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Books

# The flying doctor reports back

Adam Roberts

Before criticising this book, four things should be said loud and clear. First, it is a fascinating account of the international relations of a turbulent period. Its 1,500 pages record in extraordinary detail Dr Kissinger's activities as President Nixon's Assistant for National Security Affairs between November 1968 and January 1973: another volume will cover his role as us Secretary of State in the following four years. Kissinger reveals much that was hitherto unknown or only guessed at: whether it be about Indonesia (of which more below), about Soviet attempts to set up a submarine base in Cuba, about opening relations with China, or about Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.

Secondly, this book presents a persuasive glimpse of the White House of Nixon's first term as President. Kissinger's view of Nixon is ambiguous: he owed his elevation and subsequent influence entirely to Nixon, shared his distrust of the bureaucracy, and admired his ability to take bold decisions. On the other hand, he comments repeatedly on Nixon's avoidance of face-to-face confrontation, his secretiveness, and the impetuous and arbitrary character of his orders. Time after time, Kissinger obstruc ted unwise Nixon decisions, while waiting to see whether Nixon really wanted them im plemented. In a memorable phrase, he writes of "a President strong in his decisions but inconclusive in his leadership."

Thirdly, these memoirs are often very funny. For example, there is a beautiful vignette of Defence Secretary Laird muscling in on the presidential party's audience with Pope Paul VI. He was told that at least he should do away with his inevitable cigar while in the papal presence. As the Pope was speaking, smoke was seen coming out of Laird's pocket. Laird's attempt to prevent self-immolation by beating out the fire was interpreted by some of the others present as applause, and they joined in. The Vatican officials—accustomed no doubt to bizarre meetings between temporal and spiritual authorities—managed to pretend that nothing unusual was going on.

Fourthly, Kissinger is surely justified in hammering home one of the book's themes: that sometimes in politics, especially international politics, it is necessary to take hard and difficult decisions; sometimes there really is no middle ground or compromise

Henry Kissinger

The White House Years

Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Michael Joseph £14.95

solution; sometimes those who advocate supposedly more moral policies are basking in the dishonest luxury of evading realities and responsibilities. Time and again in this work an implicit challenge is thrown down: don't just criticise me for bombing Cambodia or destabilising Chile, say what else one could have done in the circumstances I faced.

Despite its many virtues, only briefly and inadequately summarised above, this work has deep flaws. Partly they are flaws relating to matters of fact. Thus nothing is said here about Kissinger's role in getting the Central Intelligence Agency to spend ten million dollars in the 1972 Italian elections.

Kissinger's account of negotiations with Israeli leaders in 1969 is unpersuasive. He now claims that Nixon, in a meeting with

Golda Meir, actually used the phrase "hardware for software" in her presence, meaning that he would give weapons if she would show diplomatic flexibility. This unhappy phrase—meat and drink, surely, for a Freudian analyst—subsequently got leaked to the press, much to the annoyance of Mrs Meir, who denied that any such term had been used in her presence. So who is right, Mrs Meir or Dr Kissinger? Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs, published last week (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £10), throw interesting light on this. As Israeli ambassador in Washington at the time, he took notes of a phone conversation in which Kissinger himself explicitly reassured Mrs Meir that no such term had been used in her presence. Kissinger fails to mention this phone conversation here. So his version is probably inaccurate, certainly incomplete, and contradicted in detail by an account from a source no less reliable than himself.

On the much publicised question of phone-tappings of members of his own staff, Kissinger says little. We are told that another volume will deal with the moral issues raised by national security wiretapping; and it appears that most of the awkward facts have also been deferred. There is also an extraordinary silence in these 1,500 pages on Kissinger's treatment of his aide, Morton Halperin. After one press leak, Kissinger proposed to Halperin that he be taken off the distribution list for highly classified material; but we are told nothing of this outrageous slur here.

Omissions, or even errors of fact, of the

Philip Argent

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New Society 22 November 1979

kind indicated could easily be explained or forgiven, even if the conduct to which they refer could not. It is on the larger issues, of overall policy and of interpretation, that these memoirs are most vulnerable.

On the Indochina war, which the Nixon regime inherited from its predecessors, Kissinger is alternately profound and shallow. He was, of course, right to perceive that the North Vietnamese were essentially interested in victory, not in a compromise solution. But he was surely wrong to cling so much to a conception of the war as a case of communist aggression, pure and simple. Even now, in these pages, he claims that North Vietnam had invaded South Vietnam "without provocation," and fails to discuss at all the many provocations the North Vietnamese had faced over the years, not least the failure of the 1954 Geneva provisions for elections to reunify the country.

Kissinger's coverage of the Vietnam negotiations is detailed and fascinating, but it is also unintentionally revealing of the limitations of his own approach. He shows himself offering cease-fires, elections throughout South Vietnam, withdrawals and concessions of various kinds, one-track approaches and two-track approaches. The North Vietnamese were not interested. He seems to attribute this to communist intranigue. He nowhere systematically discusses the actual past experience of Hanoi's leaders in the matter of negotiations: an experience which seemed to them to consist of one disappointment after another, and had

left them profoundly suspicious not just of their adversaries, but also of their allies and even of negotiated agreements as such.

There is one revealing omission in the long account of the Vietnam negotiations. Kissinger hardly mentions the 1954 Geneva agreements on Vietnam, which linked together the various political and military issues in an imperfect but at least coherent way. It required no great foresight to see that they provided the only sensible starting point for negotiating a new settlement. It was a variant of the 1954 settlement that was eventually adopted by the various parties at Paris in 1973, and in the event it turned out to provide for exactly the outcome provided for in Geneva 19 violent years earlier: face-saving withdrawal by the outside power (in 1954, of course, it was France), and reunification under the communists two years later. Could such a Geneva-type settlement have been achieved by the remarkable Dr K sooner, perhaps in 1969, thus saving four years of bombing and blood-letting? It is impossible to know, but these memoirs suggest that that particular approach was not even properly tried out.

At times Kissinger seems to have overestimated the use of force as a means of achieving change. He seems naively to have overestimated the capacity of ground troops and air power to prevent guerrilla activities in and from Cambodia. Thus in March 1970, he says, "Our only realistic option was to destroy the sanctuaries." He nowhere seriously discusses whether there was a real prospect of achieving this object.

On Cambodia, Kissinger deals with some—but only some—of the accusations levelled against him by William Shawcross in *Side-show*. He does make some telling points; but Shawcross's argument that Kissinger showed no hint of knowledge of the limits of air power seems to be confirmed, rather than otherwise, by these pages.

On many other matters, besides Indonesia, Kissinger's account seems curiously lacking in perspective. On Chile's 1970 election, and Allende's programme, he says, "By definition his would be the last democratic election." It was not so: further elections were held *after* he became President. On crises, Kissinger's claims that "boldness is the safest course." Always? For both sides? It is a dangerous lesson to bequeath without any allowance for exceptions.

Because some of its analysis is simplistic and its lessons crude, this book may have an influence that is baneful as well as beneficial. It informs vastly, but it also conceals. If this seems a contradictory verdict, it is perhaps only a mirror of the man. He showed extraordinary insight in his opening to China, yet his interpretation of events in Chile still seems crude. These pages only confirm the Clausewitzian complexity of the character of this jet-age man: both a shuttle diplomat and a secret bomber. Many of the flying doctor's questionable missions, debatable diagnoses and emergency operations are illuminated by this flight report. But awkward questions remain unanswered, and some apparently even unheard.

## TRAVELLING BROTHERS
R.A.LEESON

The book seeks to pinpoint the origin of the "tramping" system and finds it in the development of the original crafts of centuries earlier. An attractively and persuasively written account of the six centuries' road from craft fellowship to trade unionism.
*Substantial and extensively researched study... the result, a rich, informative and appealing story.*

The Economist

George Allen & Unwin
£8.95

PO Box 18, Park Lane
Hemel Hempstead
Herts HP2 4TE

## Small is efficient

Barbara Ward

Progress for a Small Planet

Penguin £1.75 paperback/Temple Smith £8.95

hardback

## Peter Hall

If you care about the subject—and if not, you wouldn't have started reading this—then a large part of Barbara Ward's new book won't be new. For, as the highest of higher journalists—she was assistant editor of the *Economist* nearly 40 years ago, and published her first book some 30 years ago—she has constantly caught and then developed the mood of the times. Every theme treated in this book—finite resources, ecological hazards, the world battle over resource distribution—has been treated earlier; even the most recent, the current crisis of stagflation, turns out to have been treated predictively in one of her earliest books.

For those who didn't join the story that far back (or forward) what will be most familiar will be recent themes: scarce natural resources, alternative strategies for husbanding them, alternative resources (but never nuclear), conservation, recycling, careful agriculture. For those who know Barbara Ward's current preoccupations, the new part will be the need to relate the current economic crisis to the pattern of imbalanced growth, by concentrating first on third world development.

The common answer to all these challenges—so she argues—is a new attitude to growth. Small is not only beautiful: it is also efficient and necessary. Conservation makes individual as well as social sense. Recycling programmes can benefit individuals, by giving them a sense of involvement in a cooperative enterprise, as well as making national or global sense. Better diets will make affluent people feel healthier as well as releasing food for those still hungry. Changed work methods will benefit management as well as workers. Small scale farming experiments can transform third world economies with incredible speed.

Put this way, it almost sounds too good to be true. For Barbara Ward is a committed propagandist, whose method—announced already in her prologue—is to demonstrate in hard terms that some real people in some real places are achieving results that could be copied with benefit to others. The book is packed with telling case studies: of rural enterprises, from mid-Wales to south Korea, that have achieved extraordinary results; of self-build programmes that transformed the lives of poor people in third world cities, and made good economic sense, too; of tree planting schemes to provide fuel for needy peasants and guard against the risk of denudation; and hundreds more.

So far so good. Deliberately and just marginally overwritten, by one of the most effective authors at work on the whole contemporary predicament, this book powerfully conveys both the enormity of the problems and the possibility of grappling with them. Decision makers do learn from their

LC

# BOOKS IN GENERAL

## Bruce Page

### The Pornography of Power

The White House Years, 1968-1972 by HENRY KISSINGER Michael Joseph/Weidenfeld £14.95

DURING THE MIDDLE SIXTIES at Harvard University, Government Course 180, *The Principles of International Relations*, was taught by Professor Henry Kissinger. He had made his name as a student of 19th-century diplomatic history, and added to it with studies of nuclear weaponry: although there was nothing to foreshadow his present-day eminence, he had some extra-academic standing as an adviser to the Rockefellers, and to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Kissinger's discourse made a powerful impact upon some of his students. It began, as one of them recalls, from the notion that nuclear armouries made it difficult for Great Powers to graduate military threats in the way that they once supposedly did. Once, it had been possible for a Bismarck to notch up tension in Europe's chancelleries - gaining his way thereby - through issuing commands for mobilisation. But how to do this with nuclear missiles permanently mobilised, just a button-push away from 'mutual assured destruction'?

Such a situation, according to Kissinger, placed a 'significant premium' upon irrationality. The line of argument, says his ex-student, ran like this:

> There is a clear element of power over your opponents if you can be persuaded to believe that excess zeal on your part might touch off nuclear war.

> This particular lecture made one of the clearest impressions of my Harvard years. It is trenchant stuff: but fraught with a veritable hall of mirrors of treble ... quadruple ... multiple think. And underlying it the sombre, but then unstated, requirement to acquire a record of irrational deeds.

Also, this student recalls Dr Kissinger saying, in so many words, that the requirement of irrationality was 'unfortunately ... at odds with the democratic political system'. (True enough: Barry Goldwater's Presidential candidacy had just been wiped out because he was considered irrational on the question of nuclear warfare.) Therefore, Kissinger thought, totalitarian regimes had a powerful advantage in world affairs.

Practical people commonly assume that nonsense talked by academics and intellectuals has little impact upon the real world. But this case, at least, is not so simple. A few years later, at the outset of his star-crossed Presidency, Richard Nixon privately explained his conception of international relations to the White House adviser H. R. (Bob) Haldeman. The story is told by William Shawcross in his book *Sideshow* (much anathematised by Dr Kissinger), and it is worth mentioning that it refers to a period when most respectable opinion portrayed the Nixon White House as a citadel of modest, conservative calm.

He said, 'I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I

want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry - and he has his finger on the nuclear button" - and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.'

Where, and how, could Nixon have acquired such an idea? And once acquired, how sustained?

THE QUESTION STARES at us across a decade, and across several million corpses. For whatever the Seventies brought to Indochina, it was not peace. There had, of course, been great suffering there during the Sixties, and it was too much to hope it might end easily with the decade. But scarcely anyone can have imagined the Sixties as merely an overture to impending nightmares: an intensified war fought (despite the distribution of Nobel Peace Prizes) to its bitter conclusion; aerial bombardment like none seen before; famine; fresh wars (China versus Vietnam, Vietnam versus Cambodia); the expulsion of the Boat People; the ascendancy (still legally recognised by our country) of Pol Pot and his lethal automatons.

On one account, this catastrophe was due to a gigantic misuse of the power of America, still by vast margins the world's most richly-endowed nation. Shawcross's *Sideshow* is a chief document of any such indictment. On another, it was due precisely to an *insufficient* deployment of American power: that Indochina's misfortunes (mirrored elsewhere in the world) begin with the ambitions of totalitarian communism, and that the Western military resistance which is alone capable of checking those ambitions is systematically undermined by liberal guilt and by socialist collaboration. Dr Kissinger's huge memoir is largely devoted to upholding this view: he claims that the architecture of his Indochina peace would have held, had not the US Congress foolishly stripped the Presidency of its ability to deploy air power and military assistance. Thus, the monstrous determination of the totalitarians prevailed. One cannot, he says, blame the nature of a regime upon those who, like himself, tried to resist it but were betrayed. He has the support of, among others, the *Wall Street Journal* and the *Economist* in drawing from this geopolitical conclusions extending far beyond Indochina: if such betrayals are not corrected in future, then our civilisation is doomed.

It is not so hard to show that Kissinger's account of American involvement in Southeast Asia is a web of untruths - to an extent which makes *The White House Years* implausible as a witness to anything. It is less easy to understand why this should be so, to explain why a man of Kissinger's gifts feels he can proffer a view of the world which - for all its dress of sophistication - would be too crude

for a schoolchild equipped with any decent sense of curiosity. A notable example occurs at p. 518:

> It was Hanoi - animated by an insatiable drive to dominate Indochina - that ... organised the Khmer Rouge long before any American bombs fell on Cambodian soil.

No. Anyone investigating the plausible-enough idea of a Vietnamese desire to colonise Cambodia discovers early on that the North Vietnamese maintained for many years their own cadres of Khmer communists. These were left leashed in Hanoi during the long time that the North Vietnamese considered the 'neutralist' Cambodian regime of Prince Sihanouk to be a better option for them than a loyal, but dependent satellite. The Khmer Rouge, originally a fraction devoted to Sihanouk's overthrow, loathed Hanoi precisely because it offered no help against the Prince. After Sihanouk was replaced by the American client Lon Nol, the Vietnamese tried to take over (or supplant) the Khmer Rouge *maquis* by sending their own long-domesticated Cambodians down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Pol Pot's men slaughtered them. If the Khmer Rouge are seriously beholden to anybody, it is to the Chinese - whose Asian ambitions are scarcely smaller than Vietnam's,² but who appear in Kissinger's account as co-conspirators with himself for peace.

Naturally, this interesting, if wretched reality must be collapsed in order to allow Kissinger to draw a straight, clear line of blame. Before going further into the structure of such boldly-made but feebly-based contentions, it helps to look at the nature of Kissinger's book, and the nature of his claim to rule.

VERY SPACIOUS CLAIMS are made for *The White House Years*. The Sunday Times*, which is serialising it at length, celebrates its 'style' and 'richness'. 'A stunning book,' says Thomas Bray of the *Wall Street Journal*, '... a major inquiry into the nature and art of statecraft ... gem-like profiles of foreign leaders ... Mr Kissinger's account of his secret trip to China shines.' Even a hostile critic like Stanley Hoffman in *The New York Review of Books* finds it intellectually impressive, and says that Kissinger, if not otherwise engaged, might have made a novelist of quality. Nonetheless, Hoffman reflects, there is something 'airless and oppressive' about the volume.

This does not go nearly far enough. Not only is the book, as a literary artefact, gruesomely bad: its badness is connected with its true nature as a work of propaganda, and connected somewhat with the undue deference which Kissinger continues to be paid. To begin quietly, here is a well-praised example of one of Kissinger's gems of portraiture (the subject being Edward Heath):

> He was not free of the complexes imposed by Britain's class history ... The ruthlessness necessary to achieve his ambition did not come naturally and was all the more noticeable for that reason ... He was a warm and gentle person who anticipated rejection and fended it off with a formal politeness (punctuated often with a laugh distinguished by its lack of birth).

The result (surely leaving Tolstoy secure upon his pedestal) would be acceptable enough in a provincial newspaper obituary: it is supposed, however, to be one of the plums in Kissinger's

1. *Sideshow* (André Deutsch), serialised NS 15, 22, 29 June. Shawcross cites Haldeman and Di Mona, *The Ends of Power*, p. 83.

2. See Anthony Barnett, NS 23 February 1979.

808

## Cotswold Diary

☐ When I was asked to write the Diary for this week, I protested that I'd been away for a month, that nothing of any significance had happened to me, that I had no idea what had been happening to anyone else, and that my information on world affairs, let alone on Cotswold gossip, was nil. Write it, they said.

So. I haven't met anyone who knew Philby, Burgess, Maclean or Anthony Blunt, even as children. I haven't attended any parties, demonstrations, or meetings of the Women's Institute. The only attention I have given to Kampuchea is to sponsor a six-year-old to walk four times around his village in aid of it, which he thinks is a bit daft. I wasn't here for Guy Fawkes Night, Harvest Festival, or even the Jumble Sale. I spent a week in hospital with a kind of howdah over my right foot, in a cheerful little cupboard of a room overlooking the Lisson Grove Labour Exchange, which was handy for visitors who drew their dole there but told me very little about the horrors of unemployment under a Conservative Government. I then spent ten days in Oxfordshire, foot propped up like an old man with gout, only looking up from the typewriter to watch a mare and her foal cavorting round a square, flat field, which didn't seem to bore them. From there I moved to the salubrious heights of Willesden, and a family wedding; then five days in Kensal Rise, which may be a great place to live if you happen to live there. I was taken to Wisley Garden, which I found rather dank, and to Messrs Whitbread in the City, where they kindly gave me a pretty little silver dish and a larger and even prettier cheque to go with it. I suppose this might count as an event of national interest, since I actually saw Robert Robinson in the flesh (he said, and I quote, 'Congratulations.'). I then came home, stopping in Oxfordshire to pick up my typewriter and do twelve hours work on the way. That, apart from the fact that I must have read at least 500,000 words and written or rewritten what feel like as many, has been my month.

☐ Arrived home, my priority was to get to the local newsagent and order *The Times*. There are no political implications in this. I'm just sick of a newspaper that reserves five pages a week for a peculiar sect called 'Guar-dian Women': the relief, on 13 November, of feeling that one could potter through Levin and the excavation of Saxon churches without wearing a womb around one's neck. I also wanted a rest from the ever-expanding *Observer*, which now segregates Living, implying that news, arts, business, sport and £8,000 Cadillacs are for terminal cases only. All I want to know is where I can find the Gardening column once a week, (and on Saturdays I have the lot, anyway, including the pink one – my loyalty to Christopher Lloyd is unshakable, even if he does appear under Leisure): Otherwise, I'm perfectly happy to work through a newspaper from Home News to Wills, and whether I'm a woman, a stockbroker or a Chinese Seventh Day Adventist is none of their business.

☐ Anyway: my newsagent is a tired grandmother whose shop always seems to be full of elderly wives paying their bills in very small

coinage. Because I wasn't buying anything, I eased myself apologetically to the counter and asked if I could please switch to *The Times*. The reaction was horrifying. The exhausted newsagent looked as though I'd just told her some terrible news that she had been dreading for years.

'I'm very apprehensive about the Sunday Times,' she said. In the circumstances, the word 'apprehensive' seemed to have huge significance.

'Why?' I asked, trying to sound gentle and unshockable.

'I don't know. I'm very apprehensive.'

'You mean there's some... problem? You think you may not get it?'

'No. Oh, no.' She shook her head violently. 'I'm just – ', she glanced at the woolly-gloved fingers still scrabbling for lips; she seemed trapped, terrified, as though William Rees-Mogg and Harold Evans were hiding under the counter, ready to blast her to pieces with high-explosive Smarties. 'I'm just very apprehensive about the Sunday Times.'

I still wonder what she was trying to tell me. Maybe there's a posse of Iranian revolutionaries hiding out in the Cotswolds, ready to strike down anyone who sells Frank Giles' interview with the Shah.

☐ My prejudice against Chipping Campden is probably even more illogical than my distaste for Kensal Rise: unrelieved beauty or ugliness is nearly always a bore. Campden is one of those villages where every door-knocker gleams, every house and cottage is listed, every garden purrs under the attention of men and boys (if a garden can't purr, I'm sorry. To me, they purr.). I was therefore delighted and amazed to hear that 'Campden Wags' – we still have 'wags' in the Cotswolds – had recently festooned the village with chamber pots, built a privy out of cardboard and dumped it in the High Street, and circulated ribald broadsheet verses celebrating these acts of vandalism.

It's all something to do with the fact that the Department of Environment has given some money to the District Council, which has given some money to the local council, for the purpose of repairing the pavement and doing away with an unsightly car-park. The materials for repairing the paving (surely not new paving?) didn't arrive, so the workmen started digging up the car-park first. At this point, the traders in Lower High Street realised they would be losing a lot of business, and demanded that at least part of the car-park be kept. The town council held a fiery meeting in which the Mayor said the whole thing was most unexpected, the Chamber of Trade demanded a public explanation of what was going on, the deputy county surveyor of Gloucestershire said that it was all having a bad effect on the morals of the workmen, particularly since the county's warning lamps kept getting nicked, and Mr Seamus Stewart, the local bookseller, said there was a shortfall of £15,000 on the pavement scheme anyway, so what were they doing wasting money on 'nothing more than a cosmetic exercise?' As is usual in such affairs, it was decided to call a working party meeting, which would decide when to hold a public meeting, which would – eventually – decide what course to take.

☐ I couldn't quite see which side the chamber pots were on, but the story was irresistible; also, I love to find new bookshops. On Saturday

there was an icy drizzle and a long lunchtime, all the 'traders' were firmly shut. A bus-load of hikers were wandering about, vainly trying to look doors in the hope of buying a local art, craft, or packet of crisps. I took my bearings from the five yards of dug-up car park and found Mr Stewart's shop. 'Closed for luncheon,' the notice said: Librairie fermée – réouverture à 14 hrs: Libreria chiusa durante la colazione: Siop Ilyfrau ar gau am génio: 'Gam dhinneir/Awa tae my denner: Vipote Bibliothila Necesse Coenare Habet Librarium ...'

At that point Mr Stewart opened the door, and seemed not at all surprised to find me scribbling in a notebook. I may not have copied his Welsh and Gaelic correctly, in which case I apologise; the information was also conveyed in Hebrew, German, Arabic, Dutch and Japanese, though not, he said regretfully, in Esperanto.

I had read in the local paper that Mr Stewart is 'the erstwhile "Brain of Britain"' and should have remembered, but 'erstwhile' is something I don't come across much and I thought I was primarily there to ask him about the chamber pots. He was much more interested in telling me how the ancient Persians (I think) called out 'Thalassa' when they caught sight of the sea, and how if he had his way, the grass verges of Chipping Campden (but not, of course, the car-park) should be left to grow wild, providing they grew oxyps and eglantine rather than docks and nettles. I thought this a very promising idea, and agreed that Epsom Salts were just about as far as you could go if you were really into organic gardening. He fetched his NEW STATESMAN clippings, being an erstwhile Competition winner, and I eventually left with a load of books, none of which cost more than 45p except for his own, *Book Collecting* (David & Charles, £6.50 + 10p signing charge, which goes to cover research). Useless as a reporter I had realised that I was no wiser about who had hopped out the chamber pots or why; but discovering Seamus Stewart did a lot to reconcile me to Chipping Campden.

On the way back to the car, I read a notice pinned up in the newsagent's window: 'Black Waitress Dress and Hat. Worn Twice. 36 Bust. £5'. Repatriated, I suppose. Nice girl, of course, but a bit out of place in Chipping Campden.

## Penelope Mortimer

### This England

Prices: £3 book token for first entry, £2 tokens for others printed. Paste entries on a postcard.

☐ He said it was impossible for the company to cut back. He added: 'Other industries can cut back on overtime or manpower, but we can't have fewer swans or fairies in a ballet.' - *Daily Telegraph* (Jan Harris)

☐ After protests, the judge added: 'There are some sections of the community where beatings of one's wife is not the same as others. I mean that behaviour in Belgrave Square is not the same as behaviour in Bermondsey.' - *Guardian* (Shalini Waran)

☐ Mr Crome finished in fifth place behind the Liberal and National Front candidates. He stood at the general election to discover if God wanted an Independent Christian MP. - *Harrow Observer* (Nicolas Walter)

New Statesman 23 November 1979

807

[10]

enormous duff. It is surely unusual to read
1,500 pages of recollections by a professional
intellectual, and find them practically devoid
of general cultural references: those that
occur being apt to clang appallingly. During
his 'shining' account of the Chinese expedi-
tion, Kissinger tells Chou En-Lai that some of
his experiences make him feel like

the plumber in Kafka's novel *The Castle*, who,
having been summoned and then denied en-
trance, spent his life trying to get in...

Given the fate of the Nixon Administration,
the substitution of 'plumber' may just be a
hilarious Freudianism: but it's hard to believe
that anyone who has really encountered that
unbearable book could forget that 'K', the
protagonist in *The Castle*, is a land-surveyor,
for K's profession is woven into the tale
almost as firmly as Shylock's into *The Mer-
chant of Venice*.

An intellectual might be defined, nega-
tively, as someone who tries not to mangle
literature. Naturally, you can be a perfectly
good cook, Polar navigator or surgeon with-
out claiming intellectual virtues. But you may
not be invited to Harvard to preach the Mad-
man Theory of War, nor appointed in
Washington to practise it.

Elsewhere, our cultivated statesman fondly
re-invents the literary wheel. Reflecting that
it's tough at the geopolitical top, he says:

> I read a novel once, based on the proposition that each human being has a finite amount of qualities like courage, and endurance and wisdom, and that life consists of expending these ever-dwindling resources.

This surely is not the only theme of literature
but it's about the hardest to overlook: being
established in the *Iliad* and the *Odyssey*,
elaborated in the tale of Beowulf's final mons-
ter, and carried no doubt into the epics of
cultures other than our own. The fact that in
each individual case the contest between *virtu*
and *fortuna* has just one result was pointed
out to Roland before Roncesvalles, noted by
Cassius of Portia's suicide, and defied by the
horn outside the Dark Tower. Sweeney
among the nightingales: all this comes down
to something Kissinger picked up somewhere?
(In a *Reader's Digest* version of *The Red
Badge of Courage*?) The reader will not by
now be amazed to learn that Cambodia's fate
unfolds with (yes) 'all the inevitability of a
Greek tragedy': script by Henry Kissinger and
Richard Nixon, based on an idea by
Euripides.

Literature aside, one is surprised, not so
much that a Professor of Government (and
world statesman) should express total ignor-
ance of economics, as by the aggressive
incuriosity of Kissinger's approach to the sub-
ject. Much space is consumed in denouncing
the 'moralistic' foreign-policy tradition of
pre-Nixonian Washington, and its supposedly
lamentable effect upon America's interna-
tional potency. The idea that this falling-off
might have something to do with the collapse
of the dollar (due in good part to costly
military adventuring) is not mentioned even
by way of denial.

Still more curiously, there is an almost-total
absence of reference to the major texts on
Kissinger's own subject: statecraft, its
philosophy and history. One quick pat for
Lord Bryce, and un-indexed nod to de Toc-
queville's *Memoirs* – the reader, at this point,
feels like one who, forcing down gelid cocoa,
is reminded of the taste of chilled champagne
– a passing cuff for Gramsci and that's it. Not

a look-in for Locke, Hume, Mill, Pareto,
Oakeshott – or even Hobbes, whom one
might have thought to be in Kissinger's line.
Kissinger dilates upon his own 'penchant' for
philosophy. Yet only one philosopher, Kant,
is mentioned, just once, for an idea from a
peripheral essay. In general, it would be hard
to imagine a book less touched by Kantian
ideas, or by philosophical thought of any sort
except the kind executives mean when they
talk of 'corporate philosophy'.

Lacking any intellectual distinction, Kis-
singer's pages – 'airless' they are indeed – are
leavened only by Washington wisecracks, and
large helpings of the pornography of power.
We learn much, for instance, about the foibles
of Richard Nixon, and this will recommend
*The White House Years* to a certain groupie-
readership. But what the book lacks above all
is any clear sense of the flow and structure of
time. Such huge and many-faceted books
often append a chronology: here, there is
none, nor any firm textual continuum to
eliminate the need. William Shawcross has
observed that the story of Cambodia – against
which, with whatever motive, the White

mates that this was the last bit of fun 'bluff'
Yahya had before being overthrown in conse-
quence of the 'upheaval' in East Pakistan.
You have to trudge on to page 853 to reach
the rather *earlier* date of April 1971, and
Kissinger's acknowledgement that the
'upheaval' consisted largely of acts of geno-
cide committed by the military units under his
bluff playmate's command.

WHY SHOULD THE INTELLECTUAL POVERTY and narrative curiosities of Kissinger's memoirs matter? First, because his rise to power derived from his status (Harvard certificated) as an intellectual. Nixon, in a phrase Kissinger has used elsewhere, had a 'meatball mind'. He needed to make at least one appointment which would add mental lustre to his administration. He lacked the wide choice that Democratic presidents often enjoy, and he acquired Henry Kissinger (to considerable applause) from Nelson Rockefeller. It is, of course, more usual for people to reach high office by leading trade-unions, running businesses, displaying sitzfleisch-endurance, or just being good with a gun. But

House was directing a vast aerial offensive – is
treated for a period in obsessive detail, and
then vanishes for years on end from the
book's perspective.

Events, in *The White House Years*, are
loosened from their natural conjunctions, and
reset elaborately. The story of the Presidency
begins with a substantial, indeed over-stuffed
account of the European tour of February
1969, in which Nixon appears as peacemaker
and conciliator: conducting grand *tours d'horizon* with de Gaulle, dining cosily with
Harold Wilson at Chequers, and basking in
the repute attaching to the man who was
supposedly winding-down America's Asian
war (the first business, in any narrative sense,
to confront his Presidency). It is 180 pages
and many contexts later before the reader
learns that the itinerant peacemaker was issu-
ing from his aircraft secret orders (only coun-
termanded at the last moment, and then not
for long) to begin the secret bombing of
Cambodia.

Again: at page 739 Kissinger has reached
July 1971. He is in Pakistan en route to China,
enjoying a great 'cops-and-robbers' conspi-
racy with President Yahya Khan over keeping
the Peking diversion secret. Kissinger esti-

Kissinger's qualification is still a very old one,
tracing back to the Greeks, to whom it seemed
undeniable that intellect – the possession of a
mind with unusual capacities for learning and
rational introspection – was something which
fitted a citizen to rule. In all its sordid adven-
tures, the Western mind has never quite lost
track of this idea, and no doubt it is potent in
other cultures also.

Lacking any other substantial qualification,
Kissinger presents as an unusually pure exam-
ple of the intellectual drafted into politics: he
must therefore be examined as such, just as
we would want to know, when examining a
soldier's political record, whether his medals
were authentic, or obtained from a theatrical
costumerier's.

What is the essential nature of mind, or
intellect – which was, by reputation, Kis-
singer's title to office, and evidence of which I
allege to be lacking from his discourse? Col-
eridge, in a famous essay, asked himself what
distinguished the 'man of superior mind', and
decided that it was not, intrinsically, the
weight and novelty of his remarks, nor yet
their elegance of expression. He thought that
it lay centrally in method and arrangement.
With an 'ignorant man, though perhaps

New Statesman 23 NOVEMBER 1979

5.9

shrewd and able in his particular calling', we perceive

... that the objects and events recur, in the
narration in the same order, and with the same
accompaniments, however accidental or imperti-
nent, as they had first occurred to the narrator...
and Coleridge cites, as a prototype, Mistress
Quickly (Henry IV, Pt 2):

...Thous didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt
goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the
round table, by a sea-coal fire, on Wednesday in
Whitsun week when the prince broke thy head for
liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor...
This, at least, is not

This, at least, is not Kissinger's error –
though the one-damn-thing-after-another
quality will be recognisable to anyone who has
dealt with the memoirs of Harold Wilson –
or, still more, the scatological jumble of
Nixon's White House tapes. Its cause, in Col-
eridge's diagnosis, is 'the want of a staple, or
starting-post in the narrator himself: from the
absence of the leading Thought, which... we
may not-inaptly call the INITIATIVE'.

There are more technical and intricate
arguments for the notion that the mind must
possess an initiative, must set out to invent
any world it wishes to perceive – and cannot
be a mere receptacle, or 'bucket' in Popper's
dissmissive phrase. Still, Coleridge's literary
models are perhaps more easily assimilable.
Given a 'staple' in the narrator, products of
intellect are recognisable enough, and

the first merit, that which admits neither substi-
tute nor equivalent, is, that everything is in its
place. Where this charm is wanting, every other
merit ... becomes an additional ground of
accusation and regret.

Intellect, like clockwork, will 'divide and
announce the silent and otherwise indistinguishable lapse of time', but

the man of methodical industry and honourable
pursuits does more: he realises its ideal divisions,
and gives character and individuality to its
moments. If the idle are described as killing time,
he may justly be said to call it into life and moral
being... (making it) the distinct object not only
of the consciousness but of the conscience...
(rather than that) he lives in time, time lives in
him. His days, months and years... will survive
the wreck of worlds, and remain extant when time
shall be no more.

One asks: does Kissinger's way of dealing with
Yahya Khan cause time to become the distinct
object of consciousness and conscience?

Coleridge contrasts Mistress Quickly's
gabble with some of Shakespeare's tauest
verse, in which Hamlet, aboard ship, discovers
the papers in the death-plot against him ('Up
from my cabin/My seagown scarf'd about me,
in the dark/Grop'd I find them out; had my
desire/Fingered their packet; and in fine,
withdrew/To mine own room again ...'). But
this kind of writing, in which things 'most
remote and diverse in time, place and outward
circumstance, are brought into mental contin-
guity' depends on a balance, and

when the prerogative of the mind is stretched into
despotism, the discourse may degenerate into the
grotesque or the fantastical.

IN WHITE HOUSE YEARS, is everything
'in its place', or does prerogative become
despotism? The invasion of Cambodia makes
a good case-study, because it is one where
extra light is cast on Kissinger's processes by
the existence of variorum texts — the published
book, that is, and the 'leaked' proofs
which show what Kissinger had composed
before he saw Shawcross's *Sideshow*.

Kissinger suggests (p.485) that the invasion,

in spring 1970, was provoked by Communist
onslaughts against Lon Nol: these being sup-
ported by the recently-deposed Sihanouk in
precipitate alliance with Peking, 'still consi-
dered the most revolutionary capital in the
world ... with which we had no means of
communication whatever'. This stuff was
inserted post-Sideshow, countering Shaw-
cross's allegation that there was little rational
motivation involved: seemingly, the job was
rushed, because it jars with the passages at
p.684-93, where Washington's own precisely-
contemporary negotiations with the Peking
untouchables are discussed in no small detail.
Still, if this is despotism, it is of a kind detect-
able by the enduring reader.

The invasion was aimed at North Vietnam's
'sanctuaries' inside Cambodia, which had been
under secret air attack since the previous year.
Naturally, a provoked invasion can hardly be
pre-meditated, and Kissinger (p.487) says as
much:

There had been no consideration of attacking the
sanctuaries before April 21. The final decision
was taken on April 28.

Again, a post-Sideshow insertion, but accom-
panied this time with consequential surgery.
As first written, this chapter included a memo
written for Nixon's use at a meeting on April
26, which said in part:

The combined US-ARVN operation into Base
Area 352-353 (the Fish Hook area of Cambodia)
has been under preparation by MACV* for sev-
eral weeks, but up until now secretary Laird has
not been aware of the likelihood of its being
approved and opposition can be expected from
him as well from the Secretary of State ...

Such a document would surely be 'in its place'
as part of a chapter on the timing of the
invasion decision: most readers would
imagine 'several weeks' as going back rather
before April 21 from April 26, and would be
intrigued by the lack of knowledge attributed
to the Secretaries of State (Rogers) and
Defence (Laird). But it has vanished from *The
White House Years*.

I took up this question of the role of the two
Secretaries at Dr Kissinger's press conference
last week. The published book, I said,
recorded the following situation on April 24:

Since the National Security Council meeting two
days earlier, the Secretaries of State and Defence

had not been heard from. They knew of conting-
ency plans involving US forces...

The suggestion conveyed is of men largely
complaisant, not ones being actively circum-
vented. Yet this insertion replaced a quite
different passage:

All planning so far had been conducted without
the participation of the Secretaries of State and
Defence, who in fact devoted much of their
energy to cutting-back on even the South Viet-
namese-operation into the Parrot's Beak. (Ed: a
much less significant operation, agreed to at the
NSC.)

This suggests that the Secretaries (one of
whom, Rogers, was eventually replaced by
Kissinger) were not being listened to, rather
than not being heard from. It seemed to me, I
said to Kissinger, that the new version was
aimed at widespread criticism, evoked by
Sideshow, of White House autocracy. Which
one was true?

Both, he replied.

His lengthy explanation centred on the
idea that the two Cabinet officers were
only cut out of the system for two days:

everything being disclosed to them at an April
26 meeting. This would be a reasonable
argument in the context of decision-making
stretched over several weeks: but in order to
deny premeditation, Kissinger has already
destroyed the evidence that anything so
long-drawn-out occurred. Most people would
feel that two days is quite a time, coming in
the latter part of a week when a whole new
war is being slapped together.

THE SECTIONS of the book which confront
the events described in Sideshow are between
pages 239-254 and 457-475, and this is also
the extent to which 'variorum' text exists.
Most of these pages have significant changes,
by insertion or excision or both, and there are
several new passages running to hundreds of
words. What are we to make of other parts of
the book, where the Kissinger version has not
been undermined by detailed research, and
the effects of the Freedom of Information
Act?

Dr Kissinger claims that the changes are
such as might be found in the proofs of
anyone's memoirs: some indeed are, but not
the sort described above. (And it's worth
remembering that, before the evidence came
out, David Frost taxed him with the sugges-

*Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.

810

tion that he had rewritten in an attempt to rebut Shawcross. 'I added to the book exactly one paragraph,' said Kissinger, 'and one or two footnotes.') Although he claims to have written a historian's book, the truth appears to be that the past, to Kissinger, is rather like a pack of cards, which can be shuffled and re-shuffled at will. Time, far from being 'called into moral being', is thus assassinated: it contains no trajectory which might confront the hero of *The White House Years* with a real human dilemma, such as the handling of personal relationships when trying (notionally, anyway) to use a beastly regime like Yahya's for some higher purpose. Vast mental agility is required to juggle such masses of material, and surely no other living politician could attempt it. But this is not intellect at work, it is anti-intellect: the book is a kind of Black Hole of consciousness.

What really happened in Indochina? Essentially, the American enterprise was always impossible. This is not an equation which can be much affected by making out the best possible case for the South Vietnamese regime and the worst possible case for the communists: the essential term consisted in the fact that the communists were always in possession of Vietnam's ancient, inflexible nationalism. The nation involved has more than 50 million people. Therefore the communists could only be defeated by large land forces, taking heavy casualties. These were unavailable – not through epidemic American cowardice, but for lack of a Vietnamese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Aerial bombardment and high-technology warfare were a delusion. Deployed by a superpower, they may wreck societies, but they cannot hold military or political territory. Therefore, the concrete choice the West had to make in Indochina was not between liberal democracy and international communism. It was a choice about the level of destruction to be applied to nationalist communism in the course of its predictable, local victory: the level eventually imposed (though short of nuclear holocaust) was horribly disproportionate to the merits of the dispute.

In this situation, those who resist a movement may indeed be responsible for the form it assumes. The thought is moderately complicated within a context dominated by the 1939-45 model of war as a conflict between peoples of roughly equivalent development. The issue is therefore readily oversimplified by exercise of mental agility. 'We destabilised Cambodia', said Kissinger last week, 'the way Britain destabilised Poland in 1939.' This could only deceive people (but they are a majority) whose knowledge about Indochina is vestigial: discourse becomes grotesque and fantastical when mind is employed to manufacture such comparisons.

### NOBODY ACCURATELY FORESAW the Khmer Rouge nightmare, or contends that Kissinger should have. But what is clear is that when Kissinger and Nixon began their work, the Khmer Rouge was a splinter group, no more capable of achieving power than the Bolsheviks could have prevailed without the carnage and chaos of the first world war. And the disaster precipitated by America's aerial bombardment and invasion was no lesser in its impact on that small and vulnerable society. To be sure, one cannot predict just what will happen to a society if one props up a corrupt puppet like Lon Nol as its ruler, for five years,

saturating its countryside with high explosive in an effort to preserve him. But one can predict that it will be nothing good, and it is mere sleight-of-hand to suggest that such actions can be retrospectively sanctified by the emergence of Pol Pot.

Tirelessly shuffling his pack, Kissinger suggests that the North Vietnamese caused everything by using Cambodian territory for their bases and supply-routes, thus violating neutrality before he and Nixon did. True, the law sometimes allows one offence to cancel out another, but only if restraint and proportionality are applied – as any landowner will find if he pleads justifiable homicide after machine-gunning a few trespassers on a tenant's farm. The practical truth is that America's 'defence' of Cambodia's shaky neutrality never looked like doing anything but blow every vestige of it apart. All the real evidence suggests that the widening of the war into Cambodia was an irrational act: Kissinger's whole book is an attempt, by means of misdirection, elision, suppression and narrative disaggregation to clothe this and other irrationalities in the appearance of sober statesmanship. He receives the accolade for this from Dr David Owen in *The Times* ('on ... the delicate balance of power which determines our survival, he is ... careful, clear-headed, constrained and consistent.')

The real story, to which *The White House Years* relates chiefly as a huge, oppressive mirage, is of an attempted application of the Madman Theory of War – more academically, an attempt to cash in the significant premium attaching to irrationality. Nixon, boozing in front of the image of *Patton*, was no doubt taken with this idea, but its elaboration was surely beyond him. A pretence of intellectualism would have been required for that. Also, of course, a carapace of secrecy, for in the nuclear age any democratic politician who confesses to the practice of irrationality will be smartly booted out. (The non-democratic solution is probably a bullet.) More publicly, Kissinger and Nixon deployed the accompanying idea of 'linkage': a misapplication to international affairs of the simplistic causality in the old rhyme about the fire that made the stick beat the dog, which made the dog bite the pig, and in turn made the pig jump over the stile.

On this scheme, which Kissinger claims to have adumbrated at the outset, the idea was that the USSR, in order to obtain Middle East peace settlements, trade concession, SALT agreements and other goodies, would be persuaded to persuade the North Vietnamese to give up the aims for which they had fought without compromise for 20 years. This was not a very good idea: a better one would have been to use Nixon's conservative credentials, then unassailable, to persuade the American public that a war in which casualties are not acceptable must be abandoned.

However, it was in outline something to which rational thought could be applied. And indeed the Russians (who certainly had influence though not control in Hanoi) tried to respond. The Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, asked Kissinger in May 1969: 'Supposing the war were settled, how would you go about improving relations?' To this Kissinger says (p. 161) he could not 'answer in precise terms'. This is pretty amazing, seeing that we learn on p. 226 that the Indochina war was by that time so serious a problem in America that 'the comity by which

a democratic society must have had broken down'.

The truth about the secret bombing of communist base areas inside Cambodia (which had already begun by then) and the invasion which occurred a year later is not that they were provoked in any genuine sense by the communist offensives which were going on. They were stratagems, designed as best they could to evade the democratic restrictions of the US constitution, to convince Hanoi of Nixon's endless bellicosity, and to implant the fear that worse could yet befall. With terror thus injected into the apparatus of 'linkage' a famous victory was to be protracted. It was a scheme of horrible recklessness, and Watergate was born out of the distortions it produced.

But the real price for this recklessness was paid, and continues to be paid, by the Cambodians. It may be worth saying, that only a pseudo-intellectual could embrace the profoundly absurd idea that irrationality can ever have calculable consequences.

### NOBODY NEEDS telling that the defence of democracy is perilous. But many people still believe that 'geopolitics' can offer help, and Kissinger's ponderous memoirs are designed to reinforce that belief. They are not designed to be read, so much as to convey awe through their vast bulk and meaningless detall. The majority of people are honest, busy and aware that intellectual effort is difficult. It is an easy step to assume that any difficult book is a work of intellect.

Like many nonsense-systems, 'geopolitics' begins with the reasonable observation that nations bargain somewhat like individuals. You don't sell your car at a friendly price to someone who steals your mother's lettuces. But the 'somewhat' doesn't go very far, and Kissinger's account, once stripped of persiflage, is perceptibly absurd. It is: 'How we dragged our heels on SALT and the Middle East and East-West trade, while we frightened the Vietnamese (oh, yes, and the bad Cambodians – same thing) and drove the Russians out of their minds (as Nixon put it) by cuddling up to the Chinese (bit of a shock to the Japanese), which involved 'tilting' towards Pakistan, as against India, 'cos the Pakistanis were putting us in touch with the Chinese (tough darts, Sheikh Mujib, but writing a letter would have been too simple), in order to make the Russians do a better deal on SALT, or West Berlin, or anyway stop bugging us.' It's perhaps understandable that even the Grand Master could not give a precise answer when Dobrynin asked him what was going on.

Geopolitics, in fact, has the same relationship as chess to real warfare and real politics – which is to say, no significant relationship whatever. The qualification for expounding it is an inability to tell the difference between men and chessmen.

The rules of chess are certainly complex enough to generate an enormous array of situation. But the 'rules' of the real world, insofar as we know them at all, are infinitely more complex, and uncertain. Because of this, moral intuition is just as necessary as rationalising power in the attempt to chart a passage; indeed, 'mind', or 'intelligence', which the Greeks taught us to respect, consists in their intimate, active fusion. Kissinger's book is an exercise in separating them.

811

Penelope Mortimer

# Lusting After Ghosts

**The Executioner's Song: The Story of Gary Gilmore** by NORMAN MAILER *Hutchinson* £8.85

**The Right Stuff** by TOM WOLFE *Cape* £6.95

In the mid-Sixties, when Tom Wolfe was promoting 'The New Journalism', he labelled Mailer as a Literary Gentleman in the Grandstand. Unlike Wolfe himself, Mailer apparently suffered from an 'odd defect ... reluctance to take out the notebook and cross the genteel line and head through the door marked Keep Out'. While hailing *Armies of the Night* as a *succès d'estime*, Wolfe actually accused its author of diffidence.

The charge - like the whole confused, incoherent theory behind it - was absurd. 'The New Journalism' demanded a human camera with the power of becoming 'absolutely invisible'. Mailer specialised in self-portraits against a background of history. A 'New Journalist' had to be prepared to spend five years researching his story, as Capote had done with his jackpot *In Cold Blood*; he had to join the army, like John Sack, and actually fight in Vietnam before writing about it; he had to run with the Hell's Angels for 18 months, like Hunter Thompson. Mailer, on his own admission, is a lazy man. He hadn't the patience, the curiosity or the funds to do his own investigating. But Mailer on Mailer was wearing thin, his novels were being called 'inept', he hated to be known as a plain journalist and he had prodigious personal liabilities. He needed a quick kill - somehow he had to squeeze his ego through that door and cash in.

Marilyn, not only dead but naked, provided the answer. A photographer called Lawrence Schiller happened to take some snaps on the day she did her nude swimming scene in *Something's Got To Give*; a few months later, she was dead. Schiller collected an album of pictures, and contacted Mailer. There were no problems about living with the subject, listening to her, tediously piecing together her history; Mailer didn't even know the woman. The result (one of the most repulsive books in living memory, but let that pass) was yet another 'new event in literature' - the Novel Biography.

When the same Lawrence Schiller - now turned entrepreneur - gave Mailer 15,000 pages of data on another notorious corpse, Gary Gilmore, it must have been a happy day. Gilmore had made a few moments of history trying to save his life. He succeeded in getting himself legally shot on 17 January 1977. *Marilyn* had inevitably been a necrophilic work: Mailer could do little more than lust, however mournfully, after her ghost. But he could, he thought, identify with Gilmore, raise him from the dead as a Mailer hero, tough, tender, sensitive, maligned, misunderstood: all in all, given the fallibility of the human condition, magnificent.

Gilmore may have been an illegitimate grandson of Houdini. His father - a hereditary trait, perhaps - was unpredictable, forever escaping from tight corners and disappearing.

His mother, infested with children, was a good woman. Gilmore took to petty crime at an early age, and was educated in gaol. After 13 years inside, he was released on parole and returned to his Mormon family in Salt Lake City. He drank too much; he was unreliable; he pilfered; he fell obsessively in love with a simple-minded girl called Nicole. Finally he shot two strangers at point-blank range and, being diagnosed by the psychiatrists as sane, was condemned to death.

Capital punishment was never abolished in Utah, but it hadn't been used for some time. Gilmore, with his Mormon background, believed in reincarnation. He considered that he deserved the death penalty, but not to be forced to waste any more of his temporal life in a noisy, stinking prison, being tortured with Prolixin and ECT. The law had the right to condemn him to death, but not to hell. When

mercy threatened, he hired lawyers. Again and again, over those winter months of '76/ '77, the execution date was set, then stayed, then set again. Meanwhile, Gilmore became 'a cottage industry', run by Lawrence Schiller. Thousands of dollars were invested in his execution, but still the do-gooders tried to keep him alive. Nicole smuggled 25 Seconals and 10 Dalmanes into prison, tucked inside her vagina; Gilmore transferred them to his rectum, and that night they both attempted suicide. Gilmore survived, and Nicole was put in solitary confinement in a mental home for the rest of her lover's life.

This first half of the book is supremely successful: and if I write that with difficulty, through gritted typewriter keys, it's my problem. Using the device of scene-by-scene construction, so that the reader is never distracted or bored by narrative, Mailer very skilfully

produces a kind of verbal movie of Gilmore and his world up to the suicide pact. In this role, as in those of director and editor, he is properly invisible; as writer, he lapses only very occasionally into the anguished metaphor of the frustrated novelist. It's true that Gilmore emerges (I am still referring to the first half of the book) as a sympathetic character - but why not? What curious moral satisfaction would we get from having him presented as just another thug, a run-of-the-mill psychopath? From the evidence of his letters to Nicole, his intelligence and sensitivity were far superior to that of your average Mormon in Main Street, and Mailer's portrait of him is far more edifying - if edification is necessary - than most of the illiterate halfwits we currently use for heroes.

From this point, however, the book deteriorates. Gilmore and Nicole become minor characters, and Mailer's emphasis shifts to the scavengers, the ravening hordes of journalists, movie tycoons, TV companies, speculators of all kinds who are trampling each other to be in at the kill. They are dreary, trivial people, their behaviour predictable. Slowly (I speak for myself, having honestly struggled not to hang Mailer for the bad names I have called him in the past) one realises that the tone of the book has changed. As Gilmore is sold and resold, shot, drawn and quartered, the discreet absence of commentary becomes the silence of consent. Mailer is running with the pack. Schiller is clearly despicable, but here is Mailer, a twinkle in his eye, presenting him as an endearing rogue. It is a nasty exhibition, and would be tragic if the characters had more stature. When the book ends with an orgy of forelock-pulling and grovelling gratitude, one feels little more than weary disgust. The skill and even artistry of the first half is all too easily forgotten.

That said, *Executioner's Song* is a good deal better than *Marilyn*. Gilmore's letters, recorded interviews and taped dialogue give it at least a modicum of humour, dignity and passion. I detest every aspect of this kind of exploitative journalism, but there is no point in expecting more of Mailer than he does of himself: 'I'm like a kept woman of the nineteenth century, looking for someone to pay her bills. But I don't want to be a whores for nothing.' With Gilmore packed away in his bank account, and Larry Schiller out there sniffing the wind, Mailer should be able to put his feet up and eat bonbons for some time to come.

Tom Wolfe's *The Right Stuff* is about the first American astronauts, and it is not a great example of 'New Journalism'. Like all Wolfe's writing, it is not a great example of anything. 'If Wolfe described Judgment Day, he would somehow make it sound like July the Fourth in the Hamptons.

*The Right Stuff* looks like Robert Redford in blue, and sounds like closing time on Cup Final night:

> Manliness, manhood, manly courage ... there was something ancient, primordial, irresistible about the challenge of this stuff, no matter what a sophisticated and rational age one (sic) might think he lived 'in'.

Shepherd, Glenn, Carpenter, Cooper, Grisom, Schirra and Slayton had The Right Stuff, Wolfe tells us. Now, as a New Journalist, it's his job to get us inside that shining armour and give us a swig from the Grail. We don't get near it,

812

DURRANT'S

11 Northburgh
Street
London EC1V 0JL
01-251 4918

THE NORTHERN ECHO

DARLINGTON,
DURHAM

ISSUE
DATED

19 NOV 1979

Nixon distrusted
Wilson, says Dr K

RICHARD Nixon distrusted
Sir Harold Wilson but
admired Edward Heath,
according to Henry Kissinger,
Nixon's Secretary of State, in
his memoirs published today.

But while Sir Harold Wilson
prized his close relationship with
American presidents, the
relationship with Nixon never
flourished. Nixon's desire for
intimate collaboration with
Heath suffered the same fate.
"Like a couple who have
been told by everyone that

they should be in love and
who try mightily but futilely
to justify these expectations,
Heath and Nixon never
managed to establish the
personal rapport for which
Nixon, at least, longed. Both
were rather austere
personalities, vulnerable and
eager for acceptance, but
incapable of the act of grace
that could have bridged their
loneliness."

With Wilson there was no
attempt by Nixon to reach a
rapport.

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

329

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

GERALD FORD AND HENRY KISSINGER

*A Time To Heal*. Gerald R. Ford. W. H. Allen. £7.95.

*The White House Years*. Henry Kissinger. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. £14.95.

Gerald Ford was President of the United States for two years and a half after President Nixon's forced resignation in August 1974, having been brought in a year earlier as an emergency Vice-President. Henry Kissinger served Presidents Nixon and Ford with immense distinction in the formation and execution of foreign policy. The books are not exactly comparable. President Ford gives us readably, but plainly, the story of his life in 442 pages. Henry Kissinger takes 3½ times as much space to cover the foreign policy aspects of Nixon's first administration January 1969–January 1973. In a subsequent volume he intends to cover the period from January 1973–January 1977. 'I shall deal', he says, 'in another volume' (presumably the same one) 'with the moral issues raised by wire tapping and the political styles of the Nixon administration in general'. Watergate is carefully excluded from the huge book in front of us which is, however, packed with fascinating detail and many fine pieces of writing.

It would be difficult to imagine two more contrasted types than Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger. Ford was and is the utterly decent American; the old football star, probably the best athlete who ever became President. At a crucial moment when he was seeking re-election he was viewed, according to the polls, as 'a nice guy' who wasn't quite up to the Oval Office's demands. He tells, with his usual quiet humour, that he would have liked a smiling, congenial photograph but he was persuaded by his advisers to accept a campaign poster 'making me look as belligerent as hell'.

Henry Kissinger's career must be regarded as the most extraordinary of any top level political figure of recent times. He was a German/Jewish boy who fled from the Nazis when he was 15. It was not till he had been President Nixon's main instrument of foreign policy for nearly 4 years that his voice was allowed to be heard in television programmes. It was thought that his very thick German accent would shock 'middle America'. Certainly it was still very pronounced when I met him recently. I told him that I had just completed the first draft of a book on Nixon and moreover that I had just read right through his own mighty volume. He asked me quickly, in a guttural accent, what I made of Nixon. There were other guests queued up to speak to the distinguished visitor, so I answered briefly though not I think incorrectly, 'a great man manque'. He nodded assent. He asked me whether I thought that he had been sufficiently compassionate towards Nixon. It was now my turn to nod assent though I would have preferred to describe his attitude as one of qualified generosity, creditable to him in any case.

I shall be interested to hear, if I ever do, how Nixon feels about the book before us. Kissinger has often been accused of speaking in a derogatory fashion about Nixon at the same time as they were working together in intimate partnership. David Frost raised this point with Nixon in his television interviews. Nixon answered tolerantly 'it drove my family up the wall' but it didn't worry him except insofar as it worried them. There is no doubt that he remained very fond of Henry Kissinger.

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CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

When he was on the point of resigning the Presidency, he showed Kissinger a mark of extreme confidence by asking him to join him in prayer. They knelt down together. Somehow the news leaked out and Nixon was derided for what seems to be a matter for respect and sympathy. When I spoke to Kissinger later in the evening referred to he was evidently pained at the suggestion that the leak could have occurred through him. It stands to reason that Nixon would never have desired it. So it must remain one of those mysterious things which happen in a world where acolytes tend to have less sense of responsibility than their masters.

Kissinger insists dogmatically that the foreign policy achievements of the first Nixon administration culminating in the Vietnam settlement would have been rendered permanent if the executive power of the Presidency had not been undermined by Watergate. That we shall never know. Nixon in his memoirs has laid the main American blame on Congress which ultimately sabotaged the Vietnam settlement, but maybe, as Kissinger would argue, this could not have come about if Watergate had not exercised its catastrophic influence. These words at least that he writes about Nixon on the evening of the Vietnam settlement in January 1973 are worth recording. 'Nixon could envisage a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen friendships, and give new hope to emerging nations. It was a worthy goal for America and mankind. He was alone in his moment of triumph on a pinnacle, that was soon to turn into a precipice. And yet 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.'

Every kind of verdict has been passed on Kissinger. No one has been found to question his mental brilliance any more than in this country they questioned the mental brilliance of our Dick Crossman. He had achieved great academic success passing from Castlereagh and Metternich to problems of American foreign policy in the nuclear age. There will always be a special interest in the manner in which he applied his theories to action on the stage of world policy. William Colby, one time Head of the CIA, has written of him: 'Kissinger was obviously brilliant, vain to such a degree that even he himself joked about it'.

Though he is often referred to as 'arrogant', he shows in his Memoirs, not infrequently, capacity for self-criticism. He does not, in this book, provide any assessment of President Ford (no doubt that will come next time) but Ford has no doubt what he thinks of Kissinger. 'It would be hard for me', he writes, 'to overstate the admiration and affection I have for Henry. People who don't know Kissinger view him as solemn, gruff and pedantic. The truth is that he has an engaging sense of humour. Sure, he had an ego—most people who achieve international stature do—and it's also true that he had a penchant for secrecy. But that, I felt, was a necessary ingredient of successful diplomacy, and of Kissinger's success there could be no doubt. Our personalities meshed ...' Certainly, with all their diversities, they were equally committed to the ideal each cherished for America.

FRANK LONGFORD

HUGH GAITSKELL

*Hugh Gaitskell, a Political Biography*. Philip Williams. Cape. £15.

The British Labour Movement is a unique and very English part of our island history, if only regarded by the strange variety of leaders it has produced. The reason for the varied leadership is that the Labour Party is more than a

330

CONTEMPORARY REVIEW

FRANK LONGFORD

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

329

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Gerald Ford was President of the United States for two years and a half after President Nixon's forced resignation in August 1974, having been brought in a year earlier as an emergency Vice-President. Henry Kissinger served Presidents Nixon and Ford with immense distinction in the formation and execution of foreign policy. The books are not exactly comparable. President Ford gives us readably, but plainly, the story of his life in 442 pages. Henry Kissinger takes 3½ times as much space to cover the foreign policy aspects of Nixon's first administration January 1969-January 1973. In a subsequent volume he intends to cover the period from January 1973-January 1977. 'I shall deal', he says, 'in another volume' (presumably the same one) 'with the moral issues raised by wire tapping and the political styles of the Nixon administration in general'. Watergate is carefully excluded from the huge book in front of us which is, however, packed with fascinating detail and many fine pieces of writing.

I shall be interested to hear, if I ever do, how Nixon feels about the book before I try to read it.

[L]

# Kissinger the raconteur

PETER JAY

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 book itself, 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

host of minor ladies and no-ladies, were all faultless. War affects its victims and participants like an aphrodisiac, and women as well as men succumbed to the pressures of the moment, but so naturally that it read right.

The picture of Stonewall Jackson engaged, delighted and sometimes repelled me. He was a magnificent fighting-machine, but fighting is dirty and Thomas Keneally intends you should know that. Descriptions of the results of shell-blast are not there for your comfort, and the soldiers are all far too young. Hans Strahl is blown to pieces—'the fact of his death seemed a small

thing beside the size of that great tearing he suffered. Indeed, his mother would report seeing him around the farm for some years after . . . she could tell he was hanging around bewildered and in need of a simple explanation.'

The army marches not on its stomach but in spite of its bowels. They squat stoically, whenever they can, running with dysentery, plagued with lice, and doomed. The number of those I came to know, who died, was horrifying. This is such a magnificent book, never mind labelling it historical or otherwise, that I count it a privilege to read and keep.

## Urban fairy tale

THE PROOF of the padding is in the reading, and reading *Jailbird*, short though it is—about 67,000 words plus unnecessary index—one is uncomfortably aware that a thin story is being thickened. Why, for instance, should Walter F Starbuck, who is meant to be giving a first-person account of how he became one of Nixon's advisers, a Watergate conspirator and a convict, tangent off into eleven pages about Sacco and Vanzetti?

Ten years ago, in *Slaughterhouse-Five*, Vonnegut found a way of voicing sincere-seeming outrage about the bombing of Dresden in a narrative that was charming, funny, and delightfully easy to read. Blending science-fiction fantasy with cool documentation, he made the elements of comedy, insanity and horror push each other tellingly into perspective. But was it a novel and is he a serious novelist?

In interview he is disarmingly modest. 'You understand, of course', he told *Playboy*, 'that everything I say is horseshit . . . But it's a useful, comforting sort of horseshit, you see? . . . My books are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips, and each chip is a joke'. In the same interview, insisting that he 'didn't go after the youth market or anything like that', he proffered a tentative explanation for his success: 'Maybe it's because I deal with sophomoric questions that full adults regard as settled'.

In the thirty-page prologue to *Jailbird* Vonnegut tells the story of a massacre in which fourteen people are killed and twenty-three wounded during a strike in which the strikers have already offered to settle on any terms. Its only relevance to the plot is that the factory owner's son, Alexander McCone, a friendless multi-millionaire, pays for the Harvard education of Starbuck, who as a child played chess with him for several hours each day. McCone believes that Harvard professors are the wisest men in the history of the world; Vonnegut on the other hand seems to dislike Harvard, fighter planes which 'tear the sky to shreds', miscarriages of justice, Nixon, the CIA, *New York Times* book reviews, anti-Semitism, trigger-happy anti-riot policemen, Henry Kissinger, religiosity, large commercial corporations, the American economic system, and mindless patriotism. Few of these deserve much more sympathy than he has for them, but his determination to satirise them seems ingratiating and gratuitous, besides being unconnected with the task of impersonating Starbuck. Not that he takes this task, anyway, with much seriousness. The ruefulness of the retrospection is more characteristic of Vonnegut than of his character, as is the charm, which anyway wears rather thin. Much depends, as before, on a rhetorical repetition of catch-phrases, this time 'Peace' and 'Strong stuff'.

Vonnegut is more a joker than a novelist or storyteller, and like many compulsive jokers, he is fundamentally a sentimentalist.

## RONALD HAYMAN

In *Slaughterhouse-Five* the jokes were fairly gritty, but *Jailbird* is less like a mosaic made out of chips than a proliferating mess of globules blown out of bubble-gum, with an irreverence insistent enough to, seem dutiful. Take the treatment of Mary Kathleen O'Looney. On page 129 we are introduced to a ragged little old woman who carries all her possessions in shopping bags. Vonnegut does not visualise her very clearly. She looks like a kangaroo, he tells us, because she wears enormous basketball shoes which are so out of scale with the rest of her. It will turn out that she is not only all that is left of the first girl Walter F Starbuck ever slept with, but also the widow of a reclusive multi-millionaire who founded the corporation which has become the biggest conglomerate in the United States, owning MacDonald's Hamburgers, Colonel Sanders's Kentucky Fried Chicken and the *New York Times*, together with hundreds of other prodigiously profitable enterprises. Since becoming the majority shareholder, she has found out that no one can be trusted except Mormons and that not even Mormons can protect her from journalists, terroristic freaks, and those who want revenge for the suffering inflicted by the ruthless corporation which has 'stolen or ruined many other businesses and had even had a hand in the toppling of governments in countries that were small and weak'. She therefore lives in an almost inaccessible cellar somewhere under Grand Central Station, and goes every day to a harp showroom on the top floor of the Chrysler Building, where the salesman and his secretary have their desks inside a Victorian gazebo. In short, despite great wealth and kindly impulses, she has never had much fun.

The complex of anti-capitalistic jokes bubbling around Mary Kathleen O'Looney are floating her gently towards her death. After being sideswiped by a Checker cab on Vanderbilt Avenue, she refuses medical help, and Walter finds her in a lavatory, bleeding but comfortable. 'Her layers and layers of clothing were keeping her warm. Her little head was supported in a corner of the stall and cushioned against the metal by a pillow of rags'. Before dying she talks quite a lot. She tells him about the Mormons and about how she once hired twenty luxury suites on the top floor of a hotel owned by the corporation in Managua, Nicaragua. Despite all her precautions a woman who was mistaken for her was found strangled with a cord from the draperies, and her hands had been cut off. Walter then asks why Mary Kathleen never gave away the money that was making her so unhappy. This is what she has now decided to do. Inside her basketball shoes he will find four thousand dollars in cash, which are for him, and a will leaving the corporation to its rightful owners, the American people.

But the will cannot be implemented effectively. The federal government is not prepared to operate all those businesses on the people's behalf, and anyway, the businesses, rigged only to make profits, are indifferent to the people's needs. 'Mary Kathleen might as well have left one-fifth of the weather to the people'.

Urban fairy tale? Urban fairy tale. Soft-centred? Soft-centred. Sophomoric? Sophomoronic.

KURT VONNEGUT

*Jailbird*

246PP CAPE £5.50

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than by any matching enthusiasm for the ideological or geopolitical 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 multipolarity 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 encourages American unilateralism and European irresponsibility ... If the United States remains the trustee of every non-communist area, it will exhaust its psychological resources ... Political multipolarity, while difficult 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 idealism and lead to humane and moderate objectives, especially in relation to political and social change. Thus our conception of world order must have deeper purposes than stability, but greater restraints on our behaviour than would result if it were approached only in a fit of enthusiasm.

In other words, America must stop thinking that 'good geopolitics' (preventing the spread of communism) is 'good regionalism' (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 perceptive 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 reacting 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.

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 joke, 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 idealism 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 opportunity 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 imaginative 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.

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# War games

MICHAEL HOWARD

THE THIRD WORLD WAR has not yet broken out, and we all pray that it never will. But, paradoxically, so long as it does not it remains in some sense a possibility to be reckoned with. The military have to prepare to fight it, statesmen have to plan to prevent it. And though military history can provide only fragmentary and uncertain guidance as to its course, diplomatic history provides a mass of indications as to how it might begin, and in consequence how it might be prevented. So the origin of wars continues to fascinate historians, and not only historians but anthropologists, statisticians, psychologists, economists, ethologists, and any specialist who considers that his expertise might have something to contribute. There are precious few who do not.

Mr Taylor is defiantly old-fashioned. He believes that the best way to study the origins of wars is to examine the way they actually begin, the process by which states move from a condition of friendly intercourse to one of armed conflict, which is the way in which diplomatic historians have always approached the subject. In these lectures¹ he re-presents the mountainous Blue Books and White Books of documents that he has had to digest during his professional lifetime in clear, sparkling narratives in which the only actors who count are the individuals who actually made the decisions and signed the documents: Napoleon and Alexander, Bismarck and Cavour, Berchtold and Bethmann-Hollweg, Hitler and Chamberlain. Mr Taylor is no Marxist believing that individuals are the puppets of historical forces. He is an old-style English radical who considers that wars have always been caused by human stupidity and misperception, by misplaced belief in great armaments and the balance of power, and that if only everyone had been sensible they need never have happened.

In a sense Mr Taylor is quite right. Wars are initiated by individuals who have free will, and they might have exercised it differently. And as he points out in his introduction to these lectures, wars have usually 'sprung more from apprehension than from a lust for war and conquest'. Austria in 1859, France in 1870, Austria again in 1914, Britain in 1939, Japan in 1941, all went to war because the consequences of not doing so appeared even worse. The same could be said about Israel in 1967, or the USA in Vietnam. Simple premeditated wars of conquest like the German attack on Russia in 1941 are exceptional. It is a valid and important point, and one that in itself justifies the publication of this otherwise rather ephemeral collection of unscripted TV talks; even more than does the excellent selection of photographs which Mr Taylor has, as usual, found to illustrate his text.

Dr Paul Kennedy's collection of a dozen articles by different hands on *The War Plans of the Great Powers 1880-1914* is an altogether more substantial affair. Inevitably it lacks the sparkle of Mr Taylor's presentation: articles written for publication in learned journals seldom scintillate. But all are intensely interesting, and Dr Kennedy pulls them together with an introduction which is as readable as Mr Taylor but which explores the origins

of the First World War in much greater depth. Like Mr Taylor, he rejects the simple revisionism of Fritz Fischer's pupils—if not Professor Fischer himself—who see in the expansionist ideas of Wilhelmia Germany a sufficient reason for the outbreak of war in 1914. But neither does he accept the views of their critics, such as the late Gerhard Ritter, who have urged that an examination of the record of the other belligerents would balance the picture and restore the orthodox liberal view, that everyone was equally to blame for the catastrophe. The articles in this collection do in fact constitute such an examination, and the conclusion that emerges is that responsibility lay clearly with the Germans. 'It was only the German plan [writes Dr Kennedy] which involved an attack upon another power [France] whether or not the latter wished to become involved in the war; it was only the German plan which involved the violation of neutral territory simply to satisfy military exigencies; and—most important of all—it was only in the German plan that mobilisation meant war . . . Germany was the only country which drew no distinction between an act of brinkmanship and the opening of hostilities'.

Now this, if true (as I think it is) raises rather deeper questions about the structure of government and society in Germany and elsewhere than Mr Taylor thinks it necessary to ask. Why could the German General Staff make plans for infringing the neutrality of Belgium in the event of a war with either Britain or France whereas the British and the French (as other articles in this book spell out) could not? Why could the British Committee of Imperial Defence scrutinise and amend the war plans of the Admiralty and the War Office, while the Schließen Plan was treated by German civilian ministers as Holy Writ? Why was it that, although the Russian and Austrian and even the British General Staffs made plans whose disruption might cause huge inconvenience to their armed forces, it was the Germans alone who locked themselves into a collision course that provided their government with no alternative at all?

It is often assumed that the business of General Staffs is to make plans in peacetime for wartime contingencies that are, politically speaking, utterly remote. In fact they seldom do. 'The decision to institute preparations for an operations plan against another power is much more a political one (than a military)' Dr Kennedy observes, 'and almost invariably follows indications that that power's policies could be troublesome or threatening in the future'. Even such grotesqueries as the US Navy's plans for operations against Britain in 1890 or the RAF's plans for operations against France in 1923 tell us something about the relations subsisting between those states at that time. In an interesting article reprinted in this volume Mr J McDermott suggests that Britain's 'turn against Germany' after 1904 not only coincided with the establishment of the General Staff at the War Office, but 'was, in part, undertaken to serve the Army's interests'. But however satisfying British military planners may have found their European war games, compared with the impossible logistics involved in defending India against Russian attack, it requires tunnel-vision of a remarkably obtuse kind to believe that they would have carried on with and ultimately concentrated on such continental planning to the exclusion of all else if Britain's relations with Germany had not steadily worsened after 1905, for reasons with which the plans of the General Staff had nothing whatever to do. War plans reflect tension; they do not of themselves create it. But they also tell one something about the state of mind of the men who make them. 'It is no accident', as the

A J P TAYLOR

¹How Wars Begin

180PP ILLUS HAMISH HAMILTON £6.95

PAUL KENNEDY (ed)

²The War Plans of the Great Powers 1880-1914

282PP ALLEN & UNWIN £12.50

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