THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Letters to the Editor

# 'The Jane Fonda Version of History'

The following letter from Henry A. Kissinger is in response to a review of the television film "Kissinger and Nixon" ("Battle of the White House Egos" by Robert Goldberg, Leisure & Arts, Dec. 18). The phrases "poor old doltdish Nixon" and "a Nixon presumably too boozed up to know what he was signing" are used by Dr. Kissinger ironically, not to insult or deride Richard Nixon; their derision is aimed at the review and the film (the film depicts Nixon as drinking heavily). Dr. Kissinger also is referring to himself ironically with the terms "premier spinmaster" and "the old spinmaster," etc. (the review refers to him as "one of the first great modern spin doctors").

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read the review of "Kissinger and Nixon" in The Wall Street Journal. What is the point of being the premier spinmaster if one is found out so easily? Here the old spinmaster has been busily confusing the issue on Vietnam for 20 years. Nixon and I nearly got away with creating the impression that we were standing up for the honor and credibility of the United States in refusing to turn over to the Communists millions who, in reliance on America's promises, had cast their lot with us. We had conducted policies from a besieged White House, gone through the anguish of Cambodia and the risks of mining North Vietnam, faced down scores of congressional resolutions demanding withdrawal, to obscure the real purpose of the spinmastership—now, alas, unveiled in a TV film endorsed by The Wall Street Journal—that all this was "not to score, but to win over the fans in the bleachers." Incompetent as Nixon and I proved to be, we were not aware that there were fans in the bleachers (they surely were not in Congress or the media) and the conservatives were uncharacteristically silent.

Of course, there are a few glitches: for example, how the spinmaster, whose office was down the hall from the president, managed to escape for his nefarious secret negotiations without Nixon knowing it or how he organized the airplane to get to Paris. In fact, the spinmaster was even cleverer than that. He left memos in the files, approved by a Nixon presumably too boozed up to know what he was signing, approving every trip and its talking points in advance and every trip report later.

Poor old doltdish Nixon. He left a trail of handwritten notes urging the spinmaster to proceed and not one document or tape that supports what the filmmaker and your reviewer discovered—that he wanted to delay the negotiations until after the election. But the old spinmaster who tried to trick Ford into resisting the Cuban troops in Angola, from which he was restrained by vigilant neo-conservatives, overcame all these obstacles. He even fooled Nixon into believing that there had been no real disagreement between them, as is shown in the extract from a letter to me from Nixon dated April 9, 1990, when a national magazine tentatively tried out the thesis

so triumphantly vindicated in the film endorsed by The Wall Street Journal review, namely that Nixon and I were adversaries rather than partners.

"As you will of course recall, you often told me, as I have noted in my diaries, that Nancy believed that in view of McGovern's way-out position, our continuing to take a hardline on negotiations was politically helpful rather than harmful. While I shared that view, I often told you that if we could get the right deal before the election, we should do so regardless of what we thought the political circumstances might be. If we couldn't get the right deal, we should refuse to make an agreement even though we thought that the political effect would be negative. I believed that you shared that view then and still do.

There was only one area where we had a significant difference of opinion. I felt that you had more confidence in the negotiating process than I had. On the other hand, as I noted in my Memoirs, I had to admit, once you negotiated the Paris Peace agreement, that you were right and I was wrong on this score."

Nixon and yours truly, the old spinmaster, were clearly trying to put one over when we presented our Vietnam policy as an effort to extricate our country honorably from a liberal debacle. It was two liberal administrations that transformed the containment approach of Eisenhower into a social reform policy that blew up in our face, as it was later to do in Somalia. It was these administrations which opened the supply routes through Laos (which Eisenhower wanted to defend) into Vietnam, overthrew Diem, then sent 500,000 troops with a strategy of attrition, thus leaving the initiative to our enemy. And having negotiated a bombing halt just before leaving office, the perpetrators of that policy then joined the peace movement and made life hell for those who wanted to extricate America with honor from that war.

But the film and your reviewer were not so easily fooled. They got to the heart of the truth—which apparently was that the Nixon administration's heavy thinking was a sham, and the real failures were in the conservative camp because the "two performers were eagerly awaiting the next morning's reviews." And it was a measure of the clumsiness that the performers' reviews turned out to be uniformly hostile despite their most heroic efforts. No matter. Anyone duplicitous enough to doubt that the Backfire was a strategic bomber is also quite capable of spinning a yarn for a TV film 20 years later to the effect that he single-handedly achieved peace by double-crossing his president and betraying America's allies. Such characters must be exposed, even if it means that The Wall Street Journal ignores demonstrated factual misrepresentations and, in effect, endorses the Jane Fonda version of history.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

New York