Remarks by Henry A. Kissinger

Board Dinner for Peter Tarnoff

April 30, 1986

Pete, Cy, ladies and gentlemen. To emphasize that there is no absolute uniformity in the character of former Secretaries of State, let me point out that my mother would consider this introduction a classic case of Anglo-Saxon understatement. And I can feel that the more reasonable person could disagree with it; that even though Peter admitted much that I had submitted to him, I recognize the limitations of time under which he was laboring.

I'm here as an opening contribution to bipartisanship. I have read reports about some ambivalence I was supposed to be feeling about the new President of the Council and there's a basis in it. For example, he's admitted in a biographical statement which listed among his accomplishments, when he was Deputy Chief of Mission in that country while I was Secretary of State, his ability to deal with the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and Minister of Sports of Luxembourg--but that biographic statement did not reveal they were all the same person. On the other hand, I hope to learn a great deal from Peter because those are exactly the positions I have been after all my life, and I hope very much that he can tell me how a person can achieve such eminence. I want you to know, Peter, that you have, of course, my full support and my enthusiastic cooperation plus that of my legion of opponents from the left and the right--so it's almost impossible for you to fail.

I was very impressed by what Cy was saying about bipartisanship, and he is quite correct. He and I have talked about it for a long time and I share the admiration that Pete Peterson expressed of him. I also feel he's an

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extraordinary human being. About Cy Vance: we had a great transition period
together, which he unfortunately ended by insisting on going to the seventh
floor. No successor had ever treated me with greater decency, no Executive
Secretary of the State Department with greater fairness, than Cy and Peter
Tarnoff and I will not forget this.

My own recent excursion into bipartisanship was the Bipartisan Commission
on Central America. I must say after the elevated presentation of Cy, I might
tell one experience which causes me to use a word which perhaps the older
members of the Council have not heard in these halls, but I want to give an
accurate account. One of the more passionate Democratic members of that
Bipartisan Commission wanted to file a dissent. I argued with him for about
an hour and a half with what was the closest approximation of rationality that
I could generate, to absolutely no avail. Lane Kirkland sent me a note which
said "would you like a professional to try his hand at this?" and I called
upon Lane Kirkland. And, if you ladies here will forgive me, Lane gruntled,
"You don't want to say a chicken shit thing like this do you?" It turned out
he didn't. We had a unanimous Report. So it is in this spirit, in this hope,
that I will be happy to join you as Co-Chairman of this group assuming that
whoever makes these decisions agrees.

There are many here in this room who have had to conduct foreign policy
from its passions that the current generation would not experience, who may or
may not have been part of a golden age. We must remember that the
bipartisanship of the immediate post war period was based on a projection
forward of a simpler task in which the Communists replaced the Nazis as the
doers of unambiguous aggression across well-defined borders on the one hand
and, secondly, in which it was assumed that political instability always

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resulted from economic dislocation and therefore could be solved by substantial economic aid programs. In the period when the United States represented 52 per cent of the world's gross national product and had the huge nuclear superiority, with the economic dislocations in Europe, this was in fact true. So bipartisanship worked domestically and was successful internationally.

The crises of the late sixties through which so many in this room passed, however different the conclusions they reached, resulted in large part because of the great doubt of these assumptions compounded by the realization that our task was endless. The early foreign policy seemed to assume that there was some terminal point at which one could say peace had been restored to the world--uniquely American nostalgia for which history offers no warranty whatsoever, and which is nevertheless repeated endlessly in American academic writing on the subject as a legitimate and viable goal of foreign policy. The fact that every problem solved would be an admissions prize to a whole new set of issues was at the heart of the bitterness of much of that debate because only an evil, foolish or inadequate man could be responsible for such an unsatisfactory state of affairs. So to achieve anything approximating bipartisanship in our period is going to be a very difficult task. All the more so as there is no clearly defined group anymore that explicitly has set itself the task of thinking ahead in the category, of say, five years.

Political leaders achieve eminence through a process that dredges them of substance. I was involved in politics first with Nelson Rockefeller, who in retrospect seems hopelessly naive in his conviction that one achieved the candidacy of a major party by having the best substantive program, and who would spend years studying the issues--until one found out to one's horror

that winning the convention with the required number of delegates was equal to
the effort that had been put into the substance. No modern candidate would
waste time on such an enterprise--he would do research instead on his
followers, seeking to learn their expectations so that he could lead them. So
they often arrived in office emotionally and physically exhausted to find that
advisers, who had accompanied them on their journey and were in an equal state
of obsession with what played on the evening news and in the academic
community, tended to divide themselves between revolutionaries and job
applicants who concentrated on getting answers to immediate tactical problems.

When I was a young professor, there are many here in this room who would
meet together in academic seminars, but I don't think any of us had any
expectations of reaching high office and, therefore, we tried to think five or
more years ahead. There is no obvious constituency like this today but it
needs desperately to be created. Otherwise I feel very much we are doomed
forever to repeat scenarios(?) that were established 30 years ago and that
were quite valid then but cannot be valid forever. I must tell you, as
somebody who is himself engaged in the schedule that does not exactly
encourage reflectiveness, that perplexities multiply.

I have no difficulty affirming the role of arms control but I have
increasing difficulty giving it a concrete content that gives it substance.
When I look at the various positions that are submitted at Geneva, for
example, and try to distribute the resulting warheads in a manner that
improves the situation, it is not self-evident to me that any of them decrease
the danger of surprise attack, or the risk to the civilian population, so that
at the end there is a great danger that agreement becomes an end in itself.
How can one explain that an agreement that was not ratified and thereby gives

the Soviets 300 more missiles than it would have had had it been ratified becomes sacrosanct after it would have lapsed. While we are accusing the Soviets of violating it, how can one form a public opinion in such an environment and how can one explain where one is going. How is it possible?

In my last bipartisan effort to which I referred, Norman has heard me say in the presence of the Secretary of State that perhaps the best solution to the Nicaraguan problem would be to drop the unread copies of the Bipartisan Report on Nicaragua, unless the Human Rights Division of the State Department would consider it too much a violation of the human rights of the Nicaraguans to drop such a tonnage on them. In the debate on Central America, one has one side arguing that one cannot accept the regime in Managua and it must be overthrown by the expenditure of a $100 million to confront $500 million of Soviet equipment, and the other side arguing that we must try diplomacy first, when it is very difficult to know any example of abstract diplomacy having led to any result separate from a calculus of pressures. And, second, I believe that almost any student of Mexico will agree that its institutions are weakening if not disintegrating. I believe also that everyone in this room would agree that if Mexico erupts, we will have settled the question of whether the American attention is moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific--it will be focused on the Rio Grande without a clue of what to do about it. I'm not saying this because I know what to do about it. I wouldn't even know where to begin because in that complex and rather subtle political system they now have, the capacity for violence is extraordinarily powerful beneath the surface. I can't think of any more important task for a group like the Council to address than that.

The bankers in this room from whom I've been freeloading by writing a periodic article on the debt issue that would usually generate an invitation, depending on the personality, to either ask me or threaten me to keep quiet, but I have tried to make one mental point that had nothing to do with what the bankers were doing, who I think have acted absolutely rationally. It is that the debt issue has arrived at a moment of political upheaval in Latin America and therefore has to be understood in terms of the political direction. It cannot be analyzed entirely or even primarily in terms of capacity to pay, and it can be solved only in relation to U.S. political relationship to these countries that gives them a common sense of direction for the future within which sacrifices on which one might agree become meaningful.

One could go on, and I probably will, to that of southern Africa. Don McHenry and I over the weekend participated in a discussion. He, having thought about the problem for a long time, seemed to me to have a clear sense of direction. But I, having no difficulty whatever opposing apartheid, had great difficulty getting an intellectual grip on what democracy should look like in a multi-racial society. Not that I would know how the United States should achieve it, but something that one can believe in as a goal, not a justification of the status quo, in order to be able to mobilize energies in a constructive direction.

These are just a few of the topics which are discontinued from our past, which seem to me to require attention. There's one more I think that should be separate from the discussion group. We really have lost any sense of recent history and we have lost it for two reasons. One, I don't know how history can be written when every administration generates millions of documents and when the outsider cannot tell which of these documents were read

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by high officials, which were written to protect the author or because he had
an afternoon free, and which led to action. Especially at a time when
communications are so instantaneous, policy makers rarely give their reasons
for actions in their memoranda as the policy-makers of the nineteenth century
had to do since the executors of policy were so far away that unless they
understood the grievances there was no sense in giving them instructions. So
it's easy for anybody to rummage around documents and find some fragment
sentence that proves whatever theory he started out with; and that is terrific
for investigative reporting but disastrous for history. When that is combined
with a previous assumption that everybody in government is either a knave or a
fool, one gets a total distortion and therefore nobody can really learn from
the past anymore.

I would be interested to see what a small group of historians would think
of the problem of how history can be written in this period and how one would
go about writing the history of some event that is reasonably fair. Otherwise
we are going to run the risk of reinventing ourselves to suit whatever current
tactical purpose exists. Peter, it seems to me, an outside group like this
one, if it is bipartisan as I know you will do your utmost to make it, and if
it doesn't try to second guess day-to-day policy as I am also confident the
Council will not do as it has not done in the past, a discussion group at the
Council could make a huge contribution to our thinking.

I concluded my last two remarks here by reading Huch's German poems just
to live up to the preconceptions of some of you of my proclivities. But on
this occasion I would like to just quote from a Spanish proverb which says
"travelers, there are no paths...paths are made by walking." I am sure when
you conclude your period here, Peter, there will be many paths in very good
direction.