TORONTO, ONT., CAN.
SUN.

D. 186,351 SUN. 310,222

[LC]

DEC 23 1979

## Books in brief

**THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS:** Henry Kissinger cannot be accused of excessive modesty, and this first installment of his memoirs takes almost as long to read as they were to live. Or so it seems. For those interested in politics and history — as well as for those keen on gossip — the Kissinger book is a delight. He really has a catty streak and his character assessments of world leaders and political personalities are astute and intimate. Mrs. Gandhi and Nixon, for instance, disliked each other intensely — they were very similar and saw international affairs much the same way. The advice K got from President Johnson was canny: Always read the newspaper columnists and if ever a member of the White House staff is excessively praised — there is the source of the leak! Kissinger says that Harold Wilson, the Labor PM of Britain, was far more pro-American and trustworthy than was Edward Heath, the Tory PM. It is useful that Kissinger is finally talking. He was at the centre and his assessments of Indochina are far more valid than those of others who are only wise in retrospect. A good book — but far too long. The haunting thought is that if a Republican wins the presidency next year — Kissinger may be back in business. (Little Brown; $25)

Peter Worthington

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6 TLS NOVEMBER 23-1979 RUSSIA

[L.C]

## CHATTO & WINDUS

### Richard Hughes
In the Lap of Atlas
*Stories of Morocco*

*'Richard Hughes's own fascinating and fascinated imagination provide the gleanings from his travels.'*

*Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian*

124 pages £4.95

### Derwent May
A Revenger's Comedy

*'Consistently funny and invigorating — malice and innuendo are transformed into high entertainment.'*

*Patricia Craig,*

*New Statesman*

192 pages £5.95

### Laurie Colwin
Happy All the Time

*'An exceptionally accomplished young American author... she and the reader have the greatest fun.'*

*Janice Elliott,*

*Sunday Telegraph*

224 pages £4.95

### Stephen Becker
The Last Mandarin

*'Good pace, action and characters, a carefully drawn and exotic background and a satisfying conclusion — what more can you want?'*

*Michael Legat,*

*Daily Telegraph*

304 pages £5.95

### Bernard Malamud
Dubin's Lives

*'Transcends and surpasses all his already acclaimed earlier work.'*

# Drummer to the Revolution

By Kyril FitzLyon

### ANN and SAMUEL CHARTERS:

*I Love*

*The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik*

413pp. André Deutsch. £8.95.

0 233 97070 3

It was high time for a biography of the Russian poet Mayakovsky which restored the centre-piece of his life to its rightful place, instead of treating it as a side-show or even not mentioning it at all, as in most Soviet biographies of him. Perhaps "hub" rather than "centre-piece" is the right word, for one explanation of why he committed suicide in 1930 at the height of his popularity and success is that he felt his life was falling apart as the "hub" was being gradually re-moved from it—by his own choice, by outside pressures, by circumstances. There may have been additional reasons, like the compromises he had to make to save his individuality from being swamped or restricted by the growing state control of all the arts, especially literature; or disappointment in love and even (though there is no proof of) it in his work and the ideals that inspired it. While the "hub" was there he could face all this. Ann and Samuel Charters in *I Love* offer their explanation, but by structuring their biography around Mayakovsky's love affair with Lili Brik they make it clear that *that* was the hub of Mayakovsky's life, and that his life can be fully understood and his poetry appreciated only in terms of that love affair. They have, in effect written a double biography of Mayakovsky and Lili. They were able to interview several surviving friends of Mayakovsky's as well as Mrs Brik herself not long before her death in Moscow last year at the age of eighty-seven, and have made excellent use of the material they have gathered—even if Mrs Brik's memory made her, on occasion, remember unlikely sights such as

disastrously. Mayakovsky could eventually afford to have his own private Renault (an immense luxury for a private individual and an almost unique privilege in those days) and the services of a chauffeur to drive and look after it, the Brik continued to keep a servant, they were allowed to travel freely, and in 1921, with Russia in the grip of an unprecedented famine, Lili found she had to undergo a curative diet to keep her figure. "We didn't", she confided later to the Charterses, "notice the cold and starvation of those years." This privileged position was due partly to financial reasons and partly, no doubt, to Brik's collaboration with the secret police (the CHEKA), with whose activities in those years of terror Lili (like Mayakovsky) thoroughly sympathized. In her enthusiasm, she even sang the praises of the then newly set up concentration camps.

Mayakovsky's popularity at the time was enormous. He was, without pushing the comparison too far, the Yevtushenko of his day, of so much in popularity as to fulfill the role of the poet as an interpreter of the official ideology and its transmitter to the masses, while keeping a certain freedom (possibly spurious) to criticize official policy. The acceptance of both men by the West as true spokesmen for Soviet public opinion adds, I think, to the resemblance between them. They have other points in common, too, on a more personal, more superficial level: their charisma, their good looks, their flashiness, their dandyism, as well as their sense of publicity, their brashness and their tendency to write at the top of their voices (to borrow the title of Mayakovsky's own poem).

Their voices, however, are very different, for Mayakovsky's was that of a genuine innovator, even

if his innovations meant, to a certain extent, trivialization. It was a creative trivialization. It introduced into permitted poetic speech a vocabulary, style and turns of phrase that had hitherto been rigorously excluded from it: slangy, vulgar, coarse, even scatological, but refreshingly vigorous. It allowed much freer rhymes and rhythms than was usual in Russian poetry until then. Until, that is, just before the First World War.

Mayakovsky's name, it is true, is always associated with the Revolution (he called himself its "Drummer" and its "Doorman" and referred to it as "my Revolution"). In fact, however, Mayakovsky's place in literature was achieved before the Revolution and by about 1920 he had written practically all (with inevitable exceptions) his most original work. Thereafter, for the most part, he either repeated himself or contributed propaganda jingles of the "Mr Brown of London Town" variety to newspapers and street hoardings. Perhaps official recognition and swimming with the tide did not really suit him. As a very young poet he shocked public opinion by joining other Futurists in demanding that the "monstres sacrés of Russian literature—Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy —be "thrown overboard", and later shocked public taste by indulging in vast hyperbole and unexpected similes (such as this to describe a big, fat man: "His saliva's waves surged and rolled in his huge mouth as in an ocean bay") and in emphasizing his own ego. "I", runs a line in a poem quoted by the Charterses, "is not enough for me", but he could not think of anything greater. In fact, he gave the pronoun "I", monoliter in Russian as in English, as a title to one of his poems and cal-

led others by such titles as "I and Napoleon", "Vladimir Mayakovsky", "To me, my favourite man", etc.

A long poem, entitled "Man", is divided into several parts with headings such as "Mayakovsky's Nativity", "Mayakovsky's Life", "Mayakovsky's Passion", Mayakovsky's Ascension", "Mayakovsky in Heaven" and so forth. He feels equal to the sun itself, and describes equal in verses subtitled "The sun on a Visit to Mayakovsky" the friendly chit-chat they had when the sun dropped in on him for a cup of tea.

Inevitably, with the years, the self-centred themes began to wane. But his poetry, a shade less extravagant, but aggressive as ever, continued to sound at its best when read out (or bawled out) in streets and squares to mass audiences, preferably by himself. It is difficult to say how much and in what direction he would have developed. In certain moods he seemed to regret his commitment to "agit-prop" literature. Certainly in his last (unfinished) poem he says he is "fed up" with it and complains that he had forced himself to "step on the throat of [his] own song".

The late 1900s and early 1920s are now in fashion, as the success of the international "Dada and Surrealism", the German "Neue Sachlichkeit" and other recent exhibition of this country bear ample witness. The revival of interest in Mayakovsky is probably due to the same tide. The Charterses have thus timed their biography well and deserve success. I wish, however, their English were not so quaint. As it is, it reads like a bad translation: "Crime before culture" (meaning, as Russian speakers will guess, "Crime against culture"); "on the stage is we"; "To Thou"; "tall, stocky figure", and so on. The book is beautifully produced, with excellent and interesting photographs.

TLS NOVEMBER 23 1979 : 5

her hero's prowess between the sheets. As a picture of a period, generally assumed to have been both inhibited and reticent, it has all the charm of novelty and possesses, in addition, an interest which does not evaporate as soon as the bedroom door is closed.

### Walter Laqueur:

Henry Kissinger's *The White House Years* (Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Michael Joseph) is the most interesting book by an insider within recent memory. It can be criticized on various counts but is a powerful, well-written book, more outspoken than could be expected considering the fact that the author may not regard his political career as finished.

### Hugh Lloyd-Jones:

Let me take the opportunity to recommend a delightful Italian book, which should interest lovers of opera as well as lovers of drama. Cesare Questa is an eminent authority on early Latin, particularly Roman comedy; he is the son of a celebrated singer; and he is a lively and entertaining writer. He has devoted a small book (*Il ritto dal seraglio*: Pátron, Bologna, 1979) dedicated to the late Maria Callas, to the Helen and Iphigenia in *Tauris* of Euripides the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus, Mozart's *Die Entfaltung aus dem Serail* and Rossi's *L'italiana in Algeri*. In-voking not Claude Lévi-Strauss but Vladimir Propp, he has made "structuralism" not a bad master but a good servant; and in revealing the close connection between the works in question he has made a distinguished contribution to their understanding. He has also reminded us how classical learning, intelligently used, can throw light on later literature.

### Ian McEwan:

Virginia Woolf's neglected long essay, *Three Guineas*, appeared in a Penguin edition this year. With hypnotically sustained irony Woolf makes out a brilliant case for radical feminism. Patriarchy is taken apart like an old watch. It is a long way on from *A Room of One's Own*. The footnotes are crammed with historical and biographical gems.

### M. F. Perutz:

In *The Eighth Day of Creation* (Jonathan Cape) Horace Freeland Judson traces the history of molecular biology from Oswald Avery's discovery of the genetic material to the unravelling of the structure of proteins and the deciphering of the genetic code. The book is readable and entertaining, yet scrupulously accurate both historically and scientifically. Journalists mostly work from interviews and historians from documents. Judson used both to portray the personalities of the scientists, to follow the interplay of their ideas and to conjure up the passionate ups and downs, the tedium and the thrill of their research. Above all Judson shows that great discoveries spring not from the brooding of white-coated hermits, but from skilled experimentation, hard thinking and searching discussions by forceful, lively and sometimes brilliant people.

### Karl Popper:

The book I found most exciting is E. J. Steele, *Somatic Selection and Adaptive Evolution: On the Inheritance of Acquired Characters* (Toronto: Williams-Wallace). This is an up-to-date restatement of the ancient theory, due to Democritus, that the seed is构成 compound-particles derived from all parts of the body (an explanation of preformation). Darwin called it "pangenesis" and used it to explain the inheritance of acquired characters. This hypothesis was killed and buried a hundred years ago by Weismann. Steele now shows that, in the light of molecular virology, both Darwin and Lamarck may have been right. Steele stresses the influence of Arthur Koestler, and of the theories of Järne, Burnet, Temin, Baltimore and other experimental immunologists.

### Anthony Powell:

Richard Cobb's latest documentary of the French Revolution period, *Death in Paris*, demands attention by its sheer strangeness. Here is an examination of the corpses brought to the Paris morgue (though not yet called that), including their clothes and personal

effects. Most were suicides rather than victims of murder, some apparently wearing all the garments they possessed, that is several pairs of trousers, or skirts, according to sex. The Terror itself, soon to give way to the Consulate and Bonapartism, seems scarcely at all in evidence, but this is the world (and one can sense a whiff of both writers, if the metaphor is not too macabre) into which Balzac was born, and Stendhal just emerging as a very young man. It is a volume no Cobb addict should miss.

### Randolph Quirk:

To a former editor of *The Guardian* is attributed the dismissive comment, "Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it". With whatever mixed feelings I view its mixed origins and the mixed degrees of "good" that have come of it over the past thirty years, no one can deny its impact and pervasive influence on contemporary culture. In his 1,000-page-long *Sound and Vision* (Oxford University Press) Asa Briggs achieves the remarkable feat of marshalling and interpreting the myriad events that inured us to what Norman Mailer has called the shock waves of television", during the momentous decade 1945-55.

### Eric Roll:

A book which has given me very great pleasure is J. K. Galbraith's *Annals of an Abiding Liberal* which, I believe, will shortly be published in this country. Galbraith's collected essays, speeches, etc, are a sheer delight and bring out his best qualities, particularly his wit, in an impressive way. His account of his "relations" over many years with the FBI (one of the great benefits of the American Public Information Act) is hilarious.

### Steven Runciman:

For anyone who wants a concise history of modern Greece Richard Clogg's *Short History of Modern Greece* (Cambridge University Press) is greatly to be recommended. It is written with great clarity, by a scholar well acquainted with the

relevant sources. There may be readers who will question some of his judgments on more recent Greek politics; but, considering the bitterly controversial nature of the subject, his is an honest and authoritative attempt to be fair-minded.

### Hugh Seton-Watson:

The theme which links Isaiah Berlin's *Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas* (The Hogarth Press) can be subsumed under its title of the first: the Counter-Enlightenment. They range in time from Machiavelli to Sorel, and include Vico, Disraeli, Marx and Moses Hess. Old clichés about progress and reaction melt away as the author's generous empathy and literary skill reveal many of the irresolvable conflicts of the human condition. I was especially moved by his discussion of the incompatibility of Christian morality with the obligations of statecraft as perceived by Machiavelli, and of the evolution from utopian assimilationism to Jewish national consciousness in the life of Hess.

### P. E. Thompson:

Law and order have become, in 1979, matters which every citizen must study: it is not enough to be vaguely for or against. One periodical has now established itself as essential reading: *State Research*, a bi-monthly at £4 per annum from 9 Polan Street, W1. And there is a remarkable book by a new author, Patrick Devlin, *The Judge* (OUP, £7.50). He is not to be confused with Lord Devlin, whose writings have long been noted for their learning and liberality, but whose influence is somewhat nebulous. There is nothing blend about Patrick Devlin: indeed, if he were not so well connected, some passages in *The Judge* might be cited for contempt of court. As he gets older he becomes angrier and more implacable in argument. The angriest essay is the latest to be delivered—the Blackstone Lecture of November 1978 on the jury, "The Power without the Right". It is a superb exercise in analysis, of razor-sharp logic, dusted over with wit as dry as powdered ice. It is essential reading and, if our constitution survives, it will remain so

in 100 years' time, Patrick Devlin is uncertain whether our constitution will survive. Lord Devlin may be displeased to find me concurring in his kinsman's judgments but I am unable to dissent.

### Diana Trilling:

Samuel Lipman's *Music after Modernism* (Basic Books, New York): I don't think a better book of music criticism than this has appeared in the past twenty-five years.

### John Updike:

In the year or so past, the contemporary non-fiction book that nourished and entertained me most was Eberhard Busch's scrupulous life of Karl Barth (Fortress Press, Philadelphia).

### Tom Wolfe:

Charles Portis, author of *True Grit* and *The Incomparable Wood*, is one of the few outstanding humourists in America, in my opinion. Any Southern boy like me, who has ever driven down the highway watching the centre line through the rust holes in the floorboard of his Ford, will certainly find *The Dog of the South* (Knopf) irresistible, and I imagine that others will too.

### Frances Yates:

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, *The Printing Press, as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge University Press). Printing should not be listed with gunpowder and the compass as one of the inventions which came into use at the Renaissance. It was the one invention which made possible the whole subsequent astonishingly rapid evolution of European culture, Eisenstein owes something, as she acknowledges, to the McLuhan fashion but she develops the theme in a much more convincing way and with a wealth of new observation. Particularly interesting are her remarks on the effect of the print culture on the art of memory. This is an important book, concerned with root problems in the dissemination of culture.

THE LISTENER 22 NOVEMBER 1979

## R. W. Apple Jr
# Henry the K.

The White House Years, 1968-72.
By Henry Kissinger. Weidenfeld,
with Joseph £14.95

Some of the great men of Ameri-
can history have served as
Secretary of State. The line started
with Thomas Jefferson in 1789,
and it has included men of the
stature of William Jennings Bryan,
Elihu Root, George Marshall and
John Foster Dulles. But it is
doubtful whether any of them has
so dominated his era as Henry
A. Kissinger, the German-born
foreign-policy scholar who came
to Washington in 1969 to work
for Richard Nixon. Even before
he actually entered the Cabinet,
he dominated it; during Nixon's
first term his nominal position was
National Security Advisor, but he
was the real Secretary of State,
with the hapless William Rogers
exerting less power than some of
Kissinger's deputies. Nixon, who
was uncomfortable with intellec-
tuals, who betrayed sure signs of
anti-Semitism in his private con-
versation, whose own fragile ego
might have been expected to crack
under the force of Kissinger's as-
surance, gave the Harvard pro-
fessor free rein from the start. Not
only were the key policies—those
relating to Vietnam and China and
the Soviet Union and Southern
Africa and the Middle East—as
much Kissinger's as Nixon's;
Kissinger became a media figure
of nearly equal size and far
greater popularity. Pudgy, near-
sighted, Teutonic, his manner as
heavy as a Leberknödl, he was
transformed into 'Henry the K,' the
swinger who announced that
'power is an aphrodisiac' and ap-
peared at parties with starlets and
other long-legged lovelies.

That Kissinger, the Kissinger
who seduced the Washington
press corps in a way that no one
had done since John F. Kennedy,
is not on view in his memoirs, at
least not in the first volume, which
treats his four years in the White
House. It is a curious book from a
man who has spent most of his life
as an academic, sifting the past
and searching for large principles
and grand patterns. And it is a
curious book from a man who
knew so well how to vouchsafe
the telling anecdote to a reporter,
the one that made the point Kiss-

inger wanted the reporter to make.
Kissinger has made no selection,
no overall evaluation; it is all
here, as if he had set out to write
a source document, not a book.
He is afflicted with the literary
elephantiasis of our time, expend-
ing 1,496 pages in telling the story
of American foreign policy for
four years—four dramatic and sig-
nificant years, to be sure, but still

CHARLES YORK

only four years, only 1,460 days.
That's better than a page a day.
One is reminded of an old maxim
among American journalists: 'I
didn't have enough time, so I had
to write long.'

For all that, there is much that
is new and exciting. For me, at
least, the story of the historic
rapprochement with China, which
Kissinger and Nixon conceived
with a boldness and a vision that
could have saved tens of thousands
of lives if applied to South-East
Asia, is one of the epics of
20th-century diplomacy, and Kiss-
inger tells it with verve and skill.

It was fraught with difficulty, as
on the occasion when Washington's
'crude occidental minds' com-
pletely missed the signal when the
American sinologist, Edgar Snow,
was given the extraordinary
honour of being photographed at
Mao's side during the annual
National Day parade in Peking.
Small actors played large roles,
we learn; would the American
table-tennis team ever have got
to Peking had it not been for the
quick and positive reaction of
William Cunningham, the low-
ranking diplomat in Tokyo who
advised them to accept their
wholly unexpected invitation at
once? It is hard not to be swept
along by the excitement of the

tale, as Kissinger probes for open-
ings in Warsaw, drafts secret mes-
sages and finally flies secretly
from Pakistan to China, fretting
all the while about the publica-
tion of the Pentagon Papers,
feigning a stomach-ache to explain
his disappearance, and landing at
last in Peking: 'Only some truly
extraordinary event, both novel
and moving, both unusual and
overwhelming, restores the inno-
cence of the [childhood] years
when each day was a precious ad-
venture in defining the meaning of
life. This is how it was for me as
the aircraft crossed over the snow-

capped Himalayas ... Then the
first handshake with Chou En-lai,
'one of the two or three most im-
pressive men that I have ever
met', and eventually Nixon's own
trip to China.

In the course of his evaluation
of the China that he discovered,
Kissinger comments that it had
been created at 'an enormous, by
my values exorbitant, price. The
sacrifices in freedom, spontaneity,
culture, family life, seemed to me
to go beyond what any group of
leaders have a moral right to im-
pose on their people.' At another
point, he makes a similar comment
about the Soviet Union, remarking
that there hung over him during
a trip to Moscow 'that miasma of
totalitarianism which invariably
depresses the visitor, that heavy
uniformity which warns the human
spirit of the future that awaits it
if free peoples lose faith in their
liberties and cease defending their
values and institutions'. Yet he
can write of Iran under the Shah—
'a friend of our country and a
pillar of stability in a turbulent
and vital region'—that his auth-
oritarian—totalitarian?—methods
were 'in keeping with the tradi-
tions, perhaps even the necessi-
ties, of his society'. For the
Pahlavis and their predecessors,
one surmises, repression and tor-
ture and the imposition of an alien
way of life were unfortunate by-
products of good intentions; from
the Chinese communists, heirs in
their way to the Mogul emperors,
and from the hard men in the
Kremlin, not entirely dissimilar to
the tsars, such methods were un-
acceptable.

In the inconsistency, which runs
right through the memoirs, there
is a key to Henry Kissinger's great
failing. The Metternich scholar
sees everything in terms of its
strategic impact; he focuses so
intently upon global realities that
he is often unable to understand
the thoughts and emotions of those
whose concerns lie almost entirely

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THE LISTENER 22 NOVEMBER 1979

within their own societies. It is a special kind of élitism. He can understand the Shah, who is, as he says, a rather shy man who by force of will made himself into a tyrant (my word, not Kissinger's). He can understand the complex, covert, extraordinarily neutrotic Nixon better than most men. But he shows no sign of having understood either how or why the mullahs overthrew the old order in Iran, any more than he seems to fathom how or why the anti-war movement undercut support in the States for the disastrous adventure in South-East Asia.

When one reads Kissinger's considered judgment that 'one of the prime causes of his disaster ... was that the Shah modernised too rapidly and that he did not adapt his political institutions sufficiently to the economic and social changes he had brought about,' one nods in agreement. But then the next morning's paper brings word back from Washington that Kissinger has said that President Carter must bear much of the blame for the Shah's overthrow, and it is clear that Kissinger doesn't understand, after all. Just how was Carter to blame? Because he encouraged the Shah to pay more attention to human rights and to decentralise power? Is that

not adaptation of political institutions to economic and social change? Or because he failed to send in the marines to prop up 'one of America's best, most important and most loyal allies in the world'? Probably the latter; Kissinger notes approvingly that the Shah 'had been restored in 1953 by American influence [read CIA] when a leftist [read nationalist] government had come close to toppling him [had in fact already driven him into exile]'.

Having seen the war in Vietnam, the protest in America and the uprising in the streets of Teheraz from a much less exalted viewpoint than that of the former Secretary of State, I take a less geopolitical view. I find it as hard to accept his justification of the intrusion into Cambodia, which seems to be based on the curious notion that it was dishonourable for the North Vietnamese to take refuge there and then emerge to fight against the American troops who had chased them thence in the first place, as I do to accept his argument that it was necessary to prolong the war so that the United States could depart from Vietnam with its reputation intact—a goal that was clearly out of reach by the time he took office. It had been put out of reach by strategic

misconception, rooted in a misunderstanding of Vietnam and Asian communism generally, not by any failure of the American national will. Most of all, I find it hard to accept his view from the top that the outcry against the war represented a breakdown of the American political process; if the unwashed masses had only shut up, he seems to be saying, the best and the brightest—Nixon and I and the people we trusted—could have sorted it out. But that, of course, is the kind of thinking that set the whole tragedy in motion.

James Fenton

## Creamy butterflies

New Poems. By Mary Wilson. Hutchinson £1.95

It is Lady Wilson's reported wish that her poems be considered without fear or favour. What she wants is serious treatment, and this is what, within the bounds of possibility, I propose to provide. But I have to say from the start that in normal circumstances this new collection would never merit a solus review. It is of interest because we may be certain that its sales will be enormous—in the same class as Betjeman, Pam Ayres or Patience Strong.

There are various ways of attaining that class. Betjeman got there by writing exceedingly good poems, Patience Strong by writing exceedingly bad ones. Pam Ayres achieved it through a mixture of comic talent and televisual personality. And Mary Wilson was famous long before she was famous for her poems. Yet there is a close similarity between her reputation in political life and her qualities as a poet—in a way that there is not in the case of, say, Enoch Powell (whose constituency could not care two hoots about either his poems or his much vaunted expertise on the subject of Herodotus).

Mary Wilson the Prime Minister's wife wears the same hat, if hat she wears, as Mary Wilson the poet. The personality in both cases—that of the pleasant, unaffected, devout Congregational minister's daughter—is the same. People like her as a poet, just as they liked Churchill as a painter, because if they were going to write poems,

these are the sort of poems they might reasonably aspire to write. Their rhythms are natural and unstrained. Their rhymes are appropriate. The language is decorous without being 'poetic' in any preposterous degree. Betjeman, with whom the author has had an exchange in verse, emerges as the master, but is not slavishly imitated. Mary Wilson is at her best when describing, and at her least good when opining.

The best poem in the collection is one of the shortest, 'My Agapanthus Hedge'. If you are not a gardener and do not know what an agapanthus is, you may be excluded from the full understanding of the work. But you will also be in the minority in Mary Wilson's readership. Here is the poem:

> Blue, blue, and blue!
> But when the sun goes down
> Flushing to pink and violet,
> Reflecting the evening skies;
> Hundreds of heads of blue
> Shaking outside my window—
> Locks hung with burnished bees
> And with creamy butterflies.

Notice here the easy rhythmical variety of the lines, the unobtrusive rhyme, the final cadence. Notice also that the author has known when to stop—an important quality in any kind of artist. In the next poem, 'Barbecue on Northwethal', the accumulated description of an evening pleasure trip is marred by quite unnecessary poeticisms. So we get a completely natural stanza:

> Rising like seals up through the tide
> Wet-suited divers, dripping crystal drops
> Plod up the beach on flippered feet,
> To stand around the fire and turn
> Their goggled heads slowly from side to side.

### Followed by this:

> And now the lighthouses begin to gleam,
> And from its lonely vigil in the West—
> The first to greet the sailor home—
> Like summer lightning in the sky,
> The Bishop Rock shines out its double beam.

The first stanza is a piece of genuine description, taken from life. The second is copied from second-rate poetry. The last stanza of the poem throws away all the gains made by the others, by looking up to the dark infinity and seeing—not surprisingly—nothing of any particular interest.

## SECOND FRONT NOW!
### THE ROAD TO D-Day
### GEORGE BRUCE

Why did Britain not agree to an invasion of Europe until mid-1944? Why were Stalin's and then the United States' previous demands for a second front rejected? Would an earlier invasion of Europe have shortened the war, or been a massacre on the beaches? This controversial study answers these questions and many more in a revealing insight into the thinking behind Britain's wartime political and military leaders' decision not to invade until mid-1944, effectively telling the story through them — right up to the moment on June 6 when the first Allied troops landed on D-day.

£7.95 192pp

JANE'S PUBLISHING COMPANY
8 Shepherdess Walk, London N.1

From the circle

BY
GERALDINE
RANSON

WHEN you go around in the same circle of friends, it is all too easy to feel that everyone knows what you will be wearing even before you arrive.

Choosing evening clothes is particularly tricky. No one minds being seen again and again in the same jeans—but the same dress, however much you love it, can lose its charm when your friends have expected its arrival.

This week I have chosen a group of medium-priced clothes to wear after dark. I have included the ankle-length silk dress because it could be worn to a dance and these days I find that pretty and inexpensive dresses of this type are very thin on the ground.

The one-piece flying suit is the latest in evening sports-wear. Make sure you choose these rather masculine styles in a soft and very feminine fabric. This one is in silvery viscose which should put you ahead in the inter-galactic race.

The rest are separates which offer the obvious advantage that you can swop them around to produce different effects. For example, substitute the camisole or bustier tops for a cotton or silky shirt and the mood of your clothes becomes

DURRANT'S

[LC]

11 Northburgh
Street
London EC1V 0JL
01-251 4918

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

135, FLEET STREET,
LONDON, E.C.4

ISSUE
DATED

17 NOV 1979

Self-expression

A T yesterday's Press conference to launch his enormous volume of memoirs—all but 1,500 pages—grandly entitled "The White House Years," Dr Henry Kissinger spent most of his time fending off criticisms of the invasion of Cambodia, which he prefers to call an "incursion."

Kissinger's grasp of detail in the face of these attacks was impressive but his use of language came under strain. He spoke of not being aware in 1970 "of the existence of (Sheikh) Mujib in an operational sense," and in a tight corner referred to "on-going activities" and "inherently ambiguous circumstances."

But Dr Kissinger revealed a dis-armingly frank view of his authorial skills. He declared that his publishers, Michael Joseph and Weidenfeld, would have preferred his book to have been "abbreviated," and quoted an English reviewer of one of his earlier works, who said: "I don't know whether Dr Kissinger is a great writer but anyone finishing the book is a great reader."

Nevertheless, Lord Weidenfeld handsomely described him as "most co-operative."

Weidenfeld

[LC]

DURRANT'S

THE FINANCIAL TIMES

10, CANNON STREET,
LONDON, E.C.4

ISSUE
DATED

19 NOV 1979

Sign of the times

America's most controversial
former Secretary of State,
Henry Kissinger, is being given
a rough ride these days by the
gentlemen of the Press. On the
subject of Cambodia especially,
they goad him to the point
where he is wont to turn
white with anger and frustra-
tion, stumbling over his words
and stabbing the air like Basil
Fawlty reprimanding Manuel.
Last Friday—at a London news
conference held to publicise his
memoirs, The White House
Years—he was faced with a
particularly hostile crowd of
interrogators from Britain and
abroad, and it was revealing,
therefore, to see so many of
them creep up afterwards to the
good doctor begging him to
autograph their free copies of
his book.

finals of the Football League Cup at the expense of Brighton generally reckoned to be the most anaemic eleven seen here this season, and making their away win at Nottingham Forest even more remarkable.

On Saturday, Arsenal thoroughly deserved their 2-0 victory over Everton, which takes them into a challenging fifth place in the first division.

[L]

of them from a man who was both a trained
analyst and a participant. For later historians
it will be like having Clarendon's *History of
the Great Rebellion* transposed to the 20th-
century scale of world politics. And until you
look at the table of contents, it is difficult to
recall how many and how portentous were
the international developments unfolding
between January 1969 and January 1973. The
main theme is inevitably the painful and
laborious effort of the United States to
extricate itself from the war in Vietnam, if
possible in a way that would save the national
face and avoid compromising the electoral
prospects of the Nixon Administration. Since
the book ends with the second Nixon
Inauguration and the initialling by Kissinger
of the ironically named 'Paris Agreement on
ending the war and restoring peace in
Vietnam', those aims can be said to have been
achieved at a heavy cost not only in human
lives but also in national self-esteem. But
the Vietnam War, while it overshadowed
American politics and diplomacy during those
four years, by no means limited the vast field
through which Dr Kissinger, as Presidential
Assistant for National Security, had to
range.

There was the continuous and hazardous
dialogue which he had to maintain, on the
President's behalf, with the Soviet Union,
involving, on the one hand, Moscow's desire
for a summit agreement on the limitation of
strategic nuclear armaments and, on the
other, Washington's determination to make
the Russians pay for it by using their influence
with their clients in Hanoi to put an end to
hostilities. Underlying these exchanges was
Kissinger's own 'doctrine of linkages' - an
attempt to convince the Russians that all
issues of policy between the two super-powers
were interconnected. There was at the same
time the exciting and eventually rewarding
adventure of re-opening United States' re-
lations with the People's Republic of China.
There was the fidgety fence-mending to be
done inside the Nato alliance with West
European governments united only in their

demand for a continued American military
presence in Europe and in their insistence on
their right to be consulted over United States
dealings with the Soviet Union. There was the
labyrinthine tangle of the Middle East, with it
perpetual threat of war. And during what he
calls 'the Autumn of Crises' of 1970, Dr
Kissinger had to advise his President on three
explosive issues almost simultaneously. There
was the situation in Jordan, where King
Hussein was confronting not only the
rebellious Palestinian element in his own
country but also the threats of his bellicose
neighbours, Iraq and Syria. There was the
clumsily surreptitious attempt by the Soviet
Union to establish a nuclear submarine base in
Cuba. There was the coming to power in
Chile of what was seen as the radical
and anti-American government of President
Allende.

But the major events it describes do not by
themselves account for the fascination of Dr
Kissinger's book. It is the story of how a first-
generation German-Jewish immigrant found
himself taken up into the inner sanctum of
American power with full opportunities to
shape the destiny of the nation that had
received him. It is an account of how an
academic specialist in international affairs
found himself confronted with the practical
day-to-day conduct of those affairs. Although
his emphasis is naturally enough on his succes-
ses, he does acknowledge his fallibility and
does not always place the blame for mistakes
on colleagues. *The White House Years* is also
an illuminating description of the byzantine
complexities of modern United States govern-
ment, and, above all, of the elaborate rivalry
between the executive staff of the President
and the professional bureaucracy of govern-
ment departments headed by the Secretaries
appointed by the President. The bureaucracy
with which Kissinger found himself constantly
at odds was, of course, that of the State
Department, headed by William Rogers,
though he had his occasional brushes with
Melvin Laird, who controlled the Pentagon
hierarchy. And he is sharply critical of the

'breath-taking effrontery' of lower-level civil
servants who used their professional skill to
frustrate Presidential directives of which they
disapproved: since he was, as often as not, the
real author of those directives, his resentment
is understandable. The solution encouraged
by Nixon and welcomed by his Assistant was
the use of 'backchannels'. Kissinger explains
this device:

Essentially a backchannel is a communications
system that seeks to circumvent normal proced-
ures; it requires, however, somebody's facilities.
Usually the excluded party was the State Depart-
ment which had victimised itself by technology
and habit: by technology because its computers
automatically distribute even the most sensitive
cables through the building by pre-established
criteria; by habit, because diplomats live on
trading information and are infinitely ingenious
in getting round formal restrictions. This is why
even the State Department has set up its own
system of internal backchannels, and why almost
every modern President has sought to evade
State's formal communications machinery.

There is one more aspect of *The White House Years* of consuming interest: Kissinger's own relationship with and understanding of Richard Nixon. Obviously the time limits of this volume preclude any anticipation of Watergate, apart from one or two hindsight hints. But Kissinger makes no secret of his awareness, from the start of their association, of the President's psychological disabilities. There is a revealing description of Nixon at his first Inauguration:

> He was dressed in a morning coat, his pant legs as always a trifle short. His jaw jutted defiantly and yet he seemed uncertain, as if unsure that he was really there. He exuded at once relief and disbelief. He had arrived at last after the most improbable of careers and one of the most extraordinary feats of self-discipline in American political history. He seemed exultant, as if he could hardly wait for the ceremony to be over, so that he could begin to implement the dream of a lifetime. Yet he also appeared somewhat spent, even fragile, like a marathon runner who has exhausted himself in a great race. As ever, it was difficult to tell whether it was the occasion or his previous image of it that Nixon actually enjoyed.

Another of these insights is occasioned by
Nixon's reaction to the national uproar over
Vietnam:

> He had taken initiatives that reversed the course of his predecessor; he had withdrawn troops and de-escalated the war – all steps urged on him by the Establishment groups whom he simultaneously distrusted and envied. And instead of being acclaimed, he was being castigated for not moving more rapidly on the path on which they had not even dared to take the first step. It was not a big leap to the view that what he really faced was not a policy difference but the same liberal conspiracy that had sought to destroy him ever since the Alger Hiss case. Here were all the old enemies in the press and in the Establishment uniting once again; they would even accept, if not urge, the military defeat of their country to carry out the vendetta of a generation.

At close quarters with this complex man,
Kissinger could still give him credit for his
abilities, and above all for an intuitive appre-
hension of a line of policy. On the opening to
Peking, he writes:

I doubt whether the rapprochement could have
occurred with the same decisiveness in any other
Presidency. Nixon had an extraordinary instinct
for the jugular. He was less interested in tactics
or the meticulous accumulation of nuance; too
much discussion of details of implementation,
indeed, made him nervous. Once he had set a
policy direction, he almost invariably left it to me
to implement the strategy and manage the
bureaucracy. But though I had independently
come to the same judgment as Nixon, and
though I designed many of the moves, I did not
have the political strength or bureaucratic clout
to pursue such a fundamental shift of policy on
my own. Nixon viscerally understood the essence
of the opportunity and pushed for it consistently.

Perhaps it was because Kissinger was himself a newcomer to the United States and a mere novice in American politics that Nixon trusted him and generally accepted his advice. At times their relationship reads like that between a manic-depressive patient and a sympathetic male-nurse.

The book includes several set-piece studies

of personalities which will certainly be quoted
by historians. Both Chou En-lai and Mao
Tse-tung are sensitively and convincingly
depicted. The study of Mao, involving both
the powerful aura of the man himself and an
analysis of the inner conflict which beset him,
is too long to quote. But there is an
entertaining snapshot of President Brezhnev:

His hands were perpetually in motion: twisting
his watch; flicking ashes from his ever-present
cigarette; clanging his cigarette-holder against an
ash-tray. He could not keep it still. While his
remarks were being translated he would restlessly
bound up from his chair, walk around the room,
engage in loud conversation with his colleagues,
or even leave the room without explanation and
then return. Negotiations with Brezhnev thus
included the bizarre feature that he might
disappear at any moment, or while you were
being most persuasive he could be concentrating
not on your remarks but on forcing food on you.
On one occasion he brought along a toy cannon
to the conference-room normally used for meet-
ings of the Politburo. It refused to fire. Making it
work preoccupied him far more than whatever
profundities I might be uttering at the moment.
Finally the contraption went off with a roar.
Brezhnev strutted round the room like a prize-
fighter who has knocked out his opponent.

One cannot help wondering here whether the
imperturbable Dr Kissinger was not being sub-
jected to gamesmanship tactics of a subtlety
with which he did not credit the Russians:

Sometimes he betrays a notable lack of sen-
sitivity in special areas. There is no recognition
or acknowledgment of the Palestinian case in
the Middle East. In the chapter on Chile, there
seems to be total unawareness of the counter-
productive effects of the so-called 'covert
operations' with which the United States
Government has sought to protect its interests
in Latin America. Occasionally there are
inconsistencies: on one page he writes, 'There
does not seem to be any unifying thread to
Soviet policy'; on another he speaks of
'the durable impulses of nationalism and
ideology that lie behind Soviet policy'. But
these are minor flaws in a remarkable book. ☐

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Middle East Books

[LC]

The White House Years

by Henry Kissinger

Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Michael Joseph,
London, 1979, £14.95

In the light of the time it has taken me to read, the speed
with which this book was written seems little short of
miraculous. Of course Dr Kissinger employed research
assistants, and there are passages which bear their traces. But
these are remarkably limited, and the whole vast work is per-
meated by its author's powerful, lucid, prescient and
exceptionally detached intelligence. By a somewhat sardonic
humour too, as in his comment on negotiating with Israel:
"In the combination of single-minded persistence and con-
voluted tactics the Israelis preserve in their interlocutor
only those last vestiges of sanity and coherence needed to
sign the final document".

Two factors in particular contributed to his detachment: he was not born an American, and he had had a distinguished career as an academic historian before he was offered political responsibility. His parents did not leave Germany until after Hitler came to power. He recalls that when he first walked the streets of New York, "seeing a group of boys, I began to cross to the other side to avoid being beaten up". As a historian he was fascinated by European power politics, by the diplomacy of Metternich and Bismarck, and when he came to practise their craft he showed an understanding which is rare in Washington for European attitudes

and preoccupations. He writes of Pompidou, for instance,
with notable warmth.

Indeed, the generosity with which he appraises foreign
statesmen effectively undermines his self-disparaging observa-
tion that "the capacity to admire others is not my most fully
developed trait". If the book has a hero (aside from the
author) it is Chou En-lai, his partner in what was probably
the most significant achievement of his years in the White
House — the opening to China. Others for whose qualities he
expresses high esteem include Andrei Gromyko, Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto and Anwar Sadat.

His most complex human problem, however, was that
presented by President Nixon, "this lonely, tortured and
insecure man" with whom he established "a wary relation-
ship — close on substance, aloof personally". The Chief's
defects of character were balanced for Kissinger by the
similarity of their outlook on international politics. They
shared a profound distrust of the emotional impulses which
in their view had caused American policy to oscillate
between tendencies on the one hand to idealistic global
overcommitment, and on the other to isolationist with-
drawal. "Nixon and I wanted to found American foreign
policy on a sober perception of permanent national interest".
All issues, however specific and regional they might be, were
carefully weighed for their potential influence on the overall
balance of power. Kissinger's favourite word is "geopolitical".

Kissinger's appreciation of the president's unsentimental
approach to world politics, and the "kind of joyless,

its budgeted requirement, and indicates the persistent failure
of the international community to contribute adequately.

In fact, UNRWA is slowly dying on its feet, as the cuts it
must make to trim its budget to its actual income become
annually more extensive. Severe reductions in food rations
have become a permanent feature of refugee life. Staff
remuneration for cost of living increases has been withheld
time and again. Suspension of the lower secondary cycle of
education for 90,000 refugee children was only averted last
year at the very last possible moment, as a result of un-
expected and substantial additional contributions made by
certain Arab governments. There is no guarantee that such
additional money will be forthcoming again.

UNRWA has already had to draw up a revised budget for
1980 which ensures that it will not be overcommitted.
Ration issues, which have already been halved, will continue
at the same reduced level; a vital programme for the rebuild-
ing of unsafe refugee shelters and dilapidated school
buildings may have to be abandoned; and the long overdue
increases in staff remuneration may have to be shelved once
again. If the lower secondary cycle of education is to
continue at all after the second week in April, substantial
additional contributions will have to come from the member
states of the UN.

There is a limit to the cheese-paring that can be done
without permanent damage to UNRWA's institutions and
without serious side effects. Temporary suspension of the
lower secondary education cycle, involving the dismissal of
1000 teachers, would almost certainly mean the permanent
closure of an institution which is absolutely vital to the
future of the Palestinian community. Further postponement
to pay increases for the UNRWA staff may well provoke an

David McDowall worked for UNRWA until recently in
Beirut and Vienna. The views expressed in this article are his
own and do not necessarily reflect official UNRWA thinking.

The Soviet bloc blames Western imperialism for creating
the Palestine refugee problem. Consequently it has never con-
tributed to UNRWA, maintaining that it is the moral
responsibility of the West to support it. While this position is
shamelessly hypocritical (the USSR, for example, raced the
US to be first to recognise the new Jewish state in 1948,
while Czechoslovakia assisted with vital arms supplies during
Israel's first war with the Arabs), there is no reason to
suppose that the Societ bloc will have a change of heart.

The Arab states likewise blame the West for the Palestine
problem, as they have done consistently and justifiably ever
since the Balfour Declaration. But most of them also con-
tribute to UNRWA's needs. In 1979 Libya, for example,
pledged $4 million, substantially more than the individual
contributions of seven of the nine members of the EEC.

But some Western governments now seem to be tiring of
their humanitarian responsibilities: France has not increased
its contribution for a whole decade, during which time
UNRWA's costs have increased fourfold; Australia, Spain and
New Zealand have not increased their contributions for three
or more years; the United Kingdom has not yet pledged a
contribution for 1980 at all; and — most serious of all — the
US government has not substantially increased its contribu-
tion for three years. For many years the US maintained a
practice of providing roughly 35 per cent of UNRWA's total
requirements, and this made it possible for UNRWA to
continue to operate. That percentage has fallen dramatically
over the past two years to 25 per cent. Furthermore,
Congress has made payment of a portion of the US contribu-
tion ($9.5 million out of $52 million) contingent on the
contribution of a matching amount from OPEC members.
This kind of condition is a dangerous error of judgement.
However much Congress may desire a more equitable distri-
bution of the UNRWA burden, this sort of coercion may well
be viewed as blackmail by OPEC members and consequently

[L.C.]

desperate courage" with which he was prepared to take
major decisions, and no doubt Nixon's reciprocal apprecia-
tion of his national security adviser's solid realism and
self-confidence, led them to operate without undue reference
to the Department of State and at times in complete and
deliberate concealment from it. "Let's try to get it done",
was Nixon's observation on one decision they faced, "and
not fool around with the State Department". It was perhaps
a little naive of them both to be "thunderstruck" when, after
their preparations for Kissinger's secret journey to Peking
were already far advanced, the unfortunate Secretary of
State Rogers appeared on television to express disbelief in
the seriousness of a reported Chinese overture.

Not that the president himself was always allowed his own
way. "In serving Nixon one owed it to him to discriminate
among the orders he issued and to give him another chance at
those that were unfulfillable or dangerous".

One area which at the outset of Nixon's presidency was
left as an almost exclusive preserve of the State Department
was the Middle East. Both Nixon and Kissinger believed that
an active policy in that region would almost certainly fail,
and Nixon consequently saw no point in risking a confronta-
tion with the Israeli lobby. He "considered himself less
obligated to the Jewish constituency than any of his
predecessors had been"; nevertheless at the beginning of
1970 he took the precaution of sending word to the Jewish
community that the "Rogers plan" was aptly named and
had not originated in the White House. As for Kissinger, he

doubted the advisability of US pressure on Israel "until
those who would benefit from it would be America's friends,
not Soviet clients".

It was a state of mind made for Sadat. Whether or not the
Egyptian president sensed this, we learn here that he made
his first overture to Washington in April 1972, more than
two months before his explusion of the Soviet military
advisers and experts from Egypt, and that his proposal was
to establish a direct channel of communication between the
two presidencies, bypassing the foreign ministries. By this
time Kissinger had become involved in Middle Eastern affairs,
mainly because Nixon was nervous lest any embarrassing
crisis should develop on that front during the run-up to the
presidential election in November. Kissinger's first reaction
to the expulsion of the Russians was that of some of Sadat's
Egyptian critics, that the president had been reckless in for-
feiting an important negotiating asset without bargaining for
any *quid pro quo* from Washington. Kissinger tells us that he
came later to realise that this was "vintage Sadat. His
negotiating tactic was never to haggle over detail but to
create an atmosphere that made disagreement psychologically
difficult".

For the time being the story ends there. We must wait for
the second volume of these memoirs to follow the develop-
ment of Kissinger's relationship with "one of the few truly
outstanding leaders I have met", and of the disengagement in
Sinai.

Harold Beeley

Turkey's difficulties have not, of course, all stemmed
from weak government. "It is arguable," Professor Dodd
says, "that the most important population problem in
Turkey is that of sheer growth and that there is little to fear
where homogeneity is concerned". With regard to homo-
geneity, Professor Dodd may perhaps be understating
the number of Kurds (whom he puts at 8 per cent of the
population), but he is surely right in stressing the importance
of the growth of population from 16 million in 1935 to over
40 million today (with some 55 million projected for the end
of the decade), and of the problems of urbanisation and of
the shanty-towns, in which, he says, some 9 to 12 per cent of
the country's population now live. He is, I think, also right in
his belief that the shanty-towns "are not the breeding places
of revolution yet", and visitors would confirm his observa-
tion that "the effect of the rural migration to the towns is
beginning to make them ... seem less obviously European or
American, and this Turkification is occurring despite the
increasing numbers of cars, refrigerators, washing machines
and the like". As for the content of this 'Turkification',
Professor Dodd concludes that "there can be no ... direct
religious threat to temporal power in Turkey, but a slow
reassertion of Islamic values, and their injection into the
political system is not at all out of the question as a reaction
either to the materialist and libertarian aspects of western
civilisation, or to the spiritual emptiness of its Marxist
variety". But materialism and libertarianism have to be
enjoyed before they are rejected, while the spiritual empti-
ness of Marxism may also be discovered only after personal

On the Record

"The peace treaty between Egypt and Israel is not an initiative that should bring national suicide to Israel. The question of settlements for us is a basic inherent right and the most important means to assure our national security."

Dr Eliahu Ben-Elissar, Israel's ambassador-designate
to Egypt, quoted in the *Washington Post*, 16 February

"... Israeli people have been frightened by pretexts of 'security' into supporting the extreme Zionist dreams held by a minority of their fellow citizens ...

By one ruse or another, Jews are encroaching upon
the [West Bank's] Arabs, adding to the 'archaeological'
and 'army' camps with newly requisitioned or purchased
rural lands and now with claims to ancestral homes
inside hostile Arab cities.

For most members of Prime Minister Begin's
cabinet, annexation may not even be the main
objective. Many do not share the ambitions that drive
the West Bank settlers. But they find it expedient to
let extremists and the small religious parties drive their
way...

But US diplomacy cannot escape the taint of Israel's
conduct. If Arabs deeply resent the perceived injustices
to the Palestinians, then colonising the West Bank
further is bound to injure US interests.

Given its great investment in Camp David and

MAR 26 1988

Children's Books Fall 1979, Pages 49 to 71

35¢

The New York Times

Book Review

NOVEMBER 11, 1979

Self-Portrait

WHITE HOUSE YEARS

By Henry Kissinger.

Illustrated. 1,521 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $22.50.

By BARBARA W. TUCHMAN

Vivienne Flester

IN the last century, the historian Leopold von Ranke laid down the dictum that foreign relations were supreme among the influences that shape the history of nations. This may be arguable, but for the immediate past it is certainly maintainable. No one has been more deeply engaged at so influential a level in the conduct of foreign relations than former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, or gained so much public recognition of his role. He became a cult figure, a popular celebrity, the subject of countless full-length books, studies and analyses. Publication of his own version is thus something of a historical event.

With some relief I can report that it contains no more Metternich. Because Kissinger's doctoral dissertation and first published book, "A World Restored," dealt with Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, and the resettlement of Europe after the windstorm of Napoleon, everyone writing about Kissinger since then has made a comparison between them. Kissinger, writing about himself, does not mention Metternich — rightly, for the world he has had to deal with is so different in such absolute ways that a comparison is inapplicable. The differences are important: whatever their rivalries, the nations at the Congress of Vienna had a common outlook and a common goal — restoration of the status quo ante. Today, nations are split between two opposing ideologies, and the globe is dominated by two antagonistic superpowers locked in quarrel. Balance of power is inoperable; the third world has emerged to upset any balance; a new risk center exists in the Middle East; the industrial nations are in thrall to the oil of the undeveloped; nuclear weaponry overshadows all.

In such a world, Kissinger's task as he saw it on taking office in the Administration of Richard M. Nixon in January 1969 was to end the Vietnam War, manage a "global rivalry" and nuclear-arms race with the Soviet Union, reinvigorate alliance with the European democracies and integrate the new nations into a "new world equilibrium."

How well did he succeed in his mission? He himself offers no overall assessment — perhaps because he has allowed himself no time for reflec-

Continued on Page 34

Barbara W. Tuchman is the author of "The Guns of August," "Stilwell and the American Experience in China" and, most recently, "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century."

Mordecai Richler on Daniel Fuchs's stories, David Bromwich on a life of W. H. Auden

9

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The Living Section

Wednesday in
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ERNEST
HEMINGWAY
88 POEMS

Edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis.

The first authorized edition,
including 47 previously unpublished
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Kissinger

*Continued from Page 1*

tion. To make ready for publica-
tion a text of 1,476 pages in two
and a half years since leaving
office is an Olympic feat leaving
little room for philosophy. Kiss-
singer has been in such a hurry
to vindicate his management of
complex and turbulent events
that he seems not to have let a
day elapse between doing and
writing or removed himself in
any way to gain perspective.
The book is all record, no as-
sessment. He has written too
much too soon.

The plunge into writing seems
to carry on a habit and a condi-
tion of his office. Its pressures
did not allow time to think, to
examine a problem on all sides
and a course of action in all its
consequences. This is undoubt-
edly a fault of the system rather
than of character; public life, as
Kissinger acknowledges, "is a
continual struggle to rescue an
element of choice from the pres-
sure of circumstance." Surely
that is all the more reason, once
released from the pressure, to
have taken time for thought.

What we have is an im-
mensely long and superfluously
detailed account of virtually
every message, meeting, jour-
ney, negotiation and conversa-
tion in the 50 months from Kis-
singer's appointment in Novem-
ber 1968 to the signing of peace
with North Vietnam at the end
of President Nixon's first term
in January 1973. We do not need
all the aide-memoires and the
daily comings and goings of
Egon Bahr, Vladimir Semenov
and dozens of other secondary
intermediaries to understand
what was going on; indeed, the
picture would be clearer if Kis-
singer had taken the trouble to
strain out the insignificant and
condense his tale as a whole.
Since by training he knows bet-
ter than to confuse setting down
the total record with writing his-
tory, one must assume that the
record — in his version — was
what he wanted, and I have no
doubt that specialists in strate-
gic arms, the U.S.S.R., NATO,
China, Chile, the Middle East,
India and Pakistan, and Viet-
nam will be mining it for years.

It is enlivened (in spots) by
small revelations, vivid scenes
and portraits, and glimpses of
the often astonishing mechanics
of official life. For example, out
of the blue in August 1969 a
Soviet Embassy official asked a
State Department official at

Henry Kissinger.

lunch what would be the United
States reaction to a Soviet at-
tack on Chinese nuclear facili-
ties. Mr. Nixon's speechwriting
staff had a specialist for every
tone the President wished to
adopt. In 1969 China had only
one ambassador serving abroad
— in Cairo. Through names pre-
sented privately by Kissinger to
Ambassador Anatoly I. Dobry-
nin, the release of 550 out of 800
hardship cases of Soviet Jews
was obtained over a period of
time. On a Presidential journey,
every member of the official
party is given a little book list-
ing every event and movement
timed to the minute, together
with charts showing where
everyone is to stand. All these
are surprises, at least to this re-
viewer.

There are sparkies amid the
long stretches: the "thrill" of
the first summit visit when, as
the plane door opened on arrival
in Brussels, "we were bathed in
the arc lights of television," a
red carpet and honor guard
were on hand, and the King of
the Belgians waited at the foot
of the ramp; the papal audi-
ence, during which smoke sud-
denly poured from the garments
of Secretary of Defense Melvin
Laird (in response to Kissin-
ger's suggestion that he dispose
of his cigar, he had concealed it
alive in his suit pocket). There
are incisive small history les-
sons introducing, among others,
the problems of Pakistan and of
Poland. There are gems of
quotation, as when Dean Ache-
son, asked why a meeting of
senior advisers lasted so long,
replied, "We are all old and we
are all eloquent."

The author is less good at pro-
fundities. When he attempts
them, for example in reflections
on the space age, his language

invariably swells into the sen-
tentious, not to say banal, and
he sounds less like himself than
Gerald R. Ford. On the "agony
of Vietnam" he sees his role as
"helping my adopted country
heal its wounds, preserve its
faith and . . . rededicate itself to
the great tasks of construction
awaiting it." Or, on the end of
the war, he hopes Americans
will "close ranks" and the peo-
ples of Indochina "perhaps at-
tain at long last the future of
tranquility, security and
progress . . . worthy of their sac-
rifices." Coming from the sar-
donic gentleman who once, on
being thanked by an effusive
wellwisher for "saving the
world," is reputed to have re-
plied, "You're welcome," this is
pure hype on a level with cam-
paign rhetoric, as if he were
running for office. Perhaps he
is.

Perhaps that explains his
hurry to bring out the book, in
good time to make its impres-
sion before November 1980.
Could it be that this tremendous
tome is a campaign document
designed to exhibit the author as
the most knowledgeable, ex-
perienced and expert, the in-
lectable, the only possible Sec-
retary of State under the next
Republican President? I cannot
believe that his eye is on Capitol
Hill. The Senate has no scope for
the summiteer, for shuttle di-
plometry, for the commuter
from Tel Aviv to Peking to Mos-
cow to Bonn, the guest at Cheq-
uers and the Elyseée. I imagine it
is to this life of the Air Force
One jet set that he wants to re-
turn.

That would explain why — for
the sake of dignity — Kissinger
as a personality, the phenome-
non of Super-K, the swinger, the
media's delight, is missing from
this book. Beyond some rather
stilted references to "my
warped sense of humor," no
hint comes through, yet the at-
tention showered upon him
must be a factor in the record.
"Power is an aphrodisiac," Ki-
singer himself has said (though
not in this book), and although
popularity is a different thing, it
reinforces power. Kissinger's
explanation of his popularity
with the press is that because its
members disliked President
Nixon they tended to give credit
for favorable developments to
"more admired associates . . .
and I became the beneficiary of
this state of affairs." Clearly
more than that was at work; a
distinct personality made itself
felt. Kissinger was refreshing
and the press succumbed to the
wit and charm he knew how to

34

men, was incomparably more influential among his peers, left an indelible mark on several of the later performers who are included (Santana, the Allman Brothers Band).

There are gems here, such as Dan Morgenstern's careful appraisals of various jazzmen, John S. Wilson on figures as diverse as Josephine Baker and Xavier Cugat, and Douglas Green writing about some of the stars of country music. But too many of the entries read like press handouts, and, when one wants hard facts or concise critical evaluations, most of the time they just aren't there.

Sheldon Harris's "Blues Who's Who" is nothing if not encyclopedic. This "Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers," with 571 entries, bibliographies, a discography and a detailed index, fills a notable gap; until now the only blues reference works in English were discographical. In his introduction Mr. Harris promises "the bare facts, without embellishment," and this is what one gets. The author began collecting these facts more than 18 years ago, when he was working as a volunteer at the Institute for Jazz Studies, and he has wisely supplemented his basic data by drawing on the expertise of a worldwide network of blues record collectors and other specialists.

The factual approach has its drawbacks. One wonders who could possibly be interested in long lists of nightclubs, colleges, festivals and radio stations where various artists have performed, and there's almost nothing here in the way of stylistic analysis or critical commentary. But there is an absolute mountain of information, and every major figure as well as many minor ones are included. Anyone seriously interested in the blues and its many offshoots in American popular music should have access to "Blues Who's Who," in a nearby library if not on their own shelves." ■

## Author's Query

For a study about the role of interpreters/translators in world affairs, I would appreciate personal anecdotes from anyone experienced in national or international organizations. Confidentiality respected.

R. A. ROLAND
201-I Murphy Mill Road
Americus, Ga. 31709

## Women

*Continued from Page 12*

morning. Then I sat on the floor, leaned up against the wall and gave up for about 15 minutes." Because of their vulnerability, employers used women when they could, especially when new technology made older skills obsolete. This not only depressed wages but heightened the friction between male and female workers.

While employers either mercilessly exploited women or refused to hire them, the unions were almost as bad. "I believe that woman is not qualified for the condition of wage labor," a veteran labor leader declared at the turn of the century. "The mental and physical makeup of women is in revolt against wage service. She is competing with the man who is her father or husband, or who is to become her husband." Her place, said another, is that of "queen of a little house — no matter how humble — where there are children rolling on the floor." Increasingly, women learned to rely on themselves.

"Women the world over need protection and it is only through the united efforts of women that they will get it." It is this feminist perspective, articulated by Alva Belmont — an upper-middle-class member of the Women's Trade Union League of New York City and supporter of the shirtwaist workers' strike of 1909 — that gives Professor Foner the most difficulty. His analysis is class-based; he believes that working people — male and female — should have united against the common enemy, rapacious employers. Yet his evidence reveals that middle-class "ladies" were more sympathetic to the plight of laboring women than male-dominated unions were. In

short, whatever solidarity did appear stemmed from sex and not class. "It was my interest in women," Mrs. Belmont proclaimed in 1909, "in women everywhere and every class that drew my attention and sympathies first to the striking shirtwaist girls." The author rightly makes that successful strike the watershed in his narrative but then is constrained to observe that only "the Jewish cigarmakers union and the United Hebrew Trades" supported the action. "Small wonder then," he concludes, "the shirtwaist workers were compelled to look to upper-class women for support."

Nor was this feminist dimension new in 1909. Throughout the 19th century, upper-class women reached across social lines in active sympathy. As Barbara Berg's "Remembered Gate" demonstrated, they developed compassionate ties with female outcasts, including prostitutes, as well as engaging in the charity work characteristic of their class. To be sure, women's organizations and leaders differed on tactics: some wanted to emphasize equal pay; others sought to redress their grievances through suffrage. But they increasingly came to believe that the common predicament of women in a male-oriented society was more fundamental than class lines. Professor Foner's analysis has the same problem with black working women: not only sex but race transcended class considerations.

Fortunately, the author's historical predilections do not mar the force or extent of this narrative. Based on a lifetime of research, this volume brings together the details of a courageous struggle for elementary justice. By 1914 victory was not yet in sight, but a base had been established for a larger measure of success in this century. ■

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exercise, although they find virtually no expression here.

How did the sudden blossoming of this pudgy professor into the rose of the Nixon Administration affect American foreign policy? I would speculate that it enhanced his belief, already embedded intellectually, in his own powers of manipulation and hence in over-reliance on personal negotiation. It may have nurtured fantasies of omnipotence. Although his text is impersonal, that is not from modesty. The illustrations tell a different story. Out of 65 photographs, Kissinger himself appears in 63, 28 of them in the company of Mr. Nixon, as if to assure posterity of his close and constant access to the President. And it seems that he even needed to reassure himself. Apropos of the low protocol rank of his office, which seated him far below the salt at official dinners, "I spent much time calculating the distance separating me from the Presidential person and the odds on my reaching my car before the Presidential limousine pulled out." Who can envy the life of officialdom weighed down by these concerns?

If there is a key to Kissinger's concept of a minister for foreign affairs, it lies in this sentence: "My approach was strategic and geopolitical; I attempted to relate events to each other, to create incentives and pressures in one part of the world to influence events in another." Here is the activist, the great manipulator, convinced that he can pull the strings that will make the nations, like puppets, play out his scenario. No matter how often they evade or refuse, he pursues his objective with unwerving persistence and intensity. Geopolitical is his favorite word, applied to every problem in every region — and it is, in this outsider's opinion, the explanation of American mistakes. Our approach is too geopolitical and not sufficiently local. If we had paid more attention to the history of Vietnamese nationalism or to the internal stresses in Iran, we could not (one hopes) have invested our policy and support in regimes lacking a valid mandate from their own people. Geopolitical, as Kissinger uses it, is just another word for cold war. It means combating the machinations of Communism wherever they are exercised on the globe. The contest with Communism is indeed serious but, as we should have learned by now, the

opponent is divided and disparate, not solid, and the combat will be lost if we are not more sophisticated about conducting it in local terms.

Kissinger's activism was risky because it set in motion reactions and consequences that could not be controlled or even at times foreseen, as happened in Cambodia and Chile. He had been warned that it would be a mistake to try to solve the problem of North Vietnamese presence in Cambodia by force and that it would be wiser, as a State Department official put it, "to wait on events, saying little." Had this counsel been followed, Cambodia would have been spared untold agony and Kissinger a stain that will not wash away.

Because the North Vietnamese were unquestionably the first to violate the neutrality of Cambodia — as the Germans were of Belgium in 1914 — the current controversy about American violation is a false issue. American guilt lay in extending the war to a nonparticipating land and people and in requiring our Air Force deliberately to falsify the record. Kissinger's strained defense — on the ground that it was necessary to keep silent in order not to force the necessity of a protest on Prince Norodom Sihanouk or provoke North Vietnam to retaliation — is not impressive. Keeping silent is one thing; extreme precautions of secrecy (which Kissinger omits to mention), to the point of transgressing our own military code, are quite another.

Equally, the justification on the ground that American soldiers were being killed by North Vietnamese based in Cambodia seems inappropriately indignant. Kissinger fulminates about an "unprovoked offensive killing 400 Americans a week" and the "outrage of a dishonorable and bloody offensive." Is an offensive supposed to be bloodless? Is there something peculiarly shocking about killing enemy soldiers in war? When it comes to "dishonorable," I cannot follow Kissinger's thinking at all.

He talks a lot about honor in these pages. American honor and American innocence are terms that recur as often as "realities" and "realpolitik," with which they consort oddly. The United States is said to have entered Vietnam "in innocence, convinced that the cruel civil war represented the

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35

volve ourselves" in the attempt. He preferred to try for an interim agreement to break the impasse and open the way to further advances. Thus originated the step-by-step process, to be dramatized by the Kissinger shuttle in the next term, that eventually achieved progress where none had been registered for 30 years.

In the end, however, although Russia and the Middle East may be more important for the future, it is Vietnam that is the test of the man and the statesman, and of his mark on American history. The necessity of American withdrawal having already been acknowledged by both candidates in 1968, the effort to negotiate terms that would save our face occupied Kissinger from the day he took office. The difficulty was that the Administration was bent on negotiating a withdrawal that would not look like deserting Saigon, that would not destroy the confidence of other peoples in America, that would "offer a fair and equitable settlement to all," in short, that would make America look good — all of which was a contradiction in terms with the fact of withdrawal. Under domestic protest, withdrawal had already begun while negotiations were under way, which amounted to a signal to Hanoi that it did not have to meet American terms. A beligerent does not have to negotiate "fair and equitable" terms with an enemy on his way out who has given up the goal of victory.

Throughout the interminable talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, Kissinger kept rediscovering that Hanoi did not want a compromise settlement, that Hanoi "had no intention of withdrawing its own forces" from the South, that Hanoi "would be satisfied only with

victory," that, in short, good terms from our point of view were unobtainable. The only bargaining lever left to us was to make continuation of the war a greater risk to Hanoi than a settlement would be. Hence the bombing and the offensive against North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. Military action was not pursuit of a military solution but an argument by force that would bring Hanoi to an agreement to leave Saigon in place and allow the United States to depart looking strong.

The failure of creative policy was the failure to consider that confidence in America meanwhile was not being furthered by the spectacle of our military impotence in a guerrilla war in Asia. A great role in foreign affairs could have been played by an adviser who could have brought us to a withdrawal on the basis that we had done all we could or ought to do for Saigon and that its ultimate survival depended on itself, or otherwise would be valueless, as indeed it proved. Kissinger lacked the imagination and, doubtless, the influence for that solution. In the end, Christmas bombing and all, after four years' talk at a cost of 19,000 more American lives and untold more lives and destruction in Vietnam, the terms obtained were no better than might have been obtained at the start. The four years of additional death and devastation were a waste.

Kissinger acknowledges none of this. Even less does he understand the domestic dissent of the time, although it is a constant theme in the book and clearly the factor that most deeply disturbed him. He treats it as a perverse opposition that, by encouraging Hanoi to stall, frustrated his negotiations. He quotes The Wall Street Journal statement that "Americans

want an acceptable exit from Indochina, not a deeper entrapment" and The New York Times statement that bitter experience had "exhausted the credulity of the American people and Congress" and The Milwaukee Journal statement that "If [the South Vietnamese] can't stand on their own feet now it is too late. The U.S. can no longer stand the internal frustrations and disruptions that the bloody, tragic and immoral war is costing," but he does not absorb the message. His comment is that the national debate was "engulfed in mass passion," not that it was telling him something he should have listened to. Apropos of the Congressional vote to terminate action in Cambodia that finally blocked the Executive in 1973, he writes that Cambodia was the victim of "the breakdown of our democratic political process," when in fact what was taking place was the functioning, not the breakdown, of that process. It is unsafe to have high office filled by someone who does not know the difference.

Kissinger complains that "we faced a constant credibility gap at home" and that he could have succeeded "if the public had trusted our goals," but he never traces any connection between the public's lack of trust and the acts and policies of the Administration he represented. He has no inkling of the concomitant damage: that the cost of playing tough may come too high; that a foreign policy that alienates one's countrymen and causes dislike and distrust of government is not worth what it might gain against the adversary; that a nation's strength lies ultimately in its self-esteem and confidence in what is right; and that whatever damages these damages the nation. ■

## Vivante

*Continued from Page 15*

the strengths and weaknesses of New Yorker stories generally. The dangers here are those of preciousness and attenuation, and a too-uniform tastefulness. In "Of Love and Friendship," a man with a passion for studying lichens communicates his enthusiasm to the narrator, who, in turn, offers an elegant de-

scription of lichens, then in-tones: "How did nature manage to be so unerringly tasteful?" Nature, as portrayed in "Run to the Waterfall," is unerringly tasteful, and this strikes me as sentimental and untrue.

But having duly noted the perils of exquisiteness, it is important to reiterate how fine a writer Mr. Vivante is, how exacting his craftsmanship, and how tender and luminous his perception of people and the world around him. The impres-

sion left by so many of these stories is best captured by the author himself when speaking of his mother's letters: "'Reading them,' one critic wrote, 'it occurred to me that many of us ought to throw away the pen, which in our hands is a hoe and in hers a little April branch.' "

Mr. Vivante speaks very softly. Where everyone else is shouting, his voice might be easily lost.

His voice ought not to be lost. ■

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HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH 37

Kissinger:
The Imperial Self
In the Arena
Of History

WHITE HOUSE YEARS. By Henry Kissinger. Little, Brown. 1,521 pp. $22.50

By TOWNSEND HOOPES

IT HAS BEEN REMARKED THAT Henry Kissinger's life and career have progressed upward because he has been able, at each critical juncture, to transform himself into something else—to rise to each occasion, to meet each test of new circumstance and new opportunity. A traumatized teen-age refugee from the Nazis in the late 1930s, he was by 1945 the American sergeant in charge of a small town in occupied Germany, imposing the Allied will by manipulating the ingrained habit of former SS officers to obey orders. A frumpish, ponderous professor when he arrived in New York in the mid-1950s to write a book under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations, he emerged as a suave establishment figure, a special protégé and later a valued friend and adviser to Nelson Rockefeller. A man who had cuttingly criticized Richard Nixon, both publicly and privately, and was the object of special suspicion within the Nixon entourage, he became the one oasis of distinction in the desert of that mediocre and squalid administration.

With publication of the first volume of his memoirs—*White House Years*—Kissinger seems, at least in one sense, to have done it again. As a work of literature, this is an elegant and impressive book. One recalls the dense, convoluted, abstract prose of earlier Kissinger books, from which the reader could extricate himself only with the aid of a machete. Philip Moseley, director of the Russian Institute at Columbia, who edited Kissinger's *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy* for the Council on Foreign Relations, admitted to cutting it by a third in six weeks, and was sure he could have improved it further with more time. Kissinger was furious, but not at the time in a position to resist. In contrast, this book is a pleasure to read. The writing ranges from clean, sure narrative reporting to gemlike definitions of complicated diplomatic situations and philosophic observations that occasionally rise to the level of majesty. The reader is propelled by a powerful and lucid intelligence-sardonic, cynical, manipulative even when self-deprecating, yet always compelling. The encapsulated portraits of foreign leaders are sensitively observed and skillfully drawn (by comparison, most administration figures come off as thin and two-dimensional, confirming the truth that Kissinger's passion is diplomatic, not bureaucratic).

The piecemeal assessments of Richard Nixon that run through the book are often brilliant and telling. They praise Nixon for a sturdy capacity to make tough, unpopular decisions (usually, in Kissinger's view, "the right course"); more often they take note of the man gnawed by an ineradicable sense of inadequacy—as reflected in an inability to argue down his cabinet officers face-to-face, a tendency to elliptical instructions, a deep need for secretiveness and periodic withdrawal, a lack of social and physical graces and a consuming hunger to avenge numberless humiliations suffered at the hands of his "enemies." If some entering editor were to collect all of these fragments into one chapter or short book, the result might well be the most sensi-

(CONTINUED ON PAGE 8)

TOWNSEND HOOPES, former under secretary of the Air Force, is the author of *The Limits of Intervention* and *The Devil and John Foster Dulles*.

ILLUSTRATION FROM "21st CENTURY FOSS" (see New in Paperback on page 13)

## Books

**WHITE HOUSE YEARS.** By Henry Kissinger. Reviewed by Townsend Hoopes Page 1

**AS WE KNOW.** Poems by John Ashbery. Reviewed by Edmund White Page 4

**THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.** By Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Reviewed by Carolyn G. Heilbrun Page 4

**THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS.** By Elaine Pagels. Reviewed by Harold Bloom Page 5

**IN EVIL HOUR.** By Gabriel García Márquez. Reviewed by William Logan Page 5

**THE BOER WAR.** By Thomas Pakenham. Reviewed by Byron Farwell Page 10

**THE MOUNTAIN SPIRIT.** Edited by Michael Charles Tobias and Harold Drasdo. **CLIMBING IN NORTH AMERICA.** By Chris Jones. **HIGH AND WILD: A Mountaineer's World.** By Galen Rowell. Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle Page 11

**THE AMBUSH MURDERS: The True Account of the Killing of Two California Policemen.** By Ben Bradlee Jr. Reviewed by Jon R. Waltz Page 12

**ABORTING AMERICA.** By Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D. with Richard N. Ostling. Reviewed by Coleman McCarthy Page 14

## Features

**SCIENCE FICTION.** By Ron Goulart Page 7

**LITERARY CALENDAR FOR DECEMBER** Page 9

**WASHINGTON HARDCOVER BEST SELLERS** Page 12

**CURRENT AND CHOICE** Page 12

**WASHINGTON PAPERBACK BEST SELLERS** Page 13

**DAILY BOOK WORLD** Page 13

**NEW IN PAPERBACK** Page 13

**LETTER FROM NEW YORK.** By Leonore Fleischer Page 15

**BOOK BAG CONTEST** Page 15

EDITOR
BRIGITTE WEEKS

DESIGN EDITOR
K. FRANCIS TANABE

DEPUTY EDITOR
MICHAEL DIRDA

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BOOK WORLD

Vietnam war lay in Moscow, or possibly in Moscow and Peking. It lay in Hanoi. He thought India's intervention in East Pakistan and Syria's attack on Jordan were "proxy wars" waged for the benefit of Soviet policy. He was wrong. Undaunted, he continued to apply his global abstractions with disastrous consequences for Chile, where he secretly intervened to undo the wholly legal and constitutional election of a Chilean Communist, Salvador Allende. Kissinger was not faintly interested in Chile, per se, or gifted with any special insight as to how the Allende affair might have played out if left alone. He was interested only in applying the iron logic of his geopolitical theory, according to which Allende had the "patent intention" to achieve "Communism" which would involve "sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union." That was sufficient justification to throw a neighboring nation into the convulsions of a murderous military dictatorship.

The perils of infatuation with high-level abstractions seem most evident in the Kissinger effort to resolve the Vietnam war, which required four destructive years and consumed 500 pages of the book. Nixon and Kissinger found themselves in early agreement that considerations of national "honor" precluded a quick exit. As the situation evolved, it became evident that "honor" required no less than the permanent anchoring of a non-communist regime in South Vietnam. This was, to say the least, an astonishing conclusion to reach in 1969; it had been the goal of every U.S. Administration since 1954, and it had proven unrealizable even when 550,000 American troops were deployed in South Vietnam. Now total withdrawal of these troops was recognized as a domestic political necessity.

Two questions arise. First, why did Kissinger believe that "honor" prohibited an orderly strategic departure based on the assumption that, after training and equipping a South Vietnamese Army of more than 800,000 men over a period of 17 years, and after fighting fiercely with our own forces for four years, we had done all we could for Saigon? In a word, because "credibility" demanded it—and never mind that our NATO allies were long since convinced of the futility of the enterprise and worried that the United States was poorly deploying our military and political energies, quite possibly to their detriment; never mind that the Russians could only be comforted by persisting American failure on a far peninsula;

never mind the wasted years, the continuing large-scale loss of human life, the embittered divisions in American society growing deeper every day.

The second question is, what made Kissinger think he could pull it off, recognizing not only the domestic opposition and the relative fragility of the Saigon regime, but especially the "hatred and pathological distrust between the Vietnamese parties"? This last was proof positive against any genuine *modus vivendi*; it meant that the Kissinger "solution" accepted a state of permanent war between the parties, held in check only by a permanent readiness to apply American airpower whenever and wherever necessary to assure survival of Saigon. But was there in 1972 any real basis for the belief that Congress and the American people would support a permanent military commitment to South Vietnam, especially in a situation where the high probability was that it would have to be invoked frequently? The entire previous four years had been consumed by a savage struggle between Congress and the executive branch over the pace of our expansion from Vietnam and over the scale of our involvement in Cambodia; these contests had torn the social fabric to shreds; there was no resilience left in the body politic to accept new military commitments in Indochina.

Kissinger indicates his belief that the political resilience was in fact there. On that reading, his conclusion in the book that the subsequent eruptions of Watergate are to blame for the failure to realize the outcome he envisioned is largely an alibi for his own misjudgment. But there is another possibility that cannot be lightly dismissed. It is that, had there been no Watergate disclosures, Nixon would have tried to tough it out, insisting on his 1972 electoral "mandate," accepting even deeper and more disruptive domestic turmoil and planning to contain it by widespreadaretapping and similar measures designed to neutralize or suppress growing internal opposition. That readiness to violate the constitutional rights of citizens was the thrust of the 1970 White House surveillance plan (the so-called Huston Plan, which, despite formal cancellation, was in fact never fully repudiated). It would be surprising if this alternative had not occurred to Kissinger for whom "credibility" in Vietnam was close to a doctrinal imperative and whose career suggests a belief that it is possible to get away with almost anything if one is clever enough. ☐

HENRY KISSINGER WITH PRESIDENT NIXON IN 1972

PAGE 10

BOOK WORLD

NOVEMBER 23, 1979

The Washington Post
Annual
Education
Review

Sunday, January 6
in Book World

# The Boers: Battling The British Empire

THE BOER WAR. By Thomas Pakenham.
Random House. 718 pp. $20

By BYRON FARWELL

1899-1902) began
it battle pieces
ious wars, and
guerrilla war of the
ay. It was a con-
then at the
pride, and the
ly farmers, of
inch stock, who
South African
and the Orange
ish Cape Colony.
revotes nearly a
to the compli-
that led up to the
provoked but
right. The initial
ters and Britain
nders (foreign-
had come seek-
l fields of the
lifestyle cram-
customs of the
revolt in 1895.
magnate who
ster of the Cape
Leander Starr
tenant, was dis-
from the Cape
aal. The revolt
iders captured,
deterred, con-
the right to vote
e Transvaal leg-
Britain where
y for them, and
s High Commis-
sion the Boer presi-
dent of the
make conces-
sions to the compro-
mer, rec-

PHOTOGRAPH OF THE BOARS FROM THE BOOK.

turned to guerilla warfare and the war
went on for more than a year longer.

Pakenham's research is impressive. He
employed four research assistants and
he learned Afrikaans; his bibliography
and notes on sources cover 53 pages, in-
cluding more than 2,000 footnotes. He
searched diligently for letters and dia-
ries; he or an assistant interviewed 52 an-
cient veterans. Unfortunately, his exten-
sive research turned up surprisingly lit-
tle that is new, and his book is based
largely on published works.

In spite of his research team, there are
a number of curious mistakes regarding
the history and customs of the Victorian
British army. There are also some curi-
ous omissions. Pakenham says little
about the Boers who fought on the Brit-
ish side (a fifth of all the fighting burgh-
ers by the end of the war) or about the
prisoners of war. He also dismisses one
important battle, Stormberg, with a
short paragraph; later in a list of impor-

lacked strength. The author has misread
Milner's character.

As for his other themes, blacks played
a minor role in what was then called a
"white man's war." Both the Boers and
the British used them as laborers and
scouts; the British armed some, but used
them only as guards. Pakenham adds lit-
tle to what is already known about them.
The Boer women made a considerable
contribution to the war by keeping the
farms in operation and the Boer com-
mandos supplied with food and forage;
later they also suffered terribly in Brit-
ish "concentration camps," but these
trials have been described in previous
accounts.

The great weakness of this book is the
author's misreading of the characters
and abilities of the chief actors in the
drama. All historians have agreed that
Buller was one of the most incompetent
commanders in Victorian military his-
tory. Julian Sumons once said, "Nobody

# Dr Kissinger's illusions

## ENOCH POWELL

### THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS by Henry Kissinger.
Weidenfeld & Michael Joseph, 1,521 pp, £14·95.

For eight years from 1969 to 1977 Professor Kissinger of Harvard University was at Richard Nixon's right hand, first as Assistant for National Security Affairs, and then as Secretary of State. He has in less than three years thereafter delivered himself of the first of two volumes in which he bequeaths his memoirs of that period to posterity. If the second volume matches the first, the whole document will comprise 3,000 pages of text. It is a heavy book physically, as only American books can be, and dense in content, a running account day by day of "how it happened" to Henry Kissinger from start to finish.

I met Dr Kissinger briefly in London in 1966 after the United States was caught fast in the Vietnam quicksand, and upon his request for my view I replied: "Go on board ship" to which at the time he replied not at all, but subsequently wrote from America that I was not to assume from his silence that he necessarily disagreed. The following year I addressed his seminar at Harvard, and gained a considerable appreciation of the quickness and sensitivity of his mind.

To an English observer the appropriate title for his memoirs would be "A Professor at the Court of King Nixon." But then it is probably beyond the English imagination any way to comprehend how university professors—and other

sorts of non-politicians, totally unversed and inexperienced in the life and ways of government —can step straight into high office and public responsibility.

It is not so much that our sense for apprenticeship and hierarchy is offended. The trouble is that for Americans the expression "government of the people by the people," which to us appears a mere catch-phrase, is factual description: that anybody can be anything is part of the American idea of democracy, just as it was part of Athenian democracy that Cleon could be a leather-seller one day and a general commanding an expedition the next.

Henry Kissinger is not a Richard Crossman, who, while zestfully and professionally playing a leading role in politics and government, remained throughout essentially the don and philosopher, finding his highest satisfaction in academic contemplation and analysis of the scene. When Kissinger entered the White House, he left his Harvard seminar behind him.

His memoir belongs to the style of Caesar's "Commentaries" rather than that of Marcus Aurelius's "Reflections"; or, not to pitch the comparison too high, it would bear equation with that of Harold Macmillan and Harold

Wilson telling us what happened while they were Prime Ministers and how successful (on the whole) they had been. As a specimen, the conclusion of the passage on Kissinger's visit to Chou in 1971, to prepare the way for Nixon, will do as well as any:

> We had conducted one of the most comprehensive reviews of international relations in my diplomatic experience. In one giant step we had transformed our diplomacy. We had brought new flexibility to our foreign policy. We had captured the initiative and also the imagination of our own people. We had much farther to go, of course; but we had made a new departure and travelled some distance down the road.

Well, well; the transformation of the professor into the politician had certainly gone "some distance down the road." As the reader perseveres, he becomes more and more doubtful whether any vestiges of detachment or critical sense survived that transformation. It was Kissinger who negotiated and signed the USA's capitulation which ended the Vietnam war in January 1973—America's own "Treaty of Paris," 190 years later, if an Englishman may be permitted that sardonic comparison. Here is his epilogue upon it:

> We [Nixon and I, that is] had no illusions about Hanoi's long-term goals. Nor did we go through the agony of four years of war and searing nego-

> tations to achieve a "decent interval" for our withdrawal. We were determined to do our utmost to enable Saigon to grow in security and prosperity so that it could prevail in any political struggle. We sought not an interval before collapse but lasting peace with honour. But for the collapse of executive authority as a result of Watergate, I believe we would have succeeded.

That last sentence crowns the terrifying self-revelation. What? "No illusions"? Every word is saturated with illusion. Kissinger writes of his quondam patron, Nelson Rockefeller, that "he was quintessentially American in his unquenchable optimism; he could never imagine that wrong could not be righted, or that effort could not conquer obstacles in the way of honourable goals." Foreign-born though he is, Henry Kissinger is 100 per cent naturalised. And there was Nixon, according to Kissinger, "envisaging a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen friendships and give new hope to emerging nations. It was a worthy goal for America and mankind."

Heaven save us from such dreamers.

Continued from facing page

Kissinger

LC

By Lord Home

He set about assessing the "bargaining relationship." That study revealed that there was no horse-trading to be done. He could not use Taiwan. On the contrary, because America's opinion would not allow any dilution of their support for it, he was bound to conclude that the subject had to be by-passed.

This was, therefore, a case of approach by philosophic discussion of world affairs, and no two people were better equipped to do so. Chou En-lai was in Kissinger's opinion "one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met," and in the subtleties of diplomacy the two were admirably matched.

Kissinger, therefore, was ready to respond when it became clear that for Taiwan there was no rapid solution and that the other matters were "too trivial to provide an enduring relationship." The answer was to discuss fundamentals; "our perception of global and Asian affairs in a manner that clarified our purposes and perspective, and thereby bridged two decades of mutual ignorance."

Thus, in the upper air of philosophy, was the new relationship forged between the United States and the West and China which could yet change the world to face the direction of peace.

There is much more in the book. The strong action to save Jordan from invasion by Syria, assisted by Russian arms; the advantage taken of Sadat's break with Russia to sow the seed of co-existence between Egypt and Israel; the attempt which was unsuccessful to prevent war between India and Pakistan; the endless discussion on the limitation of arms.

In all these and more Dr Kissinger was totally involved, and the verdict must be that he deserves well of the free world.

NatWest
Bank

NatWest announced with effect from 19th November its Base Rate is from 15½% to 13½% per annum.

The basic Deposit Savings Account will be increased from 13½% to 15½%

THE HO

The Home

announce th

To 17%

["EVENING STANDARD, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1979-19", "[L]C", "# The twilight of Doctor Miracle", "## by MAX HASTINGS", "KISSINGER: Moved and excited by power.", "WAS it only seven, 10 years ago that the world greeted Dr Henry Kissinger as the maker of miracles, the walker on water, Dr Strangelove, the vain, smiling, German wizard who could bring Sadat and Meir to a disengagement agreement, Le Duc Tho to a peace treaty, the Russians to SALT, Nixon to China?", "Because his celebrity was so great his eclipse — even disgrace — left him far to fall. Left-wing authors have assailed his role in the destruction of Indochina. His place in the Nixonian world of wiretaps and ambition, ruthless pragmatism and paranoia about subordinate loyalty has been revealed, and has done him little honour.", "But today the first huge volume of Kissinger's memoirs is published*. In 1521 pages, covering the years from 1968 to 1972, we are reminded of the part this man played in shaping the world: There is little in the book to make us like him. But after reading it, it becomes very difficult to deny the power and reach, the perception and brilliance of the author.", "The book forcefully reminds us that Kissinger will be remembered as one of the giants of the age, whatever verdict history reaches on his use a Good Book of power.", "He opens with a moving insight on the last days of Lyndon Johnson. Already named as Nixon's Special Adviser, he was summoned to the White House to meet the outgoing President, nursing his bitterness and defeat:", "> \"I have only one piece of advice: give you professor\", he said, and I leaned forward to profit from the distilled wisdom of decades of the columnists' advice. He added, 'and if you call a member of your staff thoughtful, deplorable, friendly, friendly,

(L)

in Paris in February 1969 on Nixon's first
visit to Europe, de Gaulle greeted Henry
Kissinger with the query: "Why don't you
believe, I'm sudden withdrawal might give
us a credibility problem?" "Where?"

Twice in this book, which covers his
Assessment for National Security Affairs,
for the Nixon Administration, was similar
expression of policy not as a collapse,
an historical analogies are rarely applied,
and this one is no exception. De Gaulle
crossed over to Algeria the acute danger of
right wing military takes over and the
risk of constant knowledge that eventually
pied no doors. Nixon had to make all to
make sure salvage limitations on his room for
enormous negotiations.

In liquidating the Algerian war de
Gaulle was criticised for going too slow and
too fast. Winston Horne in *A Savage War
of Peace*, a brilliant term fig on the Algerian
war, says de Gaulle "suffered" in the lesson
not learned by Kissinger in Vietnam,
or perhaps by the Israelis vis-à-vis the
Arab world—namely that peoples who have
been humbled for their independence for a
century, fighting for it for a generation,
can afford to sit out a presidential election,
a year or two in the life of an old man in a
hurry."

"In 1969 President Nixon inherited over
half a million American troops in Vietnam
and 31,000 had died there. Kissinger writes
"It seemed to me important for America
not to be humiliated, not to be shattered,
but to leave Vietnam in a manner that
demonstrates that protesters might later see as
dignity and self respect". Yet by 1969 was
there any longer an effective American
culture of leaving Vietnam?

Henry Kissinger's book is sadly but
Nixon's overshadowed by the United
States involvement in Vietnam and Cam-
making and finishes on a note of hope
with the initiating just after President
Nixon's Second inaugural on January 23,
1972, the truer and Le Duc Tho of the
Paris Agreement on the越戰停战
the restoring peace in Vietnam. But the
book's words will know that with the initial
press enthusiasm for the agreement and
the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the
two negotiators the resumed bombi-
ing of Cambodia in February the fall of
President Lon Nol in April 1975 the
entry of the Khmer Route to Phnom
Penh. Then in December 1978 the invasion
of Cambodia by the Vietnamese. In 1979
we see the terror and tragedy of a
devastated region. Words like honour,
dignity, self respect or even crediting
hollow when seen against the present
day destruction of what was Cambodia as
well as South Vietnam. To William Shaw-
Cross in *Sideshows: Kissinger, Nixon and
the Destruction of Cambodia*, "Nixon and
United States nor their friends nor those who
are caught helplessly in their embrace are
well served when its leaders act, as Nixon
Kissinger has said, and, without care. Cam-
bodia was not more harmful. It was a crime.
The world is diminished by the experience."

To Henry Kissinger by April 21, 1970 when Hanoi was the National United Front of Cambodia's radio broadcast an appeal to over-throw Lon Nol over the Viet Minh and the Viet
radio the basic issue had been laid bare
"it was whether Vietnamization was
to be merely an alibi for an American
warfare and a serious strategy designed to
achieve a honourable peace. If the
former, neither the rate of withdrawal nor
events in neighbouring countries were
important", he writes. "My intellectual
difficulties arose with those who pre-
tended that there was a middle course of
action that would avoid collapse in Viet-
nam and yet ignore the impending com-
unist takeover in Cambodia."

This is a fair summary of the position
and the critics are wrong to the extent that
there is freedom of choice in reacting
to the events in Cambodia that April. The
Administration was by then gravely cir-
cumscribed being 15 months a
strategy which had as its central pillar
the proposition that if the Vietnamese
would not negotiate seriously then the
United States would use maximum
pressure and wait for military progress to
force negotiations. It is fair, too, for
Kissinger to point out as he does
repeatedly in the book that a negotiated
settlement of 1969 was the objective of
the vast majority of American opinion
would be through of American policy and
politicians and pundits. Liberal America
had never faced up to the situation which
became clear from the secret negotiations
with Le Duc Tho that there was no chance

for balanced negotiations over Cambodia
or Vietnam. The Vietnamese wanted vic-
new front.

Some in the Administration recognizing
that the bombing of Cambodia was a
threshold decision urged that a distinc-
tion should be made between shallow cross-
country penetration and deep penetration
retary who was consistently at odds with
politician apart from Nixon in the inner
operations and wanted only shallow cross
border rather than American troops. Since
Laird was also the strongest supporter of
Vietnamization he may have known the risks
of not attacking deeply. Cambodia for
some out of Vietnam fast, and foresaw the
gathering domestic political storm.

It had been made in April 1970 was to
realize that a basic strategy was itself
too weakly flushed, that the strategy could
be anything other than a short term
leap to cover an American withdrawal and
the eventual collapse of South Vietnam.
By leaving the war into a neutral world,
a was sufficiently brutal manifestation of
the hopeless nature of the struggle to
have stimulated a rekindling.

But it would have required great
great care for Nixon in particular to have
eliminated himself even in 1969 to a policy
of Vietnamization was no more than an
alibi for American withdrawal—by 1970
it was almost impossible.

If Kissinger had aligned himself with
Cambodia with Laird and Rogers, Nixon
might have ended differently, but I doubt
the confidence of Nixon necessary to pur-
pose tirelessly a negotiating strategy, two
years later a settlement providing for a
rescue in Vietnam and the return of
prisoners. It provided for Nixon a poli-
cial exit but did little for American
credibility.

That credibility had for most countries
been steadily eroded over eight years and
ultimately not been enhanced by the
spectacle of American rearing itself apart
in a bitter domestic dispute resulting in
such a deterioration in the standards of
the foundation for Watergate. Kissinger, like
Nixon, all too frequently judged the
credibility of United States in terms of
the virility of their own decision
making. The credibility of a nation formed
from more than the sum of its actions but
reflects its attitudes, its morale, its inner
peace. De Gaulle's initial question posed
the real choice: was going out of
Vietnam quickly and cutting one's losses,
or meant separating credibility from
vitality.

Foreign policy throughout the period
1969-73 will be seen to be readied by inter-
agency rivalries and personality clashes
between in particular Kissinger in the
White House and Rogers, Secretary of
State, and Laird, Secretary of Defence.
This phenomenon endless bickering does
little to establish his authority as the man in
to which United States policy is formed and
tivity that policy. Yet despite this considerable
diplomatic achievements
not attained over the period.

In the course with the Soviet Union,
the central issue of any United States

After reading 'Sideshow'
by Wm Shawcross

Old man on a cow,
old man on a cow;
got no clothes on;
got no clothes on;
got no hope now,
got no hope now;
cow just goes on,
cow just goes on;
poor
old
man:
"Yah!"

Christopher Logue.

foreign policy that Kissinger reveals his
flair and distinction. Ever since his book,
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, he
had been recognised as an authority on
nuclear strategy. For a person with which
a formidable intellectual background and
a grasp of Soviet realities to be
charged as carrying through the first
Salt negotiations an enlightened choice
for which President Nixon deserves great
credit.

The book reveals interesting insights
into Kissinger's negotiating strategies and
the development of the vital back channel
with Ambassador Dobynski. A letter
by Kissinger gives an excellent summary
of the controversial, though if it is only
applied essential, doctrine of linkage. "I
am convinced that the great issuing-man
between specific elements of one or
another issue or between tactical one
of two we might elect to take". I believe
that that would be the leaders should be brought
to understand that they cannot expect to
read the benefits of cooperation in one
area while seeking to take advantage of
tension or confrontation elsewhere."

While Kissinger did achieve effective
limiting terms of Soviet restraint over
the Middle East was less successful
over Vietnam where the barriers would not
prestitute. Yet they revealed how second-
ary they saw Vietnam when they did not
cancel Nixon's visit to Moscow in May
1972. The mining and bombing of
the North. A sophisticated Soviet
response demonstrating the limitations of
linkage.

The professionals will argue over
Kissinger's negotiating techniques for
decades. "I always tried to determine
the most realistic outcome and then
get there rapidly. But two moves,
This was derided as a strategy of pre-
emptive concession," by those who like
to make their moves in dribbles and at
the last moment. But I consider that
strategic primarily for placating
bureaucracies and of course consciences."

An ardent critic of the strategy and
diplomatic appeasement there are on many
pages splendidly barbed comments about the
peculiar habits of the bureaucracy in
influencing decisions. Besides a positive
liking for Secretary Kissinger and Nixon
were driven by the Washington machine to confine infor-
tion to a very small circle. This restric-
tion of the circle, however necessary,
limits great problems for the sensible
conduct of State Department business and
for relations with allies. But if President
Nixon's visit to China had not been
negotiated in total secrancy the subsequent
lobbing against the consequential
press clarifications could have
jeopardised Chinese cooperation.

The new China policy was potentially
deeplyayanetic in the United States
and perhaps only Nixon could have
achieved so wide an acceptance for it. It
meant a dramatic recognition of China's
emergence as a potential super power and
it must be one of the great events of the
Nixon Presidency.

Henry Kissinger has written a book
daunting in its detail but revealing in its
range. It is a book written by a man who
still has to be once again Secretary of
State and at times this shows through
in various asides about contemporary
issues. It is excruciatingly flattering in
its pen portraits of the world's leaders, dead
as a door. But it is at times defensive
and in tone, but it has sharts of self-
depreciation and will also have the publication
of the next volume it will be easier to
make an overall assessment of the man
and his policies.

The White House Years will always be
associated with global intellectual
analysis with substance achievements in
relation to the Soviet Union and with the
complex negotiations over Salt and the
Imagination of the interim Middle East
demonstrating that agreement. But it also
cannot be avoided that he will be
associated, apart from Cambodia, with
serious errors in supporting for too long
white racialism in Southern Africa, in
manipulating Latin America, particularly
Allenstein, and for neglect over Cyprus. Yet
when the overall balance was shifted Henry
Kissinger, despite mistakes and the inevitable
controversy that comes to any man who
has a mind of his own and is prepared
to history. For on the major issue concerning
the Soviet Union and the delicate balance
of power which determines our survival
he is shown to be careful, clear-headed,
constrained and consistent.

The White House Years is published
by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and
Michael Joseph today at £14.95.

C Times Newspapers Ltd, 1979