1ST STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.

Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
The Washington Post

June 28, 1998, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X01

LENGTH: 2369 words

HEADLINE: Presidential Deceptions and Diplomatic Errors

BYLINE: James G. Hershberg

BODY:

A TANGLED WEB

The Making of Foreign Policy

in the Nixon Presidency

By William Bundy

Hill & Wang. 647 pp. $ 35

Reviewed by James G. Hershberg, assistant professor of history and
International Affairs at George Washington University and author of "James B.
Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age."

Even when he craved its approval, even when he agreed with it, even when he,
in some ways, actually joined it, Richard M. Nixon despised "the Establishment"
-- the well-heeled, well-bred, well-educated, Eurocentric, East Coast power
elite that populated the upper reaches of government and dominated the making of
American foreign policy from World War II through the early decades of the Cold
War. On becoming president in 1969, and in league with an unlikely yet equally
conspiratorial national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon's first move
was to command a surprise attack against that enemy -- not the North Vietnamese,
Soviet, or Chinese communists but the State Department apparatchiks. The
president ordered the bureaucracies to undertake a series of sweeping, laborious
basic policy reviews while he secretly concentrated power in the White House and
set up back channels to key foreign leaders. Over the next half-decade, in
virtually every important aspect of foreign and national security policy -- from
Vietnam to U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms control to the opening of China -- Nixon and
Kissinger schemes behind the back of "experts" inside the government and used
secrecy, deception and flat-out lies to conceal controversial actions from
Congress, the press and the public.

After the two were forced from office (Nixon in August 1974, when he resigned under the threat of imminent impeachment, and Kissinger in January 1977, after a frustrating term as Gerald Ford's secretary of state), they launched preemptive strikes on history by writing voluminous memoirs that exploited their exclusive access to and control over documents that, a quarter-century later, still remain off-limits to the historians they scorned.

Now the Establishment, in the person of a man who embodies the inner circle
Nixon so fervently tried to crush, control and impress all at once, has struck

The Washington Post, June 28, 1998

back with a major critique of foreign policy in the Nixon-Kissinger years. Unlike Nixon, who sprang from working-class small-town California roots (he never tired of reminding people of them, however mawkishly), William Putnam Bundy sprouted from the aristocracy: He was the son of Harvey Bundy, a key aide to Establishment icon Henry Stimson, Hoover's secretary of state and FDR's secretary of war; son-in-law to Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state; protege of Allen Dulles, Eisenhower's CIA director; and elder brother to the late McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard dean and national security adviser to JFK and LBJ. He glided through a succession of upper-crust schools -- Groton, Yale and Harvard Law -- then came to Washington as a corporate lawyer with Covington and Burling and soon entered a two-decade career in government service. A Brahmin lawyer and intellectual of liberal inclinations but centrist Cold War instincts, he rose steadily through the ranks of CIA analysts in the 1950s, then served in senior positions in the Defense and State Departments under Kennedy and Johnson, with special responsibilities for U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia. While his brother Mc-

George achieved far greater fame until leaving government in 1965, and subsequent notoriety as Vietnam went sour, this "lean patrician with a lockjaw accent," in the words of Stanley Karnow, vitally influenced policy from his posts at the Pentagon and then State. A "classic insider's man," wrote David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest, William Bundy's "name would probably be on more pieces of paper dealing with Vietnam over a seven-year period [1961-68] than anyone else's, yet he was the man about whom the least was known and the fewest articles were written."

After leaving government, Bundy occupied that prestigious chair of the foreign policy punditocracy, editor of Foreign Affairs, from 1972 to 1984, seeking to preserve the thick gray journal's waning oracular status as the publication of record for the policy prescriptions and pronouncements of the centrist and moderately left-of-center powerful and influential. All in all, the Bundy family's association with political power in the United States rivals that of any American clan in the second half of the 20th century.

But, like his brother McGeorge and his former boss Robert McNamara, William Bundy could not escape the ghosts of Vietnam. In more ways than one this invisible insider resembled the ill-fated protagonist of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, for Bundy too, like Greene's character Alden Pyle, personified America's lemming-like spill over the Indochinese precipice. Though acutely conscious of the French precedent in Indochina, Bundy was initially confident that the United States could succeed in overcoming the communist menace by wielding superior force, technology, political will and sheer idealism. One of the early architects of U.S. military escalation in 1964-65, Bundy would come to feel gnawing doubts about the massive deployments of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Vietnam. But while warning that large-scale intervention risked "turning the conflict into a white man's war, with the United States in the shoes of the French," he never opposed the war effort or urged withdrawal within Johnson administration councils, nor did he become a public dissenter after leaving office -- an act that would have marked him (as it did Daniel Ellsberg) as an Establishment apostate.

Instead, long suspected by colleagues of entertaining a "secret craving to be a historian," according to Halberstam, William Bundy privately set down his version of the war in a never-published, 900-page manuscript, abandoned in 1971, after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department

history of the U.S. decision-making in Vietnam. Although Bundy's declassified
Vietnam opus still lies in the files of the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas,
obscure to all but scholarly researchers, A Tangled Web is a sharply critical
study of Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy that in large measure revolves around
their agonizing effort to manage "with honor" America's extrication from the
Vietnam disaster.

Bundy couches his thrusts and jabs in judicious, genteel tones befitting his
provenance, periodically dispensing praise or sympathy to his targets, and
giving credit where it seems due. But make no mistake: A Tangled Web means to
shatter the mythology that has grown up around Nixon and Kissinger as brilliant
practitioners of foreign policy.

As its title suggests -- echoing Sir Walter Scott's couplet, "Oh, what a
tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive" -- Bundy's tome
stresses the obsessive secrecy and "pattern of deception" of those years. While
occasionally finding this justifiable or at least understandable (their work on
the China opening, for example), Bundy argues that the secrecy far more often
reflected their vanity and desire for control, and led to disastrous
consequences: Cutting out relevant experts yielded policy misjudgments,
especially in regional conflicts like the 1971 India-Pakistan war; misleading
Congress and the public produced an intense resentment that ultimately ignited
the explosion that drove Nixon from office and swung the pendulum of power away
from the president and back toward Congress. As a professional foreign policy
"expert" himself, Bundy is especially prompt to blast the White House's national
security policy in the hands of Nixon, Kissinger and a handful of others
(notably Alexander M. Haig Jr.) and to praise them in those instances when
Kissinger actually deigned to assemble a suitable "team" from the relevant
experts.

A Tangled Web gets far more interesting when Bundy delves into specific
episodes. He offers fresh speculations about the final hours of the 1968
presidential campaign, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sought a dramatic
breakthrough to stop the bombing of North Vietnam and accelerate peace talks
just as it seemed that Democratic candidate Hubert H. Humphrey was on the verge
of catching Republican nominee Nixon in the pre-election polls. Historians have
long wondered about the murky circumstances surrounding South Vietnam leader
Nguyen Van Thieu's refusal to go along with Johnson's peace gambit. Mounting
evidence has emerged that Nixon's campaign, with or without the candidate's
blessing and through the auspices of longtime right-wing "China lobbyist" Anna
Chennault, had secretly encouraged Thieu to hold firm in the hopes of getting a
better deal from Nixon once he took office.

Bundy, who was involved in handling the matter for LBJ, adds new information
on Johnson's ability to track the Nixon-Saigon links in the closing week of the
campaign: Although Johnson and Humphrey had FBI and NSA intercepts of telephone
calls and cables among Chennault, the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington,
and the Saigon government, they decided not to make the information public
because it would have entailed disclosing intelligence sources and because there
seemed to be no "smoking gun" confirming Nixon's personal involvement. In
reconstructing the story, Bundy specifically rejects one controversial claim,
lodged by Seymour Hersh in The Price of Power: that Kissinger fed Nixon
classified data on the Paris peace talks to give him information on any
breakthrough by LBJ that might endanger his victory. Nevertheless, Bundy clearly
still seethes at actions by Nixon and his associates, which in his view

purloined the election and may have jeopardized a faster ending to the war.

On the rapprochement between the United States and China as well as the short-lived detente between Washington and Moscow, Bundy gives Nixon high marks for breaking out of the Cold War mold and his own hard-line past. But he also shows how geopolitical shifts, especially the violent Sino-Soviet split, were prodding Moscow and Beijing toward better relations with Washington by the late 1960s regardless of who sat in the White House. As a useful corrective to the common American impression of Nixon "playing the China card," Bundy shows (and Chinese evidence now confirms) that the initiative frequently came from Beijing -- that is to say, Mao may have been "playing the American card." Bundy also praises the Nixon-Kissinger handling of the Syria-Jordan conflict of 1970, the August 1971 economic decisions, the triumphal 1972 summits in Beijing and Moscow, Kissinger's "masterly" and "extraordinary" handling of the Egyptian-Israeli and Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreements after the 1973 war, and the administration's role in concluding East-West pacts to settle lingering disputes over Berlin and Germany.

Yet a reader keeping score as he or she negotiates this well-crafted narrative will tote up far more minuses than pluses for Nixon, both on the substance of policy choices and the deceit surrounding them: the debacles in Southeast Asia (especially ill-fated military strikes into Cambodia and Laos), the costly missteps over Chile, the "conspicuous embrace" of the Shah of Iran, the dangerous and misguided "tilt" toward India in the 1971 war with Pakistan, the lack of consultation with Japan, nuclear proliferation, the grain deal and trade ties with Moscow, the Kurds, the '73-'74 oil crisis, Angola and more. Like numerous Nixon critics and scholars before him, Bundy stresses the intense domestic political calculations that drove virtually every foreign policy move -- though he underestimates the readiness of Nixon, Kissinger and Haig to consider war protesters and opponents as traitors rather than dissidents, and to use extreme means against them in the name of "national security."

A Tangled Web presents neither sensational revelations nor noteworthy archival findings; it is, instead, an impressive synthesis of secondary works and memoirs, and above all a response to Nixon's memoirs and Kissinger's two volumes on the 1969-74 period.

Unfortunately, this failure to incorporate significant archival research -- despite partial declassification of Nixon's files at the National Archives II in College Park, Md., and new releases under the Freedom of Information Act -- diminishes Bundy's work. Bundy also finished his manuscript before he was able to make use of recently declassified Nixon tapes, published last fall in Stanley I. Kutler's Abuse of Power. Lamentably, the bulk of these tapes remain closed due to Nixon and his lawyers' machinations to splice out "personal" portions of the tapes -- an absurd decision given the seamless relationship between Nixon's state, personal and political policies.

Releases of more Nixon tapes and additional documents from both U.S. and communist archives should enable scholars to refine, corroborate or correct many of A Tangled Web's conclusions. Nixon partisans are not the only ones who will dispute some of Bundy's judgments such as his endorsement of the thesis that the U.S. stand in Vietnam "bought time" for the development of shaky "Asian Tiger" economies and political structures; his claim that divisions over the 1973 Middle East War plunged NATO into "deep trouble, perhaps deeper than at any other time in its history"; or his routine repetition of the idea that Moscow

"created" a Cuban proxy force to intervene in African conflicts in the mid-1970s.

But, for the moment, Bundy has made a strong case -- a stimulating reconsideration of the gauzy nostalgia that has been accumulating around Nixon's foreign policy in recent years (reaching an apogee in the eulogies at his funeral in 1994). While not exactly light beach reading for the casual CNN viewer, A Tangled Web should provoke discussion on both sides of the barricades. At the very least, it will bring grim smiles of satisfaction to Establishment bureaucrats who bore the brunt of Nixon and Kissinger's contempt, and who can now wave Bundy's book and say, "We would have told them so!" -- if only they'd been asked.

GRAPHIC: Illustration, CHRISTOPHER BING for The Washington Post

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: June 28, 1998