Practiced

William Bundy's study of Nixon's foreign policy

Deception

NYT Book Review

5/24/98

finds a shrewd manipulator rather than a statesman.

A TANGLED WEB

The Making of Foreign Policy
in the Nixon Presidency.
By William Bundy.
Illustrated. 647 pp. New York:
Hill & Wang. $35.

By Evan Thomas

RICHARD NIXON worked tire-
lessly in his last years to make
sure that he would be remem-
bered not as a conniving politi-
cian but as a statesman. He wrote sever-
al memoirs and leaked his confidential
memorandums to various policy mak-
ers and Presidential candidates. At his
home in Saddle River, N.J., he gave din-
ners (usually Chinese) for visiting pun-
dits and foreign policy experts. He did
not erase the stain of Watergate, but he
did earn respect, even from his critics.

William Bundy is about the last per-
son Nixon would have chosen to pass
judgment on his foreign policy record.
Bundy — of Groton, Yale and Harvard
Law School, son-in-law of Dean Acheson,
bright young man in the Kennedy
Administration, editor of Foreign Af-
fairs — epitomizes the Eastern Estab-
lishment that Nixon envied and resent-
ed. In one of his conspiratorial moods,
Nixon might have regarded "A Tangled
Web" as a plot, one last attempt by the
Harvards to get Dick Nixon. Bundy's
tone — fair-minded and dispassionate —
would merely have aroused his suspi-
cions further.

Bundy's only personal memories of
Nixon in this volume are respectful.
While working for the National Security
Council in the 1950's, Bundy found then
Vice President Nixon's approach to for-

eign policy problems to be "serious and
professional." He is careful to give Pres-
ident Nixon credit as a shrewd strate-
gist and artful manipulator — but not as
a statesman, the laurel that Nixon covet-
ed most. Who passes Bundy's test? Har-
ry Truman, for one. Although he was "in
many ways less skilled than Nixon,"
Truman built a solid foundation for post-
war foreign policy through the Truman
Doctrine, Marshall Plan and NATO.
Nixon's contemporary Willy Brandt, the
West German Chancellor, also rates
statesman status: his ostpolitik created
a détente with Eastern Europe that con-
tributed to the peaceful collapse of Com-
munism. Both Truman and Brandt were
able to alter international relations in a
lasting way, Bundy says, because they
were willing to submit their ideas to pub-
lic discussion and legislative debate.

Nixon, on the other hand, went in for
showy gesturés and dramatic speeches,
but he — like his hero, Charles de Gaulle
— was a cynic about achieving popular
consensus. According to Bundy, most of
Nixon's bold public initiatives were de-
signed for short-term political advan-

Evan Thomas, an assistant managing
editor at Newsweek, is at work on a bi-
ography of Robert F. Kennedy.

8 May 24, 1998

tage (Nixon's own re-election, for example) or to buy time while Nixon plotted some secret stratagem. This was especially true of his handling of the Vietnam War: Nixon was forever promising peace while secretly waging war. Most voters had turned against Nixon's foreign policy by 1973 not just because of Watergate, Bundy asserts, but because Nixon "never really leveled with them."

Nixon was mainly undone by "his unshakable bent to deceive," Bundy writes. Secrecy is a tool of statecraft; Nixon's opening to China could have been sunk without it. But in democracies deception almost always backfires. Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia ruined a small country without really advancing American interests; similarly, his plot to destabilize the elected Government of Salvador Allende in Chile helped discredit

the C.I.A. and deepen Latin American resentment of United States meddling.

Even more than most Presidents, Nixon distrusted the professionals at the State and Defense Departments, preferring to use back channels and an informal committee of his own national security advisers that became known as the Washington Special Action Group. While efficient, especially in a crisis, that group was inevitably driven by the personal prejudices of Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who sometimes saw the hand of Moscow or Beijing where more ambiguous forces were at work. The prudent professionals in the national security bureaucracy had less monolithic views; they were "often right, and too seldom heeded," according to Bundy.

Most ordinary readers know Bundy as one of the hubristic Ivy Leaguers of David Halberstam's book "The Best and

the Brightest" — "that other Bundy," as Lyndon Johnson called him, to distinguish him from brother McGeorge, Johnson's national security adviser. So it may seem odd to find him defending ordinary bureaucrats or, for that matter, inveighing against executive branch deception. As Assistant Secretary of Defense for international security affairs and then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy was present at the creation of the credibility gap, Johnson's secret buildup of the Vietnam War in 1964-65. Bundy should not be personally blamed for Johnson's dissembling — indeed, together with brother Mac, he privately argued for more public candor. But he was involved in covert operations that went awry, like one that indirectly helped spark the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the summer of 1964.

In "A Tangled Web," Bundy says

only that he approaches the subject of the Vietnam War with "humility." At the time, and for many years after, he agonized over his role. Today, retired after two decades of Government service and another 12 years as editor of Foreign Affairs, Bundy is properly seen as a professional foreign policy mandarin, a detached observer far removed from the political fray. Even so, as he recites Nixon's shortcomings, Bundy might have more explicitly acknowledged that he learned some of the lessons of statesmanship the hard way. Without question, his involvement in Vietnam policy during the Johnson Administration added to his sensitivity to the need for "leveling" with the American people.

Nixon did have some extremely able advisers, most notably Kissinger. But in Bundy's view, Kissinger's role has been exaggerated: while he was "a willing executor ... the choice of mea-

sures was almost always Nixon's." In some cases, Alexander Haig, then a brigadier general assigned to the national security staff, had more sway over Nixon. Bundy sees Haig as a malign influence who urged "strong courses of action and maximum military autonomy," pushing Nixon to bomb and invade Cambodia and Laos and to cut secret deals with the Saigon Government.

As a kind of final report card, Bundy makes use of Kissinger's eulogy at Nixon's funeral in April 1994. Kissinger offered an impressive list of Nixon's foreign policy achievements. When Nixon left office, Kissinger stated, "an agreement to end the war in Vietnam had been concluded." Only for American troops, Bundy observes; "the true 'end' to the war came in 1975 in the form of defeat." Kissinger next cited "permanent dialogue with China." Yes but, Bundy responds. It was the Chinese, on the verge of war with the Soviet Union in 1969, who took the initiative, and the relationship quickly began to sour. Third on Kissinger's list was a "readiness without illusions to ease tensions with the Soviet Union." Nixon did "help to accusTom the American people, especially those with conservative leanings, to the idea that America could oppose a Communist great power on many fronts and still deal with it on others." But Nixon's détente with the Soviets, Bundy argues, was short-lived; Nixon and Kissinger envisioned a continuing arms race and superpower competition in the third world.

Bundy does give Nixon points for Kissinger's fourth item — "a peace process in the Middle East" — but most of the credit he awards to Kissinger, who was busy shuttling between the Arabs and Israelis when Nixon was consumed by Watergate. As for the last item — "the beginning via the European Security Conference of establishing human rights as an international issue, weakening the Soviet hold in Eastern Europe" — Bundy concludes, "Here the historian is bound to gulp in disbelief: in the whole range of Nixon's writings there is hardly a favorable reference to human rights either as an ideal or as a practical force in international affairs."

ALL in all, a grade of no better than B minus. Kissinger's research associates are no doubt already at work on the rebuttal to this book. The best hope of Nixon's defenders may be that "A Tangled Web" is not likely to reach a mass audience. Bundy writes clearly and gracefully and at times with narrative drive, but he offers more diplomatic history than the average reader will want to know. Many of his conclusions are not exactly new — both William Shawcross in "Sideshow" and Seymour Hersh in "The Price of Power" exposed Nixon's foreign policy perfidies long ago. Still, Bundy's carefully researched analysis will have an impact on the academics, think-tank gurus and pundits whom Nixon professed to disdain but whose approval, in later years especially, he anxiously sought. ☐