The Daily Argus

MOUNT VERNON, N. Y. D 15,084

[LC]

DEC 30 1979

B.f.ILL.

Diary of a diplomat

The White House Years, by Henry Kissinger.
Little, Brown, $22.50.

Your approach to this book may well be colored by attitudes formed toward the former Secretary of State many years ago; however, whether you like or dislike Mr. Kissinger, his story of his first four years as Nixon's closest adviser on foreign policy is necessary reading if you want to know more about what happened to our country and to the world during those watershed years.

The book has Kissinger's version of his "shuttle diplomacy," the bombing of Cambodia, and other controversial milestones of the period from January 1969 to January 1973. Dr. Kissinger tells of his first meeting with Nixon—and of what he really thinks of him; of his secret trip to China, the first SALT negotiations, the 1970 Jordan crisis, the India-Pakistan war of 1971, and the summit meetings in Moscow and Peking.

Marching through these pages are the decisions that were made about the war in Vietnam, the events in Laos and Cambodia, the "Christmas Bombing" of 1972, Sadat's break with the USSR, the Chilean disaster, and portraits of such world leaders as Leonid Brezhnev, Golda Meir, Le Duc Tho, Charles de Gaulle, Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai.

I found the writing to be more than serviceable in this book, which is dedicated to Kissinger's political mentor, Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Paley and dlers of California, the ham-Eugene Meyer Post.

Halberstam, author of the seven-year study of the four major media institutions and the people who drove them, and he has told us what they have done with the power they amassed and how they have affected our lives.

It is a book of superlatives, filled with adjective-strewn prose that creates images of outsize people.

On Paley: "He was in any real sense the father of modern broadcasting, a towering figure... not just the first, but the best."

On Luce: "He was a big man... ever restless... a major figure of American journalism, the leading innovator of more than two decades... He and his magazines would be the true voice of American life at the mid-century."

Americans believe, though, that Luce may have harmed this country by distorting the truth in his magazines to reflect his narrow, personal view of people and events. Halberstam writes, "Luce's printed version of what he felt events should have been often obscured what in fact they had been." The author even suggests that Luce's twisted view of democracy was responsible for creating the climate that allowed Joe McCarthy to rise to power.

Outsize adjectives, verbs and descriptions tumble headlong through the book, embracing Teddy White, the violently anti-labor Otis-Chandler family, Kay Graham, and

# Book World

[LC]

By Broox Sledge

In the world of books one of the most brilliant men of our time has produced a deep, thorough, unmistakably-and intensely-historical volume--one which will be consulted for years to come by students, professors, amateur and professional historians, and--hopefully--the general public.

The man is Dr. Henry Kissinger. The book is "White House Years," from Little-Brown Company.

The book is the finest one on the true state of affairs in Washington, D.C. in years. No book on the contemporary scene, and precious few before, can touch it.

The only genuine candidate for the role of statesman this nation has produced in this century, Dr. Kissinger combines intellectual objectivity with enlightening subjectivity to probe and unveil and illuminate the momentous events during his years in and around the White House.

Such matters as his relationship with Richard Nixon, his secret talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, and the controversy over Indochina policy somehow seem more readily understood, more able to sit solidly in their proper context, than before Dr. Kissinger's treatise.

It is this nation's grievous loss that Dr. Kissinger was born in Germany and therefore is not constitutionally eligible for the U.S. Presidency. It is the firm belief of this writer that such an event as Iran's seizure of U.S. Embassy personnel recently would have been effectively de-fused and solved satisfactorily by Dr. Kissinger within 72 hours.

The book is filled with photographs and its profound message seems somehow distilled into its essence in one of those photographs--that of Richard Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, William Rogers and Gen. Alexander Haig seated together at a table after the Vietnam breakthrough.

In that one scene, vibrantly alive, is the epitome of sophisticated knowledge and interna-

tional expertise and influence and respect that the world cries out for today. The photo awaken a dormant, brooding memory that this is a quality our nation possessed when these men of character and class sat in power in Washington. Such is no longer the case. We are in many ways now the tail of the world and that savage barbarian in Iran is waving us.

A prayer goes up from this column that we could swap what passes for government today for that of a few years ago. What about Watergate, you would ask? What about Watergate, I would reply.

After all, it never was and history will never view Watergate as it was painted by our overblown, self-righteous, self-deified national press, but was merely a mild political faux pas fanned to blood heat by the power-wild political conglomerate of the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Washington Post and that great champion of the rights of the people--NBC, CBS and ABC.

Power does indeed corrupt. And in the case of our national "news" media, complete power has indeed completely corrupted, just as William Pitt said it would in a speech before the English Parliament in 1770.

Watergate will be long remembered in history, as it should be. But not as today's unconscionable literary high-fliers would have it to be remembered. It will be rendered, in the calm light of the passing years, as what it was--the most hideous, unconscionable misuse of power in the political tapestry of this nation--on the part of our "free" press. The press which is indeed free, if you own the press.

Dr. Kissinger will stride the pages of history with men like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Winston Churchill. If you'll get the book, immerse yourself in it, then you can stride along with him.

NEW ALBANY, MISS.
GAZETTE
TW. 7,000

JAN 1 9 1980

Kyndles

THE BOOK WORLD

BY BROOX SLEDGE

In the world of books one of the most brilliant men of our time has produced a deep, thorough, unmistakably-and intensely-historical volume—one which will be consulted for years to come by students, professors, ama-teur and professional historians, and—hopefully—the general public.

The only genuine candidate for the role of statesman this nation has produced in this century, Dr. Kissinger combines intellectual objectivity with enlightening subjectivity to probe and unveil and illuminate the momentous events during his years in and around the White House. Such matters as his relationship with Richard Nixon, his secret talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, and the controversy over Indochina policy somehow seem more readily understood, more apparently to sit solidly in their proper context, than before Dr. Kissinger's treatise.

It is the nation's grievous loss that Dr. Kissinger was born in Germany and therefore is not constitutionally eligible for the U.S. Presidency. It is the firm belief of this writer that such an event as Iran's seizure of U.S. Embassy personnel recently would have been effectively de-fused and solved satisfactorily by Dr. Kissinger within 72 hours.

The book is filled with photographs and its profound message seems somehow distilled into its essence in one of those photographs—that of Richard Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, William Rogers and Gen. Alexander Haig seated together at a table after the Vietnam breakthrough. In that one scene, vibrantly alive, is the

epitome of sophisticated knowledge and international expertise and influence and respect that the world cries out for Today. The photo awakens a dormant, brooding memory that this is a quality our nation possessed when these men of character and class sat in power in Washington. Such is no longer the case. We are in many ways now the tail of the world and that savage barbarian in Iran is waving us.

A prayer goes up from this column that we could swap what passes for government today for that of a few years ago. What about Watergate, you would ask? What about Watergate, I would reply. After all, it never was and history will never view Watergate as it was painted by our overblown, self-righteous, self-deified national press, but was merely a mild political faux pas fanned to blood heat by the power-wild political conglomerate of the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Washington Post and that great champion of the rights of the people—NBC, CBS and ABC.

Power does indeed corrupt. "And in the case of our national "news" media, complete power has indeed completely corrupted, just as William Pitt said it would in a speech before the English Parliament in 1770.

Watergate will be long remembered in history, as it should be. But not as today's unconscionably literary high-fliers would have it to be remembered. It will be rendered, in the calm light of the passing years, as what it was—the most hideous, unconscionable misuse of power in the political tapestry of this nation—on the part of our "free" press. The press which is indeed free, if you own the press.

Kissinger was at peace with himself.

Shawcross proceeds to recount the rest of the Cambodian War, which resulted in the overthrow of the US puppet Lon Nol in April 1975. Shawcross seems to be a bit harsh on the victorious Cambodian rebels, considering the role of the US and the extremely difficult situation which they faced, but that matter is really peripheral to the author's tale.

Near the end of *Sideshow*, Shawcross cites a rather prophetic comment made by a senior State Department official: "One day Henry Kissinger will retire, and he will write his memoirs. And you will buy them and I will buy them. And I will write a footnote on every page." Indeed, that is exactly what Shawcross himself has done. *Sideshow*, at least in respect to Kissinger and Cambodia, is an historical footnote to *White House Years*, and as is often the case with history books, the footnotes are more revealing than the text itself. One only hopes that other historians will footnote Kissinger's sordid role in Chile, Vietnam, and other far-off lands. In those cases, all we have now are his lies. ☐

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New in 1979 from
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by Carobeth Laird

A memoir about life in a nursing home by a survivor—the powerful, evocative story of Mrs. Laird’s time in a nursing home when she was 79 years old. The first dramatic account seen through the eyes of an “inmate.” 190 pages, paper, $5.95.

ESKIMOS AND
EXPLORERS
by Wendell H. Oswalt

A comprehensive account of Western contact with Eskimos from the Norse to the present, and from Greenland to Alaska, "Recommended for ... anyone interested in Eskimos."

—Library Journal
368 pp., cloth, illus., $15.00.

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GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN:
FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE NIXON YEARS

A Tissue of Lies: Nixon vs. Hiss
by Morton Levitt & Michael Levitt
*McGraw Hill, $14.95, cloth*

Pro and Conrad
by Paul Conrad, foreword by Art Buchwald
*Neff-Kane Publishers, $18.95, cloth*

Erik S. McMahon

A POLITICAL pundit some years ago attempted a list of the good things which could be said about Richard Nixon. Shortly after beginning this ambitious task, however, he was stymied, having achieved only one entry: he would never wear brown shoes with a blue suit.

One thing is sure: Nixon was never noted for his ability to keep promises. From a strictly selfish point of view, many wish that he had honored just one, mouthed originally 17 long and troubled years ago. Back in 1962, when Tricky Dick, still smarting from his narrow defeat by JFK two years previously, failed to capture the Governorship of his home state, he reached the nadir of oratory, delivering what will be remembered as one of the most maudlin and self-pitying concession speeches in the history of politics. "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore," he assured a group of stunned reporters, "because this, gentlemen, is my last press conference." Would that it had been true.

Nearly two decades later, despite his exit in disgrace from Washington, the swarthy specter of Nixon still haunts us. We read with dismay of his mammoth royalties from *RN* and his self-serving television interviews, the channeling of vast amounts of public funds into upkeep of his offices and pensions, his struggles to find a Manhattan apartment that will accept him, his lone wolf—or mad dog—attempts at foreign diplomacy. And Nixon is still a saleable commodity in the publishing world as well.

There is a voluminous amount of literature in print on Nixon's attainment of near-dictatorial power and his eventual fall, but comparatively little has been produced on the period of his ascendency, his single-minded scramble towards the top of the political heap. *A Tissue of Lies* attempts to fill this gap, and succeeds admirably.

Morton Levitt and Michael Levitt offer a thorough dissection of a prototypical loyalty trail, which had enormous influence on this country's political attitudes and, perhaps more than any other single event, set the stage for Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to power on a tide of Red-baiting.

Alger Hiss, who during the middle and latter years of Roosevelt's New Deal had been an upwardly mobile and respected member of the State Department,

suddenly had his credibility called into question by Whittaker Chambers, a self-confessed "reformed Communist," who was also an editor of *Time* magazine. Chambers maintained that he and Hiss were fellow-members of the Communist Party in the late '30s, and that Hiss had "furnished, transmitted and delivered" a number of restricted State Department documents to him. For some time, Chambers had been unable to find an audience for his espionage charges, but at last he managed to inspire interest on the part of the later-infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, the junior member of which was an ambitious, staunchly anti-Communist, first-term California Congressman named Richard Nixon.

The first sentence of this work is a fine indicator of what later transpired, and shows something of the bias of the authors, an eminently justifiable one: "Richard Milhous Nixon's rise to world prominence was strewn with the corpses of his political enemies." Politically astute if ethically handicapped, Nixon grabbed the Hiss issue, popularized and promoted it, and milked it for considerable political mileage. Whenever the case showed signs of lagging, Nixon, acting the part of righteous and dogged prosecutor, was there to refuel the flames of a growing nationwide Cold War indignation and paranoia. As the authors describe it, and as Hiss himself has said in similar terms, "Nixon was a man possessed, a prizefighter peaking for a title bout."

By the time Nixon became involved with the Hiss case, the statute of limitations had expired on the original charge of espionage, and Hiss was tried for perjury, his eventual downfall hinging on the fact that he refused to acknowledge even knowing Mr. Chambers. As the case unfolded, it became progressively more inflammatory and convoluted, and the present retelling of it takes on all the twists of plot and dramatic impact of what mystery fans refer to as a "procedural."

Some of the more outlandish elements of the trial testimony would, in fact, make fine detective fiction, replete as they are with falsified evidence, midnight raids, aliases, and the notorious "Pumpkin Papers"—incriminating microfilmed documents secreted in a pumpkin on the Chambers farm. There would be a great deal of black humor here, too, if the case had not had such a shattering impact on the life and career of Mr. Hiss.

The excerpts from the hearing transcripts, liberally quoted in this book, are well-chosen and revealing. The anguish experienced by Hiss is painfully obvious throughout, while his accuser attempted to play a saintly and crusading role. Consider the speech Chambers made when the question arose of a possible grudge against Hiss, proclaimed by Nixon as "...one of the most eloquent statements made in the history of the Committee on American Activities":

"...I do not hate Mr. Hiss. We were close friends, but we are caught in a tragedy of history. Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting, and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which this nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise."

*A Tissue of Lies* will be of great interest to students of the law, and those intrigued by the nature of the political animal. It will also go a long way towards a vindication of Hiss, or at least a partial one. While the Hiss defense was flawed at best, and involved a significant number of escalating untruths, the intervening years have proved beyond doubt that of the two protagonists treated of herein, Nixon was the guilty. The fact remains, as the Levitts state, that "...the evidence that convicted Hiss was, by today's standards, flimsy and controvertible." The contrasts between that and the blatant lawlessness of the Watergate conspiracy speak for themselves.

NOW, as a postscript, let us get back to the Nixonian good points, if possible. He did make life easier for political cartoonists, if no one else: his appearance, mannerisms, and actions were more easily caricatured than any other president in recent memory. Leafing through *Pro and Conrad*, a collection of the best recent work of Paul

10

SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF BOOKS

BURLINGTON FREE
PRESS
BURLINGTON, VT.
S. 30,000

JAN 13 1980

New
England
Newsclip

# Kissinger Memoirs ‘Grand’ Work [LC]

"White House Years," by Henry Kissinger (Boston, Mass: Little, Brown and Company, Oct. 23, 1979, 1,552 pp., $22.50.)

By ROBERT CLERC

Gannett News Service

Webster tells us that "grand" is one of those peculiarly American indeterminate words that

can convey any number of meanings. Among the more common are 1) higher in rank or dignity than others in the same grouping or class, 2) most important, 3) imposing because of great size, 4) characterized by splendor or display, and 5) eminent, distinguished, illustrious.

Regardless of which definition one chooses, however, "White House Years," the first of two volumes of Dr. Henry Kissinger's memoirs, ranks as a grand book.

It is an imposing work, almost intimidating in fact, with 700,000 words contained in 1,552 pages. But if the book is grand in size, it is equally grand in style. Kissinger begins on Page 1 putting the reader's mind at ease that this will not be just another stilted, sterile essay by a retired bureaucrat. His facility with words, his willingness to share insights clearly and succinctly and his appreciation of the humor and irony of a situation mark him quickly as an author of the highest caliber.

His first volume treats the three turbulent years from 1969, when Kissinger began his public life as special security advisor in the Nixon administration, to 1972 and the formal end of the Vietnam War. During that period,

KISSINGER

## Book Review

Kissinger's duties took him to the most sensitive trouble spots and brought him in contact with world leaders of every stripe and persuasion. He shares his impressions of each with an incisive candor and charm that has come to be the Kissinger trademark.

In the first chapter he sets that tone by exposing his early — and he suggests natural — aversion to the president he served so well. He explains that "all my political experience had been in the company of those who considered themselves in mortal opposition to Richard Nixon. I had taught for over 10 years at Harvard University, where among the faculty disdain for Richard Nixon was established orthodoxy. And the single most influential person in my life had been a man whom Nixon had twice defeated in futile quests for the presidential nomination, Nelson Rockefeller."

He quickly admits that he "had little direct evidence on which to base a judgment" of Nixon. But that did not alter the fact that he had done so.

A side note is appropriate here. The few pages Kissinger gives to Rockefeller by way of background for his own entry into public life are nothing short of poignant. He gives the reader a forthright look at the inner Rockefeller, a man perceived by Kissinger to be torn by his inability

to reconcile the advantage of his great wealth with his aspirations for public office. He makes no bones about his final appraisal of the New York governor: "A man who could have been one of our great presidents would never achieve his goal. This knowledge was all the harder for his friends because we know deep down that but for tactical errors and hesitations, it should have been otherwise."

Kissinger is equally forthright in his observations on Nixon. He acknowledges that he recieved his appointment to the White House staff because Nixon wanted to bridge the gap that separated him from the Ivy League intellectuals. More important, even, he wanted to run his own foreign policy. Kissinger analyzes Nixon at times with a cutting rigor:

> "The meeting of any new person filled Nixon with an undefined dread. He feared being confronted with some unexpected question, some unanticipated issue, or some line of argument for which he was not prepared and which might make him appear less in control of events than his self-image required."

At the same time he is fair. Kissinger finds reason in these personal failings to take full measure of the president's successes.

The list goes on and on. Golda Meir, Mao Tse-tung, the Shah of Iran, Chou En-lai, Leonid Brezhnev are but a few of those who are transformed by Kissinger's words from newsworthy abstractions to real people. He educates us to just how terribly and humanly fallible are the ways of these larger-than-life world leaders. It is evident throughout that the book was written with the expectation that it will be a sourcebook for future historians who engage in analyses of this tempestuous period in U.S. global relations.

Abnormal Births

AND JUSTIN M. JOFFE
is given males affect progeny

to re-examine their habits.

Lester F. Soyka, professor of
pharmacology, and Justin M. Joffe,
professor of psychology, have been
working since 1973 to prove that
drugs given to males can affect their
progeny. Originally, they set out to
study drug effects mediated (con-
veyed) by females. However, they
discovered that male rats which
were caged with females who were
receiving methadone or morphine

has discovered a mechanism or way
the drugs affect the male that would
account for such effects in the off-
spring.

Mechanisms being considered by
Soyka and Joffe include: by damag-
ing sperm during or after develop-
ment; by changing the character of
the seminal fluid, in which the
sperm are transport by so altering
mating habits that the changed male
behavior might engender harmful
hormonal changes in the female;
and by affecting levels of
testosterone, the male sex hormone.

Soyka said they are particularly
interested in the testosterone theo-
ry because "a number of drugs like
marijuana, alcohol and other
narcotics can have effects on
testosterone levels."

Soyka and Joffe's research is
gaining followers and publicity.
"Our work is getting cited which is
encouraging," Joffe said. "People
are not continuing to pretend it
doesn't exist. Reviews of prenatal
drug effects now include a mention
of paternal effects. They are sort of
cautious and not exactly endorsing
but they no longer are ignoring the
possibility."

A national commission to look at
monitoring of marketed prescrip-
tion drugs is expected to recom-
mend prescription drugs used by
males as well as females be
monitored for potentially adverse
influence on reproduction.

Free Press Photo by ELAINE ISAACSON

ALISON ARMSTRONG, NORTH DANVILLE, WAITS
... she modeled dress she made in Junior Miss event

Maggie: Junior Misses
On the Mark With Spirit

From Page 1D

receptions at the Elks Club, Bol-
ton Valley and St. Michael's s.

ried to Peter A. Landry, editor of
the group's weekend paper,
North Shore: Sunday. They re-
cently bought a home in
Georgetown.

THE COURIER-NEWS
PLAINFIELD, N. J.
D. 63,000

DEC 2 2 1979

Kissinger, Steinbrenner and Martin

[LC]

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following article has been adapted from a speech given a student in Christopher Morley's class in Effective Writing at Hillsborough High School. The setting is an interview by a book reviewer with Henry Kissinger subsequent to the publication of Kissinger's latest book, "The White House Years."

25 Little Brown

By ANDY KOERNER

It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak to you today, but unfortunately since the election of President Carter, I have not been able to do anything other than to give speeches and write books.

I had at one time been the most important person in the White House on matters of foreign affairs and had been able to use my Harvard education to impress the entire world. Having come to the United States just before World War II from a humble beginning in a small town in Germany, my rise to power has been miraculous. It certainly proved that I am almost as intelligent as I think I am and that I know how to maneuver in the world of politics.

It has been said that I always talk over the heads of my audiences and use words that they don't understand, but with my erudition and superciliousness, it's difficult to lower one's standards.

Because of my retirement from the office of secretary of state, where I enjoyed a reputation as a peacemaker in world conflict, I was most eager to seize the opportunity to mediate a domestic issue with consequences affecting the average American in many far-reaching ways.

I am talking, of course, about the recent crisis between George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, and Billy Martin, the former manager of the Yankees, that resulted from Billy's fight with the marshmallow salesman in a bar in Bloomington, Minn. Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of baseball, had called me early one morning as soon as he had heard of the altercation and asked if my services would be available to mediate the dispute.

I naturally told him that if I could make enough money I would do anything. Kuhn knew of my reputation as a conservative secretary of state under President Nixon and as a hawk in my

aggressive support of the Vietnam War. He also knew of my close friendship with Nelson Rockefeller and assumed that I liked money and people with lots of money. For these reasons, he felt that I would naturally support the position of the baseball owners and particularly that of the wealthy New York Yankees and Steinbrenner.

Kuhn was correct in his thinking, although I have never really considered myself as a conservative or a liberal, but rather as an independent who tried to look at a problem in its totality rather than just as local politics. In this case, I would try to look at the problem's effect on baseball in general and its impact on the world, of course. I did view baseball as a business rather than a sport and realized immediately that protecting that business meant helping the owners. I guess Bowie was right about me after all.

I knew that my primary objective would be to establish "detente" between the owner and manager that would enable them to work together, no matter how much they hated each other.

At the beginning, it was suggested that everyone meet with me in New York City to begin the mediation process. However, I realized immediately that it would be more dramatic if everyone stayed in their separate cities so I could fly back and forth and confer privately with each person individually. I could generate more headlines and TV coverage this way and also could tell the newspapers whatever I wanted without fear of contradiction. Naturally, I wanted everything to be conducted in utter secrecy.

I first flew out to see Martin and the marshmallow salesman, but when I arrived, they had already made up and were not sitting at the local bar singing with their arms arond each other's shoulders. I knew that news of this state of affairs would ruin my scheme. So I reported that they were still locked in serious combat at the bar and headed back to George.

Steinbrenner said he didn't care what Billy did, but would have to fire him if what he did made George look ludicrous. I realized that any action taken by Martin usually caused George

to appear that way, but I flew to Kuhn and announced that "peace was at hand." He said that I was the best thing that had happened to sports in years.

I then flew back to Billy to tell him that he could still have his job, if only he admitted that George was smarter than he was. If he didn't, then the whole crisis could spread to World War III. With that, Billy started swinging me, and I had to run for my life.

All was lost. I had to tell the missioner that for the present "I was no longer at hand," but if I was enough money available I would be willing to mediate through the process. It was at this time that the trouble with the newspapers and my ef- peared to be wasted as Billy was about to die.

However, this experience taught me that the wisest thing for me to do was to create a crisis with the media, not to solve one.

It was then that I decided friend David Rockefeller shah of Iran to New York City for a medical treatment.

Special program gives income, job skills to poor teen-agers

By ARTHUR L. GAVSHON
AP Diplomatic Correspondent

LONDON — Black Rhodesian leaders signed a peace agreement yesterday and exchanged cordial handshakes, then Bishop Abel Muzorewa told reporters democracy will be finished in Rhodesia if his rivals and the “murderers and rapists” who follow them gain power in upcoming elections.

"If my party does not win the election — an unlikely event — Zimbabwe will be finished as far as freedom, democracy and its economy are concerned," Muzorewa told a news conference. He and the co-leaders of the Patriotic Front guerrilla alliance had just signed the pact designed to end a 7-year-old guerrilla war and bring a new black government to Rhodesia.

Muzorewa, who resigned as prime minister when the British resumed control of its former colony, said of his foes: "The Patriotic Front is made up of murdererers and rapists. They have prepared death lists in case by some terrible miracle they come to power."

There was a surface cordiality at the signing and handshakes were exchanged, even between guerrilla leader Joshua Nkomo and Gen. Peter Walls, commander of Rhodesia's white-dominated military forces. British officials who had hoped the good will of the signing would linger afterward appeared dismayed by Muzorewa's statements.

If peace is accomplished, there will be an election in late February, follow-

program to give disadvantaged youths a chance to make money, pick up skills and realize the importance of an education.

"The whole thrust of the program is to provide them with some money to continue their education," said Tom Fulford, civilian employment superintendent at Pensacola Naval Air Station. "It gives them a chance to see what the work world is like and a chance to see what they need to get ahead in the work world."

More than 50 percent of the student-workers are black. Some are physically or mentally retarded. They are sprinkled among various jobs on the sprawling Navy base, and that may be a key to the program's success — they are put in the adult world, not bunched together with other youngsters in menial jobs.

Overall, their performance on the job is right in line with the showing of the other 9,000 federal employees on the base, according to Thelma Bellanova, coordinator of the youth-jobs program.

"The kids sort of grow up in the program," she said. "It teaches them responsibility. They acquire a better feel for handling their money.

"You'd be surprised at how much these students can do; they make good employees. Supervision has a lot to do with it. The supervisors and counselors treat them as young adults."

had sold them, not even when the judge gave him a chance to "come clean." After all, both judges and jail were fairly common experiences for the men he had grown to respect.

But that particular judge had a good idea. He decided the Boys Base program — a halfway house designed to rehabilitate "adjudicated juveniles" through job training — would be a good place to confine Larry until he could earn the money to pay for what he had stolen.

Boys Base participants live in a dormitory. They work together, play together, eat together and together solve their problems, real or imagined.

Larry now has a totally different perspective on hanging out, tossing the line, theft and, more importantly, on himself.

As an assistant maintenance mechanic at a bowling alley, he cleans the pin-setting machines, fixes them if they stick and sees to it that they stay in good functional condition. It's a highly skilled position with career potential that pays a minimum of $6 an hour.

After a year's experience, if he wants, he can apply to a company school where he can improve his skills and win certification.

"I like the job because it gives me something to do instead of hanging around the recreation hall," he said. "I never used to know where to go and look for a job. I got this now, and it ain't the only thing I'm going to do. I might just work at this until I can join the Navy. If that doesn't come through, at least I have something I can do."

Larry makes bi-weekly restitution payments to the court and saves the rest of his money for when he is allowed to return home.

"I didn't used to do anything but hang out on the sidewalk," he said. "When I get out of here, I can afford to take my girlfriend out on a date."

Nearly 1,000 juveniles with serious criminal records have graduated from the Boys Base program. Of those, only 30 percent have ever returned to a courtroom to face criminal charges.

Roland Blackmon has learned how to test aircraft parts for defects.

Jacquelyn Franklin and Stephanie Brewer have been shown how to seal seams and check wiring in helicopters.

Continued from Page A3

Job interview and how to communicate with their employer. We want them to know how to understand an evaluation so they can advance and improve themselves."

However, providing job skills for needy youngsters is not the only function of the SPEEDY program.

Larry always looked forward to the summer months — no school, few chores, plenty of time to play basketball and hang around the sidewalk outside the recreation center.

He and his friends had to stay on the sidewalk because, unless they had money, the old man who ran the place would never let them inside.

But that was all right with Larry. In fact, the sidewalk quite often was a very exciting place to be. Sometimes he would watch the older men when they stepped out behind the building to "toss the line" for a dollar a throw.

In his 16 years, Larry had seen a lot of money change hands that way. And it didn't seem like a very difficult thing to do.

The men just stood there and threw quarters at a line drawn in the dirt. Whoever came closest to the line picked up the quarters and, after collecting his dollars, returned one to each competitor.

On Fridays, when the dock workers were paid, things really got exciting.

To Larry, nothing was quite so much fun as watching a row of men making side bets and exchanging fistfuls of money. Both the careless confidence of winner, whose pockets bulged with dollar bills, and the spirited determination of a loser, who could shrug off his losses with a mere curse, were personal- characteristics he grew to admire.

Larry was eager to join the crowd — to eager, and too young.

When he showed up one afternoon more than $2, nobody objected to tossing the line. Nor did they object to his money, which he lost in 15 minutes.

He came back the following Tuesday with a $5 bill and managed to turn it eight bucks before losing it all.

Larry tossed the line at least twice a for a solid month. Nobody asked "or "where" about the money.

By ROBERT DOUGLASS
Star-Telegram Music Critic

As Elston Brooks would say, "A bit of La Triviata." Who is the operatic comedian type whose talents appeared in Fort Worth Opera Association's productions of "Mikado," "Die Fledermaus," and "H.M.S. Pinafore?"

Not so triviata — would you miss a chance to pick up on the same character in Franz Lehar's "The Merry Widow?"

I won't tell you who it is, yet. It is buried in the following paragraphs, just to keep you involved.

Lehar's turn-of-the century melodious, lighthearted, "crepe de viennoisse" (I think that works) operetta flits around Tarrant County Convention Center Theater stage Friday and next Sunday. Graduate student James Parsons (North Texas State University) delved into the popular work's background, and what he came up with sounds like a Broadway show — one of the successful ones.

The initial run in Vienna lasted two years, and 400 performances. Traveling around the world subsequently, it appeared in 20 languages. In Buenos Aires alone, it appeared (in 1907) in five theaters in five different languages.

But it really killed them in London — non-stop for 42 years in over 11 theaters, it ran right through World War II.

With spoken dialogue, hit tunes, and that kind of popularity, what keeps it from being a musical show and not an operetta, a sort of early "Oklahoma!"?

Disclaiming credit for the thought, the opera association's general manager and musical director Rudolf Kruger points out that they "didn't try it out in Connecticut and then open on Broadway." Lehar didn't let the public decide what his Viennese production would be like — he decided. Lehar worked the music in toto — melody, harmony, orchestration. None of this was farmed out. Actually, it was his gift of what to do with almost a Wagnerian-size orchestra in a light situation that makes the music such great fun to hear.

So the music is delightful, the language is English so that you can follow the comedy, and the orchestra is luscious. What other ingredients now does it take?

Fine singers (who can act) certainly, but they have to be woven together not only by conductor Kruger, but by stage director Jack Eddleman. If his name does not roll off your tongue, try "Mikado" "Fledermaus" and "Pinafore." There you go — it's the Eddleman touch that keeps comedy alive without going

slapstick, that allows good vade laughter with some kir

Sharon Daniels regularly between musical comedies ("Most Happy Fella" with the most recently). She is the next a gorgeous soprano who shares with Beverly Sills at the New

Baritone Charles Roe is (and he will be remembered for his appearances in "Fledermaus" and "Pinafore.")

New York City Opera soprano Faith Esham made some stir here as Mercedes in "Carmen," and as the second lady in "The Magic Flute." She is doing the role of Valencienne.

Camille is sung by tenor Neil Rosenshein, and other parts are carried by David Rae Smith (Baron Zeta), and James Billings as Njegus.

There will be some local-interest singers in the supporting roles — Tim Seelig is Cascada, Arden Hopkin is Donna Bogdanovitch, and Donna Norton is Sylviane.

Then there is Karen Kruger as Praskova. This is no inside track arrangement — the girl is a real pro.

Kruger offers some bonus for this production. He is bootlegging in the "Gold and Silver Waltz" which was not in the

He provided no order at the outset (19140) he wrote ing the familiar that was for full symmetrical pit-sized group, with the work.

Kruger located it for this producti the ballet, the ov Lehar's work b than life.

The operetta has ny alterations, a rather closely to sion, considered nal.

The Friday pe and next Sunday's p.m. Tickets ma opera office (731) Scott Theater box Agency, or through Sanger Harris a

Brooks' best, worst

From Page 1

ously turned down by network officials who simply didn't want an unfunny, gross bore on their hands.

2. "MOMENT BY MOMENT" — Whatever happened to John Travolta and Lily Tomlin after this one?

3. "PHANTASM" — The most frightening thing about this B-grade horror flick is how writer-director Don Coscarelli can get away with such a bad movie.

4. "PROPHECY" — It was hard to believe a director of John Frankenheimer's talents could give us this monster picture which was only a step above the Godzilla things.

5. "WANDA NEVADA" — Question: Who wanted to see a Peter Fonda film about an unsavory gambler who wins a 13-year-old girl in a crooked poker game, even if it WEREN'T directed by Peter Fonda, which, unfortunately, this one was.

6. "DAWN OF THE DEAD" — What was supposed to become, but was not, a film of director

9. "NIGHTWING" — Vampire bats, the only remaining beasties who hadn't had their own movie, sleep by day while the audience sleeps by the hour.

10. "KILLER FISH" — Hold it. Piranhas hadn't had their screen time, either, until this dreadful little bomb was filmed in Brazil with a second-rate Hollywood cast. The dreadful little piranhas were filmed in the painfully obvious confines of a glass tank.

BEST OF THE DECADE

Picking a Top 10 movie list for the decade of the '70s is the easiest and the most difficult of tasks.

It's easy to select Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" as the premiere film of the 1970s.

It's difficult to pare a list of 18 contenders down to 10.

And it's intriguing to note that director Coppola was responsible for three of the eventual Top 10.

The selections:

1. "THE GODFATHER," 1972.

see what

SOUTH CAM

ART

* Studio classes include Ceramics, Sculpture

* Art Education Class room teachers, your community center

* Art Appreciation- museums and cur

* Art History--Renais- Century

Art courses are op

The News, Wednesday, December 12, 1979

7

# People

The first quarter honor roll of Tasquas Regional Junior High School has been announced.

Students receiving honors were:

Grade 9

Highest Honors

Christopher Peters, Gary Ropiah, Heidi Sosik, Brian Szware, and Robert Tremblay.

Honors

Bradford Bartolo, Amber Bawden, Cheryl Bliss, Brenda Bressem, Janet Calcott, Kathleen Casey, Ann Marie Cooney, Nancy Duff, Thomas Fan-taroni, Fred Ferraro, Lisa Grudzien, Andrew Jaeger, Thomas Krans, Laurie Krusas, Christine Laroix, Janet DeForge, Heather MacConnell, Holly Martel, Jill Mathieu, Alan O'Grady, Christopher Reid, Melissa Rigatti, Robert Staudinger, Catherine Tosswill, and Richard Walch.

Grade 8

Highest Honors

Michael Dziura, and Karen Krans.

Honors

Annette Allard, John Aloia, Timothy Ulan, Kevin Blanchard, Pauline Langer, Charlene Boudreau, Todd Maureen Fountain, Cliff Jay Groom, Matthew Hart, Coffman, Michael Jalbert, Littlejohn, Matthew Christy Macumber, Lynne Brandy Meltzer, Eric O'Connor, Paula Orm-Perreault, Suzanne L. Peterson, Doreen Lass, Anne Remian, Ann Shailer, Laura Soliz, Bryan Thibeault, Paul Waters, and

Grade 7
Highest Honors

Edward Coye, Kathleen DiFabio, May Valerie, and Patrick O'Shea.

Honors

Daniel Allen, Donald Bradway, Todd Cantara, Melissa Damon, Karen Demers, Christine Duggan, David Hedding, Dawn Heitman, Mark Hemingway, Michelle Johnson, Kari Kastango, Debra Knight, Forrest Kocher, Mark MacGrath, Christina Menard, Christopher Michaels, Lisa Mogaero, William Morgan, Maria Petersen, Jennifer Puckett, Sharon Reece, Kyle Renaud, Pamela Salviuolo, Karen Solomon, Catherine Tetrault, Kerry Thurlow, and Steven Wilmarth.

Edward Desrosier has been named director of the Savers Co-operative Bank to fill the unexpired term of the late Mitchell Kurposka. A native of Southbridge, Desrosier is a principal in the insurance firm of E. D. Desrosier, Inc., Southbridge. Father of four children, he and his wife make their home in Southbridge.

The Holy Cross Club of Greater Worcester, an organization of local graduates of the College, has announced the awarding of scholarships to 10 Holy Cross students from this area.

Among the recipients was: Patricia Hennnessy of Walker Pond, Southbridge.

The Holy Cross Club awards scholarships each year to students from the Greater Worcester Area on the basis of academic excellence. To date, more than $48,000 has been provided to area students in the form of aid by the scholarship program, which was initiated by the Club in 1952.

Marine Sgt. Michael Fournier, son of Armand and Therese Fournier of 11 Sayles St., and whose wife, Anne, is the daughter of Russell and Dorothy Duette of 151 Fiske St., all of Southbridge, recently departed for a deployment in the Mediterranean Sea.

He is a member of Marine Composite Helicopter Squadron 261 based at the Marine Corp Helicopter Air Station, Jacksonville, N.C. His squadron is an air element of the 32nd Marine Amphibious unit, the force-in-readiness for the U.S. 6th Fleet, on call to project combined air-ground forces ashore if required.

A 1973 graduate of Bay Path Regional High School in Charlton, Fournier joined the Marine Corps in November 1973.

Father John Dalea, a Literacy Volunteers student from Southbridge, and his tutor Elizabeth Santos, were honored at the annual recognition dinner which climaxed the Literacy Volunteers Association's national conference at Wentworth By-the-Sea recently.

In his address to the conference, Fr. Dalea said, "I came to America from Romania to Southbridge two years ago, and I could not speak a word of English and it was like being deaf. But I found in the library in Southbridge my helpers in the Literacy Volunteers program."

Airman Alan Brackett, son of Mr. and Mrs. James Brackett of 30 Eastroad Road, Southbridge, has graduated from the U.S. Air Force fire protection course at Chanute Air Force Base.

Graduates of the course earn credits toward an associate degree in applied science through the Community College of the Air Force.

Airman Brackett learned how to fight structural and aircraft fires and repair fire fighting equipment.

He is being assigned to Griffiss Air Force Base, N.Y., for duty with a unit of the Strategic Air Command.

The crew of The American Trail, a daily syndicated television series, visited Sturbridge to produce a feature about shoe making at Old Sturbridge Village Dec. 10.

Pictured from left to right are cinematographer-director Jace Andersen, host Don Jacks, and technician-engineer Erik Anderson.

The American Trail deals with people, places and times in an 11-state area. The series focuses on people of the Northeast — their heritage, what they do, where they live; how they work and how they play.

The series will be seen daily on television stations in an 11-state Northeastern region through late August 1980. It will be seen each Monday through Friday in this area on Springfield, WWLP-TV at 6:30 a.m. beginning Sept. 3.

For the second consecutive month, Southbridge Navy recruiters, petty officers first class Thom L. Carmody and David H. Mercier were honored and presented with the Station of the Month Award for the medium size station category at ceremonies held recently in Providence, R.I.

The Southbridge recruiters received the award for attaining more than 100 percent of their assigned goals. Also during the ceremonies, Petty Officer Carmody was presented with a star in lieu of his second Gold Wreath Award and a letter of commendation for "recruiting excellence and exceptional performance."

The presentations were made by Captain A.C. Eastman, commanding officer of Navy Recruiting District Boston.

Located at 305 Main Street, the Southbridge office is part of NRD Boston which includes more than 60 stations in New England.

Navy Fireman Apprentice Mark Weston, son of Donald and Sheila Weston of Hollow Road, Brimfield has been deployed to the Indian Ocean.

He is a crewmember aboard the replenishment oiler USS Wabash, homeported in Alameda, Calif., and currently operating as a unit of the U.S. 7th Fleet.

During the deployment, he will be participating in training exercises with the other 7th Fleet ships and those of allied nations. Port visits are scheduled in African and Middle Eastern countries.

Weston joined the Navy in november 1978.

Barbara Monroe Maurer of Southbridge will receive a Master's degree at Auburn University, Auburn, Ala. at the end of fall quarter.

John Babis, son of Mrs. Spiro Babis of Cisco Street, Southbridge, is being transferred to Louisiana for a six-month training period in air conditioning. The transfer and instruction are part of a promotion.

He is employed by the Jury Co. of Dallas, Texas.

Six Literacy Volunteers of Southbridge tutors were honored recently for enthusiasm and commitment to the program.

Leo Aho, Kathleen Dunleavy, Frank Foley, Lillian Proulx, Betty Santo and Kathleen Shoemaker were presented gold pins bearing the insignia of the Literacy Volunteers of America. All of those honored have been with the program from two to four years.

Among the entering freshmen at Lasell Junior College in Newton is Lynne Ann Lehonzcak, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lehonzcak of Southbridge. She has entered the Community Recreation Program.

TARRYTOWN, N.Y.
NEWS
(NEW YORK CITY MARKET AREA)
D. 6,174

K[LC]

DEC 30 1979

# Diary of a diplomat

William Paley and
dlers of California
*Angeles Times*; and
ham-Eugene Meyers
*Post*.

Halberstam, and
*Brightest*, labored

771-page study of these four media institutions
and the people who drove them, and he has told
us what they have done with the power they
amassed and how they have affected our lives.

On Paley: "He was in any real sense the
father of modern broadcasting, a towering fig-
ure... not just the first, but the best."

On Luce: "He was a big man ... ever restles-
s... a major figure of American journalism, the
leading innovator of more than two de-
cades... He and his magazines would be the
true voice of American life at the mid-century."

arians believe, though, that Luce may have
harmed this country by distorting the truth in his
magazines to reflect his narrow, personal view
of people and events. Halberstam writes, "Luce's
printed version of what he felt events should
have been often obscured what in fact they had
been." The author even suggests that Luce's
twisted view of democracy was responsible for
creating the climate that allowed Joe McCarthy
to rise to power.

Outsize adjectives, verbs and descriptions
tumble headlong through the book, embracing
Teddy White's violently anti-labor Otis-Chan-

BOOKLIST
CHICAGO, ILL.

SEMI-MONTHLY 31,000

JAN 15 1980

Kissinger, Henry Alfred.

White House years. 1979. 1,521p. illus.
Little, Brown, $22.50 (0-316-49661-8).

YA

Discussing his four years as national security adviser to the president (January 1969 to January 1973), Kissinger explains with consummate articulateness his decisions and recommendations concerning the diplomatic problems of that period, particularly the war in Vietnam. Kissinger says that to compile this weighty recollection and justification, he did not rely on memory to much extent but kept at hand con-

A heritage

toward a new social history of American
women. Ed. with an introd. by Nancy F.
Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck. 1980.

448p. Simon & Schuster, $17.95
(0-671-25068-X); paper, $7.95
(0-671-25069-8). Galley.

Sifting through feminist historical studies
written in this decade, the editors have
culled a fine synthesis. Cott, a Yale history
professor and Puck J. Follow at Radcliffe

siderable documentary evidence and a
personal diary written during a portion of
the time covered. Naturally partial and of-
ten contentious, his account is nonethe-
less vital to a complete understanding of
the formulation and execution of foreign
policy during Nixon's first term. Notes
and index appended. WBH.

327.20924 Kissinger, Henry Alfred || U.S.—Foreign relations
—1969-1974 || U.S.—Foreign relations—1971-1977

[OCLC]

79-00006

355.0092 (B) Marshall, Samuel Lyman Atwood || Historians—
U.S.—Biography [CIP] 79-14949

**Maurer, Harry.** Not working. 1980. Holt, $12.95 (0-03-044131-5). Galley. YA

Studs Terkel's *Working* (Booklist 70:760 Mr 15 74) now has a parallel antipode. Free-lance writer Maurer crisscrossed the

327.20924 Kissinger, Henry Alfred || U.S.—Foreign relations—1974-1977
—1969-1974 || U.S.—Foreign [OCLC]

79-90006

In Korea, to tell the truth, I don't know
ures Marshall dallied with. All I know is
life story filled with opinions and anec-
dotes about America's twentieth-century
military involvement.

355'.0092 (B) Marshall, Samuel Lyman Atwood || Historians—
U.S.—Biography [CIP] 79-14949

Maurer, Harry.

YA

Studs Terkel's *Working* (*Booklist* 70:760
Mr 15 74) now has a parallel antipode.
Free-lance writer Maurer crisscrossed the

[Lc]

Kissinger and His Critics

Walter Laqueur

SUCCESS and failure in politics are sel-
dom absolute categories; compared
with his predecessors and his successors, Henry
Kissinger acquitted himself well. In some respects
he was lucky, for he had the support of a Presi-
dent who, whatever his other failings, had a flair
for foreign policy and also greater experience and
competence than most Presidents in recent dec-
ades. Kissinger's great incubus was Vietnam,
which he inherited. Although he surely must have
known in 1968 that the war could not be won, the
fighting continued for another five years, and the
question that inevitably arises, and which, if an-
swered in the negative, forms the basis of an ad-
verse judgment of Kissinger's whole tenure in gov-
ernment, is whether the price that had to be paid
for a negotiated settlement was not excessive.
Would the disaster, in Southeast Asia and at
home, have been any greater following a unilat-
eral American retreat in 1970? (Of course, as one
English writer, Michael Howard, says: "One can
but remark with some amazement on the amount
of obloquy the American liberals have heaped on
the man who eventually got them out of Vietnam
compared with their sympathetic attitude toward
those who got them in.")

This and other questions have arisen with fresh
urgency upon the recent publication of Kissinger's
memoirs. *White House Years* is a long book, but
not too long considering that it covers four years
of world history. It is also a very interesting book,
especially where the author sustains his own inter-
est in the subject on which he writes. And it is, fi-
nally, a very important book. Indeed, it is difficult
to think of a book on international politics of
comparable importance published during the last
twenty years. Although Kissinger's critics have al-
ready found much to get indignant about, *White
House Years* does impressively demonstrate once
again that, almost alone among policy-makers of
the recent past, Kissinger had an overall concept
and a long-term political strategy. In the days to
come, these qualities, always in short supply, may
be grievously missed.

WALTER LAQUEUR, a contributing editor of *COMMENTARY*, is chairman of the Research Council of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

FIFTY years ago the State Department
was very small. America had no ene-
mies and few rivals. The Secretary of State could
travel abroad if he was enterprising, but there was
no need to do so; there were, in any case, only
about five or six countries that mattered. The
traffic of notes was limited and there was no intel-
ligence service. Today there are some 150 sover-
eign states, America faces a great deal of ill will,
problems have multiplied in every direction.
Those conducting foreign policy are swamped by
memoranda, notes, and position papers. The num-
ber employed in the foreign service at home and
abroad has increased by leaps and bounds. This
quantum jump may be a blessing for university
graduates looking for work; whether it contributes
to a more effective foreign policy is less certain.

No Secretary of State can possibly have more
than a nodding acquaintance with all the prob-
lems facing him. Kissinger, for example, has been
accused by his critics of being uninterested in eco-
nomics, and this may well be true, for there is very
little on economics in the present volume. But if a
Secretary of State is well-versed in the problems of
foreign trade and the balance of payments, it is
unlikely that he will be equally interested in and
knowledgeable about Europe and Latin America,
Africa and Russia and China, technology and mil-
itary strategy. And if he knows about all this, the
chances are that he will have some other serious
drawback.

To cope with the unending problems and the
unwieldy apparatus there are now two Secretaries
of State (de facto if not de jure)—the Secretary
himself and the National Security Adviser, be-
tween whom the division of labor is ill-defined, to
say the least. If the government were to call in a
management expert, he would very likely recom-
mend a division of the burden among three or
four Secretaries of State, with perhaps a second
President preoccupied solely with foreign affairs.

Such or similar reforms, however logical and
necessary, and even if in the long run they may
well be inevitable, are of course unlikely to be
made in the near future. In the meantime, the
present unsatisfactory situation will continue,

• Little Brown, 1,552 pp., $22.50.

57

KISSINGER AND HIS CRITICS/59

[LC]

or who announced that Eurocommunism was the wave of the future and that it was in the American interest to make an accommodation with it; or who called Khomeini both a saint and a liberal; or who predicted that Afghanistan would be Russia's Vietnam; or who assured us that the rise in oil prices over the last six years was not a matter of great consequence. People may go bankrupt in private life, but apparently not in politics.

When it comes to foreign policy, the rule seems to be that everyone has to have a hearing, for truth lies somewhere in the middle—between the sane man and the lunatic, between the knowledgeable and the ignoramus. In London a corner of Hyde Park has been set aside for political and religious sectarians, cranks, and eccentrics, where they may preach their respective gospels to small or large crowds of the curious. In the United States the media have taken over this function, presumably in the name of democratic principles and, of course, their duty to the public. The spectacle has all the ingredients of high comedy, except that the issue at stake is the survival of the country.

Write *House Years* has attracted a great deal of criticism, most of it predictable. The book was bound to provoke the ire of those still protesting the Vietnam war and unwilling to accept that it is over. For them the Vietnam era must never end, and everything else follows from this tenet. It was Kissinger, they say, who prolonged the conflict, who lied even more than Kennedy and Johnson or even Nixon, and who was responsible for all the death and devastation. History for these people has stood still; if there have been unpleasant developments in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, they must stem from America's actions during the war. As for other international problems, they can be solved by applying the lessons of Vietnam, namely, noninterference in the affairs of other countries except through economic help and support for the legitimate national aspirations of radical movements. There is a psychoanalytic term—parataxic distortion—for this condition, in which the shock of a certain experience is so great that all subsequent experiences are interpreted in its light.

There have been defections from this camp, albeit reluctant and half-hearted ones. The reviews of *White House Years* by Barbara W. Tuchman in the *New York Times Book Review* and by Stanley Hoffmann in the *New York Review of Books* are cases in point. Neither reviewer likes Kissinger's frequent invocation of the idea of a "geopolitical" approach to foreign policy. For Mrs. Tuchman, "geopolitics" is just another word for "cold war," and Professor Hoffmann also names Kissinger as the "complete cold warrior." (Have his role as architect of détente and his speeches about a new structure of peace been so quickly forgotten?) Yet Mrs. Tuchman says that "the contest with Communism is indeed serious," and she believes

with Stanley Hoffmann that "the problem is not whether Soviet designs should be thwarted, the debate is over how to do it." In other words, Kissinger, with his large ideas, is too clumsy; the contest needs to be conducted by more discriminating types, like, presumably, Mrs. Tuchman and Professor Hoffmann.

The names of Barbara Tuchman and Stanley Hoffmann have been mentioned in the past as foreign-policy advisers; the author of *The Proud Tower*, was, I believe, Eugene McCarthy's candidate for Secretary of State. How would they have dealt with the problems confronting America? Their prescriptions are almost identical. Mrs. Tuchman believes that the contest with Communism should be conducted "in local terms." This is sensible but unstartling advice; few sane people would apply the experience of Patagonia to Finland. What else? "If we had paid more attention to the history of Vietnamese nationalism or to the internal stresses in Iran, we could not (one hopes) have invested our policy and support in regimes lacking a valid mandate from their own people." But how does one obtain a valid mandate? Mrs. Tuchman, a student of 20th-century history, knows that Hitler and Mussolini had such a mandate from their people—and so did Emperor Wilhelm II in 1914 when he got his war credits. In the Third World, where most regimes have not been elected, a valid mandate simply means effective control of a country. It follows in practical terms that the United States should support the more repressive regimes, fascist or Communist or both, because these are more effectively in control, having ruthlessly stamped out all opposition. This is indeed a possible line of action, although its moral superiority to the course of supporting old-fashioned authoritarian governments is not readily apparent—and there is nothing particularly liberal about it.

Professor Hoffmann reaches the same conclusion, following a more circuitous route. Kissinger's design, Hoffmann says, is not compatible with the U.S. system of government, first because it requires an extraordinary capacity for acting swiftly and flexibly all over the globe, and second because this capacity depends in turn on the "permission" of the electorate so that America's leaders can pursue their delicate game abroad without constraints and pressures. But this is much exaggerated. The problem for the U.S. is not its ability to act swiftly and flexibly all over the globe but its ability to react sometime, somewhere. Nor is it necessary to an effective foreign policy that there be no domestic constraints and pressures, only that these constraints and pressures not become so great as to cause paralysis.

But for Hoffmann, the problem with Kissinger is not only that his approach cannot work but that his basic design is wrong anyway. It rests on a false or unreal view of the world, in which the struggle between Washington and Moscow "ab-

58/COMMENTARY FEBRUARY 1980

[LC]

with one Secretary of State in charge of an unwieldy apparatus incapable of undertaking major initiatives, and a National Security Adviser heading the ninety-nine or so aides who make up the National Security Council, 'a body which should be able to function at least in an emergency.

Kissinger's book stresses again and again that the conduct of foreign policy is impossible without, on the one hand, continuity, and on the other hand, a minimum of secrecy. Such wisdom was not unknown in the 18th and 19th centuries and earlier, but in our time, at least in the United States, there is no continuity and there is virtually no secrecy. Kissinger held office for eight years, a very long time by modern standards (he was National Security Adviser for four of them—the period covered by *White House Years*—and Secretary of State for the remaining four, which he will cover in the second volume of his memoirs). Andrei Gromyko, by contrast, has now been Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union for almost twenty-nine years, which compares favorably with Talleyrand, Palmerston, and even Bismarck. Gromyko has seen Dulles, Rusk, Rogers, and Kissinger come and go, and he will no doubt outlast Cyrus Vance. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin has been in Washington longer than most Senators and Congressmen; his envoys have made themselves at home in the Congress, the State Department, the newspaper offices and research institutes of Washington. At the end of his stay in Moscow, the present American ambassador to the Soviet Union will just know his way along Gorky Street and may be able to make out the headlines in *Pravda*.

MUCH, perhaps most of Kissinger's time in Washington was spent in various inter-office rivalries and in keeping his designs secret; while some of this was perhaps unnecessary or the need for it at least exaggerated, the reasons behind it were all too obvious. Every major country has to keep some secrets. The American attempt to have none, while admirable in intent, has been disastrous in its consequences. Leaks may act as a corrective to mistakes about to be committed, but they also act as a brake on all positive action, as at the present time when the main danger facing American foreign policy is an overall paralysis, barely veiled by surface diplomatic action, usually unconcerted and ineffective, and resounding declarations which fewer and fewer people take seriously.

The press figures prominently in Kissinger's book—both for the leaks of government information that appeared there and were given wide publicity, and for the editorial opinion that was frequently ranged against him in the later years of his tenure. The press in this context more often than not means editorials in the New York Times. These editorials in the period under review seldom represented the most knowledgeable or the most judicious views available, but the fact that

they were the distilled collective wisdom of a great newspaper gave them a prestige which they might not otherwise have had. Like every foreign policy-maker, Kissinger needed the media and so he paid inordinate attention to them.

The same could be said of the sensitivity he displayed and continues to display toward the views of his former friends in the official and unofficial foreign-policy establishment. He was (as he himself says) much pained by the break-up of old friendships and associations, but in retrospect the mental anguish he obviously still feels seems, at least in some cases, excessive. Kissinger writes:

> Where I parted company with my friends and former colleagues was in my analysis of Soviet motivations. I did not accept the proposition that unilateral restraint in weapons procurement on our part would invoke a comparable response from the Kremlin. As believers in the predominance of "objective factors" the Soviet leaders were likely to interpret such steps less as gestures of conciliation than as weakness, caused by domestic or economic pressures. The Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis was going all out in its weapons procurement in every major category of arms. American abdication would tempt Soviet tendencies toward filling every vacuum. . . . It was true that notions of military superiority had a different significance in the nuclear age; it did not follow that we could risk standing still while our adversaries built feverishly. Over the decades a growing imbalance against us was bound to deprive our pledges to defend our allies of any credibility. . . .

All this is so obvious that one wonders why, and for whom, it was necessary to spell it out. But of course until quite recently confusion reigned supreme in leading centers of American opinion, and even the banal truth that power still counts in relations among nations needed to be argued for and defended. The Ayatollah Khomeini and Afghanistan have infused some element of reality into the debate today, but the purveyors of the views against which Kissinger had to struggle are still very much around.

It is a strange phenomenon that in our time perhaps more than in any other, politicians and those advising them in foreign affairs have been able to be consistently wrong without damage to their careers and reputations. A surgeon who kills too many of his patients, an architect whose houses or bridges collapse, even a horse with a bad track record is soon replaced. But this law seemingly does not apply to those diplomats, columnists, and political scientists who only yesterday were arguing (for instance) that the rulers of Vietnam and Cambodia were humanitarians who had taken to the sword only because they had to resist foreign aggression; or who maintained that it was altogether unthinkable that the Soviet Union (let alone Cuba) would ever interfere in Africa, and no harm if they did; or who advised a radical cutback of America's conventional forces;

60/COMMENTARY FEBRUARY 1980

[LC]

sorbs every other conflict or issue," in which the Soviets are made responsible for whatever happens, and in which every test, everywhere, has to be met. But this is no more than a caricature. Kissinger can hardly be accused of having tried to meet every test. Nor has he (or anyone else) blamed the Soviet Union for the oil policy of the OPEC states, to take but one example.

Let us state a contrary proposition: that one cannot escape every confrontation. If that is so, where would Professor Hoffmann and Mrs. Tuchman draw the line? Clearly not in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. Certainly not in the Caribbean, for this would bring the U.S. into confrontation with Cuba, which they would surely regard as most undesirable. Even Canada would be a case of "local circumstances." How should one have faced the Iranian crisis? Easy, says Hoffmann: "Isolate the Ayatollah." One can just see the nations of the world volunteering for this task, with the Soviet Union in the front rank!

A third attack on Kissinger, by McGeorge Bundy in *Foreign Affairs*, deals with a single paragraph in *White House Years* (out of 1,500 closely printed pages!) concerning the private assurances given to President Thieu to secure his acceptance of Washington's agreement with Hanoi. In his review, Bundy tries to show that Kissinger's explanations were far from straightforward. What does this prove? One finds it difficult to believe that Bundy is as innocent as he pretends to be of the uses of deliberately imprecise language in politics. The fact is that, like George Ball and other members of the older foreign-policy establishment, he does not like Henry Kissinger. One day Kissinger's biographer will have the unenviable task of sorting out the personal motives from the substantive differences in all the attacks on him. (Certainly some of his critics saw themselves as rivals for his job, which did not dispose them to think well of his performance.)

MRS. Tuchman concludes her review of *White House Years* with her own credo on the conduct of foreign affairs:

> ... that a foreign policy that alienates one's countrymen and causes dislike and distrust of government is not worth what it might gain against the adversary; that a nation's strength lies ultimately in its self-esteem and confidence in what is right; and that whatever damages these damages the nation.

She has Vietnam in mind, but the publication of her review coincided with the crisis in Iran, and in the light of that crisis her ringing words about self-esteem and confidence in what is right take on a different aspect.

The Iranian crisis did not come as a surprise to those who have watched, with sadness and concern, the steep decline in recent years of American influence all over the world. There had been many warning signs, the most recent in the

speeches and resolutions at the Havana conference of the "nonaligned" countries last fall. America in the postwar period had been admired and feared, loved and hated, suspected and sometimes emulated; but never until now has it been considered a laughing-stock and an irrelevance in world affairs.

The long-term local implications of the confrontation with Khomeini and his minions should not be exaggerated. The noise and fury may subside in Iran as quickly as they erupted. There may be political realignments difficult to visualize at present. The real importance of the Teheran crisis is to have highlighted the present status of the United States in the world.

For this one may have cause eventually to be grateful to Khomeini. He did away in a flash with many cherished delusions which otherwise might have persisted for a long time. Perhaps the chief such delusion was that America's political and military strength was second to none; as Khomeini said in one of his speeches, Carter is beating an empty drum. Curiously, the advocates of the military-power-does-not-count school claimed that the Teheran events were a striking confirmation of their thesis, for here was a crowd of students defying America despite its unparalleled military might. The moral would have been more convincing if similar mishaps had befallen, say, East Germany, or Cuba, or the Soviet Union. But they have not: Khomeini and his henchmen are not suicidal; they knew whom they could attack with impunity. From this point of view it is East Germany and Cuba that are great powers, not the United States. Their embassies will not be taken over, they can push through resolutions at the UN and other international gatherings, they can dispatch troops to any part of Africa or the Middle East, they can provide political asylum—the U.S. cannot.

It is true that the nuclear arsenal will not be enough to get the United States through the storms of the 1980's. What is needed above all is the capability to hold its own against a variety of adversaries in a variety of circumstances. This does not necessarily refer to military means, though without a military capability other actions will hardly be convincing. It does mean the ability whenever necessary to conduct political warfare such as is waged by all other nations with interests outside their borders: effective radio propaganda, for instance, instead of the present derisory efforts, and the capacity to engage in covert action without informing seven congressional committees, 150 members of Congress, and their staffs. Suggestions like this would have been rejected even six months ago; now they will be given a hearing as the conviction takes hold that the U.S. is not exactly surrounded by friends and well-wishers.

All this may be painful to accept, but unless it is accepted, the decline of the U.S. will turn into a collapse. Advice has been offered to the effect that

KISSINGER AND HIS CRITICS/61

[L]

one should not be guided by anger and that exercises of *machismo* are uncalled for and are a danger to world peace. This is true as far as it goes, but it ignores the central issue, namely, that the assertion of American power is needed not to give vent to frustration and aggression, nor even to restore American prestige, but precisely to remove the danger of war. For it should be perfectly obvious that if the present trend continues, America will sooner or later be faced with threats or demands which even a Kennedy, even a McGovern, would not be able to accept.

For a long time now America has been playing according to one set of rules while its adversaries have played according to another, involving considerably fewer inhibitions and restrictions. Khomeini's "students" have only practiced in a blatant way what others were doing more cautiously and insidiously (and therefore more dangerously). Khomeini has thus compelled Americans to rethink the rules of the game. How are we to survive if we remain incapable of reacting to political warfare, unable to defend vital interests?

Any American President will therefore have to follow a markedly tougher line in the future, not in order to play to the chauvinist galleries but simply in response to the new international climate. Allowing oneself to be pushed around incessantly is not in the American grain. When Henry Kissinger said this in a speech in Austin, Texas, he was berated by Tom Wicker and likeminded editorialists for being inflammatory and irresponsible. One can understand why: Kissinger must be blamed and discredited if their point of view is to be justified. Yet however deeply the next President may be convinced that power is unimportant in the contemporary world, he will have to accept the fact that détente between West and East, between North and South, cannot possibly replace the balance of power. And any President will also have to accept the fact that America faces a struggle for survival which cannot be won by sending food to Cambodia, by zero economic growth, by wringing our hands, or by proclaiming that we are everyone's friends.

S TILL, the learning process is only at the beginning. Even now it is argued that the U.S., unable to put its own house in order, has no right to preoccupy itself with the affairs of other countries. If the Cubans wish to install Rus-

sian bases on their territory, what business does America have complaining? Some now maintain that the central issue in world affairs today is frustrated nationalism, and that American foreign policy will succeed only as it identifies itself with the forces of "radical nationalism"—from Castro to Qaddafi. Some argue that the Soviet Union, surrounded by enemies, has more reason to worry than does the United States. Some, including a number who were directly responsible for the disastrous involvement in Vietnam, now claim that the U.S. will always behave irresponsibly if it is too strong, and must therefore be kept in a state of weakness.

The obfuscators will be fighting some mighty rearguard actions in the months to come. Some will tell us that despite Iran there is nothing wrong with America's standing in the world. Others will admit that there is something wrong, but will attribute it in part to our own aggressive and provocative actions in the past and in part to "objective" changes in world politics. Still others will appeal to instincts of cowardice and convenience. Defeatism has not only injured American self-esteem, not only affected our ability to do what is right, but it has also rendered some people incapable of seeing the difference between right and wrong. The old foreign-policy establishment, weighed down with guilt, cannot provide the lead, nor, certainly, can the advocates of the "New Politics" of the early 70's, who bear their own share of responsibility for the present mess. Many of these people (who now call themselves the "moderate Center") were, no doubt, genuinely convinced that they could restore peace to America and the world. But intentions count for little in world politics. Their misguided actions have led to a dangerous situation in which America may either have to accept, quite soon, a policy of surrender to massive, ongoing blackmail or prepare itself for armed conflict.

We are now paying the price for, on the one hand, a sustained lack of resolution, and on the other, an inability even to understand the nature of the threats facing America. Whatever may be said in criticism of the policies described and defended by Henry Kissinger in *White House Years*, the book itself does contribute to such an understanding, and in this alone—not to mention its many other distinctions—lies Kissinger's superiority to most of his critics.

Henry Kissinger
WHITE HOUSE
YEARS
Little, Brown, $22.50

Reviewed by EDMUND S. WEHRLE, professor of history at the University of Connecticut and co-author of *International Politics in East Asia Since World War II*.

THIS is a success story. It tells how one man was able to order the events which brought a set-

tlement in Vietnam, detente with the Soviet Union, a new friendship with China, and the blockage of Soviet advances from the Middle East to Chili. It is Henry Kissinger's own story of his first four years in the White House, from 1969 to 1973, when, as Richard Nixon's Assistant for National Security, he was given the primary role in planning and executing American foreign policy.

Did Kissinger's policies, in fact, enhance America's world position? If so, was it, as Kissinger puts it, the result of a preconceived "global diplomacy" the "various components" of which began to fall into place by 1970? For all of Kissinger's considerable diplomacy, it can be argued that in this book he has brilliantly designed and staged a great illusion.

Certainly Nixon's visit to China in 1972 constituted the most breath-taking of Kissinger's coups. He explains that Nixon and he had decided independently that the time was ripe for the opening to China. But Kissinger adds that, while Nixon was drawn

to the China Scheme as a "short-term" tactic to squeeze the Soviets for concessions in Vietnam, he saw it as a move which would permanently alter the structure of world diplomacy. In any case, Kissinger tells us that the Sino-Soviet clash along the Ussuri River in March, 1969, provided the opportunity to act on their theories: "we moved without further hesitation toward a mementous change in global diplomacy."

In fact, it was not until late 1970, that the China Strategy surfaced in any meaningful way. In 1969 and 1970, Nixon was urgently pressing Japan to assume the burden of containing China. This was the inner design of the famous Nixon Doctrine of July, 1969. Kissinger skirts over the significance of this pronouncement, even suggesting that Nixon may have been carried away by his own words in declaring that Asian nations must now assume the primary burden of their own defense. Later, in 1970, when Japan edged away from fulfilling its military and economic pledges to the

United States, Nixon and Kissinger were left holding an empty doctrine. They deserve credit for rapidly shifting course and picking up the signals from Peking; but this was brilliant improvement, not policy by steady design as Kissinger would have it.

Equally maddening is Kissinger's treatment of the great shift in European politics embodied in West Germany Chancellor Willi Brandt's *Ostopolitik*. Brandt sought to ease tensions with the Soviet Union by recognizing the East German regime and the borders of eastern Germany imposed by Russia in 1945. Nixon and Kissinger greatly feared the impact of this policy on the NATO powers, since it would neutralize one of the key issues of the Cold War. But their efforts to deter Brandt were unavailing.

As Kissinger tells it, the Administration accepted the inevitability of *Ostpolitik*; but withheld final approval pending Soviet concessions on the rights of West Berliners. Kissinger argues that the linking of these

two issues resulted in a considerable diplomatic success. In fact, the concessions won on Berlin were tentative and limited. Once again Kissinger claims credit for a global shift he neither initiated nor encouraged.

The same gnawing question of credibility applies to Kissinger's several chapters on the Vietnam War. His claim is that an honorable peace was achieved in the Paris Accords of January, 1973. By implication, the four years during which the Nixon-Kissinger team prolonged the war were thereby justified. Kissinger would have us believe that it was possible for Nixon to carry out his scheduled withdrawal of American forces—a domestic political necessity—and, at the same time, force Hanoi to accept the legitimacy of the Thieu regime. Kissinger's most vulnerable stance is taken in defense of the brutal aggressions which were the product of this contradictory policy: the secret bombing of Cambodia, the Cambodian incursion and the Christmas bombing of Hanoi.

*Continued on Page 8*

[LC]

John McGahern
**THE PORNOGRAPHER**
Harper & Row, $10

Reviewed by DANIEL CASEY, professor of Irish Literature at the State University of New York, Oneonta; co-editor of *Irish-American Fiction; essays in Criticism* (AMS Press).

THE author is Ireland's most important contemporary fiction writer, and *The Pornographer* is McGahern's most important work to date. The earlier novels—*The Barracks* (1964), *The Dark* (1965), and *The Leavetaking* (1974)—explored the shadowy corners of the Irish psyche and loosed demon spirits too long

closeted there. They measured out the crises of modern Irish life in judgments that were, according to the hometown critics, too true to be good. McGahern's one flaw, if indeed it be a flaw in

fiction, is that he is scrupulously honest in portraying a schizophrenic society torn between tradition and modernism, a society that either hammers its "eccentrics" into submission or drives them away.

*The Pornographer* is not lewd or lascivious; it isn't even titilat-ing. It is a confessional, narrated by a thirty-year-old school-teacher-pornographer, a man who comes to Dublin to write for an ad agency but winds up freelancing the erotic misadven-tures of Mavis Carmichael and Colonel Grimshaw for an Irish porn sheet. What he churns out is so bad, he says, that he can't bear to read it.

The crisis in McGahern's latest novel has more to do with divided loyalties than smutty literature, though. The narrator finds him-self suddenly charged with re-sponsibilities for an aged down-

Rex Weiner
Deanne Stillman

could barely make my way through the disheveled bands of stoned youth staggering about

(although 54 percent admitted one night stands with people they didn't care about). Casual-

WHITE HOUSE

From Page 3

Finally Kissinger claims that Saigon's collapse in 1975 was due

to the crippling of Nixon's presidential powers during the Watergate crisis. In fact, Watergate provides Kissinger with a cover for the inadequacies of his own strategy. Ultimately the war in Vietnam was fought over the

issue of political control. In Paris, Hanoi agreed to terms which would allow it to pursue power by political means. Once Saigon aborted these political processes, as it did, renewed armed conflict was inescapable.

Clearly Kissinger's arguments are faulty, however, any critique of the foreign policy of Nixon's first term must contend with this enormous work of justification. And since power and the illusion of power are the stuff of politics, this book will possess an abiding fascination for students of the political process.

SAMPLER!

"A Presidential decision is always an amalgam of judgment, confidence in his associates, and also concern about their morale. Any President soon discovers that his problem is not only to give an order but to get it implemented, and this requires willing cooperation. Bureaucratically unpopular orders can be evaded in a variety of ways. They can be interpreted by skilled exegesis to yield a result as close as possible to what the department

most concerned wanted in the first place; there can be endless procrastination in implementation; leaks can sabotage a policy by sparking a controversy. And there is the intangible human quality: cut off from most normal contacts, Presidents are acutely uncomfortable with unhappy associates--and seek to avoid the problem if at all possible."

WHITE HOUSE YEARS

CREDITS

Pp.2-3, official White House photos. P.4, photo © Jim Kalett. P.5, photo © Jill Mariani, 1979. P.7, photo of Greeley by Wm. McCready; photo of Gandhi by UPI.

Copyright ©1980 by the Thomas More Association, an Illinois not-for-profit corporation.
180 North Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60601 • All rights reserved • THE CRITIC is published 22 times a year.
Subscription Price: $19.95 per year. Vol. 38, No. 15; Cons. No. 279. US ISSN 0011-149X. EDITOR: Michael F. McCauley.

[LC]

8

Christian kings, Cormac, sets out on a quest for the magic cup—The Holy Grail. Accompanied by his pagan slave girl and his huge wolf-hound he encounters pirates, witches, pagan rites, and harrowing journeys by land and water. All this written in zesty, fast-paced, earthy and extremely colorful language by who? Andrew Greeley, that's who—sociologist, columnist and scholar. There seems to be no limit to the number of his facets. He's emerging as the Chesterton of our day—except that Chesterton was no sociologist and prolific though he was, is a slouch compared with the amazingly productive Greeley. There are some out there who would ardently like to see him overreach himself just once. They'll have to wait for another day because *The Magic Cup* makes remarkably good reading and reveals a solid base of research on the social trauma that accompanied the change from pagan to Christian ways.

his power and authority, but remained humble, telling his Indian followers that they could use their own will and faith to turn Indian history around. He invented a word, *satygraha* (soul-force) to articulate the strength each person has within himself, the one weapon that could triumph over the British rifles. He once walked two hundred miles to the coast to make a handful of illegal salt from the seawater in a symbolic gesture of resistance.

Shirer adds to the feeling of history-in-the-making, with

Mohandas Gandhi

Why, in a book generally insightful and showing compassionate concern for women, does Madona Kolbenschlag assume positions that seem lacking in merit and that appear inconsistent with what one would expect her own spiritual philosophy to be as a member of a religious community of women? A few random examples of such positions may substantiate the question.

"To be pregnant, and to allow the pregnancy to come to term, is to permit a process that is alien to one's self to be engaged inside one's body. It is a process that has its own rhythm and structure, its own end, and is essentially impersonal." (under-scoring supplied) ►►►

7

STRAIGHT CREEK
JOURNAL
DENVER, CO.
W. 4,000 (U)

K

Bull. U.S.

JUN 20 1979

BOOKS

[L.C.]

Kissinger's
geopolitical
philosophy

White House Years

By Henry Kissinger

New York: Little, Brown and Com-
pany, 1979. 1521 pp. $22.50

By RICHARD W. BEBAN

INSTEAD of the turgid (most of it ghost-written) prose we have come to expect from politicians and government functionaries in their self-serving biographical tomes, we get wit and erudition from Henry Kissinger. Not that *White House Years* isn't self-serving. There is nothing in this book that would cause either major political party to reject his candidacy for a U.S. Senate seat, which conventional wisdom says is his next political goal. But it is at least readable, reasonably straightforward and at times even funny.

Which is not to say that those who would try the former Secretary of State for war crimes wouldn't find enough ammunition here. There is ample evidence to suggest Kissinger's culpability. However, were he to defend himself, he would certainly not have a fool for a client. Kissinger is far from a fool; on the contrary, he emerges from the administrations he served as the most pragmatic, and probably smartest political figure among them.

Coming to work for a president he did not particularly respect, surrounded by political cronies of that president for whom he had little better feeling than thinly disguised contempt, he nonetheless was able to stomach his dislike in return for the opportunity to place his personal stamp on American foreign policy. In the process, he became the most powerful Secretary of State since John Foster Dulles.

Kissinger began his government service as an instrument through which Richard Nixon could bypass the State Department, which the president did not trust. Both men shared the view that America should develop a strong geopolitical, activist foreign policy to, as Kissinger describes it, "free out foreign policy from its violent historical

fluctuations between euphoria and panic."

In order to make the kind of broad, sweeping changes that led to such brilliant moves as the normalization of relations with China, Nixon needed a National Security Adviser free from the bureaucratic politics of the State Department which could cripple presidential initiative by foot-dragging. In Kissinger, Nixon found a man willing to conduct foreign policy in secret and to bypass the sadly used William Rogers, and a man who, by virtue of his Harvard credentials, could give the administration the aura of intellectual credibility which Nixon coveted, but lacked himself. For his purposes, Nixon made probably the best appointment of his career.

But the Kissinger of the China initiatives is the same Cold Warrior

easy to reconcile ourselves to a second Communist state in the Western Hemisphere. We were persuaded that it would soon be inciting anti-American policies, attacking hemisphere solidarity, making common cause with Cuba, and sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union. And this was all the more painful because Allende represented a break with Chile's long democratic history and would become President not through an authentic expression of majority will but through a fluke of the Chilean political system. Thirty-six percent of the popular vote was hardly a mandate for the irreversible transformation of Chile's political and economic institutions that Allende was determined to effect."

So Kissinger's feeble defense is the false issue that Allende was

> 'Allende represented a break with Chile's long democratic history and would become President not through an authentic expression of majority will but through a fluke of the Chilean political system.'

who can refer to the 1970 Cambodian invasion with the detached observation that "Cambodia was not a moral issue . . . [but] an essentially tactical choice." He argues that "strategically Cambodia could not be considered a country separate from Vietnam" because the North Vietnamese army controlled at least one-quarter of the countryside. One is reminded of Lewis Carroll's observation about those who control the definitions controlling the reality. Cambodia was not Cambodia because we said it was North Vietnam, ergo, there was no violation of Cambodian territory or neutrality. And we had troops to protect and a timed strategic withdrawal to effect, Kissinger argues.

However, one wonders how history will reflect upon a man who can justify the destruction of the freely elected president of a neighboring state with the following, chillingly pragmatic assessment:

"In any circumstance, Allende's election was a challenge to our national interest. We did not find it

elected by a plurality rather than a majority. While the author squirms to avoid any culpability in the destruction of the Chilean economy and political system which led to Allende's eventual overthrow and murder, one need only consider the foregoing paragraph to see how transparent those denials are. Allende was destroyed through a conscious application of Kissinger's pragmatic geopolitical philosophy.

*White House Years* is massive in size and scope, as much history lesson as biography. Despite its self-serving tone, this book is the best American political autobiography in years. Kissinger must have kept every memo he came across in his years of government service, but rather than bury us in them, he has used them sparingly, more as props than crutches. His style is not particularly facile—he keeps describing himself throughout as “agnostic” where various policies are concerned, and Nixon is often “beside himself”—but it is readable, and important information is conveyed painlessly.

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

VOL. 13, NO. 2 / FEBRUARY 1980

[LC]

Carl Gershman

# KISSINGER'S CREATION

With his memoir *White House Years*, Henry Kissinger intensifies the ideological struggle at home—and the Left scrambles to save its skin.

It is symptomatic of the lamentable state of American foreign policy that today, three years into the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, the central figure in the national debate over America's world role and the country's most prominent statesman is not the President or an official of his administration but a former Secretary of State. Whether the issue is Iran, Indochina, SALT, or the entire pattern of American retreat and Soviet advance, the argument seems invariably to come back to Henry Kissinger, who, depending upon one's point of view, is held to be the cause of everything that has gone wrong or the indispensable master statesman to whom the nation must turn to set things right.

Kissinger owes his present salience partly to the incompetence of the Carter administration, which has failed to put forth anything even remotely resembling a coherent foreign policy. His eight years of stewardship over American policy now seem like a Golden Age in comparison to the spectacle of different officials voicing conflicting views at the same time, or the same official voicing conflicting views at different times. And his clear if often somber exposition of policy has a growing appeal to a country increasingly dissatisfied with an administration that makes a fetish of restraint in the face of blatant, humiliating provocations.

Kissinger also owes his centrality in the present debate to the animosity that is being directed at him from the liberal Left. There is an irrational element to this animosity, a deep hatred, which cannot be fully explained by reference to differences of conception, policy, and worldview. To be sure, such differences are enormous. The Left liberals despise Kissinger's realpolitik, his reliance on an "amoral" balance of power, and his fixation on the

East-West rivalry and its attendant alliances with unsavory dictatorships of the Right. But Kissinger has been out of office for three years, so the question remains: Why attack him now with such unmistakable vengeance?

The answer lies in the Left's need to escape accountability for the consequences of its own ideas and policies. The events of the past few years have thoroughly discredited the intellectual and moral position of the Left—not just the far Left represented by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, but the liberal Left of George McGovern and Edward Kennedy. To this list one must add Jimmy Carter, who came into office disparaging Kissinger and proclaiming a new policy that would emphasize morality and the reliance upon good will, and which would lay to rest that "inordinate fear of Communism" that led the country into Vietnam and isolated America from the ascendant revolutionary forces in the Third World.

Called by some critics McGovernism without McGovern, this policy has completely failed the test of reality. America's opponents have responded to our good will not with restraint but with a swift kick in the teeth, leading to an unprecedented deterioration of the U.S. position in the world. To friend and foe alike, America has become

the pitiful, helpless giant that Nixon once spoke of—its moral posturing increasingly transparent, its paralysis of will universally perceived, its fear of Communism steadily growing. Nor has America's new affinity with the Third World diminished anti-Americanism. On the contrary, our enemies have grown more contemptuous and our friends less cooperative, and throughout the world the rudimentary structure of peace built three decades ago seems to be giving way to the forces of anarchy and aggression.

Most damaging of all, there is the Communist holocaust in Indochina—a development that was not dreamt of in the philosophy of the liberal Left. The Indochinese Communists were said to be true nationalists whose victory would bring reconstruction and reconciliation. Instead, they have shown themselves to be the worst killers since Hitler. Nobody today, with the possible exception of Noam Chomsky, is prepared to deny that Pol Pot is a mass-murderer. But in what sense are the rulers in Hanoi less odious? Their reign of terror has forced hundreds of thousands to flee Vietnam. They are using poison gas to subjugate Laos. And in Cambodia they are employing mass starvation to eliminate an alien nationalism, a policy perfectly in keeping with Stalin's attempt to destroy the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, and other non-Russian national groups during the Second World War.

Surely such momentous events call for a reevaluation of the liberal orthodoxy of the past decade. But the simpler, safer course is to blame Kissinger for what has happened—a tactic known as saving one's skin. The attack begins with Cambodia. This was "Kissinger's war," for it was started, according to liberal mythology, after the Democrats left office in early 1969 and ended with the triumph of the Kissinger-created Khmer Rouge. Vietnam is also Kissinger's fault since it was his policy, as William Pfaff wrote recently in the

Carl Gershman is Executive Director of Social Democrats, USA, and a regular contributor to Commentary magazine.

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980

7

*New York Times*, "to abandon South Viet-
nam to its enemies." Worse still, he ex-
tended the war for four years at a cost of
20,000 American lives and immense suffer-
ing for the Indochinese—all for no purpose
since, as Pfaff writes, "the result for
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos could not
possibly have been worse than what
actually happened." The Shah's downfall
is another stain on Kissinger's record (not
on Carter's, of course), because he fed the
Shah's delusions of grandeur, alienating
the Iranian people in the process. So is the
seizure of the hostages, since he pressured
Carter to admit the Shah to the United
States, even at the risk of enraging Kho-
meini. (Since no one is ingenious enough to
conceive a way to blame Kissinger for the
failure to protect the embassy, the issue is
just not raised.)

The whole exercise involves a complete
inversion of reality. It reveals the funda-
mental flaw of the liberal Left, the root
cause of its failure of will and wisdom: an
utter refusal to accept moral responsibility
for its actions and views. And as the denial
of reality becomes more obvious by the
day, the hatred of the Left for Kissinger
grows more impassioned.

In the midst of all this, we have the
publication of *White House Years*, Kiss-
singer's account of his role during
Nixon's first term. One is tempted to say
that this is Kissinger's response to the
Left, which it is, as we shall see. But it is
more than that—much more. Some un-
sympathetic reviewers have called it too
long (it is 1,521 pages), undigested, and
tedious. It is nothing of the sort. *White
House Years* is an extraordinary achieve-
ment, a book that will endure and may
eventually be seen to define the age in
which we live. It is monumental in scope,
masterfully written, and "devastating," as
the *Economist* observed, "in its elegance
and force." Barbara Tuchman, writing in
the *New York Times*, has charged that it is
"a campaign document" hastily completed
so as to position Kissinger in 1980 for a

* Little, Brown; $22.50.

triumphant return to the Department of
State. It is a petty charge that is belied by
the very nature of the book, which is not
the cautious statement of an office-seeker
but a frank, passionate, at times recklessly
polemical, always thoroughly absorbing
apologia not just for the policies of the
Nixon administration but for a compre-
hensive worldview.

The book is organized chronologically
and contains, in addition to a detailed
account of the major international crises of
the first Nixon term, brief, gem-like por-
traits of the countries and personalities
that Kissinger dealt with. These portraits
provide the counterpoint to Kissinger's
famed globalism, the textural background
against which he sought to apply "an in-
tegrating conceptual framework." He does
not hesitate to state his preferences, which
are not based on prejudice and certainly
not on fashionable opinion, but rather on
an appreciation of the interplay of psychol-
ogy, culture, and history and their impact
on the global balance of forces.

Thus he is deeply suspicious of German
nationalism (and wary of Willy Brandt's
*Ostpolitik*) because he regards Germany's
historical propensity to maneuver between
East and West as a latent threat to the
unity of the Western Alliance. But he has
no such reservations with respect to Polish
nationalism, which is viewed as a force for
freedom forged in a continuing struggle for
independence, a struggle in which Polish
patriots have "been seized with the heroic
and moving notion that they could restore
freedom to their own people only by en-
hancing freedom everywhere."

He has far more affection for "the bluff,
direct military chiefs of Pakistan" (and
gratitude for their role as a secret channel
to China) than for Indira Gandhi with her
"almost hereditary moral superiority." In-
deed, he has a profound dislike for India,
that "special favorite of American liber-
als," with its sanctimonious "claim to be
neutral moral arbiter of world affairs"
("the policy," he notes, "by which a weak
nation seeks influence out of proportion to
its strength").

His preference for China over Russia is
such that he seems ever tempted to vio-

late his stricture "never to lean to one side
or the other" in our role as *tertius
gaudens*. The Chinese are admired as "the
most unsentimental practitioners of bal-
ance-of-power politics I have encoun-
tered," historically conditioned to contend
with powerful neighbors and potential
aggressors and inwardly assured of "the
uniqueness of Chinese values." The Rus-
sians, on the other hand, are "rigid" and
"muscle-bound" in diplomacy, their "un-
dying quest for petty advantage," their
strenuous insistence on their prerogatives
as a great power, and their ultimate re-
liance on massive military power all be-
traying an "extraordinary psychological
insecurity."

These examples, which are drawn from a
vast range of observations, suggest the im-
portance that Kissinger attaches to under-
standing the character of nations and their
leaders—the material constituting the ob-
jective reality which conditions the work of
the statesman. The statesman can master
this reality and transcend it, but only if he
has "a sense of history, an understanding
of manifold forces not within our control,
and a broad view of the fabric of events."
His task is to seize the "margin between
necessity and accident," to grasp "the
relationship of events," and to understand
"the scope available for creativity." This
requires a conceptual framework which
"links" events and illuminates their
"nuances and interrelations," and which
also establishes clear priorities. It is not
this guiding framework which limits free-
dom of action but its absence, for without it
"policymakers are forced to respond to
parochial interests, buffeted by pressures
without a fixed compass."

Such will be the fate of America, Kiss-
singer is convinced, so long as it fails to
establish an integrating, geopolitical tradi-
tion in foreign policy. By geopolitical, he
means "an approach that pays attention to
the requirements of equilibrium," that
stable balance of forces that is the ultimate
guarantor of peace and security. Histori-
cally, America has not had such a tradition,
preferring, as George Washington once
said, "to steer clear of permanent alliances
with any portion of the foreign world" and
to avoid entanglements in foreign disputes
except "for extraordinary emergencies."
But after World War II, with Europe
devastated and defenseless in the face of
Soviet power, we had no choice but to
accept our responsibility as the only coun-
try which could offer security and sustain
hope.

It was a role, Kissinger writes, for which
we were not prepared either by experience
or temperament, least of all for the task of
dealing "with an adversary of comparable
strength [the Soviet Union] on a permanent
basis." Our discomfort expressed itself in
an urge to escape the responsibility thrust
upon us, first in an over-exuberant effort to
refashion the world according to our moral

8

strictions on our bombing had been
removed." Indeed, it was these tough
measures—combined with the Moscow
and Peking summits which isolated the
North Vietnamese, and with Nixon's com-
manding lead over McGovern in the polls
—that led to the decisive breakthrough in
the negotiations in October, when Hanoi
finally dropped its demand that the Saigon
government be overthrown as the price of a
cease-fire. The subsequent "Christmas
bombing" did not destroy the talks, as was
predicted, but broke an impasse, produc-
ing "a more polite tone from the North
Vietnamese" than anything that was heard
since October.

This pattern of behavior could hardly be
understood by an anti-war movement that,
according to Kissinger, "fancied the North
Vietnamese as peace-loving, essentially
gentle creatures, offended by any demon-
stration of American power and eager
above all to reciprocate gestures of Ameri-
can goodwill." In fact, the North Viet-
namese were ruthless expansionists who
treated "acts of goodwill that did not re-
flect the existing balance of forces...as
signs of moral weakness," while never
failing to take seriously "displays of
American strength...even as they resisted
them"

Kissinger demonstrates how this pattern
was repeated in many other contexts. The
State Department's "compulsive peace
initiatives" in the Middle East in 1969-
1970 had the effect of emboldening Arab
radicals and encouraging Soviet involve-
ment, a trend that only began to be re-
versed when the U.S. and Israel firmly
blocked Soviet/Syrian intervention in the
Jordan crisis of 1970. The Soviet interest in
arms-control talks was heightened by our
decision to develop the ABM system, just
as its readiness to compromise was di-
minished when Senator Muskie, running
for the Presidency, travelled to Moscow to
assure the Russians that "there was a body
of opinion in the United States that wanted
to reduce US weapons spending." Dis-
armament talks, Kissinger points out,
could be advanced only "by presenting the
Kremlin with risks and programs they
were eager to stop," not by making uni-
lateral gestures of restraint (such as can-
cellation of the B-1 bomber) which have
*never* "elicited a significant or lasting
Soviet response."

Some critics call Kissinger's approach
amoral, in that it deprecates "sentiment"
in decision-making, and some go so far as
to consider it immoral in its readiness to use
force or to condone measures such as in-
terference in the Chilean elections. But it is
morality with a double standard that allows
the Soviet bloc to assist a radical Chilean
candidate (and is even prepared to over-
look much more unseemly forms of Soviet
intervention), but deems it improper for
the U.S. to aid his democratic opponent. In
the real world, morality cannot be based

solely upon intentions, but is contingent
also upon consequences; and while means
cannot be justified by ends, they also can-
not be judged apart from a consideration of
the available options and their probable re-
sults. George Orwell once wrote that,
"Applied to foreign policy, pacifism either
stops being pacifist or becomes appease-
ment." And if appeasement strengthens
those who would make war and enslave
others, it is not just naive, but, for all
practical purposes, profoundly immoral.

Stanley Hoffmann claims that the basic
contradiction in Kissinger's conception of
international politics is not moral but prac-
tical: "He seeks an order of restraint, yet
his global view obliges him to universal
intervention." But there is no contradiction
here at all, since a readiness to intervene is
what makes "universal intervention" un-
necessary. The recognized ability and will
to exercise power reduces the need to use
force to a minimum—assuming, of course,
that a policy of deterrence is but one aspect
of a comprehensive "geopolitical" strategy
that makes sense. Power is the precondi-
tion for an *effectively* moderate policy, for
as Kissinger wisely observes, "moderation
is a virtue only in those who are thought to
have a choice." This is a lesson which
America—or better, the Carter administra-
tion—should by now have learned.

Kissinger's disagreement with his critics
on the Left comes down in the end to the
question of the Cold War. For all his diplo-
matic maneuvering that went under the
name of détente, Kissinger remains a Cold
Warrior in his view that the Soviet Union
poses a global threat which only the United
States is capable of meeting. This is the
first premise of his "intellectual frame-
work," the basic assumption without
which his concept of "linkage" becomes
unintelligible, as indeed it is to many of his
critics. For why should local events be
viewed in the context of a global challenge
if one does not recognize the existence of
this challenge, particularly its global
nature? And why should it be necessary to
demonstrate "credibility" in one area in
order to protect interests elsewhere if there
isn't a global balance of power that is
affected by our actions?

There is a sense in which Kissinger's
critics are arguing at cross-purposes with
him over essentially tactical and methodo-
logical questions that cannot be meaning-
fully discussed in the absence of some
prior agreement about the nature of the
threat that we face. As a result, their
criticism is unfocused and often petty while
his response is polemical, for his intent is
to win a "civil war" so that it will become
possible again to establish a consensual

11