Perspective

"PEACE IS
AT HAND...."

Henry Kissinger

by David Landau

As this is being written, the war has entered another one of its ominous lulls. The raids above the 20th parallel have stopped, and negotiations have resumed in Paris. The White House has spread the impression that the other side will give in and negotiate "seriously." Even so, the likelihood is that the new talks have come about not through a "signal" from the North but rather through the President's desire to assuage Congress, to appear interested in serious compromise and thus head off a new debate on Capitol Hill as to whether there should be an end of funding for the war.

Very few people clearly understood the proposed agreement that Kissinger described on October 26—a circumstance which enabled the White House to get away with its charade. The nine-point draft was not a hard-and-fast set of terms, but rather a vague statement of principle which left many of the central issues unresolved. As Kissinger himself acknowledged, the nine points were based on a separation of military and political matters; in that way, each side could set aside certain of its fixed objectives and "agree not to agree" on the irreconcilable differences of *principle* that had fueled the war.

On the central issue, political power in the South, Hanoi and the NLF were dropping their long-standing insistence that Nguyen Van Thieu be removed before a settlement was signed; the U.S., in turn, would not demand that Thieu remain in power for any period of time longer than roughly 90 days. The political arrangements in the South would be ambiguous; if Thieu were later to be overthrown, Washington could say that the old Saigon regime, and Saigon alone, was to

blame. And if the U.S. carried out its promised withdrawal, along with its tacit pledge not to commit itself further to the maintenance of the Saigon regime, Hanoi and the NLF were sure at some time in the future to realize their own long-standing goal: the removal of Thieu and the birth of an independent, united Vietnam.

Perhaps the most cynical and quietly brutal fact of the Nixon Administration's Vietnam policy is that, for all the violence it has perpetrated, the Administration has never been especially interested in the ultimate fate of the Thieu regime. This is not to deny the American President's considerable admiration of his South Vietnamese counterpart; it is just that Nixon and Kissinger, cold-blooded pragmatists that they are, have long understood privately that Thieu is a lonely, isolated figure in his own country and that no American military effort worth the undertaking can alter that essential reality. The private U.S. negotiating position, conceived jointly by Nixon and Kissinger and promulgated in Paris since 1969, is that there need only be a "decent interval" between any U.S. withdrawal and what is acknowledged to be the inevitable collapse of the Saigon regime. The problem with the decent interval is that the other side, with good reason, has never felt confident enough of U.S. trustworthiness to accept it.

The decent interval is more than anything else a cosmetic device to disguise a fundamental failure of U.S. policy. It has been pursued first in the hope that, if realized, it would make America's allies in other areas of the world less afraid that Washington will stand aside when their turns arrive to be swallowed by the Communist giants. But more fundamentally, even as Vietnam itself may be lost, the decent interval has been intended to redeem the Vietnam experience, to exonerate all the judgments and intentions which brought it about. Whatever their private doubts

and failures, the public behavior of a generation of U.S. officials would stand vindicated for all the world to see. No wonder Hanoi has been reluctant to negotiate on this basis. If America is so foolish as not to acknowledge a plain mistake, might it not seek, after a settlement, to turn its decent interval into a form of permanent victory, the fullest possible vindication of its efforts?

Some critics of the war—notably I. F. Stone—find it implausible that Nixon and Kissinger are seeking this "decent interval" as opposed to a "real victory" in Vietnam. But the weight of evidence—Kissinger's private statements to dozens of colleagues and diplomats, Nixon's repeated public declarations that U.S. policy seeks to give Saigon a "reasonable" as distinct from total opportunity to survive, etc., etc.—inclines heavily toward the interval. Moreover, in supposing that the White House seriously believes it can win a military victory, these critics grossly underestimate what is most pathological in the Administration's policy: the Quixotic thirst for "honor and prestige." The point is quite simply that, as a negotiating position, the decent interval is every bit as outrageously cynical as the demand for total surrender. Since 1969, Hanoi has justifiably viewed it as surrender in another form.

The most blatant operational defect of the decent interval has been that it can be negotiated only under conditions of extreme secrecy. For that reason, the interval idea has never gained any concrete expression even in private U.S. proposals, because those proposals, if accepted, were inevitably to become public. Hence the interval could only be explained "informally" to the other side in the private meetings, while the concrete proposals themselves demanded far more humiliating concessions from Hanoi and the NLF, such as withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the South and the Communists' acquiescence in a rigged re-election of the Thieu regime. Regardless of substance, the other side

14 RAMPARTS
March 1973

PHOTOS BY GHISLAIN BELLORGET

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had long, and justly, regarded even the rhetoric of such a settlement as unacceptable; in the circumstances of this war, rhetoric assumes a force and reality all its own, and by paying even lip service to the U.S. demands the NLF would have lost far more than a few months' time and prestige: its entire movement could have eroded, and with that erosion, its chances of success in the struggle for control of the South would have disappeared. Since 1969, the White House had not once grasped or deigned to acknowledge this essential fact: the other side would never accept a treaty which conferred on Thieu any title, however empty, as the legitimate head of state in South Vietnam.

Only with this background in mind can we properly understand what allowed the negotiations to reach high pitch in October and then caused them to collapse two months later. By all accounts, the bargaining began in earnest when Hanoi agreed to drop its

demand that Thieu be removed before substantive talks took place. Clearly, the other side was influenced by what it perceived as a forthcoming Nixon landslide, and decided in late summer to strike the best available compromise with Washington so that the U.S. would withdraw and the war would not continue at the same frightful level for four more years. Yet they would settle only if the final agreement were to leave the political future of the South completely ambiguous; only if, in other words, the U.S. were correspondingly willing to drop its demand to perpetuate the Saigon regime.

Since the U.S. position had long contemplated the eventual overthrow of Saigon, the way toward a negotiated agreement was open at last—or so it seemed to Nixon and Kissinger. The nine points were worked out in Paris, providing for U.S. withdrawal, omitting mention of Hanoi's troops in the South, permitting Thieu to remain in power but establishing a joint political

body—the National Council of Reconciliation and Concord—to assume many vital governmental functions, including the all-important mandate to set up elections for a new government. With some perfunctory tidying up—American POWs to be released immediately, Vietnamese prisoners to be freed by negotiated agreement, within roughly 90 days—Kissinger could almost have declared with justice that “peace is at hand.”

But not quite. Kissinger and the President had not yet enunciated the vital concessions. Despite the obvious steps toward compromise, which had been made and acknowledged by Hanoi, the White House was still saying that no corresponding adjustments had been made in Washington. It did not want to “admit” any failure. In his October 26 news conference, Kissinger described the nine points not as a compromise pact but as a virtual surrender

by the North: "We believe that an agreement is within sight on the May 8 proposals of the President and some adaptations of our January 25 proposals, which is just to all parties." These two sets of proposals had both been made to Hanoi in the President's characteristically insulting fashion—one along with Nixon's self-serving disclosure of Kissinger's secret talks with Le Duc Tho (talks which both sides had pledged to keep secret) and the second along with Nixon's announcement that North Vietnam's waters were being mined. Each set of proposals had earlier been loudly rejected by the other side. And yet here was Kissinger telling the nation that the North Vietnamese were willing to settle on precisely those terms!

Kissinger's arrogance was so enormous that at one point in his October announcement he singled out by name the head of government in Hanoi, Pham Van Dong, and accused him of failing to understand precisely what

the agreement contained:

> "There were certain ambiguities that were raised by the interview that the North Vietnamese Prime Minister, Pham Van Dong, gave to one of the weekly journals in which he seemed to be, with respect to one or two points, under a misapprehension as to what the agreement contained, and at any rate we would like to have that clarified.

> "There are linguistic problems in which, for example, we call the National Council of Reconciliation an administrative structure in order to make clear that we do not see it as anything comparable to a coalition government. We want to make sure that the Vietnamese text conveys the same meaning...."

Linguistics problems indeed! The issue in contention here was nothing less than the central matter of dispute

in a twelve-year war. In an interview given to *Newsweek* magazine, Pham Van Dong made clear his government's position that the National Council of Reconciliation would act as a "three-sided coalition of transition" and would serve as the primary authority in setting up elections for a new government. Thieu could participate—a clear concession on Hanoi's part—but his own authority on the matter of elections would be subservient to that of the Council as a whole. Yet Kissinger depicted the Council as a virtually powerless adjunct to an unchanged Thieu regime; he referred to the Council as "an institutionalization of the election commission that we proposed on Jan. 25 in our plan." There was a major discrepancy brewing here, not to be written off as a technical or linguistic problem, and not minimized by Kissinger's rather indelicate suggestion that the North Vietnamese head of state was misinformed as to what his own representatives had negotiated with the U.S.

A number of complications were emerging. If the October agreement was to work, each side would have to be as inexplicit as possible about political arrangements in the South. Only in this manner could there possibly be a negotiated agreement that was "just to all parties." It is also clear, if one is to draw any sensible conclusion from Hanoi's repeated clamoring after October 26 that the agreement was complete and should be signed, that the two sides had concurred in private to leave ambiguous any treatment of sensitive political issues. Yet in his statements on October 26, Kissinger was still behaving as if Hanoi had made all the major concessions and had consented to sign a treaty based on the U.S. position. In other words, Kissinger had agreed privately to one version and then publicly disclosed another version that was rhetorically much different, tougher on Hanoi and more favorable to the U.S. As the subsequent lapse of the negotiations suggested, this rhetorical indulgence became, as it inevitably would, an irreconcilable difference on a matter of the greatest possible substance. Despite the possibility of an agreement, Kissinger was still acting "honorably," striving to mask any hint or evidence of a major concession on

Washington's part. An informed reading of Kissinger's October 26 news conference would have revealed that, far from an impending agreement, the collapse of the negotiations had already been foretold.

Kissinger's open insult of Pham Van Dong would itself have provided ample reason to discount his recklessly optimistic statement that "peace is at hand." But there were other reasons as well: Kissinger has long been a proverbial optimist on this very subject, and has been proclaiming wrongly since 1969, to a variety of private audiences, that an agreement was in the offing, that all he and the President needed was a breathing spell of three to six months to bring the situation under control. Time and again, Kissinger has repeated this assessment to the Washington press corps in his now well-known "background briefings," those sessions with newsmen whose ground rules are that Kissinger cannot be named and that his words cannot be directly quoted. What was unique about Kissinger's performance of October 26 was not his prediction of an imminent peace but the fact that his prediction was made publicly. Every accredited White House correspondent was aware of that fact, yet ignored the tell-tale evidence that Kissinger was again misinforming the press.

As importantly, Kissinger (along with, for that matter, Nixon) had long espoused the notion that lies and deception of the public are legitimate and indeed necessary tools of statesmanship. Kissinger's own application of this long-venerated principle has never been as intense and protracted as in his conduct of the Vietnam negotiations. In a background briefing after the invasion of Cambodia, Kissinger went so far as to acknowledge that systematic deception lay at the very heart of the Administration's Vietnam policy: "We have to convince the American people that we will pull out our troops, but we have to convince Hanoi that the withdrawal is not independent of their actions, so that they have an incentive to negotiate." Tell Hanoi one thing, and then tell America another. Kissinger did just that on October 26.

None of this, needless to say,

received very much notice amid the euphoria produced by Kissinger's much-heralded "virtuoso" briefing on the Paris talks. This particularly striking appearance by Kissinger, a man who does not frequently offer himself up for any measure of public scrutiny, was an instant smash hit. The flashing of his imp-like form and his Teutonic voice across the nation's great airways was an event unprecedented in this Administration, and it engulfed the White House in torrents of praise and adulation. The nine-point agreement spelled out by Kissinger, intoned in the *New York Times*, "represents a truly remarkable achievement for the tireless professor-turned-diplomat. He deserves the thanks of the nation." The *Times*' great figurehead, James Reston, weighed in with his approval when he observed, in a passage that must have warmed Henry's heart, that "the efforts of Dr. Kissinger in these last few months will make one of the most intriguing chapters in the long and chequered history of American diplomacy." The covers of the major newsweeklies were adorned with the slogans "The Shape of Peace" and "Good-by Vietnam." Even the President's most eloquent critics were dumbfounded and fooled. Speaking in Iowa City a few hours after Kissinger's proclamation, all George McGovern could do was to stammer, "The question that haunts my mind this afternoon, Mr. Nixon, is why did you take four years to end this tragic war?" It was more than a week after the October 26 news conference that McGovern realized the President "has no plan for ending this war."

In another sense, however, Nixon *did* have a plan, it appears, to end the war. It is the same plan to which he and Kissinger have clung so ferociously during their four years of abusing negotiations and inflicting daily violence on the other side; it is a plan, in other words, which will never work, a plan to impose an agreement by force. There is no sign whatever that Nixon and Kissinger for one moment abandoned this tortured logic, even during the "peace is at hand" days of last fall. Despite his own proclamation, Kissinger well knew that matters of substance remained to be resolved after October 26, because he understood that the President was not fully satis-

fied with the nine-point draft as it stood in its ambiguous form. (To imagine that Kissinger could not have known this, and that he was duped by the President, as many admirers of Kissinger have recently done, is grossly to miscalculate the remarkable nature of Kissinger's own bureaucratic guile.) Yet Kissinger himself never particularly realized the impossibility of clearing Nixon's proposed changes with the other side; here he was victimized by the same blind faith in the power of the United States and in the irresistible persuasiveness of his own negotiating abilities which had caused him to predict wrongly since 1969 that the war would end soon.

Kissinger's statement of October 26, it seems, was another in a long line of White House ploys, albeit the most spectacular to date, of forcing the other side to give in on U.S. terms. By exaggerating the progress that had been made in the talks, Kissinger would insure the President's re-election. Then, in a position to threaten Hanoi with a four-year continuation of the war, Kissinger would be able to win the necessary, final concessions from the other side. (Forseeing this possibility, Hanoi had earlier insisted on an October 31 deadline for the signing of a treaty, to no avail.) Peace, then, really *would* be at hand. The claim as Kissinger made it on October 26 was deceptive and misleading. Yet as Kissinger probably saw it, he was simply engaging in his own brand of justified deception, the necessary means to a virtuous end. At a deeper level, the level at which Kissinger prefers to see himself as an earnest and sincere man, the statement was not merely a lie. It was meant to be its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

The strategy took shape when Kissinger returned to Paris in late November. The U.S. toughened its position and reverted to its rigid negotiation stance of earlier years. There were two Vietnams; Hanoi must cease support of the NLF even as Washington continued its assistance to Saigon; this was to be no makeshift solution, but, as Kissinger would announce, "a peace that had a chance of lasting." These changes in the U.S. position became evident when Kissinger re-appeared before the press

RAMPARTS 17

on December 16 to explain the col-
lapse of the Vietnam negotiations; this
he did, of course, by placing the full
blame on Hanoi. Regardless, it was
clear that Washington, not Hanoi, had
backtracked from the October docu-
ment. The ambiguities about political
power in the South would have to be
removed if the treaty were to be
signed: "... we wanted some refer-
ence in the agreement, however allu-
sive, however indirect, which would
make clear that the *two parts of Viet-
nam* would live in peace with each
other and that neither side would
impose its solution on the other by
force." Despite a prior U.S. pledge to
cease interference in the internal
affairs of Vietnam, Kissinger an-
nounced that Washington was still
committed to a non-Communist gov-
ernment in Saigon: "... we will not
make a settlement which is a disguised
form of continued warfare and which
brings about, by indirection, what we
have always said we would not toler-
ate." Kissinger even went so far as to
say that Hanoi must refrain from any
involvement, political or military, in
South Vietnam: "... we cannot
accept the proposition that North
Vietnam has a right of constant inter-
vention in the South." These were
formidable changes indeed; and,
according to Xuan Thuy, speaking
recently on ABC's *Issues and Answers*,
Kissinger threatened Hanoi at the end
of the November session that the war
would be re-escalated if, when the
talks resumed, the changes were not
accepted. At the December session,
Hanoi followed suit and began to back
away from the agreed-on document—
standard diplomatic procedure when
the other party to negotiations had
already done the same—and that, in
turn, led to Kissinger's undiplomatic
assertion of December 16 that because
of the other side's obstinancy "one
frivolous issue after another was raised
in the last three days."

What the President and Kissinger
had done, in effect, was to seek a
lengthening of the decent interval, to
demand a reversion to their long-
standing position that the interval
must be more than a few months. In
the October agreement, the political
issues were left to be resolved by the
contending sides in the South in nego-
tiations which were said would take

about 90 days. That arrangement
provided an interval of perhaps six
months—a shorter interval than
Washington had ever before accepted.
Yet after the election, by demanding
that Hanoi recognize the sovereignty
of the South and cease all open aid to
the NLF, Washington sought to rein-
state an interval of several years' time
by confining its opponent to under-
ground tactics and by forcing him to
seek circuitously a goal which, on
paper, he would already have re-
nounced. That is precisely the position
which Washington had taken four
years ago and ever since refused to
compromise. It had repeatedly been
refused by Hanoi because an interval
of years clearly ceases, in military and
political terms, to be an interval at all;
it is merely an abbreviated form of
permanent victory for the United
States, and, for the other side, a crush-
ing defeat. For these reasons, it is no
surprise the negotiations are in ruins.

A
week or so after the October
26 announcement, Kissinger
remarked to Oriana Fallaci, the
Italian journalist, "I'm not disappoint-
ed. I should be, certainly, were Hanoi
... to refuse to discuss any alterations.
But, no, I can't believe it. I can't even
suspect that we've come so far only to
fail on a matter of prestige, of pro-
cedures, of dates, of nuances." One of
Kissinger's greatest failures all along
has been to ignore the fact that pres-
tige, procedure and nuance are matters
crucial to the settlement of the war
from both sides' point of view. After
all, it is not Hanoi that has been
performing a charade in Vietnam
during the past four years, not Hanoi
which has inflicted violence on mil-
lions in pursuit of something it knows
it cannot have; the North has been
fighting for its life in this war, and it is
the United States which is exclusively
guilty of prolonging the war on
grounds of what it calls prestige. It is
dubious that America's present con-
duct in Vietnam, rather than uncondi-
tional withdrawal, has better served
the U.S. image abroad. And it is clear
that the Kissinger negotiating strategy
has failed to extricate the U.S. from
the war "honorably," even on its own
terms of honorability. If allowed to
pursue their policy unchecked, the
President and Kissinger will bring not

peace with honor but only escalation
and endless war.

But at the heart of their policy lies
an even greater misperception, a fail-
ure which has been much more funda-
mental than their inability to devise a
workable negotiating position on the
war. That is their view that this war
could somehow have been ended in a
manner that justified its origins and
upheld its rectitude. For despite all
that has happened, the President and
Kissinger will not hear of the fact that
Vietnam has exposed something very
wrong and very ugly about American
society, that the war's immense disrup-
tive effect on the lives of the Vietnam-
ese and of our own country cannot be
dismissed with a rapid diplomatic
sleight of hand. Nixon and Kissinger
have not been alone in that failure;
most Americans have shared in it as
well. How many of us have persistent-
ly demanded that our leaders treat the
war in an honest and open fashion?
How many of us have objected to the
notion that American honor can some-
how be salvaged with the appearance
of a victorious departure from Viet-
nam? How many of us have dared say
that an American victory in the war
would be the worst possible outcome
of all, that the crushing of a national
liberation movement in Vietnam and
the rigidifying of America's imperial
impulse in other areas of the globe can
only contribute to the disintegration
of world peace? In spite of his mani-
fold failures, the press continues to
hail Henry Kissinger as a diplomatic
wizard; while Vietnam stands at the
brink of complete physical destruc-
tion, we still suffer gladly the delusion
that American honor can be salvaged
from the wreckage. It is primarily
Nixon's and Kissinger's failure, but it
could not have been sustained for so
long without the assent and co-opera-
tion of most of America. And that has
been the most monstrous failure of all.

—January 6, 1973

18 RAMPARTS

New Statesman 2 March 1973

299

puts much greater strain on the political leadership and on the cohesion of the non-communist countries'.

It is a measure of Kissinger's distrust of the Soviets that the kind of arguments he has used to 'prove' that they will invariably follow a strategy of 'maximum pressure' against the West have not changed for the past 14 years; views which are argued in detail in his academic writings from the early Sixties onwards are also to be found in a more fragmented and less coherent form (thus the failure of most of the press to grasp their full significance) in many of the briefings and backgrounders he has given during the past four years. These veteran arguments have therefore survived such development as the full emergence of the Sino-Soviet split, the fall of Khrushchev and the emergence of Brezhnev, as well as any number of supposed détements between the Soviet Union and the West. It is perhaps with such doctrinal inflexibility in mind that one of his Harvard colleagues described Kissinger as 'more hard line on the Soviet Union than anyone else who has ever gone to Washington from here'.

Some of these arguments are concerned with the behaviour of the Soviet Communist Party as an institution, others with the mentality of individual Soviet leaders. Kissinger believes that the Soviet Communist Party has an interest in creating tension abroad which has more to do with a sense of its own weakness within the Soviet Union than with any conviction about foreign affairs. 'In an advanced industrial country,' Kissinger argues, 'there really isn't any role for the Communist Party, which is not needed to run the government, which is not needed to run the economy, and which therefore may develop a vested interest in foreign conflict, or at least in a certain level of foreign tension just to prove a need for its eternal vigilance.' So there is likely to be a certain promiscuity in the way the Soviet leaders ferment tension wherever they can. As leaders of the Soviet Union, governed by a sense of strategic priorities, they may well regard the dispute with China as the first priority. But as party leaders, concerned about the redundancy of their position within the Soviet Union, they will in fact exploit tension wherever it exists, in the Middle East and in Western Europe as well as along the Chinese border.

These tendencies on the part of the Communist Party as an institution are reinforced, in Kissinger's view, by the way individual Soviet leaders regard the outside world. This, he believes, is partly a reflection of how they regard each other, and partly the product of a mentality still strongly influenced by ideology. The Soviet leader 'identifies security less with good will than with a balance of forces' and he will be tempted to 'engage in constant probes designed to reduce the power and influence of countries whose size and structure makes them possible competitors of the USSR'.

Henry Kissinger's diplomacy during at least the first two years of Nixon's presidency only makes sense in the context of this exaggerated mistrust of the Soviet Union. What worried him above all else was that the Soviets would try to take advantage of the 'internal contradictions' which then existed (or at least seemed to exist) in the

United States, that they would construe America's domestic chaos as signifying that very shift of 'objective factors' which in the past had invariably led them to engage in 'constant probes' against their rivals. Now that the Nixon counter-revolution is everywhere triumphant, those early months, when the peace movement was still a powerful force and the silent majority as yet unsummoned from its torpid slumber, seem about as remote as the Stone Age. Equally remote are the opinions which were then fashionable: the peace movement was a coalition which embraced the middle-class main stream as well as the radical-student fringe; the anti-war sentiment which it embodied would be a decisive influence on American foreign policy for years to come, it would force Richard Nixon to end the war unconditionally, whatever his own inclination might be, it would deter him or any other American president from taking on any more Vietnams, and it would bring about a new isolationism, a drastic reduction of American commitments abroad.

Despite occasional talk about a fascist backlash, Henry Kissinger took none of this very seriously. The peace movement he regarded as a loose collection of special-interest groups which could be appeased by rather marginal shifts in policy: if the middle classes were against the war it was because it cost too much, involved too high casualties, and because President Johnson had promised a quick victory which was unattainable. The answer therefore was to adopt a 'less impatient strategy' (as outlined in Kissinger's January 1969 *Foreign Affairs* article) which would reduce the cost and the casualties, remove the war from the public gaze, and make it appear as

though the North Vietnamese rather than the US were responsible for its continuation. Student dissent, Kissinger thought, was essentially apolitical, the product of boredom and alienation, and it had taken a political direction only because the draft had actually required the students to make sacrifices. Once the draft was reduced (as it would be under the alternative Kissinger Plan) the student movement would simply disappear. Recent events have proved Kissinger right on both counts.

But Kissinger was also well aware that the outward manifestations of what was happening in the US, the urban riots, the student demonstrations, the trashing and the bombing, the visions of President Johnson being driven from office by anti-war sentiment and of President Nixon striving desperately to keep some room for manoeuvre, all this could well be interpreted in the Kremlin as the beginnings of the Great American Crisis, the moment when the demands of imperialism became too much for the bourgeoisie to bear. Events which Kissinger himself regarded as the product of passing, ephemeral causes would appear to the ideologues in Moscow as the workings of basic historical laws: the urban crisis would be transformed into the 'beginnings of the breakdown of the capitalist system; black looters and rioters would become the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat; the student bums and their middle-class fellow travellers would be glorified as the 'progressive bourgeoisie' invariably opposed to imperialism; the fall of Johnson and the vacillation of Nixon would be interpreted as a sure sign that 'internal contradictions' had reached the point where the imperialist elements were on the defensive. Kissinger's fear was that, armed with such an exaggerated sense of American weakness, the Soviet leaders would be encouraged to go on to the offensive, to start 'probing' in order to find out where their adversary was most vulnerable.

Expecting perfidy, Kissinger naturally interpreted every Soviet move anywhere as part of a grand subversive design aimed ultimately at the United States, and for the first two years of Nixon's presidency there were enough incidents which, viewed from Kissinger's singular perspective, tended to confirm his thesis. In the Middle East there was the Soviet military build up in Egypt, the 'Soviet-inspired' invasion of Jordan by Syria, and the 'rash and provocative' Soviet-Egyptian missile build-up along the Suez Canal. In Central Europe the Soviets attempted to 'divide the West' by 'encouraging a favourable turn in Soviet-German relations' while 'taking an adamant stand' in four-power negotiations on Berlin, and the SALT talks become bogged down because of the Soviet refusal to include any ceiling on offensive missiles (and particularly the giant Soviet SS9 missile) in the agreement. Towards the end of 1970 the Soviets, in direct violation of the 1961 agreement, attempted 'to build a submarine base in Cuba' which would have given them 'the ability to again operate offensive weapons systems from the [Western] hemisphere', and the winter of 1970 must also have been about the time, given the lag between order and delivery, when the Soviets agreed to North Vietnamese requests for a large in-

Lorenzo Luth

300

New Statesman 2 March 1973

crease in the supply of heavy weapons, of an order which made the spring offensive of 1972 possible.

Challenged by an adversary whose aggressiveness was based on a misreading of its intentions, Kissinger believed that 'equilibrium' could only be restored if the United States displayed in its actions a strength and decisiveness which would convince the Soviets that their original analysis of the American predicament was wrong. In this respect Vietnam was of supreme importance, for although Vietnam was not an area where the Soviet Union and the US were in direct conflict, it was nonetheless the place where according to the Soviet thesis the US should be at its weakest, the place where the restraining influence of 'internal contradictions' should be felt most strongly. This explains why, rumours notwithstanding, Kissinger has always been a hawk on the war. He has no great love for the Thieu regime, he does not believe any longer in the myth of an expansionist China, but he believes firmly that the US had to stand firm in Indochina simply to prove that it was capable of doing so. He was against Melvin Laird's attempt to increase the rate of troop withdrawal, he was against Secretary of State Rogers's suggestion that the US must agree to some dilution of Thieu's political monopoly as a 'risk for peace', and he favoured the occasional show of force to impress the North Vietnamese, and the Russians, though there is evidence that he regarded the bombing of the North rather than cross-border invasions as a more effective means of doing so.

## Shows of Strength

On other issues where there was some disagreement within the Administration, Kissinger, concerned always with the need to 'show strength', was invariably to be found among the hard-liners. When Rogers tried to reach a Middle East settlement with a formula which required that the United States should try to persuade Israel to withdraw from some of the occupied territories, Kissinger was unhappy because he thought the Soviets might conclude that the US was fearful of a confrontation in the Middle East (on this issue his view did not prevail). He was in favour of the extravagant sabre-rattling that accompanied the 'Soviet-inspired' invasion of Jordan, which involved the mobilisation of an entire airborne division in Germany, and the dispatch of a carrier to the Eastern Mediterranean; and he always believed that the US should go ahead with the conversion of its missiles to MIRV - a programme which makes a mockery of the SALT agreement and which guarantees another senseless escalation of the arms race.

The fact that from about March 1971 onwards the Soviets became more flexible in their dealings with the West, an evolution which made possible among other things an eventual agreement on Berlin and strategic arms limitation, was taken by Kissinger and those who thought like him as a sure sign that American policy had been a success: the strong American reaction to the provocations of 1969-70 had revealed to the Soviet leaders that their original estimate of the balance of forces had been

over-optimistic, and that the true balance required a much less assertive line of policy on their part. The need for such a tactical adjustment was also confirmed by later developments - the expulsion of Soviet forces from Egypt, the Sino-American rapprochement and the poor performance of the Soviet economy - some of which were the result of American policy, and some of which were not. The result has been a passivity in Soviet foreign policy which has lasted to the present, and which has epitomised by the puny Soviet reaction to the minising of Haiphong.

Kissinger needless to say has spent as much time thinking about how the West should deal with the Soviets when they are benevolent as he has to what should be done when they are not. Above all he believes that Western statesmen should not 'confuse atmosphere with substance', they must not assume that because the Soviets are seeking detente there must have been some 'change of heart' on their part, a sudden enlightenment which has swept away the mistrust and hostility which produced tension in the past. The 'correct' line (Kissinger's fascination with communist ideology often leads him to use Marxist jargon himself) is that Soviet 'peace offensives' are essentially a response to some 'internal or external strain on the Soviet system' and the 'same pressures' which have 'produced a relaxation of tensions ... can also tempt Soviet leaders to enter upon another period of hostility'. Therefore 'vigilance' is as necessary during a benign phase of Soviet policy as it is during a malignant one, and the US must continue to 'show strength' lest the Soviet leaders revise their estimate of the 'balance of forces'. If instead Western statesmen succumb to the 'change of heart' myth they will come to regard renewed Soviet hostility (it is always renewed sooner or later) not as an inherent characteristic of the system, but as some sort of temporary aberration.

Given this kind of mentality, the odds are that Kissinger's views on individual policies will continue to be as doctrinaire and rigid in the future as they have in the past. There is for instance the question of American re-intervention in the Vietnamese war. On this subject Kissinger is often thought to be more enlightened than some: 'after we have put them [the South Vietnamese] into the best possible shape and after we have done it in a way that is not a cop-out ... if it turns out that they can't make it anyway, I think we are facing different consequences as from the consequences of simply packing up and pulling out.' But this statement hides more than it reveals since what matters above all is exactly how the South Vietnamese collapse. If it now becomes evident that the Thieu regime cannot survive without a physical American presence, if it begins to succumb to communist subversion much as the Diem regime did in the early Sixties then it is hard to believe that even Nixon and Kissinger would be fool enough to try to save it again.

But, largely as a result of the policies Nixon and Kissinger have been following, this is now very unlikely to happen. However incept the South Vietnamese army might be, it is probably strong enough by virtue of sheer numbers and firepower to survive the kind of small-scale operations which

come under the heading of 'subversion'. Also the fact that Kissinger's peace settlement does not oblige President Thieu to surrender one iota of political power makes it much easier for Thieu to keep his regime together with the well-tried methods of torture and imprisonment. So if the North Vietnamese are still committed to reunification, they will most likely be forced sooner or later to revert to large-scale operations. It is at this level that the South Vietnamese are most vulnerable: their staff officers are incapable of handling multi-division operations and their air force, lacking B-52s and Phantom F-4s, cannot deal with large concentrations of North Vietnamese infantry and artillery.

## Perils Ahead

But the moment the war is so resumed it becomes once again a pawn in the worldwide contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. Such an offensive would 'challenge American credibility', it would violate blatantly a cease-fire agreement negotiated with the United States itself, it would be a test of whether the US commitments to South Vietnam - and US commitments in general - meant anything. If, in the face of such provocation, the US were to do nothing it would be showing 'weakness', and the Soviets would of course begin to re-evaluate their estimate of the 'balance of forces' so the B-52s and the fighter-bombers, stationed nearby in Thailand, would have to go back in however great the domestic political risk might be. This kind of hysterical reasoning is characteristic of the standard Nixon eve-of-escalation television speech, but it follows equally from Kissinger's own view of the world.

There is also the issue of whether the United States should write off the second stage of the SALT negotiations, and, at a cost of billions of dollars, build a new generation of monster missiles comparable in size to the Soviet SS9. Here, as on the issue of MIRV two years ago, the arguments rest ultimately on an analysis of Soviet intentions. Those (including Kissinger) who invariably put the worst possible interpretation on Soviet actions argued then that the MIRV programme must continue even though MIRV was essentially an anti-ABM weapon, and an ABM agreement was on the cards. The same clique is now saying that because the Soviets are about to MIRV their own SS9 missiles they must be trying for a first-strike capability against the 'dangerously vulnerable' US Minuteman force. In retaliation the US must now restore parity by building giant missiles of its own, with a throw weight comparable to the SS9. It makes more sense to argue that since the Soviets are in fact miles behind the US in MIRV capability, their decision to MIRV their SS9s should be seen as a defensive measure on their part designed to restore parity. As yet it is unclear where Kissinger stands, but if past performance is anything to go by, he will be among those agitating for a bigger bang for a buck.

In the United States the reputation Henry Kissinger has acquired has a lot more to do with China than with the Soviet Union; above all he is seen as the co-architect of the rapprochement with Peking, the man

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KISSINGER

(NEWSFEATURE)

BY RONALD CLARKE

WASHINGTON, MARCH 8, REUTER - PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER DR. HENRY KISSINGER, HIS WORK COMPLETED ON REACHING A VIETNAM PEACE AGREEMENT, IS PREPARING FOR A ROUND OF INTENSIVE TALKS ON U.S. RELATIONS WITH WESTERN EUROPE, JAPAN AND THE MIDDLE EAST, INFORMED SOURCES SAID TODAY.

KISSINGER, WHOSE PRESIDENTIAL MISSIONS HAVE TAKEN HIM TO MOSCOW, PEKING, SAIGON, HANOI AND PARIS IN THE PAST TWO YEARS, IS EXPECTED TO VISIT CAPITALS IN HIS NEW AREA OF INTEREST AFTER A SERIES OF BRIEFINGS AND DIPLOMATIC NEGOTIATIONS HERE, THE SOURCES SAID.

PRESIDENT NIXON HAS BEGUN A ROUND OF MEETINGS WITH EUROPEAN LEADERS AND THE UNITED STATES IS TRYING TO BRING THE ARABS AND ISRAELIS TO THE NEGOTIATING TABLE TO DISCUSS A MIDDLE EAST PEACE AGREEMENT.

U.S. RELATIONS WITH JAPAN HAVE BEEN STRAINED BY THE HUGE PROFITS SURPLUS JAPAN HAS BUILT UP IN TWO-WAY TRADE. ECONOMIC RELATIONS ARE EXPECTED TO PLAY A MAJOR ROLE IN KISSINGERS NEGOTIATIONS WITH BOTH JAPAN AND WESTERN EUROPE.

KISSINGER, IN PREPARATION FOR HIS NEW ASSIGNMENT, IS REORGANIZING HIS STAFF OF 120 INTERNATIONAL MILITARY AND POLITICAL AFFAIRS EXPERTS AND IS EXPECTED TO EMPLY A FEW MORE ASSISTANTS, INCLUDING A SENIOR AIDE ON ECONOMIC MATTERS, THE SOURCES SAID.

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KISSINGER 2 WASHINGTON

TREASURY SECRETARY GEORGE SHULTZ WILL STILL BE IN CHARGE OF DEALING WITH DAY-TO-DAY ECONOMIC PROBLEMS, SUCH AS THE PRESENT CURRENCY CRISIS, AND KISSINGER WILL DWELL MORE ON LONG-RANGE SOLUTIONS, THE SOURCES ADDED.

THE 49-YEAR-OLD GERMAN-BORN ADVISER IS TAKING A TWO-WEEK VACATION, STARTING THIS WEEKEND, TO REST AFTER HIS TOUGH AND LONG VIETNAM NEGOTIATIONS.

THEN HE WILL GET DOWN TO HIS NEW TASK AFTER HELPING TO COMPLETE THE WHITE HOUSE ANNUAL FOREIGN POLICY MESSAGE, EXPECTED TO BE FINISHED EARLY NEXT MONTH.

IN WESTERN EUROPE, KISSINGER IS EXPECTED TO CONCENTRATE ON SUCH QUESTIONS AS THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF COMMON MARKET POLICIES ON U.S. EXPORTS -- WASHINGTON HAS ALREADY COMPLAINED THAT MARKET POLICIES REDUCE POTENTIAL SALES OF U.S. FARM GOODS -- AND HOW LONG THE UNITED STATES NEEDS TO MAINTAIN A MILITARY FORCE OF 300,000 MEN IN EUROPE.

ADMINISTRATION POLICY SO FAR HAS BEEN THAT THE UNITED STATES WOULD REDUCE ITS FORCES ONLY IF FORCES EAST OF THE ELBE WERE ALSO CUT BACK. EAST-WEST NEGOTIATIONS ON FORCE REDUCTIONS ARE BEING HELD IN VIENNA.

NIXON, WHO BEGAN A SERIES OF MEETINGS WITH WEST EUROPEAN LEADERS WHEN BRITISH PRIME MINISTER EDWARD HEATH VISITED WASHINGTON LAST MONTH, WILL MEET ITALIAN PREMIER GIULIO ANDREOTTI HERE ON APRIL 17.

MORE JW/FD 2145

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KISSINGER 3 WASHINGTON

KISSINGER, WHO CONFERS WITH NIXON EVERY DAY WHEN BOTH MEN ARE IN WASHINGTON, WILL ATTEND MANY OF THESE MEETINGS IN PREPARATION FOR HIS OWN MISSIONS.

HE IS EXPECTED EVENTUALLY TO VISIT ISRAEL AND THE ARAB CAPITALS AS PART OF U.S. EFFORTS TO GET MIDDLE EAST PEACE TALKS UNDER WAY.

THERE HAS BEEN SPECULATION HERE THAT KISSINGER MIGHT OFFER TO ACT AS MEDIATOR IN THE U.S. PLAN TO HOLD INDIRECT TALKS BETWEEN THE EGYPTIANS AND ISRAELIS ON REOPENING THE SUEZ CANAL.

UNDER THE U.S. PROPOSAL, ISRAELI AND EGYPTIAN DELEGATES WOULD MEET SEPARATELY BUT IN THE SAME CITY, WITH A THIRD PARTY, PRESUMABLY THE UNITED STATES, ACTING AS GO-BETWEEN.

DIPLOMATIC EXPERTS SAID KISSINGER EXCELLS IN THE ROLE OF MEDIATOR, BUT THAT HIS STEPPING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST AREA COULD UPSET SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS, WHO REGARD THE ARAB-ISRAELI DISPUTE AS BEING WITHIN THEIR DOMAIN.

IN U.S. RELATIONS WITH JAPAN, KISSINGER IS EXPECTED TO TRY TO BRING DIPLOMATIC AND OTHER PRESSURES TO BEAR ON TOKYO TO IMPROVE TRADING TIES, INFORMED SOURCES SAID.

MANY U.S. ECONOMIC EXPERTS BELIEVE JAPAN SHOULD FURTHER REVALUE THE YEN UPWARD AGAINST THE U.S. DOLLAR, MAKING U.S. EXPORTS TO JAPAN CHEAPER AND INCREASING THE COSTS OF THE FLOOD OF JAPANESE GOODS IN THE UNITED STATES.

MORE JW/FD 2148

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KISSINGER 4 WASHINGTON

MEMBERS OF CONGRESS WANT THE UNITED STATES TO IMPOSE AN IMPORT SURCHARGE ON JAPANESE GOODS IF THE TRADING POSITION BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES DOES NOT IMPROVE RAPIDLY IN THE UNITED STATES FAVOR.

DR. KISSINGERS NEW ROLE STRENGTHENS HIS REPUTATION AS NIXONS STAR NEGOTIATOR. SECRETARY OF STATE WILLIAM ROGERS HAS LOST MUCH OF THE POWER IN THE FOREIGN AFFAIRS FIELD ONCE HELD BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT, AND MORE AND MORE POLICY DECISIONS ARE BEING MADE IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

THE KISSINGER TEAM IS BELIEVED TO HAVE A BUDGET OF AT LEAST 2,500,000 DOLLARS A YEAR. IN THE PAST YEAR KISSINGER HAS COME MORE INTO THE LIMELIGHT, AFTER WORKING MAINLY BEHIND THE SCENES, AND HAS EVEN STARTED GIVING TELEVISION INTERVIEWS.

HE HAS PREVIOUSLY BEEN SHY OF RADIO AND TELEVISION BROADCASTS BECAUSE HE STILL RETAINS A GERMAN ACCENT.

IN THE PAST, PUBLIC VIEWS OF KISSINGER WERE CONFINED TO NEWSPAPER PHOTOGRAPHS SHOWING THE PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER, A DIVORCEE WITH TWO CHILDREN, ESCORTING BEAUTIFUL WOMEN TO COCKTAIL PARTIES.

A FORMER HARVARD PROFESSOR, HE ONCE SAID OF THE RIVALRY BETWEEN THE WHITE HOUSE AND STATE DEPARTMENT: "IF WE DO REASONABLY WELL IN OUR FOREIGN POLICY, THERE WILL BE ENOUGH CREDIT FOR EVERYBODY. IF WE DON'T, IT DOESN'T MATTER."

REUTER JW/FD 2152

["GRACE MIRABELLA", "Editor-in-Chief", "Associate Editors:", "KATE LLOYD POLLY ALLEN MELLEN", "Managing Editor, Special Features:", "ROSEMARY BLACKMON", "Copy Editor: EDITH LOEW GROSS", "Fashion Department", "FRANCES PATIKY STEIN Executive Fashion Editor", "NICOLAS DE GUNZBURG GLORIA MONCUR", "Senior Fashion Editors", "KATHRYNE HAYS Executive Editor for\nShoes, Stockings, Lingerie, Foundations", "JADE HOBSON Accessories Editor", "SUSAN TRAIN Paris Editor", "CONSUELO CRESPI Rome Editor", "MARY RUSSELL European Editor at Large", "ALINE ROMANONES Madrid Editor", "JOAN BUCK London Correspondent", "ELEANORE PHILLIPS Los Angeles Editor", "SHARON HARTS Fashion Associate", "MAUREEN LIPPE Fabrics Editor", "SHELLEY PFEIFER Millinery; Lingerie Associate", "SARAH SLAVIN Model Assignments", "Beauty Department", "SHIRLEY LORD Beauty and Health Editor", "JESSICA CANNE Beauty Marketing Director", "Feature Department", "LEO LERMAN Consulting Feature Editor", "DESPINA MESSINESI Travel Editor", "LORRAINE DAVIS Feature Associate", "ERICA BROWN Feature Associate", "PATRICIA GRANT GARNER Research Associate", "PENELope CAPPA NANCY FLEDER Research Assistants", "Special Projects Editors", "CAMILLE DUHE MARY McFADDEN", "Contributing Editors", "ALLEN E TALMEY GLORIA SCHIFF", "FRANÇOISE DE LA RENTA MARY ROBLEE HENRY", "ALISON HARWOOD CECIL BEATON", "SUSANNA AGNELLI DOROTHEA ELKON", "ROSA MOnD BERNIER SIMONA MORINI", "LINDA RICE Assistant to the Managing Editor", "Copy Department", "Staff Writers: LYDIA MCCLEAN MARY KLEVE\nSUSAN GREENSTEIN", "Copy Executives: JEANNE BALLOT WINHAM\nVALORIE GRIFFITH WEAVER\nVIRGINIA MELCHER Assistant", "Art Department", "Layout: EMDUND WINFIELD JEAN SREBNIK\nRONALD KAJIWARA", "Production: GERALD SLATER CAROL KNOBLOCH\nREYNOLDS ROLLES", "Administrative Assistants:", "GLADYS POHL GLORIA GERSH Art", "Editorial Business Manager:", "WILLIAM H. RAYNER", "Consulting Editor:", "DIANA VREELAND", "Publisher: RICHARD A. SHORTWAY", "Executive Editor: RUTH McCARTHY", "Promotion Director: BARBARA MCKIBBIN", "Associate Promotion Director: JAYNE INGRAM", "Promotion Creative Director: WALTER RUSSELL", "Promotion Art Director: RODNEY RITTER", "Marketing Editor: JANE ANDRES", "Promotion Production Manager: MARTIN B. O'CONNELL", "Fabric Marketing Editor: SUSAN BENE", "Business Manager: NEIL JACOBS", "Advertising Manager: WILLIAM D. LEAHON", "Retail Director: RICHARD McMAHON", "Associate Advertising Manager:", "CHARLES H. REINHARDT", "ROBERT L. GROBERG", "Sales Development Manager: NEIL BUTWIN", "Beauty-Cosmetics Advertising Manager: DAVID RUBIN", "BRANCH OFFICES", "Statler Building, Boston, Mass. 02116\nRobert Brannecke, Mgr.", "875 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill. 60611\nDonald H. Koehler, Mgr.", "3921 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, Cal. 90005\nJohn P. Demorest, Mgr.", "4 Place du Palais-Bourbon, Paris 7\nCyril N. Kuhn, European Manager", "BRITISH VOGUE", "Vogue House, Hanover Square, London, W. 1", "FRENCH VOGUE", "4 Place du Palais-Bourbon, Paris 7", "ITALIAN VOGUE", "Piazza Castello 27, Milan", "International Executive Editor:", "MILDRED MORTON GILBERT", "Merchandising:", "ELIZABETH GROVES NICOLAS LARSON\nMARGARET THALKEN ROSAMOND BELT", "S. I. NEWHOUSE, JR. Publishing Director", "VOGUE IS PUBLISHED BY", "THE CONDE NAST PUBLICATIONS INC.", "420 Lexington Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017", "PERRY L. RUSTON President", "BENJAMIN BOGIN Vice President", "ROBERT J. LAPHAM Vice Pres.-Gen. Mgr.", "HAROLD G. MEYER Vice President", "DANIEL SLEMA Vice President (Overseas)", "J. PAUL YOUNG Vice President-Circ. Dir.", "FRED C. THORMANN Treasurer", "MARY E. CAMPBELL Secretary", "VOGUE AUSTRALIA IS PUBLISHED BY\nBERNARD LESER PUBLICATIONS PTY. LTD.", "MARCH, 1973", "(INCORPORATING VANITY FAIR)", "VOGUE", "PERRY L. RUSTON, Chairman", "ALEXANDER LIBERMAN, Editorial Director", "BOB STONE", "COVER: What to wear with what—that's what this issue of Vogue is all about. Here, Lauren Hutton wears a Valentino Boutique short-sleeved shirt in blue-and-white stripes and sleeveless white wool sweater . . . blue-and-white earrings . . . a thin silver chain at the neck. For another way to put it together—and further details—see page 104. Earrings: Jules Van Rouge. Chain from Amulets and Talismans. Coif by Suga of Suga Salon. . . . A good makeup to wear with it: Estée Lauder's new, glowing Color Wash and sheer Fresh Air Powder Film. Details on both, page 128.", "FASHION", "101. Vogue's Point of View: What to Wear with What . . . and Why Make an issue of it", "102-113 That's Style—how you wear it, what you wear with it: how you wear color this spring; white as a color; the perfect linen suit for day; a fresh eye on navy and white; the oversized rainshirt; pyjamas with an oversized shirt at night; new ways to wear a sweater", "114-127 There's Something About Her—Three women with a style of their own: Ginette Camu, Faye Dunaway, Mary Russell", "152-163 A Whole New Look at Paris and Italy", "164-167 Real Raincoats for Real Rain: classic lines, classic colors", "168. Vogue Patterns: The coat and pants turnover made for real rain", "170-179 Fashion Essentials: What to wear with everything—the sound of bangles; the sound of color; the bronze sandal for evening; what goes on underneath; the right shoe, right stocking; bare stripye scamps right across with short dresses, sweaters and skirts", "HEALTH AND BEAUTY", "44 Ready Beauty", "52. Beauty Checkout: The Uncurling Iron; What you should know about dark glasses for the sake of your eyes; Did you know that the potato was once thought to be a potent aphrodisiac?", "58 Beauty Checkout: Mary Russell", "128-133 Beauty Now: Color Comes Close to the Truth About You", "134. Beauty Now: Donna Mitchell—The Perfect Haircut", "FEATURES", "136 Henry A. Kissinger, By Allene Talmey", {"bbox": [395

The Moccasin . . .
as created by Mario Valentino.
Soft, supple Italian leather.
Gleaming with polished metal.
A classic.

Shown here: 'Primavera', Forty-four dollars.

MARIO
VALENTINO

Paris • Rome • Florence • Naples • S. Margherita Ligure
5 East 57th Street, New York, New York 10022 (212) 486-0322

4

VOGUE, March, 1973

# PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT...

## How Henry Kissinger Trained To Negotiate Peace

By Allene Talmey

When Henry A. Kissinger, former child inmate of a Nazi concentration camp and now surrogate for President Richard M. Nixon, scrawled his initials for the U.S.A. on the intricate cease-fire agreement in Paris at 12:30 P.M. on January 23, 1973, he was applying negotiation techniques he had defined almost twenty years earlier. In four years, the unlikely team of President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger turned around United States foreign policy, a turn foreshadowed in Dr. Kissinger's brilliant, but unread by the public, *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy*, a book published in 1957. Exuberant, strenuous, plump, a hard-liner who enjoys power, he has a touch of James Bond: the guttural lover of good living, the national-security official guarded on dangerous flights to Moscow, Peking, Saigon, Paris, ending in intimate sessions with men of international power. After talks began on August 4, 1969, he flew twenty-four times to Paris for secret talks with Le Duc Tho, the foremost negotiator, known as Special Adviser for North Vietnam. Laughing men with humor, Dr. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho are intense, stubborn, patient, and the most skillful negotiators in the world.

Wary, a plumhead canary who won't sing, Kissinger gives silly, naïve nonpolitical interviews, concealing his highly wrought intelligence—a portrait of a man with his foot in his mouth. He is a liberal Republican, a feudist with such conservative Republicans as Vice-President Agnew, a man with an uncertain future that may include a period as a don at All Souls, that rarefied no-student college at Oxford University in England. Unique, with the energizing quality of some peculiar vitamin to be called, perhaps, vitamin 73, he is the target of unfortunate cheap publicity about young, changing, succulent women companions, all so incongruous when he is really the sex hero of middle-aged women who remain still slightly in love with Professor Fritz Bhaer, the German husband of Jo March in the novel *Little Women*.

To columnists in need of a quick symbol, Kissinger is inaccurately labeled another Prince Metternich, the Austrian chancellor who in 1815 conducted the negotiations for peace at the Congress of Vienna. Not Henry. Metternich was a reactionary, tyrannical, belated eighteenth-century diplomat who lived for a time in Paris with Napoleon's sister Caroline.

Knowing that to govern is to choose, Dr. Kissinger laid (Continued on next page)

## Nixon's Negotiator Extraordinary, With His Paris Team

Right: Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Assistant to the President for National Security, in a photograph exclusive to Vogue taken in January at his Paris office, surrounded by his "secret cabinet" (left to right): David Engel, State Department Interpreter; Winston Lord and Peter Rodman, Staff Assistants to Dr. Kissinger; Bonnie Long, Secretary for the National Security Council; Mary Stifflemire and Irene Derus, Secretaries; John Negroponte, Staff Assistant to Dr. Kissinger (in back); William Sullivan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

HARRY BENSON

A variety of looks... long to short... smooth to curly... small to very full...

DONNA MITCHELL'S HAIRCUT

A beautiful young model-about-to-be-movie-star—in *The Exorcist*—Donna Mitchell knows what she likes. And what she likes now is short hair. Six months ago, she took the first step, cutting middle-of-the-back long hair until it just cleared the shoulder. Several steps later—the length you see here. Actually, two lengths—the under hair in back is cut shorter than the rest and close to the neck to give the effect of hair turning under. Everything else—in one even layer starting at the crown—curves over it. . . . The charm of hair like this—its ease, simplicity. And the endless variety of looks: it can be super straight, wavy, or curly. Can have a side part, center part, or no part. It can look long and smooth or very, very short when it's sleeked close to the head, tucked behind one ear. Always with wonderful shape to it and a feeling of having something to work with—a lot more hair than you'd expect from a cut this short. . . . Combed for day, *far left*—very full, smooth, center parted. Here, with Kenzo's low-U multi-stripe sweater ($48, Altman's). *Above left*, with a tilted crochet cap and shorter, flirtier look to it, curled back on the cheeks. *Center and below left:* the cut at its softest and airiest—set, then brushed all the way up. Marvelous this way for evening—revealing a long, graceful line of neck. . . . Cut and comb-outs, by Rick Gillette. . . . All accessories, next to last page.

BOB STONE

Wind and weather, heat, cold—all are rough on hair. What to do, what not to do to keep it in good shape...

YES'S
AND NO'S

Think of hair as an extension of skin—almost as sensitive and vulnerable, almost as easily damaged by dryness, exposure, stresses and shocks. Like skin, it exists in a delicate balance of moisture, oil, and protein; like skin, it needs help in maintaining it. It needs the same disciplined care you give your skin—the same protection against the elements, the environment. Protection is the key word, in fact—it's much easier to prevent damage to hair than to patch things up later on. . . . Here, some helpful Yes's and No's:

**YES** to shorter hair. Long hair has more problems, because there's more of it exposed—to cold, wind, sun, dryness, other hazards. Also, because it's older—and weaker. Ends are drier, because it takes a longer time for the natural oils to move down the hair shafts to the tips—which tend to split and fray. Conditioners can help, but the best solution is a good haircut. . . . Shorter hair looks newer, more in fashion now—and it's easier to keep healthy, shiny, full of bounce.

**YES** to light hairdressing and grooming creams. They're making a comeback—in new, un-greasy versions that do a slick job: they polish, moisturize, make hair easier to manage. (Clairol's Vitapointe is a case in point.) . . . What they also do is defuse the crackly static that can make hair hard to handle in cold weather—it's caused by cold and dryness, plus surface friction. (A cream rinse is good for this, too—but if your hair tends to be soft and limp, it may not be for you.) . . . Only a smidgen of hairdressing is needed. Whisk it through the hair with your fingertips, working up and back from the temples, running from scalp and roots out to the ends . . . quickly, lightly.

**NO** to going bare-headed outdoors in cold weather. Aside from making *you* colder (body heat escapes rapidly if the head is uncovered), it gives hair the shivers. Each hair shaft contains water, trapped or "bound" in the molecules—and water's a speedy conductor of heat and cold. Outdoors on a freezing day, hair gets chilled, stiff, brittle; cold wind adds a powerful drying effect. The hair literally gets chapped. . . . When you go indoors—probably, into an over-heated room—the sudden change shocks the hair and disrupts its moisture balance even further. Wearing a hat or scarf prevents all this trauma. It also helps maintain the supply of blood and nutrients to the hair roots by keeping the scalp warm, the blood circulating. . . .

**YES** also to keeping hair covered on hot days. The blazing sun dries, bleaches, burns; hair may not show sunburn the way skin does, but it suffers just the same. . . . Wear a shady hat or a scarf in the sun; use a good conditioner often, a light moisturizer in between-times.

**NO** to sizzling-hot dryers; tight rollers; metal pins; stiffening sprays; back-combing, teasing. **NO** to anything that leads to pulling, yanking at hair, and thus to tearing and breaking. . . . **NO** to letting hair fly in the wind—it's drying, and those snarls will have to be straightened out
(Continued on page 186)

135

## PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT...

(Continued) out the choices in foreign policy for President Nixon in an unofficial stance outside the State Department. But before that, in his book *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy*, he laid out puissant lines in negotiating with the Russians, the Chinese, and later applied those lines to the North Vietnamese. In the foreword to that book, Gordon Dean, a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote these warning sentences: "Dr. Kissinger argues for much more communication of our intentions to the enemy. He believes that it [the enemy] must know that our strength is great or we have lost the asset of a deterrent. He believes also that it must know that our objective is to end the aggression quickly by eliminating military targets lest we bring on an all-out thermonuclear war through a misunderstanding of our intentions." That is why Henry Kissinger led the great anti-Communist Richard Nixon to Peking and Moscow.

Fifteen years before his negotiations with Hanoi, Dr. Kissinger in *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy* defined the problems he was to face later on with revolutionary dynamism. That they were solved is a miracle of art. The American public, its military leaders, and its incessant commentators rarely understood that Dr. Kissinger knew what Lenin meant when he wrote: "Wars are most political when they seem most military."

Dr. Kissinger, who studied minutely the thinkers, the basic policy makers of the Soviets and the Chinese Communists, wrote in *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy*, in a chapter headed "The Strategy of Ambiguity: Sino-Soviet Strategic Thought," that "Negotiations within a legitimate order have three functions: to formulate agreements or disagreements in a manner that does not open unbridgeable schisms; to perpetuate the international system by providing a forum for making concessions; to persuade by stating a plausible reason for settlement. But, in a revolutionary period, most of these functions have changed their purpose." The ways in which they have changed are then spelled out. "Diplomats can still meet, but they cannot persuade each other. Instead, diplomatic conferences become elaborate stage plays which seek to influence and win over public opinion in other nations; their purpose is less the settlement of disputes than the definition of issues for which to contend. They are less a forum for negotiation than a platform for propaganda."

Neither the Russians nor the Chinese and their friends the North Vietnamese sank into the morass of morality in war; but then neither did the Americans. In negotiating, Hanoi diplomats do not, like formal American diplomats, try for legal ambiguities. It was legal linguistic ambiguities that led Dr. Kissinger to say on October 26, 1972, that "peace is at hand." Hanoi quickly taught him and President Nixon that it was not. The brilliant minds of Hanoi, however, quickly learned their lesson, upsetting their primal strategy of "protracted limited war." They learned in December, 1972, about the terror of carpet bombing, a step short of nuclear bombing. Now, that is past. The Vietnam war really stopped for the Americans at the Hotel Majestic when Dr. Kissinger, acting for President Richard M. Nixon whose game-plan the two of them had worked on, signed H.K. for the U.S.A. ■

# A SPECIAL VIEW OF
LYNDON B. JOHNSON

by Gordon Parks, not only an outstanding photographer, writer, film director, composer but a dedicated reporter on American life

I was shaving in a Paris hotel when the French radio cut off abruptly. There was a moment of quiet, then almost hysterically the announcer's voice cut through the room: "President John F. Kennedy has been shot." In shock, I unexplainably reached for the light switch and threw the room into darkness. I closed my eyes and prayed for Kennedy. I prayed that it was all a mistake. But the worst was confirmed in the next few seconds. "President Kennedy is dead from an assassin's bullet that struck him in the head."

Reaching the hotel lobby sometime later I found it stunned to a silence. The sad-eyed concierge spoke softly. "Terrible news from your country, Monsieur—and for us here." "It is indeed." I replied. Then he brought me up short. "Tell me, what is this Mr. Johnson, your new President, like?" he asked. My reaction must have seemed very curious to him. I nodded blankly and turned away without answering. Then, as I crossed the street, the reality that had by now struck millions of other Black Americans struck me. "Good God Almighty, a Southerner, a Texas cracker, was now President of the United States."

I shuddered. Through circumstance, I disliked and distrusted this man. But somehow I respected his performance when he faced a national television audience and, with a modesty not born to him, promised, "I will do my best. That is all I can do." Were the tears manufactured? Was the sorrow counterfeit? I wondered, then instantly became annoyed with myself. The man, despite his shortcomings, was beyond this. And hope replaced despair when a short time later he said, before a joint session of Congress, "Let us continue... we have talked enough in this country about civil rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write it in the law books."

Millions of Black hearts applauded that speech, but years of hollow promises held yet our distrust. By now we had grown to doubt the hopeful songs of our own fathers. We would wait. The new President would have to show the real strength of his conscience before we would realize his sincerity and worth. So our fears remained. These were fierce years for the Black man, against fire hoses, police dogs, and police clubs. Martin Luther King's armor of truth and love was wearing thin. Racism still engulfed us. It would take considerably more than love to stay the increasing violence of the stifling summers and bone-cold winters. But one July, while foul air over several American cities darkened to arsonist smoke, Lyndon Baines Johnson actually crossed over. With tremendous pride he signed the most sweeping civil-rights bill in the history of our nation into hard law. The breach between what he claimed to believe and what he practiced seemed to be closing. Our skepticism waned. It was a bill, a law, that governed America's most serious problems, those of man's divine right to equality. And later there were other notable successes to remember: the safeguards for Negro voting rights; the naming to his Cabinet of Robert Weaver, the first Black to hold such rank; the appointment of Thurgood Marshall to sit on the Supreme Court; as well as placing other Blacks in high offices. He warmed us at times when he lent his Texas drawl to our cries of "We shall overcome." And he laid the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice where it rightfully belonged—at the feet of all men who deserved it.

Johnson was disobeying the law of his Southern upbringing, of his temperament and nature. This took courage. He wanted to be a great President—with an absolute identification with all people. But ironically it was his impatience with the American people that denied him the true source of their strength—a strength he needed so desperately during the tragedy of Saigon. Within such a nightmare—and after such accomplishment—Johnson surely had to settle for his own kind of personal peace. I imagine before his death he repented the worst of himself, forgot it, then embraced the very best of himself to the end, allowing his good deeds to exalt him above his sins. ■

138

Kissinger's public anguish

[L.C.]

Joseph
Alsop

WASHINGTON — After a brilliant major foreign policy speech in New York, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger recently answered some questions about the Watergate horror. Two points were noteworthy. What Kissinger said about Watergate amounted to a cry of anguish. And because he mentioned Watergate, his major speech got relatively little notice.

If a man of Kissinger's
toughness, wideness of grasp
and acuteness of penetration is
driven to public anguish, it is
worth asking why. As warn-
ing, it must be said that the
real answer is not palatable.
In fact, it is even more unpa-
la table, and by a very long
chalk, than the Watergate hor-
ror that now absorbs every-
one.

The fact is that the United
States, for the first time in our
fortunate national history, has
utterly lost the huge margin
for error this country always
enjoyed in the past. In this

respect, we resemble a family,
formerly enormously rich and
given to self-indulgent ways,
that has exhausted its line of
credit at the banks and has too
little cash in hand.

FOR NO LESS than 181
years — from 1776 to 1957, to
be exact — geography gave us
our margin. Two oceans
placed us beyond the reach of
any other major power.

All other nations in our hem-
isphere were minor powers
compared to us. We had all
the land and all the resources
of three-quarters of a conti-
nent to exploit as we chose,

with no opponents but the
wretched Indians. This was
what Bismarck meant by his
joke:

"God Almighty looks after infants, drunkards and the United States of America."

That happy stage began to
come to an end in 1957 when
the Soviets sent their first
Sputnik into the firmament.
Long before then, our own
land had largely filled up. The
Sputnik further meant that all
our remaining margin from
geography would soon be an-
nulled by technology. In effect,
God Almighty had washed His

hands of us. We now had to
look after ourselves.

INITIALLY, this great
change in our situation was
not apparent, for we still re-
tained two other enormous
margins for error. One was
our margin of military power.
The other was our margin of
economic power.

The first to go was the mar-
gin of military power. When
President Nixon took office, it
had already begun to be neces-
sary to talk about "parity" in
strategic weapons with the So-
viet Union. Today, bleak hon-
esty, though seldom used,
compels the substitution of
"inferiority" for "parity."

Our strategic inferiority is
not grave as yet: but it is
made much worse by our
growing inferiority in conven-
tional arms.

CONVENTIONAL arms can

be desperately important, for
instance in the Persian Gulf
where our unprotected energy
jugular is now situated. Here,
indeed, both of our more re-
cent losses of margin are dra-
matically summed up. For the
same "energy crisis" that has
placed our jugular in the Per-
sian Gulf has also cost us our
former economic margin.

It is dangerous for any na-
tion to become immemorially
accustomed to operating with
all possible kinds of margin
for error. It is even more dan-
gerous for such a nation to
lose its entire margin for error
without realizing what has
happened to it. Yet this is the
American situation today.

Kissinger, whose anguished
cry has just been heard, has
even had his own unintentional
role in blinding us to our new
national situation. For Presi-
dent Nixon, he has performed
in the manner of Prince Met-
ternich, the hero of his own
first book, "A World
Restored." By extreme adroit-
ness, in other words, Kissinger
has made a dwindling allow-
ance of power go a surprising-
ly long way This was precise-
ly the mark of Metternich's
Austrian diplomacy until he
came a cropper in the end.

KISSINGER WAS, and is,
anguished, finally, because he
believes the Watergate horror
can cripple the United States
by crippling the President.
With no margin for error, it is
deadly dangerous to be crip-
pled. About all this, moreover,
Kissinger is dead right.

This does not mean that
Watergate and its even nastier
sequels ought to have a veil
drawn over them. It does not
mean that the sleazy and arro-
gant misconduct of some of
the President's subordinates
ought to be condoned. It does
not mean, either, that the
President can be freed of
blame. He hired these subordi-
nates. In that sense — and at a
minimum — the responsibility
is his.

But take former Atty. Gen.
John Mitchell. He is a man
who would always have been
much improved by being
boiled in oil. All the same,
deep-fat frying for Mrs. Mitc-
hell's husband is still a bit less
important than national sur-
vival.