Weekend Edition--16 January 1977

EDITORIALS

WASHINGTON POST 16 January 1977

The Ford Years . . .

AT NO POINT has he shown a keen or impressive grasp of the complexities of hard questions. Pedestrian, partisan, dogged—he has been the very model of a second-level party man. It is no accident that over his quarter-century of unremarkable service in the House, he has never been put forward for the presidency. . . ." So we spoke in this space a little over three years ago upon learning that Gerald Ford was about to ascend to the office of Vice President. We do not cite our despondent appraisal because we think it was on the money, but rather because we think it was not. Having been forced to replace his Vice President, and being in not-so-secure condition in office himself, Richard Nixon had just informed a waiting world that Gerald Ford was the one. Frankly, it did not occur to us that Gerald Ford was also the right one.

But we were wrong; he was. The President who will leave office this week brought precisely the needed temperament, character and virtues to the high offices he has temporarily held. These qualities are regularly subsumed under the familiar general heading of "decency," a word that does indeed fit the man. What is so revealing about the times in which we live—and the horrendous political circumstances surrounding Mr. Ford's accession to office—is the vaguely condescending way in which this particular tribute is paid to him: *Well, you have to admit he is a decent human being . . . or . . . Don't get me wrong: Of course, I think he's a decent person . . . and so on. Decency, in this context, becomes as an attribute something roughly comparable to good posture or punctuality. How odd that so few of us have been willing to acknowledge that decency in the White House can be regarded as a luxury or a bonus or afringe benefit only at our peril.*

*It is central. And its absence was central to the sorrows this country endured in the years preceding Mr. Ford's presidency. In his first days and months, it was as if he had liberated Washington—from its personal fears and hostilities and suspicions, from the dark and squalid assumptions that people had come reflexively to make about one another and about the way things "really" worked. God knows who was (and is) still listening in on whose line or who is plotting what gruesome revenge against what political foe. Our point is merely that Gerald Ford brought to the White House an open, unsinister and—yes—decent style of doing things that altered the life of the city and ultimately of the country.*

We have found many of the President's programs and positions (and lack of both in some cases) dismal news indeed. But that is yesterday's laundry list. Our summing up of the Ford presidency draws us only to the overriding legacy he leaves.

Will this city under the Carter Democrats be able to preserve that political and personal civility that Gerald Ford did so much, so unexpectedly, to revive? The Carter administration, more activist and energetic, we would guess, but its predecessor, faster-paced, more intellectually self-certain and combative, is almost by nature destined to put some of these homely, but hard-won virtues at risk. We can only hope the new administration will understand their indispensability. Mr. Ford has left it an incomparable gift in the

FORD YEARS...Pg. 2-E

1-E

... And the
Kissinger
Contribution

MORE THAN ANY other administration figure of the Nixon-Ford years, Henry Kissinger dominated his chosen area of policy and became the focus of the public's judgment of it. Though later he rode on his own power, skill and legend, initially he rose as the favored aide of a President who had entered the White House determined above all to restructure relations among the great powers. With the European intellectual's bent for conceptualization and the European survivor's knack for maneuver, Henry Kissinger was precisely the man to elaborate and execute the Nixon design.

It consisted, quite simply, of playing China against Russia. Its most celebrated results were the opening to Peking, the consolidation of the European status quo, and the onset of across-the-board negotiations with Moscow itself. This last was called "detente." Mr. Kissinger, with his chief, sold it to a wary public as promising a "generation of peace." In fact, he seems to have understood it himself as a defensive strategy meant to carry a Vietnam- (and later Watergate)-weakened America through a period of growing Soviet power. He was brave and profoundly right, we believe, to try. But the debate raging even now about Moscow's ultimate political and military aims is vivid testimony that the Nixon-Kissinger "structure of peace" was, if "buildable" at all, not built in the last eight years. Finding ways consistent with American values and resources to cope with Soviet power remains the central task of American foreign policy—though it is far from this alone.

From the start, balancing off Soviet power preoccupied Mr. Kissinger. To impress the Kremlin with American will, he felt, the unpopular war in Vietnam had to be ended on American terms. The policy flowed easily from his belief that diplomacy should be based not so much on the informed consent of others in government or society as on his own perception of the national interest. He was mistaken, of course, in his notion of how foreign policy ought to be or could be made, and in his notion of how much suffering Americans wished either to sustain or inflict on account of Vietnam. Thus was his Vietnam policy destroyed.

In Chile, Cyprus, Angola and elsewhere, Mr. Kissinger conducted a policy similarly intended to bolster the American position toward Russia. But whether the policy succeeded or failed in those terms abroad, it further eroded Mr. Kissinger's political capital and his good name at home. The public and the political opposition came increasingly to believe, not always fairly, that Mr. Kissinger regarded it as a distraction to follow an open concern for political rights or economic needs in foreign lands. All of this left him progressively less able to prepare and conduct negotiations on the central issues relating directly to Soviet-American detente, particularly the control of strategic arms. By way of further squeezing out Soviet

KISSINGER CONTRIBUTION...Pg. 2-E

A26

Sunday, Dec. 5, 1976

THE WASHINGTON POST

# Radical Africans Criticize AID Study

By David B. Ottoway

Washington Post Foreign Service

An economic and political study of southern Africa being made by the U.S. Agency for International Development has come under sharp attack by radical African nationalists and their sympathizers in the United States, who see it as a blueprint for American intervention in southern Africa.

The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), Rhodesia's most militant nationalist group, charges that the plan will be used as a vehicle to block development of black revolutionary governments.

Some African affairs specialists in the United States also have been highly critical. A spokesman for the liberal Washington Office on Africa called the AID project "a new kind of intervention" that is "more likely to succeed than our intervention in Angola."

The controversy surrounding the AID study and a British-American proposal for a $1.5 billion trust fund for economic development of a black-ruled Rhodesia raises the question of whether any U.S. economic initiative in southern Africa will overcome the growing doubts and suspicions that radical African nationalists have about U.S. policy objectives.

Although details of the AID plan have not been made public, African radicals and their supporters in the United States suspects that the main aim is to engineer, through U.S. economic assistance, the advent to power of moderate leaders in Rhodesia and Namibia.

The Washington Office on Africa called the study part of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's design to halt the radicalization of southern Africa and keep the two areas within the Western sphere of influence.

Among the principal consultants for the AID study is the Washington-based African American Scholars Council, an organization of prominent black academ-

ics. It has been given a $350,000 contract to assemble economic data, outline likely political developments and put forth U.S. policy choices specifically for Namibia (Southwest Africa) and a black majority-ruled Rhodesia, to be known as Zimbabwe.

The study is not directly linked to the trust fund proposed by Britain and the United States but State Department sources say the two projects will probably dovetail into one overall American plan for Rhodesia, once a transitional government is established there.

While work on the proposed trust fund has been shelved pending the outcome of talks in Geneva between Rhodesia's black and white leaders, the AID project is going ahead at full speed and is scheduled to be completed by Jan. 20 for consideration by the President-elect Jimmy Carter's administration.

In addition to the African American Scholars Council, two other outside groups, the American Technical Assistance Corp. in Virginia and Checchi and Co. in Washington, are involved in the study. The project includes country-by-country and regional planning. AID has reportedly budgeted more than $1.5 million for the three contracts.

Militant ZANU spokesmen have attacked the council for its role in the project.

"The plan is designed to create conditions which would serve as pretexts for U.S. and South African direct and indirect intervention in Zimbabwe and Namibia," ZANU charged in a statement issued by its New York office in mid-September. The statement called the AID study "neo-colonialist, racist, imperialist and anti-African."

ZANU also condemned the Whitsun Foundation of Rhodesia, a private, nonprofit group based in Salisbury that is attesting to mobilize local capital for economic development projects. The Whitsun director, Ian Hume, a former World Bank economist, attended a meeting of the

council in Washington last August to discuss the study project. The foundation, is not directly involved in the AID project so far as is known, however.

Also now lambasting the AID study is the magazine Counterspy, which published in its latest issue what it alleges to be a confidential document circulating within the top circles of the United Nations.

The document alleges that several AID officials and scholars working on the southern Africa study have had ties with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency or are conservative academics hostile to the African liberation movements.

"The project, proposal reads like many of the proposals set in motion by AID for counterinsurgency purposes in other countries," the purported U.N. document says. "And it seems quite likely that the finding of the council will be used to draw up plans for installing a 'moderate' government in Namibia."

A U.N. spokesman denied that Secretary General Kurt Waldheim or any of his associates has seen the document.

AID and council officials have reacted with anger and dismay to the attacks.

"We're doing economic studies to get a fix on what the requirements (for economic aid) might be. We're not even assuming we will be called upon to help," said Stanley Scott, AID's Africa director.

"The Afro-American community is extremely interested in southern Africa," said Elliott Skinner, council chairman and head of Columbia University's anthropology department. The study is an attempt by black American social scientists "not to shy away from unorthodox ideas" in approaching policy-oriented issues, he said.

"This project has the advantage of being designed to enable the United States and other interested parties to come to grips with the problem of

southern Africa before major problems occasioned by the transition to majority rule arise to plague the international community," said Skinner.

The six-month Scholars' Council project has been put under the direction of Samuel Adams, former AID director for Africa who left the agency last year and who was involved in the establishment of the council in 1971. He has selected 11 black and white scholars to produce analyses of various economic and political problems in Rhodesia and Namibia.

Golar Butcher, an associate in a Washington law firm and one of the most vocal black critics of Kissinger's African policy, is in charge of the portion of the study dealing with U.S. policy alternatives dealing with the two areas.

Probably the most controversial white scholar on the project is Robert Rotberg, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is in charge of the analysis dealing with the present and future politics in Rhodesia and Namibia.

Rotberg is a southern Africa specialist who attempted to set up a project to study African liberation movements from Lusaka, Zambia, in 1970. The University of Zambia blocked the project because it was considered highly suspect. Some council members reportedly have opposed the choice of Rotberg and also the involvement of too many white academics in the study.

[LC]

THE BOSTON HERALD AMERICAN, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30

32

# The Boston
Herald American

Robert C. Bergenheim, Publisher Dennis E. Mulligan, General Manager

Sam Bornstein, Editor 300 Harrison Avenue, Boston, Mass. 02106

Telephone (617) 426-3000

## The keep-Kissinger idea

Connecticut's Senator Abraham Ribicoff startled his colleagues the other day by suggesting that the new administration keep Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a special negotiator on matters relating to the Middle East. The keep-Kissinger idea caused an extra stir because it did not come from a loyal Republican, but from a Democrat with a well-known concern for paving the avenues of peace between Arabs and Israelis.

What will come of the suggestion is anyone's guess. It sounds crazy to the get-rid-of-Kissinger clique who view his departure as the first and greatest good to come from the victory of Jimmy Carter.

Before the idea is dismissed, however, it should be remembered that Mr. Kissinger has been uniquely successful in calming Middle Eastern turbulences. However temporary his achievements turn out to be, they were made possible by his acquaintance with Middle Eastern leaders, and their confidence in him.

Second, an interesting precedent argues for the wisdom of recruiting a diplomatic adviser from the other side of the political street.

In 1948 John Foster Dulles packed his bags and was ticketed to be the Secretary of State under President Dewey, but something happened on the way to Foggy Bottom. When Harry Truman became President, his foreign policy aides saw a measure of bipartisanship as crucial to this area of his administration.

President Truman did not exactly recruit Mr. Dulles, who

had uttered some rather harsh words about the Democratic candidate during the campaign. But Secretary of State Dean Acheson convinced the President of the importance of having Dulles on the State Department team, and Acheson was proven right.

Mr. Dulles accepted his appointment with good grace, worked harmoniously with his Democratic colleagues, and among other things played a major role in negotiating the Japanese peace treaty. It is a precedent worth considering by those pondering the practicality of Senator Ribicoff's surprising suggestion.

Kissinger, like Dulles, has attainted an especial stature in the diplomatic world. His negotiations in the Middle East are more responsible than any other activities for the favorable light in which he is held throughout the world.

Peace in the Middle East usually looks more like a hope than a reality. At the moment, however, prospects are better than they have been in months. They will become even brighter if Egypt's President Sadat continues to look to Washington, rather than Moscow, for guidance Henry Kissinger could be the one person most likely to maintain the momentum by keeping the eyes of Sadat, who trusts Kissinger, turned toward the Poto mac.

If Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles could work together for the good of the country and world peace, so could Mr. Kissinger and President Carter's Secretary of State. Senator Ribicoff's keep-Kissinger idea has merit.