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had been for several years. They were supported by Iran, Israel, Britain and other neighboring countries. Nixon was asked in 1972 to support them when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have been abandoned earlier - that was our real choice. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a moral assault is at a minimum inappropriate.

Similar distortions run through the entire review and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive conventional wisdom response. This enables Judt to write about the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the military violation of a neutral state." Give us a break. It would have been more honest, not to say honorable, to describe what happened accurately, as Bundy is among the first to know. Four North Vietnamese divisions were in Cambodia in South Vietnam killing Americans and then withdrawing into the safety of

Anrede!

Es geschieht nicht oft, daß die Stadt Fürth die Ehrenbürgerwürde ver-
leiht.

Jeden, der sich den Sinn für geschichtliche Zusammenhänge bewahrt
hat, wird es deshalb besonders bewegen, wenn Sie, lieber Henry Kissin-
ger, heute diese hohe Auszeichnung Ihrer Vaterstadt erhalten.

Ich möchte Ihnen dazu, auch im Namen des Herrn Bundeskanzlers,
herzlich gratulieren.

Natürlich wäre Henry Kissinger nicht Henry Kissinger, wenn er nicht
auch unter den 18 Ehrenbürgern der Stadt Fürth eine Ausnahmestellung
beanspruchen könnte:

er ist der einzige ehemalige Außenminister und amerikanische Staats-
bürger.

Meine Damen und Herren,

mit Henry Kissinger ehrt die Stadt Fürth einen Mann, der vor fast genau
einem halben Jahrhundert als 15-jähriger Junge mit seiner Familie seine
Heimat unter schrecklichen Umständen verlassen mußte.

Einen Mann, der Zuflucht in Amerika fand, der eine glänzende akademi-
sche Laufbahn absolvierte und der als Außenminister die Weltpolitik der
USA viele Jahre gestaltet hat.

Bei der Amtseinführung Henry Kissingers meinte Präsident Nixon, Henry
Kissinger sei nicht nur der erste amerikanische Außenminister, der vor
seiner Ernennung in Peking und Moskau gewesen sei.

Nein, er war auch der erste Einwanderer überhaupt, der es zum Außen-
minister der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika gebracht hat.

Das, was Sie, lieber Henry Kissinger, und Ihre Familie in Deutschland
erleiden mußten, machte Sie zum Amerikaner aus tiefer Überzeugung.

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Es ließ Sie zum leidenschaftlichen Verfechter des amerikanischsten aller
Werte werden - der Freiheit.

Diese Freiheit in einer stabilen, friedlichen Weltordnung zu sichern, hat
Ihren politischen Lebensweg bestimmt.

Lieber Henry Kissinger,

Fürth und Deutschland sind Sie trotz aller schmerzlichen Erinnerungen
verbunden geblieben.

Zum Ort Ihrer Kindheit haben Sie sich immer bekannt.

Und bis heute entschuldigen Sie sich für Ihr exzellentes Deutsch, indem
Sie sagen, es sei das beste Fränkisch, zu dem Sie in der Lage sind.

Seit Ihrer Kindheit hat Sie die Begeisterung für den Fußball - und vor
allem für die Spielvereinigung Greuther Fürth, wie sie heute heißt - nicht
losgelassen.

Unsere Botschaft in Washington hat Ihnen immer die Bundesliga-Er-
gebnisse übermittelt.

Sie haben kräftig mitgeholfen, den Fußball in der Neuen Welt populär zu
machen.

Und noch immer gehört das "Kicker-Sportmagazin" zu Ihrer
regelmäßigen Lektüre.

Es wird Ihnen deshalb auch nicht entgangen sein, daß mein Club, der
Karlsruher SC und die Spielvereinigung Greuther Fürth im nächsten Jahr
wohl in der gleichen Liga spielen werden.

Wir wollen hoffen, daß es für beide Vereine bald die Erste Bundesliga
sein wird.

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Meine Damen und Herren,

Henry Kissinger hat als Außenminister der Vereinigten Staaten Entscheidendes für die deutsch-amerikanische Freundschaft und die transatlantische Partnerschaft geleistet.

Wann immer es um die Sicherheit Deutschlands und Europas ging, konnten wir Deutschen auf Henry Kissinger zählen.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher berichtet in seinen Erinnerungen von einer Begebenheit, die auch ich nie vergessen werde:

Wir saßen im Juli 1974 in San Clemente in Kalifornien auf einer Terrasse und warteten auf eine Begegnung mit Präsident Nixon.

Plötzlich erreichte uns die Nachricht, daß der Verkehr auf der Transitautobahn nach West-Berlin von den sowjetischen Truppen unterbrochen worden war.

Sofort instruierte Henry Kissinger seinen Mitarbeiter Helmut Sonnenfeldt, die gerade laufenden Verhandlungen zwischen den USA und der DDR über die Aufnahme von diplomatischen Beziehungen zu stoppen.

Der Sowjetunion ließ er mitteilen, daß die USA jede Behinderung der Transitwege als eine Angelegenheit zwischen sich und der Sowjetunion betrachteten.

Diese Botschaft kam an.

Und sie zeigte Wirkung.

Die DDR-Delegation reiste zurück.

Übrigens erfuhren wir auf dem Weiterflug von Amerika nach Israel, daß Präsident Nixon zurückgetreten war.

Wir waren seine letzten offiziellen Besucher gewesen.

Das zeigt, wie Henry Kissinger das Gewicht der Weltmacht USA in schwerer Zeit für Deutschland und Europa einsetzte.

Dafür gebührt ihm unser aller Dank.

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Henry Kissinger hat - zunächst als Wissenschaftler, dann als Politiker - immer wieder klargemacht:

Nur gemeinsam können Deutschland, Europa und die USA die große Herausforderung des Ost-West-Konflikts bestehen.

Schon 1965 - also rund ein Vierteljahrhundert vor dem Fall der Berliner Mauer - hat Henry Kissinger die Auffassung vertreten:

die Teilung Deutschlands und Europas ist nicht naturgegeben.

Wenn das Ost-West-Verhältnis sich grundlegend ändert, wenn die Grenzen durchlässiger werden, wird sich auch die deutsche Frage neu stellen.

Als Außenminister hat Henry Kissinger viel dazu getan, die Voraussetzungen dafür zu schaffen.

Mit seinem Namen verbindet sich der Versuch zu Beginn der siebziger Jahre, das Ost-West-Verhältnis in neue, entspanntere Bahnen zu lenken.

Henry Kissinger war maßgeblich daran beteiligt, den Grundsatz des "peaceful change", der friedlichen Veränderung der Grenzen in Europa gegen den Widerstand der Sowjetunion in der KSZE-Schlußakte von Helsinki zu verankern.

Das wurde zu einer entscheidenden Voraussetzung für die friedliche Überwindung der Teilung Deutschlands und Europas.

Meine Damen und Herren,

Henry Kissinger hat einmal den Unterschied zwischen einem Professor und einem Politiker so beschrieben:

Der Professor kann immer wieder in seine Bibliothek zurückkehren und sagen: ich habe einen Fehler gemacht, also schreibe ich ein neues Buch.

Ein Politiker hat diese Möglichkeit nicht.

Er hat oft nur einen Versuch.

Er muß die Lage richtig analysieren.

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Und dann er muß rasch und entschlossen handeln.

Henry Kissinger hat beides in seiner Person vereint - den Professor und den Politiker, den Historiker und den Staatsmann.

Er gilt nicht nur als "the diplomats' diplomat", der Diplomat unter den Diplomaten.

Henry Kissinger hat uns aber auch brillante Analysen der internationalen Politik geschenkt.

Sein Buch über "Die Vernunft der Nationen" ist ein Lehrbuch der Außenpolitik von Richelieu bis Reagan.

Für unsere Anwärter im Auswärtigen Dienst ist dieser Klassiker Pflichtlektüre.

Wenig hat Henry Kissinger so umgetrieben wie die Frage, ob die Außenpolitik eher nationalen Interessen oder Idealen folgen soll.

Henry Kissinger hält wenig von dieser Scheinalternative.

Eine Außenpolitik, die die nationalen Interessen ignoriert, muß an der Realität scheitern.

Und eine Außenpolitik, die sich nicht den Idealen von Demokratie, Freiheit und Menschenrechten verpflichtet weiß, die den Frieden nicht als höchstes Ziel verfolgt, wird unmoralisch.

Henry Kissinger war und ist ein leidenschaftlicher, aber realistischer Verfechter dieser Werte.

Theodor Heuss hatte doch recht, als er sagte: die Franken sind Realisten ohne Träumerei !

Zu diesem Realismus gehört auch, daß es in der Außenpolitik auf schwierige Fragen oft keine einfachen und endgültigen Antworten gibt.

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Nicht ohne Grund läßt Henry Kissinger sein großes Buch über Diplomatie mit einem Zitat des spanischen Dichters Machado enden:
> "Wanderer, es gibt keine Wege, Wege entstehen beim Wandern."

Das ist wohl wahr.

Wahr ist aber auch: wir brauchen Persönlichkeiten, die uns im unübersichtlichen Gelände den Weg in eine friedliche und stabile Welt weisen.

Lieber Henry Kissinger, Sie haben das in Ihrer unnachahmlichen Weise immer wieder getan.

Tun Sie es bitte weiterhin, von heute an auch als Ehrenbürger Ihrer Vaterstadt Fürth !

Wir alle brauchen Sie auch in Zukunft - in Fürth, in Deutschland und Amerika !

TOTAL P. 08

Helmut Schmidt

Fürth, 20. Mai 1998

Ehrenbürgerwürde
für Henry Kissinger

Dear Henry,

In just a week's time you will enjoy an outstanding
anniversary of your birthday. But being aware of the
widespread superstition that one never should express
congratulations in advance of a happy event, I will
cautiously abstain from so doing. But I do not feel the
slightest inhibition to tell you how much I am delighted
over the fact that the city of Fürth, where you were born
three quarters of a century ago, bestows on you its
honorary citizenship today. My heartfelt
congratulations!

Of course, no honors and no praise nor eulogy can
ever make up for the criminal evils that your parents
and familiy and you yourself were exposed to whilst
you were living here during the first fifteen years of
your life. But I do hope: You and your American fellow
citizens will take the event this morning as a token
proof that we Germans indeed have once again become

a rational, a democratic people and a nation that is
adhering to the basic moral principles which we did
have in common with America until 1933 and which we
again do have in common since the rebirth of Germany
after World War II and since the end of the Nazi
dictatorship.

Meine Damen und Herren!

Es ehrt Sie und Ihre Stadt, daß Henry Kissinger die ihm
zugedachte Ehrenbürgerschaft annimmt. Ich bin diesem
Manne seit über vier Jahrzehnten in Freundschaft
verbunden. Als wir uns in der zweiten Hälfte der
fünfziger Jahre das erste Mal in der Harvard University
begegnet sind, da war soeben Henry Kissingers Buch
über atomare Waffen im Rahmen der Außenpolitik
erschienen, ein Buch von luzider Klarheit, das damals
in der ganzen Welt – mit Recht! – sorgfältig gelesen
wurde. Ich selbst war zu jener Zeit ein Gegner der
offiziellen Strategie der atomaren Vergeltung und
plädierte statt dessen für die konventionelle
Verteidigungsfähigkeit Europas. Aber Henry Kissinger –
neben ihm auch einige andere amerikanische Fachleute
– haben mir damals geholfen, meine eigenen
strategischen Vorstellungen in Gestalt eines Buches zu
konzipieren und zu veröffentlichen.

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Als ich knapp ein Jahrzehnt später Verteidigungs-
minister geworden war, habe ich als erstes jenen
amerikanischen Plan zu Fall gebracht, der diesseits des
Stacheldrahts, aber parallel zum Stacheldraht, einen
Gürtel atomarer Landminen quer durch Deutschland
ziehen wollte. Meine damaligen amerikanischen
Kollegen Melvin Laird und Henry Kissinger – der eine
Nixons Verteidigungsminister und der andere sein
Sicherheitsberater – haben mich gewähren lassen. Sie
verstanden, daß keine militärische Strategie sich über
die vitalen Interessen der deutschen Nation
hinwegsetzen darf.

Auch später, als Finanzminister zur Zeit der von den
USA betriebenen Aufhebung des Weltsystems fester
Wechselkurse und zur Zeit der ersten Welt-Ölpreis-
Krise, wie auch danach, als Bundeskanzler, habe ich
immer engen Kontakt zu Kissinger gehalten. Auch als
er anfangs 1977 durch Cyrus Vance abgelöst worden
war. Und auch in allen Jahren seither. Wir waren gar
nicht immer einig, aber ich habe vielerlei Einsichten von
Kissinger gelernt. Und umgekehrt konnte ich ihm – und
seiner damaligen Regierung – die Zweifel an Willy
Brandts Ostpolitik zerstreuen, genauer gesagt: den

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Argwohn nehmen, daß unsere Ostpolitik im Ergebnis
eine Abwendung von den USA bedeuten würde.

Damals, in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren,
genügten ein Abend in New York - etwa ein Gespräch
mit John McCloy - und ein Tag in Washington - ein
Gespräch mit Henry Kissinger und dazu ein weiteres
Gespräch mit George Shultz oder Arthur Burns -, um
als deutscher Politiker ausreichend klar erkennen zu
können, worauf Amerikas Politik gerichtet war und wie
sie sich entfalten würde. Heute ist das leider anders.
Zwar hören in Washington auch heute noch alle klugen
Leute zu oder sie lesen, wenn Henry über eine
außenpolitische oder eine strategische Frage spricht
oder schreibt.

Aber es gibt nicht mehr so viele kluge Leute. Genauer
gesagt: Amerika besitzt heute keine homogene
außenpolitische Elite. Einige der außenpolitisch
Einflußreichen wollen am liebsten Rußland mit der
NATO verheiraten und dadurch Amerikas Macht bis an
Chinas Grenzen ausdehnen. Andere meinen umgekehrt,
Rußland als quantité négligeable behandeln zu dürfen.
Es gibt heute keine klare Rußland-Politik in
Washington. Andere möchten die NATO zu einer
weltweit einsetzbaren Feuerwehr unter amerikanischer

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Führung machen. Es gibt auch keine klare China-Politik, keine klare Japan-Politik. Niemand scheint darauf vorbereitet, größenwahnsinnig werdenden Investmentbankern und der Habgier die dringend notwendigen Zügel anzulegen, damit solche die Weltwirtschaft gefährdenden Ereignisse beherrschbar bleiben, wie wir sie gegenwärtig in Ost- und Südostasien erleben. Statt dessen breitet sich ein supranationaler Raubtier-Kapitalismus aus. Keiner kümmert sich darum. Gleichzeitig weigert sich der Kongreß, Amerikas Beitragsschulden bei der UN zu bezahlen.

Bei alledem ist allerdings Amerikas Vitalität ungebrochen. Aber oft genug wünsche ich mir Henry Kissinger oder George Shultz zurück in das State Department!

Nicht, lieber Herr Kinkel, daß ich etwa vom außenpolitischen oder vom finanzpolitischen Weitblick der europäischen Staatslenker eine höhere Meinung hätte; sie haben sich seit Maastricht 1992 noch viel weniger der zukünftigen Weltentwicklung bewußt verhalten als die USA.

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In dreißig Jahren wird China 1600 Millionen Menschen
umfassen; Chinas Anteil am Welthandel wird dann dem
Anteil der USA entsprechen, und die chinesische
Währung wird ähnlich wichtig sein. wie Dollar und Euro.
Und Indien – heute bereits eine Milliarde Menschen –
wird ziemlich schnell nachfolgen. Natürlich bleibt auch
Rußland eine Weltmacht, trotz aller seiner inneren
Schwierigkeiten. Es ist wahrlich an der Zeit, sich an
Henry Kissingers Gleichgewichtskonzepte zu erinnern!

Lieber Henry, lassen Sie mich diesen Tag nutzen, um
nicht nur meine Bewunderung für Ihre Urteilskraft
auszudrücken, sondern ebenso meine Dankbarkeit für
Ihre Freundschaft. Was mich mit Ihnen verbindet, das
ist das freiheitliche und das demokratische Credo,
getragen von den Leitideen der Aufklärung, die 1776
die Grundlage der amerikanischen Verfassung
geworden sind, die schließlich seit 1949 auch in
Deutschland heimisch wurden und die Grundlage
unserer Verfassung sind. Was mich mit Ihnen verbindet,
das ist auch das innere Pflichtbewußtsein, zuvor so
rational wie möglich zu analysieren, ehe man handelt
oder ehe man einen Rat gibt. Es ist auch die
Rückhaltlosigkeit, im privaten und persönlichen
Gespräch wahrhaftig und zur Gänze nur das zu sagen,

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was man wirklich denkt – und nicht etwas, das
vielleicht der andere gerne hören würde.

Meine Damen und Herren, letztlich ist es in der Politik,
in der internationalen wie in der Innenpolitik, ebenso
wie in unser aller alltäglichem Leben: Aus
gegenseitiger Sympathie kann Freundschaft entstehen.
Aber nur dann wird die Freundschaft standhalten, wenn
jeder sich auf des anderen Zuverlässigkeit und
Wahrhaftigkeit verlassen kann.

Henry Kissinger steht im Geiste selbstverständlich
immer noch im Dienst seines amerikanischen
Vaterlandes. Aber zugleich ist er ein stetiger,
zuverlässiger Freund der Deutschen. Als 1989/90
François Mitterrand und Margaret Thatcher ernsthaft
versuchten, die sich anbahnende deutsche
Vereinigung zu stören, hat Henry Kissinger in den USA
öffentlich hörbar und sichtbar uns Deutschen die
Stange gehalten.

Nicht nur ich persönlich, sondern – ungleich wichtiger!
– wir alle, wir Deutschen haben Grund zur Dankbarkeit
gegenüber diesem großen Amerikaner, der heute vor
sechzig Jahren Deutschland unter akuter Lebensgefahr
seiner jüdischen Religion wegen hat verlassen müssen.

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11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:49

GOLDHAMMER

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Dear Bob, Silbers

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

It is over twenty years since I left government.

One would have thought that enough time to permit a calm
discussion of the challenge America has faced since the
Vietnam War crystallized the tension between the idealism
of a nation which has always looked on itself as [being]
on a special mission and its growing involvement in a
world of power politics, hence of relative judgments.

How to strike the balance between these tendencies
is not a simple matter and practitioners of foreign
policy are apt to get it wrong from time to time. But we
will never manage that task unless we conduct a calm
debate granting the good faith of the principal
participants. Above all, the various protagonists must
have sufficient confidence in their views to risk a
truthful definition of the issues.

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:49

GOLDHAMMER

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

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

The only personal papers in the collection are
records of telephone conversations held by a court - not
me - to be personal papers.

- Judt claims that I avoided "a clear and official
record wherever possible." This is the opposite of the
truth. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, no
administration recorded its decisions and negotiations
more carefully and fully than the ones in which I served.

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:50 GOLDHAMMER

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There is a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I put in the qualifier only to protect against slip-ups.) There are no unrecorded agreements; none has ever been claimed since I left office.

- To prove my anachronistic views, Judt quotes me as writing: "One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves." He does not say that the quote is drawn from a paragraph comparing Metternich's greater emphasis on moral consensus with Bismarck's balance-of-power politics, and he achieves his effect by cutting the sentence in half and omitting the next sentence: "...something akin to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of power is reinforced by a shared sense of values. And in the modern age, these values would have to be democratic."

- Distortions of fact are exceeded by distortions of reality. I have always had the highest regard for Bundy;

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therefore I find it painful that his resentments at an
incomplete career drive him into abandoning any sense of
perspective. Bundy's basic attitude toward Nixon and me
is similar to that of the Bourbons toward Bonaparte: our
besetting? sin was being in an office to which he - or at
least his group - felt they were entitled.

Bundy knows better than most the ambiguities of
decisionmaking. Therefore he makes no allowance for
realities impinging on policymakers. He castigates Nixon
and me for failing to brief Japan on the opening to China
in 1971, and the European allies in 1973 in going on
alert in the Middle East crisis. As a former Assistant
Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy knows only too
well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese
government without a leak; it was a painful decision not
to give advance warning, though it might have been more
elegant had we sent a special emissary rather than our
ambassador.

11-AUG.' 98(TUE) 15:50 GOLDHAMMER

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As for the alert, we faced what we considered a
Soviet ultimatum. We thought a Soviet move into the
Middle East to be *imminent*. To demonstrate our
determination to resist, we increased the readiness of
our military forces and *simultaneously* called a meeting
of the NATO Council. What would Bundy and Judt have us
do? Respond to an ultimatum only subject to approval by
the NATO Council?

This attitude of condescending righteousness leads
to extraordinary demonstrations of hypocrisy. Throughout
the review, the alleged penchant of Nixon and me for
covert operations is cited as the ultimate cause of
Nixon's downfall. Phrases like "morally repugnant" for an
operation in Chile that never was executed drop lightly
from the pen. One would have thought that an official who
served in one of the key positions when our South Vietnam
ally Diem and his brother were assassinated in a coup
instigated by the department in which he had a key

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position, under whose aegis the Phoenix Program took
place, an administration which conducted the Bay of Pigs
and the war in Laos as CIA projects, and under whose eyes
the only assassination plots involving an American
administration were planned, would show some restraint in
giving moral lectures on covert operations to his
successor.

Moreover, what is he talking about? I would think a
fair judgment would compare the number of covert
operations with those of preceding administrations. I
doubt that the charge of the review would then stand up.

Judt (or Bundy) achieve their effect by suppressing
the context of those covert operations they cite as
horrible? examples. They claim "misleading promises to
the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been
triggered into fighting Iraq by our *representations*. The
fact is that when the decision to support the Kurds was
made in July 1972, the Kurds were already fighting and

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:51

GOLDHAMMER

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had been for several years. They were supported by Iran, Israel, Britain and other neighboring countries. Nixon was asked in 1972 to support them when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the previous sponsor to match. (of the Kurds)

Without our help, the Kurds would have been abandoned earlier - that was our real choice. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a moral assault is inappropriate.

Similar distortions run through the entire review and the book. Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive conventional wisdom response. This enables Judt to write about the secret bombing of Cambodia "as the military violation of a neutral state." Give us a break. It would have been more honest, not to say honorable, to describe what happened accurately, as Bundy is among the first to know. Four North Vietnamese divisions were in Cambodia killing Americans and then withdrawing into the safety of

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:51 GOLDHAMMER

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a neutrality they were violating daily. The Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had invited attacks on the sanctuaries, both? Cluster Bombs and publicly saying the Cambodian population had been expelled. The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched attacks two weeks after Nixon assumed his office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. Sihanouk invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services Committee, the Speaker, and about twenty other congressional leaders - all from the Democratic opposition party. None urged widening the circle of those privy to the information.

Cambodia seems to block rational thought. Judt quotes with approval a Bundy argument that the bombing "made it more rather than less difficult to persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a political compromise." Since it would be too absurd to

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argue that the best way to achieve a ceasefire is to stop military operations, Bundy or Judt retreat to saying that "a much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat alive" would have done the trick. [These are] shades of the graduated retaliations which failed so ignominiously in Vietnam and of which Bundy was a principal architect. Is it not much more likely that it was the congressional cut-off of bombing that ended any prospect for negotiations?

Similarly grotesque is the treatment of European policy. The reviewer alleges that our coolness to Brandt's Ostpolitik alienated Germany and, for that matter, all of Europe. Records of conversations with European leaders make it clear that they were very wary about Ostpolitik, seeing in it the beginning of a possible national German foreign policy. We shared that suspicion initially but dealt with it by building Ostpolitik into an overall Atlantic approach. Within days

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:51

GOLDHAMMER

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of being sworn in as Chancellor, Brandt sent his closest aide on these matters, Egon Bahr, to Washington to work on coordinating our policies. He and I worked closely together for the rest of the way. We conducted backchannel negotiations with the Soviets that produced a Berlin agreement without which Ostpolitik could never have succeeded. And when Schmidt replaced Brandt and Genscher became Foreign Minister, we succeeded (in the Ford Administration) to achieve the provision at the European Security Conference for the peaceful change of frontiers that became the basis for the unification of Germany - as Genscher has stated in his memoirs.

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

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:51

GOLDHAMMER

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As for the charges of deceit, dissimulation and other epithets, I can only say that, as Secretary of State, I travelled to thirty eight states, must have testified before one hundred congressional committees, and given perhaps an equal number of speeches and interviews. Let Judt produce any knowing misrepresentation other than errors of judgment.

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

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:43 GOLDHAMMER

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Dear Bob,

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11-AUG.' 98(TUE) 15:43 GOLDHAMMER

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GOLDHAMMER

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11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:44 GOLDHAMMER

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As for the alert, we faced what we considered a
Soviet ultimatum. We thought a Soviet move into the
Middle East to be imminent. To demonstrate our
determination to resist, we increased the readiness of
our military forces and simultaneously called a meeting
of the NATO Council. What would Bundy and Judt have us
do? Respond to an ultimatum only subject to approval by
the NATO Council?

TEL:0171-493-0834

P. 006

6

Judt (or Bundy) achieve their effect by suppressing
the context of those covert operations they cite as
horrible? examples. They claim "misleading promises to
the Kurds," as if that suffering people had been
triggered into fighting Iraq by our <u>representatives</u>. The
fact is that when the decision to support the Kurds was
made in July 1972, the Kurds were already fighting and

TEL:0171-493-0834

P. 007

7

had been for several years. They were supported by Iran, Israel, Britain and other neighboring countries. Nixon was asked in 1972 to support them when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the previous sponsor to match. [Kurds]

TEL:0171-493-0834

P. 008

8

a neutrality they were violating daily. The Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had invited attacks on the sanctuaries, both Cluster Bombs and publicly saying the Cambodian population had been expelled. The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched attacks two weeks after Nixon assumed his office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. Sihanouk invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services Committee, the Speaker, and about twenty other congressional leaders - all from the Democratic opposition party. None urged widening the circle of those privy to the information.

11-AUG.'98(TUE) 15:45 GOLDHAMMER

TEL:0171-493-0834

P. 009

9

TEL:0171-493-0834

P. 010

10

TEL:0171-493-0834

P. 011

11

dissimulation

As for the charges of deceit, dissimulation and other epithets, I can only say that, as Secretary of State, I travelled to thirty eight states, must have testified before one hundred congressional committees, and given perhaps an equal number of speeches and interviews. Let Judt produce any knowing misrepresentation other than the judgment of the people. The judgment of the people is always correct, but the misrepresentation is so strong that it can be difficult to dispel.

# Counsels on Foreign Relations

Tony Judt

**A Tangled Web:**
The Making of Foreign Policy
in the Nixon Presidency
by William Bundy.
Hill and Wang, 647 pp., $35.00

## 1.

The years 1968-1975 were the hinge on which the second half of our century turned. The cultural revolt that we somewhat misleadingly call "the Sixties" reached its apoee in the early Seventies and entered the mainstream of public life and language. "Revisionist" or reform communism heaved its last, optimistic breath in Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1968; its defeat signaled first the end of a chimera in Eastern Europe and then, shortly thereafter, the first stage of the dismantling of that same fond hope in the West, with the 1973 translation of Solzhenitsyn's *Gulag* and the unraveling illusions of Old and New Left alike. In the Middle East the unstable post-'67 truce between Israel and the Arab states was followed by the "Yom Kippur" war, the oil embargo and price rise, and a radically altered power configuration both in the region and between the Arabs and the great powers. In South Asia a new country — Bangladesh — was born, in the course of a war between India and Pakistan.

In 1968 the United States was still a major presence in Southeast Asia, with over half a million troops in South Vietnam alone. Of greater significance, it was also still the world's banker, thanks to the postwar arrangements set in place at Bretton Woods in 1944: the dollar, whose relationship to other currencies was based on fixed exchange rates, was the international reserve currency, backed by US gold reserves. From August 1971 this unsustainable and increasingly symbolic role was abandoned to national and international policy initiatives and the fluctuations of trade and currency markets. In a related development the member states of the European Community voted the following year to commit themselves to the goal, however distant, of political unity. The nervous but familiar certainties of the cold war gave way to "détente": between the US and the Soviet Union (SALT 1, the first international agreement to limit strategic armaments, was signed in 1972), and between Germany and its eastern neighbors following Willy Brandt's *Ostpolitik* and the treaties and agreements he secured with the Soviet Union in 1970 and the years that followed.

In Asia the United States, after studiously ignoring Communist China for two decades, entered into a series of communications and meetings with Chinese leaders that would culminate (in 1979) in the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries, something that would have been unthinkable for most American politicians and statesmen of the cold war era. By April 1975 the US had been evicted from Vietnam and Cambodia; two months later the Helsinki conference on security and cooperation in Europe was convened. The dramatic

international developments of the 1980s were still unforeseen and unthinkable (for all but a few imprisoned dissidents in Eastern Europe); but their foundations were now in place.

Throughout this protein moment in the international and national history of our times, the foreign policy of the most important country in the world was effectively run by one man, Henry Kissinger—first as national security adviser, then as secretary of state. And for most of that time he answered to the desires of Richard Nixon, president of the United States from January 1969 until his forced resignation in August 1974, after which Kissinger stayed on in a similar capacity under Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford. Kissinger's protracted domination of state business, and the fact that Nixon's presidency coincided with such an important turning point in world affairs, make his management of US foreign policy a matter of unusual general interest, and have tended to favor the claim made by both men that there was, in fact, no coincidence—that their strategic thinking and their actions played a central role in bringing about changes I have described.

That is one reason why William Bundy's new book is important. It is a carefully written and painstakingly researched narrative of US foreign affairs as they were conducted by Nixon and Kissinger. It is not the last word on its subject—as Bundy acknowledges, many archives and papers remain inaccessible, not least those public documents reclassified by Kissinger himself as “personal” papers and closed to prying scholarly eyes until five years after his death. But nothing of importance is left out; the story is not likely to change significantly in later versions. And that story, as we shall see, is distinctly unflattering to both men.

In itself that is hardly new—Nixon has long been a soft target for journalists and historians, and Kissinger too has been the subject of more than one critical assessment. But William Bundy is not a journalist and he is not, at least by profession, a historian. He was for a very long time a member of the old foreign policy “establishment” of this country; indeed his curriculum vitae is

almost a caricature of the type. From 1951 to 1960 he worked for the CIA as an analyst of international political developments; from 1961 to 1964 he was in the Office of International Security Affairs, a Pentagon-based oversight committee evaluating the political and diplomatic impact of military options. From 1964 through 1969 he was the assistant secretary of state responsible for East Asian policy; according to former Senator and Ambassador Mike Mansfield, it was William Bundy, together with his brother McGeorge, Robert McNamara, and General Maxfield Taylor (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), who were the “architects” of American policy in Vietnam. From 1972 until 1984 he was the editor of *Foreign Affairs*, the prestigious and influential “house journal” of that same establishment.¹

William Bundy, then, is a consummate “insider,” and this is an insider’s analysis of the making of US foreign policy, at a time when the old foreign policy elite was losing control to a new brand of international relations “expert.” It is cool, reasonable, dispassionate, sometimes quite technical, and at least as much concerned with how policy gets made as with its implementation. It does not blame its subjects for situations they inherited—understandably, since these, notably in Southeast Asia, were largely the work of Bundy himself and his peers and colleagues. Nor does Bundy devote overmuch space to discussing the moral and political dimensions of that inheritance. Moreover, he offers scrupulously balanced accounts of the choices Nixon and Kissinger had—and didn’t have—and he gives credit where credit

¹Mansfield is quoted from a conversation with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington. See Anatoly Dobrynin, *In Confidence* (Times Books, 1995), p. 137. It is perhaps also germane to add that Bundy is the son-in-law of the late Dean Acheson, that his father, Harvey Bundy, was a close adviser of Henry M. Stimson during World War II, and that his brother McGeorge was President Kennedy's national security adviser, all of which makes him a member of the innermost foreign policy elite as much by dynamic relations as by election.

is due. But just for that reason his book is a devastating, and within its limits, definitive, dismantling of a certain myth, and it should be read by an audience far transcending the author's fellow insiders, though they may be more startled than anyone by its conclusions.

The myth in question is that of the strategic originality, even genius, of American foreign policy making in the Nixon era. It is a version of history as simultaneously cultivated by Nixon himself, by Henry Kissinger in his memoirs, other writings, speeches, and public persona, and by their many admirers and acolytes. We found the world in a mess, it says: the cold war still frozen, the US trapped in a hopeless war in Southeast Asia, incoherent and contradictory. American alliances and dealings with allies and enemies alike. In six short years we executed two truly radical departures: the opening to China and détente and arms agreements with the Soviet Union. We extrapolated the country from its Asian imbroglio, we propounded the “Nixon doctrine” whereby the US would support foreign allies without getting militarily embroiled in local conflicts, we set in place the basis for Middle Eastern dialogue, we established enduring personal and institutional relations with foreign statesmen, and we laid the groundwork for the great changes of the decades to come.

And we managed all this, the story runs, because we truly understood how a global foreign policy should be made and what its objectives ought to be. If our achievement is underestimated today it is because of domestic sniping, the failure of our successors to follow through on our initiatives and strategic design, and above all because of the tragic diversion of Watergate. In the long view, the myth concludes, the foreign policy “turn” taken in the years 1968-1974 will be appreciated for the courageous and original grand strategy that it truly was.

Some of this received version can stand the test of time—most obviously the decision to make contact with the leaders of Communist China. Other claims may strike some readers of *The New York Review* as spurious; but they can't be ignored. They are, or were, quite well received in certain circles in Europe and Asia and in this country they have left a strong impression—witness the prestige of Kissinger himself and the curiously affectionate and even admiring eulogies that greeted Nixon's death. Their successors, in the presidency, in the National Security Council (NSC), and at the State Department, have not always been men of outstanding intelligence or integrity, and this, too, has helped. And Kissinger in particular has been a master at presenting his own thoughts and deeds to an enthusiastic and receptive audience of journalists and scholars, then and since.

A Tangled Web cuts a broad, clear swathe through such claims. In the first place Bundy shows how the way in which foreign policy was made under Nixon—the effective exclusion of professional expertise, especially that of

54

The New York Review

the State Department, and Kissinger's
clever reorganization of committees
and hierarchies at the NSC and in the
White House so as to centralize virtually
all knowledge and authority in his
own office—mean that foreign policy
was no longer subjected to careful or
contradictory debate and discussion.
Hardly anyone interrogated Kissinger
on the possible side effects or unin-
tended consequences of his words and
actions. Decision-making was certainly
rendered more “efficient,” in the sense
that more decisions were unlikely to
be questioned or diluted before im-
plementation, but the results, Bundy
writes, were often disastrous. One
clear implication of his book is that US
foreign policy in these years, far from
growing out of brilliantly reasoned
and long-mulled strategic rethinking,
was a “seat-of-the-pants” operation,
with much consequent effort devoted
to various forms of damage control.

This, it has to be noted, is a partisan
position. Kissinger and Nixon most
certainly did ignore and snub qualified
experts, especially those in the profes-
sional diplomatic and intelligence com-
munities with whom William Bundy
was closely identified. But the track
record of such “experts” through the
Sixties had its own blemishes. The
Communist regimes of Southeast Asia,
including the one in Hanoi, were au-
thoritative and repressive and posed a
threat to their non-Communist neigh-
bers; and Hanoi was implacably deter-
ded to expand its power. But no one
in the West had found any very convinc-
ing way to oppose those governments
without propping up unsavory (and
often unpopular) local non-Communist
regimes, and in most cases not very suc-
sessfully at that. Many American sol-
diers had died in Vietnam before
Richard Nixon came to office, for rea-
sons that seemed increasingly obscure
to many people. The “experts” could
try to explain why and how the US was
in Southeast Asia, but they had little to
offer on what should now be done, ei-
ther to save South Vietnam or to extri-
cate American forces. And that, above
all, was the problem facing the incom-
ing Republican administration.

Bundy's second theme follows from
the first. The "streamlined" decision-
making process, with all power and
initiative centralized under two men
and their staffs, was from the outset
intended to exclude not just unimagi-
native bureaucrats but also, and espe-
cially, those offices and agencies con-
stitutionally empowered under US law
to oversee and share in the making of
foreign policy, notably Congress. This
would in due course be the source of
Nixon's undoing, when congressional
committees and even erstwhile sena-
torial supporters of the Vietnam War,
for example, grew not just frustrated
but genuinely alarmed at covert oper-
ations, unauthorized bombings, and the
like and began to rein in the executive
power. But it is also related to the in-
ability of Nixon, in particular, to grasp
that in a democracy the government is
not only obliged but is also well-advised
to give a running account of what it is
doing and why if it wishes to retain
public confidence and support.

On the contrary, Bundy writes, for-
ign policy under Nixon and Kissinger
was not only not adequately discussed
with Congress or the electorate, it was
on vital occasions deliberately hidden

by what can politely be called dissum-
ilation. The administration did not just
indulge in covert acts or illegal mili-
tary operations and wiretapping or oth-
erwise persecute those whom Nixon or
Kissinger suspected of leaking details
of their undertakings (which in Kis-
singer's case included members of his
own staff). When they did describe what
they planned to do, and why it ought to
be done—whether to a congressional
committee, to a roomful of journalists,
or in a televised speech—they not infre-
quently, Bundy writes, said one thing
and then in practice did the opposite.

In the short run, Bundy observes,
this gained support for their policies—
as when Nixon impressed upon his
domestic constituency the virtues of
“Vietnamization,” or Kissinger prom-
ised great things for the Paris Peace
Agreements of January 1973. But the
point is that, while the Paris accords
were probably the best outcome that
to the US could get by that date, they
represented an unhappy compromise,
and at best a holding operation, as
Kissinger well understood. To claim more
for them— to hold out the prospect of
a free and autonomous South Viet-
namese state for the foreseeable fu-
ture—was disingenuous. And such
frustration, disillusion, and ultimately cyn-
icism when it turned out that the re-
sults were quite other than promised.

This chronic preference for offering
self-serving, optimistic tales and then
hoping no one would notice the unap-
zeitung outcomes is one of Bundy's
major themes and he sees it as having
had a corrosive effect on US public
life: “In the end, Richard Nixon's use of
covert operations was less impor-
tant than his persistent record of mis-
representing his policies and pursuing
strategies and actions at odds with
what he told Congress and the Ameri-
can people.”²² And, finally, these dom-
estic shortcomings cannot simply be
excused with the claim that at least the
policies themselves were strikingly ef-
fective. Some were, but others were
not. The opening to China and the
arms agreements with the USSR were
good in themselves, and in the Chinese
case helped unfreeze US domestic dis-
cussion of foreign policy. Nixon and
Kissinger can rightly take credit for
these accomplishments. But they never
merged into some overarching grand
strategy, the very idea of which turns
out to have been, for the most part, an
Oz-like illusion.

It is one of the strengths of Bundy's
book that he manages to demonstrate
how integrally related were all the sep-
arate characteristics and defects just
noted. He provides many examples.
We have long known about Kissinger's
scorn for foreign policy professionals,
his confidence in his own knowledge
and understanding—in the words of
one earlier commentator, he “enjoyed
putting the boot in State whenever pos-
sible.” When one of his staffers objected

²Bundy is for the most part ostenta-
tiously polite in expressing his distaste
for the way in which the Nixon admin-
istration went about its business, con-
fining his strictures to the content of
its actions. Only very occasionally does
he let slip a note of undisguised dis-
taste. When the last set of tapes was
released, on April 30, 1974, he com-
ments almost as an aside that “the
mind-set of the White House was re-
vealed as that of the gutter.”

to the plan to invade Cambodia in April
1970. Kissinger responded revealingly,
“Your views represent the cowardice
of the Eastern Establishment.”³

2.

Bundy, however, is concerned not so
much to offer further illustrations of
such attitudes as to show their detri-
mental impact on policy-making itself.
Better staff work and a more sensitive
ear to local knowledge, he argues,
might have mitigated the long-term
impact on US-Japanese relations of
the unwelcome surprise (shokku) of
the opening of links with China in
1971—something that Nixon and Kis-
singer kept very much to themselves,
while leaving it to the then Secretary
of State Rogers and his hapless staff to
explain this turn of events to the per-
plexed and worried Japanese, who had
been given no advance warning.

In a similar way, Bundy writes, the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
only learned the full extent of Nixon's
“initiatives” in Cambodia thanks to
the revelations of a disgruntled army
officer. Although, according to Bundy,
“a very few selected members of
Congress” were told about the secret
bombing, none of the congressional
committees constitutionally established
to authorize and fund military actions
had ever been informed of the military
violence of a neutral state. Nor, Bundy
writes, had Nixon or Kissinger thought
to consult other influential congress-
men about these undertakings—with
that result when they were finally and
inevitably leaked, they led not just to
the congressional decision in June
1973 to cut funding for future US mil-
itary action in Southeast Asia, but to
the broader mood of frustration and
resentment that contributed to Nixon's
fall. Bundy is quite insistent upon
this sequence of events. It was not just Wa-
terpage that brought the President
to the fore; rather, it was the accu-
mulation of broken promises, exagger-
ated claims, and straightforward lying—
in foreign as in domestic matters—
that finally drove the other branches of
government into revolt—“failures of
trust brought on by years of neglect and
deepeation,” in Bundy's words.

Bundy, as befits a former official of
the CIA, has nothing against “secrecy,”
an inevitable component of policy-
making in any sensitive area, and one
for which there are appropriate and le-
gitimative institutional structures.
His criticism concerns deception, and the
peculiar combination of duplicity and
vagueness that marked foreign policy
in the Nixon era. “The essential to good
diplomacy,” Harold Nicolson once sug-
gested, “is precision. The main enemy
of good diplomacy is imprecision.”
And, paradoxical as it may seem, the
main source of imprecision in this
era was the obsession with personal
diplomacy (Harold Nicolson
again) “should be a disagreeable

³For “putting the boot in State” see U.
Alexis Johnson, *The Right Hand of
Power* (Prentice Hall, 1984), p. 520,
quoted by Michael Schaller in *Altered
States: The United States and Japan
since the Occupation* (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997), p. 211; for “the cow-
ardice of the Eastern Establishment”
see William Shawcross, *Sideshow: Kis-
singer, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia*
(Simon and Schuster, 1979),
p. 145.

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business... recorded in hard print."

For Kissinger, in Bundy's account, the reverse was true—he preferred to treat diplomacy as a series of confidential contacts with men with whom he could “do business,” while avoiding a clear and official record wherever possible. Moreover, in Bundy's words: “Contrary to the repeated claims of Kissinger in particular, neither he nor Nixon operated solely, or even habitually, on the basis of dispassionate analysis of the US national interest.” Both men thought rather of people in terms of “heroes and villains,” and both “were strongly influenced by personal impressions of individuals.”⁵

As a result Kissinger sidetracked professional diplomats, established backchannels with all manner of persons, and took over crucial negotiations himself, often without consulting the existing negotiating team and leaving them completely in the dark. On this Bundy is quite unfrustrating. The “parallel track” in Paris, where Kissinger met secretly with Le Duc Tho while the official US negotiators twilled their thumbs, or a series of interventions in arms negotiations that resulted in the frustrated resignations of senior US officials—these are the occasion for some of his more forthright strictures. Of the SALT 1 talks in 1970 he writes, “It was hardly the way to conduct a major negotiation: A President not really interested, his principal assistant intervening without the knowledge or concurrence of the negotiators, left to fend for itself.” Of those same SALT talks a year later: “Kissinger had left many loose ends, in another sloppy negotiating performance.” And of the Vietnam peace talks and Kissinger’s “personal diplomacy” in general: “Negotiations bored Nixon and fascinated Kissinger, whose enthusiasm was not always matched by his skill.”

How telling are these criticisms? That Kissinger was sometimes high-handed in dealing with his staff, or that on occasion he humiliated professional negotiators in order to preserve secrecy or highlight his own role, would be neither here nor there if he had secured the desired outcomes. Bundy's emphasis on such matters may strike some readers as excessive. But on many issues his criticisms are justified by the evidence he provides of poorly executed negotiations and oversold agreements.

In order to keep direct control over everything in this way, Nixon and Kissinger did not just deceive others as to their actions; they were also, Bundy suggests, less effective than they might have been in matters that interested them. As for places and problems in which they had no sus-

tained interest, or about which they knew very little, the outcomes were disastrous. They were blindsided, for example, by the oil crisis of 1973–1974 because, by Bundy writes, neither man grasped the connection between domestic demand, US domestic oil production, and the changing terms of trade in international energy (the US share of world oil production fell from 64 percent in 1948 to 22 percent by 1972, even as US domestic usage steadily rose). Oil—like trade, or small, peripheral countries—did not figure in their view of what counted or how the world worked, and they were consistently ineffectual or a wrong, either through inaction or a badly conceived policy, when faced with such matters.

Three instances will serve to illustrate these claims. Cambodia—“Mr. Nixon’s war”—is normally thought of as the major flaw in the Nixon record, and so it is. It is the occasion for Bundy’s strongest condemnation: “a

black page in the history of American foreign policy.” In Cambodia the Nixon administration repeated all the mistakes of Vietnam on an accelerated and concentrated scale without the excuse of inexperience. It secretly authorized over 3,600 B-52 air raids against suspected (but undiscovered) Vietcong bases and against North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia in 1969–1970 alone. By 1974, as Bundy shows, this policy had contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge—a Communist guerrilla organization whose crimes certainly cannot be laid at Nixon’s door, but whose political prospects were enhanced by the devastation brought about by the war. Bundy’s summary of the final stage of the Cambodian disaster is characteristic in its careful review of the record and worth quoting at length:

> General Vogt [the commander of the US 7th Air Force] and most of the senior civilians involved (including Ambassador Swank) believed that the bombing kept Lon Nol aloft in the face of the 1973 Khmer Rouge offensive. It may have been crucial in enabling the government forces, using artillery, to hold their central enclave, including Phnom Penh, into 1974 and eventually until the early spring of 1975. Massive airpower used against a lightly armed attacking force with no antiaircraft capability could be effective in preventing victory for the opposing force.

On the other hand, the intensity of the bombing—as a matter of common-sense judgement shared by many objective observers—drove the Khmer Rouge to greater military efforts. It also made them more self-reliant, more separate from Nörth Vietnam, more alienated from Sihanouk, and altogether less subject to influence

from any of their Communist supporters. The bombing surely made it more rather than less difficult for any party to persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a cease-fire and negotiate a political compromise—which was the stated objective.

The chances of such a change of course by the Khmer Rouge were almost certainly slim already. A determined negotiating effort to enlist Sihanouk...combined with a much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat alive, might just have stood a chance. As it was, intense bombing with no negotiating effort, until the Khmer Rouge was even more embittered, was the worst of all worlds. As throughout the American involvement in Cambodia, the policy miscalculations alone—apart from eventual congressional reactions—were monumental. They must be laid squarely at the door of Nixon and his two principal advis-

ers, Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger.

Nixon, Kissinger, and Alexander Haig kept the details of the Cambodian operation to themselves and a handful of colleagues as long as they could, rarely sought advice from sources outside the military (which was uniquely concerned with blocking North Vietnamese supply routes passing through eastern Cambodia), and made, Bundy writes, imprudent and unsustainable promises to Lon Nol (Cambodia's ruler following the overthrow in March 1970 of the ostensibly neutral Prince Sihanouk in the wake of the initial bombings). They not only lost the country to the Communists anyway, following a devastating four-year war, but undermined their own support for the country and their country's standing abroad. In Bundy's words, “In short, the United States was raining bombs on a small country with little prospect of a good outcome... The stakes in Cambodia came down, then, almost entirely to the asserted psychological impact in South Vietnam if Cambodia fell and to Nixon's sense of personal commitment to Lon Nol.”

Hardly a victory for grand strategic thinking. There were well-informed people in the State Department (and even more at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris) who might have counseled Kissinger and Nixon against doing what they proposed, but they were not asked.⁶

In view of the admiration of both Kissinger and Nixon for Charles de Gaulle, it is curious how little they learned from the French experience— in Indochina and again in Algeria. The French track record was far from admirable, but by 1969 they had learned enough to stay clear of Southeast Asia—“Get out now,” as De Gaulle advised Nixon; and after a long history of

Kissinger, even more than Nixon, held it as axiomatic that the world is run by great powers, to whose instructions and interests lesser states duly respond. Policy in and toward Cambodia was thus conceived and practiced with no consistent attention paid to the distinctive characteristics of any of the local interested parties. In the case of Communist states and organizations, however, Kissinger took it to be self-evident that the lines of communication ran straight and true, from Moscow (or Beijing) to the lowest guerrilla operative in the bush.

To be fair to Kissinger, he was not alone in this belief—and in the case of the satellite states of Eastern Europe under Stalin and his successors, or powerless and tiny Communist movements in Western Europe or the US, it was in large measure accurate. And the rulers of the Kremlin, at least, clearly wished it were universally true, and had an active interest in convincing outsiders that it was. But the experience of Malaysia, Indonesia, and much of Latin America might have taught otherwise had those in power been listening. Just as the Vietnamese rulers in Hanoi were historically suspicious of China, so the Cambodian Communists were never in thrall to their Vietnamese “comrades,” though the Maoist “model”—which they had experienced firsthand in China—undoubtedly shaped their thinking more directly. Zhou Enlai even tried once to convey this basic truth about Asian history and Communist politics to Kissinger, and the offer was available.

The Cambodian policy, in Bundy's analysis, was thus ultimately justified by the claim that there was “linkage,” that just as invasion in Cambodia might pay off in Vietnam, so pressure in Hanoi (by its Soviet or Chinese “masters”) might trickle down to the Khmer Rouge and bring about some sort of truce in Cambodia itself. Hence the suggestion that one of the virtues of “détente” would be the leverage the US could assert, through its improved relations with Moscow or Beijing, upon their ill-behaved offspring in Southeast Asia. The military and logistical links were there, but, as Bundy's account makes clear, the leverage never existed. The whole enterprise rested on an astonishing mix of overconfidence, misguided strategic theorizing, and ignorance.

Cambodia was the worst example, but it was not the only one. In March 1971 the Pakistan dictator Yahya Khan violently suppressed riots in East Pakistan; millions of refugees fled into neighboring India. Tension mounted all year until December when, following Pakistan's dispatch of large numbers of troops to quell discontent in East Pakistan, fighting broke out between India and Pakistan on India's northwest frontier. The war lasted a matter of weeks, until the Pakistani forces surrendered and withdrew, and East Pakistan declared its independence as Bangladesh, leaving a defeated, humiliated, and much-reduced Pakistani state. The indigenous sources of this conflict needn't concern us failed attempts to govern Cambodia they might have been able to advise the US against risking that country's fragile neutrality for the sake of a temporary interruption of a North Vietnamese supply route.

The New York Review

56

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DEDALUS FOUNDATION, INC.
1999 SENIOR FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

The Dedalus Foundation invites applications to its program of grants in support of art historians, critics, and curators pursuing projects related to the study of modern art and modernism. Applicants need not be affiliated with educational institutions or museums; they may not, however, be candidates for a degree. Applicants must be U.S. Citizens. Awards will be made for periods of up to one year. Sitipenda will vary according to need, with a maximum of $25,000.

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ANDREI CODRESCU
discusses

WALKER EVANS: SIGNS

on Wednesday, August 26 • 7 pm

Walker Evans: Signs is a collection of fifty images of signs, billboards, graffiti, and handlettered posters produced by Evans during his lifetime. In an insightful essay, Andrei Codrescu, a poet, novelist, and filmmaker, interprets the America that Walker Evans knew and reflects on the photographer's images as documents and commentary.

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America) require little attention or respect, so long as they stay in line. He believed, as has been seen, in "linkage"—the notion that US dealings with any one country or region should always be part of a global set of policies, rather than responses to local situations on an individual basis. And he believed in the "balance of power."

A case can be made for any of these approaches, taken separately. A policy based on maintaining the "balance of power"—a concept deriving from the English strategy for dealing with European states in the nineteenth century, juggling favorites and favors so as to prevent any one continental power from becoming overly-mighty—could make some sense in a multipolar world. Kissinger's practice, however, was inconsistent: if unchanging national and geopolitical criteria "trump" everything else, for example, why base a foreign policy on the belief that countries sharing the same ideological form—communism—

Ironically, this is precisely because Kissinger was so caught up in the "big" picture that he and Nixon, as we have seen, made a cumulative series of crucial missteps in the "peripheral" zones whose significance they dismissively underestimated. William Bundy's summary of the "deplorable" American treatment of Chile in the Allende era can stand for much else: "Nixon and Kissinger never gave Chile the attention required under their own decision-making system, and acted impulsively, with inadequate reflection. Their actions were not only morally repugnant but ran grave risks of the eventual exposure that damaged the United States in Latin American eyes."

There is a revealing historical precedent for this sort of failed foreign policy, where "realism" is exposed to moral condemnation and ends up diserving its own goals. In the 1870s the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pursued a policy of great-power "realism" in the Balkans, supporting the declining Turkish empire in its repression of the claims of national and religious minorities under its control. This policy, carried out in the name of Britain's strategic interests, was condemned by Disraeli's Liberal opponent, William Gladstone, who made a series of fiery and effective public attacks on it at the election of 1880, when Disraeli's government was brought down to defeat.

Gladstone's rhetoric is dated, but his theme is unmistakable and familiar: "Abroad they [i.e. the government] have strained, if they have not endangered, the prerogative by gross misuse, and have weakened the Em-

pire by needless wars, unprofitable extensions and unwise engagements, and have dishonored it in the eyes of Europe." Disraeli's brazen unconcern for the behavior of his friends, or for the interests of others, especially small nations, was inimical to Britain's long-term interest, Gladstone declared: if British interests were accepted as "the sole measure of right and wrong" in Britain's dealings with the world, then the same attitude might logically be adopted by any other country and the result would be international anarchy.

Gladstone was responded in particular to Disraeli's dismissal of national movements in the Balkans (especially the notorious "Bulgarian massacres" of 1876); at best he didn't take any interest in them, at worst he attributed the troubles to the work of foreign secret societies. As for his critics at home in Britain, Disraeli dismissed their complaints as "coffee house babble"—a striking anticipation of Spiro T. Agnew's description of similarly inspired critics of President Nixon as "nattering nabobs of negativism." But although Gladstone was able to turn Disraeli's haughty unconcern for informed opinion and public moral distaste to electoral advantage, Britain's standing as a disinterested interlocutor in European affairs was indeed significantly imperiled.²⁰

That is the trouble with geopolitical realism in foreign policy, especially

²⁰See R. W. Seton-Watson, *Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A

when it is practiced with disdain for domestic constraints. You begin with a reasonable-sounding worldliness, of the kind articulated by Metternich and quoted admiringly by Henry Kissinger: "Little given to abstract ideas, we accept things as they are and we attempt to the maximum of our ability to protect ourselves against delusions about realities."²¹ You then find yourselfally allying with disreputable foreign rulers on the "realist" grounds that they are the people who you have to do business, forgetting that in so doing you have deprived yourself of any political leverage over them, because the one thing that matters most to them—how they get and keep power over their subjects—is of no interest to you. And at the last you are thus reduced to cynicism about the outcomes not just of their actions but your own.

Thus, William Bundy points out, some of the most vaunted achievements of "realist" foreign policy turn

out to bogus. Kissinger and Nixon could hardly have been unaware, he concludes, that the Paris settlement of 1973 that "ended" the Vietnam War was a mirage, its clauses and safeguards "toothless." It looked only to short-term political advantage, with no vision or strategy for handling the longer-term fallout. Their unstinting support for the Shah of Iran was similarly disastrous—first joining with him in misleading promises to the Kurds in order to bring pressure on Iran's western neighbor, Iraq, then abandoning those same Kurds to a bloody fate, and finally bonding the image and power of the US to an increasingly indefensible regime in Tehran. Like so much else about the foreign dealings of the Nixon era, the bill fell due a little later: in 1975 in Vietnam and Cambodia, in 1979-1980 in Iran. And in each case the interests of the United States were among the first victims.

This history is important, because Kissinger has always claimed that—in contrast to administrations before and since—the governments in which he served were not bemused by "idealist" mirages and kept firmly in view the chief objective of foreign policy: the

*Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics* (Norton, 1972; first published in London 1935), pp. 548-549, 566. Henry Kissinger interprets the affair rather differently. In his version the moralizing Gladstone, a "Wilsonian" idealist, undercut Britain's standing and influence in international affairs. See *Diplomacy*, pp. 161-163.

²¹Kissinger, *Diplomacy*, p. 86.

Mao, Nixon, and Kissinger, Beijing, February 21, 1972

UPI/Corbis/Brabançot

*The New York Review*

pursuit and defense of the US national interest. One can debate endlessly what US international "interests" really are and how they are best served. But what is clear, and this was Gladstone's point as it is Bundy's, is that in a constitutionally ordered state, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are enshrined in and protected by agreed procedures and practices, it can never be in the long-term interest

of the state or its citizens to flout those procedures at home or associate too closely overseas with the enemies of your founding ideals.

Richard Nixon was in one respect a most fortunate man. Felled by Watergate, he has been resurrected in some quarters as an unlikely tragic hero—the greatest foreign policy president we (nearly) had, as it were; a man whose human flaws undermined his unrealized talents in this crucial arena of pres-

iential action. Henry Kissinger has identified twice over from this strangeification—the flaws are Nixon's and the foreign policy was Kissinger's, and its failures were attributable to Nixon's domestic imbroILITIES. Anyone tempted to give credit to such claims should read William Bundy's book, which anticipates what one must hope will be the considered judgment of history upon a troubled and troubling era in American public affairs. ☐

# TWA 800: A Second Exchange

The following correspondence took place between Elaine Scarry, author of "The Fall of TWA 800: The Possibility of Electromagnetic Interference," published in the April 9, 1998, issue, and James E. Hall, Chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. Previous correspondence between Elaine Scarry and Chairman Hall appeared in the July 16 issue.

July 8, 1998

Dear Ms. Scarry:

Thank you for your June 17, 1998, letter regarding the National Transportation Safety Board's ongoing investigation of the accident involving TWA flight 800. In your letter, you stated that you were interested in hearing about Safety Board research on the possible role of High Intensity Radiated Fields (HIRFs) in the TWA flight 800 accident. I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation.

The Safety Board is working with the Joint Spectrum Center (JSC) in Annapolis, Maryland, to conduct a study of the electrical field strength, which may have existed in the airspace around TWA flight 800 when the accident occurred. The JSC maintains extensive files on the capabilities and characteristics of military aircraft, vessels, and ground-based transmitters. It has investigated the possible role of electromagnetic interference in aircraft accidents in the past. Its analysts provided exceptional expertise in this area during the investigation of the crash of a US Air Force CT-43A (Boeing 737) in Dubrovnik, Croatia, which killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. The JSC will provide Safety Board investigators with classified information regarding military emitters, as well as military reports on electromagnetic interference (EMI), including reports generated by Charles Quisenberry that you mentioned in your article in The New York Review. Although the Safety Board will consider all of this information in its analysis of the TWA flight 800 accident, some of the details of military emitters are-classified and cannot be divulged to the public.

The Safety Board is also discussing EMI/HIRF research with researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center. Researchers there have conducted flight tests with a Boeing 757 and have taken measurements of the electromagnetic environment inside the aircraft in the presence of HIRF from known antenna sites. The Safety Board is evaluating with the NASA staff ways in which their work can provide information on the electromagnetic environment that may have existed inside TWA flight 800.

I appreciate your continued interest and comments regarding this aspect of our investigation.

Sincerely,
Jim Hall

July 16, 1998

Dear Chairman Hall:

Thank you for your July 8, 1998, letter which describes the most recent stage of

the Safety Board's research into the possible role of High Intensity Radiated Fields in the TWA 800 accident.

You state three major pieces of information. Each of the three is extremely heartening to me and (I would think) to anyone connected with High Intensity Radiated Fields. The first is that the Joint Spectrum Center will attempt to assess the electrical field strength of the airspace around TWA 800. The second is that you will be engaged in discussion with NASA. The third is that the 1988 Air Force Study into the effects of radio waves on military craft—headed by Colonel Quisenberry—is now being made available to the National Transportation Safety Board.

The expertise of the Joint Spectrum Center on the phenomenon of HIRFs must surely be high. Eliminating the problem of electromagnetic interference is the very task for which that agency was brought into being, and that agency is now being made available to the National Transportation Safety Board. Included among its functions is (according to the limited printed information available to me) the specific task of certifying that a scheduled military exercise does not conflict with, or in any way imperil, civil society.

Anlaying an observer must have some question about the Joint Spectrum Center's own position as both investigator and partial subject since, as noted above, it bears partial responsibility for anticipating the electromagnetic complications of military exercises. (In saying this, I do not call into question the integrity of the Joint Spectrum Center, but simply acknowledge the longstanding legal principle that separates the rates of an inquiry from the agents carrying it out.) Nevertheless, I assume that the NTSB and the JSC have evaluated this potential conflict of interest and have devised a way of circumventing it.

Your revelation that NASA, as well as the Joint Spectrum Center, will be assisting you in determining the electromagnetic environment outside and inside the plane is also very reassuring, especially since their work (the 1994 NASA study by Martin Shooman of the effect of HIRFs on civilian planes; the present research you cite on Boeing 757s) places them in the position of having intricate information about outcomes that occur in actual flight.

Although both laboratory data and actual field data will make crucial contributions to our understanding, the inadequacy of the first to predict the second has repeatedly been stressed in the scientific and military literature. A leading Air Force scientist, Carl Baum (quoted in my article at length on pages 64–65 of the April 9 *New York Review*), refers to the laboratory test as an “electromagnetic hammer” that in its crudity cannot adequately reveal the complexity of what happens in real flight. This point is also stressed by pilots who are quoted in the public record as saying they are put in jeopardy by flying through airspace whose electromagnetic complexity has not been duplicated in the laboratory.

Both NASA and the Joint Spectrum Center should be able to bring forward concrete information about the actual environment.

One key source—to me the most potentially important of all—has so far not been included in your description of the recent investigation now being undertaken: the men and women who were on the ten or more military craft in the area. Nothing can substitute for the information they can provide, especially in view of the important part—noted above—of realistic physical evidence in analyzing the complexities of electromagnetic interaction. The eyes and ears of the country's defense are greatly assisted by the powerful radars and sonars; but our final security resides in the observations of living persons. Over the past two years, press accounts of the accident have remarked on the absence of information about the accident from the country's powerful (and astonishingly expensive) ship, air, and satellite monitors. But, so far as we have been told, the most acute and trustworthy sensing equipment of all has not been consulted. If the men and women who were present on the various aircraft, ships, and military installations in the area have been invited to give concrete, minute-by-minute information about the precise equipment that was turned on and turned off, the public has not been informed about it.

I understand that reasons of state can sometimes mean that information must be withheld. But surely the fall of a civilian aircraft resulting in 230 deaths presents us with a reason of state of the highest order. Without concrete information from the men and women who were present, I cannot understand how the NTSB, JSC, and NASA can evaluate the precise electromagnetic environment; and without that evaluation, there is no way to know whether or not High Intensity Radiated Fields caused the catastrophe.

If I may make a suggestion, it would be that there should be—if there is not already—a person or persons inside the Safety Board specifically designated to assess High Intensity Radiated Fields as a potential cause. It is of course crucial that other experts would subject any seemingly positive evidence about HIRFs to rigorous testing. But just as the positive arguments and evidence need to be tested, so, too, do the negative arguments and evidence. Having both positive and negative views represented would increase the chance that the truth will eventually be arrived at, whatever that truth may be. If you have not already done so, I hope you might consider inviting into the formal inquiry some of the scientists or military persons (in addition to members of the JSC) who have dealt directly with HIRF inquiries, such as Colonel Charles Quisenberry, whose Air Force study is now in your possession, and Martin Shooman, whose research for NASA on civilian planes gives us important information on this subject.

I appreciate your generosity in taking time to write to me and am honored to be in conversation with you.

Sincerely yours,
Elaine Scarry

August 13, 1998

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