ABC NEWS NIGHTLINE Show #1478

Air Date: January 22, 1987

Kissinger Interview

**TED KOPPEL (voice-over):** Henry Kissinger has been there. He knows the pitfalls of foreign policy, on dealing with terrorists.

**HENRY KISSINGER, former secretary of state:** The only safe position with hostages is to say you will not negotiate.

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** On protecting the President from embarrassment or worse.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** If you know this is a president who is given to leaps, you owe it to him to tell him where a leap could go wrong.

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** On President Reagan's research.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** What was put before him is amazingly sloppy, superficial—

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** Tonight, some unusually blunt comments from Henry Kissinger on this past year in U.S. foreign policy.

(on-camera) Good evening. I'm Ted Koppel, and this is Nightline.

(voice-over) Kissinger on the bureaucracy:

**Dr. KISSINGER:** —If you don't watch them, the bureaucracy gives you three options: nuclear war, unconditional surrender, and their preference.

**KOPPEL:** And on the unplanned summit at Reykjavik:

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I thought it was a madly dangerous procedure.

**KOPPEL:** Our guest, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

**ANNOUNCER:** This is ABC News Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

**KOPPEL:** He became a figure of worldwide importance as the principle foreign policy adviser to Presidents Nixon and Ford. He served in both administrations as secretary of state, but began with President Nixon as head of the National Security Council. Before that, he had served as adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, and many of the world's leaders today studied foreign policy under Professor Henry Kissinger at Harvard. He knows the territory. He also knows that it is a mine field. Dr. Kissinger has stepped on a few of those mines himself, among them Vietnam and Chile. But few people alive are better qualified to assess where, how and why U.S. foreign policy is in trouble. We spoke to Dr. Kissinger yesterday at his office in New York. We began with the subject of hostages, and the wisdom or folly of selling weapons to Iran.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** You have to remember that at any one point, there are tens of thousands of Americans around. So you have to weigh the price you pay for releasing any four or five of them against the added inducement that any number might be taken if the idea gets around that you can pay a price. Secondly, you have to understand what many of these terrorist groups are attempting to do. They are trying to show — especially the Middle Eastern ones — they're trying to show that if the United States cannot protect its own citizens, and if the United States can be made to pay ransom for its own citizens, that then those people in the Middle East who rely on America protection or American support cannot possibly count on it. And, therefore, they are undermining the whole American position in the Middle East.

**DAVID REED, nephew of hostage:** We are extremely concerned as a family for Frank's mental health, for his safety in captivity, and we pray for humane treatment.

**PEGGY SAY, sister of hostage:** What's wrong here? Where did Terry Anderson as a journalist get lost in the shuffle and Nick Daniloff is out in 30 days.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** When you meet the hostage families, of course, it's a very moving and upsetting experience. But if you once establish the principle that a price will be paid for hostages, then you can trigger a whole set of events whose long-term cost will be greater than whatever punishment is involved with the hostages.

**KOPPEL:** Dr. Kissinger, again and again and again, the vice president, within the past 48 hours, has restated the administration's policy: we do not deal for hostages.

**Vice President BUSH:** We do not make concessions to terrorists. We will go the extra mile to free those American hostages.

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**Dr. KISSINGER:** The two things cannot be reconciled. The only safe position with hostages is to say we will not negotiate, painful as it is. Once you open negotiations, you have indicated that there is a price you're going to pay, and you're haggling about the price. You've given up the principle, and my strong temptation would be to say, "If you have said that you can control release of the hostages, there's no possibility of getting anything from us until the hostages are released. If any harm comes to the hostages, we will take retaliation." Now what— that would have to be studied more carefully than I have studied it.

**KOPPEL:** In terms of public stance, though, no one could have taken a tougher public stance than Ronald Reagan. No one could have backed that tougher public stance with tougher action than what he did against Libya, for example.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** That did a lot of good. It made the Syrians more cautious, it— not much has been heard from the Libyans since then in the field of terrorism. But, that stance was vitiated by the fact that the key actors knew that while we were doing that, we were paying off the Iranians, who are the more formidable opponent. After all, when you use arms dealers from the Middle East to ship arms into Iran, when you do it via Israel, that may be a secret to the American public, but it surely was not a secret to some of the key players in that area. My criticism of this action from a procedure point of view— I can understand how a president, seeing the families and knowing somebody's getting tortured, is overwhelmed with human feelings, but somebody should go to him and say, "Now, Mr. President, if you do this, the following will happen. You do it through Khashoggi, [ADNAN KHASHOGGI Saudi Arabian businessman, arms dealer]"

and he will pick up a telephone and call Fahd within 30 seconds."

**KOPPEL:** The king of Saudi Arabia.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** The king of Saudi Arabia. So the Saudis will know immediately that you're shipping arms, even though your secretary of state has pledged to the Gulf Council, which is the nations of which Saudi Arabia is the key, that not only will we not send any arms, but we don't want anyone else to send any arms. What will the king of Saudi Arabia conclude? One, since he assumes that we know what we're doing, he has to assume— and that this is not trust, a compassionate thing, he must assume that we want the Iranians to win the war. If that is our policy, and since they think the Iranians have the upper hand anyway, then they have to get themselves into a position where they are not the last fighter on the barricades, and they want to preempt this. But, if by chance, they did believe that all we were interested in was hostages, then they could only conclude that if the Americans are so worried about four prisoners, how can we expect them to run the risks of hundreds of casualties, if not more, for our defense, to which they have pledged themselves. So, whatever theory you assume, once we got into this arms shipment to Iran, the consequences among the moderate Arabs had to be serious. And in the documents that I have seen that have been published, I see no reference to that at all.

**KOPPEL:** When we come back, Dr. Kissinger focuses on the National Security Council — what it should be doing and what, over the past couple of years, it has done.

### [Commercial break]

**KOPPEL:** The full story, of course, is still not yet known. From what is known, it appears that former national security adviser John Peindexter and one of his aides, Lt. Col. Oliver North, ran certain aspects of foreign policy — arms sales to Iran, profits to the contras — with President Reagan only partially informed.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** What the President desperately needs — any president — is a clear statement of the options. I use to say jokingly that if you don't watch them, the bureaucracy gives you three options: nuclear war, unconditional surrender, and their preference. And what the President needs is to understand the consequences of various courses of action. Any president can make a mistake. But when he makes a mistake, he should have the consolation of knowing that he did it on the basis of choices he considered, and then took the wrong one. What's hard to take, for a government, is that he never even got a chance to consider the things that turned out to be disastrous. Now, in a case like this, to sell arms to Iran when your an-

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JUN 23 '87 10:31 NIGHTLINE

[LC]

nounced policy is not to sell it — when you, in effect, do something that looks like
ransoming hostages when your announced policy is that you shouldn't, somebody
should have put down the arguments that overwhelm these obvious inconsistencies.
And when your secretary of state and defense disagree, I think the President's
entitled to know why they disagree. What was put before him is amazingly sloppy,
superficial, and out of any proportion to the gravity of what he was being asked to
do. And so I don't know: did he understand that he was overruling them on an issue
of principle, or did he think this is like the numbers in the arms control negotia-
tions, where he has to grab one and go with it? I don't know.

**KOPPEL:** Part of it is a function of what the National Security Council ought to do and what it has been doing. This National Security Council, or at least the one that was in place until a few months ago, became quite literally an operational branch of government. Good? Bad?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I think potentially disastrous, because— for two reasons: one, the—
I don't oppose using the National Security Council for specific limited operational
missions. Indeed, when I headed it, it was used for specific, limited operational mis-
sions. But its principal overriding function is to make sure that the President
engages in an orderly decision-making process, and that he knows the major consid-
erations that bear on a decision. In any event, many of the staff members of the
National Security Council were chosen for ideological purity rather than for experi-
ence in foreign policy, so they had a temptation to go to more extreme positions,
and there was no countervailing force to check them.

**KOPPEL:** Let me come at it another way. You've got a situation here, for example,
in Nicaragua, where the President's point of view is unambiguous.

President RONALD REAGAN (January 29, 1981): The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause.

(February 6, 1985): The Sandanista dictatorship of Nicaragua, with full
Cuban Soviet bloc support, not only persecutes its people, the church, and
denies a free press, but arms and provides bases for Communist terrorists at-
tacking neighboring states.

(June 4, 1986): A Communist Nicaragua, aligned with the Soviet Union, is
a permanent threat to us all.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** The President may feel that the world would be better off without the Sandanista government. He may be heavily committed to doing it. But that is not the same as saying, "Disregard a congressional instruction to the contrary, that prevents me from doing what I want to do." Now, I have some sympathy for this problem. The President is deeply convinced that his cause is right. And, I think, on balance, his analysis is better than that of his critics on this issue. Congress prohibits him from doing what he wants to have done. He feels convinced that within six months he can turn the Congress around, that he will then start looking around, and even more, his staff looks around, how he gets through those six months is an understandable emotion, though it does not justify illegal actions. On the other hand, all of his experts tell him that if he gets $100 million out of the Congress, he's doing terrifically well. For any administration, including the ones I have served, there is always the temptation to follow the Leo Durocher principle: use your best pitcher today because tomorrow it may rain. So, if you can get $100 million this year, then maybe something will happen next year.

**KOPPEL (voice-over):** Blocked by Congress from giving what he believed to be essential aid to the contras, President Reagan authorized several end runs around Congress. Representatives of the President became involved in a sort of a privatization of foreign policy, soliciting money from like-minded citizens at home and from sympathetic governments like Brunei, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia abroad.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I have sympathy for the dilemma of a president in that situation. When you go to Brunei, which is about as far away from the world—in the world from Nicaragua as you can get, then you go to Saudi Arabia and you say there, "We can't handle a problem 400 miles from our border that we think is a threat to our national security. Will you please kick in $X million, and will you put it in a private bank account in Switzerland, so we— and we don't even have a regular machinery

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for dispersing it," it must raise questions about how you can conduct yourself on those issues that are of greatest consequence to them.

**KOPPEL:** When we come back, Henry Kissinger explains why he believes the summit in Reykjavik between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was a far greater disaster than the Iran arms deal.

[Commercial break]

**KOPPEL:** It began, you may recall, with the President's advisers insisting, somewhat angrily at times, that Mr. Reagan wasn't going to Reykjavik for a summit with his Soviet counterpart. It was to be nothing more than a preparatory pre-summit meeting. It turned out, of course, to be much more than that, much more substantive and, in Henry Kissinger's view, much more dangerous.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** You know, if you had asked me ahead of time whether it could happen, I would have said— I would have thought it inconceivable. It got off the rails, in my judgment, to begin with, when Gorbachev arrived with a memorandum which had four major proposals in it, the existence of which we didn't even know about.

: It was Gorbachev who took the early initiative, pulling from his briefcase a detailed set of proposals to cut both sides' strategic arsenals by roughly 50% in five years, and to reduce intermediate range missiles in Europe to zero.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** That's absolutely unheard of, that a— that you present your opposite number at a summit with a negotiating paper which you know and he hasn't seen — puts him at an immediate disadvantage, also runs a huge risk that if they disagree, that then there is no further court of appeals, and if they agree, that they may not know what they agreed on. All the summits that I have ever seen are studied at a preparation in which we told the other side what we were likely to say and asked them to tell us, so that was the first thing. Now, second, is the Soviets were very clever—

**KOPPEL:** Well, what should the President have done at that point—

**Dr. KISSINGER:** In my view—

**KOPPEL:** —when he got that memorandum?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** I think what the President should have said— done is to say to Gorbachev, "Read this, very interesting, has many positive aspects, but I wrote you a letter in June on only one of these four topics that took you three months to answer. So you will understand that this is a complex thing that I cannot answer quickly here. I want to consult my advisers, I want to consult my allies. In a few weeks, few months" — whatever he wanted to say — "Secretary Shultz will be prepared to meet with Shevardnadze, give the answer. As they make progress, you and I should meet again." I think that would have been a very good outcome. President Reagan could have come home and said, "I elicited a major proposal. We've adopted the following procedure." It would have been much less dangerous than to have a group of advisers upstairs, to have President Reagan, who, as no other president, can be an expert on all these issues, and the secretary of state, who also, with all his good qualities, is no expert on these issues, negotiate from a Soviet paper when— the Soviets very cleverly took a lot of proposals that we had made over the years and that had emerged out of the peculiar Washington syndrome of state and defense fighting with each other and then [the] President adopting some number that they could both agree to, figuring that a lot of other things would happen before it ever saw the light of day. They've just dumped it all on us, and so that we were psychologically vulnerable, because, in a sense, they were accepting a lot of things that at some time or other we had put forward.

**KOPPEL:** So who should have done what? I mean, is this a time when the President just has to say—

**Dr. KISSINGER:** Well, I think—

**KOPPEL:** "Hold it, time, we need to—"?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** No, I think probably what should have happened, what I would like to think should have been recommended is— it's very dangerous to put the President— unfair to the President to put him into a position to negotiate from a Soviet paper on the basis of numbers that no president can master, and ask him in

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24 hours to settle the nuclear age, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff went there and
have never studied this thing, the secretary of defense hadn't seen these numbers.
our allies hadn't seen these numbers. There were two negotiating sessions of three
hours each, half of them devoted to interpretation, and I thought it was a madly
dangerous procedure that even if they had come to an agreement, I am convinced
the impementing negotiations would have broken down by now.

**KOPPEL:** When we come back, we'll talk about President Reagan's competence, and
what his strengths and weaknesses require from his top advisers.

*(Commercial break)*

**KOPPEL:** It's much easier to talk about a leader's advanced age, and whether, figuratively speaking, he's lost a step or two, when it's someone else's leader you're talking about — the late Soviet President Brezhnev, for example, who was visibly out of touch at times during his summit meeting with President Jimmy Carter. For a man about to turn 76, President Reagan has enormous vitality. He could easily pass himself off as being ten years younger, but he is almost 76. And that, as Dr. Kissinger pointed out, requires that his closest advisers take particular care in spelling out options and that they exercise an exceptional sort of bureaucratic courage.

**Dr. KISSINGER:** My impression of President Reagan is that, so far as I can read, he has never been a man to focus on details, as governor or as president. His great strength is a sort of intuitive feel of what might or might not work, and a great courage in making a leap in that direction. Now, any associate of a president has two choices, he can take advantage of the President's psychology — and every president has a particular psychology — or he can try to compensate for it, so that if you know that this is a president who is given to leaps, you owe it to him to tell him where a leap could go wrong. And the way you must work with this is just to make sure — it may cost you your job — but you have to be willing to be a gadfly and say, "Most of the time you've been right on these things, Mr. President, but I just want you to know if you do this, it's— it's a debacle."

**KOPPEL:** Did you see any such heroes in the Carter administration?

**Dr. KISSINGER:** My judgment of President Reagan is that he's — except sometimes in flights of rhetoric — a very careful man, and I do not believe that either at Reykjavik or on Iran people went up to him and said, "You just cannot do this. You're paying a huge price if you do do it, and I think—I don't— and this has to be built into the present system."

**KOPPEL:** Our thanks to Dr. Kissinger for sharing his time and his experience.
That's our report for tonight. I'm Ted Koppel in Washington. For all of us here at
ABC News, good night.

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On Instinct

HENRY KISSINGER has been on the TV circuit for the past several weeks as a tireless defender of President Reagan in his hour of travail. Kissinger's thesis — a sound one — is that Reagan had positioned himself for spectacular

By Ray Jenkins

breakthroughs on U.S.-Soviet relations before everything began to fall apart at the Iceland summit and in the Iran scandal.

The fault, Kissinger says, lies in the terrible advice Reagan got from his foreign policy team, for whom the former secretary of state holds only scornful contempt. When Reagan gets the full range of options, Kissinger contends, he almost always makes the right choice because he tends to act more prudently than he speaks and, more important, he posesses an uncanny instinct for the right decision and the courage to act on those instincts.

Those who, like Kissinger, view Reagan through the prism of experience in other administrations share Kissinger's awe at Reagan's instinct, which is a far greater factor in his successes than his legendery "luck." Undeniably, Reagan is "lucky," but let us remember, luck tends to favor those who seek it.

My own prism was observation of Jimmy Carter. Like most, I marveled at Carter's fabled mastery of "detail" — which, like luck, favors those who seek it. To cite one example of Carter's powers of concentration, he would read, on average, 350 pages of official papers every day — on top of books and newspapers.

But in the end, I concluded that even if a president can move a molehill of "detail" every day, the mountain will remain at sun-down. It is simply beyond human capacity for a president to absorb all the "detail" he needs to know, so ultimately any occupant of that office must rely on instinct.

Reagan's success tended to confirm this view — until "luck" began to run out. In a sense, the Bitburg flasco two years ago was the first harbinger of things to come. Reagan found himself alone in the dark in the cemetery

on that occasion because his instinct was not adequately grounded in an awareness of the past. If, for example, he had read William Styron's novel, "Sophie's Choice," Reagan might not have scandalized himself by honoring the "heroes" of the Waffen SS who lay in the Bitburg cemetery. In atoning for that misjudgment, Reagan stood before the Anne Frank monument at Bergen-Belsen and proclaimed, "I am a Jew." That experience, while constructively chastening, would not have been necessary if he had read the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who wrote that sentence in his poem, "Babi Yar," 30 years earlier.

So I part company with my old professor Henry Kissinger in the reasons for the sudden collapse of Reagan's instinct. Rather than blame it on bad advice, I blame it on neglected education. From all I can gather, Reagan reads almost no history. I would be surprised if he read any of Henry Adams' seminal work on the presidency; almost no literature — I would be surprised if he read any of Faulkner; almost no philosophy — I would be surprised if he read Thoreau's essay "On Civil Disobedience."

I don't mean to suggest that a president can't be competent unless he has read these particular works. I do suggest that unless he has some speaking acquaintance with some materials akin to the aforementioned, he simply cannot adequately understand the country he is governing.

Lacking educational foundation, instinct inevitably degenerates into what sociologists call ethnocentrism — a belief that one's own culture, religion and values are not only superior, but that others are inferior and maybe even dangerous. And Reagan is the quintessential ethnocentric man who, from all indications, sees Hollywood as the embodiment of American virtue, and the wealth of his friends as the tangible rewards of their virtue. Hence, the "evil empire" speech which poisoned U.S.-Soviet relations for so long. Hence, his appalling insensitivity to the plight of those entrapped in urban squalor. Hence, his confusion of manic daredeviltry with "heroism" in Ollie North.

Henry Kissinger, whose very genes carry the intellectual tradition, knows these things as well as I; if he says otherwise, he is — to put it diplomatically — simply not telling the whole truth.

[LC] PROOF copy
The Baltimore
Sun, 1/21/97