In the last century the historian Leopold von Ranke laid down the dictum that foreign relations were supreme among the influences that shape the history of nations. This may be arguable, but for the immediate past it is certainly maintainable. No one has been more deeply engaged at so influential a level in the conduct of foreign relations than former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, or gained so much public recognition of his role. He became a cult figure, a popular celebrity, the subject of countless full-length books, studies, and analyses. Publication of his own version is thus something of a historical event.
With some relief I can report that it contains no more Metternich. Because Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation and first published book, A World Restored, dealt with Prince Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, and the resettlement of Europe after the windstorm of Napoleon, everyone writing about Kissinger since then has made a comparison between them. Kissinger, writing about himself, does not mention Metternich—rightly, for the world he has had to deal with is so different in such absolute ways that a comparison is inapplicable. The differences are important: Whatever their rivalries, the nations at the Congress of Vienna had a common outlook and a common goal—restoration of the status quo ante. Today nations are split between two opposing ideologies, and the globe is dominated by two antagonistic superpowers locked in quarrel. Balance of power is inoperable; the third world has emerged to upset any balance; a new risk center exists in the Middle East; the industrial nations are in thrall to the oil of the undeveloped; nuclear weaponry overshadows all.
In such a world Kissinger’s task as he saw it on taking office in the administration of Richard M. Nixon in January 1969 was to end the Vietnam war, manage a “global rivalry” and nuclear-arms race with the Soviet Union, reinvigorate alliance with the European democracies, and integrate the new nations into a “new world equilibrium.”
How well did he succeed in his mission? He himself offers no over-all assessment—perhaps because he has allowed himself no time for reflection. To make ready for publication a text of 1,476 pages in two and a half years since leaving office is an Olympic feat leaving little room for philosophy. Kissinger has been in such a hurry to vindicate his management of complex and turbulent events that he seems not to have let a day elapse between doing and writing or removed himself in any way to gain perspective. The book is all record, no assessment. He has written too much too soon.
The plunge into writing seems to carry on a habit and a condition of his office. Its pressures did not allow time to think, to examine a problem on all sides and a course of action in all its consequences. This is undoubtedly a fault of the system rather than of character; public life, as Kissinger acknowledges, “is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” Surely that is all the more reason, once released from the pressure, to have taken time for thought.
What we have is an immensely long and superfluously detailed account of virtually every message, meeting, journey, negotiation, and conversation in the fifty months from Kissinger’s appointment in November 1968 to the signing of peace with North Vietnam at the end of President Nixon’s first term in January 1973. We do not need all the aide-mémoires and the daily comings and goings of Egon Bahr, Vladimir Semenov, and dozens of other secondary intermediaries to understand what was going on; indeed, the picture would be clearer if Kissinger had taken the trouble to strain out the insignificant and condense his tale as a whole. Since by training he knows better than to confuse setting down the total record with writing history, one must assume that the record—in his version—was what he wanted, and I have no doubt that specialists in strategic arms, the U.S.S.R. NATO, China, Chile, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, and Vietnam will be mining it for years.
It is enlivened (in spots) by small revelations, vivid scenes and portraits, and glimpses of the often astonishing mechanics of official life. For example, out of the blue in August 1969 a Soviet Embassy official asked a State Department official at lunch what would be the United States’ reaction to a Soviet attack on Chinese nuclear facilities. Mr. Nixon’s speechwriting staff had a specialist for every tone the President wished to adopt. In 1969 China had only one ambassador serving abroad—in Cairo. Through names presented privately by Kissinger to Ambassador Anatoly I. Dobrynin, the release of 550 out of 800 hardship cases of Soviet Jews was obtained over a period of time. On a presidential journey every member of the official party is given a little book listing every event and movement timed to the minute, together with charts showing where everyone is to stand. All these are surprises, at least to this reviewer.
There are sparkles amid the long stretches: the “thrill” of the first summit visit when, as the plane door opened on arrival in Brussels, “we were bathed in the arc lights of television,” a red carpet and honor guard were on hand, and the King of the Belgians waited at the foot of the ramp; the papal audience, during which smoke suddenly poured from the garments of Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (in response to Kissinger’s suggestion that he dispose of his cigar, he had concealed it alive in his suit pocket). There are incisive small history lessons introducing, among others, the problems of Pakistan and of Poland. There are gems of quotation, as when Dean Acheson, asked why a meeting of senior advisers lasted so long, replied, “We are all old and we are all eloquent.”
The author is less good at profundities. When he attempts them, for example in reflections on the space age, his language invariably swells into the sententious, not to say banal, and he sounds less like himself than Gerald R. Ford. On the “agony of Vietnam” he sees his role as “helping my adopted country heal its wounds, preserve its faith and … rededicate itself to the great tasks of construction awaiting it.” Or, on the end of the war, he hopes Americans will “close ranks” and the peoples of Indochina “perhaps attain at long last the future of tranquility, security and progress … worthy of their sacrifices.” Coming from the sardonic gentleman who once, on being thanked by an effusive well-wisher for “saving the world,” is reputed to have replied, “You’re welcome,” this is pure hype on a level with campaign rhetoric, as if he were running for office. Perhaps he is.
Perhaps that explains his hurry to bring out the book, in good time to make its impression before November 1980. Could it be that this tremendous tome is a campaign document designed to exhibit the author as the most knowledgeable, experienced and expert, the ineluctable, the only possible Secretary of State under the next Republican President? I cannot believe that his eye is on Capitol Hill. The Senate has no scope for the summiteer, for shuttle diplomacy, for the commuter from Tel Aviv to Peking to Moscow to Bonn, the guest at Chequers and the Elysée. I imagine it is to this life of the Air Force One jet set that he wants to return.
That would explain why—for the sake of dignity—Kissinger as a personality, the phenomenon of Super-K, the swinger, the media’s delight, is missing from this book. Beyond some rather stilted references to “my warped sense of humor,” no hint comes through, yet the attention showered upon him must be a factor in the record. “Power is an aphrodisiac,” Kissinger himself has said (though not in this book), and although popularity is a different thing, it reinforces power. Kissinger’s explanation of his popularity with the press is that because its members disliked President Nixon they tended to give credit for favorable developments to “more admired associates … and I became the beneficiary of this state of affairs.” Clearly more than that was at work; a distinct personality made itself felt. Kissinger was refreshing and the press succumbed to the wit and charm he knew how to exercise, although they find virtually no expression here.
How did the sudden blossoming of this pudgy professor into the rose of the Nixon administration affect American foreign policy? I would speculate that it enhanced his belief, already embedded intellectually, in his own powers of manipulation and hence in over-reliance on personal negotiation. It may have nurtured fantasies of omnipotence. Although his text is impersonal, that is not from modesty. The illustrations tell a different story. Out of sixty-five photographs, Kissinger himself appears in sixty-three, twenty-eight of them in the company of Mr. Nixon, as if to assure posterity of his close and constant access to the President. It seems that he even needed to reassure himself. Apropos of the low protocol rank of his office, which seated him far below the salt at official dinners, “I spent much time calculating the distance separating me from the Presidential person and the odds on my reaching my car before the Presidential limousine pulled out.” Who can envy the life of officialdom weighed down by these concerns?
If there is a key to Kissinger’s concept of a minister for foreign affairs, it lies in this sentence: “My approach was strategic and geopolitical; I attempted to relate events to each other, to create incentives and pressures in one part of the world to influence events in another.” Here is the activist, the great manipulator, convinced that he can pull the strings that will make the nations, like puppets, play out his scenario. No matter how often they evade or refuse, he pursues his objective with unswerving persistence and intensity. “Geopolitical” is his favorite word, applied to every problem in every region—and it is, in this outsider’s opinion, the explanation of American mistakes. Our approach is too geopolitical and not sufficiently local. If we had paid more attention to the history of Vietnamese nationalism or to the internal stresses in Iran, we could not (one hopes) have invested our policy and support in regimes lacking a valid mandate from their own people. “Geopolitical,” as Kissinger uses it, is just another word for cold war. It means combating the machinations of communism wherever they are exercised on the globe. The contest with communism is indeed serious, but, as we should have learned by now, the opponent is divided and disparate, not solid, and the combat will be lost if we are not more sophisticated about conducting it in local terms.
Kissinger’s activism was risky because it set in motion reactions and consequences that could not be controlled or even at times foreseen, as happened in Cambodia and Chile. He had been warned that it would be a mistake to try to solve the problem of North Vietnamese presence in Cambodia by force and that it would be wiser, as a State Department official put it, “to wait on events, saying little.” Had this counsel been followed, Cambodia would have been spared untold agony and Kissinger a stain that will not wash away.
Because the North Vietnamese were unquestionably the first to violate the neutrality of Cambodia—as the Germans were of Belgium in 1914—the current controversy about American violation is a false issue. American guilt lay in extending the war to a non-participating land and people and in requiring our Air Force deliberately to falsify the record. Kissinger’s strained defense—on the ground that it was necessary to keep silent in order not to force the necessity of a protest on Prince Norodom Sihanouk or provoke North Vietnam to retaliate —is not impressive. Keeping silent is one thing; extreme precautions of secrecy (which Kissinger omits to mention), to the point of transgressing our own military code, are quite another.
Equally, the justification on the ground that American soldiers were being killed by North Vietnamese based in Cambodia seems inappropriately indignant. Kissinger fulminates about an “unprovoked offensive killing 400 Americans a week” and the “outrage of a dishonorable and bloody offensive.” Is an offensive supposed to be bloodless? Is there something peculiarly shocking about killing enemy soldiers in war? When it comes to “dishonorable,” I cannot follow Kissinger’s thinking at all.
He talks a lot about honor in these pages. “American honor” and “American innocence” are terms that recur as often as “realities” and “realpolitik,” with which they consort oddly. The United States is said to have entered Vietnam “in innocence, convinced that the cruel civil war represented the cutting edge of some global design.” One fails to comprehend why containment of communism is described as innocence. Elsewhere he says we entered the war out of “naïve idealism,” which sounds strange coming from Henry Kissinger, the unsentimental dealer in hard realities. Why is he trying in this book to make himself appear something he is not, to wear a Roman toga, as it were, over a coat of mail? Perhaps, with an eye on office, it is to legitimize himself with those on the right.
The vicious tyranny that has descended upon Chile, with the assistance of the United States, belongs to the period after this book closes in January 1973 and presumably will be dealt with in Kissinger’s next volume. Here he includes a chapter on the decision by the so-called 40 Committee, of which he was chairman, to authorize expenditures by the Central Intelligence Agency to influence the Chilean elections of 1970. Here we come to an outright instance of American illegality in a cold-war cause, even if in the first instance it was ineffectual.
With copper and ITT in the background, Kissinger eschews reference to American innocence and concentrates instead on making a fervent case of the danger represented by Salvador Allende, who is credited with the “patent intention” to accomplish the transition to communism. His predicted electoral victory (by a plurality but miniority vote) would establish another Castro in the Western hemisphere. He “would soon be inciting anti-American policies, attacking hemisphere solidarity, making common cause with Cuba, and sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union,” with profound effect “against fundamental American national interests.”
If such was the case—and Kissinger can be very persuasive—a legitimate question arises. In the national interest, was it not an American duty to do what it could to fend off a second communist state in Latin America? The answer, in this case, must be no, for, whatever the threat, Allende’s approaching presidency was to be accomplished by constitutional means. For the United States to interfere in the domestic affairs of a neighboring state in an attempt to thwart their legitimate operation is intolerable. We have come a long way from the election of 1888, when the British Ambassador to the United States advised a correspondent in a private letter to vote for Grover Cleveland and, on this being leaked to the press, the Ambassador’s recall was demanded for interference in American politics. I do not believe that international relations can be guided by morality, but I believe in obeying as far as possible the rules we have worked out for the social order, otherwise society slides back into anarchy—which is as dangerous for the right wing as for the left.
In Nixon circles Kissinger was an ambivalent figure, suspect on the right for friendship with Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Harvard background, entree in Georgetown, and flexibility on Russia. Yet, as agent of a President farther to the right than any since McKinley, he accomplished progress in important areas: in China, in the Middle East, even in détente with Russia and in the Stygian labyrinths of strategicarms limitation.
One thing that the overwhelming detail of the book succeeds in demonstrating is the breadth of subject matter Kissinger dealt with, the unrelenting hard work it demanded, and the fierce schedule he maintained. Japanese textiles, Common Market, Ostpolitik, ABMs and MIRVs, Palestinian hijacking, Soviet submarines in Cuba, Soviet missiles in Egypt, channels to China, Nixon to Romania, Polish riots, crisis in Jordan, war in Pakistan, summit in Moscow, the Year of Europe, the death of Nasser, visit to the Shah, and through it all, secret and subsequently formal conferences in Paris with the North Vietnamese. It was no job for a self-doubter, which Kissinger is anything but. All this seemed to him to require his personal presence. He was continually in motion, talking, traveling, which may not have been the most creative use of his time. Once, in the years before prominence, when a colleague asked him what he thought of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, he thought for a moment and replied, “He travels too much.”
Kissinger did contribute creative policy to the Middle East in his rejection of that dream of never-never land, the “comprehensive” solution. He understood that disengagement between Israel and Egypt had no chance of success if it had to be negotiated as part of an overall settlement and, as he points out with admirable common sense, “if there was no chance of success I saw no reason for us to involve ourselves” in the attempt. He preferred to try for an interim agreement to break the impasse and open the way to further advances. Thus originated the step-by-step process, to be dramatized by the Kissinger shuttle in the next term, that eventually achieved progress where none had been registered for thirty years.
In the end, however, although Russia and the Middle East may be more important for the future, it is Vietnam that is the test of the man and the statesman, and of his mark on American history. The necessity of American withdrawal having already been acknowledged by both candidates in 1968, the effort to negotiate terms that would save our face occupied Kissinger from the day he took office. The difficulty was that the administration was bent on negotiating a withdrawal that would not look like deserting Saigon, that would not destroy the confidence of other peoples in America, that would “offer a fair and equitable settlement to all,” in short, that would make America look good—all of which was a contradiction in terms with the fact of withdrawal. Under domestic protest, withdrawal had already begun while negotiations were under way, which amounted to a signal to Hanoi that it did not have to meet American terms. A belligerent does not have to negotiate “fair and equitable” terms with an enemy on his way out who has given up the goal of victory.
Throughout the interminable talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, Kissinger kept rediscovering that Hanoi did not want a compromise settlement, that Hanoi “had no intention of withdrawing its own forces” from the South, that Hanoi “would be satisfied only with victory,” that, in short, good terms from our point of view were unobtainable. The only bargaining lever left to us was to make continuation of the war a greater risk to Hanoi than a settlement would be. Hence the bombing and the offensive against North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. Military action was not pursuit of a military solution but an argument by force that would bring Hanoi to an agreement to leave Saigon in place and allow the United States to depart looking strong.
The failure of creative policy was the failure to consider that confidence in America meanwhile was not being furthered by the spectacle of our military impotence in a guerrilla war in Asia. A great role in foreign affairs could have been played by an adviser who could have brought us to a withdrawal on the basis that we had done all we could or ought to do for Saigon and that its ultimate survival depended on itself, or otherwise would be valueless, as indeed it proved. Kissinger lacked the imagination and, doubtless, the influence for that solution. In the end, Christmas bombing and all, after four years’ talk at a cost of nineteen thousand more American lives and untold more lives and destruction in Vietnam, the terms obtained were no better than might have been obtained at the start. The four years of additional death and devastation were a waste.
Kissinger acknowledges none of this. Even less does he understand the domestic dissent of the time, although it is a constant theme in the book and clearly the factor that most deeply disturbed him. He treats it as a perverse opposition that, by encouraging Hanoi to stall, frustrated his negotiations. He quotes the Wall Street Journal statement that “Americans want an acceptable exit from Indochina, not a deeper entrapment” and the New York Times statement that bitter experience had “exhausted the credulity of the American people and Congress” and the Milwaukee Journal statement that “if [the South Vietnamese] can’t stand on their own feet now it is too late. The U.S. can no longer stand the internal frustrations and disruptions that the bloody, tragic and immoral war is costing,” but he does not absorb the message. His comment is that the national debate was “engulfed in mass passion,” not that it was telling him something he should have listened to. Apropos of the congressional vote to terminate action in Cambodia that finally blocked the Executive in 1973, he writes that Cambodia was the victim of “the breakdown of our democratic political process,” when in fact what was taking place was the functioning, not the breakdown, of that process. It is unsafe to have high office filled by someone who does not know the difference.
Kissinger complains that “we faced a constant credibility gap at home” and that he could have succeeded “if the public had trusted our goals,” but he never traces any connection between the public’s lack of trust and the acts and policies of the administration he represented. He has no inkling of the concomitant damage: that the cost of playing tough may come too high; that a foreign policy that alienates one’s countrymen and causes dislike and distrust of government is not worth what it might gain against the adversary; that a nation’s strength lies ultimately in its self-esteem and confidence in what is right; and that whatever damages these damages the nation.
New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1979.