tearing itself apart in a bitter domestic debate resulting in
a such a deterioration in the standards of
democratic government that it laid the
foundation for Watergate. Kissinger, like
Nixon, all too frequently judged the
credibility of the United States in terms of
the virility of their own decision
making. The credibility of a nation derives
from more than the sum of its actions but
reflects its attitudes, its morale, its inner
peace. De Gaulle's initial question posed
the real choice. It meant getting out of
Vietnam quickly and cutting one's losses,
it meant separating credibility from
virality.

Foreign policy throughout the period
1969-73 will be seen by the readers of
a book to have been devoured by inter-
agency rivalries and personality clashes
between particular Kissinger in the
White House and Rogers, Secretary of
State, and Laird, Secretary of Defence.
This seems to be a thickening does
little to establish trust in the manner in
which United States policy is formed and
it must have impaired the overall effec-
tiveness of that policy. Yet despite this
considerable diplomatic achievements
were obtained over this period.

It is in relations with the Soviet Union,
the central issue of any United States

After reading 'Sideshow'
by Wm Shawcross

Old man on a cow,
old man on a cow;
got no clothes on,
got no clothes on;
got no hope now,
got no hope now;
cow just goes on,
cow just goes on;
poor old man:

“Yah!”

Christopher Logue.

foreign policy, that Kissinger reveals his
flair and distinction. Ever since he took
up Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, he
had been recognised as an authority on
nuclear strategy. For a person with such
a formidable intellectual background and
a real grasp of Soviet realities to be
charged with carrying through the first
good years of the Vietnam War, it was
undisputed that for which President Nixon deserves
great credit.

The book reveals interesting insights
into Kissinger's negotiating strategies and
the development of the vital back channel
with Ambassador Dobrynin. A better
idea for Nixon to Rogers but drafted by
Kissinger gives an excellent summary of
the controversial, though if sensibly
applied, essential element of linkage. "I
am convinced that the great issues are
fundamentally interrelated. I do not
believe that the great issues are simply
between specific elements of one or
another issue or between tactical steps
that we might elect to take.... I believe
that the Soviet leaders should be brought
to understand that they cannot expect to
reap the rewards of cooperation in one
way and while seeking to reduce the passage
of tension or confrontation elsewhere."

While Kissinger did achieve effective
linkage in terms of Soviet restraint over
the Middle East he was less successful
over Vietnam where the Soviets would not
pressurise. Yet they revealed how second-
ary they saw Vietnam when they did not
cancel Nixon's visit to Moscow in May
1972 following the mining and bombing
of the North. A sophisticated Soviet
demonstration representing the limitations of
linkage.

The professionals will argue over
Kissinger's negotiating techniques for
decades. "I always tried to determine
the most reasonable outcome and then
get there rapidly in one or two moves.
Nuclear weapons are a strategy of pre-
emptive concession" by those who like
to make their moves in dribbles and at
the last moment. But I consider that
strategy useful primarily for placating
bureaucracies and saving consciences."
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy are
a diplomatic appeasement approach that
is on many pages splendidly barbed comments about
the peculiar habits of the bureaucracy in
frustrating decisions. Besides a positive
liking for secretary Kissinger and Nixon
were driven by the leakiness of the
machine to confine information
to a very small circle. This implies
the necessity of the circle, however necessary,
presenting great problems for the sensible
conduct of State Department business and
for relations with allies. But if President
Nixon's visit to China had not been
negotiated in total secret, the subsequent
lobbying against and the consequent
tough press clarifications could have
jeopardised Chinese cooperation.

The new China policy was potentially
easily divisive within the United States
and only the United States could have achieved
so wide an acceptance for it. It
marked a dramatic recognition of China's
emergence as a potential super power and
it must be one of the great events of the
Nixon Presidency.

The new China policy has written a book
daundering in its detail but revealing in its
range. It is a book written by a man who
still hopes to be once again Secretary of
State and at times this shows through
in asides about contemporary
distinctive radiating in the complex
negotiations of the interminable Middle East
demilitarization agreement. But it also
cannot be avoided that he will be
associated, apart from Cambodia, with
serious errors in supporting for too long
white racism in South Africa and in the
manipulating Latin America, particularly
Allende, and for neglect over Cyprus. Yet
when the overall balance is weighed, Henry
Kissinger, despite mistakes and the inevit-
ability that comes to any man who
has a mind of his own and is prepared
to exercise it, will be judged well by
history. For on the major issue concerning
the Soviet Union and the delicate balance
of power which determines our survival
he is shown to be careful, clear-headed,
constrained and consistent.

The White House Years is published
by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and
Michael Joseph today at £14.95.

The Weidenfeld Years is published
by Michael Joseph today at £14.95.

© Times Newspapers Ltd, 1979

10

Spectator 24 November 1979

17

## Books

# Don Nixon's Sancho Panza?

George Gale

**The White House Years** Henry Kissinger (Weidenfeld; Michael Joseph £14.95)

The years in question are those of Nixon's first presidency: early 1969 to early 1973. They come before Watergate and the time of Kissinger's ascendancy as Secretary of State. During the four years covered by this immense book, Kissinger was Nixon's Assistant for National Security, and as such was very much part of Nixon's determination to bring and to keep control over foreign policy into his own hands and out of the hands of the State Department. Throughout these years a great deal of Kissinger's effort went into keeping foreign policy in his – and thus the President's – hands. 'As time went by, the President, or I on his behalf ... came to deal increasingly with key foreign leaders through channels that directly linked the White House Situation Room to the field without going through the State Department – the so-called backchannels.'

There is no doubt that between them, Nixon and Kissinger successfully removed the conduct of American foreign policy from the State Department. Kissinger's 'backchannels' were avenues of communications which were closed to the State Department. Their use frequently confused America's allies and adversaries, and led to endless domestic political complications. Kissinger enjoyed all the tomfool cloak-and-daggery which went with the subterfuges demanded by his false situation, and Nixon was not averse to the irresponsibility conferred upon him by his unofficial Foreign Secretary.

The arrangements were essentially foolish, insofar as they were not irresponsible: for a President of the United States has no difficulty, political or constitutional, which prevents him from gathering the control of foreign policy into his own hands, should he desire such control. He has no need to set up an entirely independent, unofficial State Department, with its own lines of communications and its own boss, in order to impose his will.

But Nixon felt unable to have his way with the State Department he inherited from the Democrats; so he used Henry Kissinger to fetch the conduct of American foreign policy back into the White House. Hence *The White House Years*. The subsequent four years, when Kissinger actually was Secretary of State, will be dealt with in a further volume, doubtless as weighty and lengthy as this.

Together, they will amount to Kissinger's apologia: for it is already clear that he intends the full eight years to display how, slowly but surely, he turned himself from being the chosen instrument of presidential policy into its architect.

The book ends with what Kissinger calls a 'Postlude', with Nixon announcing the agreement and cease-fire which concluded the United States' undeclared war in Vietnam on 23 January 1973. Nixon had just had his second Inauguration. 'Peace at Last' says Kissinger's chapter heading. Kissinger, just back from signing the agreements in Paris, waited for Nixon to speak to the nation: 'It was the culmination of all we had endured and endeavoured for four years', he writes.

Kissinger has himself reflecting, as he waits for Nixon to speak, upon the preceding four years of his diplomacy: 'We stood, I fervently hoped, as the threshold of a period of national reconciliation that would be given impetus by the unique opportunity for creativity I saw ahead. Perhaps America had found the way to merge the idealism of the early Sixties with the sterner pragmatism of the recent past.'

Later that night Nixon called Kissinger from the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House 'where he had been brooding alone'. Kissinger permits himself some poetic licence: 'He was wondering whether the press would appreciate what had been done; probably not. But that was not what he really had on his mind. He knew that every success brings a terrific letdown, he said. I should not let it get to me. I should not be discouraged. There were many battles yet to fight. I should not weaken... Listening to him, I could picture the scene: Nixon would be sitting solitary and withdrawn... loudspeakers would be playing... probably Tchaikovsky. He was talking to me, but he was really addressing himself.'

This is a Sancho Panza talking about his master. 'What extraordinary vehicles', Kissinger goes on, 'destiny selects to accomplish its design. This man, so lonely in his hour of triumph, so ungenerous in some of his motivations, had navigated our nation through one of the most anguishing periods in our history... Despised by the Establishment, ambiguous in his human perceptions, he had yet held fast to a sense of national honour and responsibility... with all his insecurities and flaws he had brought us by a tremendous act of will to an extraordinary moment when dreams and possibilities conjoined.'

Nixon's achievements were not at all negligible. He did find a peaceful settlement for the Vietnam war which enabled him to withdraw American troops without military disaster. It took him and Kissinger the full four years of his first presidency to bring this about, and although he claimed it was 'peace with honour', in the upshot it was the concession of defeat. North Vietnam now rules over South Vietnam and extends its sway over Cambodia. What, really, had 45,000 American soldiers laid down their lives for? And for what had Vietnam been ravaged by American troops and guns? What use had been the bombing of Cambodia? What good had America's entire South-east Asian adventure done? Vietnam was not Nixon's war, and he and Kissinger deserve credit for getting their country out of it. But they took too long about the withdrawal, and in the process of protecting their divisions they drew themselves into Cambodia and further tarnished their country's reputation. The main responsibility for the disaster which is Cambodia is not to pulp. But American B-52s helped to pulp the country; and I do not think that Kissinger establishes a sufficient necessity for their raids, either to enable the American troops to withdraw, or to prolong the Thieu regime in Saigon. The Americans could always have got out by sacrificing Thieu. Had they saved Thieu, and had South Vietnam remained independent, then Kissinger's prolonged negotiations, and the bombing, could possibly have been justified. As it is, their peace was not with honour, for it was without dividend.

In many pages the book is funny. I am not sure how intentional this is. Kissinger has all the ponderous humourlessness of his German upbringing, which his Jewishness does little to leaven. He takes himself extremely seriously, too. Yet the pictures he paints, the impressions he evokes, are often comical. We find ourselves continually smiling at the short, plump little German Jew, waddling through the minefields of diplomacy utterly confident in his ability to avoid getting himself blown up. We are also with him, for in a way, we feel that he is unlikely to get us blown up either. He is a clever fellow, a tricky chap. Forever speaking of his high purposes, Kissinger is totally unable to conceal his glee at the low methods which he frequently employs. He writes of 'we, the Americans', with the unembarrassed enthusiasm of an immigrant. His pride in his adopted country is as touching as his patriotism is fierce.

His instincts, in foreign policy, were usually sound, like those of his chief, Richard Nixon, to whose repeated acts of political courage he pays repeated tribute. Nixon, indeed, becomes the central figure of Kissinger's account of his White House years in this book, as he must have been

18

Spectator 24 November 1979

## FORUM

FORUM PRESS LTD.,
2 BRAMBER ROAD, LONDON
W14 9PB

Telephone: 01-385 6181 Telex:
919865

## THE FOLLOWING AUTHORS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN FORUM MAGAZINE

Leo Abse

John Bratby

Brigid Brophy

Maureen Colquhoun

Alex Comfort

Germaine Greer

James Hemming

Patricia Hewitt

James Joyce

Anais Nin

Simon Raven

Peter Redgrove

Julia Stonehouse

Chad Varah

Auberon Waugh

Isn't it time you picked
up your copy?

Subscription only
£7.70 pa from

2 Bramber Road,
London W14

Or on sale at your
newsagent

in fact. Somehow, for all his flaws, Nixon emerges as a substantial man, far more fleshed out than his servant and sometime detractor Kissinger. It strikes me that, had Nixon determined policy in another direction than that which was pursued, Kissinger would have gone along with it, and found reasons to support it. He was, is, clever all right; but it is not at all clear that he possessed or possesses any guiding intelligence or a sufficient desire capable of translating his opinions into policies. He needed Nixon to do this; to see the wood from the trees. The crucial decisions of these White House years were Nixon's: all of them.

This may be why I detect humbug in much of the book: 'If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint. But I believed equally that no nation could face or even define its choices without a moral compass that set a course through the ambiguities of reality, and thus made sacrifices meaningful. The willingness to walk this fine line marks the difference between the academic's - or any outsider's - perception of morality and that of the statesmen.' Kissinger was an academic and an outsider who became the most inside of insiders and aimed to be a statesman. I do not think he helped his nation to face or to define its choices, nor do I think that the course he helped to steer through 'the ambiguities of reality' was either moral or immoral. In these years he did not become a statesman but remained Nixon's man. Certainly neither he nor Nixon made the sacrifices of Vietnam 'meaningful'. They did, however, in the end, stop them from being made.

## Like it or not

Simon Jenkins

The Fall of the House of Beaverbrook
Lewis Chester and Jonathan Fenby
(Deutsch £7.50)

The plot is worthy of Ian Fleming. The Aitken family under Lord Beaverbrook owns three newspapers, the *Daily* and *Sunday Express* and the *Evening Standard*, together with some property. Viability depends, so they firmly believe, on the circulation performance of the *Daily Express*, and this is losing out badly in the middle-ground market which has already claimed the *News Chronicle* and *Daily Herald* and is mauling the *Daily Mail* as well. The old man dies and the company is left in the charge of his son. Sir Max Aitken, his friends and relations. Failure breeds

failure. No one knows what to do; they do what they have always done only more often - which mostly consists in sacking each other. They dare not look even beyond the next overdraft negotiation. Can they survive?

Industrial logic dictates a merger with the *Daily Mail* and *Evening News*, owned by Associated Newspapers. Other suitors include Rupert Murdoch, James Goldsmith and 'Tiny' Rowland. A merger with Associated would mean closing at least one title and a sell-out to the hated Harmsworth family, arch-rivals of the Aitkens. Lord Goodman struggles frantically to bring both sides to the altar. They are almost there when... galloping up to the church doors comes a complete surprise, the property company Trafalgar House.

Lewis Chester and Jonathan Fenby of the *Sunday Times* have done full justice to their breathless narrative. They are good with the subplots: the battle to save the *Evening Standard* (in which I must declare a past interest); the desperate efforts of the staffs to discover what was happening to their livelihoods; the attempt by the more able Beaverbrook executives to sack Jocelyn Stevens (and his success in stopping them); the lunatic social whirl in which the deals and counter-deals take place, with the participants all on first name terms yet often behaving towards each other like fifth-form cads in a Flashman novel.

The book has its limitations as instant history. The patent non-cooperation of certain key sources, including Aitken, Harmsworth, Goodman and Broakes and Matthews of Trafalgar House, makes it inevitably a partial account: we are given no analysis, for instance, of Broakes's motives in wanting to saddle his partner with the burden of running the *Express*; we do not know what the Aitken family really thought of being so briskly stripped of their inheritance; and the wider industrial and public policy implications of this extraordinary morsel of newspaper history are not touched on at all. But, as one who lived through it, I can vouch for the accuracy of the Chester-Fenby account and for the authenticity of the glimpse into how corporations can behave on the brink of collapse. They capture the heady cocktail of exhilaration, callousness and intellectual anaesthesia which must apparently be swallowed these days to provide newspapers for the masses. And they brilliantly illustrate two of the cardinal rules for success in an industrial takeover - that morale is more important than money and that everything depends on whom you know, in the Stewards' Enclosure or at Annabels.

So where does it all get us? Chester and Fenby end their book with a bizzarre benediction on their cast of characters: 'Like it or not, the history of Fleet Street and in particular that of Beaverbrook Newspapers suggests that vigorous owners are crucial to the development of vigorous newspapers ... If Trafalgar House's victory represents the re-emergence of the involved proprietor it could bring benefits to Fleet Street that

## Panza?

This may be why I detect humbug in much of the book: 'If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint. But I believed equally that no nation could face or even define its choices without a moral compass that set a course through the ambiguities of reality, and thus made sacrifices meaningful. The willingness to walk this fine line marks the difference between the academic's - or any outsider's - perception of moralirty and that of the statesmen.' Kissinger was an academic and an outsider who became the most inside of insiders and aimed to be a statesman. I do not think he helped his nation to face or to define its choices, nor do I think that the course he helped to steer through 'the ambiguities of reality' was either moral or immoral. In these years he did not become a statesman but remained Nixon's man. Certainly neither he nor Nixon made the sacrifices of Vietnam 'meaningful'. They did, however, in the end, stop them from being made.

Weidenfeld

DURRANT'S

11 Northburgh [LC]
Street
London EC1V 0JL
01-251 4918

THE BIRMINGHAM POST

BIRMINGHAM,
WARWICKSHIRE

ISSUE
DATED

22 NOV 1979

NOV 1979

# Kissinger in depth

The White House Years. By Henry Kissinger, (Weidenfeld, £14.95)

Daunting to approach, exhausting to work with, yet compelling to follow. The description of the book is as that of the man and there are rewards in both.

Whatever your personal/political point of view, this is in every way an important contribution to contemporary geopolitics, the more valuable for its sheer speed of arrival and — yes, even at 1,500 pages — depth of field.

Dr. Kissinger is primarily a thinker of the grand school. He did not, until late in his working life, enter the active field, and even while attached to the Nixon White House he more often than not saw his primary role as explaining and interpreting. He clearly revelled, however, in his "action" periods, particularly his first, secret, trip to China which is told with all the dash of a good thriller and some very wry observations on fellow diplomats.

In this first volume, Dr. Kissinger sets out to explain the early days of Nixon foreign policy — both with East and West — and how it eventually was applied practically.

Relations with the Soviet Union naturally play a large and intertwining role. Chile, Vietnam-Cambodia, the Middle East, Cuba, are all explored in great detail. The insights offered are important and the lessons to be drawn legion.

I am happy to say that a great deal of fashionable cant, which surrounded some episodes of the Nixon-Kissinger years, is knocked on the head with typical Teutonic thoroughness. For example, it is the accepted wisdom of the Left, both mod-trendy and seriously committed, that the United States wrecked the Chilean economy and precipitated the coup that ousted

By P. T. BANGSBERG

Dr. Kissinger, a quizzical look at the past.

Allende, the first avowed Marxist to be freely elected.

Perhaps, if they trouble to read the book, these bemused folk will understand exactly what Allende's platform (and subsequent policy) actually was and why his regime collapsed under its own weight of socio-economic dogma. It is true that America made strenuous efforts to keep Allende out. But surely if the "other side" can pour money and propaganda into the battle because it sees positive gains, then the West can do likewise if it sees positive losses.

Similarly, I keep cocking my head these days to hear the roars of outrage and chants of derision from the bands of the conscience-stricken who were so vehement in denouncing the United States for its role in Indo-China. Or doesn't it count

when a Communist regime commits atrocities on a Nazi-scale? Only when the USA tries to help an ally fight off an occupying force?

The agonies of Indo-China are recounted in full. If, in the early days the Americans were misguided to think they could win the Vietnam war solely by military might, then it is instructive to read chapter and verse of the duplicity and bloody-mindedness of the North Vietnamese when they thought they need not negotiate because the war would end their way.

Dr. Kissinger is, however, quick to admit mistakes — his own as well as everybody else's. That is why the book reads so much better than more "sanitised" (to use a favourite White House-ism) ones. This is very much a first-person book, and thus the views are considerably influenced. But Dr. Kissinger is the quintessential first-person man, which does nothing to detract from his account of crises, decisions and directions.

The book varies between the statesman and the professor. I would especially commend to anyone uncertain of the realities of the world his splendid dissertation on just what makes the Russians tick. It is instructive both to those of the "grand strategy" school and to those who believe that Kremlin policy can be influenced by the weak.

This volume will stir what is often referred to as lively debate; so it should. The subjects treated are themselves matters of controversy, controversially stated. There is also a great deal of sound analysis and pithy observation. I await the second instalment eagerly.

SIR Books Jan. 5, Issue
SRAA-26 11-16-79 Proof 1 Galley 4

Actually, the only option the United States had by the end of 1972 was total extrication, and there was no reason to doubt that Hanoi remained determined to win total victory. But this is not quite the way Kissinger, who always recognized this reality, tells the story. Instead, he proclaims, "we sought not an interval before collapse, but lasting peace with honor," and "but for the collapse of executive authority as a result of Watergate, I believe we would have succeeded." This, I submit, is not credible, from a historian of Kissinger's stature.

Moving farther away from history to polemics, Kissinger offers us other extraordinary statements of this type. Thus he says that Cambodia's ultimate fate—the 1975 takeover by the Khmer Rouge and the advent of the savage Pol Pot régime—resulted from "the breakdown of our democratic political process." Assumedly, he has in mind the Congressional ban in August, 1973, on the continued bombing of Cambodia by American planes. Apart from the fact that it is entirely unclear whether indefinite bombings would have saved the pro-American government in Phnom Penh, it is astounding to read that our democratic process broke down when the Congress decided to end the United States military involvement in Indochina. In speaking of both Vietnam and Cambodia, Kissinger stops at the water's edge of suggesting in so many words that Nixon's 1974 resignation likewise signified a breakdown of the democratic process. Had Nixon been left alone, Kissinger seems to say, Vietnam and Cambodia would have been saved, a bizarre proposition.

Still topically polemical, Kissinger jumps ahead of his story to blame the Carter administration, though without naming it, for the ouster of the Shah of Iran early in 1979. Offering no documentation, he writes that the Shah "was unprepared for an America vacillating in his hour of tragedy," and in a footnote he asks rhetorically whether it was "wrong to fail to support him effectively in 1978 and 1979?" The truth is that the Carter administration, confused as it was by the Iranian revolution, tried to cling to the Shah as long as possible. And Kissinger does not tell us what Washington could have done to save the emperor.

Such pronouncements weaken the case Kissinger, attempting to write as a historian, makes for his moulding of foreign policy. One is also astonished that he should be shocked as he appears to be, that the Russians, the North Vietnamese, and even the Israelis should be excruciatingly tough negotiators. After all, why wouldn't they be? Speaking of the Israelis, unable to understand in 1970 the American hesitation to provide them with new aircraft to fight the "attrition war" with Egypt, Kissinger makes this comment: "In the combination of single-minded persistence and convoluted tactics the Israelis preserve in their interlocutor only those last vestiges of sanity and coherence needed to sign the final document." It would be interesting to read Israeli comments on Kissinger's negotiating techniques.

SIR Books Jan. 5, Issue
SRAA-26 11-16-79 Proof 1 Galley 5

Possibly the most vital aspect of Kissinger's years in the White House was his relationship with Nixon. But here, too, Kissinger does not tell the full story. He seems to be torn between admiration for the former Present (as when he remarks that Nixon was usually right in major policy decisions) and something akin to irritation and contempt.

He dwells on Nixon's "usual ambivalence" in decision-making, describes that Nixonian abhorrence of facing subordinates who had disagreed with him (usually Cabinet officers) and of issuing direct orders. He describes how he and others in the White House often disregarded instructions given in anger by Nixon because they knew he would forget about them the next day. Still, the picture drawn by Kissinger is of these two men in the White House fighting a steady battle against everyone else in the executive branch—from Secretary of State Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to faceless bureaucrats who, if Kissinger is to be believed, invariably counseled concessions by the United States to one and all. In a strange passage, he notes that Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had learned from experience "that in the Washington Establishment there was an inexhaustible reservoir of masochism eager to assume the blame for every impasse." Quite an indictment of everybody in the United States government—except Kissinger.

EMIs there a summation of Kissinger's foreign policy philosophy? The closest to it is this comment: "Of all the achievements of Nixon's first term, I consider the preservation of the sinews of our military strength among the most significant. Without it all efforts at relaxing tensions would have failed. For moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have a choice."

This, in effect, takes us back to the initial conclusion about Kissinger's book, that basic problems facing American policy have not changed. Though he may feel vindicated that today, unlike in his time, the Congress demands a strong U.S. military posture, this sentiment is also proof that the Nixon-Kissinger policy—the "generation of peace" strategy—did not succeed, simply because it could not. The euphoria of détente was self-serving. This may be the great lesson of history that one does not find in White House Years.

Tad Szule is a Washington-based writer on foreign policy.

◀ END OF RUN expertype, inc. ☎ pickups/dispatch

[LC]

HENRY A. KISSINGER

January 10, 1980

Dear Winston:

I thought you might be interested
in the attached letters I received
about the book as well as a review
on it by Michael Howard.

Look forward to seeing you on Sunday.

Mr. Winston Lord
President
Council on Foreign Relations
58 E. 68th Street
New York, New York, 10021

Prime Minister
Singapore

[L.C.]

18 Dec 79

Dr Henry A Kissinger
Suite 520, 1800K Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20006

Dear Henry

I have just finished 1476 pages plus most of the Chapter notes. Parts, like your first journey to Peking, were like a thriller, parts, as the arguments on SALT, were like a Socratic dialogue on power and its restraints in a thermo-nuclear world.

You have tackled subjects of immense complexity with infinite skill and transparent simplicity. To have controlled all these complicated problems simultaneously with so many interlocutors was nothing short of genius: a grand master in chess taking on two dozen opponents at the same time. To have marshalled the relevant details in so thematic and scholarly a manner is a feat.

I savoured your essays on the Middle-East, on India and Pakistan, on Israel; they are masterpieces in profundity and brevity. I was captivated by your keen observation compressed in succinct sentences, like your description of Fawzi: "a professional with the ingratiating manner of the educated Egyptian and the weary air of one who has seen much of man's foibles". It brought him vividly back to my mind. Of Dennis Healey: "His restless intellect sometimes cause him to shift his positions faster than his admirers could assimilate"; I would have been proud to write so truthfully of a friend in so inoffensive a manner. It is a tight summary of four hectic years, with all the chaff winnowed out and enough relevant details etched out so that the lessons can be drawn.

You must have received greater praise from more eloquent pens that carry greater clout. I can claim to equal them only in sincerity of my sentiments. The impression on my mind was of an author who was a man of principle. On 28 October in Taipei, on my way back from Tokyo, Chiang Ching-kuo, who must have read those parts

- 2 -

[Lc]

of your book relating to China and Taiwan, said of you:
"他有立场" (ta yu li chang) literally, "he has a stand",
or he is a man with principles. He said the position taken
by Nixon and you in the Shanghai communique was honourable.
And, if I may add, so also was your treatment of the Shah
of Iran, of Yahya Khan, Lon Nol and, not least, of Thieu.
The antonym of "有立场" (yu li chang) is "投机"
(tou zhi) or opportunistic. That you never were.

The most valuable lesson I learned was the importance
of an essential optimism; without that you could not have
gone through all those hectic events, nor reviewed and
written with zest about events which did not end happily.
To be able to recount the excitement of the quest for peace
in Vietnam, after knowing its conclusion, required that you
had faith in what you were doing, that you believed it was
the best you could have done for America and her allies,
given the circumstances.

As I approached the last 200 pages, I was filled
with irrational dread and misgivings. I did not want to
be reminded of the anguish of the events between the
North Vietnamese 1972 attacks and the Paris peace settlement.
Nevertheless, as I read on I began to understand your hopes;
I must confess that, at that time, I had premonitions of
likely disaster.

The saddest parts of the book were the reminders
of how the American media and Congress set out to make
the Executive lose in Vietnam. Your revelations of the
inter-departmental pettiness and spitefulness were
disquieting. The calculated leak to thwart official
policy has become too pernicious a habit. These flaws
in the governance of America may not assure the world of
strong and steady American leadership in the 1980's.

Thank you for your autographed book. It stands
in line with my favourites at the foot of my bed.

Handwritten note on a ball

Yours
Hany.

Beijing, December 6, 1979

Dear Mr. Kissinger,

The copies of your memoirs, the *White House Years*
which you kindly gave to Premier Hua Guofeng, Vice-
Premier Deng Xiaoping, Minister Huang Zhen and myself
have been duly received. And I will read the book with
keen interest. On behalf of Premier Hua, Vice-Premier
Deng and Minister Huang and in my own name, I have the
pleasure to extend to you our sincere thanks.

During Premier Hua's recent visit to four West
European countries, we had the privilege of meeting
you once again in Paris and had a useful conversation
with you on major current international issues. I
found it a great pleasure to meet you, my old friend,
and renew our friendship on foreign land.

Since the establishment of diplomatic relations,
the relations between China and the United States have
developed steadily. May we score new successes in our
common endeavour to further strengthen the amicable
Sino-U.S. relations and secure world peace and stability.

THE EMBASSY OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

2300 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20008

Dec. 28, 1979

Dr. Henry Kissinger
1800 K Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20006

Dear Dr. Kissinger,

I have the pleasure to express my sincere thanks to
you for the copy of your recently published book, the
White House Years.

During the full year after the normalization of
relations between our two countries, we have made
satisfactory progresses in developing and strengthening
the friendly relations between the Chinese people and
the people of the U.S. Looking into the new year, I am
sure you will contribute new efforts as you do always
towards a still better relationship between our two
peoples.

I am looking forward to meeting with you in our
embassy shortly on the occasion of the first anniversary
of the establishment of relations between China and the
U.S.

My wife joins me in wishing you and Mrs. Kissinger
a very happy new year.

JAN 9 1980