FEB 24 1986

A FAIRCHILD PUBLICATION

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Duncan Christy

Dear Dr. Kissinger,

As promised, our story about Ambassador Vernon Walters (p. 78), which, we hope, is an accurate if brief glimpse of the man and his remarkable career. You were kind to take the time to answer my questions, and your remarks have broadened our vision nicely. Thank you.

A COLD WARRIOR'S POWER DIPLOMACY:

# GENERAL WALTERS AT THE U.N.

BY DUNCAN CHRISTY

"What's the difference between the diplomat and the military man?" asks Ambassador Vernon Walters, who should know. "The answer is, none—they both do nothing, but the military get up very early in the morning to do it with great discipline, while the diplomats do it late in the afternoon, in utter confusion."

Walters, U.S. representative to the United Nations, has done both. In a 45-year career, he has evolved from a much-decorated military officer to the current chief American envoy to the world's most visible political forum. And if he roasts his twin professions, it is with an insider's affection, chuckling dryly that "the story was probably put out by a businessman."

More seriously he adds: "You need diplomacy to avoid conflict, and you can't exercise diplomacy unless you have power behind it."

A man of decisive, unblinking opinions, Walters has been a unique observer of the exercise and appraisal of power. A gifted linguist, who speaks seven foreign languages and keeps an honorary African linguist's staff from President Joseph Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire beside his desk, he has translated the most urgent, secret colloquies of American presidents and generals and their global counterparts. He is given to the self-deprecating jest that his interpreter's skills—considered a unique, startling feat in his native land—would qualify him for a job as a hotel concierge in Europe—"maybe, if I knew the city too." Called upon in mud-caked foxholes and at glittering official summits and functions, they've been his passport to the top—to

three-star general status in the U.S. Army, to lucrative private consulting work in Washington, and now to his focal position at the United Nations.

The nucleus of the Walters world view is, simply, that the United States must act as a superpower: "Sometimes people complain of the policies of the United States, but they don't understand that because of the size and influence of our country, we can't operate with a keyhole vision," he says. "We've got to see a much broader panorama than most countries look at, which is their immediate interest."

In his view, strategic alliances also demand an unemotional attitude toward such global realities as "friendly dictatorships." "We have no place in our pantheon for the popular dictator. We think that all dictators are universally hated by everybody, and their people are only waiting to revolt, and that isn't always true," he says. "See, we can't believe that everybody doesn't want the same kind of government that we have. Ours is by far the best, but everybody doesn't share that belief, and if the government is any way different from ours, we think it's automatically hated by the people. You know, I would guess that the German people supported Adolf

PHOTOGRAPHY BY HARRY BENSON

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> "Americans have this idealistic world where everything is going to come out beautifully, with the Rover Boys going to take over. There are very few Rover Boys outside the United States in the Western world."

Hitler collectively up until about Christmas 1944. But that didn't make it right."

He confronts the delicate question of how liberty-minded Americans are to countenance alliances with governments whose state security mechanisms often resemble those of the totalitarian regimes the nation formally deplores: "One of the great things we Americans are looking for," he says, his words tinged initially with sarcasm, "is a wonderful, democratic, middle-of-the-road, fine, upstanding solution. That is very rarely present. The Shah (of Iran) may have been no saint, but the Imam's secret police has killed a lot more people. We didn't like Batista, so we got Castro—a much more efficient dictator. We didn't like Somoza, we got the Sandinistas—a much bloodier group. We didn't like the Shah—we got Khomeini.

"You know," he continues, "we have this idealistic world where everything is going to come out beautifully, with the Rover Boys going to take over. There are *very few* Rover Boys outside the United States in the Western world. We always want optimum solutions, and sometimes you have to settle for those that are not quite perfect."

"Dick" Walters might today be retired from a career as an insurance salesman—another 69-year-old duffer, senescent in Florida—but for the Army. Life abroad as a youth—his father was a British insurance executive—introduced him to the languages of Western Europe, for which he was an eager pupil. Family business reverses, though, cut his schooling short at 16, and with it the thoughts he had been toying with of a life in the seminary. The Army, which he joined as a private in 1941, was an escape route from the

insurance business he had reluctantly entered; his mastery of the multiple languages he had learned propelled him through its ranks.

His yearning for an active command was never fulfilled: "I kept complaining, and they kept promoting me," he remembers. Too valuable were his skills as a liaison officer, first to Gen. Mark Clark as the Allies entered Europe, and afterward during his numerous "silent missions" (the title of his 1978 memoirs) as increasingly ranking aide and interpreter. Lingering is a jesuitical streak, the mark of the Catholic brothers who taught him. A powerful, hearty man, he is brisk, assertive, comfortable with doctrine and the defense of the American faith. His vice, he reveals without embarrass- ment, is chocolate, which he consumes indiscriminately: "I just love the taste of chocolate. Chocolate is to me what

Walters (left) translates for Brazilian Maj. Gen. João Batista Mascarenhas and Field Marshal Sir Harold R.L. G. Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander, Italy, 1944.

With Ike in Dornheim, Germany, 1950

UPB/GETTMANN NEWS PHOTOS

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> "To my knowledge, we and the Soviets haven't killed one another for 35 years. All of this thing about people running around with silent pistols and shooting and poisoning one another is garbage."

cigarettes and alcohol are to most other people. I wouldn't leave any lying on the table if I could help it."

Unmarried, he wrote in "Silent Mis-
sions" of other temptations during a
former posting. As military attaché in
France during the late 1960s, he was
routinely tested by the French intelli-
gence services: "... the fact that I
was a bachelor had provided them, as
they thought, with two opportunities or
two handles that they might get on
me, namely, girls or boys." A French
colleague later confirmed the fruitless
experiment. " 'When neither of these
worked out,' said my friend, 'we
decided that you were like the tradi-
tional bishop-never in your own dio-
cese.' "

A veteran of intelligence-gathering
operations, he wrote in "Silent Mis-
sions": "Americans have always had
an ambivalent attitude towards intelli-

gence. When they feel threatened, they
want a lot of it, and when they don't,
they regard the whole thing as some-
what immoral." In an era of insidious
terrorist acts, he chafes at the conflict
between the strategic need for accurate
intelligence and the constraints of the
society he serves. "Basically, you've
got to live according to what's accepted
in your society," he explains. "Unfor-
tunately—I mean, we live in an Ameri-
can society that will not countenance
shotgun reprisals," he continues.
"You saw the great outcry because 59
people died in this plane in Malta (last
November). Some countries would just
shrug that off, but in our country that's
viewed as a terrible disaster, as not
really a successful operation, even
though all the hijackers were killed or
captured."

The American sense of "fair play"
makes for serious differences—and

drawbacks—in intelligence techniques,
in his view. "The United States collects
intelligence in very different ways than
the Soviet Union and the other totali-
tarian nations do," he remarks. "And
also, the kind of publicity we give to our
secrets limits the willingness of other
countries to share their secrets with us,
and limits the willingness of individuals
to cooperate with us."

On what he once lyrically described
as "the invisible battlefield of intelli-
gence, a battlefield that is quiet but
never still," American methods are
more restrained: "We don't kill; we
don't drug; we don't torture . . . It's
tiring and time-wasting to try to break a
guy down—besides which in our soci-
ety, it's not accepted. I'm not telling
you it's never happened." But the
cloak-and-dagger tactics that are the
premise of so much popular entertain-
ment brings a snort of derision. "To

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

With Secretary of State George Shultz at the United Nations, 1985

MARCH 1986 M

81

## SELECTIONS FROM THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WALTERS

At the U.N., Vernon Walters serves on the front lines of diplomatic confrontation. The roiled politics of that body—an arena described by one veteran observer as “rich in curious rituals and politically impossible stances”—pit him frequently against rabid, even fanatical detractors of U.S. policy. Sheathing his pugilist’s instincts in the gloves of the diplomat, he aims to “give as good as he gets,” leading and countering with the facts as he sees them.

**On Marxism and socialism:** “I think it’s probably the most noble and unselfish ideology that’s been devised since Christianity. It just doesn’t work . . . Most of the (nations) in Africa that have turned to socialism are basket cases.”

**On internal opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines:** “I mean, how do we really know that Marcos is this unpopular? Marcos does have the support of the two largest parties in the Philippines, the Nationalists and the Liberals.”

**On double standards of judgment applied to U.S. policy:** “When we do business with Rumania or Hungary, no one is saying, ‘The United States is supporting those left-wing dictatorships.’ But when we do business with the Philippines, everyone said, ‘You see, the United States is supporting those repressive, right-wing regimes.’ People are determined that the United States supports right-wing dictatorships. We don’t, but the Soviet Union does support left-wing dictatorships, with troops. There’s a Soviet armored brigade in Cuba, 25 miles from Havana. There’s a Soviet armored brigade in Ethiopia, 25 miles from Addis Ababa. There are no American armored brigades running around supporting unpopular governments.”

**On South Africa:** “There are 30 countries which still have embassies in Pretoria. We get the onus for supporting (the South Africans).

But half the people that condemn them are selling them equipment, and nuclear reactors, and all sorts of goodies. While the United States, which has not sold them one weapon in the last 15 years, is supposed to be the one supporting Pretoria. Again the double standard.”

“Apartheid has got to be abolished, and abolished without violence, without destruction of the infrastructure, which will be necessary for all of the people who will live there in the freer South Africa of tomorrow. Obviously apartheid is an idea that belongs in the 12th Century, not the 20th Century.”

**On the International Court of Justice:** “The withdrawal” from the Court’s jurisdiction, prompted by Nicaragua’s official protest of alleged U.S. violations, “was held up as a terrible American sin. I think one must realize that, of the 15 judges on the International Court of Justice at the Hague, 10 of the countries they represent do not recognize the compulsory judgment. And that includes the Soviet Union and all its friends.”

**On American expectations of political solutions:** “We Americans always want quick solutions, because we do things quickly. It only took us 10 years from the time we made up our minds to go to the moon to get there. We can’t understand a problem”—Israel’s bitter relations with its geographical neighbors—“that’s gone on for 38 years. Because it involves people, and people are the most complex things on this planet.”

my knowledge, we and the Soviets haven’t killed one another for 35 years,” he says. “All of this thing about people running around with silent pistols and shooting and poisoning one another is garbage. They do it to dissenters, and to their own people who’ve betrayed them—but not to us.”

On recent perforations of the American intelligence community—disclosure of spying by friendly as well as hostile nations, lax security measures, in places an unstanched flow of classified information—Walters is philosophical: “I think they’re terribly unfortunate. I think they show some weakening of the national resolve. But if you think that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people involved (in the various intelligence agencies), it’s a remarkably small number.” The death penalty, reinstituted by Congress for acts of espionage, he perceives as a necessary deterrent: “I’m in favor of it. I’m in favor of the death penalty for premeditated murder. And in the case of serious espionage, no one knows how many deaths will result from it.”

Don't Tread on Him: An unabashed apologist for

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[LC]

"I'm very high on Ambassador Walters," says Henry Kissinger. "Mrs. Kirkpatrick"—Walters' combative predecessor—"was the style for the times. A more modulated course such as Ambassador Walters' is the right style for these times."

Tailoring the straitened attitude of a military man to the flexible *realpolitik* of a modern diplomat is the challenge Walters faces at the United Nations. His service to the Reagan Administration as ambassador-at-large from 1981-85, during which he logged over a million miles in transit, has already taken him to the smallest, newest countries of the world. Now he must attempt to conciliate them and others; he states his mission with a blunt, military snap: "To decrease the number of my country's enemies, and increase the number of its friends, and to advance the cause of freedom generally.

"For the first time in my life I'm hustling up the votes," he says cheerfully. "This is the first time I've ever had to worry about rounding up a consensus, rounding up a majority. It's an interesting transition. If you look at the last few months, we haven't done badly. We've

rounded up more votes on the resolution on Afghanistan, we've rounded up more votes on the resolution on Cambodia, we've defeated the challenge to Israel's credentials, we've gotten Yasir

Arafat uninvited (to the 40th anniversary celebration)."

As always, his languages—German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian—and his store of

cultural empathies will be his long suit. Former U.N. ambassador Donald McHenry looks hopefully to the Walters tenure: "He has many of the characteristics that I would say one needs to succeed in that job—experience in government, versatility of language, a conversationalist's style. He's the best linguist we've ever had there at that level." McHenry then assesses a theoretical strength of Walters' position: "He has the chance of being Pope John. He's not going to use that platform up there for some higher position—the Senate, the lecture circuit or the presidency of the United States, and that is very important in terms of having the chance to succeed."

"He understands, as so many Americans do not," Henry Kissinger analyzes, "that it's conflict and coexistence." The former secretary of state, whom Walters successfully smuggled to secret negotiations with the

Some of Walters' career decorations

American foreign policy, Walters keeps a South Vietnamese flag on his desk, the symbol of what he calls a "noble war."

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83

A WALTERS' WHO'S WHO

Vernon Walters has rubbed shoulders with the mightiest leaders of modern times. Interpreter for countless conversations between heads of state, he has also been a "fly on the wall" during some of the century's historic meetings, such as Harry Truman's 1950 conference on Wake Island with Douglas MacArthur, shortly before he fired the insubordinate general; the U-2 conference in Geneva in 1960, and Henry Kissinger's secret negotiations in Paris in the early 1970s.

In his view, the ideal leader possesses a global vision tempered with the detachment to "leave the job in the office. A man needs time to think," he advises, "and if he's so preoccupied with his day-to-day details that he can't think in the strategic sense," the panorama of that vision becomes clouded. At ease throughout his career in the company of major leaders, Walters has noticed that each was governed by a profound sense of history. "All or nearly all of them (were) extraordinarily well versed in history, as a background against which they were operating, as a criterion against which they would be judged in the future," he says. He briefly characterizes the men he remembers as "the giants":

*   **WINSTON CHURCHILL:** "He was just like the legend. He was larger-than-life. He *sounded* like Winston Churchill. He *looked* like Winston Churchill. As Time said, when they named him the man of the half-century in 1950, 'He launched the lifeboats of civilization.' "

*   **DWIGHT EISENHOWER:** "An extraordinary understanding of the world, an extraordinary ability to conciliate." Walters recalls that when he was hospitalized with a broken leg, he initially occupied a pleasant room with two other lieutenant colonels. Eisenhower, dissatisfied with his aide's accommodations but not wanting to show too obvious a favoritism, sent an enormous bouquet; the note, on White House stationery, was signed: "To Dick: Get well soon. Affectionately, Ike and Mamie." "Did anything happen?" the President inquired innocently. "Yes," Walters responded. "I was in a private room about five minutes later."

*   **HARRY TRUMAN:** "He was an extraordinary man catapulted into a position of extraordinary power. For most countries, achieving great power status is a long, laborious process. With us, it was very sudden. Mr. Truman was equal to that situation. He had a number of important decisions to make, and all the important ones he made right."

*   **RICHARD NIXON:** "The cool- est under fire," the ambassador says categorically. "I saw him in physical violence, when his life was in danger," in Caracas in 1958 when Wal-

ters was accompanying the vice-president as aide and interpreter, and their car was stoned by anti-American demonstrators. "I saw him through the whole Watergate business, and he was extraordinarily cool. I find it difficult to associate the man with the Woodward and Bernstein story."

*   **CHARLES DE GAULLE:** "Olympian detachment, absolute assurance, absolute conviction that he was right regardless of what anyone else thought. A certain oblivionfulness to circumstances. He made France a world power at a time when physically it was not. That is the difference between the statesman and the politician. The politician is carried along by the winds of history; the statesman channels the winds of history in the direction he wants his boat to go."

*   **DOUGLAS MACARTHUR:** "He was a very great man. He was one of the few American generals who looked beyond military victories to what was going to come. He made just one fundamental mistake. He didn't understand that whether the president is right or whether the president is wrong, he's the president of the United States. In my opinion, if he'd made more of an effort to try to convince the president"—to pursue the U.S. military advantage in Korea—"instead of to defy him, he might have gone further. I'm quite convinced that if we'd clobbered them in North Korea, we would never have had the Vietnam War."

North Vietnamese in Paris in the early 1970s, is confident of the ambassador's ability "to pursue a route through these two polarities. I'm very high on Ambassador Walters," he continues, citing the moderating influence Walters is likely to exert. "Mrs. Kirkpatrick"—Walters' combative predecessor—"was the style for the times. A more modulated course such as Ambassador Walters' is the right style for these times."

Not all observers agree, some seriously questioning the ambassador's credentials and priorities. "He's always been a totally amoral operator," charges Lawrence Birns, the director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, "who has been enormously successful in developing close and abiding relations with military

establishments." The largely labor union-supported, liberal-left research group, which bitterly opposed the Walters nomination to the U.N., maintains an extensive dossier on the ambassador, with which Birns fuels his stinging criticism. "He's a pragmatic cold warrior who doesn't go for the ideological rhetoric, but who has persuasively argued the case for these military establishments"—Birns names the military governments of Guatemala, Argentina and Chile as examples—"as being bulwarks against the spread of Communism. Right-wing repression has never bothered him; he's always found excuses for it."

Walters apparently welcomes the change of personal style that his new position requires. Once a teetotaling aide who declined to consume the glass of whiskey

PHOTOGRAPHY BY HARRY BENSON

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[L]

> "It would have been so easy to end the Vietnam War at any time by conventional means. In my view, all we had to do was land two divisions at Haiphong, march to Hanoi and say, 'If you guys want to go play in the woods, go play in the woods.'"

immersing his lieutenant colonel's insignia—an Army custom signifying the promotion—he now enjoys the social whirl of diplomatic occasions, accepting wine for the oratorio of toasts that formality demands. His Waldorf Towers official residence is filled with books, his numerous medals, his collection of subway maps from all over the world, and presided over by two cats, Bambi and Snowball. “They have a placidity I admire,” he says of them, adding perhaps more meaningfully, “Cats have no lords.”

From a flag-filled office overlooking the U.N., Walters contemplates the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev. “Judging from what I’ve seen of the summit, he showed a considerable measure of realism. I mean, he did not demand that we do away with SDI (the

Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars). I think he's smart enough to realize that it's inevitable." Professing no fear of the ultimate specter of nuclear annihilation—"I believe there's no possibility of it"—he says of U.S. relations with Gorbachev, "I am cautiously hopeful."

Walters is no Hamlet, wearing doubt on his sleeve, and his opinions ripple with inner certainty. The outcome of the Vietnam War still rankles the career officer, who cajoled his way to the Asian theater and describes it as "a noble war." "You know, it would have been so easy to end that war at any time by conventional means. In my view, all we had to do was land two divisions at Haiphong, march to Hanoi and say, 'If you guys want to go play in the woods, go play in the woods.'" Instead the

U.S. "bugged out," having won every battle but betrayed by "the pressure of the media and the pressure of public opinion at home. If there was ever an apt illustration of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, that was it."

His bitter regret he tempers with admiration for the President. The national purpose, a vital abstraction Walters feared dead of the Vietnamese schisms, has shown strong signs of recovery. "I think Mr. Reagan's restored it in very good measure," he says. His own role in the current patriotic climate he mentions with pride: "At an age when most of my contemporaries are out driving golf carts, or being President of the United States, here I am, still having fun, doing all sorts of interesting things, serving the things in which I believe." M

Walters tickling the ivories for Bambi in his official Waldorf Towers residence

After his induction in 1941

UPI/BETTMANN NEWS PHOTOS

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