11

efforts. It also made them more self-reliant, more
alienated from Shihanouk..." In other words, basically
America was to blame for the murderous character of the
Khmer Rouge. This makes an much sense as blaming the
holocaust on the British bombing of Hamburg.

Judt quotes with approval a Bundy argument that the
bombing "made it more rather than less difficult to
persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and
negotiate a political compromise." Are Bundy and Judt
arguing that the best way to achieve a ceasefire,
especially with genocidal murderers like the Khmer Rouge,
is to stop the miliary operations? Not even Bundy will go
this far. Endorsed by Judt, he retreats to saying that "a
much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat
alive" would have done the trick. Shades of the
"graduated escalation" which doomed the Johnson
administration's effort in Vietnam and of which Bundy was
a principal architect. Is it not much more likely that it

12

was the Congressional cut-off of bombing that ended any
prospect for negotiations? And would it not be more
honest to list among the causes of Cambodia's collapse
the gradual strangulation of a friendly country by
progressive Congressional restrictions?

The Vietnam experience was traumatic for all
involved. We will never come to grips with it unless a
serious effort is made to examine with some understanding
the real choices and above all the fact that there were
no good choices--something Bundy should have understood
better than most. The Nixon administration genuinely
believed that, with adequate help, Cambodia could be
saved. The Vietnamese could not hide among the
population; the Khmer Rouge forces were relatively small
and difficult to supply. Our domestic opponents were
determined to prevent a repetition of the Vietnam
experience and imposed crippling budgetary restrictions
and severe limitations on the ground. This is turn left

13

bombing as the sole recourse. This is not the place to
refight those arguments. Both sides of the argument are
convinced that the other is responsible for the debacle
in Cambodia. But the nation would surely benefit from a
discussion that begins with granting the good faith of
all parties. This is what Bundy and Judt absolutely
refuse to do. Unproved and unproven hypotheses are not
historical research.

Space does not permit dealing with the equally
distorted descriptions of the energy crisis and the
India/Pakistan war of 1971. I will confine myself to the
grotesque treatment of the Nixon administration's
European policy. Judt, following Bundy, alleges that our
initial coolness to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated
Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of
conversations with other European leaders make it clear
that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it
the beginning of a possible national German foreign

14

policy. We shared that suspicion at first but, influenced
by Helmut Schmidt and others, dealt with it by
integrating Ostpolitik into an overall Atlantic approach.

Shortly after being sworn in as Chancellor, Brandt
sent his closest aide on these matters, Egon Bahr, to
Washington to work on coordinating our policies. Bahr and
I worked closely together for the rest of the way, as his
memoirs describe. Bahr and I conducted the backchannel
negotiations with the Soviets that produced a guarantee
for access to Berlin and for its status, without which
Ostpolitik could never have succeeded and which remained
in force until German unification.

And when Schmidt replaced Brandt and Hans-Dietrich
Genscher became Foreign Minister, we succeeded (now in
the Ford administration) in achieving in the Helsinki
Final Act a provision allowing for the peaceful change of
frontiers that became the basis for the unification of

15

Germany. Genscher has credited our policy for this in his
memoirs.

As for the charge that relations with Europe were
so bad when I left office that they took a decade to
repair, the surviving heads of government who have
remained warm friends will, I am confident, be as
astonished as I was to hear this.

Bundy, scion of a distinguished family and with a
record of devoted service to our country, was in a
position to write knowledgeably about a period in which
he served and which could stand dispassionate analysis.
Instead he chose to describe the record of the Nixon
administration not in terms of serious men trying to do
the best for their country in a difficult situation, much
of which they inherited, but as a tale of deceit,
dissimulation and conspiracy. And Judt endorses this
collection of secondary sources and interviews with

16

people of various grievances--but not with me--as fair
and definite and complete.

When I was in office, there was a vigorous public
debate in which I was an eager participant. As Secretary
of State, I travelled to thirty eight states, must have
testified before scores of Congressional committees, and
delivered over a hundred speeches and interviews. I gave
a full accounting for my tenure in office in my memoirs,
including a forthcoming volume on the Ford period. There
are the voluminous verbatim accounts of my negotiations
and the memos to and from the Presidents I served. I will
stand on that record. The decisions and judgments of high
officials are of course always fair game. But their honor
should not be lightly impugned.

It is a pity that the wounds of Vietnam are never
permitted to close. It is especially sad when they are
being ripped open by someone who at one time was one of
the principal victims of the kind of assault being

AUG-19-1998 10:50

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.16

2424 WORDS

1
DRAFT

8/17/98 12:00pm

To the Editor of The New York Review of Books:

I have read Tony Judt's review with some sadness.

It is over twenty years since I left government.

One would have thought that to be enough time to permit a
calm discussion of the challenge America has faced since
the Vietnam War destroyed the national consensus on
foreign policy. The deeper meaning of the period is that
it crystallized the inherent tension between America's
idealism--the perception we have of ourselves as a nation
with a special mission--and our growing involvement in a
world of power, hence of relative judgments.

How to strike the balance between these competing
realities is not a simple matter, and practitioners of
foreign policy have struggled with that problem for most of you
and for most of me.

The reconciliation of ambivalent pulls is a task never
likely to be completed, but we will not manage any

AUG-19-1998 10:49

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.15

2

progress unless we grant the good faith of the principal
participants in the debate and have sufficient confidence
in ourselves to risk a truthful definition of the issues.

Both Bundy's book and Judt's review fail to meet
this test:

- Judt asserts that I have reclassified public
papers as "personal" in order to close them to "prying
eyes." This is flatly untrue. No public document has ever
been reclassified by me. The papers in my collection at
the Library of Congress are copies of originals in the
files of either the State Department or the Nixon and
Ford libraries. They are available to researchers on the
terms established by the originating departments.

The only unique papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations that a court of law--
not I--confirmed to be personal papers and that never
were treated as public papers *before* LBJ.

AUG-19-1998 10:49

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.14

3

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the truth. No administration recorded its deliberations, decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is in the official files a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the "nearly" an indented backchannel qualifier only to protect against unintended slip-ups.)

There is also a complete record of all my memoranda to the President prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining the proposed talking points and afterwards reporting the results. There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

- To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view, Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not reveal that he is fiddling with the quote which is from a paragraph comparing Metternich's greater emphasis on

AUG-19-1998 10:48 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.12

knows only too well that there was no way of briefing the
Japanese government without a leak; it was a painful
decision not to give advance warning, though all friends
and allies--and especially Japan--were consulted to the
utmost once the US-China dialogue began in earnest.

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a
Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into the
Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours away.
To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased the
readiness of our military forces and simultaneously
in Bunnell, while waiting infeldheim
called a meeting of the NATO Council as well as brief-
in the capitals of our principal allies, why this is
threatened by Bundy and Judt as some kind of conspiracy
against Europe is beyond me.

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt follows
Bundy in treats the alleged penchant of Nixon and me for covert
operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon's downfall and

AUG-19-1998 10:47 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.09

elevate it to a moral assault is at a minimum
inappropriate.

Similar distortions run through the entire review and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive response. Instead of Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in place of the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the military violation of a neutral state."

I know that assertions about Cambodian bombings have achieved a near liturgical quality. If so, their advocates should be able to risk stating the facts bearing on the decision without invoking totally misleading forms of words.

Bundy, given his previous position, knows the facts well enough. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based in Cambodia, killing Americans in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real question is why the Johnson administration, of which

AUG-19-1998 10:47 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.08

Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, ~~whirl so many American lives.~~ accepted this charade ~~not why we "violated" it. It is~~ the North administration also relevant that Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had all but invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, ~~including~~ in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the Johnson administration), ~~as well as~~ publicly. He implied that he would ignore such attacks because the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists.

The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched an offensive (the mini-Tet) two weeks after Nixon assumed his office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. After four weeks of this and suffering over 1,500 dead, Nixon retaliated by bombing a ten-kilometer-wide zone along the South Vietnamese border where the sanctuaries were located. Nor would it have been possible to keep the bombings secret without Sihanouk's cooperation. We had originally

AUG-19-1998 10:46 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.06

Judt quotes with approval a Bundy argument that the
bombing "made it more rather than less difficult to
persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and
negotiate a political compromise." Are Bundy and Judt
arguing that the best way to achieve a ceasefire,
*especially* with genocidal murderers like the Khmer Rouge,
is to stop the military operations? Not even Bundy will go
this far. Endorsed by Judt, he retreats to saying that "a
much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat
alive" would have done the trick. Shades of the
"graduated escalation" which doomed the Johnson
administration's effort in Vietnam and of which Bundy was
a principal architect. Is it not much more likely that it

AUG-19-1998 10:46

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.04

bombing as the sole recourse. This is not the place to
refight those arguments. Both sides of the ~~argument~~ are
~~debate~~

in Cambodia. But the nation would surely benefit from a
We will never leave the sight unheeded.

refuse to do.

Space does not permit dealing with the equally
distorted descriptions of the energy crisis and the
India/Pakistan war of 1971. I will confine myself to the
grotesque treatment of the Nixon administration's
European policy. Judt, following Bundy, alleges that our
initial coolness to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated
Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of
conversations with other European leaders make it clear
that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it
the beginning of a possible national German foreign
policy. We shared that suspicion at first but, influenced

AUG-19-1998 10:45

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.03

14

And when Schmidt replaced Brandt and Hans-Dietrich
Genscher became Foreign Minister, we succeeded (now in
the Ford administration) in achieving in the Helsinki
Final Act a provision allowing for the peaceful change of
frontiers that became the basis for the unification of
Germany. Genscher has credited our policy for this in his
memoirs.

1

2424 WORDS

DRAFT

8/17/98 12:00pm

How to strike the balance between these competing
realities is not a simple matter, and practitioners of
foreign policy are apt to get it wrong from time to time.
The reconciliation of ambivalent pulls is a task never
likely to be completed, but we will not manage any

2

The only unique papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations that a court of law--
not I--confirmed to be personal papers and that never
were treated as public papers.

3

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the truth. No administration recorded its deliberations, decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is in the official files a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier only to protect against unintended slip-ups.) There is also a complete record of all my memoranda to the President prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining the proposed talking points and afterwards reporting the results. There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

4

moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power
politics, specifically that he is cutting the sentence in
half and omitting the next sentence: "...something akin
to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of
power is reinforced by a shared sense of values. And in
the modern age, these values would have to be
democratic."

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by
distortions of the underlying reality. Bundy's tendency
to treat Nixon and me as somehow illegitimate usurpers
drives him into abandoning any perspective.

This is why Bundy is unable to overlook adaptations
to realities impinging on policymakers, which he should
know better than most from his own experience as being
necessary. He castigates Nixon and me for failing to
brief Japan about China in 1971, and the European allies
in 1973 on our alert in the Middle East crisis. As a
former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy

5

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a
Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into the
Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours away.
To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased the
readiness of our military forces and _simultaneously_
called a meeting of the NATO Council as well as briefed
in the capitals of our principal allies. Why this is
treated by Bundy and Judt as some kind of conspiracy
against Europe is beyond me.

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt
treats the alleged penchant of Nixon and me for covert
operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon's downfall and

O

6

cites Bundy approvingly to that effect. Phrases like
"morally repugnant" for a covert operation in Chile that
was never carried out--and was in many ways an
extrapolation of the activities of the administration in
which Bundy served--drop lightly from Bundy's pen. One
would have thought that having served in one of the key
positions in two administrations truly profligate in the
use of covert operations, Bundy would not open up the
subject. Bundy served in high office in the party? when a
coup was instigated against our South Vietnamese ally,
Ngo Dinh Diem, during the course of which Diem and his
brother were assassinated, in that same administration
the Phoenix Program in Vietnam took place, the Bay of
Pigs and the war in Laos were conducted as CIA projects,
and the only assassination plots of any American
administration were planned.

The Cold War was not a tea party, and I do not pass
judgment on complex decisions from this perspective of

O

7

thirty years, only that Bundy is in no position to give
moral lectures on covert operations to his successors
whose use of covert operations both in scope and
frequency was much more limited.

Judt (or Bundy) suppresses the context of covert
operations they cite as egregious. They claim "misleading
promises to the Kurds," as if that suffering people had
been triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations
to them. The fact is that when the US decision to support
the Kurds was made in July 1972, the Kurds had already
been fighting Saddam's oppression for several years. They
were supported by Britain, Iran, Israel, and other
neighboring countries. Nixon was asked to support them in
1972 when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began
to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds'
existing sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds
would have been destroyed earlier - that was our real
choice. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to

8

Similar distortions run through the entire review
and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive
response. This enables Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in
describing the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the
military violation of a neutral state."

Bundy, given his previous position, knows the facts
well enough. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based
permanently in Cambodia, killing Americans in South
Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a
specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real
question is why the Johnson administration, of which

9

Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade, not why we "violated" it. It is also relevant that Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had all but invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, including in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the Johnson administration) as well as publicly. He implied that he would ignore such attacks because the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists.

10

planned to react to a Sihanouk protest by asking for a UN
investigation, thereby revealing the presence of the
sanctuary. But Sihanouk did not protest and even invited
Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key
members of Congress had been briefed, including the
Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations
Committees, the Speaker, all Democrats, and about twenty
other Congressional leaders. None urged widening the
circle of those privy to the information.

After a year of secret bombing of the ten-kilometer
zone, Nixon ordered American forces into the sanctuaries
for two months. They destroyed some 20 thousand tons of
supplies, yet Judt speaks seemingly of "undiscovered base
areas." From then on, for five years, American military?
operations were in the open.

Bundy, endorsed by Judt, objects to the entire
military effort, because "the intensity of the
bombing...drove the Khmer Rouge to greater military

11

12

13

refuse to do. Unproved and unprovable hypotheses are not
historical record.

M

14

15

Bundy, scion of a distinguished family and with a
record of devoted service to our country, was in a
position to write knowledgeably about a period in which
he served and which could stand dispassionate analysis.
Instead he chose to describe the record of the Nixon
administration not in terms of serious men trying to do
the best for their country in a difficult situation, much
of which they inherited, but as a tale of deceit,
dissimulation and conspiracy. And Judt endorses this
collection of secondary sources and interviews with
people of various grievances--but not with me--as fair
and definite and complete.

16

It is a pity that the wounds of Vietnam are never
permitted to close. It is especially sad when they are
being ripped open by someone who at one time was one of
the principal victims of the kind of assault being
practiced in this review.

AUG-17-1998 10:30 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.02

1

2284 WORDS

How to strike the balance between these competing realities is not a simple matter, and practitioners of foreign policy are apt to get it wrong from time to time. The reconciliation of ambivalent pulls is a task never likely to be completed, but we will not manage any progress unless we grant the good faith of the principal participants in the debate and have sufficient confidence in ourselves to risk a truthful definition of the issues.

AUG-17-1998 10:30 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.03

The only unique papers in the collection are records of telephone conversations that a court of law - not I - confirmed to be personal papers and that never were treated as public papers.

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the truth. No administration recorded its deliberations, decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier only to protect against unintended slip-ups.) There is also a complete record of all my memoranda to the President prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining the proposed talking points and afterwards reporting the results. There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

- To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view, Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not reveal that he is fiddling with the quote which is from a paragraph comparing Metternich's greater emphasis on moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power

AUG-17-1998 10:35

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.15

3

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by distortions of the underlying reality. I have always had the highest regard for William Bundy, "tenderness and love," therefore, I find it painful that his resentments have driven him into abandoning any sense of perspective. Bundy's busi-enee,~~统一~~, as a result of his attitude toward Nixon and me is similar to that of the weedy, Lectistarrish,opoulos toward Bonaparte, our besotted sin was replacing him and his group in an office to which they felt they were entitled.

This is why Bundy seems unable to overlook adaptations to realities impinging on policymakers, which he should know better than most from his own experience as being necessary. He castigates Nixon and me for failing to brief Japan about China in 1971, and the European allies in 1973 on our alert in the Middle East crisis. As a former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy knows only too well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese government without a leak; it was a painful decision not to give advance warning, though all friends and allies--and especially Japan--were consulted

TOTAL P.15

AUG-17-1998 10:31 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.04

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into the Middle East was imminent--perhaps a matter of hours away. To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased the readiness of our military forces and simultaneously called a meeting of the NATO Council as well as briefed in the capitals of our principal allies. Why this is treated by Bundy and Judt as some kind of conspiracy against Europe is beyond me.

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt treats us alleged penchant of Nixon and me for covert operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon's downfall and cites Bundy approvingly to that effect. Phrases like "morally repugnant" for a covert operation in Chile that was never carried out--and was in many ways an extrapolation of the activities of our predecessors--drop lightly from Bundy's pen. One would have thought that having served in one of the key positions in two administrations truly profligate in the use of covert

operations, Bundy would not open up the subject. It was served in the past when the administration that instigated a coup against our South Vietnamese ally, Ngo Dinh Diem, during the course of which he and his brother were assassinated, in the hope that theVN regime

AUG-17-1998 10:31 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.05

P. The Cold War was not a tea party +J did not pass judgment on enabler blunders from the perspective of thirty years, only administrations under whose aegis the Phoenix Program in Vietnam took place, which conducted the Bay of Pigs and the war in Laos as CIA projects, and which planned the only assassination plots of any American administration that were planned. (Sandy is in no position to give moral lectures on covert operations to his successors, who are a set of current speaking hot in fire + frequency noise made to masquerade as limiters.)

Judt (or Bundy) suppresses the context of covert operations they cite as egregious. They claim "misleading promises to the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations to them. The fact is that when the US decision to support the Kurds was made in July 1972, the Kurds had already been fighting Saddam's oppression for several years. They were supported by Britain, Iran, Israel, and other neighboring countries. Nixon was asked to support them in 1972 when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds' existing sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have been destroyed earlier - that was our real choice. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a moral assault is at a minimum inappropriate.

Similar distortions run through the entire review and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive smooth response. This enables Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in

AUG-17-1998 10:32 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.06

Bundy, given his previous position, knows the facts well enough. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based permanently in Cambodia, killing Americans in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real question is why the Johnson administration, of which Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade, not why we "violated" it. It is also relevant that Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had all but invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, including in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the Johnson administration) as well as publicly. He implied that he would ignore such attacks because the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists.

AUG-17-1998 10:34

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.10

it not much more likely that it was the congressional
cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for
negotiations? And would it not be more honest to list
among the causes of Cambodia's collapse the gradual
strangulation of a friendly country by progressive
Congressional restrictions?

Space does not permit dealing with the equally
distorted descriptions of the energy crisis and the
India/Pakistan war of 1971. I will confine myself to the
grotesque treatment of the Nixon administration's
European policy. Judt, following Bundy, alleges that our
initial coolness to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated
Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of
conversations with other European leaders make it clear
that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it
the beginning of a possible national German foreign
policy. We shared that suspicion at first but, influenced
by Helmut Schmidt and others, dealt with it by
integrating Ostpolitik into an overall Atlantic approach.

AUG-17-1998 10:34 FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.11

for access to Berlin and for its status, without which
Ostpolitik could never have succeeded and whilst remained in force
until Gamen unification.

As for the charge that relations with Europe were
so bad when I left office that they took a decade to
repair, the surviving heads of government who have
remained warm friends will, I am confident, be as
astonished as I was to hear this. A few months ago when I
was made an honorary citizen of the town where I was born
the German Foreign Minister, Klaus Kinkel, thanked me for
my contributions to Ostpolitik and Helmut Schmidt's
laudation is, I believe, more reflective of my relations
with Europe's leaders than Bundt's, as evidenced by Zinck,
"Dear Henry. Let me use this occasion to express my
admiration for your judgment and my gratitude for your
friendship. What unites me with you is the dedication to
human freedom and the democratic credo that since 1776
has been the basis of the American constitution and has
since 1949 found a home in Germany as the basis of our
own constitution. What ties me to you is the sense of

AUG-17-1998 10:34

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.12

10

truthfully what one really thinks and not something that others might like to hear.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in the end, in politics, foreign or domestic, it is as in life itself: mutual sympathy can bring about friendship. But friendship lasts only when each side can count on the other's reliability and truthfulness.

Not only I personally, but--much more important--all Germans have every reason to be grateful to this great American who was obliged to flee Germany, it is now sixty years ago. Gratitude and friendship--that is what has brought ne here this morning."

Bundy, scion of a distinguished family and with a record of devoted service to our country, and Judt prefer to view the record of the Nixon administration not in terms of serious men trying to do the best for their country in a difficult situation, much of which they inherited, but as a tale of deceit, dissimulation, and conspiracy.

When I was in office, there was a vigorous public debate in which I was an eager participant. As Secretary of State, I travelled to thirty eight states, must have testified before scores of Congressional committees, and delivered over a hundred speeches and interviews. I gave a full accounting for my tenure in office in my memoirs, including a forthcoming volume on the Ford period. I will stand on that record. The decisions and judgments of high officials are of course always fair game. But their honor should not be lightly impugned.

AUG-17-1998 10:35

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.13

10

duty, the willingness to analyze carefully and rationally
before one offers advice or acts. It is also the
readiness in private and personal conversations to say
truthfully what one really thinks and not something that
others might like to hear.

Not only I personally, but--much more important--
all Germans have every reason to be grateful to this
great American who was obliged to flee Germany, it is now
sixty years ago. Gratitude and friendship--that is what
has brought me here this morning."

Bundy, scion of a distinguished family and with a
record of devoted service to our country, ~~and~~ *Judaize* ~~and~~ *Judaite* to view the record of the Nixon administration not in
terms of serious men trying to do the best for their
country in a difficult situation, much of which they
inherited, but as a tale of deceit, dissimulation, and
conspiracy. And *Judaize* endorses this collection of
*Judaize* interviews with people of various
*Judaize* views as fair & defenseless & complete.

When I was in office, there was a vigorous public
debate in which I was an eager participant. As Secretary
of State, I travelled to thirty eight states, ~~must have~~ *Judaize* testified before scores of Congressional committees, and

AUG-17-1998 10:35

FROM

TO

NEW YORK 2 P.14

11

TOTAL P.11

1

2284 WORDS

2

The only unique papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations that a court of law -
not I - confirmed to be personal papers.

3

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by
distortions of the underlying reality. I have always had
the highest regard for William Bundy. Therefore, I find
it painful that his resentments have driven him into
abandoning any sense of perspective. Bundy's basic
attitude toward Nixon and me is similar to that of the
Bourbons toward Bonaparte: our besetting sin was
replacing him and his group in an office to which they
felt they were entitled.

4

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt
treats its alleged penchant of Nixon and me for covert
operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon's downfall and
cites Bundy approvingly to that effect. Phrases like
"morally repugnant" for a covert operation in Chile that
was never carried out--and was in many ways an
extrapolation of the activities of our predecessors--
drop lightly from Bundy's pen. One would have thought
that having served in one of the key positions in two
administrations truly profligate in the use of covert
operations, Bundy would not open up the subject. It was
these administrations that instigated a coup against our
South Vietnamese ally, Ngo Dinh Diem, during the course
of which he and his brother were assassinated, the

5

administrations under whose aegis the Phoenix Program in
Vietnam took place, which conducted the Bay of Pigs and
the war in Laos as CIA projects, and which planned the
only assassination plots of any American administration.
Bundy is in no position to give moral lectures on covert
operations to his successors.

Similar distortions run through the entire review
and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive
response. This enables Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in

6

7

and suffering over 1,500 dead, Nixon retaliated by bombing a ten-kilometer-wide zone along the South Vietnamese border where the sanctuaries were located. Nor would it have been possible to keep the bombings secret without Sihanouk's cooperation. We had originally planned to react to a Sihanouk protest by asking for a UN investigation, thereby revealing the presence of the sanctuary. But Sihanouk did not protest and even invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, the Speaker, all Democrats, and about twenty other Congressional leaders. None urged widening the circle of those privy to the information.

Judt quotes with approval a Bundy argument that the bombing "made it more rather than less difficult to persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a political compromise." Since it would be too absurd to argue that the best way to achieve a ceasefire, especially with genocidal murderers like the Khmer Rouge, is to stop the military operations, Bundy, endorsed by Judt, retreats to saying that "a much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat alive" would have done the trick. Shades of the "graduated escalation" which doomed the Johnson administration's effort in Vietnam and of which Bundy was a principal architect. Is

8

it not much more likely that it was the Congressional
cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for
negotiations? And would it not be more honest to list
among the causes of Cambodia's collapse the gradual
strangulation of a friendly country by progressive
Congressional restrictions?

9

for access to Berlin and for its status, without which
Ostpolitik could never have succeeded.

As for the charge that relations with Europe were
so bad when I left office that they took a decade to
repair, the surviving heads of government who have
remained warm friends will, I am confident, be as
astonished as I was to hear this. A few months ago when I
was made an honorary citizen of the town where I was born
the German Foreign Minister, Klaus Kinkel, thanked me for
my contributions to Ostpolitik. And Helmut Schmidt's
laudation is, I believe, more reflective of my relations
with Europe's leaders:

"Dear Henry: Let me use this occasion to
express my admiration for your judgment and
my gratitude for your friendship. What unites
me with you is the dedication to human
freedom and the democratic credo that since
1776 has been the basis of the American
constitution and has since 1949 found a home
in Germany as the basis of our own
constitution. What ties me to you is the
sense of duty, the willingness to analyze
carefully and rationally before one offers
advice or acts. It is also the readiness in
private and personal conversations to say

10

Not only I personally, but--much more
important--all Germans have every reason to
be grateful to this great American who was
obliged to flee Germany, it is now sixty
years ago. Gratitude and friendship--that is
what has brought me here this morning."

2057 WORDS

2

3

4

5

6

7

and suffering over 1,500 dead, Nixon retaliated by bombing a ten-kilometer-wide zone along the South Vietnamese border where the sanctuaries were located. Nor would it have been possible to keep the bombings secret without Sihanouk's cooperation. We had originally planned to react to a Sihanouk protest by asking for an UN investigation, thereby revealing the presence of the sanctuary. But Sihanouk did not protest and even invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, the Speaker, all Democrats, and about twenty other Congressional leaders. None urged widening the circle of those privy to the information.

8

9

10

AUG-12-1998 17:20

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.01/15

1

2179 WORDS

8/12/98 Draft #3

AUG-12-1998 17:20

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.02/15

AUG-12-1998 17:20

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.03/15

decisions and negotiations more carefully or more fully
than the ones in which I served. There is a nearly
complete verbatim record of all my negotiations,
backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier only to
protect against unintended slip-ups.) There is also a
complete record of all my memoranda to the President
prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining
the strategy and afterwards reporting the results. There
are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

- To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view, Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not reveal that he is fiddling with the quote which is from a paragraph comparing Metternich's greater emphasis on moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power politics, specifically that he is cutting the sentence in half and omitting the next sentence: "...something akin to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of

AUG-12-1998 17:21

KISSINGER ASSOC.

4

This is why Bundy and Judt make no allowance for...

the realities impinging on policymakers, which he should
know better than most, He castigates Nixon and me for
failing to brief Japan about China in 1971, and the
European allies in 1973 on our alert in the Middle East
crisis. As a former Assistant Secretary of State for East

AUG-12-1998 17:21

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.05/15

5

Asia, Bundy knows only too well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese government without a leak; it was a painful decision not to give advance warning, though all friends and allies--and especially Japan--were consulted to the utmost once the US-China dialogue began in earnest.

12-1998 17:21

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.07/15

of preceding administrations would not support the charge
of the review.

Judt (or Bundy) achieve their effect by suppressing
the context of covert operations they cite as egregious
examples. They claim "misleading promises to the Kurds,"
as if that suffering people had been triggered into
fighting Iraq by our representations to them. The fact is
that when the US decision to support the Kurds was made
in July 1972, the Kurds had already been fighting
Saddam's oppression for several years. They were
supported by Britain, Iran, Israel, and ~~other~~ neighboring
countries. Nixon was asked to support them in 1972 when
the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour
arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds' existing
sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have
been destroyed earlier - that was our real choice. It is
possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a
moral assault is at a minimum inappropriate.

AUG-12-1998 17:22

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.08/15

8

Similar distortions run through the entire review and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive response. This enables Judt to cite Bundy approvingly in describing the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the military violation of a neutral state." (Give us a break.) [CYS] [well known] [I]

Bundy, given his previous position, knows the facts. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based permanently in Cambodia, killing Americans in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real question is why the Johnson administration, of which Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade, not why we "violated" it. It is also relevant that Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had already invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, to defend Cambodia's neutrality, including in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the Johnson administration) as well as publicly. He implied that he would ignore such

AUG-12-1998 17:22

KISSINGER ASSOC.

10

persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and
negotiate a political compromise." Since it would be too
absurd to argue that the best way to achieve a ceasefire,
especially with genocidal murderers like the Khmer Rouge,
is to stop the military operations, Bundy, endorsed by
Judt, retreats to saying that "a much more limited
program of bombing to keep the threat alive" would have
done the trick. Shades of the "graduated escalation"
which doomed the Johnson administration's effort in
Vietnam and of which Bundy was a principal architect. Is
it not much more likely that it was the congressional
cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for

negotiations?

AUG-12-1998 17:22

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.11/15

11
initial coolness to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated
Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of
conversations with other European leaders make it clear
that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it
the beginning of a possible national German foreign
policy. We shared that suspicion at first but, influenced
by Helmut Schmidt and others, dealt with it by
integrating Ostpolitik into an overall Atlantic approach.

Shortly after being sworn in as Chancellor, Brandt sent
his closest aide on these matters, Egon Bahr, to
Washington to work on coordinating our policies. Bahr and
I worked closely together for the rest of the way, as his
memoirs describe. We conducted backchannel negotiations
with the Soviets that produced a guarantee for access to
Berlin and for its status, without which Ostpolitik could
never have succeeded. And when Schmidt replaced Brandt
and Hans-Dietrich Genscher became Foreign Minister, we
succeeded (now in the Ford administration) in achieving

AUG-12-1998 17:23

KISSINGER ASSOC.

13

found a home in Germany as the basis of our own
constitution. What ties me to you is the sense of duty,
the willingness to analyze carefully and rationally
before one offers advice or acts. It is also the
readiness in private and personal conversations to say
truthfully what one really thinks and not something that
others might like to hear.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in the end, in politics,
foreign or domestic, it is as in life itself: mutual
sympathy can bring about friendship. But friendship
lasts only when each side can rely on the other's
reliability and truthfulness.

Not only I personally, but--much more important--
all Germans have every reason to be grateful to this
great American who left Germany, it is now sixty years
ago. Gratitude and friendship--that is what has brought
me here this morning."

AUG-12-1998 17:23

KISSINGER ASSOC.

P.15/15

15

TOTAL P.15