Weekend Reading

THE Atlantic

FOUNDED IN 1857

# THE BALANCE OF MUTUAL WEAKNESS

## Nixon's Voyage into the World of the 1970s

by Henry Brandon

The President and the Professor blocked out a daring course: "stop-go retreat" from Vietnam and manipulation of big-power antagonisms. They took a first in Peking, covered ground in Moscow, and now, the election won, with or without Henry Kissinger at his side, the President has another four years in which to travel the new direction of international diplomacy. Where will it take us?

The tapestry of American foreign policy in the seventies will be woven out of a clearer understanding of the limitations of American power, whether military, financial, or economic; a fatigue with foreign commitments and a disenchantment with the world; a rebellion against the American values of the last fifty years, noisy on the left, quiet in the center, resisted on the right; a despair about the intractability of domestic problems; an overall disposition to retrench and retreat.

President Nixon shifted the gears of U.S. foreign policy into reverse, but at the same time he put his foot on the brakes to slow the backing up, when

his Democratic critics would have had him step hard on the accelerator. The actual pace of the American retreat will be faster than he is willing to admit and slower than they want it to be. But the President's sense of pace—typified by the stop-go retreat from Vietnam—was confirmed by his overwhelming election victory. With Henry Kissinger at his side, at least for now, he is in the ascendancy.

The first half of the seventies is a period of transition and experimentation, a search for new fixed points of orientation. It is a period of uncertainty as to the role the American public wishes the United States to play in the world, the amount of influence it wants to preserve. The intellectuals, when President Nixon came to power, withdrew to their ivory towers to contemplate the mistakes of the past and the lessons to be drawn from them for the future. And the indications are that the foreign-policy elite, having found overseas affairs their undoing, are now turning inward and are more interested in becoming a domestic-policy elite, under the impulse of the overriding problems that any American government will be facing at home in the seventies. Europeans and the Japanese tend to underestimate these problems; Americans perhaps tend to overestimate them.

The new generation of Americans is coming to power with a different experience and a different

Copyright © 1972, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass., 02116. All rights reserved.

outlook. It is hardly aware of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1947; it has no memory of the Berlin blockade, the invasion of Korea, or the suppression of Hungary. Uppermost in its mind is the catastrophe of Vietnam. The poison from that war will circulate in the American body and the American conscience for some time to come; the war's character and conduct are bound to remain part of the American experience and may leave an imprint as lasting as that of the Civil War. To this new generation it is damning evidence that the far-flung responsibilities of the United States have been executed in a reckless manner, that the limitations of American power have not been correctly assessed, and that American domestic needs have been badly neglected. The aim of this new generation will be to change the priorities of the past. Between those who do not understand the game of world power politics and those who exaggerate the need for overkill capacity, a great political struggle is developing in the seventies. There are many eloquent spokesmen among this new generation for the urgent American domestic needs, but for internationalism there are as yet none who can command the respect of this generation as well as of Congress. The kind of last-ditch defense the Nixon Administration mounted by sending the old guard of internationalists to do battle against Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's attempt to cut drastically American troop commitments in Europe will be difficult to repeat.

This new generation became the engine behind the shifts and changes in the Democratic Party for the presidential campaign, and by 1976, with many more million young people enfranchised, its impact, of course, will become increasingly effective. Their influx into active politics has profoundly upset many political assumptions, and the consensus that for twenty-five years gave American foreign policy continuity, bipartisan support, and a remarkable stability has, as a consequence, been badly undermined. There are many who believe that an entirely fresh start has to be made, that every priority, every commitment, every assumption needs to be reexamined. The very idea of continuity, which has been the basis on which the world viewed American foreign policy with either confidence or awe, has become an albatross around the neck of the United States.

Some revered and idealistic concepts, such as the Atlantic Alliance, have been elbowed aside by the march of events. The United Nations, one of those great idealistic hopes, strongly promoted by the United States, that rose from the destruction of World War II, has been shunted onto the side-tracks of history. As a guardian of international security it has lost its significance. It will linger on as an international meeting ground and, who knows,

could once again become a useful instrument when the challenge of the Third World to the industrial world becomes more acute.

The momentum for big ideas which accompanies the aftermath of great catastrophic wars has perished out. The young of today may be idealistic, but it is with an inner-directed idealism. They have no feeling for, no understanding of, no commitment to the world that created the United Nations.

Americans are now sharply divided on the U.S. role in the world, and any President in this decade will find it difficult to enter into new commitments, least of all any that could lead to sending American fighting forces abroad again, unless there should be a very drastic change in the international situation. Such change seems to me to be unlikely because, despite their overweening power, the United States and the Soviet Union are confined by a mutual vulnerability of which they have become well aware. It is this balance of mutual weakness that has raised hopes around the world that the seventies will be a period of relative peace and stability. Not only are there the weapons of infinite power, which compel the superpowers to coexist because neither can use them to impose its will on the other, but there is also the lesson the superpowers are beginning to grasp: that it is in their own interest to keep tension down and to avoid getting too deeply involved in peripheral conflicts. Diplomacy, as Henry Kissinger defines it, "is the art of restraining the exercise of power."

In that sense President Nixon's foreign policy has been extraordinarily successful. And success very much affects the way the public views foreign policy. Had the American intervention in Vietnam, for instance, ended in victory, it would not have aroused the opposition and revulsion it has, and American foreign policy would not have come under the kind of barrage of criticism it has. Whatever public controversy it engendered would have been soon forgotten in the wake of a successful conclusion. That is why some of the controversial, but successful, foreign-policy moves found easy acceptance.

Nixon met the public desire for a shift away from the cold-war outlook that had dominated American foreign policy throughout the post-World War II period by actively pursuing a détente with Moscow and Peking. In the process he and his impresario Henry Kissinger introduced a new diplomatic approach, balance-of-power diplomacy, at least as far as the United States, Russia, and China were concerned. It meant a far more radical change in the conduct of American diplomacy than is as yet fully recognized. The acknowledgment of the existence of a mutual weakness, the fading of the cold war, the weakening of

The Balance of Mutual Weakness

the old rigid framework of coalition diplomacy, and the public pressures everywhere for exploring a détente policy, all contributed to this new approach. Kissinger described it in 1968 as follows: "... Political multipolarity, while difficult to get used to, is the precondition for a new period of creativity. ... The shape of the future will depend ultimately on the conviction which far transcends the physical balance of power ... part of the reason for our difficulties is our reluctance to think in terms of power and equilibrium."

By opening up relations with China, Nixon made the Soviet Union suspicious and jealous, and so eager to hold the Moscow summit that the Soviet leaders were prepared to swallow the affront of the mining of Haiphong harbor. It became important to them to make certain that the balance of power in the seventies would be three-cornered, and to demonstrate that the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was more important than that between the United States and China. When Kissinger squared the triangle by returning to Peking after the Moscow summit, he wondered, as he flew toward the China coast, whether he would get the same cordial reception as previously. But in spite of Moscow's smiles and Haiphong's mines, he was received even more warmly than before.

The world of the seventies is not so compact as the early-nineteenth-century political world which has been Kissinger's life study, and it is accordingly much more difficult, in his own phrase, "to respond to change with counter-adjustment." He readily admitted this when he told members of Congress in June, 1972: "This Administration's policy is occasionally characterized as being based on the principles of the classical balance of power. To the extent that that term implies a belief that security requires a measure of equilibrium, it has a certain validity. ... But to the extent that balance of power means constant jockeying for marginal advantages over an opponent, it no longer applies. The reason is that the determination of national power has changed fundamentally in the nuclear age. Throughout history, the primary concern of most national leaders has been to accumulate geopolitical and military power. It would have seemed inconceivable, even a generation ago, that such power once gained could not be translated directly into advantage over one's opponent. But now both we and the Soviet Union have begun to find that each increment of power does not necessarily represent an increment of usable political strength."

This became painfully obvious during the Indo-Pakistan crisis, when all the counteradjustments were not enough to prevent war from breaking out. Still, as Nixon and Kissinger have shown, at least as regards the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, scales for balancing relations

can be a valid instrument in the diplomatic tool, even in the complex world of today.

However, to pursue a balance-of-power concept a clear definition of basic interests is needed. Britain, at the height of its Empire days, was ruled by an elite which could forge its foreign policy on the basis of what it thought was in Britannia's interest—irrespective of public opinion. These interests were so clearly defined that even after the introduction of universal suffrage, the British public had an instinctive understanding of what was best for the Empire. No similar instinctive understanding is to be found in the United States today. The Nixon Doctrine is too vague a definition of American interests and priorities. It does not offer enough guidance about how new priorities should be adjusted between U.S. domestic and international responsibilities and commitments, how to marshal resources to maintain the balance-of-power equation with the Soviet Union, even if it is only a balance of mutual weakness. What complicates these calculations and adds to the pressures for a new approach is the recognition that has begun to sink in among economic planners—the fact that economic growth, which used to absorb the rising social costs of government, cannot do so anymore, and that new ways must be sought of finding the resources for the kinds of new undertakings that are increasingly being talked about by leading politicians, from a new welfare program and a national health scheme to income redistribution, to mention the costliest. Americans have come to accept a much more extensive interventionist policy by the federal government in dealing with social problems, but they have not yet found ways to fund new programs adequately.

The most obvious target in the search for funds for domestic needs is the defense budget. Half of that budget goes to paying for the forces on active duty. The conventional force structure therefore is constantly eyed for possible savings. It means that the defense requirements of Western Europe are increasingly exposed to attacks, especially as the détente becomes a settled state of mind. American interests and defense commitments therefore are under review, the cost of the so-called "bargaining chip" policy is frowned upon, and the margins of safety are bound to be narrowed. But there is something of a vicious circle between the security that is desirable and the cost of military expenditures to ensure it. Opinions as to how large an insurance premium the United States should pay vary enormously if one compares, for instance, the Nixon and McGovern views. The Nixon Doctrine, being designed for all seasons, offers arguments to justify defense cuts, but that aspect of it has been obscured for the present by the requests for new

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weapons included in the defense budget. Even sympathetic critics at the Brookings Institution wonder whether these new weapons systems are not being determined before the nature of the threat is fully analyzed—in other words, whether they are not being pressed prematurely.¹

It has become obvious, therefore, that with American economic means limited, greater stringencies will have to be imposed, and they will have their effect not only on defense and foreign policy but also on American foreign economic policy.

A much more pervasive economic nationalism is making itself felt as a consequence of the costs of American defense commitments abroad, the heavy balance-of-payments deficits, and the influence foreigners can exert on the dollar. But just as the liberal Establishment has lost influence because of its misjudgments in Vietnam in the past ten years, so the international economic Establishment is now coming under increasing criticism for not deploying enough of its financial resources in the United States, for not being nationalistic enough.

John Connally, when he was Secretary of the Treasury, reflected the revival of economic nationalism, which had not been respectable for a generation or more. Even an internationalist such as Senator Hubert Humphrey thought it expedient to adopt an economic nationalist slogan during the California presidential primary of 1972; he admonished American investors to "make the dollar more patriotic." What he meant was that Americans should invest at home rather than abroad, so that Americans rather than foreigners would benefit.

Connally's outlook was not isolationist, but a mixture of nationalism and protectionism. It troubled not only foreign governments but also American business corporations, which are, with their multinational operations and vast holdings overseas, the last American globalists. His views were not typical, but they nevertheless reflected the views in the U.S. Treasury and of many in Congress. Mr. Nixon considers himself an expert in foreign policy, and so does Kissinger, but neither has a real understanding of overseas economic affairs. As a consequence there has been an unfortunate lack of American leadership in this field. Mr. Connally, while in power, was primarily interested in tactics, not long-term strategy. Still, he presented the President with a highly controversial, still unpublished proposal for a dollar bloc as a counter to the potential power of the European Economic Community. The EEC, he was convinced, would increasingly threaten American interests and exploit weaknesses in the overall American economic situation. What he underrated was the extent to

which these weaknesses were mutual and therefore created an interdependence. He saw the harnessing of dollar power as the best way to stave off the threat. It was difficult, however, to see the practicality of a dollar bloc, and easy to predict that to play the balance-of-monetary-power game would lead to trade and monetary wars and would inevitably jeopardize not only international economic relations but political relations as well. It was an idea that certainly did not fit the Kissinger scheme of things.

There was anyway a danger that relations between the United States and the Western European alliance would deteriorate. Nixon and Kissinger, preoccupied with their diplomatic forays to Peking and Moscow, had little time—except during the dollar crisis after August 15, 1971—to think about future economic, financial, military, and nuclear relations with their European allies. These relations were of a lower priority to Nixon and Kissinger, engaged as they were in over arching balance-of-power maneuvers, because Western Europe did not figure as a great power. What added to the Europeans' feeling of being on the outside was the realization that, in order to gain a freer hand for this great-power diplomacy, the Nixon Administration tended to behave like a mother bird toward its allies and friends to make them more aware of the future need to fly on their own wings. They wondered whether the Gaullist view—that it was interests, not friends, that mattered—had come to inspire American diplomacy. The American view of the world, in the quest for flexibility, seemed to have become an extension of the weaknesses that Nixon and Kissinger share—a difficulty in committing themselves intimately to other people, a desire to have no firm commitments and to have the freedom of several options. The European allies made their own contribution to the alienation with Washington by being too insensitive on their part to American problems. As a result, allied relationships have deteriorated and have been unnecessarily hurt. Kissinger once quipped that "the worst fate that can befall one is being an ally of the United States." Even if this was said facetiously, the detached U.S. attitude toward her allies did come as a surprise after the impressions Mr. Nixon left behind on his first European tour in February, 1969. There was also an implicit assumption that countries like West Germany (and Japan) had nowhere else to go, so they had to stay, in their own interests, close to the United States, and an assumption, too, that self-interest was a more enduring basis for relationships between governments than the sentimentality of a feeling of friendship. But mutual confidence, I, being a bit of a romantic, believe, does play a role in international relations and to undermine it is a loss

¹ Setting National Priorities: The 1973 Budget (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1972).

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to both sides. The British in their Empire days ruled supreme, convinced they did not need to consult with anybody. But when the Empire was transformed into the Commonwealth and Britain became *primus inter pares*, it consulted more and more, because it correctly concluded that a cooperative Commonwealth would help to make up for Britain's declining influence.

The continuing American interest in the Western alliance is to make certain that the most powerful industrial complex outside the United States does not come under Soviet control, but Americans also have a cultural conscience about the fate of Europe and, with so many other U.S. interests at stake, they want to keep their oars in European affairs.

One of the serious dangers, as the spirit of the Atlantic Alliance continues to fade in the seventies, is that the United States and Western Europe will come to see each other as competitors and not as allies. There are important men on both sides who are either anti-European or anti-American, and an unfortunate coincidence of chain reactions could play into the hands of those so prejudiced. A major American troop withdrawal, for instance, without proper consultation with NATO, a breakdown in the negotiations about EEC preferential tariffs followed by new protectionist legislation in Congress—just to dip into a basket of eels—could set in motion forces on both sides of the Atlantic that would be difficult to restrain.

Western Europe cannot become a military equal of the United States or the Soviet Union and should not even try to. What will decide its power position in the seventies, whatever efforts are made to create a European Defense Community, is whether it can acquire a unified foreign, economic, and monetary policy. Whether it will have the political will to achieve that remains uncertain, but in seeking it the Europeans will have to be careful not to overplay their hand in dealing with American interests. There is an interdependence between economic and security relationships, and alienating one could lead to alienating the other.

The United States is not prepared anymore to pay a high economic price for the political benefits of European unity. A growing number of Americans have strong reservations about how desirable a new independent European power is, especially from the U.S. economic point of view. There is almost no area where the United States feels a more acute sense of vulnerability than in its economic relationship with Western Europe and Japan. The danger exists that the uncooperative behavior of the United States's main trading partners or of the United States in monetary affairs, with both blaming each other, will make for transatlantic and transpacific friction. Moreover, the United States, which for so many years shunned trading with Communist countries, will become a major com-

petitor for Europeans, who used to have this market virtually to themselves. The United States also enjoys better communications with Russia today than do most European governments, and American interests in preserving this duopoly are also bound to conflict at times with the interests of the Western alliance.

The pressures at home for withdrawals of American troops from Europe will add to the strains between the United States and the rest of NATO. There is no evidence that these pressures reflect a desire for change in the relationship toward Western Europe. When the most vocal senators, such as Mansfield, Fulbright, or Church, raise the issue, they see it more as a housekeeping problem. Nor are there any public pressures for a change in the relationship. What troubles Congress is the disparity between the American defense effort and that of the Europeans, and the cost of maintaining that many troops under arms. One way to delay the congressional pressures for a troop withdrawal from Europe (which are mainly budgetary) would be to deactivate those forces stationed in the United States that are assigned for the defense of Europe; they represent about half of the expense, and it costs the United States as much to keep them in uniform at home as it would in Europe. Withdrawing the troops actually in Europe would not in itself save money. And since there is logic in maintaining American troops in Europe as a "bar-gaining chip" for the negotiations with the Russians about mutual and balanced force reductions, this would be a practical way for the U.S. government to approach this problem. Furthermore, there is a new reason for maintaining sufficient conventional forces in Europe: the advent of nuclear parity between the two superpowers could become a temptation to the Russians to use their conventional forces, if not for military ends, then for political pressures.

The advocates of troop withdrawals reject the accusation, usually from across the Atlantic, that such withdrawals would throw doubts on the reliability of the American security guarantee. They are believers in the trip-wire theory, which holds that even a handful of American soldiers in Europe would be enough to activate the guarantee. Still, this accusation raises a more fundamental question—how reliable, in fact, is this guarantee in the era of mutual weakness? Men like Kissinger believe that the Europeans, to be safer, should create their own nuclear deterrent. The British, in contrast to the French, used to oppose this in the belief that it would give the Americans a tempting escape clause, or that at any rate it would lessen the psychological deterrence of the American commitment. Kissinger is a Realpolitiker; the British tend to believe more in the mystique of power, though Edward Heath is the first British Prime Minister also to favor a European nuclear deter-

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rent. It is impossible to decide who is right. Kissinger and Heath may be, in the light of the balance of mutual weakness and vulnerability between the great powers; but then it may be more important to preserve the psychology of the American guarantee in the Russian mind. The best hope, of course, is that the test as to which is the better choice will never occur.

Europe in many ways has become politically more stable. Written agreements usually are nothing more than the codification of an already existing situation, but the treaty on Berlin and the agreements of the Federal Republic of Germany with the Soviet Union and with Poland are the equivalent of a peace settlement of World War II. The territorial gains made by the Soviet Union and Poland are now legally confirmed and, since the Russians attach great importance to legality, they will help to lessen tension in the center of Europe. Berlin, the symbol of these tensions for so many years, is likely to become more a symbol of relaxation, and, as the frontiers between the two Germanies harden, will become something of a bridge. The psychology of the division of Germany is changing. What used to be regarded as a forcibly imposed division, arousing frustrations and illusions about the unrequited promises of unification, will be viewed instead as a recognition of the existence of two German states with two different and deepening identities. This is not likely to be a permanent solution, but probably one that will last through the seventies, and one that will be equally welcome to the Russians and the West Europeans. It will help the Russians to maintain control over Eastern Europe and at the same time it will strengthen West Germany's sense of belonging to the European community.

Unquestionably, therefore, the United States will want to maintain an influence in Western Europe, though the relationship will come to rest more on psychological than institutional foundations. As the power of NATO declines and the U.S. security guarantee seems to become open to question, this psychological relationship will provide the necessary index. If it is good, then so will be the deterrent value of the guarantee; if it deteriorates, then the guarantee will be devalued with it. The growing fluidity in international relations will not make all this any easier.

In the Middle East the Israelis, though lacking a formal guarantee, will continue to rely on the United States to counterbalance Soviet power. When Egypt's President Sadat told Secretary of State William Rogers in 1971 that he would never allow the Russians to remain in his country indefinitely, Rogers was encouraged and impressed, but his elation was met with skepticism inside and outside the Administration. Yet a year later, to every-

body's surprise, the Russians had been "expelled." The Middle East, with so many irreconcilable elements, so many people driven by emotion, so much smoldering hatred, is bound to remain a crisis area. But Mr. Nixon's luck in foreign affairs held even in this unpredictable area, and he and Mr. Rogers can take solace in the fact that they were able at least to begin the seventies by preserving a cease-fire along the Suez Canal. However simple it seems to many Israelis that the status quo is better than any settlement Israel could negotiate with its neighbors, the Arab-Israeli territorial conflict cannot go on indefinitely. Because of the enormous costs in men, material, and money to Israel, and the slow but growing strength of Egypt, however relative to the past the latter may be, something will have to give somewhere sooner or later. American policy will continue to aim at preserving a balance of power to prevent Israel from being destroyed. The Israelis would feel readier to give up territory that reinforces their security and their frontiers if they were more certain about the extent and consistency of this U.S. protection. What Israeli policy makers must take into consideration, and American planners increasingly talk about, is that by the end of this decade the United States will be facing a very serious energy crisis. And, since so much of the needed oil comes from the Middle East, the Arabs will by then be in a powerful bargaining position with the United States.

In Asia, U.S. and Chinese interests are nowhere in serious conflict, except for Taiwan, and that problem has been defused. The Chinese do not mind the world behaving as it pleases, so long as it does not impinge on their interests. The two powers that could impinge on them are the Soviet Union and Japan, and with both of them the United States can exert an important influence—most importantly, to give the Chinese a certain reassurance that neither the Soviet Union nor Japan will attack them.

The Chinese, for instance, were very much concerned about the outcome of the Indo-Pakistan war, which involved Chinese interests, but Peking proved unable to give the support its Pakistani allies expected. The United States, whose interests were also involved, was not able to prevent the war from truncating Pakistan, but it nevertheless played an important hand, much more than China. In Washington the United States was seen as defending American interests, but in Peking it also seemed to be defending Chinese interests in this situation. Thus Peking does not mind the United States maintaining a position in Asia, because it imposes certain limitations on Russia's freedom to extend her influence. Actually, the Russians have been careful enough not to get tied too closely to a weak country like India; what probably matters most to them is to ensure that India does not fall under Chinese influence. It was not surprising that

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the Indo-Pakistan war was compared to the old Balkan wars and the roles of the United States, Russia, and China to those that Austria, Prussia, and Russia played then. What actually happened to India and Pakistan seemed of lesser interest to the observers of big-power play. It was the maneuvers among the big powers that aroused the greatest attention, and not in the sense of who was gaining geographical advantages, but who was cleverer in preventing the other from gaining any. The Indo-Pakistan war experience points at the danger of small, limited wars among minor powers, as did the Arab-Israeli war, and at the risks and temptations they create for the great powers. It may be even more difficult to prevent them, now that big-power intervention is fraught with so much danger and therefore cannot dictate their settlement. The great powers are also learning that the developing world is hard to deal with. The Russians have learned that lesson in Indonesia, in the Sudan, and, above all, in Egypt; the United States learned it in Vietnam. It is bound to moderate their outlook and appetite.

If the Russians desist from moving against China—and they may already be too late—then China, probably with some technological support from the United States, will gradually move toward great-power status (Chou En-lai still refers to China as a developing country). If the United States continues to play its cards well and does not try to play off China against the Soviet Union, then it will place the Russians in a position where they will want to maintain not only the détente in Europe but also a modus vivendi in the gray areas where their interests overlap.

U.S.-Japanese relations have markedly deteriorated under the Nixon Administration, and although the United States would like Japan to assume the leading role in the Pacific region, no well-defined concept for this has yet developed in either country. Certainly in Washington the war in Vietnam and the initiative toward China took up too much of the time and effort of Kissinger and his staff to leave room for much else. Whatever frustrations were caused by the Vietnam War were compensated for by the exhilaration of the new relationship with China. For the rest of Asia, as for the Third World, no time was left on Kissinger's calendar, which, he once remarked, "was so crowded that it left no time for war."

The majority of Americans, despite the new relationship with Moscow and Peking, remain very conscious of the risks and dangers of cutting too deeply into the muscle of American power. Just as the forces for change in the United States are formidable, so are the forces of resistance. Robert W. Tucker, in his small book *A New Isolationism*—which he advocates with so

much persuasiveness to American ears—admits that "the mood of the public is clearly ambivalent, the American people show little propensity to impose a massive veto on Presidential action on foreign policy, at least so long as this action avoids a repetition of the events associated with Vietnam." Whether interventionist or isolationist, Americans remain power-conscious and power-proud. A drastic reduction of the military budget soon is therefore unlikely; even if desired, it could not be accomplished except over a period of three to five years. The trade unions, the military-industrial complex, the military and congressional forces will slow it down. After all, the USSR is not sitting complacently on its achievement of nuclear parity. What the great debate in Washington will be about is not whether the United States should protect whatever qualitative lead it has in nuclear weapons, but the degree to which it should try to keep ahead. The next phase of the SALT talks ought to make this easier to decide.

But I have no doubt that the United States will, in the next few years, cut its overseas commitments more closely according to the cloth at its disposal. Nixon and Kissinger became very conscious of the fact that the United States no longer had the capacity to fulfill the range of commitments it had acquired after World War II, when the balance of power among the leading nations was quite different. There were commitments America was bound to live up to, but there were others it was prepared to jettison if necessary. The two therefore came to feel that they were acting from a hand that was, as they saw it, vulnerable. It is not impossible that in the recesses of his mind Kissinger occasionally compared his own situation to that of the Iron Chancellor Bismarck, who, at least after 1871, applied his mastery of the balance-of-power game to protect a vulnerable Prussia against any hostile coalition. The feat of developing good relations with China and the Soviet Union at the same time was alone one that would have been quite a challenge to Bismarck or Metternich; Kissinger succeeded because he knew how to restrain the contending forces by manipulating their antagonisms.

What presents a serious problem for the future is the intricate weave of the Nixon and Kissinger diplomacy and the difficulty of anybody else's assuming its management. Abram Chayes, the Harvard Law School professor who headed a task force to develop McGovern's foreign policy during the election campaign, called Kissinger a virtuoso for whom there was no obvious successor because there was simply no one, he thought, who had the same command of diplomacy and who could play the balance-of-power game with the same skill and success. Nothing worries Kissinger more than the fear that a President will come to power in this decade who will not understand his scheme of things, who will see the world quite differently and

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tear down the pillars of the power relationship he built. Essential to his thinking is the belief that you do not cut your strength and then fashion policy accordingly, but that you maintain or build up your resources and then negotiate about limiting or reducing them, if they can be limited or reduced. He has more faith in the power than in the prospects of limiting it; he is convinced of human fallibility. But it is a policy that increases rather than decreases budgets, and therefore it will become more difficult to follow.

What may alleviate this problem is that the two superpowers have in common the urgent need to deal with demands for domestic reform, as have China and Japan. This *Drang* for reform is most obvious, though, in the United States and the USSR, the two societies that have prided themselves for so long on being "classless." They have become more class-ridden than they are willing to admit, and the leaders in both countries have come to recognize that they must do more to alleviate these pressures for the sake of internal peace and order. It is a vital element in the balance of mutual weakness. The rebellions in the American ghettos and among the workers in Poland were signals no government could ignore. What happened in Poland, where police power is almost as strict as in the Soviet Union, could happen in the Soviet Union itself tomorrow.

In the Soviet Union the raising of the standard of living is still a relatively simple problem of more and better consumer goods; in the United States the problem is how to restrain the glut of inessential consumer goods that eat up an inordinate amount of raw materials, and how to reduce the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor. Americans could say with Churchill, "We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty." The focus may shift between the schools, the cities, the environment, the welfare program, but all are aspects of the redistribution of wealth, which will be the great social struggle in the United States in the seventies. What this requires is a Kissinger for domestic policy who can undertake the kind of long-term economic planning that this requires; Mr. Nixon lacked such an equivalent.

The retreat of American power will continue to prove a traumatic experience for Americans, their friends, and even their enemies. This does not mean, however, that the Western world will not continue to look to the United States for leadership, or will not watch with some anxiety whether the retrenchment will be managed wisely and how much the polarization of forces on the right and left will be kept under control. The stability of the Western world will continue to depend on the quality of American leadership. In a period of détente, which the seventies promise to be, and in an even more complex world than the one we are used to, it will be more difficult to keep a

steady rudder than it was in a period of tension, when the answers often imposed themselves automatically. It will require a careful balancing between preserving the essentials of the older policy principles and making sufficient allowances for the new public mood. Whoever is in charge during the rest of this decade will have to remember that people do not forgive their leaders when they err, even if their errors reflect the popular preferences.

The seventies will go down in history as representing a watershed in the American relationship to the rest of the world. This relationship will prove to be more restrained, more impersonal, more detached, more self-centered. After a period when everyone knew where everyone else stood, when diplomacy was played to well-established rules, and a certain intimacy and interdependence were observed within the alliance, the world of the seventies will be less predictable. But the basic design of the retreat of American power is drawn. Only its pace and limits remain in doubt. ☐

## HOLY DAY

Los Angeles hums
a little tune—
trucks down
the coast road
for Monday Market
packed with small faces
blinking in the dark.
My mother dreams
by the open window.
On the drainboard
the gray roast humps
untouched, the oven
bangs its iron jaws,
but it's over.
Before her on the table
set for so many
her glass of fire
goes out.
The childish photographs,
the letters and cards
scatter at last.
The dead burn alone
toward dawn.

by Philip Levine

Nation's Press

# Peace! Where?

By DON OAKLEY

(Newspaper Enterprise Assn.)

The only trouble with Henry Kissinger's statement some seven weeks ago that "Peace is at hand" in Vietnam was that most people were so elated they never thought to ask: Which hand?

Like the elusive pea under the shell (to continue the image of sleight-of-handmanship), what the public thought was there turns out not to be there at all. And like the victims of that carnival game, a lot of Americans are resentful and feel that they have been had.

But had by whom?

For those who never did, do not now and never will like Richard Nixon, the answer to easy. For those who forgive a trespasses except those committed by their own country, the answer is also easy:

Obviously, the President er couraged the belief that peace was imminent for purely political advantage. Then, bolstered by his landslide re-election victory, he proceeded to adopt a harder line toward Hanoi, raising new conditions unacceptable to them.

Unfortunately, there is just enough evidence, just enough rumors and leaks from sources close to the negotiations, to lend credence to this charge, and Americans, who have been deceived before, are again wondering whom to believe and whom to trust.

One thing is certain, and that is that the disappointment runs very deep.

Yet it must be remembered that it was Hanoi, not Washington, who first broke the news that an agreement was ready to be signed and who, in fact, set a deadline of Oct. 30 for that signing. It was this that led to Kissinger's famous appearance on nationwide television.

Since the North Vietnamese could hardly be desirous of enhancing Mr. Nixon's already favorable re-election prospects, it can only be concluded that their

aim was to sweep the administration into a settlement on a wave of public euphoria in this country.

At least, this conclusion is as credible as any other.

On the other hand, Kissinger contributed to that euphoria by minimizing the seriousness of the issues that remained to be settled — perhaps in "one more session" of three or four days.

In the light of the new impasse in Paris and the resumption of bombing and mining, those points could not have been so minor. Either that or new questions, or old ones thought to have been settled, have been introduced by one or

## Change Time Of Meetings

The meeting time for the City Panning Commission will be changed next year, according to Ed Baldwin, planning department director.

# The Education of Henry Kissinger

**Metternich**

by Alan Palmer.
Harper & Row, 405 pp., $12.50

**Dear Henry**

by Danielle Hunebelle.
Berkley, 224 pp., $1.25 (paper)

**Kissinger: The Uses of Power**

by David Landau.
Houghton Mifflin, 270 pp., $5.95

**I. F. Stone**

Metternich is Kissinger's hero. There are many resemblances between them. There are even a few between Metternich and Nixon. Like Nixon, Metternich hated "campus bums," though he would never have used so vulgar an expression. In the Metternich era, as in the Nixon Administration, editors and newspapermen generally ranked with university teachers and students among the prime objects of suspicion. Agnew's ghost writers might like to quote in his next attack on us "effete snobs" that gloomy passage in Metternich's secret memorandum to the Tzar Alexander which questioned whether "society can exist with the liberty of the press, a scourge unknown to the world before the latter half of the seventeenth century...."¹

The earliest secular analogue to our own House Un-American Activities Committee, whence Nixon began his rise to the Presidency, was the Central Commission set up by Metternich under the infamous Carlsbad Decrees to watch over any sign of subversive activity in the German Confederation. A censorship was established over the press and a system of surveillance in the universities. Suspect professors were blacklisted, as were many of our own two decades ago. In the memorandum which led to the Carlsbad Decrees, Metternich stressed "the absolute necessity that professors whose sentiments are notoriously bad and who are involved in the intrigues of the latter-day disorders among the students shall be immediately deprived of their chairs."² Metternich "had a very low opinion of the political capacity of the professors," the German nationalist historian von Treitschke wrote, "basing this judgment, characteristically enough, upon the opinion that no professor knew how to pay due regard to the value of property."³ The House Un-American

Activities Committee in Nixon's day took a similar view.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan kept his seat in the White House warm and sold his family assistance plan by telling Nixon he bore a striking resemblance to Disraeli, a comparison some touchy people might regard as anti-Semitic. Moynihan seemed to be applying Disraeli's own maxim, that in dealing with a reigning monarch you lay it on with a trowel.⁴ One wonders whether in tired moments Nixon gets a pickup by hearing Kissinger tell him that in Nixon's early

years as a hunter of radicals and as a founding father of the Subversive Activities Control Board he was walking in the aristocratic footsteps of Prince von Metternich.

Kissinger's first book, *A World Restored*, dealt with Metternich's career and provides a kind of blueprint for his own. Kissinger seems to have modeled himself on his hero in small

ways as well as large. Metternich was also "a swinger," in fact he seems to have found his one recreation in chasing women. So extensive—and politically important—were his conquests that it took a two-volume work, *Metternich und die Frauen*,⁵ to do them justice. A major source of information on Metternich's thinking lies in his letters to his women friends; his letter-writing seems to have been as inexhaustible as his libido. One of his many biographies is entitled *Metternich, the Passionate Diplomat*⁶ and the

latest by Alan Palmer seems to devote as much attention to Metternich's sexual as to his diplomatic triumphs. The index lists eight known mistresses,

pretty good for a man with three wives, and also recounts occasions when French spies tailed him as he visited certain "houses."

Poor Henry by contrast never seems to get beyond holding hands. Indeed he seems to drive women to almost u believable extremes. In the first and so far only book on his career as a lover, Danielle Hunebelle's *Dear Henry*, we find this intimate revelation:

> "Washington can be such a boring town, Danielle," he said in his slow, warm voice. "What are you going to do for ten days in Washington?" I answered that I'd taken the trouble to bring my entire library with me.

Metternich never drove girls to reading in bed.⁷

Metternich and Kissinger were both uprooted from their native Germany by revolution and war. Metternich, a Rhinelander, became Austria's foremost diplomat; Kissinger, a Bavarian, has become America's. Their origins could hardly have been more diverse. Metternich's, Palmer tells us, were "impeccably aristocratic," reaching back over eight centuries. Kissinger was the son of a small-town Jewish high-school teacher. But both emerged from their youthful ordeals with much the same conservative outlook.

Palmer, like most Metternich biographers, attributes his outlook to his experiences in the wake of the French Revolution, which cost him his family estates in the Rhineland. David Landau, Kissinger's first biographer, attributes Kissinger's to his suffering and exile under Hitler. "In the Vietnamese who are fighting for their freedom."

> "The White House," the bookseller said, "is reading that like mad." Nobody wants to get caught with a "who he?"

⁵E. C. Corti, Vienna and Zurich, 1949.

⁶Barbara Cartland, London, 1964.

⁷Dear Henry sets a new high-water mark for kiss-and-tell literature, since it provides 224 pages of tell and not a single kiss, except for one planted on Henry's photograph in the last paragraph by the writer, who was certainly a woman hard to discourage.

⁸Barnard Law Collier in *The New York Times Sunday Magazine*, November 14, 1971.

¹Text in *Metternich's Europe*. 1813-1848, edited by Mack Walker, Harper & Row, 1968, p. 124.

²Ibid. Text of the Teplitz convention, p. 93.

³In his *History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century*, quoted here from

a selection in *The Metternich Controversy*, edited by Enno E. Kraehe, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1971, p. 76.

⁴This far-out flattery seems still to reverberate in the Nixon entourage.

While browsing through a Washington secondhand bookstore for background material on the Metternich period, I pulled off the shelf a copy of *Disraeli* by Robert Black (St. Martin's Press, 1967), the most recent biography.

The New York Review

Landau writes, "and in the American antiwar demonstrators who may bring on the stronger and more fearsome legions of the extreme right, Kissinger sees the shades of Weimar... a vision that is firmly rooted in the irrational, chaotic experience of Kissinger's early life," which has given him "a deep horror of internal upheavals."

Kissinger himself denies this. "That part of my childhood," he told one interviewer,⁸ "is not a key to anything. I was not consciously unhappy... the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life." This seems to be the truth. Nowhere does he show any of the most common reactions to the Hitler experience. He did not react as a Jew by becoming a Zionist, or with anti-Germanism, or by an extreme sensitivity to any trends that smack of Fascism in his adopted country. He would hardly have taken service under Nixon if he had been rendered nervous over anything that seemed to show a disregard for basic and Constitutional liberties.

There seems to be the same post hoc, propter hoc fallacy in the way biographers treat both men. There is little reason to believe that their outlooks would have been fundamentally different if they had never been uprooted. More often than not, men emerge from crises with the same preconceptions they had when they went in, only strengthened. The same events can be used to prove very different propositions. Pacifists see every war as demonstrating the need to give up violence while militarists see it as a lesson to be better prepared next time. Liberals conclude from revolutions that they might have been avoided by timely reform. Others, starting with conservative predispositions, may conclude that stability would have been preserved by timely repression. This was Metternich's philosophy. It was congenial to his temperament and necessary to his advancement in the service of the Hapsburgs, who were constitutionally averse to change.

Other men were moved in their youth by the idealism of the French Revolution and then alienated by its excesses. Metternich saw it with aristocratic contempt from the start. He was a student at the university in Strasbourg when the first news of the fall of the Bastille set off popular demonstrations of sympathy. "Surrounded by

a number of dull spectators who called themselves the people," Metternich recalled loftily in his memoirs,⁹ "I had been present at the plundering of the Stadthaus in Strasbourg, perpetrated by a drunken mob." Metternich's lifelong attitude toward the democratic aspirations of his time is reflected in that phrase about "a number of dull spectators who called themselves the people." The very thought of "the people" drove him to his snuffbox. The French Revolution confirmed, it did not create, his basic prejudices.

There is no reason to believe that Kissinger's diplomacy in dealing with the Vietnam war, which takes up a major portion of the Landau book, would have been any different if there never had been a Hitler. Kissinger's

inner drive is for power, and all his studies have concentrated on how best to use it in statecraft. This fascination with power is reflected in the two men to whom he has devoted biographical studies, Metternich and Bismarck, the latter in a brilliant essay for the Summer, 1968, issue of *Daedalus*, an issue devoted to Studies in Leadership. Either could have been written under Weimar or the Kaiser in his native land.

Where Bismarck spoke of "blood and iron," Kissinger deals with blood and guile, the proper mix of military force and diplomacy, in achieving national objectives and international stability. This is neither new nor Germanic, but nowhere but in Germany has the application of force in statecraft been discussed with such open rejection of moral scruples or—as Germans have often said—in defensive rebuttal—with such absence of "Anglo-Saxon" cant. After all, the only difference between Nixon and Kissinger on Vietnam is that the latter spares us doses of Billy Grahamism as we continue to escalate death over Hanoi. The policy is still as it was under Lyndon, to force an "honorable" solution by making them "hurt."

Both Metternich and Kissinger were swift climbers, with a keen instinct for the main chance. Metternich beat Kissinger to the top by ten years: he became Foreign Minister of Austria at the age of thirty-six. Kissinger was forty-six when Nixon named him Assistant for National Security Affairs. But Kissinger had the harder climb.

Metternich practically married his way into the job; his first wife was the granddaughter of Kaunitz, Austria's eighteenth-century elder statesman. Its Foreign Minister from 1753 to 1792. The dowry that went with the marriage more than made up for the estates Metternich lost to the revolution. By contrast to this indolent aristocrat in a gilded age Kissinger seems like a poor little academic bootblack, in a revised Horatio Alger story, with a sharp eye for the most likely spot where an heiress might be rescued from a runaway horse. He picked the Council on Foreign Relations as the opportune corner, and Nelson Rockefeller turned out to be his most important catch until Nixon came along.

The rungs, on Kissinger's ladder to success have a common characteristic. At each major step upward he has been the protege of men who believed in military strength and, if necessary, war, and who were obsessed with the postwar struggle for hegemony between the US and the USSR and fearful of the revolutionary tide in the poorer countries. All saw in him an exceptional mind and a willing spirit for enlistment in the cause of the cold war and American imperialism.

His first patron, in the US Army during World War II, was Dr. Fritz Kraemer, a German adventurer with a law degree and two PhDs who enlisted in the US Army as a private after Pearl Harbor, won a battlefield commission, and set up a military government school in the Eighty-fourth Division in which Kissinger was a buck private.¹⁰ He is now a reserve colonel who works in the office of the Army Chief of Staff as a military and political strategist. He has the bearing and style of a Prussian and is probably the only

⁹Quoted in the Palmer biography, p. 14.

¹⁰Joseph Kraft, "In Search of Kissinger," *Harper's*, January, 1971.

The New York Review

- 3 -

officer at the Pentagon who wears a
monocle at work.¹¹ Miss Hunebelle
says "Dear Henry" told her about the
early and great influence Kraemer had
on him. "He's more rigid and conserva-
tive than I am," Miss Hunebelle quotes
Kissinger as saying, "but with deep
convictions." Her only meeting with
Kraemer was unpleasant. She met him
in Kissinger's office, where Kraemer
had just had lunch.

He was a tall, very formal man. I asked politely whether he would agree to say a few words for the film [she was making of Kissinger for French television]. In a voice that literally screeched, evoking for me with an unbearable acuity the Nazi period, Kraemer declined. "In my position I have no relationship with the press nor with television!" I looked at Henry. He smiled at me as though to soften the disappointment which he shared with me. But I began to think that a part of Henry would always remain closed to me, foreign, not to say hostile.

Dr. Colonel Kraemer seems to have
been less inhibited with other inter-
viewers. In one interview he described
Kissinger at their first meeting in the
Army with patronizing affection as
"this nineteen-year-old little Jewish
boy, whose people knew nothing really
of the great currents of history that
were overwhelming them."¹² Within
twenty minutes he felt that he had
discovered in Kissinger "a most impor-
tant historical mind." He told the same
interviewer he hoped "to see the day
when Henry is remembered like
Tocqueville." Through Kraemer, Kissin-
ger became an interpreter to the
commanding general and after the war
obtained a $10,000 a year job as
instructor in an army training school.

Kissinger found a similar relic of the
past as a patron when he entered
Harvard: Professor William Yandell El-
liott, of whom Landau provides a vivid
portrait.

... a small-town boy from Tennessee turned brilliant scholar, an all-American tackle at Vanderbilt who became the ruling power in Harvard's Department of Government.... In 1924, Elliott had written a brilliant analysis of the European political scene which described with prescience the forces that would produce the

European fascist dictatorships of
the following decade.¹³ Sadly, he
never again equalled the fea of
scholarship at any time during the
rest of his career, and many of his
colleagues would later come to
regard him as a windbag, an
intellectual has-been, an excessive
bore.

Even by the standards of the
late Forties, he was a violent Cold
Warrior.... Another of Elliott's
graduate students remembers that,
on returning from a one-year stay
in Britain, he received a lengthy
harangue from the old man on the
"namby pamby" quality of Cle-
ment Attlee's Labour government.
Socialism had been such a failure
in Britain, Elliott proclaimed, that
the government could not provide
enough meat for its own people.
When the student presumed to
inform Elliott that Britain now
had the highest per capita rate of
meat consumption in western
Europe, Elliott threw him out of
his office....

Yet his personality was undoubtedly forceful and flamboyant, and he never quite lost his interesting, powerful cast of mind... It was this apparition, this tattered image of a bygone age, that Kissinger latched onto while a Harvard undergraduate.¹⁴

With Elliott, to whom Kissinger dedicated his book on Metternich, Kissinger founded and directed the Harvard International Seminar; he was its executive director from 1951 when he was still studying for his master's until 1969 when he left Harvard to join the Nixon Administration. The seminar brought influential foreigners to Harvard for the summer months and the contacts thus made served Kissinger's reputation abroad. In the meantime he cultivated two centers of power, the Pentagon and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Kissinger's sketch in Who's Who lists an extraordinary number of consultantships with the special boards on which the national security establishment uses outside intellectuals. These connections and their influence on him and his career have yet to be explored by any of those who have written about him. In 1950, the year he was graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he became consultant to the "operations research office," a job he held for eleven years. In 1952, the year he got

his MA (his thesis was on Hegel,
Spengler, and Toynbee), he became
consultant to the director of the
"psychological strategy board," and
three years later to the "operations
coordinating board." In 1959 he be-

came consultant to the "weapons sys-
tem evaluation group" where he served
until 1960.

Professor Elliott, who was on the
War Production Board during World
War II, had two key jobs in Washing-
ton during the same decade of the
Fifties. He was assistant director of the
Office of Defense Management in
1951-53 and a member of the planning
board of the National Security Council
under Eisenhower from 1953-57. He
must have played a part in helping his
protege obtain these Pentagon con-
sultancies in the same period. Per-
haps Colonel Kraemer did, too.

Kissinger was a young man in a
hurry. He had barely finished his PhD
dissertation on Metternich and a year
as an instructor in the Department of
Government when he began to look
around for wider opportunities. "His
immediate goal, a tenured position on
the Harvard faculty," Landau writes,
"was no easy matter and the member-
ship of his department was not uni-
formly friendly to him."

An opportunity came in the winter
of 1954-55. The managing editor of
Foreign Affairs, the quarterly of the
Council on Foreign Relations, had just
quit, and its editor, Hamilton Fish
Armstrong, asked Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., then in the history department, to
suggest a young scholar for the post.
Schlesinger gave him Kissinger's name.
But Armstrong later told Landau that
he found Kissinger's style "somewhat

¹¹The monocle touch I owe to the
Collier article cited above.

¹²Ibid.

¹³Actually Mussolini, the first of the Fascists, had come to power two years earlier with the so-called March on Rome by his bully boys, the squadristi. Elliot's book was *The Pragmatic Revolt: Syndicalism, Fascism and the Constitutional State*.

¹⁴Landau, pp. 40-42.

stiff and overly labored" but thought Kissinger might serve as rapporteur for a study group then meeting at the Council on the subject of nuclear weapons. Elliott and Schlesinger recommended Kissinger for this job, so did McGeorge Bundy, then Harvard's dean of faculty. Kissinger accepted in a letter of March 8, 1955, which was shown Landau. Kissinger said he was taking the post "not only because it seems directed to the main line of my own thought, but also because the Council seems to furnish a human environment I find attractive."¹⁵

For an ambitious young man just out of Harvard, the human environment at the Council on Foreign Relations must have been very attractive indeed. The panel on nuclear weapons which retained Kissinger to write up the results of its deliberations contained such top bankers as David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan and Frank Altshul of General American Investors, an investment trust sponsored by Lazard Frères and Lehman Brothers. There were four generals on the panel, none below the rank of major general. There were such inveterate commuters between the Defense Department and the upper reaches of New York's corporate law and banking firms as Paul H. Nitze, Roswell L. Gilpatric, and Frank Pace. The last two figure prominently in the history of General Dynamics, our number one defense conglomerate. And the chairman of the panel, Gordon Dean, was about to leave the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission to become GD's senior vice-president for nuclear energy. It was a gathering in which no gentleman would have used the term military-industrial complex.

The panel deliberated for almost eighteen months. The fruit of these deliberations was Kissinger's book, *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy*, published in 1957 just before the appearance of the book based on his Metternich dissertation. To reread Gordon Dean's foreword now while Dr. Kissinger is commuting to Moscow and Peking is an odd experience, even for those who lived through that earlier period. Future historians may conclude from it that no ruling class has ever showed a greater capacity than ours for frightening itself to death. The nightmarish fears then expressed by a panel of the most powerful men in the most powerful country of the world, at a time when it possessed enormous nuclear superiority, were unbelievable.

Russian enslavement might be just around the corner, but Chase Manhattan was as firm as Patrick Henry. Despite the danger, Dean wrote, our objective must not be "peace at any price." That "can always be secured," he continues scornfully "on Russian terms." For most of those on the panel "the survival of ourselves and our children is not sufficient." They insisted on "survival and freedom." They were "abhorrent of war but unwilling to accept gradual Russian enslavement of other peoples around the world, which we know will eventually lead to our own." Carthage cowered, but as yet with spirit unbroken.

In resisting to the end, however, they faced "a great dilemma, and Dr. Kissinger," Dean wrote, "analyzes this dilemma in fine detail," 455 pages of it in fact. The dilemma was that we were afraid to use our own weapons. "Assume a situation," Dean wrote:

> ... where the vital interests of the United States are at stake, if for no other reason than that the USSR is attempting to take over another small but strategic area of the world. Would the United States be prepared to use force? Would it be prepared to use tactical atomic weapons to prevent such a conquest if the employment of such weapons were best suited to end quickly a local aggression?

These are still the questions that hover over the Vietnam war. Dean saw nothing immoral in the use of such means, since "immorality arises not from the type of explosive" but "from the use to which weapons are put." The end justifies the means, and what end could be more moral than the preservation of freedom?

Dean said Kissinger's book was "no easy reading" and the eyes glaze over it now "even more than they did then. But the real fear and the simple strategy for dealing with it come out more clearly in Dean's preface than in the interminable and intellectually exhibitionistic book itself. The fear, plainly, is that we might set off a nuclear war in which we, too, would be destroyed. How to use nuclear weapons as an instrument of policy

¹⁵Ibid., pp. 43-44.

¹⁶*Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy*, p. 190.

without ourselves being incinerated by them? The answer was better communication with the enemy! We must let them know that such weapons "will be used with discrimination; that our objective will always be to restrict the area of conflict and to destroy military targets which threaten the freedom we must preserve." So here we have it—precision bombing with small nuclear weapons.

Behind the veiled and sanitary phrases is the old idea of peace through terror, or what the Germans in World War I called the policy of "schrecklichkeit," except that the schreck must be limited lest it frighten the adversary into pushing his own doomsday button. As Dean summarizes it,

Dr. Kissinger argues for much more communication of our intentions to the enemy. He believes that it must know that our strength is great or we have lost the asset of a deterrent. He believes also that it must know that our objective is to end the aggression quickly by eliminating military targets lest we bring on an all-out thermonuclear war through a misunderstanding of our intentions [italics added]. He believes that if this message is not conveyed to the Soviet leaders we shall give ammunition to the advocates of peace at any price who are ready to accept any fate which does not involve force. I share this thesis with him.

A basic task, as Kissinger himself outlined it at one point, was to teach us to learn to live with the bomb and like it. "The decision to resist aggression by nuclear war," he wrote, "requires a diplomacy which seeks to break down the atmosphere of special horror which now surrounds the use of nuclear weapons."¹⁶ In part at least he blamed this horror on Soviet propaganda. "The utilization of nuclear weapons," he went on, should be "non-negotiable." We should emphasize instead "measures to mitigate their effect." He would shift "the focus of disarmament negotiations" from "eliminating the use of nuclear weapons to reducing the impact of their employment."

Such was the preposterous Strange-lovian nonsense with which our hero made his first step into public life. ☐

*(This is the first of two articles on Henry Kissinger.)*

The New York Review

November 21 1972.

# The Flowering of Henry Kissinger

Kissinger: The Uses of Power
by David Landau.
Houghton Mifflin, 270 pp., $5.95

Metternich
by Alan Palmer.
Harper & Row, 405 pp., $12.50

I. F. Stone

I

For a book that developed from the pages of the Harvard *Crimson* as part of the student revolt against the Vietnam war and Kissinger's part in it, David Landau's *Kissinger: The Uses of Power* opens with a prologue full of romantic nonsense. "Kissinger," he writes, "is not a man who blindly seeks power. . . . It is true that he has an unusual impulse toward power and authority, but it is an impulse that springs from a strong sense of personal mission. . . ." This sounds more like a press release from Herbert Klein than a put-down from a campus radical.

Or what is one to make of the passage in which Landau tells us, echoing one of Kissinger's favorite philosophers,

Hegel's belief in history as an organic process is really mystical in origin . . . it may perhaps best be described as an article of faith. It is a faith to which Kissinger adheres. His belief that the United States has global responsibilities . . . cannot be described as nationalistic or self-centered [my italics]; it is a vision exposed by Hegelian lumière.

Hegelian horsefeathers! Every imperialism in the last two centuries has broadcast mystical nonsense about its mission civilisatrice.

Worst of all is to be told that Kissinger's view of the US role in the world "might best be described as a kind of muscular liberalism, designed to defend a pluralistic world order and prevent the emergence of forces which might threaten it." That has been the

2

State Department line since the cold war began. "His opposition to wars of national liberation, brutal and unjustified though it has been," Landau continues, "does not spring from any desire to suppress movements for national independence and is not without its measure of compassion for the peoples who are fighting them." Compassion is one quality wholly lacking in everything Kissinger has ever written.

Landau concludes that Kissinger's opposition to wars of national liberation springs from the fear that "if such wars should appear to succeed, then other great powers with less noble intentions [my italics] will be spurred toward ideological quests." Those two Kissinger assistants Landau thanks for talking with him "at some length"—what poop did they feed this bright fledgling radical journalist to make him serve up such apologetic tripe?

"Wars of national liberation" is a new term for an old imperial problem—how to deal with popular unrest that threatens friendly or puppet regimes. We have been intervening against such movements for a century in Central America and the Caribbean. Kissinger has been concerned with them for a long time. He even launched new terms for them in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund report called "International Security: The Military Aspect," which was prepared under his direction.

This says we need to create a military establishment "diversified" enough in its weaponry and tactics to deal even with "concealed wars" or "non-overt aggression." The latter is a metaphysical hobgoblin well suited to the paranoia of the cold war. The report becomes clearer when it speaks of "concealed wars" which "may appear as internal revolution or civil war." It cites Greece and Vietnam as examples. This report was published in January, 1958, and shows how sensitive he and his Rockefeller patrons were even then to Indochina.

"The gradual penetration of a government by concealed foreign penetration" may present issues, the report said, which are "deliberately and intrinsically unclear." But "our security" and that of "the rest of the non-Communist world" may depend, the report urged, on our willingness to act in these unclear situations that "fit neither the soldier's classic concept of war nor the diplomat's classic concept of aggression."¹ That is how we acted against Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala and Papandreou in Greece. And that is how and why we are still in Vietnam today.

How little Kissinger's basic views have changed since those days may be seen in an excerpt Landau quotes from a file of "not for attribution" Kissinger backgrounder he obtained. Kissinger told the press at San Clemente on June 26, 1970, that the Administration felt that, "precisely because we are here not only to liquidate one war, but because we have a larger responsibility to try to create what we hope is to be a more lasting peace what we do in Vietnam has to be measured in terms larger than Vietnam itself." He said, "History teaches us that people do not forgive their leaders for producing disasters, even if what they do seems to reflect their immediate wishes." He illustrated this in another backgrounder Landau quotes by pointing out that Chamberlain, so popular right after Munich, was discredited eighteen months later.

This is the "papa knows best" attitude that has marked Vietnam policy from the beginning, the strabismic analogy that equates a nationalist uprising in Asia with the struggle against Hitlerism, and the smug assurance that ordinary people in Vietnam and at home must suffer and die in the name of History, a synonym for American face and prestige. The phrasing is more sententious but the lumière is the same as Lyndon's.

¹Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports (Doubleday, 1961), pp. 113-114.

3

II

As a quickie by a youngster just graduated from Harvard, Landau's book is a feat, the debut of a young man who will go far, I believe, in American journalism. Much in his account of Kissinger is useful and grossing but written too swiftly, at times contradictory and not always reliable. The most sensational revelation in the book does not check out. He says at one point (p. 71) that when the Berlin wall went up, Kissinger recommended to President Kennedy that he "order an invasion of the Eastern sector" to tear it down. At another point (pp. 62-63) he says Kissinger's recommendations at the time "embodied a willingness to threaten Moscow with the use of tactical [nuclear?] weapons over Soviet behavior in the divided city." This, if true, would make Kissinger quite a giddy brinksman.

But Landau gives no source for the second statement. The first he credits to Daniel Ellsberg in a footnote which says, "Other officials also knew of the Kissinger recommendation." The other officials are not named, and Ellsberg denies he told Landau that Kissinger had made such a recommendation at the time to President Kennedy. All Ellsberg says is that Kissinger, in a conversation with Ellsberg many months later, said, "We should have knocked the wall down." One unnamed Landau source, who was not an official, told me he heard the same story but as hearsay and furnished the names of two others he said would really know. They both denied ever hearing the story before and both said the idea that Kissinger would make so reckless a recommendation was "out of character." Kissinger himself, when asked, sent word through his secretary that the story was "total outrageous nonsense."

At other times, despite his strong bias, Landau can be amazingly uncritical. When he describes the atmosphere of the Fifties in which Kissinger became an adviser on foreign and

military policy, Landau accepts wholesale many of the premises and pretenses of the cold war. At one point he speaks of the postwar research institutes which sprang up "at Harvard and across the country" and says they "mass produced" a "whole generation of philosopher kings." It would have been more sober to note that most of them were financed directly or indirectly by the Pentagon and that what they mass produced was not philosopher kings but military intellectuals, gurus for the gilded ashrams of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Air Force. We have already seen in our first installment (NYR, October 19) in how many of these Kissinger joined other consultants in military meditation.

Landau's description of the Fifties swallows all its stereotypes. "These were the frightful days of Stalin," he writes,

> ... the days of valiant Cold War confrontation, with the nations of the Free World locked in deadly combat with an ever-expanding Communist Bloc. And as a counterpoise to a hyperbolically growing Soviet world, there arose a "structuralist" tendency in American foreign policy....

All this overblown writing obscures the realities and echoes American propaganda. Is this how they teach recent American history at Harvard?

I would put the activity of these cold-war intellectuals in a very different perspective. To see the whole period clearly one must go back to that blinding flash over Hiroshima. It gave some of the most benighted a moment of vision. Only last March the State Department declassified and printed for the first time a secret memorandum written a quarter century ago shortly after the first bomb fell. The memo, virtually unnoticed when it was released, was written by the general who headed the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb. "If the peoples of the major powers of the world really knew or could understand the peril inherent in

4

atomic weapons," Major General Leslie R. Groves wrote, "they would demand of their various governments a real solution to the problem of war."²

Henry Kissinger's writings and activity in the Fifties and Sixties must be seen as part of the movement to blur that vision. A whole generation of intellectuals, operating in the plush orbit of the Pentagon and the Council on Foreign Relations, worked to let institutional inertia and ancient habits have their way. They rationalized a nuclear arms race which immeasurably increased the peril. They distracted attention from the need for a wholly new world order. Instead of helping men to move away from catastrophe, they sold them that lunatic formulation, "the balance of terror," an adaptation to the atomic age of the power politics already proven bankrupt by two world wars.

This generation of sometimes weirdo geopoliticians was not the fruit of a mental epidemic. It was a response to an urgent demand. After World War II, an American century seemed to have begun. American capitalism was expanding into every continent in the vacuum created by the devastation of its business rivals. But the new dangers seemed as great as the new opportunities. Soviet power had moved halfway across Europe to the Elbe. China was falling to communism. A Third World was rising as the old empires fell apart.

An even more fundamental threat was the technological revolution in warfare. For a century US investments in Latin America had been protected by gunboat diplomacy. Behind the Monroe Doctrine were the marines. The Truman Doctrine was the Monroe Doctrine extended. But how could the new investments in Europe, Asia, and Africa be safeguarded if people began to believe that war had become too

dangerous a game to play? How to maintain an empire without a credible threat to use force? How to maintain a credible threat without a public conditioned to live with the bomb and like it?

"The acid test of a policy," Kissinger wrote in his book on Metternich, "is its ability to obtain domestic support." In 1955, the year he left Harvard to work for the Council on Foreign Relations, the effects of Hiroshima had yet to wear off. Even General MacArthur that year told the American Legion war was now obsolete. His speech, though he sounded in it like Bertrand Russell, was made available to an audience of millions by *The Reader's Digest*. It undercut the very basis of the cold war and the arms race. General MacArthur said these were fueled "by two great illusions," the Soviet fear that we were "preparing to attack them" and our fear "that the Soviets are preparing to attack us." He said both were wrong, that war could "mean nothing but mutual disaster." "But," he warned, "the constant acceleration of preparation may well, without specific intent, produce a spontaneous combustion."³

These are illusions Marshal Grechko and Admiral Moorer still cherish. In spite of the hopes aroused by SALT I, "the feverish activity in developing new and deadlier weapons" which MacArthur then assailed has if anything been speeded up. The only course of safety, the old warrior pleaded, was construction of a new world order in which armies could be reduced to the minimum required for "internal order and international police." For the Pentagon this was far more subversive than anything in Marx or Lenin. It threatened the military with technological unemployment.

Thanks to the labors of the military intellectuals, nobody of prominence talks that way any more. The last major occasion was Kennedy's American University speech in June, 1963,

²Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Vol. 1, General: *The United Nations*, released March 16, 1972. Supt. of Documents, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. $7.25, 1,544 pages. The quotation is from page 1202. The volume is an untapped gold mine for students of how US military and diplomatic policy was shaped in the wake of the nuclear age. General Grove's own solution was a Pax Americana.

³The full text of the speech may be found on page 212 of *A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur* (Praeger, 1965). The speech, abridged, appeared in the May, 1955, *Reader's Digest*.

5

his greatest. Of course, had Kissinger
been swept away by such sentiments in
the Fifties, he might by now hope to
occupy as high a post in Washington as
executive secretary of the National
Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.

III

In his books and in the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund report of 1957-1958 on
"International Security: The Military
Aspect" which was prepared under his
direction, Kissinger, like his hero Met-
ternich, put his great talents and
greater energies at the service of a
rickety and anachronistic order. "The
willingness to engage in nuclear war
when necessary," said the Rockefeller
report, "is part of the price of our
freedom."⁴ This, the ferocious conven-
tional wisdom of the Pentagon, runs
like a *leitmotiv* throughout his work.
The only shifts were tactical. *Nuclear
Weapons and Foreign Policy*, published
in 1957, placed its reliance on small
nuclear weapons and limited nuclear
war. *The Necessity for Choice*, pub-
lished in 1961, backed away from
limited nuclear war in favor of building
up strong conventional forces,⁵ but
rejected the idea of a "no first use"

⁴The report was released January 6, 1958, with the notation that it was prepared under the direction of Kissinger, who was director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund project until June 30 of that year. All the reports published by the Fund from 1958 to 1961 were published in one volume by Doubleday in 1961 under the general title *Prospect for America*. The report on Military Security begins on page 93 and this quotation is from page 117. Among the panel members who worked on the Military Security report were Dr. Edward Teller, the late Henry Luce, Roswell Gilpatric, Townsend Hoopes, Gordon Dean, Frank Altshul, two retired generals, and Col. George A. Lincoln, professor of social science at West Point. Kissinger's two old friends and patrons William Y. Elliott and Fritz G. A. Kraemer are listed among "Consultants and Authors" at the end of the collected reports on pp. 466-467.

⁵The reversal may be found on pages 75-81 of *The Necessity for Choice* (Harper & Row, 1961). Kissinger's preface says the chapters on strategy

agreement because "it would be ex-
tremely risky to create the impression
that we would acquiesce in a conven-
tional defeat in vital areas."⁶

All these cool calculations make
nuclear war sound very antiseptic.
Human suffering and moral qualm do
not penetrate the insulated walls of
Kissinger's thinking. In *machtpolitik*
such considerations are irrelevant.

The Rockefeller report on military
security was about as militaristic in its
thinking as if it had been written at
the Pentagon. It was for a sharp
increase in the military budget: "Where
the security of the United States and
the free world is at stake, cost cannot
be the basic consideration."⁷ In the
great national debate on the fallout
danger and nuclear testing, it sup-
ported those who opposed a test ban,
taking the line of Edward Teller—the
only scientist on the panel—that an
end to testing would be positively
inhumane because it would prevent us
from developing "clean" bombs and an
ABM.⁸ Fallout was not so dangerous,
but peril lurked in disarmament nego-
tiations. We must not be "seduced by
Soviet slogans, which in the past have
used these negotiations as a means to
disarm their intended victims. The
nature of disarmament must be under-
stood if peace and not slavery is to
result from efforts to attain it" (p.
143). This was the standard model
demonology of the time.

owe a great deal to his work at the
Council on Foreign Relations in
1958-1959 as research secretary for a
discussion group on "Political and
Strategic Problems of Deterrence." The
names of those participating are given
in the preface and include many of the
same people who were on the earlier
panel on nuclear weapons he served
and on the military security panel at
the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Among
new names are Robert Amory, then
deputy director of the CIA; Dean
Rusk, soon to be Kennedy's Secretary
of State; and H. Rowan Gaither of the
famous never-published but alarmist
"Gaither Report" on national defense
in 1957 which the Eisenhower Ad-
ministration refused to release. It
called for a $22 billion fallout-shelter
program and readiness for limited nu-
clear war (Facts on File 1957, p. 413).

⁶The Necessity for Choice, p. 91.

⁷*Prospect for America*, p. 155.

⁸See pp. 146-147.

IV

The best clues to Kissinger as a diplomat still lie in his study of Metternich. Nothing would have surprised Kissinger's hero more than to be told that a century and a half later he would be held up as an admirable example to the ruling class in an anxious America. He regarded the American republic as the source of a "flood of evil doctrines and pernicious examples."⁹ The republic returned the compliment by promulgating the Monroe Doctrine to keep his "evil system" out of the New World.

In his secret memorandum to the Tzar Alexander, Metternich located the "moral gangrene" and revolutionary danger of their time in the "new middle classes,"¹⁰ the upstarts of wealth and talent challenging the established aristocratic order in Europe and ruling unchallenged in America. Liberalism and nationalism were the subversive doctrines Metternich set himself to oppose. One of his main weapons was a ubiquitous secret political police.¹¹ It is no wonder that liberal and nationalist historians alike regarded the period of his ascendancy from 1815 to 1848 as one of monstrous reaction. "It was Metternich's misfortune," as Kissinger put it, "that history in the latter half of the nineteenth century was written by his opponents, to whom he was anathema by principle and policy."¹²

A more favorable revisionist view of Metternich, from which Kissinger's work derives, began to appear in the Twenties. The break-up of the Hapsburg empire at Versailles in the name of national "self-determination" had proven disappointing. The Balkanization of the Danube basin and the inability of the mutually jealous successor states to find a substitute in

voluntary cooperation led to a general disillusion with liberalism and nationalism. The newly liberated nationalisms in power often tended to become reactionary and more ungenerous with their minorities than the old empires had been with them. In Italy and Germany, nationalism soon took the extreme form of fascism and Nazism. A nostalgia for the old order led to a reassessment of Metternich.

Kissinger's revisionist view of Metternich as an heir of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and as a Good European, a preserver of peace by a wise and agile manipulation of the balance of power, had its origin in Vienna in 1925, in a huge two-volume biography by a Pan-German Austrian historian, von Srbik.¹³ The cosmopolitan Metternich, who spoke and wrote French by preference and was rather disdainful of his countrymen, seems a strange hero for a Pan-German. How can you equate a Good European with a Pan-German? Von Srbik seems to have arrived at this position by a kind of corkscrew logic. He disliked Bismarck because the latter had excluded Austria from the German Reich, while Metternich had taken Austria into a German Confederation, albeit a very weak one.

During the Twenties, Austria, stripped of empire, seemed a head without a body. Von Srbik was so strongly for Austrian *Anschluss* with Germany that he welcomed Hitler's annexation of it and ended up in the Nazi camp. For that he lost his chair in modern history at the University of Vienna when the war was over. His politics were as muddy as his prose, as has happened all too often in the nation of "Dichter und Denker" poets and thinkers,¹⁴ as the Germans liked to describe themselves in the heyday of Kultur and Kaiser.

⁹Metternich's *Europe* edited by Mack Walker (Harper & Row, 1968), p. 12.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 119.

¹¹In *The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma*, Stendhal has pictured the kind of ambitious young men they watched and the intimidating atmosphere they created.

¹²*A World Restored* (Grosset & Dunlap, 1964, paperback edition), p. 319.

¹³Metternich, *Der Staatsmann und der Mensch*.

¹⁴A better conservative defense of Metternich than Kissinger's came from Peter Vierëck in his more incisive and less wordy *Conservativism Revisited* (1949). He credits Metternich with sensing the proto-Nazi tendencies in German nationalists like Jahn and Kleist, both heroes later of Nazism. Goethe and Heine had similar fore-

7

The packaging of Kissinger's study of Metternich was admirably suited to the Fifties. The very title *A World Restored* was, as an advertising man might say, subliminally soothing. The subtitle, "The Politics of Conservation in a Revolutionary Age," seemed to offer exactly what the worried American big businessman was looking for: How to keep what he had in a world of change. The answer on the very first page sounded satisfactorily profound and reassuringly familiar. Even in an age facing "the threat of thermonuclear extinction," it was not wise, Kissinger wrote, to make peace "the overriding concern." Whenever "the international order has acknowledged that certain principles could not be compromised even for the sake of peace," he put it, ponderously and slowly, as if extruding a new axiom in the philosophy of statecraft, "stability based on an equilibrium of forces was at least conceivable." This is our old friend "better dead than Red" in glossier wrappings.

V

The Metternich Kissinger portrayed was an enemy of appeasement, a man of principle, a conservative, though-able scholar that he is—Kissinger added enough qualifications and caveats to protect his flanks. The fact is that this interpretation is open to challenge on all three counts. Metternich did his best to appease Napoleon, even to the point of arranging his marriage with a Hapsburg. It was not until Napoleon had ruined the Grand Armée in Russia, and even then was blindly and compulsively unable to settle down and

bodings. But none of this appears in Kissinger's study of Metternich. By the Fifties such perspectives were out of fashion since the US was grooming Germany as its major ally on the continent. Viereck acknowledges that he, too, had "drawn heavily on Srbik for his information, not necessarily for his interpretations and certainly not for his later politics" (footnote 2, p. 139).

compromise, that Metternich finally-like a jackal-joined in a sure kill.

Largely from Metternich's self-serving *Nachgelassenen Papieren*, Kissinger has culled bouquets of sententious sayings to demonstrate his hero's principles. I think that Alan Palmer in the preface to his new biography of Metternich has disposed very swiftly of these pretensions. Palmer says the principles "pompously propounded over the years in earnest memoranda heavy with profundity" (how like much of Kissinger's own output!) provided Metternich "with a code of respectable obscurity in which he might envelop what was basically a day-to-day and hand-to-mouth policy" and that his were "victories of intrigue rather than of creative conviction, triumphs of expediency more than of principle."

As for being a conservative, Metternich can more justly be described as a standpatter. Unlike Disraeli and Bismarck, he never tried to shore up the existing order by social reform. Kissinger defends his hero by saying in effect that the nature of the Austro-Hungarian empire and of his monarch Francis I made such constructive social conservatism impossible.¹⁵ The emperor was about as banal and shallow as Kissinger's own master, Nixon.

Another of the resemblances one suspects between Kissinger and the Austrian statesman is that neither would risk his political neck by pressing his

¹⁵Kissinger follows Srbik in implying that Metternich was more enlightened than Francis I. But a more recent work by Julius Marx on the Austrian censorship shows that "Metternich fully shared the repressive ideals of Francis I." ("Metternich Studies Since 1955," by Paul W. Schroeder, *Journal of Modern History*, September, 1961; p. 255. This is a most useful study of the literature on the subject since Srbik's work appeared in 1955. Schroeder calls attention to three more recent works in German which "reinforce the general conclusion that in respect to censorship and secret police, at least, Metternich, despite his disclaimers, did rule Austria.")

8

master too hard. The only aspect of domestic policy in which the otherwise rather indolent Metternich took a strong hand was in the censorship and the secret police. He seems to have seen plots everywhere. From the Decembrists in Russia to the carbonari in Sicily, he saw one vast international revolutionary conspiracy. He was even suspicious of Bible societies. In this our two statesmen differ. Kissinger's touch of paranoia seems to be personal rather than political.

Metternich's real gifts—like Kissinger's—were those of a glorified con man: what better definition, after all, of the talented diplomatist? As fate closed in on Napoleon, and Metternich had to make up his mind when and on which side Austria would stand, he talked one way in private to the Russians, another to the Prussians, and still another to the French. In the thicket of Metternich studies scholarly controversy still rages over just whom he was diddling in 1813. The balance-of-power game as he played it was indeed a masterpiece of escroquerie and prestidigitation. "Though he prided himself on a logical scientific approach to political problems," Palmer sums it up, "his gifts were those of an artist." This is what so dazzled his colleagues and contemporaries, and this is what dazzles Kissinger's, for in this the two men are much alike. Kissinger has a positive genius for ambiguity. His evasions are so nimble they are aesthetically pleasurable even while frustrating. He deserves to be Secretary of State, both as reward and in punishment.

Kissinger has conned his way to the top in Washington; he is a master of the seductive arts. Amid the dull plastic men at the White House he shines out by his self-disparaging humor (in this he is Jewish rather than German), by his wit, and by his sophistication. He says what Nixon says, but with a smoothness and subtlety that stirs admiration. He is willing to listen to opposing points of view with an understanding often deceptive; the understanding look is often taken for agreement. He can, without compromising himself, create

the most contradictory impressions, depending on whom he happens to be talking to and wishes to impress. The newspapermen—and despite the hard-boiled stereotype we are all pretty naïve and pushovers for a bit of charm—call him “Henry” affectionately. A little of his performance may even rub off on his master.

He is a skillful actor. With peaceniks he makes himself out a bit of a martyr, a hurt and misunderstood little Jewish boy. He not only makes you feel he understands your concerns; he is good at telling you what your concerns are. He asks what you would do in his place—a skillful way of creating a bond between him and his interlocutor.

With those on the other side he is the hard-boiled master of realpolitik who will not sacrifice one jota of American interest. Thus while he tells one side that the North Vietnamese could have what they want if they would only trust him and be patient and stop being such pernickety "little lawyers"—as he recently put it to Norman Mailer—he tells journalists on the right that he is working to maintain American power in Vietnam. I have not talked to him myself but you can collect quite an anthology of contradictory impressions from people who have. You can hear that he was opposed to the Cambodian incursion and the Haiphong mining and you can hear that he considered them necessary bargaining tools, and I believe the latter is in character and more likely.

Another trait which has facilitated his rise to power is that he sees absolutely no sense in doing anything which he thinks would be unsuccessful. He will not venture an idea which he thinks might be unpopular. Opportunism he calls “timing.” He is ready now, though often still only in private, to admit that certain ideas bolder men put forward in the Forties or Fifties were quite right, but untimely. In this he is, for all his academic background, as much a politician as Nixon.

Metternich's personal talents in confining his opposite numbers in diplomacy gave him a great deal of leverage.

9

By sheer charm and brains he often won what a faltering empire could not have achieved had it relied simply on power. The power equation of Metternich's time was very different from that of today; there is no analogy between the crumbling hulk of the Holy Roman Empire and the United States. There was no revolutionary technological change whose magnitude matches nuclear firepower. What Metternich showed was how effective personal talents could be in diplomacy, and this I believe Kissinger may be demonstrating again today, particularly in the great turnabout of American policy represented by the reopening of relations with China and the new detente with Moscow. These took commanding skills at negotiating and for this history will credit Kissinger; the communist capitals, after all, tend to be most suspicious when offered what they had most wanted. Yet if one looks more closely at the unexpected rapprochement, this, too, was a matter of timing.

## VI

Nothing in Kissinger's past, just as nothing in Nixon's, prepared us for this turnabout—except for certain hints dropped in the 1968 campaign which no one took seriously; they were so out of keeping with the records of both men. Kissinger was foreign policy adviser and speechwriter for Nelson Rockefeller in the struggle for the nomination that year. Two of Rockefeller's major but little noticed speeches are examples of what we all overlooked. The first, in May, called for "a dialogue with Communist China" and a friendlier relationship with the Soviet Union so that a Vietnam solution could be achieved "in the wide context of world relations." The second indicated the goodies that would be available to the Soviet Union if it helped out in Vietnam and stopped exploiting "local tensions, as in the Middle East." Rockefeller offered Moscow "most favored nation" status, a diminution of export controls, and "the widest scientific and cultural exchange." To top it all, Rockefeller, who had constantly

criticized Eisenhower for spending too little on defense, now advocated a letup in the arms race.¹⁶

We can now see that Nixon was thinking along similar lines. We now know from the book by his former speechwriter Richard J. Whalen that his so-called "secret plan" for peace was to buy a favorable settlement in Vietnam in return for economic and political concessions to Moscow and Peking.¹⁷ Looking back with hindsight one can now understand the signals Nixon sent up in August of 1968 when he told a press conference his view of communism had changed now that it was no longer monolithic and that an "era of confrontation" had ended and an era of negotiation begun. To the Republican platform committee he said the Vietnam war must be ended by negotiation but that success in the negotiation would depend on having a conference table made "wide enough, and the issues placed on it broad enough, to accommodate as many as possible of the powers and interests involved,"¹⁸ i.e., set for a big power deal. Here, too, was the shape of things to come.

Just as it is not easy until later to pick out what is significant in the din of conflicting statements during a Presidential campaign, so it is not easy for contemporaries to see the full significance of such turnabouts as the current change in American relations with China and the Soviet Union. The

¹⁶The first was to the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia, May 1 (reprinted in *Vital Speeches*); the second before the International Platform Association in Washington, July 26. I tracked down the text through the Rockefeller office.

¹⁷See his *Catch the Falling Flag*, and my review of it in the *New York Review*, June 1. The book gives the text of the "secret plan" speech scheduled for March, 31, 1968, but cancelled when Johnson suddenly went on the air that night and bowed out of the campaign for re-election.

¹⁸See *Facts on File* for 1968 at 322C1 and A2, and 323E3.

10

convergence of Rockefeller's views with Nixon's in 1968 can only reflect a new consensus in the American capitalist class. These matters are well chewed over in the bankers' clubs and corporate board rooms before their regurgitation in the common cud of campaign discussion.

I believe the turnabout will be seen by the historian as a product of three developments. The Russian ICBMs made America vulnerable for the first time to devastating attack no matter how formidable its military arsenal and its ability to destroy Russia in return. As the new fact of strategy sank in, a policy of "sphere of influence" began to be seen as a necessity. A second factor was the resurgence of Japan and Western Europe to the point where their competition in the struggle for markets and resources became far more real and painful than ideological differences with Moscow and Peking. We began to look to China as a counterweight to Japan, and to Russia as a counterweight to Western Europe.

This was the old balance of power game. It was intensified by a desire to get to the untapped resources of Siberia and the potential market for capital goods in the Soviet Union before the Japanese or the Germans could. The third factor, of course, was the desire to bypass the Vietnam war and create a situation that would make possible a favorable or at least face-saving settlement in Vietnam.

The turnabout was facilitated by the fact that the Republicans were in power. Had the Democrats attempted it, the anachronistic ideological issue would have been exploited against them. The SALT agreements, the heavily subsidized wheat deal, and the trade concessions to Moscow would have been attacked as sell-outs to the Soviet Union for which the Administration had gotten in return (so far) only "atmospherics" for use in the current election campaign. As for the Peking visit, it would have been aspired as a betrayal of Nationalist China and the abandonment of the Far East to the Reds.

The Democrats out of power, on the other hand, can hardly attack policies of detente their better men have long

advocated, just as it is hard for them to attack wage-price controls for which they—and George Meany—have long called. So the opposition to the turnabout was reduced to an impotent fringe on the right, and Richard the Red giant-killer turned up in the nick of time to bale Moscow out of a serious food crisis. History, destiny, fate or providence—never did they act so whimsically. These are the strings on which Kissinger danced to power. This is the route which leads Metternich's pupil and America's policy toward an unholy alliance with Moscow and Peking.

## VII

There would be little ground here for euphoria even if we were not savagely bombing the Indochinese peninsula day after day in the heaviest air assault of all time. For small nations as for large, there is no safety in the balance of power game. "The only time in the history of the world that we have had any external period of peace," Nixon said last January, echoing Kissinger and Metternich, "is when there has been balance of power.... I think it will be a safer world if we have a strong healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance."

"Even balance"? What even balance is there today between China and Russia, one among the poorest of nations, the other a nuclear superpower? Or between America and Japan, when the former is now registering its fifth annual $3 billion plus trade deficit with the latter—a process which has been depleting our gold reserves and fattening Japan's to the point where the latter threatens the downfall of the dollar? The Nixon-Connally rudeness to Japan was no simple lapse in finesse but the reflection of a deep and long-smoldering envy and resentment, the first open sign of a renewed rivalry.

There never was an even balance in all history. The periods of peace were preparations for new wars, breathing

11

spells to wait for a fresh crop of young men. What look like clever combinations and skillful agreements to the chancelleries are risings and fallings as irrational as the waves of the sea. "That five-power, balance of power thesis," McGovern rightly said in his City Club speech on the new internationalism, "attempts to force on the contemporary world a naive pre-nuclear view dating back to the nineteenth century and before." And "Mr. Nixon forgets," McGovern continued, "that no balance among the giants can eradicate the causes of war among the rest of mankind, nor can it dispel the demand of some 140 countries to have a say in the issues which determine their survival."

Even the "balance among the giants" cannot eradicate the causes of war among them. A world without law, a jungle of prowling beasts, each apprehensive of the other, can have no balance and enjoy no "repose"—a favorite word of both Metternich and Kissinger.

The Concert of Europe over which Metternich presided was dissonant from the start. In fifteen years it was confined to Central and Eastern Europe. Revolutions in 1830 and 1848 shook its worm-eaten foundations and led to Metternich's downfall. The balance of power system stimulated an ever more onerous arms race, split Europe into hostile blocs, and led inescapably to the First World War, in whose trenches men suffered the greatest bloodletting they had ever known. When it was over, men tried to get away from balance of power politics, to limit national sovereignty—a euphemism for the right to kill—and to create a world confederation. Their failure led to another unsteady balance of power, a new arms race which ended in World War II, and another attempt at a world organization. But the United Nations was soon pushed aside by a new "balance" of hostile blocs and mounting arms expenditures. Here we go again.

It is time to read again the old warnings and listen again to the saner but forgotten voices. In every so-called balance of power, Woodrow Wilson

warned the Senate in 1919 when he begged it to accept the League of Nations, there lies concealed a "terror." Never was that truer than today when we live with its most precarious and perilous form—the nuclear "balance of terror." Let us listen to his words and try and imagine the terrible carnage from which they sprang. I cannot reread them without tears when I think of what their failure cost Wilson and the world:

> War had lain at the heart of every arrangement of the Europe-of every arrangement of the world-that preceded the war. Restive peoples had been told that fleets and armies, which they toiled to sustain, meant peace; and they now knew that they had been lied to: that fleets and armies had been maintained to promote national ambitions and meant war. They knew that no old policy meant anything else but force, force-always force. And they knew that it was intolerable..

Every true heart in the world, and every enlightened judgment demanded that, at whatever cost of independent action, every government that took thought for its people or for justice or for ordered freedom should lend itself to a new purpose and utterly destroy the old order of international politics. Statesmen might see difficulties, but the people could see none and could brook no denial. A war in which they had been bled white to beat the terror that lay concealed in every Balance of Power must not end in a mere victory of arms and a new balance. The monster that has resorted to arms must be put in chains that could not be broken.¹⁹

How many more wars can this planet take before men are cured of the old delusions Nixon and Kissinger propagate? ☐

*(This is the second of two articles on Henry Kissinger.)*

¹⁹Quoted from *War and Peace: The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson*, edited by Baker and Dodd, Vol. 1, pp. 547-548 (Harper and Row, 1927).

# The Nixon-Kissinger team

By Roscoe Drummond

Point of view

Washington

No single political person looms larger in Washington today than Henry Kissinger who isn't running for anything and probably never will.

At the National Press Club the other day he received a standing ovation when he walked in beside his longtime friend and patron, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. He wasn't even making a speech.

For weeks he has been getting the most favorable headlines and now more than ever with a Vietnam cease-fire, which he negotiated, within reach.

## Building blocks

So much in world affairs has been going right so steadily for so many months that one can hardly fail to wonder who's doing it all or most of it? Who is the architect and who is the builder?

The underpinnings of a more stable world have been put in place in this momentous year and the names of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger both have to appear on these four huge building blocks:

1. The first crucial step to limit the perilous nuclear arms race in the SALT agreements with the Soviets.

2. Improved relations with the People's Republic of China.

3. The first visit of an American president to the

Soviet capital which carried forward a muting of the cold war and brought wide-ranging joint enterprises between Russia and the U.S.

4. The patient, complex, successful negotiations with the North Vietnamese bringing an imminent cease-fire.

## Team accomplishments

These are monumental accomplishments. They are primarily the accomplishments of the Nixon-Kissinger team, but not entirely. The first steps toward negotiation with Hanoi were taken by President Johnson, and both LBJ and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara helped open the minds of the Soviet leaders to see that a sufficiency of nuclear arms was better for each than the dangerous costly attempt to get superiority.

The evolving relationship between the President and Kissinger is a fascinating subject to Washington correspondents who have watched them operate together.

Nixon had not known Kissinger before they met for the first time in the president-elect's working suite at the Pierre Hotel in New York shortly after the election. At the end of an afternoon's conversation Nixon knew he wanted Kissinger for what he had in mind. They got on well at once and trust and intimacy have matured.

Example: The President used to read every word of the cabled pages and pages of verbatim transcript which poured into the White House every night during the long, secret talks Kissinger was having with the Hanoi negotiators. Nixon gave it up, because he soon saw that his agent was always saying the right thing, was never mistake-prone.

## The right man

Each brought much to the service of the other. Kissinger brought a lucid, analytical, creative intellect immersed for years in the expertise of foreign policy.

The President provided a cool, pragmatic, independent mind, a willingness to move in new directions — as with China and the Soviet Union — whenever breaking with the past seemed wise and necessary.

The goals — on SALT, on unlocking the door to China, on détente, on getting Moscow to help bring the Vietnam war to a negotiated settlement — these goals were Nixon's from the start.

Kissinger helped immeasurably to realize them. I incline to think he was indispensable. Their roles are not competitive; they are complementary.

President-Elect Nixon felt he had the right man after one three-hour conversation in November, 1968, and he has never doubted it.

Wherever Henry Goes...

By JOY BILLINGTON

Star-News Staff Writer

In a burst of flashbulbs, Henry Kissinger arrived at the South Vietnamese Embassy last night to help that controversial country celebrate its national day.

And in a moment, guests who had been sedately sipping drinks crowded around the man-of-the-moment, whispering congratulations and advice in his ear, jamming into photographs with him, shaking his hand and thrusting themselves through the mob to introduce themselves.

KISSINGER himself, looking relaxed and good-humored, modestly disclaimed the congratulations he received for having almost achieved a peace settlement in Vietnam.

"What have I done?" he murmured, almost shrugging his shoulders.

Heading through the crowd of newsmen gathering around him, the presidential aide answered another question. "There's no hang-up in Saigon.

"I'm uniting Vietnam, and both halves are screaming at me."

He moved toward the dining room, smiling benignly: "I love Vietnamese food."

Peace, Dr. Kissinger answered another question, "is coming through. I think so."

Declining to tell when he might be leaving for another round of negotiations in Paris or Saigon, Kissinger accepted an offer of a drink from a Vietnamese embassy official, and started to sip a tomato juice.

"Every fifteen minutes some member of the press corps calls me and takes my temperature," he quipped, moving toward Gen. Creighton Abrams, U.S. Army chief of staff, to exchange a few words.

As Kissinger tried to talk with Abrams, Mrs. Abrams was almost crushed against a door.

"I get all sorts of credit," Kissinger went on, as guests leaned toward him trying to catch his words.

"First I announce what we're going to do. Then I announce it three more times. Then we do it."

To the dean of the diplomatic corps, Ambassador Sevilla Sacasa of Nicaragua, Dr. Kissinger offered his services. "But you haven't any problems... or I'd be glad to come down" (to Latin America).

THERE WAS NO beautiful girl on Kissinger's arm last night, perhaps because it was an "all-business" appearance in the middle of a time of serious negotiations to end a problem that has beleaguered the world for over two decades. Gen. Alexander Haig, Kissinger's deputy in Paris, accompanied him.

"I'm his usual girl friend," Haig joked.

After fighting his way through the embassy's main hall toward the dining room, Kissinger (who didn't actually get to the table loaded with delicacies) started to make his way back.

He stopped at one point to pose with his hostess, Mrs. Tran Kim Phuong, wife of the Vietnamese ambassador, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs William Sullivan, who accompanied him to Paris recently for negotiations with the North Vietnamese.

As the three stood waiting for their picture to be taken, a youngish-looking woman from Rockville, Mrs. Judith Pretka, managed what she had been trying to achieve for most of Kissinger's 25-minute visit. She slipped in for the picture and stood beside Kissinger, who looked slightly surprised, wondering who she was.

Continued on Page D-3

Henry Kissinger:
“I’ve been uniting
Vietnam, and now
both sides are screaming
at me. But I think
it will all work out.”

Hero at
Vietnam
Embassy

By Dorothy McCardle

Dr. Henry Kissinger, architect of the new peace plan for Vietnam, attended the National Day reception at the Embassy of South Vietnam last night. And he got a hero's welcome from American and foreign diplomats who crowded around him.

"Congratulations!" were shouted at him.

"What have I done?" he countered with a bland grin. But, he added: "I've been uniting Vietnam, and now both sides are screaming at me. But I think it will all work out."

Ambassador Bui Diem was not there to welcome Kissinger because he was called home to Saigon by President Thieu 10 days ago. Mrs. Diem welcomed Kissinger and posed for many pictures with him, and so did the Charge d'Affaires Phung Nhat Minh.

Kissinger, in his first appearance at a diplomatic reception since his peace announcement, arrived shortly after 7 p.m., accompanied by his long-time deputy, Brig. Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., who is now vice chief of staff of the Army and a peace negotiator with Kissinger.

The President's foreign policy trouble shooter stayed about 25 minutes, long enough to make a public demonstration of support for the U.S. increasingly anxious allies. He asked for a glass of tomato juice in the front hall. Then he found himself surrounded by newspaper persons as he drank it down.

"Newspapermen keep calling me up every 15 minutes taking my temperature," he said, "and here they are all around me, and it looks like I'm holding a press conference.

Then he glanced at the newswomen. "As long as it's a female press conference, I don't mind."

Kissinger then slowly made his way to the dining room where he nibbled on some Vietnamese hors d'oeuvres ("I love Vietnamese food," he said,) and had a chat with Gen. Creighton Abrams, the Army chief of staff.

A Vietnamese rushed up

See KISSINGER, C3, Col. 4

By Larry Morris—The Washington Post

Nicaragua Ambassador Guillermo Sevilla-Sarcasa and Henry Kissinger at the South Vietnam embassy last night.