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Street
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01-251 4918

NEW SOCIETY

128 LONG ACRE
LONDON WC2

ISSUE
DATED

14 MAY 1981

## Reviews in brief [LC]

Henry Kissinger

For the Record

Michael Joseph and Weidenfeld & Nicolson

£9.95

Somebody must have thought that the return of the Republicans to power would mean the return of Henry Kissinger to high office. Only that thought could justify the publication of this rag-bag of speeches and interviews on a variety of themes from international business to the Middle East to SALT. As Kissinger seems to have little place in the Reagan administration, then it is not necessary to scour these pages for clues as to future American foreign policy or to the man himself. The book provides an interesting example of someone edging away from his past (and his achievements) in an effort to adjust to new conditions. Apparently he could not adjust as quickly or convincingly as necessary. LAWRENCE FREEDMAN

Weidenfeld

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LANCASHIRE EVENING POST

PRESTON,
LANCASHIRE

ISSUE
DATED

9th May
1981

# The thoughts of Henry K

HENRY KISSINGER, Nixon's remarkable Secretary of State, is a writer of immense clarity, with a style uncluttered by the American habit of multi-syllabic periphrasis. He comes straight to the point - and the point is usually hard to disagree with.

"For The Record" (Michael Joseph and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £9.95) is a collection of statements made since Dr Kissinger retired as Secretary of State in 1977. He offers sane, conservative views on issues such as human rights, NATO, the Shah, SALT, the Middle East, detente and oil.

## Reviews in brief

Henry Kissinger

For the Record

Aryeh Y. Yodfat and Yuval Arnon-Ohanna

PLO: strategy and tactics

Croom Helm £11.50

This book looks and reads like an academic publication, and its references and appendices are of the same length as the text. But the views of the Israeli authors, and their prejudices against the Palestinians and other Arabs, are not very different from those of the Israeli government. A number of rather moth-eaten myths reappear, such as the "invasion" of Israel by seven Arab armies in 1948, though in fact only one (the Egyptian) briefly entered ter-

New Society 14/5/81

[10]

Henry Kissinger, For the Record.
Selected Statements 1977 - 1980.

Weidenfeld and Nicolson
91 Clapham High Street, London
SW4. & Michael Joseph
44 Bedford Square, London WC1.

Price £9.95.

2/5/81

હાથી જીવનો લાખનો, મરે તો સવા
લાખનો. આ કહે'ન અમેરિકાના એક-
વારના સેકે'ટરી ઓફ સ્ટેટના નિવેદનોને
લાગુ પડ' છે. ૧૯૭૭ સુધી તેઓ સત્તા
પર હતા. પણ તે બાદ, ૧૯૭૭ થી ૧૯૮૦
સુધી એમણો વિવિધ વિવયો જે'વાં કે
પશ્ચિમી સંયે, નાટો, અમેરિકા અને
ર્સિયા વચ્ચે ઠ'ડે, ઘુધ્ધ, મિડલ ઇસ્ટ,
SALT II પર જે' મહત્વના પ્રવચનો
કર્યા, ઊંટરવ્યુ આપ્યા કે લેખો લખ્યાં તેમાં-
ના મહત્વના આ પુરતકમાં ગ્રેથસ્થ થયાં
છે. આ લખાણો અને પ્રવચનો પરથી શ્રી
દિકસી'નરનો અમેરિકી વિદ'શનીન્ત અને
વિશ્વના મહત્વના પ્રશ્નો પરનો ઊ'ડો રસ
સૂચવે છે. લાક્ષિણિક શે'લી, હજવાે કટાક્ષ
અને વિવધને સરળ કરવાની એમની
શંકિતનો એમાંથી ખયાલ આવી શકે છે.
વિદ'શ નીઠિત, સાંપ્રદ રાજકારણું અને
વધુ માહિતી નાણવા ઈચ્છનાર વાચકને
ઉપયોગી પુરતક. એમના પ્રથમ પુરતક
White House Years ૧૯૯૮માં
પ્રકટ થયં હતં. હવે તેઓ સેકે'ટરી ઓફ
સ્ટેટ તરફેના તેમના વર્ષો'નું આલેખન
કરી રહયા છે. જ' ટ'ંક સમપમાં પ્રસિધ્ધ
થશે. ગ્રાજામાં Gujaratી

DE
LIBRIS

For The Record: Selected Statements 1977-1980

by Henry Kissinger. Little, Brown
and Company, Boston, Toronto;
332 pages, $12.95.

CONSIDERED as writing, this bunch
of stuff pulled out of Kissinger's
files — speeches, articles, interviews
— and thrown together to make a
stopgap between *White House Years*
and the presumably forthcoming sec-
ond volume concerning his eight
years of ministry in the Nixon and
Ford Administrations, is shockingly
inferior. It is certainly paled by the
works that brought Dr. Kissinger to
the attention of the intellectual
world in the dozen years from the
appearance in 1957 of *Nuclear Wea-
pons And Foreign Policy* to his arrival
in 1969 as National Security Advisor
to President Richard Nixon. Kissin-
ger himself has noted that men do
not grow in high office, they cash in
on whatever maturity they have
achieved on the way up. Maybe Hen-

ry has played his hand out. Com-
pared to *Nuclear Weapons And For-
eign Policy* or *The Necessity For
Choice*, his book *For The Record sug-
gests that the cupboard is bare.

To be sure, that is not necessarily
so. Kissinger is not yet sixty, an age
which "we of wisdom and of reach"
(Polonius, you know) recognize as the
onset of maturity. There is no reason
to believe that Henry is not the man
he was. Granted his talent for decep-
tion, he could have no motive for
deliberately changing his image so
countercharismatically. If he seems
dull and irrelevant now, perhaps he
was always so. My friend Dr. "Pete"
Abramson of Marksville, Louisiana,
has told me for years that Kissinger
was not so smart as I fearfully
thought. (Pete and I agreed that,
dumb or smart, Kissinger was bad.)
*For The Record* makes me more toler-
ant of Dr. Abramson's dissent.

Yet I still think that Kissinger is
smarter than Dr. Abramson allows, if
not so smart as I feared, and certain-
ly not so smart as Kissinger himself
evidently supposes. Henry Kissin-
ger's great talent is that he can say
one thing while meaning another, and
thus gain the support of many who
disagree with what he intends. This is
what is called a mastery of "nu-
ances." Perhaps the most important
illustration is provided by Kissinger's
successive and mutually opposite
stands on SALT I and SALT II. In the
present work he documents this him-
self, for the obvious purpose of jus-
tifying himself at a time when his
earlier stand had come to be widely
perceived as clearly and gravely
wrong.

In a statement before the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee on July
31, 1979, reprinted as a chapter of *For
The Record*, Kissinger said: "When I
was a professor, I participated in the
academic discussions of military

JUNE, 1981

57

doctrine and strategy that underlay
early initiatives in arms control. I
helped design the first SALT agree-
ments in 1972. I was involved in the
negotiations of the Vladivostok ac-
cord of 1974, which marked the first
breakthrough of SALT II; I played a
major role in the negotiations which
came close to completing an agree-
ment in January 1976. I have a long
personal commitment to the process
of limiting strategic nuclear arms."

All that is preliminary to trying to
rationalize the fact that he, perhaps
the chief author of SALT I, was now
preparing to oppose ratification of
SALT II — a somewhat less radical
threat to U.S. national security than
SALT I had been. Kissinger contin-
ues: "Thus I regret to have to say that
the present treaty comes up for rati-
fication at a time of grave danger to
our national security and to the glo-
bal equilibrium. The military balance
is beginning to tilt ominously against
the United States in too many signif-
icant categories of weaponry. The
unprecedented Soviet use of proxy
forces in Africa, the Middle East,
and Southeast Asia, and the turmoil
caused by radical forces and terrorist
organizations sponsored by Moscow's
friends, mark ours as a time of pro-
found upheaval . . . . If present
trends continue, we face the chilling
prospect of a world sliding gradually
out of control, with our relative mili-
tary power declining, with our eco-
nomic lifeline vulnerable to black-
mail, with hostile foreign forces
growing more rapidly than our ability
to deal with them, and with fewer
and fewer nations friendly to us
[our] surviving." (Someone tell Hen-
ry about the possessive with the ger-
und.)

It is a bit much to hear, not only
the author of SALT I opposing SALT
II, but also this crucial figure in our
giveaway of the Panama Canal be-

moaning vulnerability of a U.S.
"economic lifeline," also this partner
of Lord Carrington's in putting the
heat on Rhodesia deploring "Soviet
use of proxy forces in Africa," and
above all the sounding of that same
complaint regarding Southeast Asia
by the commander-in-chief of U.S.
forces in Vietnam (for that's what
Henry Kissinger was under Nixon
and Ford). What were the North Viet-
namese and the Vietcong but Soviet
proxy forces? True, Kissinger was
not in power in the early days of
Vietnam; among his predecessors
were McGeorge Bundy and Walt
Rostow; but Kissinger's role seems to
have been more crucial, in part be-
cause of his intimate association
with Soviet Ambassador to the U.S.,
Anatoli Dobrynin. Their mutual
"Channel" seems important enough
to suggest that if Kissinger was not a
Soviet agent, Dobrynin must have
been an American agent. (But what
did we get out of it?)

The apparent contradiction be-
tween Kissinger's stand on SALT I
and his stand on SALT II, as well as
the other items noted above, is less
disturbing than the equivocation with
which he explains his seeming trans-
mogrification from dovish disciple
of *détente* to hawkish huckster of
the hard line. It may be that Kissin-
ger is entirely sincere when he speaks
of "global equilibrium" and "mili-
tary balance" as if they were intrinsi-
cally desirable, and of "a world slid-
ing gradually out of control" as if a
world under control were the sum-
mum bonum. Of course, world con-
trol by anybody is exactly what the
U.S. has opposed since Jefferson,
Washington, Monroe, and the elder
Henry Cabot Lodge, among others.
What is pejoratively called "isola-
tionism" is a long and respected tra-
dition in the United States. Insofar
as we have since, say 1898, shown

58

AMERICAN OPINION

[L.C]

signs of imperialism, it has been an America First imperialism, and never contemplated global extent, except perhaps in the somewhat fevered brain of Henry Luce.

No rational American, isolationist or imperialist, ever wanted the U.S. to be part of a "balance of power." Isolationists want the security which comes from foolproof defense, and leaving the rest of the world alone. Imperialists want to be Number One in the world, with authority to go anywhere in the world, for our own benefit or that of others, but not administrative control of internal affairs of foreign nations. Neither isolationists nor imperialists in America want to create somewhere else a balance of power *vis-à-vis* our own. The concept of balance of power is specifically British. It did not mean making another power equal to Britain. It meant making sure that no one power on the Continent was superior to all the others. The goal — often achieved — was that there should be a balance of power *outside* Britain, so that Britain could at the pivot of the balance manipulate the others. Rome had a similar concept — *divide et impera*.

Nobody knows this better than Henry Kissinger. It's his field. If, as he seems to imply, he seeks a balance of power between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., he wants some power outside either to be in position to manipulate both. I don't know what Henry, with his "nuances," really wants. Maybe he doesn't really want balance of power. But he speaks as if he did. He backed SALT I because he thought the U.S. was stronger than the Soviet Union, and the latter should be allowed to catch up (a foolish thing, or worse, for an American to think). He opposed SALT II because, he says, he thought the Soviet Union had become strong-

er than the U.S., and we should do what we can to catch up.

His new advice would be more serviceable if it had been joined with a full confession of error in his earlier counsel. And if he would quit talking about balance of power as if that were in itself a proper goal of political action. A proper balance of power is one that happens, not one that is constructed. Rome and Britain had much to be admired, but in the long run both the *Pax Romana* and the *Pax Britannica* generated barbaric hatred on every side. The American ideal has been very properly Liberty and Independence, "with a firm reliance" not on global equilibrium but "on the protection of divine Providence." — MEDFORD EVANS

## The Battle For The Mind

by Tim LaHaye. Fleming H. Revell Company, Old Tappan, New Jersey; 247 pages, $8.95.

TIM LAHAYE summarizes the substance of his book at the outset of his second chapter: "During the past 200 years, humanism (man's wisdom) has captivated the thinking of the Western world. After conquering Europe's colleges and universities, it spread to America, where it has developed a stranglehold on all public education. Recognizing as they did the strategic nature of both education and the communications field in waging their battle for the minds of mankind, the humanists gradually moved in, until they controlled both. Almost every major magazine, newspaper, TV network, secular book publisher, and movie producer is a committed humanist, surrounding himself with editors and newscasters who share his philosophy and seldom permit anything to be presented that contradicts humanism, unless forced to by community pressure.

JUNE, 1981

59

The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS, TEX.
D. 273,880 S. 326...

MAY 10 1981

# The world of Kissinger

[lc]

FOR THE RECORD:
Selected Statements, 1977-1980

By Henry Kissinger (Little, Brown, $12.95).

By John Edward Weems

AS ASSISTANT to the President for National Security Affairs and as secretary of state, Henry Kissinger was known by many Americans for his wit, application, conviction, perception and persuasion — and for his ego. These selected statements made in speeches, articles and interviews since he left the cabinet post show why.

They contain astute remarks on a variety of politics: the Communist threat, NATO, international business, detente and trade with the Communist World, American foreign policy, human rights, and so on. There are also tributes to Kissinger's longtime friend Nelson Rockefeller and to Golda Meir.

Some of the speeches sound like any politician's speeches — like this statement that, for the brilliant Kissinger, seems a political platitude (with the exception that very few politicians would have said "for better or worse" or would have mentioned possible failure): "... We can be certain that economics and politics will be closely related, and that American decisions, for better or worse, will shape the response of the industrial democracies and thereby of the rest of the world. Without us there can be no progress; if we fail, we risk recession, confrontation, and chaos."

Another deduction is a seeming loss of timeliness. Kissinger refers frequently to a "current" Carter administration; yet those people have come and gone. Further, a few of his statements are in regard to now-past issues many Americans would like to forget — Iran and the Shah, for example.

BUT KISSINGER'S keenness comes through in most of the book. Examples:

— "Alas, most statesmen are mediocre, and it was not evil intention but mediocrity that produced World War I. None of the political leaders of Europe understood that their system was tending toward confrontation."

— "History is not a cookbook which gives re-

cipes; it teaches by analogy and forces us to decide what, if anything, is analogous. History gives us a feel for the significance of events, but it does not teach which individual events are significant. It is impossible to write down a conceptual scheme and apply it mechanically to evolving situations. Certain principles can be developed, certain understandings can be elaborated, but it is impossible to predict in advance how they apply to concrete situations."

— "It is dangerously arrogant to believe that foreign policy can be conducted effectively without knowing something of how other generations have faced comparable problems — the compromises they have had to make, how their best judgments turned out, and how limited human foresight is, even in the best men and under optimal circumstances. We always tend to think of historical tragedy as failing to get what we want, but if we study history we find that the worst tragedies have occurred when people got what they wanted ... and it turned out to be the wrong objective."

WHAT DOES Kissinger foresee for the future? Not surprisingly, he says the decade of the 1980s will be a period of massive crises for all of us, if present trends continue. He sees NATO getting weaker, with the possible exception of naval strength, and, in fact, he sees the overall military balance shifting against the United States. (But in another section he states that the potential strength of the United States is not in such precarious balance.)

The advent of the Reagan administration might change some of his observations, but probably not many — and especially not this remark, which sums up very well Kissinger's own method of procedure as secretary of state:

"For the first time in American history we can neither dominate the world nor escape from it. Henceforth this country will be engaged in world affairs by reality and not by choice. America must now learn to conduct foreign policy as other nations have had to conduct it — with patience, subtlety, imagination, and perseverance."

John Edward Weems, Waco free-lance writer and occasional teacher, is author of nine books.

The Dallas Morning News: Jay Godwin

Henry Kissinger, looking at our past and future.

NATIONAL REVIEW
NEW YORK, N.Y.
B.W. 35.900

MAY 15 1981

Books Arts & Manners

An American Statesman

GERHART NIEMEYER

How is it that former Secretaries of State whose performance in office was, let us say, controversial can later attain a reputation for real and indisputable wisdom? Acheson, Rusk, and now Kissinger are cases in point. Hindsight, it is said, is always twenty-twenty, but that cannot be the whole explanation. I have another hypothesis: Americans in general are not given to thinking logically and systematically about foreign policy; the few who do that kind of thinking—e.g., the above-named—nevertheless often incline to put a gap between their own analysis and their choice of action, so that the action seems uninfluenced by, and sometimes opposed to, the analysis. This gap occurs when emotions take the place of thoughts. It is by no means universal in capable of, and trained for, cool analysis; but in politics, a free-wheeling emotional factor is the rule rather than the exception. However, when former makers of policy are freed from the need to make public choices, they can afford to heed their intellects and begin to teach the rest of us.

Henry Kissinger is acknowledged to be a top-ranking statesman, not only in a national but in a world context. While he was in office he pursued the disastrous policy of detente, but once free to write, since 1977, he has produced works worthy of a first-rate intellect and established himself as a source of truth (to the extent to which "truth" applies to something like foreign policy). This book, a collection of addresses and interviews, would be a model textbook on foreign affairs. It succeeds in introducing the lucidity of order into the relation between principles and facts, the whole and the parts, the expedient and the moral.

Let us, starting from two cases, see what Kissinger is about. First: Why did our government fail to assess the situation in Iran and to anticipate the revolution? "The failure," writes Kissinger, "was less of intelligence than of a conceptual apparatus." (My emphasis.) Second: Why is it that Americans cannot

get rid of Cuban interference in Africa? Kissinger: "Because there is no consensus of its significance." (My emphasis.)

A "conceptual apparatus"—carried, or not carried, by "a consensus." That is how he perceives the task. The needed concept is first given a formal statement: It is the balance of power, defined as "a scope for action, a capacity to affect events and conditions." Into this

For the Record, Selected Statements
1977-1980

By Henry Kissinger

Little, Brown, 332 pp., $12.95

formal frame Kissinger injects the concrete historical circumstances: the ideological incompatibility of the Soviets and the West, together with the disproportionate destructiveness of nuclear weapons, the "political turmoil" in the Third World, an impending economic crisis, the energy problem. Here are the elements with which he can, in concrete terms, ring the changes on the main theme.

One related axiom should be mentioned: A balance of power requires fast action at the point when a rising danger is still ambiguous. Once it has developed to the point of certainty, the moment of prevention has passed. The French could have avoided the breakdown of the European balance of power if they had intervened when Hitler, defying the Treaty of Versailles, occupied the Rhineland in 1936. At that time, however, Hitler had not yet shown himself for what he really was. The French would have had to act on a hunch. Similarly, in Africa, in 1975: "Had we succeeded in Angola, there would have been no Ethiopia." But at the time when preventive action was still possible many would have raised grave doubts whether "this time and this place" really served our national interest. Thus "any nation has

Brigitte Berger is a professor of sociology at Wellesley College. . . . Alan I. Miller is an editorial writer for the Detroit News. . . . Gerhart Niemeyer taught government for many years at the University of Notre Dame. Recently he was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church. . . . Francis B. Randall teaches Russian and Communist history and art at Sarah Lawrence College.

562 NATIONAL REVIEW / May 15, 1981

to make a choice between being psychologically certain and paying a heavy price if it turns out to be wrong, or being psychologically uncertain and paying a low price for taking the necessary precautions."

This does not mean that Kissinger is advocating decisions of a less than rational character; rather, in the words of a sign hanging in the body shop where my automobile gets its beauty-work done, he urges "precision guesswork." The guess has an element of precision precisely to the extent that it is informed by a *conceptual apparatus* embodying rational notions about the forces and conditions of the world. One such notion is that "the balancer of power is a kind of policeman, whose responsibility is to prevent peaceful countries from feeling impotent and aggressors from becoming reckless." In this role we need, among other concepts, a "concept of change to which moderate humane forces can rally," one that frees us from bowing helplessly to any violent computation which in our eyes is wholly internal and which we therefore incline to surround with a false halo of inviolability.

A prime example of Kissinger's lucidity is his chapter entitled "The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II." The treaty, he says, must be evaluated not in isolation but in the context of the shift in actual arms balance brought about not by treaty but by our unilateral decisions first to favor a certain type of strategic arms, and then to cancel or delay the B-I bomber, the MX ICBM, the Trident submarine and missile, and various kinds of cruise missiles. By contrast, after SALT I the Soviets not only did not slow down their strategic competition, they accelerated it.

Hence, not only have Soviet strategic forces gained superiority over our own, but, in addition, the original American advantage in theater-based forces has been revised to the point that "a Soviet superiority in theater-based striking power is at hand." This process was induced by one of those dark emotional factors intervening between cool analysis and practical choice—in this case, the feeling that our possession and deployment of formidable armed might had given just offense to the other side, and that therefore we would contribute to peace more by being vulnerable than by promoting our invulnerabilities.

Comments Kissinger: "Rarely in history has a nation so passively accepted such a radical change in the military balance." His honesty compels him to admit contritely that he had a share in this pervasively "moral" quest for our own vulnerability. (One must also mention a corollary of this development which he fails to include in his confession: the so-called Sonnenfeldt Doctrine, which asserts that the Soviet Union would be more peaceful in measure as we favored and promoted the consolidation of its hold on its East European allies.)

Be that as it may the Kissinger of today is not the Kissinger of 1973-74. He now emphasizes that "the common stake in peace" offers no "common bond" between us and the Soviet Union; he accuses the Soviets of having conducted, since 1975, "an unprecedented assault on the international equilibrium," and concludes that this assault "must be ended if there is to be any prospect for East-West coexistence or cooperation." Thus, "linkage" of arms-control problems and geopolitical problems is imperative. As regards the arms-control prospect: "If we want equality, we must build up to equality." The treaties can do no more than reflect the actual conditions of balance or imbalance of nuclear weapons, both strategic and theater. Speaking of theater nuclear weapons, our failure to develop a theory concerning their use is another element in the weakening of our strategic capabilities which, left to do the whole job themselves, suffer from a widening credibility gap.

All these are problems of balance: not merely of balancing one type of weapon against a similar type on the other side, but of balancing strategic with theater capabilities, military agreements with geopolitical conduct, and legal limits with the determination to build. The conceptual apparatus must be developed to point up relevance, orient assessments, and facilitate judgments. It is all there, no more than sketched, but the sketch is complete.

Still, certain doubts linger, and parts of this book tend to deepen them. Kissinger himself points to the U.S. as a unique example of a nation that has passively permitted the depletion of its

means of defense. He also admits to having contributed to the school of thought which claimed to see sense in this nonsense. An inability to perceive nonsense derives from the emotions—such emotions as overwhelm human beings who are floating in what we may call a metaphysical vacuum. Kissinger shows us in this book the integrity of a logical, lucid, "penetrating and combining mind," to use Burke's phrase. I am not so confident that the emotions underlying it can be said to be equally reliable.

Included in this book, for example, is an astonishing eulogy of Nelson Rockefeller. One would expect, for a friend, more than the usual warmth, more than the standard praise. But even allowing for this, his words must be termed exaggerated. "His failure to reach the Presidency was, in my view, a tragedy for the country. What a great President he would have been. How he would have ennobled us!" Or again: "When Nelson was relaxed, he did not speak about power but about love ... it was the grace of the inwardly strong, an all-embracing feeling that only those who are truly at peace with themselves can dare to articulate." Here Kissinger manifests a lack of measure, an absence of a sense of limit which indicates wobbly emotions underneath the powerful mind.

OTHER doubts come to mind. The phrase "to build a world" recurs too often, for my taste, as does the slogan "peace and progress." My uneasiness was deepened when I read Kissinger's remarks on Iran in which he seems to give wholesale approbation to "modernity." One doubts that he has any real grasp of the conflicts which modernization induces as it clashes with the religious traditions of a settled culture. Yet a pertinent series of disturbed countries lies right before our eyes: Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, China, Japan, countries which at best exist in a dimly perceived schizophrenia between modernity and tradition, and at worst constitute a people torn in half. Our own intelligence regarding these countries is flawed by our will to look upon modernizing tendencies alone as rational, as real, and to dismiss religious tra-

May 15, 1981 / NATIONAL REVIEW

563

ditions as primitive, irrational, and contemptible. Our own modern hostility to religion here plays tricks on us.

Finally, one must mention Kissinger's hope of being able to "impose a code of conduct" on the Soviets, which eventually would make "real coexistence and cooperation" possible and give rise to "the creativity of a world in diversity." Now, Kissinger himself looks with scorn on "the so-called progressive [American] consensus [which] deals with almost every political crisis abroad by proposing a coalition government." It is ridiculous to propose "such a solution to factions who are killing each other precisely because they cannot agree on the minimum necessities for a political contest." In what way, one asks, is the idea of our "imposing a code of conduct" on the Soviet Union different from proposing coalition government to factions who no longer share basic values? The Soviet Union is ruled by people who throughout their lives have killed in themselves every vestige of the values they might once have held in common with other human beings. These leaders are in a permanent state of war even with the majority of their own subjects. They are unwilling to acknowledge any "code of conduct" other than "the interests of the class struggle" (as Lenin put it), which they consider identical with "the interests of the Soviet Union." One may erect obstacles in the path of their expansion, but one cannot educate such people to respect values which they have strenuously rejected all their lives.

While failings of this kind may ac-

count for the controversial performance of Kissinger as Secretary of State, they need not prevent our acknowledging without stint the stature of this thinker on foreign affairs, the first after Mahan to have risen among us. ☐

[LC]

and solidarity with those who are the
victims of her hardly benign historical
neglect.

One of the major fascinations of the
book, however, lies in the intimate sto-
ry of two personalities. The first is
Breytenbach, a young Afrikaner poet,
who, during a European sojourn, joined
a confused conspiracy against apartheid
and later, under the trying conditions
of solitary confinement, offered his ser-
vices to the state. The other is Selby, a
young Mosotho, a leader of the Soweto
uprising of students in 1976. The tragic
figure is Breytenbach, his poetic talents
shackled by a nightmare of despair and
betrayal; his tragedy is the tragedy of
white South Africa. Selby's story is the
story of hope, of the inevitability of the
forces of history enforcing a relentless
retribution, readjusting the scales, seek-
ing the attainment of proper human
values. For history has galloped at an
unstoppable speed during this century.
Revolutions have occurred; millions of
serfs in Russia, China, millions of ex-
ploited peoples in Africa and Asia have
been released from centuries of degra-
dation and given the possibility of reor-
ganizing their lives. Errors have been
made in those revolutions. But the fact
remains that the human spirit that
released them continues to stir and to
seek redress particularly for those er-
rors that attempt to shackle the human
soul with the strangling chains of dog-
ma and political tyranny. In South
Africa, too, the change will occur, even
if it takes a thousand years. W W V

FOR THE RECORD:
SELECTED STATEMENTS

1977-1980

by Henry Kissinger

(Little Brown and Co.; xiii + 332 pp.;
$12.95)

Donald J. Puchala

One reacts to *For the Record* very much in the way one reacts to Henry Kissinger himself. It is impossible to come away unmoved from an encounter with the man, his thinking, his words, or his actions. It is also difficult to come away unperplexed.

*For the Record* is a chronologically ordered selection of Kissinger's speeches, essays, interviews, and other pronouncements delivered between 1977 and 1980. Most address topics of

foreign policy—Soviet-American relations, NATO, the Middle East, international aspects of the energy question, and other current issues. Most transmit and amplify the uncomplicated message that there has been a shift in the global balance of military power to the advantage of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government is deriving substantial political benefit from its militarily advantaged status. Moscow could push even harder on political fronts in years ahead. The deteriorating position of the United States has resulted partly from Soviet doggedness but mostly from confused strategies, budgetary blockages, and political immobility in Washington. A global balance of power can be restored, but this will require massive investments in defense, greatly enhanced NATO cooperation, and clearer Western thinking about ends and means in foreign policy.

Disclaimers notwithstanding, what Kissinger obviously wants to put on record in publishing these statements is his disagreement with much of the foreign and defense policies of the Carter administration. For the debate about who in our era is "following in the footsteps of history," Kissinger wants to make sure that his preferred pathway is clearly marked. As such, the book represents counterpoint to the dominant themes of Jimmy Carter's policies. Most penetrating is the critique of the Carter defense policy, brilliantly expressed in Kissinger's congressional testimony on the SALT II Treaty. Kissinger chides an administration that "seems to have a far from settled view about the need for a strengthened defense. Witness the cancellation of the B-1, the nuclear carrier, and the neutron bomb; the closing of the Minuteman III production line; and the stretch-out of the MX, Trident and cruise missile programs....It is not a question of balancing the insistence of conservatives for higher defense with the considerations of liberals for a reduction in our military spending. The issue is what out country needs for its long-term security."

But it is not only defense policy that provokes the former secretary of state's disapproval. Kissinger questions the American abandonment of the shah of Iran: Should great powers treat their most loyal allies in such a manner? On China, Kissinger belittles the notion of a "China card": Can Washington really believe that a three thousand-year-old

sovereign state will permit itself to be
manipulated in another's interest? On
human rights. Who gains when the
United States pressures and alienates
some of its closest friends? And repeat-
edly on the Soviet Union: How many
expansionist thrusts can be ignored in
the name of détente?

NATO allies and Third World governments also come off rather badly as Kissinger puts his positions for the late 1970s on record. The allies are reprimanded for underestimating the gravity of the threat from the Soviet Union, for choosing to believe that détente is divisible, for shirking defense burdens, and for criticizing the U.S. "at one and the same time for risking détente and for paying inadequate attention to security." Some allies in particular are chided for their unwillingness to unify Western positions on energy questions. Europeans are admonished for their leanings toward the PLO. Kissinger displays little interest in the PLO, or in a West Bank state governed by them. Toward radical regimes in the Third World, Kissinger is harsh:

> "As for the Third World nations now meeting in Cuba, when I was in office I never read their resolutions...which is just as well because I might have said something rather nasty...It seems to me nostalgia, not policy, to appeal to radical elements in the Third World...the Third World is not our escape route; we may not lose there but we are not likely to win there by repeating their slogans."

Whether or not one agrees with Kissinger's positions, the forcefulness and clarity of his arguments must be admired. All his points follow consistently from basic geopolitical assumptions. Relations among states are fundamentally contests for power, and expanding power can be contained only with countervailing power. The contest for power (call it "national security," if this sounds more acceptable) in contemporary world affairs is manifested primarily in the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. All other contests, and indeed most other relationships, must be interpreted as aspects of, or subordinate to, the Soviet-American competition. In Kissinger's estimation, singlemindedness is a statesman's virtue. Any distraction from the centrality of the bipolar contest could doom the West to capitulation or the world to nuclear disaster.

Yet it is this singlemindedness in

WONews / June 1987

25

Kissinger's approach that is most perplexing. "Greatness" in the annals of statesmanship is certainly related to identifying forces shaping history and adjusting policies accordingly. But is the struggle between the superpowers in fact the only, or primary, force shaping the history of our time? Might it be that American and Russian mutual obsessions will result ultimately in both countries being swept aside by more relentless historical forces? And if so, might not Henry Kissinger's counsel be misleading?

There is very little in *For the Record* that suggests sensitivity to or appreciation of the magnitude of social and economic change currently taking place in the Third World. Dismissing Third World radicals is one thing; ignoring most of mankind's movement to modernity is something else again. This movement may be the main stream of the next century's history. Similarly, Kissinger has little to say about global, environmental, and demographic phenomena that might also prove to be the crucial forces of our time. Food and water shortages, mass movements of people, altered climates, expanded deserts, and polluted oceans could easily become the subjects and objects of world politics in the next generation. Should this come to be, Americans and Russians, arsenals at the ready and gazes fixed upon each other, may be left to wonder what became of the world while they were not paying attention. For the record, Kissinger might have at least cautioned us about such possibilities. [WV]

## A GATHERING OF PERSONALITIES

Books continue to affirm our faith that the affairs of men are not simply the affair of impersonal forces. Don Cook's *Ten Men and History* (Doubleday and Company; x+518 pp.; $14.95) celebrates the work of three Britons, four Frenchmen, and three Germans who contributed to the building of postwar Europe. A. J. P. Taylor's occasional pieces are gathered in *Politicians, Socialism and Historians* (Stein and Day; 270 pp.; $15.95). Individuals from all continents who have suffered for their beliefs are the subject of the forthcoming *Convictions* by Arthur Dobrin, Lyn Dobrin, and Thomas Liotti (Orbis Books; c. 128 pp.; $5.95). John Kenneth Galbraith, in *A Life in Our Times: Memoirs* (Houghton Mifflin; 537 pp.; $16.95), includes a generous array of politicians, economists, and others he has met in his public life. Wilfred Burchett's *At the Barricades: Forty Years on the Cutting Edge of History* (Times Books; x+341 pp.; $15.00) contains, in its account of the Australian author's career as a foreign correspondent of decidedly leftist sympathies, sketches and appraisals of important political figures.

## THE PUGNACIOUS PRESIDENTS
by Thomas A. Bailey

(The Free Press; 478 pp.; $17.95)

Jean Yarbrough

In *The Pugnacious Presidents* the historian Thomas A. Bailey combines traditional diplomatic history, political history, and psychobiography in an effort to explain anew the causes for America's wars. He concludes that "there was little or no demonstrable connection between the incumbent's party and his involvement in war, major or minor"; "The United States, regardless of the President's party, got involved in all of its major wars because a larger war already existed to suck in the Americans."

Had Bailey stuck to this theme, his argument would be unobjectionable, if somewhat simplistic. But the book Bailey has written has nothing to do with political parties and not much to say about outside circumstances. As its title suggests, *The Pugnacious Presidents* is about personalities. Bailey believes there is a connection between foreign affairs and presidential psychology, but the connection between the relations of nations and presidential personality is never made clear. Bailey fails to show how an analysis of each president's "pugnacity level" substantiates his conclusion that circumstances beyond U.S. control have drawn us into war. Indeed, his conclusion suggests the opposite: If it is circumstances beyond our control that have embroiled America in war, then an analysis of "presidential pugnacity" is irrelevant at best.

But Bailey's analysis is not merely irrelevant; it is contradictory and superficial. Had he argued that, once confronted with a threatening international situation, the "pugnacity level" of the president decisively affected American foreign policy, it might have made sense. Bailey's analysis demonstrates, though, that there is no connection between presidential personality and the conduct of foreign affairs. Andrew Jackson was "unquestionably the most pugnacious man ever to enter the White House," yet he avoided provoking a war with Mexico over Texas; Grover Cleveland receives "high marks" for his pugnacity, yet he conducted a notably conciliatory and largely uneventful foreign policy. "Men of peace" such as James Madison involved the country in war.

Bailey nowhere tells us what he means by presidential pugnacity; what standards he uses to determine whether a president is bellicose or peaceloving; and finally whether pugnacity in a president is ever justified or desirable. At best Bailey muddies the waters by talking about "aggressive defensive ness" and "defensive aggressiveness."

In Bailey's simplistic analysis, pugnacity is nearly always bad, pacifism nearly always good. One exception is his surprisingly mild criticism of "brinkmanship," "massive retaliation," and "liberation" during the Eisenhower years. More in keeping with Bailey's superficial Manichaeism is his assessment of Jimmy Carter: "With his soft Southern accent, his ever-smiling [sic] teeth, and his record as a dedicated follower of the gentle Jesus, he could be expected to be a man of the olive branch rather than a man of the sword." Bailey never considers the far more important question of whether Carter's conciliatory policies harmed the United States. Instead he criticizes Carter for retreating from his pacifism in his 1980 State of the Union message, a speech Bailey considers "probably the most bellicose State of the Union" address ever delivered.

Finally, the book is not even well written. Its pages are cluttered with tongue twisting alliterations ("black blemish of bondage"), offensive stereo types ("feathered red men"), and embarrassing efforts at being cute ("the hand that dispensed the firewater indeed ruled the tomahawk"). In fact, the only cliché that seems to be missing is an appropriate one: "the pits." [WV]

26

# Henry Kissinger's butter and knife

FOR THE RECORD. Selected Statements
1977-1980

By Henry Kissinger. Little-Brown. 332 pp.
$12.95.

By Mark Feeney
Globe Staff

"Kissinger's Scraps" is what the New Repub-
lic called "For the Record," and that is as good a
description as any. Nevertheless, the identity of
the man behind them ensures their special treat-
ment. Regard Henry Kissinger as you will - detest
him, esteem him, or maintain a diplomatic neu-
trality - he cannot be ignored. He remains, as
Thomas Mann once said of Bertolt Brecht, "very
gifted, unfortunately."

His gifts, fortunate and otherwise, are inter-
mittently displayed in these 16 articles, inter-
views and addresses written between June, 1977,
and July of last year. "Occasional pieces" are
what the English professors would call them;
and, like post-war Germany, Korea and (had Kis-
singer had his way) Vietnam, they divide not so
neatly into two parts.

Let us call them the butter and the knife. In-
cluded in the former category are his tributes to
Sadat and Golda Meir, his thoughts on business'
role in international relations, and (surprisingly,
for it is the most serious problem facing us today)
his views on energy. The opinions he advances
are bland to the point of nonexistence, and writ-
ten in a style which recalls, hmm, processed
cheese.

For example: "America's economic vitality is
our greatest asset. It is the product of the creative
spirit of a free and industrious people and of an
economic system that gives opportunity to pri-
vate incentive. It is the foundation of our prosper-
ity, our military strength, and constructive rela-
tionships in a world of peace."

Gardeners call this sort of thing mulch.

The knife however, is a different story - and,
as one might expect, cuts through the butter.
Writing on Eurocommunism, the future of NATO,
SALT II, and related topics, Kissinger forgoes the
platitudes. With tough, detailed analyses, he sets
forth his views. Many are controversial, most are

now in ascendancy, and all are revealing of the
man behind them.

The recurring words are "geopolitics," "link-
age," and "balance of power," and realpolitik is
the underlying premise. It defines and motivates
Kissinger's writings just as it did his policies. In a
business like diplomacy, Kissinger implies, where
necessity dictates all, an unreconstructed ideal-
ism has no place. "This is not a personal recom-
mendation as to desirable policy," he says in a
disclaimer representative of all his thought, "but
a judgment of stark reality." Liberal and conser-
vative critics of Kissinger's policies may demur.
All too often, they could object, he confuses politi-
cal realities with an exaltation of the status quo.

"But the art of policymaking is to identify the
range of effective influence available to us," Kis-
singer urges. Just as war is too serious a business
to be left to the generals (or so Talleyrand
thought), foreign policy is too important to be left
to the ideologues. If that means a deem-
phasis of human rights so be it; a
willingness to treat with Marxism,
OK. Let the liberals and the con-
servatives be offended, just
make sure the diplomatic
trains run on time.

The disturbing thing
about these weightier
pieces is not the over
RECORD, Page A52

[10]

Buffalo Evening News

BUFFALO, N.Y.

D. 266.260 SUN. 221,687

APR 1 2 1981

Kissinger View

FOR THE RECORD: Selected Statements, 1977-1980, by Henry Kissinger; Little, Brown, 332 pp., $12.95.

Three secretaries of state have held office since Henry Kissinger left that post in 1977, but Kissinger still manages to remain close to center stage. He offers in this collection of speeches, public statements and interviews some of the same insights that marked his views before and during his government service.

In his "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy" in 1957 and many writings since, Kissinger stressed the need for an overall strategic view in a world of nuclear stalemate. In the present volume, he says that the American approach to war has been "that you fight a war, you defeat your enemy, and then you make peace and live happily ever after."

During World War II, he said, none of the statesmen, except perhaps Churchhill, paid any attention to the issue of the structure of the post-war peace until the Soviet Army was in the center of Europe. — N.R.

# The world of Kissinger

FOR THE RECORD:

By John Edward Weems

They contain astute remarks on a variety of topics: the Communist threat, NATO, international business, detente and trade with the Communist World, American foreign policy, human rights, and so on. There are also tributes to Kissinger's longtime friend Nelson Rockefeller and to Golda Meir.

Some of the speeches sound like any politician's speeches — like this statement that, for the brilliant Kissinger, seems a political platitude (with the exception that very few politicians would have said “for better or worse” or would have mentioned possible failure): “... We can be certain that economics and politics will be closely related, and that American decisions, for better or worse, will shape the response of the industrial democracies and thereby of the rest of the world. Without us there can be no progress; if we fail, we risk recession, confrontation, and chaos.”

Another deduction is a seeming loss of timeliness. Kissinger refers frequently to a “current” Carter administration; yet those people have come and gone. Further, a few of his statements are in regard to now-past issues many Americans would like to forget — Iran and the Shah, for example.

> "For the first time in American history we can neither dominate the world nor escape from it. Henceforth this country will be engaged in world affairs by reality and not by choice. America must now learn to conduct foreign policy as other nations have had to conduct it — with patience, subtlety, imagination, and perseverance."

By Henry Kissinger. *Little-Brown*. 332 pp.
$12.95.

By Mark Feeney
Globe Staff

"Kissinger's Scraps" is what the New Repub-
lic called "For the Record," and that is as good a
description as any. Nevertheless, the identity of
the man behind them ensures their special treat-
ment. Regard Henry Kissinger as you will - detest
him, esteem him, or maintain a diplomatic neu-
trality - he cannot be ignored. He remains, as
Thomas Mann once said of Bertoldt Brecht, "very
gifted, unfortunately."

"But the art of policymaking is to identify the range of effective influence available to us," Kissinger urges. Just as war is too serious a business to be left to the generals (or so Talleyrand thought), foreign policy is too important to be left to the ideologues. If that means a deemphasis of human rights so be it; a willingness to treat with Marxism, OK. Let the liberals and the conservatives be offended, just make sure the diplomatic trains run on time.

The disturbing thing
about these weightier
pieces is not the over
RECORD, Page A52 40

all to bipartisanship - and
proceeds to slip bipartisan-
a mickey. The impression Kiss-
ger gives is not so much of a loy-
opposition, as of a government
one) in exile.

His right - his obligation - to
ress himself on American for-
policy is unquestioned. His
e of doing so is not. While one
of "For the Record" sells a
ticularly soporific version of po-
ral homiletics, the other special-
in a very sophisticated form of
emic. Calls for national unity on
ign policy preface essays in
isanship. Kissinger can write
s lofty a plane as he likes, but
not disguise (and only cheap-
is political intent.

statesman, Harry Truman
observed, is nothing but a
 politician. If nothing else,
the Record" serves to remind
that Henry Kissinger is still very
ch alive.

convers we might like them to
have been. Good dirty fun.

Perhaps not all fabrication either. These good, grey elders were an odd lot. Carlyle, like Ruskin, shunned sex; Charles Dodgson set out to trap little girls in his prose and photographs; Holman Hunt, Gabriel Rossetti and John Millais shared passions for painting and passionate painters' models. The air in this novel is filled with such lurid color and Dickensian harshness: peacocks scream, seances lift, laudanum soothes and bold personal gestures flaunt. "Rossetti entered with a flourish of a single gladiolus." Chopin entered coughing,

Keep Dry When
It's Wet...
Get Home
Delivery of The
Boston Globe.
For Home
Delivery Call
929-2222 or
Toll Free Inside
Mass. 1-800-
532-9524.

## ZUÑIGA

### AN ALBUM OF HIS SCULPTURE AND DRAWINGS
Text by Carlos Echeverría
Comments by Zuniga

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spiritual succession to Rivera, Orozeo
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wronged husband Flaubert's novel should be: humored.

> "Jane Brody's very comprehensive book is a marvelous combination of sound science and common sense...the best home reference on nutrition I have seen."

—G. TIMOTHY JOHNSON, M.D., M.P.H.,
editor, Harvard Medical
Health Letter

At last the most comprehensive book on nutrition yet written—by America's foremost writer on health and science. Encyclopedic in scope, yet personal in tone, it explains the "whys" behind good eating and the "hows" of making sensible dietary changes.

> "Skip all the other diet-nutrition books. Jane Brody's is the best I've ever read."

—WILLIAM A. NOLEN, M.D.,
author of *The Making of a Surgeon*

# JANE BRODY'S NUTRITION BOOK

## *A Lifetime Guide to Good Eating for Better Health and Weight Control*

By the Personal Health Columnist of the *New York Times*

552 pages • Over 50 delicious and healthful recipes
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Norton

W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York 10110

BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
BOSTON, MA
S. 606,389

MAY 10 1981

New
England
Newslet

■ RECORD 40

Continued from Page A51

lapping and repetition to which
they are prone; such flaws are un-
avoidable in a collection of this
sort.

But again and again he sounds
the call to bipartisanship – and
then proceeds to slip bipartisan-
ship a mickey. The impression Kis-
singer gives is not so much of a loy-
al opposition, as of a government
(of one) in exile.

His right - his obligation - to
express himself on American for-
eign policy is unquestioned. His
style of doing so is not. While one
part of "For the Record" sells a
particularly soporific version of po-
litical homiletics, the other special-
izes in a very sophisticated form of
polemic. Calls for national unity on
foreign policy preface essays in
partisanship. Kissinger can write
on as lofty a plane as he likes, but
it cannot disguise (and only cheap-
en) his political intent.

A statesman, Harry Truman
once observed, is nothing but a
dead politician. If nothing else,
"For the Record" serves to remind
us that Henry Kissinger is still very
much alive.

# Mr. Kissinger, Warts and All

FOR THE RECORD: Selected Statements 1977-1980. By Henry Kissinger. 332 pp. Little, Brown. $12.95.

Henry Kissinger's views on *realpolitik* are well known. We've gotten most of them in bits and pieces in newspaper reports, in magazine articles and television interviews. But getting the full impact of them in one volume gives you a slightly different perspective.

This volume contains speeches, statements, articles and interviews from the period after he left his post as secretary of state for Nixon and Ford and before Reagan was elected.

Although at the beginning, Kissinger makes a point of going easy on the early efforts of the Carter Administration to implement its own version of American foreign policy, he gradually becomes bolder in his criticism, particularly in regard to the fall of his friend, the Shah of Iran, and the subsequent hostage crisis.

"What turned the inchoate unrest (in Iran) into a revolution was the conjunction of modernization, lack of political imagination by the Shah, American policies, demonstrations of American weakness and assaults on American institutions perceived by those countries as essential for their survival. And clumsy tactical handling, of the situation," Kissinger says in an interview originally published Feb. 10, 1979.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing of this overview of Kissinger thinking is his insistence that American foreign policy should be constructed almost exclusively on big power politics.

In his speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 10, 1980, Kissinger outlined what he called the four inter-related issues he felt the next president should address: "First, the military balance; second, the geopolitical equation; third, the attitude toward the process of change in the world; and fourth, U.S.-Soviet relations."

Kissinger seems to relegate the problems of the Third World to a position of insignificance or of significance only inasmuch as those countries support either the United States or the Soviet Union.

"Somewhere, somehow, the United States must show that it is capable of rewarding a friend or penalizing an opponent," he says.

The Presidential Commission on World Hunger, a body composed of leaders from a broad political spectrum, called the hunger and malnutrition problems of more than a fourth of the world's population the gravest situation facing the United States and the developed world. It urged that dealing with this problem be made the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s.

Kissinger totally ignores this problem. Instead, he sees the so-called North-South debate between the developing and developed countries purely in its economic context for the United States and multinational corporations although he admits in passing that it would be a mistake to assume that all the concerns of the developing nations are unfounded.

As to human rights, he seems to be saying that it's fine to defend them as long as it is in the U.S. interest.

Kissinger's funeral oration for his close friend and patron Nelson Rockefeller stands out in this collection as the only glimpse

we get of Kissinger as possibly having some feelings behind his iron exterior and coldly cynical view of world affairs.

He quotes Rockefeller as saying to him "because I needed it, but, above all, because he deeply felt it: 'Never forget that the most profound force in the world is love.'"

In reading Kissinger's remarks it is precisely the lack of any love, compassion or feeling that seems to characterize his views of the world and of relations between nations and peoples.

Gaddis Smith, reviewing this book for *The New York Times*, cites this passage and says: "Love divorced from power, Mr. Kissinger is saying, may be a profound force, profoundly dangerous. Those who walk the path of love walk to destruction."

— EDGAR MILLER

Kissinger Testifies Before U.S. Senate

-AP-

The bubble is with us again. The fizz, the foam and the froth of a budding economic scheme now proclaim a heady effervescence in the form of savings for the corporation that pollutes.

In 1716, John Law, a Scottish monetary reformer, convinced the French government that he could help lower the nation's debt by establishing a central bank with authority to issue notes. He then came up with a scheme to link the bank with the Louisiana Company, which promised great mineral wealth from the vast French territories in the Mississippi Valley.

The venture became known throughout Europe and America as the "Mississippi Bubble." It was a colossal hoax and when it burst, thousands lost their holdings. The word "bubble" forever after was synonymous with the word "bust" in the economic world.

This time some savvy corporate officials, tired of getting all their thinking done by a government regulatory agency, have devised a novel scheme to save money for corporation and consumer and have tagged it with the title "Bubble Plan." It is working so well that even brokerage systems have been formed to sell the pollution profits like credits in a futures market.

Some of the credits are already worth millions of dollars and a number of the firms are becoming reluctant about selling them. Unlike Law's approach, this scheme, in effect, thumbs its nose at central government and central banking. It stems from an old American business approach — let us (the corporations) set up some options instead of being told precisely what we must do, no matter the cost to us.

Here's the way it started. The Armco

Another
Economic
'Bubble'

Steel Company in Middletown, Ohio, has blast furnaces that belch more than a ton of iron oxides each day. Because its standards did not meet the demands of the national Clean Air Act, the company was ordered to cut its emissions substantially by 1983, requiring millions of dollars worth of antipollution equipment.

The company convinced the government officials to try some untraditional options. They planted trees and grass on the plant grounds, perpetually wetted down the 15 miles of company roads, periodically sprayed outdoor piles of iron ore, and arranged shuttle buses so that employee did less driving around the plant.

Result? Company and federal officials agree that as of last August, Armco had accomplished roughly six times the required reduction in pollution at only one-fourth the projected cost!

Under the bubble program, Environmental Protection Agency gives up its privilege of saying not only what a company must do but also how it must do it. Instead of requiring pollution reduction at each individual smokestack or boiler, the agency treats an entire plant — even a series of plants — as a single polluter and requires a cutback in the aggregate of fouled air.

That's where you get the name. It's as if the plant were contained by a bubble with one outlet. The polluting company then has its engineers decide whether it is cheaper and more efficient to control the pollution from one valve or smokestack instead of another; whether, for example, it would cost less to control sources of open dust than to install expensive antipollution equipment.

Jeffrey Smith, science news writer and commentator for the weekly magazine *Science*, reports that the year-old program has popular support from both sides of the fence. He says that programs for a dozen other companies are near approval and about a hundred more are expected this year.

Other firms are achieving similar success. A utility in Providence, R.I., saves $2.7 million by burning high sulfur oil at one plant and natural gas at another, replacing expensive low-sulfur oil at both and resulting in a net reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions. There are a number of trade-offs planned in which companies propose certain outlays in exchange for relaxed pollution controls in other areas.

EPA has streamlined some of its review processes and set up generic rules for implementing state-level programs, a rule expected to permit about 100 New Jersey chemical companies to obtain permission for bubbles that limit hydrocarbon emissions.

The futures market comes about this way. Firms using the program sometimes find their resultant pollution is less than the law allows. That gives him a credit toward added pollution in the future and as these credits proliferate the EPA plans to sell the credits from one firm to another.

This would facilitate new growth in an area now listed under stiff pollution limits. It would permit compensation at a future market price for voluntary efforts to lower pollution. Brokerage systems have been established through local government in Louisville, San Francisco and Seattle. Some companies are already learning about the risk of selling credits which they may later need for themselves.

To the extent the bubble program grants more discretion to industry, observers say, they will be popular with the Reagan Administration, and to the extent they enable industry to accept present standards and not vigorously seek changes in current law, they will be satisfactory to environmentalists.

Worth Repeating

"Though the state's role has never been small, it has increased in the post-war period. By now, one third of the U.S. gross national product passes through federal, state and local government coffers. In addition, there is considerable regulation of private economic activity, not only the familiar regulation of prices of utilities and railroads but also that controlling environmental hazards." "The current mixed economy, with its high but not dominant proportion of government activity, did not

emerge by accident or by the willful design of corrupt politicians. It arose as a series of responses to felt needs. This condition does not mean that the specifics of the mixed economy must be regarded as ideal. On the contrary, just as in the private sector, particular commodities may always be found wanting or be replaced by superior alternatives. But the needs met by the government sector must be recognized."

— Kenneth J. Arrow, in *Harper's*

NEWS-FREE PRESS
CHATTANOOGA, TENN.

D. 65,017 SUN. 78,195

FEB 15 1981

BOOKS

# Kissinger For The Record

FOR THE RECORD: Selected Statements 1977-1980. By Henry Kissinger. Little, Brown and Company. 332 pages. $12.95.

As the United States and the industrial democracies face the geopolitical challenges of the 1980s, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remains one of our most influential experts on foreign policy. This book assembles some of Kissinger's major statements from the Carter years, in which he brings his experience and knowledge of history to bear on the evolution of policy.

Evolution is an important word here, for none of these statements was originally intended for book publication. Kissinger's *White House Years*, on his experience as National Security Adviser, appeared in 1979; a memoir on his tenure at the State Department is to be published later this year. Little, Brown asked him to prepare this volume as a bridge.

The book appears at a time when U.S. foreign policy is perhaps moving more toward the Kissinger mode, after woes of ineptitude under after problems with inconsistency and ineptitude under Carter and his oft-feuding team of Zbigniew Brzezinski at the

White House and Cyrus Vance (later Edmund Muskie) at State. As President Reagan's appointee, retired Gen. Alexander Haig, takes over, he does not inherit the Iran hostage crisis but must contend with eroded detente with the Soviets, a labor-Communist Party crisis in Poland and flash points from the Persian Gulf to Central America. Kissinger offers Haig, and the rest of us, many policy suggestions in this book.

The evolution of Kissinger's thought in these 16 statements seems at first supportive of Carter policy, but more critical in late 1979 and 1980. Ultimately, Kissinger says, the Carter administration failed to take a broad view of foreign policy: "The essence of a strategic view is to see the interconnection of events, and the trend of events. Yet we have been unwilling to resist the seemingly marginal encroachments that cumulatively show amount to a major erosion of the free world's security." Angola, Iran, Afghanistan... the anti-free trend around the world must be stopped somewhere, Kissinger says.

A repeated warning of the architect of detente and SALT I is that the Free World. cannot seek peace at any price,

for by accommodating the Soviets it gives them opportunities to encourage revolution and terrorism. But he does not advocate confrontation; instead he says the Soviets must be presented reasonable alternatives. Meanwhile, he says, with our allies and the Third World nations we must pursue a consistent policy instead of just reacting in crises and turning the foreign policy establishment upside down with every change of administration.

Kissinger reminds us that, whether human rights or terrorism be the matter of concern, the function of United States foreign policy is to further the country's interests abroad. As the United States increases its power in relation to the Soviet Union, the security of the Free World will be greater. And Kissinger warns that military might — both human and technological — is necessary to maintain that power.

The Soviets do not really have a central foreign policy. Kissinger writes, other than the goal of advancing Communism and destroying capitalism worldwide. But when the Soviets see an opening for influence in a new area, they take it. Thus by seeking to advance capitalism and free-

> "In terms of resources, social and economic trends, I would believe that history is clearly against the Soviet system. In that sense we (of the West) are the wave of the future. It is this that give the 1980s their particular urgency, because the chief element lacking in this potential coalition (resisting the Soviets) is an organizing strategy, an organizing will."

—Henry Kissinger

dom, and by supporting its friends, the United States can prevent the Soviets from finding openings.

> "In terms of resources, social and economic trends, I would believe that history is clearly against the Soviet system," Kissinger says. "In that sense we are the wave of the future. It is this that gives the 1980s their particular urgency, because the chief element lacking in (a) potential coalition of countries is an organizing strategy, an organizing will."

Thus Dr. Kissinger's prognosis for the eighties is guarded optimism. But the West must find that "organizing will," and only America can provide it.

Allen Chesney

Henry Kissinger

6C The Sunday Peninsula Herald, Sunday, February 15, 1981.

[10]

# Kissinger Sees U.S. In Preservation Role

*"For the Record: Selected Statements 1977-1980," by Henry Kissinger. (Little Brown. $12.95.)*

Who can tell for sure when the eagle screams in pain, in triumph, in warning, to cover flight or just to clear his throat? The matter of American intentions and resolve in world affairs must concern anyone within range of our strategic thinking and strategic weapons, and that means just about everybody.

We turn then to this selection from Henry Kissinger's public statements since leaving office. The successes of Kissinger's diplomacy, his capacity for strategic thinking and for sophisticated negotiation and force remain with us, even if the particulars of his work have proved somewhat evanescent.

Kissinger worked interim magic. He fashioned, from his quickness and some moderate version of our imperial interests, a policy. Neither hawk nor dove, Kissinger did diplomatic service for a people in shock, in transition, and not in conscious possession of their aims, purposes and requirements.

These statements bring again to mind the keen and resourceful play of his talent, his instinct for power and persuasion. Kissinger offered us the uncommon sight of a superpower bothering to use diplomacy.

Reading these selections — delivered to European and American diplomatic, business and political groups, including three searching interviews, some occasional pieces and presentations to committees of Congress — one admires again Kissinger's suavity and ability.

Reading this book as a member of a general audience affords a thrilling, flattering taste of the fascination Kissinger must exercise when given the chance to educate a specific audience to his view. One agrees almost inescapably with his unstated conclusion that someone with his view of the situa-

tion ought to be running things.

Kissinger thinks American foreign policy has been lacking in the resolve and clarity necessary to defend our strategic interests in the world. We have failed to estimate the Soviet threat, hence to meet it. We need to think less sentimentally and more helpfully about the underdeveloped world and face up to the energy crisis. Our strategic position is deteriorating.

Kissinger's version of the resolve we lack differs somewhat from many of his compadres in Republican arms. He sees resolve as a matter of will, as they do, but he considers it a prerequisite for policy rather than the policy itself: The people must attain a certain state of sophistication about letting diplomats do their work, as well as a certain state of patriotic heat.

His version of our inherited assumptions is a slanted jeremiad. He does say that our country must rally to an older standard. He also says our way of life is at stake. His discussions of the energy crisis and economic issues are subtle and menacing. Strategic fumbling and inept foreign policy resulting from American failures of character will lead to our destruction, specifically the end of our way of luxurious life, he believes.

Kissinger's message seems to be that the purpose of American strategic policy is not to change the world and run it but to preserve what we enjoy within it — through the balance of power. These may also be fighting words, but they suggest different kinds of fights than World War II or the Cold War. In stirring the old-time spirit, Kissinger does not give comfort to those who view that spirit as impatient with diplomacy, uneasy with the very complexity of a world order it can't quite grasp. Those who doubt that the American lack of resolve is simply a matter of will must be disappointed and concerned.

Robert Dawidoff

5C

## But Not Curfew

# Salvadorans
Learn to Live
With Death

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — When Salvadorans walk to work they step over bodies. If their bus is shot up by terrorists, they take another. Now, caged up by a strict curfew, they are taking more liquor, more tranquilizers and more birth control pills.

"We all hate the curfew," said Jose Martinez Gonzalez, a taxi driver. "But what can we do? If we are on the street after 7 p.m. or before 5 a.m., the soldiers will kill us on sight. We have to stay confined to our homes."

A hotel worker who declined to be identified said that since the curfew was imposed a month ago, she and her husband were spending more time together than ever, drinking more and enjoying it less.

"All I do is color and paint — yuk. He reads and reads and reads," she said.

### 200 Slain

The archdiocese of El Salvador says about 200 people have been slain on the streets, most while violating the curfew, since the edict took effect Jan. 11.

The Rev. Arturo Rivera y Damas says Salvadorans are getting fed up with the curfew and leaders of the Roman Catholic Church here called on the government to shorten or abolish it. But the government maintains that the curfew is needed to combat the political terrorism that has plagued this nation for two years.

Stores are selling more liquor, while hotels are offering special overnight packages so people can gather, drink, dance, roller skate and do something other than stare at their television sets or read book after book.

Singles are organizing house or apartment complex parties. Others are leaving for long vacations or to live abroad. Outgoing airline flights are full and long lines wait outside the visa sec-

(Christian Science Monitor Photo)

ieve time is circular, that events re-hurry? The view pervades the predomi-ine, even: The same word (kal) is used to both yesterday and tomorrow.

## the Clock

that hinged on a peasant's ability to confirm with some exactness when a specific event occurred.

"I went crazy trying to pinpoint the time, but he had no idea what I was talking about" Singh recalled.

While India's continued industrialization has brought increasingly large numbers of its population under some form of time discipline during the past three decades, there are few signs of any fundamental change in the value a Hindu gives to time.

"Time is too auspicious to give it material value," said Chandra. "To do so would depreciate it."

## at Tally

The Evening Bulletin
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
D. 536,330

FEB 1 5 1981

Kissinger: For the record

FOR THE RECORD: Selected Statements, 1977-1980. By Henry Kissinger. 332 pages. $12.95. Little, Brown and Company.

By RICHARD E. BISSELL

Henry Kissinger has not been named Secretary of State by President Reagan — thus depriving this book of its potentially dramatic value — but he is a person who deserves an attentive ear. This collection of speeches and interviews that represents his major non-aud BIOGRAPHICAL work of the last four years should be read carefully.

It was said at the time Henry Kissinger left office, at the beginning of 1977, that he was unlikely to sit at home reading good books by the fireplace. Indeed, he immediately proved his critics and fans right, by maintaining contacts and involvement with issues as he had when Secretary of State. He created, in effect, an alternate State Department while in opposition, establishing corridors of communication with those American friends abroad who found it difficult to work with the Carter Administration.

During that period of Democratic rule, Kissinger made numerous speeches, and commented frequently on the most salient foreign policy issues. He has made an excellent selection of those records for this book, with the subject matter ranging over the entire globe (but particularly Soviet relations and Western Europe) and delving into economic issues (such as business and the energy crisis) to an extent far beyond his evident interest as Secretary of State. His speech on the role of American business in the modern world, for instance, is nothing short of masterful, summarizing neatly the pitfalls and rewards of operating in a disorderly world.

The value of these statements for any reader, however, is limited by the variability of the level of discourse. In his various approaches to the public as a private citizen, Kissinger was necessarily faced by varying levels of expertise. It is quite different, for instance, to be addressing the National Conference of State Legislators than it is to give an interview to the eminent scholar, Walter Laqueur. Some statements, then, would be perfect for the general public, and would bore scholarly experts. The opposite happens with the reading of other speeches. Readers are thus forewarned: Do not judge the book on the basis of one or two selections, because there is something for everyone in these statements.

What may be daunting in these statements for any reader is Kissinger's apparently incorrect habit for elliptical discussions.

The language art of Kissinger diplomacy: Making simple issues sound complex.

Even in addressing the most straightforward issue, he inevitably makes it sound complex. And where he doesn't want to give a direct or indirect statement, the thought is raised to a level of abstraction sufficient to discourage the listener or reader from asking further questions. His reluctance to deal in specific cases is presumably derived from a desire to avoid offending any reader — and a useful habit for a Secretary of State to have — so long as abstraction is not a cover for an inability to think concretely. Judging from Kissinger's track record, that is not his problem.

Whatever disagreements one may have

with specific policies pursued by Kissinger during his tenure, it is clear from the statements gathered here that he had greater intellectual depth than any other modern Secretary of State. One can only wonder whether the new President and Secretary of State Alexander Haig will in fact find a way to harness that depth and his experience for tackling the major problems of American foreign policy.

Richard E. Bissell is associate director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute Philadelphia, and the author of articles on American foreign policy.

Kissinger Speaks 'For The Record'

MAR 8 1981

THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER

BY ROBERT CLERC

Enquirer Editorial Writer

Call it the Gospel according to Kissinger, for in this one, relatively slim volume the reader will find the statesman's views on every subject from Western European Communist Parties to open trade to the lessons of history.

He treats such immediately critical issues as the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, oil and the Middle East and the pros and cons of the SALT II treaty.

THERE ARE, in addition, moving personal tributes to some of the leaders with whom Kissinger has worked and for whom he harbors great affection and respect: Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, Nelson Rockefeller. He is brief, but typically candid, in his appraisal of the controversy surrounding the late Shah of

Iran's hospitalization in the United States.

*For the Record* is something of a departure from what this writer had anticipated the publishing schedule for the Kissinger series to be. Unlike his *White House Years*, this volume is not a memoir, written systematically and a comfortable distance from the events that are described and analyzed. Rather, this is a collection of statements excerpted from 16 speeches and interviews. And the book draws several strengths from that.

KISSINGER HAS compiled a comprehensive survey of contemporary public affairs and foreign policy. Scarcely a subject of international importance, either during his tenure as secretary of state or since, is not touched to some degree in this book.

The observations and opinions presented are both timely and, where appropriate, immediate. In the area of U.S. relations with Iran alone, there is an interview with the editors of *The Economist* which was published in that magazine on Feb. 10, 1979—some 10 months prior to the taking of the hostages—in which Kissinger discusses the factors leading up to the Shah's exile, the problems that evolved from the emasculation of the Central Intelligence Agency and his beliefs at the time about what the future held for revolutionary Iran, the Persian Gulf and U.S. relations in that region.

The chapters reflect both a diversity and continuity that probably would not have resulted had the book been other than a compilation. In each of the speeches and interviews Dr. Kissinger was attentive, understandably, to the particular interests and concerns of his audience. The result is a thorough, often multi-sided defense of his perceptions of the proper course of

American policy.

THE LATTER is even more important because of Kissinger's unusual capacity for weaving the fabric of policy from the threads of different disciplines. In his analysis of "The Energy Crisis and the World Order," for example, he drew from government, marketing and technology, and then tempered his data with his understanding of *realpolitik* and the social pressures of emerging Third World nations, to arrive at his conclusion.

What Kissinger and his editors have produced is a single-volume, easy-to-read interpretation of the issues that have determined, and continue to determine, the course of world events. It is not necessary that the reader agree with every analysis. As in his earlier works, it is enough to share the thinking of one of the contemporary world's pre-eminent scholars and statesmen.

Safe to say that this book, because of its subject range and treatment, deserves a place on the bookshelf of everyone with an interest in contemporary governmental affairs.

The Conservatory—Ladies night, Thu.; TGIF party, Fri.; 640 W. Third St., Covington. 491-6400.

**The Conservatory**—Ladies night, Thu.; TGIF party, Fri.; 640 W. Third St., Covington. 491-6400.

**Uncle Woody's**—Joe Wiles and Friends, Thu.; Silvertones, Fri. and Sat.; 339 Calhoun St. 751-2518. No admission charge.

**Calhoun Street "Nite" Club**—Cheaters, Thu.; Modulators, Fri. and Sat.; 335 Calhoun St. 751-8236.

**Overflow**—Charles Howard, Thu. and Fri.; 32 W. Seventh St., Covington. 581-3509. No admission charge.

## friday

**Miller Gallery**—“Contemporary Landscapes” opening 7-9 p.m. Fri. through April 4. Open 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sat., other times by appointment. 2722 Erie Ave. 871-4420. No admission charge.

**Night with Live Writers**—Jim Bertolino, J.P. Kelly and Jane Jaspers, 8 p.m., Fairview Arts Center, 355 W. McMillan at Ravine. 421-2363.

**Film Society**—“The Giant Claw,” “I Was A Teenage Frankenstein”

PIANIST Aldo Ciccolini
performs today at XU.

LEON REDBONE does
his stuff at Bogart's
Tuesday.

Closed Sat. 244-4420. No admission charge.

**Cincinnati Art Club**—Spring Art Show, 2 p.m.; 1021 Parkside Place. 241-4591. No admission charge.

**Art Academy**—Drawing and Collage of Alice Mahler through Fri. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri.; noon-5 p.m. Sat. and Sun. 721-5205. Eden Park. No admission charge.

**Historical Society**—“Gems from the Collections” some of the items collected since 1831, through May 2; Eden Park, adjacent to Art Museum. Open 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tues.-Sat. 241-4622. No admission charge.

**University of Cincinnati**—Selection from Alice and Harris Weston collection through March 24, Tangeman Fine Arts Gallery. Open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri.; 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Sat. 475-3462; “Mixed Emotions” by Bobbi Thomason through March 31, Center for Women's Studies, 146 McMicken Hall, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. and by special arrangement on Sat., 475-6776. No admission charge.

**Northern Kentucky University**—David Keator ceramics through March 31, Main Gallery; Group photography exhibit through

MONTEREY, CALIF.
PENINSULA HERALD
D. 30,048

FEB 15 1981

Kissinger worked interim magic. He fashioned, from his quickness and some moderate version of our imperial interests, a policy. Neither hawk nor dove, Kissinger did diplomatic service for a people in shock, in transition, and not in, conscious possession of their aims, purposes and requirements.

Robert Dawidoff

Chattanooga Daily Times

CHATTANOOGA, TENN.
D. 54,544 SUN. 59,148

FFR 21 1981

Mr. Kissinger, Warts and All

[LC]

Henry Kissinger's views on *realpolitik* are well known. We've
gotten most of them in bits and pieces in newspaper reports, in
magazine articles and television interviews. But getting the full
impact of them in one volume gives you a slightly different per-
spective.

This volume contains speeches, statements, articles and inter-
views from the period after he left his post as secretary of state
for Nixon and Ford and before Reagan was elected.

Although at the beginning, Kissinger makes a point of going
easy on the early efforts of the Carter Administration to imple-
ment its own version of American foreign policy, he gradually
becomes bolder in his criticism, particularly in regard to the fall
of his friend, the Shah of Iran, and the subsequent hostage crisis.

"What turned the inchoate unrest (in Iran) into a revolution was the conjunction of modernization, lack of political imagination by the Shah, American policies, demonstrations of American weakness and assaults on American institutions perceived by those countries as essential for their survival. And clumsy tactical handling of the situation," Kissinger says in an interview originally published Feb. 10, 1979.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing of this overview of Kissing-
er thinking is his insistence that American foreign policy should
be constructed almost exclusively on big power politics.

In his speech before the American Society of Newspaper Edi-
tors on April 10, 1980, Kissinger outlined what he called the four
inter-related issues he felt the next president should address:
"First, the military balance; second, the geopolitical equation;
third, the attitude toward the process of change in the world; and
fourth, U.S.-Soviet relations."

The Presidential Commission on World Hunger, a body com-
posed of leaders from a broad political spectrum, called the hun-
ger and malnutrition problems of more than a fourth of the
world's population the gravest situation facing the United States
and the developed world. It urged that dealing with this problem
be made the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s.

Kissinger totally ignores this problem. Instead, he sees the so-
called North-South debate between the developing and developed
countries purely in its economic context for the United States and
multinational corporations although he admits in passing that it
would be a mistake to assume that all the concerns of the deve-
loping nations are unfounded.

Kissinger's funeral oration for his close friend and patron Nel-
son Rockefeller stands out in this collection as the only glimpse

Gaddis Smith, reviewing this book for *The New York Times*,
cites this passage and says: "Love divorced from power, Mr. Kiss-
singer is saying, may be a profound force, profoundly dangerous.
Those who walk the path of love walk to destruction."

— EDGAR MILLER

-AP

## Another Economic 'Bubble'

## Worth Repeating

DURRANT'S

EASTERN DAILY PRESS

NORWICH,
NORFOLK

ISSUE
DATED

27 MAR 1981

Kissinger speaks — again

THERE ARE at least two Henry Kissingers if not more. The evidence at any rate for a dual personality is strong and it is increased by the book in question, *For the Record*, a volume of selected statements by the master stretching from 1977 to the first quarter of last year.

They are drawn from various sources — speeches, interviews and evidence to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate — and cover a range of subjects. The importance of these seems to increase as we move into what Kissinger himself identifies all too rightly as a period of massive crisis for all of us.

This is on the assumption that present trends continue, but there is no reason to assume they will not do so if the Western powers fail to make the requisite efforts to turn the course of events.

Evidence for the Jekyll and Hyde situation is provided by the sympathetic impression overall conveyed by this book. Kissinger the academic, standing a little back from the struggle and revealing what is undoubtedly one of the finest minds in present day America, is an altogether more attractive person than Kissinger the peripatetic winner under radically false pretences of a Nobel peace prize.

There are inevitably areas where one would wish to argue with him, and he would no doubt welcome the exchange for he is a combative man. But although this is, of its nature, a scissors and paste job, culled from various sources,

FOR THE RECORD: Selected Statements, 1977-1980. By Henry Kissinger. Weidenfeld & Nicolson with Michael Joseph, £9.95.

book is never less than thought provoking, and in places highly illuminating as a commentary on problems which grow steadily harder to solve.

The book is also, unconsciously, a commentary on Kissinger the Secretary of State, for the author offers sage advice which he succeeded only very imperfectly in applying himself. Without stretching the analogy any further than the elastic will stand, one is reminded of injunction to do as the pharisees say rather than as they do.

Progress is in chronological order and the account opens with remarks made in the middle of 1977 to a Washington conference. They relate to Euro-communism, a subject which may at this moment seem to date but which it would be foolish to ignore.

Dr. Kissinger says many things to shake the complacent and his warning that there are many people who have permitted themselves to be convinced that Euro-communism is only social democracy with a Leninist face deserves to be taken very seriously.

If for no other reason, this is the case because the triumph of one such party in a NATO member state would signally increase the already growing problems of the alliance.

The most immediately relevant parts of the book are the chapters relating to SALT II, a reprint of Dr. Kissinger's statement before the Senate Committee, and his thoughts on the future of NATO delivered to a conference in Brussels.

Dr. Kissinger is at his least impressive when he juggles with numbers of missiles of various descriptions. The power of the atom is too awe-inspiring to be enfolded in the precision of such mathematics; and in any case the author comes much nearer to the reality of the situation when he points out the political considerations behind this tremendous accumulation of Soviet armaments, and also stresses the extent to which the Russians have secured local and regional superiority.

"Never in history has it happened," he remarks, "that a nation achieved superiority in all significant weapons categories without seeking to translate it at some point into some foreign policy benefit. It is therefore almost irrelevant to debate whether there is some magic date on which Soviet

armies will head in some direction or another. I am willing to grant that there is no particular master plan nor is there any specific deadline. I do not even consider that the present Soviet leaders are superadventurous."

So Dr. Kissinger does not subscribe to the great Russian conspiracy theory. On the other hand, what the Russians are aiming at is of much less importance to us in the West than the point at which they arrive, especially provided they are alert enough to profit by their opportunities, whether expected or not.

John Dingle

Kissinger's collected 'wisdom':
Muddying the waters of history

FOR THE RECORD. By Henry Kissinger. Little, Brown. $12.95.

By Thomas J. Moore

IN one of the few moments of candor in *For the Record*, Henry Kissinger reveals why future historians will find it impossible to reconstruct an accurate picture of American foreign policy in our times:

"An enormous amount of material accumulates that cannot possibly be studied by any one scholar. The (diplomatic) instructions go out in many different channels and under so many different classifications (for security) that it will be next to impossible for somebody who was not a participant to determine what was crucial and what was peripheral, what was written to keep the bureaucracy quiet and what was written for purposes of later disclosure, and what was written to be implemented."

Here we have a brief glimpse into the real world of Henry Kissinger: It is a world of fake memos written "for later disclosure" and worthless option papers prepared "to keep the bureaucracy quiet." Meanwhile, the real policies get executed through one of those "many different channels" Kissinger used with unsurpassed deviousness and dexterity.

The Kissinger reign will not only baffle historians. It already baffled the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who dispatched a Navy yeoman to pilfer Kissinger's briefcase to find out what was actually going on.

SINCE *For the Record* was hardly written to be "implemented," it is quite something else. It is a collection of speeches, testimony and interviews, all previously published or delivered, spanning Kissinger's early retirement period, of 1977-80.

The contents vary from stupendously boring speeches ("The Future of Business in the International Environment") to dated but quite lively interviews with foreign journalists and others. The published excerpts of these conversations decorously omit any references to the dirty historical slush of secret bombings, wiretaps of aides, destabilization of foreign democracies and other less lofty topics.

But when taken together, does this collection of used material offer any fresh insights into Kissinger's global vision?

A few, perhaps. But these nuggets must by mined by the tenacious reader willing to plow through thousands of words of turgid platitudes. (Example: "We must learn more effectively to synchronize our national decision making [among allies] so that

national policies can complement and reinforce each other, and not be at cross-purposes."

Kissinger's world, as gleaned through the pages of *For the Record*, is a global chess game in which the United States and the Soviet Union are the only forces of significance.

Over, over and over again, he forces every complex issue into the mold of U.S.-Soviet confrontation and competition. Eurocommunism, he warns, is little more than a Communist plot to destabilize Western Europe with dire consequences. Angola was nothing more than a Soviet probe into Africa. The Shah was an essential bulwark against Soviet encroachment in the Persian Gulf.

EUROCOMMUNISM, although it has fallen on hard times lately, may be fully as perilous as he suggested, but the subtle and varied texture of West European democracies is far too interesting and complex to be squashed into Kissinger's rigid mold of U.S.-Soviet competition. The same can be said for Angola and the unique and chaotic forces on the African continent.

If Kissinger's world is a chess game between the United States and the Soviet Union, he shows signs of understanding his principal adversary well. His understanding of Soviet strengths and weakness shows up most lucidly in an interview with the editors of Der Spiegel. Later in the book, when he moves off political and diplomatic turf to deal with the military balance, he simply echoes shrill conservative concerns about growing Soviet military might.

Outside his principal focus, some of his views verge on shocking insensitivity. He dismisses the possibilities for dialogue between the rich and poor nations thus:

"It is the stale rhetoric of confrontation and their adherence to Marxist doctrines that have never worked in countries where they have been implemented, and their insistence on bloc tactics that are at the heart of the problem."

Other observers might have found enormous disparities in wealth, grinding poverty, environmental deterioration, near financial bankruptcy to have some relevance to the issue.

A second example is his assessment of the growing power of multinational corporations to allocate wealth and resources on a global scale: "All developing countries have the power to insure that private business, including foreign private business, comports itself in accord with public priorities."

On Capitol Hill, when a witness announces he is submitting his statement "for the record," he means he is providing a lengthy tome so tedious that the present audience should not be forced to sit through it.

At least *For the Record* is aptly titled.

Thomas J. Moore is a member of the Sun-Times Washington bureau.

[LC]

NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
S. 1.409.549

FEB 1 1981

New
England,
Rhode Island

A Guide to Realpolitik

FOR THE RECORD

By Henry Kissinger.

332 pp. Boston:

Little, Brown & Co. $12.95.

By GADDIS SMITH

WHERE would we be now if there had been no Carter Administration and if Henry Kissinger had remained the directing mind behind American foreign policy? And what will be the shape of foreign policy in the years ahead if, as seems probable, Mr. Kissinger's ideas are again ascendant? The former Secretary of State's own answers to these questions are implicit in this collection of articles, speeches, interviews and testimony — a record of his thoughts since he left office in January 1977.

Experienced Kissinger-watchers will find nothing surprising here; nevertheless, since the pieces all stem from the belief that only Great Powers count, the book serves as an elegant and succinct guide to realpolitik. The familiar central message would bring nods of warm assent from American Cold Warriors of the Korean War era: The United States must manage all of its affairs — its attitude toward human rights, relations with allies, arms control, energy policy, its response to the third world — so as to increase its power in relationship to the Soviet Union. We must banish all sentimentality from our foreign policy, especially the belief that the moral values of individuals can be applied to international relations. Power to contain Soviet expansionism, not peace for its own sake, must be the nation's strategic objective, its vision of the future.

The earlier pieces, written in 1977 and 1978, are Olympian in tone. The old veteran does not want to criticize lest he add to the difficulties of the neophytes who are trying so sincerely to do the right thing. But the 1979 and 1980 pieces, written in the context of the fall of the Shah, the debate over SALT II and the approaching Presidential election, are more strident. Mr. Kissinger charges the Carter Administration with abandoning a loyal friend (the Shah), undermining American military power by unilaterally forgoing such weapons systems as the neutron bomb, failing to stop Soviet adventures and generally creating a situation of extreme danger.

His opinions about Iran and the Shah are part of his larger criticism of the Carter Administration for failing to accept the argument that the end justifies the means on issues of human rights. Mr. Kissinger tells us that we should distinguish between authoritarian regimes that trample on human rights because they are threatened by subversion or external pressure and totalitarian regimes that deny human rights as a matter of ideology. Although he admits that the Shah's regime was not perfect, he implies that the Carter Administration must bear the responsibility for the Shah's collapse. The Shah, Mr. Kissinger says, embarked on liberal reforms in the belief that he could not otherwise retain American support, losing control of the situation and his throne in the bargain. The naked message beneath the verbiage is that we should urge more repression, not less, when "friendly" deserts begin to wobble in the face of an incipient revolution. Mr. Kissinger also argues that a concern for human rights, which can cause us to withdraw support

from regimes that do not meet our standards, can raise that dread monster of isolationism.

Mr. Kissinger testified in favor of the SALT II treaty, but his approval was so adorned with criticism of the Carter Administration that his words provided powerful ammunition for the opponents. SALT II, he argued, should be accompanied by a great increase in American military power. We must also abandon the principle of agreed mutual vulnerability, which has been a foundation of strategic arms control negotiations since SALT I. While admitting that he once helped frame the "amazing theory . . . that vulnerability contributed to peace and invulnerability contributed to risks of war," he now sneers at that notion. The renunciation of this theory is based on the even more amazing assumption that strategic invulnerability can be attained and that a race toward invulnerability does not mean an increased risk of nuclear war.

Mr. Kissinger asserts that the fate of the world depends on the ability of the United States and its allies to maintain a balance of power with the Soviet Union. This may well be true, but it does not follow that this balance of power will alone determine the fate of the world or that every American policy should be linked to that one issue. Mr. Kissinger wants complete linkage. He shows little sympathy for the viewpoint of third world leaders, but at the same time attaches ultimate significance to what the Soviet Union or a Soviet proxy such as Cuba may do in the third world. "Had we succeeded in Angola," he writes, "there would

have been no Ethiopia. . . . I think this was one of the decisive watersheds." He compares recent failures to stop Soviet adventures in the third world to the French and British failure to stop Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 — the last, lost chance to prevent World War II. That is nothing but a variation, equally dubious, of the Munich analogy so often advanced by proponents of the American war in Vietnam.

Carter's Panama treaties and the Camp David accords receive Mr. Kissinger's approval. But overall he indicts the late Administration for being naïve and hopeful jellyfish. Remember, he tells us, those who "try to avoid difficult choices by making comfortable assumptions about the future win no awards for restraint; they only speed their own demise." In short, we must assume the worst.

The most eloquent essay — Mr. Kissinger's oration at the funeral of his patron and friend, Nelson Rockefeller — stands alone, quite out of character with the rest of the book. Here Mr. Kissinger recalls that Rockefeller in his final years "would say, because I needed it, but, above all, because he deeply felt it: 'Never forget that the most profound force in the world is love.'"

Aside from this moment, with its poignant self-awareness, there is little love in these essays or in the world view the author advances. Love divorced from power, Mr. Kissinger is saying, may be a profound force, profoundly dangerous. Those who walk the path of love walk to destruction. ■

Henry Kissinger.

Gaddis Smith, author of a book on Secretary of State Dean Acheson, teaches at Yale.

MAR 6 1981

# Prince Myshkin of the Auden Circle

## LETTERS TO CHRISTOPHER

Stephen Spender's Letters to Christopher Isherwood
1929-1939

With "The Line of the Branch"

—Two Thirties Journals.

Edited by Lee Bartlett.

Illustrated. 219 pp. Santa Barbara, Calif.:

Black Sparrow Press. Cloth, $14. Paper, $7.50.

By SAMUEL HYNES

YOUNG Stephen Spender, all accounts agree, was excessive in everything: too tall, too poetic, too shy, too awkward; too loud when he laughed and too prone to weep; too quick in his affects and too generous to his friends — a sort of Prince Myshkin of the Auden circle. To his friends he seemed a kind of madman; but he also seemed clearly a poet — the Shelley of his generation, perhaps, or (as someone later and less kindly suggested) the Rupert Brooke, but in any case a poet of romantic, lyrical self-consciousness. And so, in his early poems, he was.

In another time Spender might have gone on poetically recording his self-regard through a lifetime of adolescence. But history interrupted his introspections. In January 1933 the dust jacket of his first book,

Samuel Hynes, a professor of English at Princeton, is the author of "The Auden Generation."

"Poems," could describe him in conventional literary terms: "If Auden is the satirist of this poetical renaissance, Spender is its lyric poet." But by the end of the year Spender knew that he would have to be something more than, or at least different from that: "At the beginning of this year," he wrote in December, "something happened in Germany which has added to the political self-consciousness of almost every contemporary writer in Europe." What had happened, of course, was that Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany; and with that fact, reality had changed. Isherwood understood this, when he chose to end "Goodbye to Berlin" with the chilling statement that "the sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city." Spender understood it too, though he had trouble finding ways of expressing political self-consciousness in lyric poetry: His next book, "Vienna" in 1934, shows how difficult he found the problem, and he went on struggling with it throughout the 30's.

Spender's eager insecurity made him a born discipline. He took everything that Auden said as wisdom, and he accepted Auden's word that Isherwood was not only the Novelist of the Future, but an infallible critic and guide as well. So when Isherwood went to Berlin, Spender followed, and for three years "lived precariously off the excitement" of being with him. To the young Spender, Isherwood must have seemed a vastly superior being: He was five years older (which seems a great seniority when one is 20), and he had already published a novel. But more than that, he had chosen

poverty and exile for his art; he was in

the excitement of being off, there were

eventually the two went their very different ways. They remained friends, but on a less intimate basis: By the end of the 30's, Spender had grown up, and into a life of his own.

The letters that Spender wrote to Isherwood during the decade record this maturing process with extraordinary frankness ("I told him everything," Spender later recalled of his years with Isherwood, and so, it seems, he did). The earliest letters, written while he was still at Oxford, speak with the voice of the early poems — naïve, confessional and self-regarding, full of crushes and quarrels and anxieties. After Oxford the travels begin: Spender writes from Barcelona; Malaga, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Innsbruck, Athens, Salzburg, Gibraltar, and other subjects intrude upon the overheated private life — vividly rendered foreign scenes, gossip, acute literary judgments, a love affair and then, suddenly, a marriage. And more and more as the years pass, political concerns and opinions.

Through all this wandering, Spender was working very hard, though he worried continually that he wasn't working hard enough (there was a hard-driving puritan beneath the self-indulgent facade); during the years that these letters cover he produced three collections of verse, a play, a book of stories, two criti-

*Continued on Page 16*

# To Write Something Good and Make a Mark

## ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

A Life Study.

By Jenni Calder.

Illustrated. 362 pp. New York:

Oxford University Press. $19.95.

By ZACHARY LEADER

IN 1878, while still in his 20's, Robert Louis Stevenson received the following astonishing letter from Leslie Stephen, to whom he'd just sent the earliest of his short stories:

"It has occurred to me lately that you might help me in an ever-recurring difficulty. I am constantly looking out rather vaguely for a new novelist. I should like to find a Walter Scott or Dickens or even a Miss Brontë or G. Eliot. I cannot help thinking that, if you would seriously put your mind to such a piece of work you would be able — I will not say to rival the success of Waverly or Pickwick but — to write something really good and able to make a mark in the Cornhill [of which Stephen was editor]. Of course you must have thought of this, but a little push from outside may help the thought to develop itself."

This request is notable in several respects. To begin with, Stephen was not alone in his extravagant expectations of Stevenson. Though our age often patronizes Stevenson as a merely charming author of adventure and children's books, his did not. Other writers of distinction who befriended and admired him as a colleague included Henry James, George Meredith, Ed-

mund Gosse, W. E. Henley and the art historian Sidney Colvin. Moreover, the inspiration for Stephen's letter, like so much of the high praise young Stevenson attracted, seems to have been in part extra-literary, the product of the author's immensely attractive personal qualities.

From the first, the appeal of Stevenson's life and character — the fact that he became and cut what James called "a Figure" — distorted his literary reputation. When, therefore, he not only failed to meet the inflated expectations of friends and admirers but turned his back on the English literary world, "the disappointment," according to Jenni Calder, "was proportionately profound." It is only since the 1930's (thanks in part to Graham Greene and Edwin Muir) that Stevenson's real but limited gifts as a writer have begun to emerge from the ensuing reaction. His reputation as a man has also had to be realigned: from that of an impossibly perfect "Seraph in Chocolate" (Henley's term) to its no less improbable opposite, the Burns-like satyr, to something altogether more human.

Not that Stevenson's life and character were unromantic. On the contrary. At base, after all, lay that most romantic of illnesses — consumption, a chronic weakness of the lungs that was the source of the impossibly frail and attenuated physique captured in the famous Sargent portrait. Illness drove him first from Edinburgh (and a semi invalid childhood and adolescence) to France and Belgium (where he collected material for "An Island Voyage" and "Travel With a Donkey"); then, in defiant reaction to his frailty, across America and into the arms of the exotic and strong-willed American divorcée, 10 years his senior, who eventually became his

Zachary Leader is a writer living in London. He is the author of the forthcoming "Reading Blake's Songs."

Stevenson and his wife honeymooned high up in the coastal mountains near Calistoga, in the office of an abandoned silver mine. Often at daybreak an eerie opaline fog — always menacing in Stevenson's life and work — poured like a sea into the valley below. From California they returned to Europe, to a specialist in Davos, Switzerland (whose regimen of forced inactivity Stevenson hated); then on to Bournemouth. Bournemouth eventually drove them to the Adirondacks and on to the South Seas in a yacht chartered from the American sales of "Treasure Island" and "Dr. Jekyll," which made Stevenson rich.

Stevenson was helped in these journeys by several gifts: an indomitable will; indifference to custom and domestic comfort (and a corresponding love of the natural and the outdoors); and a vigorous wife of genuinely bohemian nature (Stevenson's own bohemianism being more a matter of show and will than character). At Samoa, the Stevensons and their entourage (of some size by now) settled down on a 300-acre estate and built a great house on the grounds. Henry Adams, who once likened Stevenson to "an insane stork" (and his wife to "a half-breed Mexican"), seems to have been the only of his guests immune to its picturesque charms. It was here, while at work on "Weir of Hermiston," that Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 44.

In the midst of all this journeying and illness Stevenson managed to fashion a handful of escapist fictions — adventure stories, travel tales, historical romances — of at times rare and disturbing complexity. As Jenni Calder and others before her have remarked, his characters were often deeply divided by what prove to be equally valid rival claims to truth: Jekyll and Hyde ("No more myself when I laid aside re-

in a vacuum." Lacking an immediate
sense of an audience, Woolf "spun her
brain in a vacuum" by returning to her
past and digging down into her uncon-
scious, as she said in her diary, to
"enlarge the circumference, to give my
brain a wider scope, to make it objec-
tive, to get outside."

But there was no getting outside.
The closer Woolf got to actual self-
analysis, the more uncertain and
frightened she became. As she said, "I
remember too much," and she could not
now go through it all again. So after
writing "A Sketch of the Past" and
other fragments she suddenly broke
off, and in the last few months of her
diary she repeats the phrase "Avoid
interspection." She was then no longer
spinning her brain; it was spinning by
itself and swinging her with it. As she
says in a letter to Ethel Smyth, "I should
swing like a frantic pendulum" without
writing. By February 1941 she was
openly complaining to friends, "I can no
longer control my brain," and by March
she could not write. "No audience. No
private stimulus, only this outer roar."

Virginia Woolf's extreme desperation
in her last days becomes fully evident
only when the *Letters* are placed within
the context of her other writings, par-
ticularly the diary and autobiographical
memoirs. Her letters to friends right
until the day before her suicide are
matter-of-fact. Nicolson and Traut-
mann have re-dated two of Woolf's
three suicide notes and argued that
Woolf's decision to kill herself predates
her actual death by 10 days. The two
suicide notes to Leonard and the one to
Vanessa are therefore interspersed in
this final volume with perfectly ordi-
nary letters to old friends, such as Lady
Cecil, Lady Tweedsmuir, V. Sackville-
West, and to business associate John
Lehmann, who was arranging for the
publication of *Between the Acts*. These let-
ters show, for the last time, how she
could maintain the surface appearance
of the ordinary while confronting her
psychic disintegration and contemplat-
ing her own death. This final element of
control, manifested in her letters, is the
best suggestion of how to understand
her motive for suicide.

Woolf believed she was going mad
again; she knew the signs from her past
experience with madness and she rec-
ognized them reappearing. In her fear
and depression she believed that this
time she would not be able to recover.
To her there did seem to be a pattern to
her life which now with its sledge-

hammer blows was breaking through
the cotton wool and forcing her to act
the part of a madwoman. Even though
there is not a single letter in this volume
about Virginia Woolf's writing of *Between
the Acts*, this last work of fiction shows
her anxious fascination with being
forced to act a part in a drama one does
not know the meaning of. Rather than
become merely an actor, an object of
fate, Woolf chose not to suffer madness
and the strict and humiliating regime of
treatment that accompanied it—being
forced to stay in bed in a darkened room
without books or visitors, being made
to rest, to eat, always being watched by
attendants. She chose not to become
again a source of suffering to those she
loved and who loved her. She chose to
take her own life. This premeditation,
now emphasized by the re-dating of the
suicide notes, shows that Woolf's death
was not an insane or impulsive act, but
rather her last desperate act of free will.
By choosing to take her own life she
authored, as well as acted, her fate. Her
death was the final expression of her

"spirit" in response to that terrible
hardness of life which again seemed to
be closing in on her in her last years.

Leonard Woolf understood the para-
dox of her action, for when he buried
Virginia's ashes under a great elm just
outside the garden at Monk's House,
he chose the last words of *The Waves*
as her epitaph: "Against you I fling
myself unvanquished and unyielding,
O Death!" For the common reader of
the life and letters of Virginia Woolf,
her death completes and reveals the
whole pattern contained within all the
fragments. But the pattern does not
allow us to know with absolute cer-
tainty the extent to which Virginia
Woolf's life and death may have been
determined by forces beyond her con-
trol even in her assertion of some con-
trol over them. Virginia was so ground
down by the harshness of her fate that
finally the only expression of her spirit
was to choose death over madness, fus-
ing permanently in a single action her
life and death, her character and her
fate.

Kissinger Redivivus

For the Record: Selected Statements, 1977-1980
by Henry Kissinger

(Little, Brown; $12.95)

Henry Kissinger's latest literary pro-
duction is not apt to hold a reader's rapt
attention from beginning to end. It is
made up of nine speeches, three inter-
views, two written pieces, and two
statements before congressional com-
mittees. It does not lend itself to easy
summary because it takes on so many
different subjects—Eurocommunism,
energy, commemorations of Golda Meir
and Nelson Rockefeller, the Middle
East, the shah of Iran, the SALT nego-
tiations, NATO, detente, Soviet-Amer-
ican relations, and oil. Much of this mis-
cellany reads like excerpts from memo-
randa provided by his research assis-
tants. This impression comes through
most strongly in the speeches and
statements made on international bus-
iness, energy, and oil, as if Kissinger
were determined to demonstrate that
his mind is not impervious to econom-
ics, as had been thought. Scattered
through the speeches and interviews,

however, are opinions offered and posi-
tions taken on matters more native to
him and on which he undoubtedly has
thought long and hard. Some of the
opinions are not quite the same as those
he had held either as an academic before
1969 or as assistant for national secur-
ity affairs and secretary of state be-
tween 1969 and 1976. I am going to
limit myself to one subject—detente
and relations with the Soviet Union—
of basic importance in itself and symp-
tomatic of the change in his political
line, in order to deal with that change
more thoroughly than would be possi-
ble otherwise.

But first I must say that I was struck
by an increasing coarseness of thought
and carelessness with fact. One talk in
this book has a "determined Western
Alliance" brought into existence in
1948, a year too soon, and much sooner
than the alliance could have become
"determined." The Western Alliance is

January 31, 1981

27

[LC]

also alleged to have been held together "by a system of close consultation," though Kissinger frequently has criticized the United States for having habitually made unilateral decisions, with the merest pretense of consultation. Again, Kissinger makes a reference to "our unequaled economic vigor" in 1977. In fact, by this time our economic vigor had been equaled and even surpassed by other Western countries and Japan. In another speech that same year, he asserts that the United States "accounted for very little in the scale of world economics" in the 19th century. It may come as a surprise to him to learn that the United States was Great Britain's leading trading partner throughout the 19th century and for that reason alone of no little account in the scale of world economics; that US exports exceeded those of Britain by the end of the 19th century; and that the United States at about the same time became a creditor rather than a debtor nation. These factual lapses occur in the first 30 pages. They were not typical of the academic Kissinger, perhaps because he did his own research and did not wander so far afield.

Kissinger's concepts also get him into trouble in this book. In the past he was devoted to the idea that "nuances" were critical in the success or failure of foreign policy. In an interview with Walter Laqueur in 1978, however, Kissinger came forth with a theory of "structure" that, if pushed as far as he pushes it, would make nuances almost totally irrelevant as historical forces. Kissinger's structural concept arose in a discussion of Hitler's string of successes before World War II. The reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 was, according to Kissinger, the fatal blow. "When France did not move following the occupation of the Rhineland, it was all over." Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were bound to fall, "from a structural point of view." That France was still far stronger militarily than Germany after the reoccupation of the Rhineland evidently did not matter. In the same way, according to Kissinger, the "structure of the postwar peace" after World War II settled the balance of European power in Russia's favor.

"Structure," then, is here the controlling concept for Kissinger. It is interpreted to the outer limit of determinism; one failure and it is "all over." If we took this approach seriously, it should be all over for us by now; the West has suffered not a few "Rhineland"s since

1945. But nuances still enjoy Kissinger's favor. What, however, is the use of nuances if structure determines all? Nuances are the smallest of diplomatic small change; structure presupposes that only the largest objective and even physical elements or factors really count. It is conceivable to prefer nuances, however implausible; it is also conceivable to choose structures, however questionable in Kissinger's interpretation. But it is inconceivable that both nuances and structure should be given paramount importance; one cancels out the other. Possibly these extremes satisfy different aspects of Kissinger's nature. With nuances, he tends to be overly optimistic about being able to accomplish almost anything by personality or artfulness; with structure, he leans over to a pessimism almost amounting to fatalism once an international fabric has begun to unravel.

THIS SCHIZOTHYMIA has begun to pervade Kissinger's thinking about other matters. It is most striking in the case of detente and relations with Soviet Russia.

The pre-Nixonian Kissinger (before 1969) was adamantly anti-detente. The Nixonian Kissinger was converted to the beneficence of detente by 1971 and managed the negotiations which led to the consecration of the US-Soviet detente at the summit meeting in Moscow in May 1972. He even concocted a set of concepts to make detente seem inherent in the very nature of the

nuclear age. Detente, he maintained, was built into the international system because neither side could now rationally seek "marginal advantages," "increments of power," "tangible advantages," or "tactical gains."

The Kissinger in this book would like to have it both ways. He now seeks to downplay detente, passing it off as "an aspiration, not a contract." He sees it as nothing more than "a yardstick by which to measure compliance with norms of international behavior." He still upholds it on the ground that it helped to keep armaments from rising and made the environment "somewhat more predictable." In January 1980, however, he uttered these words about detente: "The last period of what has been called detente was characterized by Western euphoria and, to some extent, nonperformance of what we said we would do. It was also characterized by massive Soviet rearmament and a massive Soviet assault on the equilibrium."

Which Kissinger to believe? If detente was merely an "aspiration" or a "yardstick," why the euphoria in the West? Whose euphoria was it? If there was nothing to perform, why the "nonperformance"? Far from holding down the level of armaments, according to Kissinger it enabled the Soviets to rearm massively behind a screen of Western euphoria. In fact, the agreement on detente was more than an aspiration or yardstick and less than a contract. The illusions or euphoria it engendered made the environment far more un-

## THE PRODIGAL SON

The Prodigal Son is kneeling in the husks. He remembers the man about to die who cried, "Don't let me die, Doctor!" The swine go on feeding in the sunlight.

When he folds his hands, his knees on corncobs, he sees the smoke of ships floating off the isles of Tyre and Sidon, and father beyond father beyond father.

An old man once, being dragged across the floor by his shouting son, cried: "Don't drag me any farther than that crack—I only dragged my father that far!"

My father is seventy years old. How difficult it is, bending the head, looking into the water. What we cannot solve is expressed by the swine.

Robert Bly

28

The New Republic

[LC]

predictable, since the post-detente surge of Soviet rearremament and adventurism admittedly caught the American leaders by surprise.

Detente tantalizes Kissinger. He cannot hold on to it, and he cannot let it go. "Yes, there is a crisis of detente," he recognizes in an interview. "But," he says in the next breath, "it is not insoluble." What will make it soluble? His answer is that the Soviets must give up their expansionism. They will give it up, however, only if the United States and its allies force them to do so by mustering superior power. Thus Kissinger's own logic makes detente a function of the balance of power. Detente can do only what a favorable balance of power permits it to do; without a favorable balance, detente is a snare and a delusion.

THE PARADOX of detente, which is supposed to be a relaxation in the struggle for power, is that detente itself becomes a weapon in that struggle. The way to make detente work is not to make it depend on the balance of power but to call off the struggle for power—something that no one in his right mind expects.

The contradictions of detente lead Kissinger into indulging in such double-talk as: "The fact of a detente policy shouldn't be disputed. Its content should be disputed." But if its content proves to be devoid of real substance or even dangerously illusory, what kind of fact is it? The fact is that detente is not a fact at all; if it cannot be filled with the right kind of content, its status as "fact" must be disputed. This play with "fact" and "content" is rather a reflection of Kissinger's political dilemma. By holding on to detente as a "fact," he avoids disavowing his past allegiance to it; by disputing its "content," he is able to repudiate any particular form of detente.

As a result, Kissinger cannot make up his mind how to struggle with the Soviet dragon or where the struggle is going to end. He takes a hard line in his insistence that Soviet expansionism must be resisted on all fronts. He records "the Kremlin's insatiable tendency to exploit every strategic opportunity." He believes in the similarity between the Soviet challenge and Hitler's, though their methods may differ. This is one side of Kissinger's attitude toward the Soviet Union and corresponds with his anti-detente present. But he also works the other side of the street, corresponding to his pro-detente

past. He exhorts that we still must be ready "to explore routes to genuine peaceful coexistence." The United States and the Soviet Union "must" practice "moderation and ultimately cooperation." We are "doomed to coexistence." We must still find out whether "a code of restraint" is possible, and if so reward the Soviets by renewing the SALT process.

Structurally, if Kissinger was right before, it should be incumbent on him to make up his mind about whether the struggle with the Soviet Union must run its course toward confrontation or cooperation. If both, then the confrontations must end in cooperation. "None of the political leaders of Europe," Kissinger complains about the statesmen who brought on World War I, "understood that their system was tending toward confrontation." One would expect an answer from him as to where the present structural system is tending. The answer he gives, however, is profoundly ambivalent—first confrontation, then cooperation. But how can cooperation be brought about with a Kremlin in the grip of an "insatiable tendency to exploit every strategic opportunity"? If structure decides, the answer to such a question cannot be left up in the air or open to contradictory resolutions.

The questions that Kissinger raises about detente and relations with the Soviet Union are not merely intellectual exercises. They have a direct bearing on personal behavior and practical policy. A striking case in point was recently reflected in a photograph that appeared in *Time* magazine on November 24, 1980.

The picture showed three men who could not have seemed to be more pleased with one another. They were Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, former president Richard Nixon, and ex-secretary of state Henry Kissinger. The occasion was the annual celebration in the Soviet embassy in Washington commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Dobrynin is shown talking, overflowing with good humor and camaraderie. Nixon and Kissinger listen, beaming with delight. They were not the only Americans there. "The place was jammed," reported Hugh Sidey, *Time's* Washington correspondent, "with Republican contributors, consultants and former administration aides, as though the Soviets had summoned a meeting of the shadow government that had been lurking in the wings

the past four years." Sidey sensed that Dobrynin was trying to project "unusual warmth" toward president-elect Reagan and the Reaganites who had answered his summons. "Old friends," said the Soviet ambassador, as he repaid all these Republican contributors, consultants, and former administration aides with a "great smile."

Nixon and Kissinger did not miss the opportunity to make pronouncements on future relations with the Soviet Union. "Rather than this being a period with a danger of war," said Nixon, "it will be the opposite." Kissinger offered a psychological explanation of how the transformation would be achieved. "The Soviets want a predictable administration," he said. "And in a curious way, I think they want one that puts limits on them. Their system is not capable of operating under the principle of self-restraint."

And in an even more curious way, a recent reader of both Nixon and Kissinger hardly would have expected such words from them. Not more than six months earlier, Nixon had put out a book, *The Real War*, the message of which is that the United States and the Soviet Union already are at war—indeed, “World War III began before World II ended.” One would like to laugh off this Nixonian bombast—calling on Americans to recognize that a real war has been going on for some 35 years, in May, and calling it off in November. Yet if we may trust William Safire, a licensed tattletale who worked for Nixon and got the news straight from Nixon at a small dinner party in Nixon’s New York home, Nixon successfully lobbied with president-elect

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January 31, 1981

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[L.C]

Reagan for the appointment of Alexander Haig as secretary of state, and Nixon has been conducting the advanced political education of Senator Charles Percy, the new chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. A photograph in the December 15, 1980, issue of *Time* shows Reagan at his desk in his Pacific Palisades home with one book prominently displayed at his right hand: Richard Nixon's *The Real War*. The new president apparently was trying to tell us something.

Kissinger also seems to have changed his mind, in the 10 months before the Soviet embassy party, about how to handle the Soviets. On that occasion, his formula was little more than pop psychiatry—the Soviets wanted external limits to be put on them, and all the Americans had to do was to oblige. In a speech in January 1980 recorded in *For the Record*, however, he had something more to say about treating the Soviets as if they were a psychiatric problem. He ridiculed “the tendency to deal with East-West relations as if they were like relations among individuals, the tendency to attempt to solve the problem of war and peace psychiatrically,” and warned that “the worst method in negotiations with the Soviet Union is the psychiatric approach.” What was altogether wrong at a business-management forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January was just right at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, in November. The cream of the jest is that Dr. Kissinger’s prescription for handling the Soviets was right out of Dr. Spock’s immortal opus on child care:

> A child, like an adult, knows when she is getting away with too much naughtiness or rudeness even when her parents are trying to close their eyes to it. She feels guilty inside. She would like to be stopped. But if she isn't corrected, she's likely to behave worse and worse. It's as if she were saying, 'How bad do I have to be before somebody stops me?' (Baby and Child Care, Pocket Books.)

A practical consequence of these confusions and contradictions is that Nixon and Kissinger willingly answered the summons of Ambassador Dobrynin. Somehow these two found themselves together once more. The United States could boycott the Moscow Olympics, but the former president and secretary of state could not boycott a celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. They were the glittering prizes among the phalanx of Republican contributors, consultants,

and former administration aides who also could not resist the call.

If this were only the personal behavior of two of our former high officeholders it would be sad enough. But far more important is the practical policy implied by this behavior. Before they made their deals with the Soviets in 1971-72, Nixon and Kissinger regarded themselves and were regarded as two of the hardest of hard-liners. They were fully conscious that this reputation enabled them to make deals that others might have flinched from or might not have been able to put across. The Nixon-Kissinger type of hard line can act as the cover for a Soviet-American deal or, as Kissinger put it, as a route to ultimate cooperation. Ambassador Dobrynin knew something from long experience when he greeted them and his other Republican guests with unwonted warmth and familiarity.

The question now is whether this kind of hard line is going to be the course of the Reagan administration. Kissinger, like Nixon, clearly is staging a political comeback through a personal relationship with president-elect Reagan. A way evidently has been found to make use of Kissinger in a Reagan administration. While there has been much hullabaloo about getting rid of two rival, duplicative centers of foreign policy around the secretary of state and the assistant for national security affairs, we may be getting something very different—a troika. The French have a word for the third member: éminence grise. Kissinger already has made a start on his new career with his junket

to the Middle East as a “private citizen” with Reagan’s approval and with a commission to report back to the new president. An Associated Press dispatch interpreted his role to mean that Kissinger had been sent “on an unofficial exploratory mission for the Reagan administration.” An unofficial mission made officially would seem to be an unmistakable formula for an éminence grise. Since president-elect Reagan seems to need a plethora of advisers and middlemen, he should have no trouble adding one more to his foreign policy entourage, especially if the move can be disguised as “unofficial.” If Reagan should turn out to be a weak president and Haig a hapless secretary of state, as is not impossible, they would be the perfect combination to be Kissingerized. The operation might require the appearance of crisis for the Republic or for the president, but such an eventuality can hardly be ruled out in the next four years. Uneasy lies the head of a vulnerable secretary of state with Kissinger waiting in the wings and his chief former aide already in place. That Haig apparently has acquiesced in Kissinger’s new role will not save him when his time should be up. Politics makes ungrateful bedfellows. The extraordinary saga of Henry Kissinger goes on.

Theodore Draper

*Theodore Draper* is the author of *The Roots of American Communism and American Communism and Soviet Russia*, both published by Viking Press.

## Who Knew What and When

### The Terrible Secret:

### Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's 'Final Solution' by Walter Laqueur

(Little, Brown; $12.95)

In April 1979 two CIA employees made public an aerial photograph of Auschwitz, complete with gas chambers, crematoria, and a group of prisoners lined up for “registration.” The picture was reprinted in several places, most dramatically in the April issue of *Life*, along with a brief commentary to let us know that the photo was taken on

August 25, 1944, and that the men who took it “had no inkling of the grisly installation that lay below.” After the mission, the picture was “routinely studied” and then filed away with “dozens” of similar photos. Dozens? Yes, but lest we be misled, one of the CIA men “suspects,” as he says, “that the Allies might have mistaken Auschwitz for an ordi-

30

The New Republic

THE FOLLOWING REVIEWS APPEARED IN _BOOKLIST'S "UPFRONT ADVANCE REVIEWS"
IN THE ISSUE DATED ______________ November 15, 1980

Kissinger, Henry. For the record: selected statements
1977-1980. 1981. Little, Brown, $12.95
(0-316-49663-4). Galley. January.

The former secretary of state gathers recent speeches, articles, statements, and interviews from 1977 to 1980 to extend and update his views on U.S. foreign policy and the international scene since he has left office. Kissinger warns of the dangers of Eurocommunism and cautions the nation on detente and arms limitation as he selectively reviews past history, his own role and performance, and the Carter administration's record. Among the topics discussed are the Middle East situation, Iran, and the world energy crisis; in addition, appreciations are accorded Golda Meir and Nelson Rockefeller. A bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking on the diplomatic battlefront from an old warrior who hasn't let his talent for controversy or his prickly style go stale in retirement. JB. 327.73 U.S.--Foreign relations//Kissinger, Henry

NOV 20 1980

[lc]

BOOKLIST
CHICAGO, ILL
SEMI-MONTHLY 37,300

NOV 15 1980

The former secretary of state gathers recent
speeches, articles, statements, and interviews from
1977 to 1980 to extend and update his views on U.S.
foreign policy and the international scene since he
has left office. Kissinger warns of the dangers of
Eurocommunism and cautions the nation on detente and
arms limitation as he selectively reviews past his-
tory, his own role and performance, and the Carter
administration's record. Among the topics discussed
are the Middle East situation, Iran, and the world
energy crisis; in addition, appreciations are ac-
corded Golda Meir and Nelson Rockefeller. A bit of
Monday-morning quarterbacking on the diplomatic bat-
tlefront from an old warrior who hasn't let his tal-
ent for controversy or his prickly style go stale in
retirement. JB. 327.73 U.S.--Foreign relations//Kis-
singer, Henry

as Adam Smith loves to say, "this skidding

George Harmon, former financial editor of the Sun-Times and the old Chicago Daily News, is now a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

We have borrowed to live the way we wanted to," Smith writes. "We still live on the nicest spread in the country, but the old farm is mortgaged to the hilt, the banks are nervous, and the boll weevil is out there in the cotton. Our inheritance looks vast, but it's all mortgaged."

This Adam Smith, it is worth pointing out again, isn't to be confused with the 18th century Adam Smith, the first modern political economist, although the pair no doubt would be congenial if they could meet today for sole and Sancerre at the top of the World Trade Center.

Today's Adam Smith is a pseudonym for

# Kissinger's collected 'wisdom'
## Muddying the waters of history

FOR THE RECORD. By Henry Kissinger, Little, Brown. $12.95.

By Thomas J. Moore

I
One of the few moments of candor in For the Record, Henry Kissinger reveals why future historians will find it impossible to reconstruct an accurate picture of American foreign policy in our times:

"An enormous amount of material accumulates that cannot possibly be studied by any one scholar. The (diplomatic) instructions go out in many different channels and under so many different classifications (for security) that it will be next to impossible for somebody, who was not a participant to determine what was crucial and what was peripheral, what was written to keep the bureaucracy quiet and what was written for purposes of later disclosure, and what was written to be implemented."

Here we have a brief glimpse into the real world of Henry Kissinger: It is a world of fake memos written "for later disclosure" and worthless option papers prepared "to keep the bureaucracy quiet." Meanwhile the real policies get executed through one of those "many different channels" Kissinger used with unsurpassed deviousness and dexterity.

S
INCE For the Record was hardly written to be "implemented," it is quite something else. It is a collection of speeches, testimony and interviews, all previously published or delivered, spanning Kissinger's early retirement period, of 1977-80.

A few, perhaps. But these nuggets must be mined by the tenacious reader willing to plow through thousands of words of turgid platitudes. (Example: "We must learn more effectively to synchronize our national decision making [among allies] so that

national policies can complement and reinforce each other, and not be at cross-purposes.")

Kissinger's world, as gleaned through the pages of For the Record, is a global chess game in which the United States and the Soviet Union are the only forces of significance.

E
UROCOMMUNISM, although it has fallen on hard times lately, may be fully as perilous as he suggested, but the subtle and varied texture of West European democracies is far too interesting and complex to be squashed into Kissinger's rigid mold of U.S.-Soviet competition. The same can be said for Angola and the unique and chaotic forces on the African continent.

A second example is his assessment of the growing power of multinational corporations to allocate wealth and resources on a global scale: "All developing countries have the power to insure that private business, including foreign private business, comport itself in accord with public priorities."

At least For the Record is aptly titled.

Thomas J. Moore is a member of the Sun-Times. Washington bureau.

seems trapped by the big screen, aw納

HENRY KISSINGER: A world of

# The power of diplomacy

*Continued from First Page*

communications that shrink from the harsh and unsubtle democratic daylight.

Reading these selections—delivered to European and American diplomatic, business and political groups, including three searching interviews, some occasional pieces and presentations to committees of the Congress—one admires again Kissinger's suavity and ability. His speeches make one wish, by the way, that more than one metropolitan daily made a habit of printing the speeches of our public men. Reading this book as a member of a general audience affords a thrilling, flattering taste of the fascination Kissinger must exercise when given the chance to educate a specific audience to his view. One agrees almost inescapably with his un-stated conclusion that someone with his view of the situation ought to be running things. Like Joseph with the Pharaoh, Kissinger's divination suggests his own counsel.

The volume tells a story. A former secretary of state moves into reluctant loyal opposition to the inept leadership that succeeds him. Grave geopolitical danger to the nation shadows this personal drama. In the interviews, Kissinger defends his policies, chronicles the mistakes of others, regrets that his own offers of assistance have not been accepted and otherwise advances the narrative. His SALT II presentation is a subtle exercise in the sliding scale of opposition. His tribute to Nelson Rockefeller, who would have been his ideal President, is touching and revealing: Rockefeller offered Americans ideas, Kissinger says, when they want personalities. The fun of the last part of the book comes from watching him articulate the hard-line views of his onetime critics without seeming to have much changed his own mind or repudiating his past successes.

Kissinger thinks American foreign policy has been lacking in the resolve and clarity necessary to defend our strategic interests in the world. We have failed to estimate the Soviet threat, hence to meet it. We have abandoned linkage and thus legitimized Soviet adventurism by refusing to punish

it where we might in other areas. We have been disloyal to our friends and stupid about who our friends and enemies are. We have scared our allies and dangerously confused our opponents. We need stronger and more flexible defenses in order to negotiate workable, not self-destructive, SALT agreements. We need to think less sentimentally and more helpfully about the underdeveloped world and face up to the energy crisis. Our strategic position is deteriorating:

> "In the last five years, beginning with the collapse of Indochina and the fiasco of Angola, almost every significant change in the world has been produced by Soviet weapons, Soviet friendship treaties, Soviet proxy troops or outright Soviet invasion."

Kissinger's version of the resolve we lack differs somewhat from many of his compadres in Republican arms. He sees resolve as a matter of will, as they do, but he considers it a prerequisite for policy rather than the policy itself. The people must attain a certain state of sophistication about letting diplomats do their work, as well as a certain state of patriotic heat. His version of our inherited assumptions is a slanted jeremiad. He does say that our country must rally to an older standard. He also says our way of life at stake. His discussions of the energy crisis and economic issues are subtle and menacing. Strategic fumbling and inept foreign policy resulting from American failures of character will lead to our destruction, specifically the end of our way of luxurious life. Presumably luxury corrupts the will. But the lure a diplomat like Kissinger uses to encourage the will is the threatened loss of luxury! He wants Americans to be able to conduct diplomacy again and he delves uneasily into the fundamentally undiplomatic assumptions of our world involvement. He resists any call to action that might unduly inhibit a subtle diplomatic future. Here one wonders how close in accord he is with Reagan and Haig and their more traditionally American view of what world order is.

but to preserve what we enjoy within it—through the balance of power. These may also be fighting words, but they suggest different kinds of fights than World War II or the Cold War. In stirring the old-time spirit, Kissinger does not give comfort to those who view that spirit as impatient with diplomacy, uneasy with the very complexity of a world order it can't quite grasp. Those who doubt that the American lack of resolve is simply a matter of will must be disappointed and concerned. Kissinger

LC

has critics these days, may be a marcher, weakly not bristling.

David Montague

# On the track of a missing tribe

The Lost Jews by Louis Rapoport (Stein & Day: $13.95; illustrated)

The Ethiopian Falashas are some of the most unique people in world history. Numbering fewer than 30,000 today, the Falashas, who are black, claim to be one of the lost tribes of ancient Hebrews.

This book details contemporary Falasha family and village life in Ethiopia.

## Reviewed by Ron Finney

Falasha history, the waxing and waning of Christian and Jewish interest in them and Israeli resistance to their immigration—essentially because they are black—despite government recognition of them as Jews.

But the author's treatment doesn't match the depth or uniqueness of the subject. The book is poorly edited (there are Jewish acronyms and terms not explained; significant people and events are not indexed) and Rapoport gets lost as he meanders through bibli cal history far from the Falashas. We

receive only a superficial description of the relations between the Falashas and the present Ethiopian regime. Rapoport makes no distinction between the Marxist government and the feudal landlords, supporters of the former government, whom the Falashas see as their real oppressors.

Rapoport's goal, it seems, is not to take the Falashas as they are, but only to take them to Israel. He quotes another author: "Most of the reports that have so far been made about the Falashas are incomplete and characterized by a Christian or Jewish missionary tendency, which appreciably diminishes their value." The same could be said of this book.

If there is to be a book truly telling the Falasha story, this isn't it. If interest in the Falashas ebbs and flows, as Rapoport claims, this is an ebb.

Finney directs the Hilda G. Finney Center, an independent black research center in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Times
LARGE CIRCULATION IN THE WEST
LOS ANGELES CAL.
D. 900 W. 5th St. SUN. 1.270.538

FEB 1 1981

# The power of diplomacy

*Continued from First Page* 15

Reading these selections—delivered to European and American diplomatic, business and political groups, including three searching interviews, some occasional pieces and presentations to committees of the Congress—one admires again Kissinger's suavity and ability. His speeches make one wish, by the way, that more than one metropolitan daily made a habit of printing the speeches of our public men. Reading this book as a member of a general audience affords a thrilling, flattering taste of the fascination Kissinger must exercise when given the chance to educate a specific audience to his view. One agrees almost inescapably with his unstated conclusion that someone with his view of the situation ought to be running things. Like Joseph with the Pharaoh, Kissinger's divination suggests his own counsel.

The volume tells a story. A former secretary of state moves into reluctant loyal opposition to the inept leadership that succeeds him. Grave geopolitical danger to the nation shadows this personal drama. In the interviews, Kissinger defends his policies, chronicles the mistakes of others, regrets that his own offers of assistance have not been accepted and otherwise advances the narrative. His SALT II presentation is a subtle exercise in the sliding scale of opposition. His tribute to Nelson Rockefeller, who would have been his ideal President, is touching and revealing; Rockefeller offered Americans ideas, Kissinger says, when they want personalities. The fun of the last part of the book comes from watching him articulate the hard-line views of his onetime critics without seeming to have much changed his own mind or repudiating his past successes.

Kissinger's version of the resolve we lack differs somewhat from many of his compadres in Republican arms. He sees resolve as a matter of will, as they do, but he considers it a prerequisite for policy rather than the policy itself. The people must attain a certain state of sophistication about letting diplomats do their work, as well as a certain state of patriotic heat. His version of our inherited assumptions is a slanted jeremiad. He does say that our country must rally to an older standard. He also says our way of life is at stake. His discussions of the energy crisis and economic issues are subtle and menacing. Strategic fumbling and inept foreign policy resulting from American failures of character will lead to our destruction, specifically the end of our way of luxurious life. Presumably luxury corrupts the will. But the lure a diplomat like Kissinger uses to encourage the will is the threatened loss of luxury! He wants Americans to be able to conduct diplomacy again and he delves uneasily into the fundamentally undiplomatic assumptions of our world involvement. He resists any call to action that might unduly inhibit a subtle diplomatic future. Here one wonders how close in accord he is with Reagan and Haig and their more traditionally American view of what world order is.

but to preserve what we enjoy within it —through the balance of power. These may also be fighting words, but they suggest different kinds of fights than World War II or the Cold War. In stirring the old-time spirit, Kissinger does not give comfort to those who view that spirit as impatient with diplomacy, uneasy with the very complexity of a world order it can't quite grasp. Those who doubt that the American lack of resolve is simply a matter of will must be disappointed and concerned. Kissinger

has not yet learned to speak to his critics. If the pervasive message of these pronouncements is that Kissinger's sort of expertise is needed, one may also worry as he does about Bismarck: "His greatest weakness was the weakness of all great men; that he did not bring along his successor." We shall see.

Dawidoff teaches history at the Claremont Graduate School.

# Kissinger Redivivus

[LC]

## For the Record: Selected Statements, 1977-1980
by Henry Kissinger

(Little, Brown; $12.95)

Henry Kissinger's latest literary production is not apt to hold a reader's rapt attention from beginning to end. It is made up of nine speeches, three interviews, two written pieces, and two statements before congressional committees. It does not lend itself to easy summary because it takes on so many different subjects—Eurocommunism, energy, commemorations of Golda Meir and Nelson Rockefeller, the Middle East, the shah of Iran, the SALT negotiations, NATO, detente, Soviet-American relations, and oil. Much of this miscellany reads like excerpts from memoranda provided by his research assistants. This impression comes through most strongly in the speeches and statements made on international business, energy, and oil, as if Kissinger were determined to demonstrate that his mind is not impervious to economics, as had been thought. Scattered through the speeches and interviews,

however, are opinions offered and positions taken on matters more native to him and on which he undoubtedly has thought long and hard. Some of the opinions are not quite the same as those he had held either as an academic before 1969 or as assistant for national security affairs and secretary of state between 1969 and 1976. I am going to limit myself to one subject—detente and relations with the Soviet Union—of basic importance in itself and sympathetic of the change in his political line, in order to deal with that change more thoroughly than would be possible otherwise.

"Structure," then, is here the controlling concept for Kissinger. It is interpreted to the outer limit of determinism; one failure and it is "all over." If we took this approach seriously, it should be all over for us by now; the West has suffered not a few "Rhinelands" since

This SCHIZOTHYMIA has begun to pervade Kissinger's thinking about other matters. It is most striking in the case of detente and relations with Soviet Russia.

## THE PRODIGAL SON

[LC]

Robert Bly

predictable, since the post-detente surge of Soviet rearmament and adventurism admittedly caught the American leaders by surprise.

The contradictions of detente lead Kissinger into indulging in such doubletalk as: "The fact of a detente policy shouldn't be disputed. Its content should be disputed." But if its content proves to be devoid of real substance or even dangerously illusory, what kind of fact is it? The fact is that detente is not a fact at all; if it cannot be filled with the right kind of content, its status as "fact" must be disputed. This play with "fact" and "content" is rather a reflection of Kissinger's political dilemma. By holding on to detente as a "fact," he avoids disavowing his past allegiance to it; by disputing its "content," he is able to repudiate any particular form of detente.

past. He exhortes that we still must be ready "to explore routes to genuine peaceful coexistence." The United States and the Soviet Union "must" practice "moderation and ultimately cooperation." We are "doomed to coexistence." We must still find out whether "a code of restraint" is possible, and if so reward the Soviets by renewing the SALT process.

And in an even more curious way, a recent reader of both Nixon and Kissinger hardly would have expected such words from them. Not more than six months earlier, Nixon had put out a book, *The Real War*, the message of which is that the United States and the Soviet Union already are at war—indeed, "World War III began before World II ended." One would like to laugh off this Nixonian bombast—calling on Americans to recognize that a real war has been going on for some 35 years, in May, and calling it off in November. Yet if we may trust William Safire, a licensed tattletale who worked for Nixon and got the news straight from Nixon at a small dinner party in Nixon's New York home, Nixon successfully lobbied with president-elect

A Modern Dunciad — $4

vicious & profound verse

by Richard Nason

—CHOICE

The Magic Whorehouse — $4.25

"warm-spirited eloquence"

—VILLAGE VOICE

New Year's Eve 1929 — $4.50

"proves Farrell deserved

Nobel nomination"

—NY TIMES

The

Smith

5 Beekman St. N.Y.C. 10038

clip & mail

distributed by Horizon Press

NEW REPUBLIC
WASHINGTON, D.C.
W. 79,500

JAN 31 1981

Kissinger also seems to have changed his mind, in the 10 months before the Soviet embassy party, about how to handle the Soviets. On that occasion, his formula was little more than pop psychiatry—the Soviets wanted external limits to be put on them, and all the Americans had to do was to oblige. In a speech in January 1980 recorded in *For the Record*, however, he had something more to say about treating the Soviets as if they were a psychiatric problem. He ridiculed “the tendency to deal with East-West relations as if they were like relations among individuals, the tendency to attempt to solve the problem of war and peace psychiatrically,” and warned that “the worst method in negotiations with the Soviet Union is the psychiatric approach.” What was altogether wrong at a business-management forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January was just right at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, in November. The cream of the jest is that Dr. Kissinger's prescription for handling the Soviets was right out of Dr. Spock's immortal opus on child care:

> A child, like an adult, knows when she is getting away with too much naughtiness or rudeness even when her parents are trying to close their eyes to it. She feels guilty inside. She would like to be stopped. But if she isn't corrected, she's likely to behave worse and worse. It's as if she were saying, 'How bad do I have to be before somebody stops me?' (Babyl and Child Care, Pocket Books.)

### Theodore Draper

Theodore Draper is the author of *The Roots of American Communism* and *American Communism and Soviet Russia*, both published by Viking Press.

## Diplomacy

Where we might in other areas. We have been disloyal to our friends and aid about who our friends and enemies are. We have scared our allies and energetically confused our opponents. We need stronger and more flexible devices in order to negotiate workable, self-destructive, SALT agreements. We need to think less sentimentally and more helpfully about the undeveloped world and face up to the energy crisis. Our strategic position is deteriorating.

In the last five years, beginning with the collapse of Indochina and the invasion of Angola, almost every significant change in the world has been produced by Soviet weapons, Soviet friendship treaties, Soviet proxy troops outright Soviet invasion."

Kissinger's version of the resolve we don't differ somewhat from many of his盟adres in Republican arms. He sees resolve as a matter of will, as they do, but he considers it a prerequisite for policy rather than the policy itself. The people must attain a certain state of sophistication about letting diplomats do their work, as well as a certain state of chaotic heat. His version of our inherent assumptions is a slanted jeremiad. He says that our country must rally an older standard. He also says our policy of life is at stake. His discussions of energy crisis and economic issues are subtle and menacing. Strategic rivaling and inept foreign policy resulting from American failures of character will lead to our destruction, especially the end of our way of luxurious life. Presumably luxury corrupts the mind. But the lure a diplomat like Kissinger uses to encourage the will is the created loss of luxury! He wants Americans to be able to conduct diplomacy again and he delves uneasily into the fundamentally undiplomatic assumptions of our world involvement. It resists any call to action that might rudely, inhibit a subtle diplomatic future. Here one wonders how close in accord he is with Reagan and Haig and their more traditionally American view of what world order is.

## a missing tribe

(195; illustrated)

receive only a superficial description of the relations between the Falashas and the present Ethiopian regime. Rapoport takes no distinction between the Marxist government and the feudal landlords, supporters of the former government, whom the Falashas see as

# The true story of a perfect crime

A Southern California murder in the tradition of *Double Indemnity* and *The Blue Dahlia*.

Trail of the Fox is a tale of greed and moral corruption that will thrill many readers.

by Lawrence Taylor

Simon & Schuster

$13.95

[LC]

THE WAY AHEAD

[Lc]

FOR THE RECORD: SELECTED STATEMENTS 1977-1980. By Henry Kissinger.
Little, Brown. 332 pp. $12.95.

As this was being written Henry Kissinger was in the Middle East seeing heads of state on "private visits" before the Reagan Administration took office. Kissinger's private visits are strongly reminiscent of his shuttle diplomacy as Secretary of State. It is hard to believe that his talks will have no bearing on future foreign policy. Indeed at a meeting with the editors of the German newsmagazine, "Der Spiegel," in 1978 he was asked outright whether he might become Secretary of State once more. He responded with a characteristically humorous evasion: "We cannot demoralize the professional Foreign Service with this prospect before them."

But, as Gertrude Stein once presciently remarked: "History teaches that history teaches." We are already faced with the not unlikely prospect that Kissinger's former protégé, Alexander Haig, is to be Secretary of State while

(MORE)

[L]

Kissinger periodically visits global trouble-spots for a first-hand study of foreign policy problems likely to confront the Reagan Administration. All of which makes this collection of Kissinger statements on foreign policy over the past three years of considerable interest insofar as they look ahead and look back at the actions of the Carter Administration.

If you seek evidence in these pages of Kissinger's differences with Carter foreign policy, they are not hard to find although invariably couched in polite, discreet diplomatic language. "If our foreign policy," he said at New York University in 1977, "is well conceived, it must reflect national purpose and not personal idiosyncrasy." Was this an oblique reference to Carter's human rights policy, which alienated certain countries whose security is important to the United States?

Nor, it is clear from other speeches, would Kissinger have turned thumbs down on the development of the neutron bomb and the Bl bomber. This follows logically on his belief that the Soviet Union's military strength has grown rapidly in the last ten years. "Yet," he added, "the West probably remains technologically superior. There must be a reason why the Soviets at no time since the end of World War II have ever run the risk of a direct confrontation with the United States once they understood that certain actions would indeed produce it."

Like a red thread the theme of preparedness in these troubled times runs through Kissinger's utterances. Speaking of foreign policy to a convention of the Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington in 1980 he declared: "Rarely in history has a nation so passively accepted so radical a change in military balance. We will pay a heavy penalty if we continue to take comfort in soporific assurances that the military establishment is still second to none."

In the most recent section of the book, the foreword written last August, Kissinger struck the same urgent note of warning. "We no longer have the option of turning our backs on the world. Our security is not self-ensuring, our preferences do not automatically prevail, our interests and values require vigilance and effort if they are to survive."

After our performance in Iran these points should by now be crystal-clear to every thinking American. One can only hope that Kissinger's pragmatic view of contemporary history will become part of American foreign policy whether or not he himself is in office.

JOHN RAINHAM REVIEWS

* * *

[LC]

Virginia Woolf's extreme desperation
in her last days becomes fully evident
only when the *Letters* are placed within
the context of her other writings, par-
ticularly the diary and autobiographical
memoirs. Her letters to friends right
until the day before her suicide are
matter-of-fact. Nicolson and Traut-
mann have re-dated two of Woolf's
three suicide notes and argued that
Woolf's decision to kill herself predates
her actual death by 10 days. The two
suicide notes to Leonard and the one to
Vanessa are therefore interspersed in
this final volume with perfectly ordi-
nary letters to old friends, such as Lady
Cecil, Lady Tweedsmuir, V. Sackville-
West, and, to business associate John
Lehmann, who was arranging for the
publication of *Between the Acts*. These let-
ters show, for the last time, how she
could maintain the surface appearance
of the ordinary while confronting her
psychic disintegration and contemplat-
ing her own death. This final element of
control, manifested in her letters, is the
best suggestion of how to understand
her motive for suicide.

Leonard Woolf understood the para-
dox of her action, for when he buried
Virginia's ashes under a great elm just
outside the garden at Monk's House,
he chose the last words of *The Waves*
as her epitaph: "Against you I fling
myself unvanquished and unyielding,
O Death!" For the common reader of
the life—and letters of Virginia Woolf,
her death completes and reveals the
whole pattern contained within all the
fragments. But the pattern does not
allow us to know with absolute cer-
tainty the extent to which Virginia
Woolf's life and death may have been
determined by forces beyond her con-
trol even in her assertion of some con-
trol over them. Virginia was so ground
down by the harshness of her fate that
finally the only expression of her spirit
was to choose death over madness, fus-
ing permanently in a single action her
life and death, her character and her
fate.

Kissinger Redivivus

(Little, Brown; $12.95)

Henry Kissinger's latest literary pro-
duction is not apt to hold a reader's rapt
attention from beginning to end. It is
made up of nine speeches, three inter-
views, two written pieces, and two
statements before congressional com-
mittees. It does not lend itself to easy
summary because it takes on so many
different subjects—Eurocommunism,
energy, commemorations of Golda Meir
and Nelson Rockefeller, the Middle
East, the shah of Iran, the SALT nego-
tiations, NATO, detente, Soviet-Amer-
ican relations, and oil. Much of this mis-
cellany reads like excerpts from mem-
anda provided by his research assis-
tants. This impression comes through
most strongly in the speeches and
statements made on international bus-
iness, energy, and oil, as if Kissinger
were determined to demonstrate that
his mind is not impervious to econom-
ics, as had been thought. Scattered
through the speeches and interviews,

January 31, 1981

27

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also alleged to have been held together
"by a system of close consultation,"
though Kissinger frequently has criti-
cized the United States for having habit-
ually made unilateral decisions, with
the merest pretense of consultation.
Again, Kissinger makes a reference to
"our unequaled economic vigor" in
1977. In fact, by this time our economic
vigor had been equaled and even sur-
passed by other Western countries and
Japan. In another speech that same
year, he asserts that the United States
"accounted for very little in the scale of
world economics" in the 19th century.
It may come as a surprise to him to learn
that the United States was Great Brit-
ain's leading trading partner through-
out the 19th century and for that rea-
son alone of no little account in the scale
of world economics; that US exports
exceeded those of Britain by the end of
the 19th century; and that the United
States at about the same time became a
creditor rather than a debtor nation.
These factual lapses occur in the first 30
pages. They were not typical of the aca-
demic Kissinger, perhaps because he
did his own research and did not wander
so far afield.

Kissinger's concepts also get him into
trouble in this book. In the past he was
devoted to the idea that "nuances" were
critical in the success or failure of for-
eign policy. In an interview with Walter
Laqueur in 1978, however, Kissinger
came forth with a theory of "structure"
that, if pushed as far as he pushes it,
would make nuances almost totally
irrelevant as historical forces. Kissin-
ger's structural concept arose in a dis-
cussion of Hitler's string of successes
before World War II. The reoccupation
of the Rhineland in 1936 was, according
to Kissinger, the fatal blow. "When
France did not move following the
occupation of the Rhineland, it was all
over." Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Po-
land were bound to fall, "from a struc-
tural point of view." That France was
still far stronger militarily than Ger-
many after the reoccupation of the
Rhineland evidently did not matter. In
the same way, according to Kissinger,
the "structure of the postwar peace"
after World War II settled the balance of
European power in Russia's favor.

"Structure," then, is here the control-
ling concept for Kissinger. It is inter-
preted to the outer limit of determin-
ism; one failure and it is "all over." If we
took this approach seriously, it should
be all over for us by now; the West has
suffered not a few "Rhinelands" since

THE PRODIGAL SON

An old man once, being dragged across the floor
by his shouting son, cried:
"Don't drag me any farther than that crack—
I only dragged my father that far!"

Robert Bly

The pre-Nixonian Kissinger (before
1969) was adamantly anti-detente. The
Nixonian Kissinger was converted to
the beneficence of detente by 1971 and
managed the negotiations which led to
the consecration of the US-Soviet de-
tente at the summit meeting in Mos-
cow in May 1972. He even concocted a
set of concepts to make detente seem
inherent in the very nature of the

nuclear age. Detente, he maintained,
was built into the international system
because neither side could now ration-
ally seek "marginal advantages," "in-
crements of power," "tangible advan-
tages," or "tactical gains."

The Kissinger in this book would like
to have it both ways. He now seeks to
downplay detente, passing it off as "an
aspiration, not a contract." He sees it as
nothing more than "a yardstick by
which to measure compliance with
norms of international behavior." He
still upholds it on the ground that it
helped to keep armaments from rising
and made the environment "somewhat
more predictable." In January 1980,
however, he uttered these words about
detente: "The last period of what has
been called detente was characterized
by Western euphoria and, to some ex-
tent, nonperformance of what we said we
would do. It was also characterized by
massive Soviet rearmament and a mas-
sive Soviet assault on the equilibrium."

Which Kissinger to believe? If detente
was merely an "aspiration" or a "yard-
stick," why the euphoria in the West?
Whose euphoria was it? If there was
nothing to perform, why the "nonper-
formance"? Far from holding down the
level of armaments, according to Kis-
singer it enabled the Soviets to rearm
massively behind a screen of Western
euphoria. In fact, the agreement on
detente was more than an aspiration or
yardstick and less than a contract. The
illusions or euphoria it engendered
made the environment far more un-

28

The New Republic

[LC]

January 31, 1981

29

[LC]

Kissinger also seems to have changed his mind, in the 10 months before the Soviet embassy party, about how to handle the Soviets. On that occasion, his formula was little more than pop psychiatry – the Soviets wanted external limits to be put on them, and all the Americans had to do was to oblige. In a speech in January 1980 recorded in *For the Record*, however, he had something more to say about treating the Soviets as if they were a psychiatric problem. He ridiculed "the tendency to deal with East-West relations as if they were like relations among individuals, the tendency to attempt to solve the problem of war and peace psychiatrically," and warned that "the worst method in negotiations with the Soviet Union is the psychiatric approach." What was altogether wrong at a business-management forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January was just right at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, in November. The cream of the jest is that Dr. Kissinger's prescription for handling the Soviets was right out of Dr. Spock's immortal opus on child care:

> A child, like an adult, knows when she is getting away with too much naughtiness or rudeness even when her parents are trying to close their eyes to it. She feels guilty inside. She would like to be stopped. But if she isn't corrected, she's likely to behave worse and worse. It's as if she were saying, 'How bad do I have to be before somebody stops me?' (Babyn and Child Care, Pocket Books.)

If this were only the personal behavior of two of our former high officeholders it would be sad enough. But far more important is the practical policy implied by this behavior. Before they made their deals with the Soviets in 1971-72, Nixon and Kissinger regarded themselves and were regarded as two of the hardest of hard-liners. They were fully conscious that this reputation-enabled them to make deals that others might have flinched from or might not have been able to put across. The Nixon-Kissinger type of hard line can act as the cover for a Soviet-American deal or, as Kissinger put it, as a route to ultimate cooperation. Ambassador Dobrynin knew something from long experience when he greeted them and his other Republican guests with unwonted warmth and familiarity.

to the Middle East as a "private citizen" with Reagan's approval and with a commission to report back to the new president. An Associated Press dispatch interpreted his role to mean that Kissinger had been sent "on an unofficial exploratory mission for the Reagan administration." An unofficial mission made officially would seem to be an unmistakable formula for an éminence grise. Since president-elect Reagan seems to need a plethora of advisers and middlemen, he should have no trouble adding one more to his foreign policy entourage, especially if the move can be disguised as "unofficial." If Reagan should turn out to be a weak president and Haig a hapless secretary of state, as is not impossible, they would be the perfect combination to be Kissingerized. The operation might require the appearance of crisis for the Republic or for the president, but such an eventuality can hardly be ruled out in the next four years. Uneasy lies the head of a vulnerable secretary of state with Kissinger waiting in the wings and his chief former aide already in place. That Haig apparently has acquiesced in Kissinger's new role will not save him when his time should be up. Politics makes ungrateful bedfellows. The extraordinary saga of Henry Kissinger goes on.

Theodore Draper

# Who Knew What and When

## The Terrible Secret:

(Little, Brown; $12.95)

In April 1979 two CIA employees made public an aerial photograph of Auschwitz, complete with gas chambers, crematoria, and a group of prisoners lined up for "registration." The picture was reprinted in several places, most dramatically in the April issue of *Life*, along with a brief commentary to let us know that the photo was taken on

August 25, 1944, and that the men who took it "had no inkling of the grisly installation that lay below." After the mission, the picture was "routinely studied" and then filed away with "dozens" of similar photos. Dozens? Yes, but lest we be misled, one of the CIA men "suspects," as he says, "that the Allies might have mistaken Auschwitz for an ordi-

30

The New Republic

[LC]

— EDGAR MILLER

-AP

Chattanooga Times | Feb 21, 1981

THE SOUTH AFRICAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION

[LC]

NAT B/C (EX JHB)
DATE OF B/C: 11.12.80
REPEAT B/C: 14.12.80

"TALKING OF BOOKS"

THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS - by Henry Kissinger, published by WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON AND MICHAEL JOSEPH (Agent: Hodder) (R29,00)

(Review by John Barratt)

Dr Henry Kissinger is in the news again as a Foreign Policy Adviser to President-elect Ronald Reagan, with the possibility that he may receive some appointment in the new American Administration. But Henry Kissinger is never out of the news for long, and the first volume of his memoirs -- covering his four years as President Nixon's National Security Assistant from 1969 - 1973 -- also attracted considerable attention and a fair amount of controversy. A second volume will be published in 1981, covering Kissinger's four years as Secretary of State from January 1973.

The first impression of the memoirs is the sheer size of the first volume, running to over 1500 pages. It contains a painstaking accounting of the foreign policy issues dealt with by Nixon and Kissinger, but, in spite of the physical weight of the volume, it is not really heavy reading for anyone interested in contemporary history. Apart from some excessive detail -- which can be skimmed through by the general reader -- Kissinger writes clearly, and he proves often to be a good story teller, including many perceptive and entertaining character sketches, though not all unbiased, of colleagues in government and of foreign leaders.

The memoirs, I believe, serve two main purposes.

In the first place, they provide a useful foreign policy record of the first Nixon Administration. The foremost issue was Vietnam, and the negotiations are fully described. Kissinger considered the eventual agreement a considerable achievement, and "peace at last" is the title of the final chapter, where he writes also of being "at peace with myself". However, one must add that, after what has happened in Indo-China since 1973, the extent of this achievement is perhaps debatable.

The Middle East was another issue of high priority throughout Kissinger's White House years, and it will, of course, continue as an even more critical issue in his second volume. The story of the break-through to China -- including Kissinger's own secret visit to Peking and Nixon's public visit in 1972 -- is also fully recounted. This was a major development of the Nixon presidency which Kissinger justifiably regards as a considerable achievement.

Relations with the Western Alliance, uneasy then as they are today, provide a further important theme of the memoirs. But relations with Latin America receive very little treatment, and one must assume that during Kissinger's White House years Latin America was not a high priority. This is surprising and rather disturbing, given the unsettled state of Latin America and its historical links with the United States.

2/......

- 2 -

[LC]

What is less surprising, though also disturbing, is that Africa apparently received no serious White House attention. There are only a few passing references to the continent in the memoirs, and no reference to South Africa, South West Africa or Rhodesia at all. But perhaps one should withhold judgement on this, as it is likely that Southern Africa will figure primently in the second volume, covering the years 1973 to 1976, and Kissinger may take the opportunity then to fill in the earlier background.

These are the significant regional issues dealt with (or neglected) by Kissinger. But the overriding question throughout the memoirs, related to all these issues, is the question of relations with the Soviet Union. This fact leads to the second main purpose of the memoirs, and probably the more important, namely the opportunity for Kissinger to explain - and often defend - his own views of the world and of the United States' place in the world. Basically Kissinger believes that world peace can only be maintained by a stable balance of power globally. This means a balance between the United States and the Soviet Union, which requires American strength and the firm assertion of American interests. Within this balance of power co-operation becomes possible, and it was in this context that the Nixon/Kissinger policy of détente developed.

But Kissinger added two important refinements to this simple bi-polar model of the world. The first was the doctrine of "linkage" whereby events in different regions of the world are seen as inter-connected, each of them affecting overall relations between the two Super Powers. The second variation of the bi-polar model was the opening up to China, which no doubt in the view of Nixon and Kissinger served to put added pressure on the Soviet Union. But it also served to bring China back into the world community to play at least an ancillary role in the struggle between the Super Powers.

These and other aspects of his geopolitical view of the world are discussed by Kissinger in what amounts to an apologia for his views. Many of these views -- as well as his accounts of actual events -- are contested by commentators and by his academic and political rivals. But his role as a major actor on the international stage cannot be lightly dismissed, whatever one's final judgement of that role. And, of course, a final judgement may have to await, not only the second volume of memoirs, but even a possible come-back to the international stage.

In any case, the story of his role so far, and his interpretation of the roles of others, are an important contribution to an eventual historical assessment of our times. The full assessment, as Kissinger himself admits, will have to await publication of many other sides of the story.

**********

/KK

8.12.80