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4/5/94 PM2

With the collapse of Communism, the disappearance of a global military threat, and the simultaneous emergence of great powers in Asia and Europe, the problem of how to build a new world order has become central to American foreign policy.

In "Diplomacy" I sought to examine how previous periods have dealt with this challenge, from the emergence of the modern nation-state to the present. In particular, I tried to describe America's historic blending of its hopes and its necessities, of its sense of America as a beacon and America as a mission, to draw conclusions for our own time.

A contrary approach views international relations in more normative ways as a conflict between good and evil. Professor May seems to belong to this school of thought. Had he

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elaborated this disagreement in his review, he could have
sparked a significant dialogue.

Professor May has not done so. Instead of avowing his
philosophical disagreements with me, he tries to impose them
on me by indirection, ascribing value judgements incompatible
with my actual views to descriptive material. And he attacks
my scholarly qualifications with needless personal invective
by a specious and nitpicking search for errors.

Professor May's idiosyncratic treatment of quotes from
"Diplomacy" tempts him into distortions for which there is no
evidence. For example, Professor May alleges that I wrote
"contemptuously" about Gladstone and then produces a quote
which contains no evaluation by me whatsoever, which in turn
is drawn from a respectful description of Gladstone's
political thought ("Diplomacy" p.160-62). He claims that a
reference to the similarity between Napoleon III's quest for

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public approbation and that of modern political figures is
"elliptically" aimed at Jimmy Carter, who is nowhere mentioned
in the text, which did not even specifically single out the
United States.

Similarly, Professor May alleges that I "admit admiration"
of Stalin. I did no such thing. It takes unusual ingenuity or
bias to distill admiration from a quote which begins, "Stalin
was indeed a monster," and is followed by a sentence omitted
by Professor May, which leaves no doubt that I am talking
about the method by which Stalin concluded the Nazi-Soviet
pact: "Without knowing it, the Western democracies were
tempting fate by counting on an irreconcilable ideological
conflict between Stalin and Hitler, by teasing Stalin with a
French pact that foreswore military cooperation, by excluding
the Soviet Union from the Munich Conference..." Nor does

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Professor May mention my discussions of Stalin's tyranny, for
example, *inter alia*, on pp. 411, 440-41, 499-50.

Continuing the same method, Professor May alleges that I
also express admiration for the "tyrants of Beijing." Once
again he separates a purely descriptive sentence from its
context, which deals with Nixon and the Chinese leaders
managed to come together despite profound ideological
differences. And he omits to mention that *the same paragraph*
(this time in a preceding sentence) refers to Mao as a
"ruthless, pitiless, occasionally murderous revolutionary."

In his determination to demonstrate that I never met a
dictator I did not like, Professor May even implies, in a
sentence directly following the one charging me with
admiration for Stalin and Mao, that my objection to Hitler was
not so much moral as snobbish and intellectually fastidious:

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"Mr. Kissinger is impatient with Hitler because he 'operated by instinct rather than analysis.'"

Professor May's unworthy innuendo towards a victim of Nazi persecution is drawn from a factual account of Hitler's governing style, and no more "impatient" than my alleged reference to Gladstone was contemptuous. What he omits is the phrase which begins that section: "Hitler's advent to power marked one of the greatest calamities in the history of the world....the orgy of killing and devastation it unleashed was the work of one demonic personality."

Professor May next turns to a hunt for errors. He claims to find one error of omission and three of commission, arguing that these would preclude me - a former colleague of his at Harvard - from achieving "a pass degree in history" were I a student and that they constitute "amateur history."

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This snide and totally inappropriate comment is not supported by his evidence. Professor May describes the error of omission as follows: "Neither a line of text nor a footnote mentions Sir Harold Nicolson's elegant book of 1939, also entitled "Diplomacy."" A reviewer cannot be expected to check every footnote and every paragraph. But neither should he make criticisms contrary to the facts. Footnote 33 of Chapter 4 cites Nicolson's book, and the copyright page of "Diplomacy," in a prominent, set-off note, states the following:

> The title "Diplomacy" has been used before. Both the author and the publisher pay tribute to the late Sir Harold Nicolson's book (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1939), which was quite different in scope, intentions, and ideas.

With respect to so-called errors of commission, Professor May returns to the method of ascribing to me views I neither

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hold nor expressed and then rebutting them. Interpreting the sentence (p. 222) that Wilson's doctrine of self-determination "put European diplomats on thoroughly unfamiliar terrain" to mean that they had never heard of the concept, he argues that leading newspaper publishers in Milan and London had advocated the same thesis previously. However, the issue was not whether the doctrine was known - after all, I trace Wilson's antecedents to Gladstone (p. 160-162) - but whether it had ever been implemented. The sentence *following* the one quoted by Professor May contained a precise definition of what I meant by "unfamiliar:"

> The assumption behind European settlements had been that borders could be adjusted to promote the balance of power, the requirements of which took precedence over the preferences of the affected population.

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The rest of the page explains in some detail how the principle of equilibrium had dominated various European congresses in the century preceding the First World War. It was in that sense, and not in the misleading interpretation of Professor May, that Wilson's challenge drew European diplomats onto unfamiliar terrain.

Professor May finds a second "error" in the quote attributed to Lloyd George in the winter of 1918 - that he would "squeeze Germany until the pips squeak" - calling the reference both wrong and unjust. Though the quote is often attributed to Lloyd George, it may well have originated with a member of Lloyd George's government. But far from misstating Lloyd George's views - as Professor May asserts - the quote is an accurate reflection of them: at Newcastle on November 30, 1918, Lloyd George insisted that Germany pay "the cost of the war up to the limit of her capacity;" at Bristol on December

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11, he vowed that Germany "must pay to the very last penny"
and that, in quest of the "ultimate farthing..., we will
search their pockets for it." Lloyd George's attitude toward
Germany at the end of the war was also reflected in his
statement to the War Cabinet on October 26, 1918 (quoted on p.
270): "The question arose whether we ought not to continue
lashing her as she had lashed France."

These quotes make nonsense of Professor May's allegation
that the disputed phrase "caused trouble for Lloyd George, who
clung to a last-ditch hope that public opinion would not
demand unreasonable reparations from just-defeated Germany."
After all, Lloyd George had done as much as anybody to
generate, or at least to exploit, that public opinion. True,
in the course of the subsequent peace negotiations in the
spring of 1919, Lloyd George substantially modified his
earlier views, a change described on p. 241 of "Diplomacy" as

[N]

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"too late" to affect the outcome. Professor May is beating a
debating quibble to death.

Professor May finds a third error in the description of the
so-called Hossbach memorandum on p. 309. Once again, he takes
two sentences devoted to another point to misrepresent the
thrust of the argument, which dealt exclusively with tracing
when Hitler first revealed his long-term objectives to his
military leaders. Professor May correctly points out that the
phrase that Hitler revealed his plans to "almost all of
Germany's general officers" is inaccurate. In fact - as my own
research showed - only five top general officers were present,
representing most of the German High Command. The mistake is
one of those technical errors that, in normal circumstances,
is corrected in later editions without comment. In the final
stages of copy-editing, the word "top" was inadvertently
dropped. The rest of the paragraph would, moreover, suggest to

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any unbiased reader that it deals with the top command.

Professor May argues that this technical error (which has been
corrected in the German and all other editions by restoring
the word "top" to its original place) skews the German postwar
debate about the responsibility of the German generals for the
war. I find it flattering though hard to believe that my two
sentences could affect a debate to which they are not relevant
and which has generated many volumes of scholarly research.

Thus Professor May's harvest in a book of 912 pages
(including notes), hundreds of footnotes, and scores of events
yields a copyediting error which did not affect the narrative
or the conclusions.

Professor May has done significant historical research in
the past; it is therefore not possible to consider his
comments as inadvertent. He would have contributed more to
general understanding had he articulated and debated his

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Professor May's idiosyncratic treatment of quotes from
*Diplomacy* tempts him into distortions, for which there is no
evidence. For example, Professor May alleges that I wrote
"contemptuously" about Gladstone and then produces a quote
which contains no evaluation by me whatsoever, which in turn
is drawn from a respectful description of Gladstone's
political thought ("Diplomacy" pp.160-62). He claims that a
reference to the similarity between Napoleon III's quest for

Professor May mention my discussions of Stalin's tyranny, for
example, _inter alia_, on pp. 411, 440-41, 499-50.

Continuing the same method, Professor May alleges that I
also express admiration for the "tyrants of Beijing." Once
again he separates a purely descriptive sentence from its
context, which deals with (Nixon and the Chinese leaders
managed to come together despite profound ideological
differences. And he omits to mention that _the same paragraph_
(this time in a preceding sentence) refers to Mao as a,
"ruthless, pitiless, occasionally murderous revolutionary."