8/25/92

Suzanne,

Attached, with review of the Isaacson book
by Mr. Hyland, appears in the current
FALL 1992 issue of *Foreign Affairs*. This
extract is just FYI for Dr. Kissinger,
from Mr. Hyland.

Thanks,

97

I feel
on
ad-
ories
One
on

the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, and Robert Lovemore.

THE END OF THE COLD WAR: ITS MEANING AND IMPLICATIONS. Edited by Michael J. Hogan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 275 pp. $44.95 (paper, $13.95).

This is a stimulating collection of essays mainly by diplomatic historians. Most of them appeared in *Diplomatic History*, the admirable journal of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, which Michael Hogan also edits. They tend toward the revisionist side, but are sufficiently diverse to arouse the reader's interest. As Raymond Garthoff notes in his own essay: "It was the Soviet threat, real or imagined, that generated the American dedication to waging the Cold War. . . . The revisionist interpretation errs in attributing initiative and design to American diplomacy, but it is not entirely wrong."

GEORGE F. KENNAN AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1947-1950. By Wilson D. Miscamble. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 1992, 419 pp. $35.00.

Another book about George Kennan would seem redundant, but this volume is a good analytical examination of American foreign policy as seen through the lens of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, which Kennan led from 1947 until 1950. As such it embraces much more than the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The author insists that there was no grand design to American policy in these years, but one is impressed by the pervasive and lucid intellect of Ambassador Kennan.

THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLD WAR. By John Lewis Gaddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 285 pp. $24.95.

A collection of the author's essays, most of which have already appeared elsewhere, but have been revised. Well worth perusing nevertheless. The last essay, "Toward the post-Cold War World," is a stimulating examination of the conflict between the traditional desire for international integration and new forces of fragmentation, so obviously now at work in Europe.

KISSINGER: A BIOGRAPHY. By Walter Isaacson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, 711 pp. $30.00.

The first full-scale biography of the former secretary of state that examines not only his public life and policy but his origins and his activities since leaving office. While not an "authorized" biography, the author enjoyed some access to many of Kissinger's friends and colleagues (including this reviewer), as well as to Kissinger's family. This does not mean that the book is uncritical; on the whole the author strives for and achieves a balanced objectivity, though this reviewer would disagree with some of his judgments about policy. Written with an engaging flair, it suffers slightly from the journalist's tendency to write episodes. For a new generation of

NA
1303

197

the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, and Robert E. L. Stetson.

## THE END OF THE COLD WAR: ITS MEANING AND IMPLICATIONS.

## GEORGE F. KENNAN AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, 1947-1950.

## THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLD WAR.

## KISSINGER: A BIOGRAPHY.

["NAME: UPDATE PAGE: 4 SESS: 4 OUTPUT: Thu Aug 6 12:18:53 1992\n/303/team3/foreignaff/5775/boo", "Fall 1992\nForeign Affairs", "RECENT BOOKS 197", "of overwriting: every time a name or event is mentioned the authors feel\ncompelled to explain at some length, while the principal subject waits on\nthe sidelines.", "Nevertheless these are three significant contributions, well worth read-\ning, especially if one prefers to imbibe history through personal stories\nrather than the more standard diplomatic and political histories. One\nhopes that somewhere there are biographers at work on Dean Acheson, on\nthe Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, and Robert Lovett.", "THE END OF THE COLD WAR: ITS MEANING AND IMPLICA-\NTIONS. Edited by Michael J. Hogan. New York: Cambridge University\nPress, 1992, 275 pp. $44.95 (paper, $13.95).", "This is a stimulating collection of essays mainly by diplomatic historians. Most of them appeared in *Diplomatic History*, the admirable journal of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, which Michael Hogan also edits. They tend toward the revisionist side, but are sufficiently diverse to arouse the reader's interest. As Raymond Garthoff notes in his own essay: \"It was the Soviet threat, real or imagined, that generated the American dedication to waging the Cold War. . . . The revisionist interpretation errs in attributing initiative and design to American diplomacy, but it is not entirely wrong.\"", "GEORGE F. KENNAN AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN FOREIGN\nPOLICY, 1947-1950. By Wilson D. Miscamble. Princeton (NJ): Princeton\nUniversity Press, 1992, 419 pp. $35.00.", "Another book about George Kennan would seem redundant, but this\nvolume is a good analytical examination of American foreign policy as seen\nthrough the lens of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, which\nKennan led from 1947 until 1950. As such it embraces much more than the\nSoviet Union and Eastern Europe. The author insists that there was no\ngrand design to American policy in these years, but one is impressed by the\npervasive and lucid intellect of Ambassador Kennan.", "THE UNITED STATES AND THE COLD WAR. By John Lewis Gaddis.\nNew York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 285 pp. $24.95.", "A collection of the author's essays, most of which have already appeared\nelsewhere, but have been revised. Well worth perusing nevertheless. The\nlast essay, \"Toward the post-Cold War World,\" is a stimulating examination\nof the conflict between the traditional desire for international integration\nand new forces of fragmentation, so obviously now at work in Europe.", "KISSINGER: A BIOGRAPHY. By Walter Isaacson. New York: Simon &\nSchuster, 1992, 711 pp. $30.00.", "The first full-scale biography of the former secretary of state that\nexamines not only his public life and policy but his origins and his activities\nsince leaving office. While not an \"authorized\" biography, the author\nenjoyed some access to many of Kissinger's friends and colleagues (includ-\ning this reviewer), as well as to Kissinger's family. This does not mean that\nthe book is uncritical; on the whole the author strives for and achieves a\nbalanced objectivity, though this reviewer would disagree with some of his\njudgments about policy. Written with an engaging flair, it suffers slightly\nfrom the journalist's tendency to write episodes. For a new generation of"]

JOBNAME: UPDATE PAGE: 5 SESS: 3 OUTPUT: Wed Aug 5 08:45:51 1992
bs1/503/team3/foreignaff/5775 boo

198 FOREIGN AFFAIRS

readers, for whom these years are fading into genuine history, it is "must"
reading. It is likely to stand as the definitive biography, at least until more
of the Kissinger, Nixon and Ford papers become available to scholars.

General: Political and Legal

Andrew J. Pierre

TRADITIONS AND VALUES IN POLITICS AND DIPLOMACY. By Kenneth W. Thompson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992, 341 pp. $37.50 (paper, $12.95).

Thompson is one of the best teachers still active from the postwar
generation of scholars that developed the discipline of international
relations. In this finely crafted work he touches upon many aspects of
world politics—the role of moral standards in diplomacy, the relationship
between power and ethics, human rights, peace studies as a field and the
debate between realism and idealism in international relations theory, to
name only a few. The actions and policies of five presidents (Lincoln,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon) are viewed through the fine
prism of the values they held and the choices they made. Thompson
provides a wealth of thought and a good deal of wisdom. What makes this
book such pleasurable and profitable reading is not the novelty of the issues
addressed but the cultivated, intelligent mind that leads the discussion.

INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION: THE US-USSR AND MIDDLE EAST CASES. By Louis Kriesberg. New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 1992, 275 pp. $35.00.

A sociologist at Syracuse University, the author has long been a student
of conflict resolution. In this enterprising and successful study he takes the
Soviet-American rivalry of the postwar decades and the Arab-Israeli
conflict as laboratories to examine how international conflicts can be
reduced. This leads to the identification of steps toward deescalation—ways
to initiate negotiations, choose issues and reach implicit as well as explicit
agreements. The role of inducements is discussed, as is the creation of
"ripeness" for settlement. Conflict termination is correctly seen as an
elaborate and subtle process in which the wider environment of interna-
tional politics often has a determining influence. This is a significant
contribution to scholarship.

EXPANDING THE FRONTIERS: SUPERPOWER INTERVENTION IN THE COLD WAR. By Karen A. Feste. New York: Praeger, 1992, 232 pp. $45.00.

In converse to the book above, this work looks at how nations get drawn
into intervening abroad, thereby creating conflict. Soviet and American
intervention, mainly in the Third World, is examined. Such interventions
are seen as having expanded the frontiers of the Cold War. What a reading
of Feste makes clear is that Moscow and Washington were pursuing their
own agendas in these Third World escapades, looking through their own
ideological prisms, and often with inadequate understanding of local
conditions where the interventions took place. Although an interesting and
well-conceived study, the momentous transformations of the past three
years already give it an antiquated feel.

THE ARTS

# Master of the Power Lines

A new life of our greatest diplomatic technician

UPI

'Sometimes Henry starts to think he's president': Breakfasting with Nixon in 1972

In August 1973, years of quiet backstabbing finally got Henry Kissinger the job he wanted. Secretary of State William P. Rogers, the victim of his endless undercutting, decided to quit. Richard Nixon didn't want to put Kissinger in his place; he preferred former treasury secretary John Connally or lawyer-diplomat Kenneth Rush. But eventually the president was convinced of Henry's inevitability. Paddling in his pool at San Clemente, Calif., he brusquely informed Kissinger of his promotion. "I hope to be worthy of your trust," murmured Kissinger. The next day, at a press conference to which Kissinger was not invited, Nixon heaped praise on Rogers. His announcement of Kissinger's elevation was terse. "Dr. Kissinger's qualifications for this post, I think, are well known by all of you," he said. Kissinger, watching the press conference on television, missed his brief moment of triumph. He was distracted by a phone call from Liv Ullmann.

That's the narrative line in Walter Isaacson's new book, **Kissinger: A Biography (893 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30).** In Isaacson's steady stream of ironies, Kissinger's sheer brilliance—his gift for conceptualization, his intuitive understanding of power and his skill as a negotiator—is matched by compulsive egotism, sycophancy and duplicity. Isaacson, an assistant managing editor of Time magazine, was coauthor, with NEWSWEEK'S Evan Thomas, of an earlier book on postwar American statesman-

ship, "The Wise Men." His biography of Kissinger manages to have it both ways: friendly and unflinching. He dishes plenty of dirt about Kissinger's personal weaknesses, but he also pays tribute to the clarity of his vision and the deftness of his diplomacy.

Isaacson's principal complaint is that Kissinger practiced realpolitik at the expense of morality, never grasping that America's strength is based in part on doing the right thing. "The structure of peace that Kissinger designed places him with Henry Stimson, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson atop the pantheon of modern American statesmen," he writes. "But Kissinger never had an instinctive feel for American values and mores."

Kissinger never pretended to be a moralist. He was this century's greatest diplomatic technician, a hard-eyed realist who used balance-of-power dynamics to shore up his adopted country when its idealism was lost in the wreckage of Vietnam. He and Nixon produced grand designs—the breakthrough to China, détente with the Soviet Union, shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East—that helped to steer the United States through the shoals of self-doubt toward ultimate victory in the cold war.

Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Bavaria, young Heinz developed "that odd mixture of ego and insecurity that can come from growing up smart yet persecuted," Isaacson writes. After his family moved to New York City in 1938, Kissin-

ger displayed the immigrant's eagerness to please. He attached himself to a series of patrons: an army officer, a Harvard professor, then Nelson Rockefeller and Nixon. He could be amazingly obsequious. In 1971, he sent Nixon a mash note that read: "Your serenity during crises, your steadfastness under pressure, have been all that have prevented the triumph of mass hysteria. It has been an inspiration to serve. As always, H." When Kissinger met Pat Nixon for the first time, he praised her husband lavishly. "Haven't you seen through him yet?" she asked.

**Temper tantrums:** Well, yes, he had. Behind Nixon's back, Kissinger could be deeply contemptuous of the president. He would call Nixon "our drunken friend," a "basket case" or "the meatball mind." Nixon had no illusions. Once, after a string of temper tantrums from Kissinger, the president "said that perhaps he would have to fire Kissinger if he did not agree to seek psychological help." Isaacson writes. As he left office, Nixon said, "There are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts. Because sometimes Henry starts to think he's president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child."

One of the most improbable parts of the Kissinger persona was his self-proclaimed status as a swinger. In the years before his 1974 marriage to Nancy Maginnes, he dated a conspicuous string of actresses, including Jill St. John, Samantha Eggar, Shirley MacLaine, Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen and Liv Ullmann. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" was one of his most famous sayings. It may explain what women saw in him, but what did he want from them? Perhaps celebrity. "The dirty little secret about Kissinger's relationship with women was that there was no dirty little secret," writes Isaacson. "He liked to go out with them, but not home with them."

Fifteen years after leaving office, Kissinger is still working hard to keep himself in the limelight, as a big-ticket speaker, a commentator for newspapers, television and magazines (including this one), and an international consultant in his own firm. "The secretive world of Kissinger Associates," Isaacson writes, "involved a lucrative blend of strategic advice, foreign affairs insight, good connections, some door-opening, and the cachet that came from one of the world's most marketable names." In a good year, Kissinger earns up to $8 million. He is only one of eight living former secretaries of state. But in Isaacson's view, his "mixture of brilliance and abrasiveness, ego and insecurity, charm and furtiveness, humor and ambition had made him, for better and for worse, one of the premier stars of his era." In glittering semiretirement, Kissinger has become a monument to himself.

RUSSELL WATSON

56 NEWSWEEK: SEPTEMBER 7, 1992

Country Music Is The Soundtrack For The Working Man.

TRAVIS
**t·r·o·u·b·l·e**
TRITT

THE NEW ALBUM
FEATURING
"LORD HAVE MERCY ON
THE WORKING MAN,"
"T·R·O·U·B·L·E" AND
"CAN I TRUST YOU WITH MY HEART"

AVAILABLE NOW ON WARNER BROS. CASSETTES AND COMPACT DISCS

© 1992 WARNER BROS. RECORDS INC. HATS OFF TO YOU, TT.

ing. In retrospect there is something alarming about its simplicities and the enthusiasm we brought to it. It is the great virtue of this grandly scaled yet deliriously energetic movie that it reanimates that long-ago feeling without patronizing it—and without making us think we will wake up some day once again embarrassed by it.

BOOKS

America's
Metternich

TITLE: KISSINGER: A BIOGRAPHY

AUTHOR: WALTER ISAACSON

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 893

PAGES: $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: *An engrossing critical portrait of the former Secretary of State deftly analyzes the impact of the man's flaws on U.S. policy.*

By JOHN JUDIS

WHEN HENRY KISSINGER returned to Germany in 1945 as a U.S. Army sergeant, he discovered a friend from Fürth who had survived the concentration camps. He watched over him during his recovery, and when he left to live with an aunt in the U.S., Kissinger tried to prepare her. The survivors, he wrote, "had seen man from the most evil side. Who can blame them for being suspicious?"

Kissinger denied that the Nazi holocaust, which forced him and his family to flee to the U.S., and which claimed many of his relatives, had an impact on his thinking. He once told a reporter that his childhood in Fürth "seems to have passed without leaving any lasting impressions."

But as Walter Isaacson's biography reveals, Kissinger's brush with evil lay at the heart of his "gnawing insecurity" as a man and his rejection of ideology and moralism as a statesman. Kissinger's life was a consuming quest for respect and esteem, while his diplomacy was an attempt to restore the balance of power among nations that prevailed before Nazi and Soviet revolutions.

Drawing upon extensive interviews with Kissinger and with his colleagues, friends and enemies, Isaacson's book is the most complete record yet of the former Secretary of State's life and foreign policy. It is filled with spicy revelations about Nixon and Kissinger's tortured relationship: Nixon, we learn, believed Kissinger was mentally unbalanced and

TIME, SEPTEMBER 28, 1992

Our experience in overseas markets and our understanding of local business practices and insurance needs give AIG people a unique advantage when serving multinational businesses around the world. Whether they're in transportation, steel, textiles or global finance. In the booming Pacific Rim or anywhere else in the world.

AIG

WORLD LEADERS IN INSURANCE AND FINANCIAL SERVICES.

American International Group, Inc., Dept. A, 70 Pine Street, New York, NY 10270.

at one point in 1971 considered firing
him, while Kissinger referred to Nixon
behind his back as "our drunken
friend" and the "meatball mind." Isaac-
son also details Kissinger's passionate
distrust of even his closest aides, which
led to his wiretapping them and helped
lay the foundation, Isaacson argues, for
the Watergate scandal. But more impor-
tant, Kissinger also contains the most
credible account of Nixon and Kissin-
ger's inability to disengage from the
Vietnam War and the collapse of Kissin-
ger's détente strategy in 1975.

Isaacson, an assistant managing editor of TIME, credits Kissinger and Nixon with transforming America's understanding of the world. Instead of seeing the U.S. as engaged in a struggle against an evil monolith, world communism, Nixon and Kissinger viewed the Soviet Union and China as traditional nations

STEFAN FISCH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE BOSS: Nixon and his Secretary of State changed America's world view

driven by competing interests; they designed U.S. foreign policy to exploit that competition in order to create a new, stable balance of power. It was, Isaacson writes, "a triumph of hard-edged realism worthy of a Metternich."

Isaacson faults the two men, however, for their indifference to "the moral values that are the true source of [America's] global influence." He reveals how Nixon extended the Vietnam War for six months solely because he believed a "hawkish image" would benefit his 1972 election campaign, and he portrays Kissinger as having acquired a coroner's callousness toward the victims of geopolitics. According to Isaacson, Kissinger told Gerald Ford's press secretary on the eve of Saigon's fall in 1975,

Become a Host Family

One friendship at a time and you'll enjoy the company of students from countries like Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, South America and Japan.

Call 1-800-SIBLING for more information on how you can develop a friendship with some of the brightest students from around the world.

American Intercultural
Student Exchange

A non-profit tax exempt organization

TIME, SEPTEMBER 28, 1992

73

IT'S THE
YEAR
2020.

You like to watch movies on:

☐ The silver screen

☐ A laser disc

☐ HDTV

☐ A virtual reality headset

It could be all of the above. Find out what awaits in the year 2000, the next century and the next thousand years in The Millennium, a TIME special issue.

Every week, TIME brings you unique perspective on the world past, present and future. Now TIME's editors lift the curtain on science and society, marriage and medicine, family and fashion — and more — in the 21st Century.

**THE MILLENNIUM: A TIME Special Issue**

*On Sale Throughout October*

Exclusive Advertiser

IBM

TIME

COURTESY OF PAULA KISSINGER

**THE MENTOR:** Fritz Kraemer became Kissinger's patron in their Army days

"Why don't these people die fast? The worst thing that could happen is for them to linger on."

Isaacson attributes the collapse of détente and the beginning of a decade of arms buildup to the political backlash that occurred because of Kissinger's indifference to human rights and obsessive secretiveness, but he also puts considerable blame on Democratic Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson and his aide Richard Perle, who later joined the Reagan Administration. In 1974 Jackson and Perle, who were opposed to détente, held the treaty granting the Soviet Union most-favored nation trading status hostage to Soviet agreement to allow expanded Jewish emigration. The Soviets retaliated by shutting off emigration and also, as Isaacson argues, by giving the green light to North Vietnam to make the final push toward Saigon.

Isaacson's judgments are generally sound, but like other Nixon and Kissinger biographers he is driven to take sides between the two men. He compares Kissinger with Metternich and Nixon with the wily diplomat's slow-witted superior, Austrian Emperor Francis I, but it was Nixon who persuaded Kissinger to encourage West Germany's overtures to East Germany and who initiated the opening to China. Clearly the two men had similar conceptual strengths and personal weaknesses.

Isaacson's book is brilliant journalism, but he doesn't make us see and feel the drama of events through Kissinger's eyes. Except for the occasional tantrum, Kissinger disappears behind Isaacson's analysis of controversial policy decisions. But this is now the definitive account of Kissinger and one of a handful of books that should be read by anyone concerned with the Nixon era and American foreign policy. ■

John Judis, a contributing editor to the New Republic, is the author of Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century.

74

TIME, SEPTEMBER 28, 1992

Memoirs

# A lethal thing of b

## Leni Riefenstahl's cloud of unknowing

IAN BURUMA

Leni Riefenstahl

THE SIEVE OF TIME
670pp. Quartet, £30.
07043 70212

Leni Riefenstahl was never a Nazi. She had never heard of Hitler before 1932. And until she was told in 1945, she had no idea what had happened to the Jews. This is what she tells us in her long, rambling memoirs. Yet this was the woman who became world-famous as Hitler's greatest propagandist. When she heard of Hitler's death, she threw herself on her bed and “wept all night”.

Perhaps Leni Riefenstahl is lying. Perhaps she has lied for so long that she believes her own fibs. But I am inclined to go along with her, some of the way. Her memoirs could have been titled “Reflections of an Unpolitical Woman”, after Thomas Mann. To be “unpolitical”, in Mann’s view, before he changed his mind somewhat in the 1930s, was a German virtue. It spoke of a rich, poetic inner life, so much more profound than the specious gloss of the “political” Anglo-Saxon. But the mind that looks in, naturally sometimes fails to look out, and is bound, therefore, to miss a few things – the rise of Hitler, for example, or millions of people disappearing into cattle-trucks.

Here is Leni, as a child: “It seems that the heavenly bodies were always to have an influence over me. It might even be said that in my childhood I was literally moonstruck . . . ” And Leni, aged sixteen: “It was now 1918 and the war was over. We had lost. There had been a revolution and there was no Kaiser, no king. But I experienced all these things in a cloud of unknowing. My mind was turned in on a tiny exclusive world.”

There is something convenient about this image of moonstruck little Leni so enveloped in silver mist that anything short of the sublime would have escaped her attention, yet I am still inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. There is a price to pay, however, for the thirst for estasy – a price any former acid freak would recognize. Great highs are often followed by depression; a mixed feeling of

Riefenstahl had her first success in film with *The Blue Light*, which opened in Berlin in 1932. It was, Riefenstahl remembers, “an undreamt-of success, a triumph beyond my wildest dreams – a sensation”. But it was more than just a triumph, it was a premonition: “*The Blue Light* told of my ultimate fate: Junta the strange mountain girl, living in a dream world, persecuted and driven out of society, dies because her ideals are destroyed.”

One of the most tiresome things about this ill-written book is the monotonous alternation of self-pity and triumph. There is a touch of the Nibelungen in everything she says or does. There is nothing in Riefenstahl's life, from her own account, between “undreamt-of success” and rank betrayal and persecution. Either she is adored or she is cast out. The people she knows are either worshippers or enemies (rather often Jewish: Susan Satong, the World Jewish Congress, etc). *Verehren* (to worship) and *Verehren* (worshipper) are the two most common words in her book. She craves worship and submission (of one of her *Verehren* she writes: “He wanted to

carry out my every last wish”), and she is no mean worshipper herself.

So when Hitler strutted to centre stage, one year after her undreamed-of success, Leni was more than willing to reach out to him. She saw him first at the Berlin Sports Palace in February, 1932. There is an odd discrepancy here. She writes that she “heard the name of Adolf Hitler for the first time” after the première of *The Blue Light*, which was in March. Still, it was an awfully long time ago, and one’s memory does play such tricks on one. If only the copy editors could have been a bit sharper-eyed.

There she was, at any rate, at the Sports Palace, hearing the Führer say “Fellow Germans!” and...

That very same instant I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.

With such orgasmic capacity, it is no wonder so

German youths seeking the sublime on moonlit nights, the step towards becoming Hitler's propagandist was not a big one. She was, one might say, exactly the right woman in the right place at the right time. Was she an opportunist? Let us say that career and faith formed a seamless whole. The reason she continues to fascinate us is that she was the only artist of the Third Reich to have lifted Nazi propaganda to something approaching excellence.

To say, as she has said on many occasions, that *Triumph of the Will*, the film about the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg in 1935, was not propaganda at all, but a documentary, pure and simple, is of course absurd. As Susan Satong observed in her famous 1975 essay on Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism”, the film was far from being just a cinematic record of the event. The two were planned together, by Hitler, Speer, Goebbels and Riefenstahl. The film was part of the event, and vice versa. Everything about it, from the opening sequence of Hitler descending God-like from the clouds to the crowds gripped by mass hysteria, speaks of pseudo-religious estasy. It is kitsch.

With Guzzi Lantschner, before the Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936

many men threatened to kill themselves over Leni – or so he tells us; her love life, too, appears to have been nothing but swoons and treacheries. But adulation of the strong man did not in itself make her a Nazi. Here is a case, I think, of the worship of power for its own sake. The actual object of this worship is almost incidental. Riefenstahl is not the only artist to be that way inclined. Think of Han Suyin, whose idols have included both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. Domination is the thing: “Although there was a great deal in his speech that I didn’t understand, I was still fascinated, and I sensed that the audience were in bondage to this man.”

Was Leni? Or was Hitler perhaps in bondage to her? They were almost equals in megalomania. Riefenstahl describes a bizarre scene in which Hitler, strolling along a northern beach, has to summon all his heroic self-control not to pounce on her in a fit of passion. Was it all argon, then, and no politics? The two were, perhaps, indistinguishable. Hitler, in stadiums and sport palaces, demanded sexual submission and exaltation, and Riefenstahl was willing to submit and be exalted. This, to her, was his politics.

Riefenstahl was an artist who took kitsch seriously. And with her experience of rapturous mountain films, starring pure, clean, heroic

but thanks to Riefenstahl's gifts as a film-maker, it is sublime kitsch.

To say, as she did in a recent interview with Gitta Serenyi in the *Independent on Sunday*, that *Triumph of the Will* had “nothing ideological in it”, is equally nonsensical. In speech after speech, the Nazi ideals, woolly and murderous, are extolled. If Riefenstahl missed the point of her own most famous work, her boss certainly did not. Susan Satong quotes from Hitler’s preface to a book entitled *Behind the Scenes of the Nuremberg Rally Film (Hinter den Kulissen des Reichparteiat films)*. The film, Hitler wrote, was “a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement”.

If Riefenstahl really thinks that her film is nothing but a dispassionate chronicle, her simulation of great passion, indeed worship, is the product of a deeply cynical mind, or else she is the truest of coins: the believer for whom the faith simply is reality. Again my inclination is to give her the benefit of the doubt. *Triumph of the Will* is a work of passionate engagement. Riefenstahl is intoxicated by the sheer beauty of it all. She must really have thought that the lonely march of the Leader through the iron ranks of the faithful, and his ascent of the speaker’s rostrum (which Speer had

-3-

books

TIME the super k

MEN OF THE YEAR
Triumph and Trial

Walter Isaacson's revealing new biography of former secretary

of state Henry Kissinger looks at the private life
and career of the controversial power broker.

Edward Jay Epstein sizes up realpolitik

*Time* magazine's "Men of the Year," Kissinger and Nixon, January 1, 1973, **ABOVE.** Kissinger and Nixon talk it through, **RIGHT.** Kissinger with Sadat in Cairo, 1974, **TOP RIGHT.** and Le Duc Tho (at right) in Paris, 1972, **BOTTOM RIGHT.**

Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, first captured the public's imagination in July 1971 when, as President Nixon's professorial assistant for National Security, he turned up in the Forbidden City in Beijing, paving the way for Nixon's surprise trip to China. Only three years earlier he had been lecturing students at Harvard about the theory of geopolitics. Now, in a hastily borrowed oversize made-in-Taiwan shirt, which made him appear to have no neck at all (his own shirts were left behind in the rush to breach the Bamboo Curtain), here he was with Chou En-lai, the legendary premier of China, cracking through the diplomatic ice that had separated the United States from the world's most populous nation. Then, in three more stunning coups, Kissinger arranged a summit meeting in May 1972 in Moscow between Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev that would make détente between the United States and the Soviet Union a conceivable reality; secretly negotiated with the North Vietnamese an end to American fighting in the Vietnam War in January 1973, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize; and brokered a miraculous truce to the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With his thick German accent, he not only popularized the otherwise eye-glazing vocabulary of geopolitics—SALT, balance of power, arms verification, linkage, nuclear deterrent—but turned foreign policy into an ongoing adventure for the public. By the time he became secretary of state in 1973, the mild-mannered academic from Harvard, with his self-mocking Jewish wit and penchant for nibbling

on junk food during high-level meetings, had received enough media steards to transform him into Super-K (as he was called on *Newsweek*'s cover)—the globe-trotting grand strategist who became the model for Hollywood's unforgettable Dr. Strangelove and was cited as the “most admired person in America” by the Gallup poll. In this first full biography of him (*Kissinger*, Simon & Schuster), Walter Isaacson shows that he was also “the world's least likely sex symbol.”

Isaacson, the coauthor of *The Wise Men* and an assistant managing editor at *Time* magazine, sets out to place Kissinger's myth in a more rounded—and critical—context. He methodically quarries bits of embarrassing information from what was left over from the mini-industry of scathing books attacking Kissinger (including Seymour Hersh's *Price of Power*, William Shawcross's *Sideshow*, Strobe Talbott's *Endgame*, and more dubious ones written by resentful White House rivals who went to prison during the Watergate scandal) as well as from scores of interviews with Kissinger's former associates. These recycled allegations, none of which come close to being “smoking guns,” accuse Kissinger of such things as betraying the Democrats' scheme to use the Paris peace plan for electoral advantage in 1968 by tip- ▶ 206

VOGUE MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 1973

VOGUE October

books

ping off the Republicans, allowing the FBI to place wiretaps on staff members, and collaborating in the decision to bomb Cambodia. When added, however, to the matrix of Kissinger's powerful autobiographical memoirs—*White House Years* and *Years of Upheaval*—this ambitious reprocessing produces a surprisingly exciting book.

Isaacson traces Kissinger's odyssey from his childhood in Nazi Germany, to New York, to which his family escaped when he was fifteen, to his career in the U.S. Army during the 1940s, where, because of his incredibly high intelligence-test scores and language abilities, he was assigned to the counterintelligence staff in occupied

Germany and wound up lecturing at the army's elite Command Intelligence School. After graduating from Harvard with highest honors in 1950, he was made director of its international seminar program—for which he recruited a veritable who's who of geopolitical strategists. From there, he went on to the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, where Nelson Rockefeller selected him to direct the massive study on national strategy he was financing. By 1968, after working on the Vietnam peace negotiations for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he returned to teaching at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. Even though Richard Nixon was aware that Kissinger had bitterly opposed his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate, he chose him to be his national security adviser.

In reconstructing foreign policy during the period of 1969-1975, which is the core of the book, Isaacson attempts to combine in a safe synthesis Kissinger's own version of events with his critics' charges. In the case of Cambodian genocide in 1975-1977, for example, he concludes "There was more than enough blood to stain many hands"—and then assigns the blame, not only to the Khmer Rouge faction that committed the murders, but also to Kissinger and Nixon on the problematic theory that the U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, five years earlier, had made the Khmer Rouge stronger and more brutal.

If Isaacson had merely tried to set the record straight on Kissinger, I would have no qualms about his well-researched effort. But, unfortunately, he embellishes the book with a personality theory, which he justifies on the journalistically convenient rationale that "policy is rooted in personality." Such a theory allows Isaacson to dragnet into the book flotsam that otherwise might seem irrelevant to understanding foreign (if not other) affairs, such as what are described as the uneventful, if not unexciting, dates Kissinger had with movie starlet Jill St. John, TV personality Barbara Howar, author Gloria Steinem, and anchorwoman Diane Sawyer. For example, expounding at length on the "dirty little secret" that nothing romantic occurred between Kissinger and "socially aggressive" Jan Golding Cushing (who was apparently his shallow-throated source), he infers from Kissinger's re-

straint toward Ms. Cushing that Kissinger lacked macho sex drive, suggesting a possible preference for political over priapic power. For Kissinger, such a dating postmortem is a no-win situation. If he had made a

more aggressive pass at the talkative Ms. Cushing, Isaacson could nail him on some variation of sexual harassment or even the charge of using power as an aphrodisiac. In any case, as it turns out, Kissinger had been very productive in courting Nancy Maginnes, Nelson Rockefeller's attractive

foreign policy aide, whom Kissinger married in 1974.

Isaacson's personality theory also permits him to deploy a wide variety of loaded epithets about Kissinger—in alphabetical order: abrasive, arrogant, brilliant, brooding, chameleonlike, charming, conspiratorial, deceitful, devious, duplicitous, eager to impress prominent people, egotistic, furtive, gloomy, insecure, intellectual. Machiavellian, manipulative, megalomaniacal, paranoid, ponderous, prone to power struggles, quirky, short-tempered, vulnerable, and yearning for stability. Such all-purpose modifiers can be applied to almost anyone in power, including the media. Conspicuously missing from this ad-

jectival cocktail, especially given all the jokes Isaacson quotes from Kissinger, is witty.

This side of Kissinger is best revealed in his own book *The White House Years*, which is full of examples not only of his unexpected self-deprecating humor, such as the previously mentioned saga of his having to borrow a neck-swallowing shirt from his much taller aide, but his Gogolian eye for the bathetic side of power, such as his description of how Brezhnev incessantly played with a toy cannon in the midst of a negotiating session with him in the Kremlin until it accidentally went off, and then, while Kissinger strained to keep his diplomatic aplomb, Brezhnev "strutted around the room like a prizefighter who has knocked out his opponent."

While such characterizations may serve to protect Isaacson from any suspicion that he has been taken in by Kissinger, they do not always square with the substance of his research. Consider how Isaacson labeled Kissinger duplicitous for his part in brokering a Middle East peace after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 had left Egypt's armies precariously encircled by Israeli armies. After meticulously searching State Department transcripts of Kissinger's conversations with Israeli and Arab leaders for evidence of Kissinger's duplicity, Isaacson could find no examples of Kissinger lying. Nonetheless, he posits that Kissinger was deceitful because he stressed different points to the different parties, told them different jokes, and did not volunteer unhelpful information. Such a standard, unless one is judging a parrot's ability to mimic, seems excessively trivial. In the bigger picture, Kissinger was straightforward in clearly announcing his objectives—Israeli and Arab armies had to disengage; Israel had to withdraw from captured territory; the Arabs had to accept a de facto peace. And, after much posturing, this is what happened. So where is the deceit?

Kissinger steps out with, TOP TO BOTTOM: socialite Jan Cushing in Paris, 1972; actress Jill St. John, 1973; his wife, Nancy, 1988.

► 208

VOGUE OCTOBER 1992

new york

206

Books

His personality theory becomes more troubling when Isaacson, with only his journalistic license, practices pop psychiatry. He cites Kissinger's "paranoia" (or "paranoid" attributes) at least fourteen times, suggesting that it may have been caused by unremembered childhood traumas in Nazi Germany. While Doc Isaacson never defines his terms, words like *paranoia* and *paranoid* have meaning. They conjure up a person who is not merely suspicious (and Kissinger had good reason to be since, as Isaacson points out, his papers were being illegally rifled through by a spy ring organized by one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) but is unable to separate reality from recurring delusions of persecution and grandeur. Applying such a term to Kissinger explains nothing and diverts attention away from the singular quality that accounts for so much of Kissinger's success: his penetrating grasp of reality in even the murkiest swirl of events. This virtue explains why he was picked by Rockefeller, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, and Nixon for national security assignments. Isaacson does recognize this quality in other parts of his book—where he points out that “Kissinger’s analytic lucidity took him straight to the core of any problem” and “at the core of his brilliance was an ability to see the relationships between different events.”

In attempting to derive policy from personality, Isaacson has put the wrong man on the couch. Nixon was president, Kissinger was his assistant. Nixon set policy, at least until he became fatally mired in Watergate; Kissinger helped carry it out and, by dint of his intellect, clarify it. Viewed as a symphony for which Nixon created the score, these policies were conducted by Kissinger, with baton in hand. Isaacson skirts this conceptual glitch (that Kissinger was not president) by artificially bonding Nixon to him with a deceptive hyphen and referring to the "Nixon-Kissinger policy" or the "Nixon-Kissinger response." Through this legderdemain, Isaacson evades the vexing reality that Nixon was Kis-

singer's boss. Or, he simply omits Nixon entirely, blaming Kissinger, for example, for circumventing the State Department on initiatives such as the opening to China, when in fact Nixon decided to cut the State Department out, as was his right, because he believed it would leak, if not sabotage, his plan. When it comes to actually dealing with Nixon, Isaacson again resorts to pop psychiatry, suggesting Nixon also suffers from "paranoia" and, for good measure, describes the White House as infected by a "general air of paranoia."

To be fair to Isaacson, beneath the slippery pop-psychiatry icing, *Kissinger* is a solid assessment of American foreign policy that provides an invaluable perspective on Kissinger—one that has been lacking in more ill-tempered, one-sided books. His most serious criticism of Kissinger is that he looked upon statecraft as an amoral pursuit based on national interests instead of a pursuit based on universal moral principles. The issue of state morality, which has been hotly debated by philosophers since Machiavelli's *The Prince* more than four centuries ago, is not easily resolved. The dilemma is whether whoever is in charge of a nation's safety can base statecraft on the private moral precepts that conflict with the safety of the nation. For instance, should a leader lie if that lie will prevent a nuclear holocaust? Can he do otherwise?

Even while blaming the antagonism Kissinger engendered on the "perceived amorality of his geopolitical calculations," Isaacson places him "atop the pantheon of modern American statesmen," and concludes that "As the only European-style realist ever to guide U.S. foreign policy... he was able to take a clear-eyed approach to the creation of a new global balance, one that helped to preserve American influence in the post-Vietnam era and eventually contributed to the end of the Cold War." If so, perhaps Kissingerian realism, not moral sentimentality, was exactly what was needed in American foreign policy. •

## comfort of strangers

*William Boyd finds passion and poetic prose in Michael Ondaatje's compelling new novel about wartime secrets, spies, and hidden pasts*

In a semiruined villa somewhere in the north of Italy in the final year of World War II, a young Canadian nurse called Hana—numbed by the horrors of war—cares for a hideously burned aviator who has no name. He is the English patient, his brittle, cauterized skin the color of aubergine. He is alone in the villa, the nurse his only company, left behind to die, one assumes, by the field hospital that once occupied the building. The nurse bathes him, reads to him, listens to him, and injects him with morphine to mask the ago—v of his terrifying burns.

This is the opening of Michael Ondaatje's compelling and haunting novel *The English Patient* (Knopf), and it is hard to imagine a better and more disturbing mise-en-scène, combining as it does all manner of romantic, gothic, and mysterious elements: a young and beautiful woman tending to a permanently disfigured man in an antique and classical landscape ravaged by war. What secrets lie here, what expectations, what undercurrents of feeling, of emotion? Guilt and loss, pain and redemption, endurance and love. . . . The book is avid with the potential to move and beguile.

And Ondaatje, a poet turned novelist, does not disappoint. His interest in his characters and their situations leans heavily toward their symbolic and elegiac aspects. Indeed, this curious conjunction of nurse and patient could have occurred in any war, in any place, in almost any time. A reader expecting the conventions of a realistic novel such as Hemingway's *A Farewell to Arms* (another juxtaposition of nurse and patient in an Italian war) will be frustrated.

Ondaatje eschews the nuts and bolts of period detail, the roughage of authentic fact, for the trenchant reverberation of metaphor and image. And in so doing the book sets entirely its own tone and its own conventions. To ask a question of it along the lines of: Would the senior staff of a World War II army field hospital *really* abandon a traumatized young nurse and one of its badly burned patients in a bomb-damaged villa while it moved on to safer and more secure quarters? is redundant, not to say pedantic. Ondaatje's novel is hermetic and self-sufficient, its conveniences and its final reality—and its power—belong to it alone.

In any event, the nurse, Hana, and her patient are not ►210

8

VOGUE OCTOBER 1994

THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 1992

> "If he were ten percent less brilliant and ten percent more honest, he would be a great man."*

A BIOGRAPHY

Kissinger

WALTER
ISAACSON

PHOTO: RALPH G. HARRIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

"If there was no such word as 'riveting,' it would have to be invented to describe this book. Isaacson has a grasp of history that is truly rare."

—ROBERT A. CARO

"It is the book to end all books on Mr. Kissinger.... A devastating portrait."

—THEODORE DRAPER, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"If ever there was a book to demonstrate the effect of personality on history, Kissinger is it....The Kissinger portrait is devastating: that of a wizard whose stunning achievements were largely vitiated by faults of character no amount of heavy-handed charm was able to conjure away."

—PRISCILLA JOHNSON MCMILLAN, CHICAGO TRIBUNE BOOKS

"Walter Isaacson's *Kissinger* is masterly and damning."

—RHODA KOENIG, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

"Mr. Isaacson's work is a model of insight, delicacy, and fairness that moves at a lively pace."

—NEW YORKER

"Kissinger will not like this cold-eyed, scathing, yet fair-minded and occasionally affectionate biography....He remains a national treasure. The problem he will have with this book is that Isaacson reminds us exactly how much he cost."

—LARS-ERIK NELSON, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Kissinger's sheer brilliance—his gift for conceptualization, his intuitive understanding of power and his skill as a negotiator—is matched by compulsive egotism, sycophancy and duplicity."

—NEWSWEEK

"Brilliant."

—MEL SMALL, DETROIT FREE PRESS

"A masterful biography full of wise insights, witty asides and pungent detail."

—STEVEN V. ROBERTS, NEW YORK NEWSDAY

"Brilliant and disturbing....Its illustrations of its subject's various modes of operation are so outrageous and entertaining that you plunge into the narrative and don't come up again until the book is done."

—CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"An entertaining and uniquely American story."

—JOHN PODHORETZ, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB MAIN SELECTION

SIMON & SCHUSTER
A Paramount Communications Company

• NAHUM GOLDMAN

A13

WALTER ISAACSON

> "If there was no such word as 'riveting,' it would have to be invented to describe this book. Isaacson has a grasp of history that is truly rare."

—ROBERT A. CARO

> "It is the book to end all books on Mr. Kissinger.... A devastating portrait."

> "If ever there was a book to demonstrate the effect of personality on history, *Kissinger* is it.... The Kissinger portrait is devastating: that of a wizard whose stunning achievements were largely vitiated by faults of character no amount of heavy-handed charm was able to conjure away."

> "Walter Isaacson's *Kissinger* is masterly and damning."

> "Mr. Isaacson's work is a model of insight, delicacy, and fairness that moves at a lively pace."

—NEW YORKER

> "Kissinger will not like this cold-eyed, scathing, yet fair-minded and occasionally affectionate biography.... He remains a national treasure. The problem he will have with this book is that Isaacson reminds us exactly how much he cost."

> "Kissinger's sheer brilliance—his gift for conceptualization, his intuitive understanding of power and his skill as a negotiator—is matched by compulsive egotism, sycophancy and duplicity."

—NEWSWEEK

> "Brilliant."

> "A masterful biography full of wise insights, witty asides and pungent detail."

> "Brilliant and disturbing.... Its illustrations of its subject's various modes of operation are so outrageous and entertaining that you plunge into the narrative and don't come up again until the book is done."

> "An entertaining and uniquely American story."

SIMON & SCHUSTER

• NAHUM GOLDMAN

THE NEW YORK TIMES **EDITORIALS/LETTERS**

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1992

Kissinger Mistakes
Role of Protesters

To the Editor:

In Senate testimony on prisoners of war and those missing in action (front page, Sept. 23), former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger blamed the antiwar movement in part for making it impossible for him to exert pressure on North Vietnam in 1973 to make a full accounting of the P.O.W.'s and M.I.A.'s.

There was no antiwar movement in the United States in 1973 — or 1972 for that matter. Ask George McGoverno.

The last major antiwar demonstrations took place in Washington from April 18 to May 6, 1971. After that, the movement disintegrated because of fratricidal tactical disputes among disillusioned leaders, the beginning of the end of the draft, troop withdrawals and decreasing American casualties, news media inattention and, especially, President Nixon's successful — and often illegal — attempts to penetrate, disrupt and harass antiwar groups.

Undoubtedly, the movement was important in affecting policy making from 1965 through 1971, but after that, Mr. Nixon demonstrated its relative impotence when he mined Hanoi and Halphong harbors in May 1972, and ordered the Christmas bombing that December without confronting much significant domestic opposition.

Mr. Kissinger cannot blame the antiwar movement for his failure to pursue the P.O.W.-M.I.A. issue from 1973 through 1976. MELVIN SMALL

Detroit, Sept. 23, 1992

The writer, professor of history, Wayne State University, is co-editor, "Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement" (1992).

[lc]

Copyright 1992 Newsday, Inc.

Newsday

October 4, 1992, Sunday, CITY EDITION

SECTION: CURRENTS; Pg. 33 Other Edition: Nassau and Suffolk Pg. 37

LENGTH: 660 words

HEADLINE: They Were Fools For the Money

BYLINE: Murray Kempton

KEYWORD: COLUMN; BANK OF CREDIT AND COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL; INVESTIGATION; BANK; JOHN KERRY; HANK BROWN BODY:

SENATORS John Kerry (Dem.-Mass.) and Hank Brown (Rep.-Col.) needed 794 pages to package their discoveries in the four years they spent probing the affairs of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Their report could not by now add overmuch to what we already know about that vastest of criminal enterprises.

It fascinates us instead as a study in the anatomy of the Washington Coverup, a subject of which we are generally kept as ignorant as we are familiar with the anatomy of the Swindle.

The Washington Coverup is a sphere reserved for those who found out how to rig government by working for government.

BCCI's devices were never on a scale less than grand, whether in the dimensions of its larcenies or the size of its fees to lawyers and accountants for protecting it from exposure.

BCCI bagged its American safari's first trophy in 1977, when it bought the National Bank of Georgia (NBG) from Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter's former budget director. The Federal Reserve Board had lively suspicions that Ghaith Pharaon, NBG's purchaser of record, was a BCCI front. But it was also aware that NPG might collapse without Pharon's capital infusion.

The Fed was equally uneasy about Pharon and about the consequences of turning away this last hope for NBG's salvation. All doubts were resolved in the shadowy Pharon's favor thanks to the persuasions of his lawyer, Baldwin Tuttle, a former Federal Reserve Board Counsel. It would be, Kerry and Brown observe, "a painful judgment" for the Federal Reserve to "deny an application" supported by the "assurances given by the clients of a former colleague."

The Fed's alumni were ever on call for BCCI's emergencies. As late as 1991, well after the exposure of Clark Clifford's scandalous doings as BCCI'S protective coloration at First American Bankshares of Washington, the Federal Reserve went

looking for an independent trustee to handle the disposal of the
wreckage. Jerry Hawke, the Fed's former general counsel, bobbed
up at once to lobby the job for William Isaacs, former chairman
of the FDIC and an intimate associate of Hawke's law firm.

Isaacs would have had his profit-promising chance to be First
American's redeemer if it had not been revealed that he was
himself so far from redemption as to have but lately worked for a
California bank secretly owned by BCCI.

BCCI seldom cast its net into the Capital's seas without
hauling up any gaudy fish it desired for its pond. The only
distinguished specimen identifiably shrewd enough to keep his
distance was Henry Kissinger, tempt him though BCCI tried.

The flesh and blood of the Washington Coverup's anatomy is
private greed and its bone is official timidity. BCCI never
acquired a bank without hurtling it toward ruin and the
regulators into panic.

In 1991 First American was facing the collapse that would make
its Federal Reserve Bank loans forever unpayable. Abu Dhabi
offered to rescue First American with more cash. The Fed asked no
inhibiting questions, painted this sooty knight white and
suffered the unpleasant surprise of Abu Dhabi's runout on its
pledge. Whenever BCCI brought a bank to the point of disaster,
the regulators would swallow anything to stave off its arrival.

Price Waterhouse was paid $ 5 million a year to provide BCCI
with a "true and fair" accounting. Its auditors discovered
flagrant irregularities as early as 1985 and duly certified the
account year after year until 1990 when Price Waterhouse's
British affiliate took alarm at the risk of getting itself in
trouble as an abettor and blew the whistle to the Bank of
England. Even then the Bank of England and Price Waterhouse (UK)
agreed to conceal the true facts for awhile so BCCI could boodle
on in the flimsy hope of an Abu Dhabi bailout.

And why not? BCCI had already defied scandals long enough
almost to prove the proposition that somewhere there is always
some mercenary to save some unsavory state of things for pay.

[L]

Copyright 1992 Star Tribune

Star Tribune

October 3, 1992, Metro Edition

SECTION: News; Pg. 16A

LENGTH: 442 words

HEADLINE: Sharing blame on MIA follow-up

BODY: Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger are easy to dislike. Both men had instant credibility problems last week when they told a Senate committee that the Nixon White House had no knowledge of American prisoners of war left behind in Indochina. Elliot Richardson, Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger, all held in higher esteem, told a different story. The three, who served Nixon as secretaries of defense, reported strong concerns that American MIAs had been abandoned. What to believe?

For starters, ask other questions: If Richardson, Laird and Schlesinger truly believed Americans were abandoned, where have they been? Between 1969 and 1975 each served as defense secretary. They now present themselves as strongly skeptical that the Vietnamese repatriated all living American POWs in 1973, and they point accusatory fingers at the Nixon White House.

But where was their skepticism then and in the intervening years? If the secretary of defense couldn't raise a powerful fuss on behalf of uniformed servicemen left behind, who could? Was the failure to follow up on the MIA accounting a matter of deliberate political expediency that required overlooking strong evidence, as the three former defense secretaries now suggest? Or was it something messier: a falling-through-the-cracks sort of failure during a time of terrible military, social and political turmoil? If political expediency was the cause, then Laird, Schlesinger and Richardson share culpability for dishonorable behavior.

Kissinger and Haig say the White House shared general concerns about the MIA accounting and sought to press Hanoi, but had no hard evidence of living Americans left behind. Kissinger makes the telling point that the American public wanted out of Vietnam in the worst way and was in no mood for delays based on general, unsubstantiated worries that MIAs were being abandoned.

Moreover, no proof has been offered of the deliberate, geopolitically inspired conspiracy of silence that has been a staple argument of MIA activists. Neither has credible evidence been offered of living Americans still held captive in Indochina.

At most, the Senate committee has uncovered about what should have been expected: fallible human beings making messy decisions

books

TIME the super k

*Time* magazine's "Men of the Year," Kissinger and Nixon, January 1, 1973, ABOVE, Kissinger and Nixon talk it through, RIGHT, Kissinger with Sadat in Cairo, 1974, TOP RIGHT, and Le Duc Tho (at right) in Paris, 1972, BOTTOM RIGHT.

The Washington Post, January 1, 1973

VOGUE OCTOBER 1992

books

The New York Times, Gannett News, Getty Images, BANQUETTOURS

new york

206

VOGUE OCTOBER 1992

books

comfort of strangers

■ In a semiruined villa somewhere in the north of Italy in the final year of World War II, a young Canadian nurse called Hana—numbed by the horrors of war—cares for a hideously burned aviator who has no name. He is the English patient, his brittle, cauterized skin the color of aubergine. He is alone in the villa, the nurse his sole company, left behind to die, one assumes, by the field hospital that once occupied the building. The nurse bathes him, reads to him, listens to him, and injects him with morphine to mask the ago-
ny of his terrifying burns.

This is the opening of Michael Ondaatje's compelling and haunting novel *The English Patient* (Knopf), and it is hard to imagine a better and more disturbing mise-en-scène, combining as it does all manner of romantic, gothic, and mysterious elements: a young and beautiful woman tending to a permanently disfigured man in an antique and classical landscape ravaged by war. What secrets lie here, what expectations, what undercurrents of feeling, of emotion? Guilt and loss, pain and redemption, endurance and love. . . . The book is gravid with the potential to move and beguile.

Ondaatje eschews the nuts and bolts of period detail, the rough-
age of authentic fact, for the trenchant reverberation of metaphor
and image. And in so doing the book sets entirely its own tone and
its own conventions. To ask a question of it along the lines of:
Would the senior staff of a World War II army field hospital *really*
abandon a traumatized young nurse and one of its badly burned pa-
tients in a bomb-damaged villa while it moved on to safer and more
secure quarters? is redundant, not to say pedantic. Ondaatje's novel
is hermetic and self-sufficient, its conveniences and its final reali-
ty—and its power—belong to it alone.

In any event, the nurse, Hana, and her patient are not ► 210

208

VOGUE OCTOBER 1992

October 9, 1992

[L]C

Biography

(London) Times Literary Supplement

# The arch juggler

JIM HOAGLAND

Henry Kissinger has escaped again – but just barely this time.

A new biography, by Walter Isaacson, gives us the fullest, most elegantly imposed and richest portrait of this deviously illiquid statesman-celebrity that we are likely to find in Kissinger's lifetime. Isaacson distils the mplex essence of Kissinger: the wit, verve, ceit and paranoia that have made this German fugee from the Holocaust the most intriguing undurable figure in American public life for two decades. No wonder Kissinger is in a towering ge about the accuracy of parts of the book. They e all too accurate, and insightful.

Thick but highly readable throughout, this biography pushes far beyond the previous one-mensional Kissinger books, which have treated their subject either as unalloyed demon (Seymourovich) or wise demigod (the Kalbs, Kissinger himself). Here is a book that does justice to all the enrys, the good and the bad, that inhabit issinger, and shows how they came to be.

But on key judgments, Kissinger has subtly -opted Isaacson, getting his biographer to cept his premises and make false distinctions out foreign policy – and about America – that rve to justify the unjustifiable in Kissinger's ng, mixed record of inspired diplomatic suc-esses (the Middle East, the opening to China) d dismal failure (detente, Indochina, Angola). getarians maintain we are what we eat. nuclearists and biographers frequently become nat, or whom, they cover. Isaacson, a senior itor at Time magazine, struggles gamely to oid that trap; but ultimately he succumbs to the mptation to see Kissinger as Kissinger sees itself on the points that matter.

I have in mind the author's two most con- trated paragraphs of summing-up about his object, which appear in the last chapter, entitled "egacy". The first of these paragraphs deals with issinger's undeniable, extraordinary intelli- ance:

> At the core of his brilliance was an ability to see the relationships between different events and to conceptualize patterns. Like a spider in its web, he sensed, sometimes too acutely, how an action in one corner of the world would reverberate in another, how the application of power in one place would ripple elsewhere.

A casual observer of Kissinger's career could easily reach this conventional judgment. It is, in fact, partly borne out in the skilful way Kissinger gled the politics and personalities of the iddle East and in Soviet – US relations, where he had both cards to play and a requisite feel for the problem.

But Isaacson is not a casual observer. He had st expended a small forest to show that in Vietnam, the India – Pakistan war, Chile, the irsian Gulf and elsewhere, Kissinger at times w patterns where there were none, or failed to e how his immediate actions would affect long-term US interests. The author represses, th that judgment, what he has written in earlier adapters to demolish the excessive emphasis that issinger placed on preserving "American credi- lity" by stretching out the losing effort in Vietnam.

> But the "domino effect" that Kissinger and others predicted, and later claimed to see, was not so clear . . . . Instead of tumbling through to Thailand, the dominoes seemed to bounce back and forth in ways that policymakers never predicted . . . . When the US government finally abandoned its policy of force in Indochina, it was slowly able to rehabilitate its reputation at home and abroad, which probably was the best way to increase its global influence.

Isaacson then quotes with evident approval issinger's own 1975 judgment that "we probably ade a mistake" by being too concerned about the global effect of the Vietnam War. "We

Walter Isaacson

KISSINGER

A biography
893pp. Faber. £25.
0571 168582

perhaps might have perceived the war more in
Vietnamese terms rather than as the
outward thrust of a global conspiracy," Kissinger said.

Or compare Isaacson's praise for Kissinger as strategic spider, with this earlier passage on America's blstering impotence in the 1971 war in the Indian subcontinent: "In the long run . . . the belief that the Soviets could be restrained from meddling in regional crises by threats and bluster, or that America's regional enemies could be

controlled by putting pressure on Moscow, would
turn out to be largely an illusion."

That illusion was the centre of the Kissingerian web of "linkage", which ensnared Nixon and Kissinger far more effectively than it ever hampered Brezhnev and the Politburo. One revelation in the book is how quickly Kissinger accepted that linkage would deliver far less than he said it would. When the Soviets stonewalled their efforts to trade arms control negotiations for help on Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger quickly acquiesced and opened the arms control talks on Soviet terms. But they continued to talk a great game of linkage to the American public.

Kissinger argues that such duplicity was neces-
sary to enable him to carry out his worthy causes.
Isaacson accepts that argument, repeatedly, ex-
plicitly and implicitly. Here is the other essential
paragraph in the concluding chapter that does
much to undermine the logic and strength of the
reporting that has gone before it:

Kissinger never had an instinctive feel for American values and mores, such as the emphasis that [Henry] Stimson would place on honor over intrigue or on idealism over national strengths. Nor did he have an appreciation of the strengths to be derived from the healthy raucousness of American politics or from open decision-making in a democratic society. "Henry is a balance-of-power thinker," said Lawrence Eagleburger, one of his closest colleagues. "He deeply believes in stability. These kind of objectives are antithetical to the American experience. Americans tend to want to pursue a set of moral principles" in foreign policy.

There is the essential Kissinger defence against
critics of his policies and actions as Nixon's
national security assistant and Secretary of State.
Democracy made me do it. As a balance-of-
power realpolitician, how can I be expected to
deal with an idealistic, naive American public and
Congress on foreign policy? Yes, I am devious,
but I have to be to get things done in a system
dominated by Wilsonian idealists craving to do
good instead of facing up to the world's brutal
realities.

There are two things wrong with that defence. First, in the fascinating and revealing opening section of the book on Kissinger's pre-government life, Isaacson shows that duplicity is not a tool for Kissinger's diplomacy, but an inalienable way of life for him, whether it is in pursuit of personal gain or world peace. It is part of Kissinger's charm, his effectiveness and of our fascination with him; but we should not be fooled by the straw man of Wilsonian idealism as the only significant alternative to Realpolitik in American foreign policy.

American leaders and statesmen before and after Kissinger have pursued foreign and security policies that in fact are not dramatically different, over time, from those of other nations. Those policies, over time, are certainly not based on some unique moral basis unavailable to other peoples. Stimson, who said gentlemen did not read each other's mail, was the exception, not Kissinger.

It is true that Americans essentially want to be
left alone in the world. That desire shapes a
particular American approach to international
problems. But power, deceit, spying, cunning,
ingenuity and self-serving grasping in American
foreign policy did not begin or end with Kissinger.
For all the high-blown rhetoric, Wilson himself
was a Machiavellian politician who covertly led
America into the First World War, not a
dreaming, woolly-headed idealist.

"Covert action should not be confused with missionary work", Kissinger said, in explaining why he cut off aid to the Kurdish rebels who were fighting Saddam Hussein's regime in northern Iraq in 1975. By joining Kissinger in limiting the analysis of choices to "the realist tradition" and "idealism" in foreign policy, Isaacson ignores the fact that American policy has always been a mixture of those two strands and more. The real question is how effective is the mixture. In the case of the Kurds, Kissinger's decisions contributed directly to Saddam Hussein's drive to dominate the Gulf, and all that followed. But the book kisses the Gulf off with precious few paragraphs and no serious inquiry, as did Kissinger.

What was unique about the Nixon-Kissinger years was the totally amoral, conspiratorial way in which the two men approached not foreign policy but their own staffs, associates and friends – the American power elite. Bugging, backstabbing and betrayal became a way of life at the White House. You may think you know all you want to know about that period, but Isaacson adds to our store of knowledge, and sense of revulsion, about the roots of Watergate and Kissinger's indirect role in launching that scandal.

Isaacson adopts the view that Kissinger's
philosophy of politics and life sprang from his
being "a product of the Weimar Republic and a
victim of the Nazis' ideological fervour". His
personality masks "the soul of a refugee" who
needed to ingratiate himself in his adopted land.
The book shows Kissinger going from being
persecuted by the Nazis for being a Jew to being
persecuted by Nixon in the White House for the
same reason. The difference was that, in the
White House, Kissinger acquiesced, telling Jew-
ish staffers he could not take them to a meeting
because Nixon would think there were too many
Jews present. Isaacson reports this without
betraying what – if anything – he thinks this says
about his subject.

It is perhaps not surprising that Kissinger feels
that he paid Isaacson handsomely in the coin
politicians use with writers – access and tasty
morsels of previously hidden information – only
to be bitten on the hand. My disappointment as
a reader lies elsewhere. For all the fun along
the way, his biographer fails in the end to get the
proper, critical distance on Kissinger and on the
accomplishments that make him one of the
twentieth century's most important figures. It was
a close-run thing this time, but Kissinger has
slipped free, to continue to argue with force and
brilliance the version of history that best suits his
own ends.

Jim Hoagland is Chief Foreign Correspondent of
the Washington Post.

-4-

[L.C.]

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Simon & Schuster Consumer Group

1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
212-698-7340

Michael Korda

Corporate Vice President
Editor-in-Chief
Trade Division

October 7, 1992

Dear Henry:

I'm no stranger to the idiosyncrasies and problems of intellectual
conflict of interest in book publishing, but I hope you will believe me
when I say that I was shocked and upset by the choice of Nahum Goldman's
quote as the lead in Simon & Schuster's advertisement for the Isaacson
biography that appeared in Tuesday's New York Times.

Had I been consulted, I would certainly have strongly advised against
using so prominently a quote that questioned your integrity, when
numerous other, less sensational, quotes might have been used with equal
effect to sell the book.

It is never comfortable publishing books that are critical of one's
authors or one's friends (and I count you as both), but egregiously
rubbing salt in open wounds is going farther than the normal give-and-
take of First Amendment rights and publishing realities requires, and
the advertisement seemed to me to have been prepared with what
Talleyrand would have condemned as "_trop de zele._" _Beaucoup trop_, as a
matter of fact.

I know we will publish your book with equal zeal, but in the meantime I
want you to know that this is a case of one hand not knowing what the
other was doing, and that I am, as you may imagine, _personally_ embar-
rassed by what has happened.

With all best wishes,

Fondly,

Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, New York

A DuPont Communications Company