Henry Kissinger: Pragmatic Statesman in Hostile Times 9780415837385, 9780415837392, 9780203379868

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Henry Kissinger in American History and Foreign Policy
PART I: Henry Kissinger
Chapter 1 The Early Years
Chapter 2 Harvard and New York
Chapter 3 National Security Advisor
Chapter 4 China, Communism, and Arms Control
Chapter 5 Secretary of State
Chapter 6 Watergate and Exit from Government
Chapter 7 The Later Years
Epilogue: On the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy
PART II: Documents
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger: Pragmatic Statesman in Hostile Times explores the ­influence of statesman Henry Kissinger in American foreign relations and national security during 1969 to 1977. Henry Kissinger arrived in the U.S. as a young Jewish refugee and went on to serve as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford. The consulting firm he founded has advised e­ very U.S. president since. In this book, Abraham R. Wagner reveals how Kissinger used his knowledge of history and international relations to advocate a realpolitik approach to U.S. foreign policy. Through seven selected primary source documents, Wagner tracks how Kissinger became an iconic figure in international relations that polarized opinion during 1969 to 1977, a critical and controversial period of American history. This book will be useful for students interested in American history and security studies, especially those with an interest in U.S. international ­relations during the latter years of the war in Vietnam. Abraham R. Wagner is Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies on Terrorism and serves as a consultant to several government agencies. He served in national security positions for over 40 years and has since taught at Columbia University, USA; University of California, Los Angeles, USA; and New York University, USA.

Routledge Historical Americans Series Editor: Paul Finkelman

Routledge Historical Americans is a series of short, vibrant biographies that illuminate the lives of Americans who have had an impact on the world. Each book includes a short overview of the person’s life and puts that person into historical context through essential primary documents, written both by the subjects and about them. A series website supports the books, containing extra images and documents, links to further research, and where possible, multi-media sources on the subjects. Perfect for including in any course on American History, the books in the Routledge Historical Americans series show the impact everyday people can have on the course of history. Muhammad Ali: A Man of Many Voices Barbara L. Tischler Sojourner Truth: Prophet of Social Justice Isabelle Kinnard Richman Andrew Jackson: Principle and Prejudice John M. Belohlavek Patrick Henry: Proclaiming a Revolution John A. Ragosta Ida B. Wells: Social Reformer and Activist Kristina DuRocher Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet: Exploration, Encounter, and the French New World Laura Chmielewski Harvey Milk: The Public Face of Gay Rights Politics Eric Walther Joe Louis: Sports and Race in Twentieth-Century America Marcy S. Sacks Henry Kissinger: Pragmatic Statesman in Hostile Times Abraham R. Wagner

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Henry Kissinger Pragmatic Statesman in Hostile Times

Abraham R. Wagner

www.routledge.com/cw/HistoricalAmericans

First edition published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Abraham R. Wagner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wagner, Abraham R., author. Title: Henry Kissinger : pragmatic statesman in hostile times / Abraham R. Wagner. Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, [2019] | Series: Routledge historical Americans | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019012745| ISBN 9780415837385 (hardback) | ISBN 9780415837392 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780203379868 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Kissinger, Henry, 1923- | Statesmen—United States—Biography. | United States—Foreign relations—1969–1974. | United States—Foreign relations—1974–1977. Classification: LCC E840.8.K58 W335 2019 | DDC 327.730092 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012745 ISBN: 978-0-415-83738-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-83739-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-37986-8 (ebk) Typeset in Minion by CodeMantra

For Andrea, Edythe, Jennifer and Melissa

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction  Henry Kissinger in American History and Foreign Policy 1 PART I

Henry Kissinger 7 Chapter 1

The Early Years 9

Chapter 2

Harvard and New York 15

Chapter 3

National Security Advisor 39

Chapter 4

China, Communism, and Arms Control 77

Chapter 5

Secretary of State 95

Chapter 6

Watergate and Exit from Government 125

Chapter 7

The Later Years 137

Epilogue

On the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy 151

viii  • Contents PART II

Documents 159 Selected Bibliography 237 Index 247

Acknowledgments

This book was a wonderful opportunity to engage in fascinating research and also to reflect on events and people with whom I have worked for over four decades. As both a participant and witness to some of the events discussed in the book this effort afforded me a chance to look back without the pressure of having to respond to immediate demands as well as the luxury of informed hindsight. I owe a debt to a number of my colleagues from my own Washington years, including Steven E. Herbits, Richard V. Allen, Thomas Garwin, Donald Rumsfeld and Anthony H. Cordesman. Significant insight which I drew upon in preparing this book came from a number of individuals who I worked with and are sadly no longer with us but played important roles in the events described, including former presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, Helmut S­ onnenfeldt, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, General Alexander Haig, General Gordon Sumner, Jr., General Vernon “Dick” Walters, James R. Schlesinger, Robert ­Ellsworth, William Colby, Andrew W. Marshall, and Paul Y. Hammond. A special debt of gratitude is owed to my teacher and mentor, Henry A. Kissinger. I should also like to thank my colleagues Nicholas Rostow and Albert ­Carnesale as well as my wife Edythe Wagner for their helpful comments on the manuscript. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my lifelong friend and colleague Paul Finkelman for inviting me to write this volume for Routledge’s Historical Americans series. Preparation of the manuscript also benefitted greatly from the assistance of several of my graduate students including Michelle Cantos and Camille Francois. It has also been a pleasure to work with the excellent editorial staff, including Zoe Forbes and Sandra Stafford.

Introduction Henry A. Kissinger in American History and U.S. Foreign Policy

This book is about Henry Kissinger, who was born in Germany, came to the United States as a young Jewish refugee during the rise of Nazism, and ultimately rose to be one of the most significant figures in the shaping of U.S. foreign policy in the past century. In a remarkable career spanning many decades, Kissinger was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and served as both National Security Advisor and concurrently as Secretary of State to Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. Early on in his professional career Kissinger served as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army during World War II, and after finishing his studies at Harvard remained as a distinguished faculty member, authoring seminal works on both foreign policy and nuclear strategy. As a proponent of realpolitik, he played a dominant role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy from 1969 to 1977, which brought about the end to the Vietnam War, and was the architect of the U.S. opening with China. He also shaped critical events in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. Various U.S. policies of that era, such as the bombing of Cambodia and covert operations in Latin America, remain controversial as are the results of the October 1973 Middle East War which continue to influence events in that region to this day. Following Government service as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Kissinger founded an international consulting firm, and has continued to provide counsel to every U.S. president since he left office. He continues to write and speak to audiences worldwide on a wide range of foreign policy topics at age 96.1

2  • Introduction

This biography is the story of an iconic figure in the formulation of American policy during one of the nation’s most critical periods, who came to work in government with a remarkable understanding of not only history but the reality of international relations and viable means to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives. Along with George C. Marshall, he is widely regarded as the most significant Secretary of State in at least a century. Decades after he left office he continues to be a prominent figure on foreign policy matters in the media as well as intellectual and academic debate over these issues. By many accounts he remains the most significant foreign policy intellectual in the world whose advice is still sought by world leaders, corporate executives and the news media. When Kissinger joined the Nixon Administration in 1969, he began the very difficult task of ending the Vietnam War which that administration inherited.2 Domestic opposition to the Vietnam War was still intense and the complex negotiations with North Vietnam dragged on for several years for reasons which in hindsight make little sense. Ultimately the efforts by Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho brought an end to the conflict, for which they shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. Not long after, the October 1973 Middle East War required major efforts on the part of the U.S. to bring to aid the parties in negotiating a cessation of hostilities and practical disengagement of forces. This was also a very difficult phase of the Cold War, with a massive Soviet build-up in military forces and a need for effective arms control agreements. In the midst of all this he managed to negotiate an historic diplomatic opening with the Peoples Republic of China which heretofore had been though impossible. There are few people in the world that could have accomplished what he did. Kissinger was forced to face a host of national security and foreign policy crises, and did so during a time of great domestic turmoil. It is important to appreciate the state of the nation during the time of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the intelligence crises post-Watergate. At the same time there was an unanticipated war in the Middle East and a very critical phase of the Cold War. Dealing effectively with these crises as a political realist, with hostile fire coming from all sides even within Nixon’s own administration. There continue to be significant controversies over Kissinger and the way he and the presidents he served approached these difficult issues. Some of his critics still believe that he is a war criminal.3 In almost all cases this volume comes down on Kissinger’s side, and presents the case that Kissinger had both a better understanding of the issues, the actual options, and the intelligence to support what he recommended. Further,

Introduction  • 3

as Kissinger has argued, much of what he accomplished in key areas could not have been done otherwise, working around established bureaucratic processes and procedures. Many of Kissinger’s severest critics have specific issues with actions taken during the Nixon and Ford Administrations to get the nation out of the Vietnam War, which had become a larger conflict in Southeast Asia. In large part they fail to appreciate that this was a situation created by the Democratic administrations of Kennedy and Johnson, advised by Rostow, Bundy, Rusk, McNamara and others, but like these he was an adviser and would like to place blame on an incoming Republican one for all of it. Others look at various actions taken in terms of covert operations and military operations in Latin America during Kissinger’s tenure such as in Argentina where the nation was supporting a right-wing military government and their death squads against leftists attempting to seize power. Accusations of a so-called “dirty war” that took many lives are still ascribed to Kissinger. In many such cases Kissinger was trying to direct the nation into making the least bad choice among a set of alternatives that were not attractive. It is possible to take exception to many of the specifics of how this was accomplished and argue it could have been done otherwise. Without question he and Nixon wrested the foreign policy-making process from the State Department, and much of their work was conducted in secret without the knowledge of the Secretary of State. There are always “Monday morning quarterbacks” but, in reality, much of what Kissinger accomplished could never have been done through the established diplomatic process dominated by career bureaucrats most often afraid of any type of bold new initiative. In the Middle East he was able to accomplish more than anyone previously, and some would argue since. Compared to others who have held the post of National Security Advisor, in terms of sheer brilliance and understanding of world affairs, Kissinger was a true master. Often lost in any consideration of Kissinger is the fact that long before Harvard and his academic work he had extensive experience as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army and retained his interest in covert operations throughout his career. For him this was not simply an academic enterprise. Often during his White House tenure he was deeply engaged with CIA officers on the operational aspects of policies serving American interests. Born in Germany in 1923, Kissinger emigrated to the U.S. in 1938 when his family fled Nazi persecution. As a youth he began his higher education in New York at George Washington High School and later at the City College of New York, where he was known not only for an inquisitive mind,

4  • Introduction

but also for achieving perfect grades in all subjects. His studies were interrupted in 1943 by World War II, when he was drafted into the Army, seeing service as an intelligence analyst in Europe. After World War II, Kissinger served as a civilian Army employee for a time, teaching at the European Command Intelligence School. Returning to the U.S. in July 1947 Kissinger entered Harvard that fall and received his A.B. in 1950, followed by his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1952 and 1954. He remained at Harvard as a faculty member, while also serving as a consultant to the Psychological Strategy Board, the National Security Council and other Government offices. These years also saw major publications in the area of nuclear weapons and foreign policy. Seeking greater influence on U.S. foreign policy, he accepted a post at the Council on Foreign Relations and then became an advisor to N.Y. Governor Nelson Rockefeller in his bids for the presidency in 1960, 1964, and 1968. Following his election to the presidency in 1968 Richard Nixon appointed Kissinger as his National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State where he played a dominant role in U.S. foreign policy until 1977. Kissinger played a major role in ending the Vietnam War which had been tearing the nation apart, and for which he shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. A proponent of realpolitik he extended the policy of détente, leading to a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union. A major element of this strategy was a series of arms control talks with the Soviet, leading to the SALT I treaty in the strategic area, as well as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) and other accords. Another major area of accomplishment during Kissinger’s early days in the White House was the opening to China, paving the way for the historic 1972 summit between President Nixon and the Chinese leadership as well as normalization of U.S.–Chinese relations which heretofore had been thought impossible. In 1973 President Nixon also appointed Kissinger as his Secretary of State, while he retained his post as National Security Advisor. His tenure in these dual posts was marked by a series of major international crises where Kissinger was instrumental in their resolution, including withdrawal from Vietnam, helping to end the India–Pakistan War, aiding in the resolution of the 1973 Middle East War, as well as other achievements in Latin America and elsewhere. There are few people in the world who could have accomplished what he did. Discussion of the complex relationship between Nixon and Kissinger is still a subject of inquiry among historians.4 Kissinger’s views were certainly a “driving” force in U.S. foreign policy during the period, but Nixon also had some very strong views of his own. From the outset they shared a common interest in radically changing the foreign policy-making process,

Introduction  • 5

wresting what they saw as ineffective from entrenched bureaucrats at the State and Defense departments, moving the real power and decision making to the White House under an expanded National Security Council. Without question Kissinger has been a controversial and, in some ways, polarizing figure in U.S. foreign policy. At the same time his view of realpolitik and as well as his realist philosophy in international relations influenced most of his actions when in office supported by presidents Nixon and Ford, and his thinking about world affairs since leaving office. Looking back at the long list of crises, wars, and other events he helped to manage it may be possible to argue that some alternatives could have been better but, in every case, Kissinger looked for solutions that were best for the nation and world order as he saw it. In some cases, such as Chile, this meant imposing U.S. will on other nations which they saw as being in the U.S. interest. Subsequent to his full-time government service Kissinger moved to New York and founded the international consulting firm that bears his name, Kissinger Associates. He has, however, continued to support every president since then on a personal and professional level, and remained a tireless speaker and author on subjects related to foreign policy and national security.

Notes 1. See Kissinger’s Eulogy for Senator John McCain, Part II (Document 7), and “Remembering Senator John McCain, With Eulogies by Obama and Bush,” New York Times, September 1, 2018. 2. Various references, including some “official” ones from the State Department, show Kissinger as beginning his service as President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1968. These are incorrect. While Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, he did not take office until January 1969, when Kissinger became his National Security Advisor. He joined the president-elect’s team in November 1968 following Nixon’s election to advise Nixon and the incoming administration. 3. See, for example, Jon Lee Anderson, “Does Henry Kissinger have a Conscience?” The New Yorker, August 20, 2016. 4. See Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).

part

I

Henry Kissinger

chapter 

1

The Early Years

Henry Kissinger was born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, in the town of Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923 during the time of the German Weimar Republic, to a family of German Jews.1 Kissinger’s father, Louis Kissinger, was a schoolteacher and mother, Paula (Stern) Kissinger, was a homemaker. The family adopted the surname Kissinger in 1817 when his great-great-grandfather Meyer Löb, took the name after the Bavarian spa town of Bad Kissingen.2 The Jews of Bavaria had been subjects of continued repression for centuries, and by the time of Kissinger’s birth the Jewish population of Fürth had shrunk to about a thousand. Here Jews were increasingly treated as aliens, even though their families had lived there for generations. Among other things, they were barred from attending public gatherings, such as league soccer matches. As a youth, Heinz loved soccer and played for the youth side of his favorite club and one of Germany’s best soccer clubs at the time, SpVgg Fürth. By most accounts his interest in soccer was greater than his skill, but his enthusiasm for the sport got him elected as team captain one year. Indeed, throughout his career Kissinger continued to follow the Fürth team and remains a fan to this day. Louis wanted his two sons Heinz and Walter to attend a state-run high school, or Gymnasium, but they were rejected as Jews in a period of rapidly increasing German anti-Semitism under Hitler and his Nazi party. Instead Heinz attended the Israelitische Realschule which was academically as good as the state school, and here he studied largely history and English, as well as religious subjects including the Bible and Talmud. Kissinger always regarded his father Louis fondly and has been reported as saying “he was the gentlest person imaginable, extraordinarily gentle” and “good and evil didn’t arise for him because he couldn’t imagine evil.

10  •  Henry Kissinger

He couldn’t imagine what the Nazis represented. His gentleness was genuine, not the sort of obsequiousness that is really a demand on you.”3 Fleeing Nazi persecution, the Kissinger family moved first to London, England, in 1938, and subsequently arrived in New York City in September 1938 when Henry was fifteen. Many things about America and New York City impressed the young Kissinger, but one thing that stuck in his mind was that here he did not have to cross the street to avoid being beaten as a Jew by other non-Jewish boys coming toward him. He was most eager to become an American and be regarded as one. The Kissinger family first settled in the Washington Heights section of upper Manhattan where they became part of the existing immigrant German-­Jewish community. While the young Kissinger assimilated quickly into American culture, he never lost his pronounced German accent. Some accounts attribute this to a childhood shyness that made him hesitant to speak, although he was never known to be either shy or reluctant to speak following childhood.4 Kissinger ultimately returned to his birthplace in Bavaria several times as an American, first as a member of a U.S. Army counterintelligence unit, and later as a distinguished scholar and eventually as a renowned statesman. After moving to New York the Kissingers joined the Orthodox Jewish Congregation K’hal Adeth Jeshrun that had been recently formed by Rabbi Joseph Breuer who also emigrated from Germany. Breuer was not only strictly Orthodox, he also tried to impose his orthodoxy on the entire neighborhood. Kissinger faithfully attended what was known as “Breuer’s synagogue” although this may have been more out of devotion to his father than a sincere belief in Jewish orthodoxy. Socially Kissinger moved away from Jewish orthodoxy, joining the Beth Hillel youth group which was composed largely of Reform Jews, who were mostly from Germany as well. Most of the Beth Hillel members attended Edith Peritz’s ballroom dance classes, as did Kissinger. Among the girls in the dance class Kissinger met Anneliese Fleischer, also a refugee from Germany, who was later to become his first wife—Ann Kissinger. Ann and Henry began dating and attended Beth Hillel activities together.5 Ann’s family were Conservative Jews, who did not keep kosher, but Kissinger’s parents were happy enough with the couple as it seemed to make Henry less withdrawn and more social. Unlike many of his friends in what was a tight-knit German-Jewish community, Kissinger was far more serious about assimilating into the larger American culture, even though he retained a pronounced German accent. While some of the friends became successful in business and other professions, they retained a close tie to their ethnic heritage—but not Kissinger, who saw rapid assimilation as a key to independence and greater success in the long run.

The Early Years  • 11

In New York City Kissinger attended George Washington High School. After his first year at George Washington High School as a day student, Kissinger attended school at night as a part-time student, working days at a shaving brush factory. Following high school he first attended the City College of New York (CCNY) where he studied accounting, although he did not have any great love for accounting. He later recalled, “I thought it might be a nice job.” At CCNY he was known not only for an inquisitive mind, but also for achieving perfect grades in all subjects. Kissinger’s studies in were interrupted in February 1943 by World War II when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, ultimately serving as an Army intelligence analyst in Europe, where is native fluency in German was a significant asset. This early training and experience in the field of military intelligence provided a depth of understanding in the intelligence area that served him greatly in his later years, at Harvard and in government service. Kissinger underwent basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he also became a naturalized U.S. citizen on June 19, 1943 at the age of twenty.6 Following basic training, the Army sent him at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, to study engineering but the program was cancelled, and Kissinger was then reassigned to the 84th Infantry Division where he made the acquaintance of Fritz Kraemer, his commanding officer and fifteen years his senior. Kraemer was also a fellow immigrant from Germany who quickly noted Kissinger’s fluency in German as well as his intellect, and arranged for him to be assigned to the military intelligence section of the division. As Kissinger remembered Kraemer, he was “the greatest single influence of my formative years, and his inspiration remained with me even during the last thirty years when he would not speak to me.”7 As Kissinger recalls it, this relationship changed his entire life. After the division reached Europe, Kraemer arranged to have Kissinger transferred to the G-2 (Intelligence) section where the two worked together and, after work, walked the streets of battle-scarred towns at night during total blackouts while Kraemer spoke of history and postwar challenges in his stentorian voice—sometimes in German, tempting nervous sentries. Over the next several decades, Kraemer shaped Kissinger’s reading and thinking, as well as influencing his choice of college. It also awakened in the young Kissinger an interest in political philosophy and history, which inspired both his undergraduate and graduate theses, and became an integral and indispensable part of his life. Kraemer dedicated his life to fighting against the triumph of the expedient over the principled, and Kraemer’s values were absolute. Like the ancient prophets, he made no concessions to human frailty or to historic evolution; he treated intermediate solutions as derogation from principle.

12  •  Henry Kissinger

Later Kraemer’s perspective became the source of the estrangement when Kissinger became part of the policy-making world and entered the realm of the contingent. For Kraemer, the prophet, there could be no gap between conception and implementation; the policy maker must build the necessary from the possible. Kraemer saw values as eternal, independent of time. For the policy maker, absolute values must be approached in stages, each of which is by definition imperfect. The prophet thinks in terms of crusades; the policy maker hedges against the possibility of human fallibility. The policy maker, if he wants to avoid stagnation, needs the prophet’s inspiration, but he cannot live by all the prophet’s prescriptions in the short term; he must leave something to history.8 Kissinger returned to the Europe he had fled as a youth and saw combat with his division, volunteering for hazardous intelligence duties during the Battle of the Bulge when American forces were able to advance into Germany. Kissinger, only an Army private at the time, was put in charge of the administration of the city of Krefeld, largely owing to a lack of German speakers on the division’s intelligence staff. In just over a week in Krefeld, he was able to establish a new civilian administration for the city. Kissinger was then reassigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and promoted to the rank of sergeant. With his new promotion, he commanded a counter-intelligence team assigned to tracking down Gestapo officers and other saboteurs in Hanover. In recognition of these efforts Kissinger was awarded the Bronze Star. Later, in June 1945, Kissinger was appointed the commandant of the CIC detachment operating in metropolitan Bensheim, in the Bergstrasse district of Hesse, where he was responsible for the “de-Nazification” of the district. While this position gave Kissinger extensive authority in the area, including the powers of arrest, he took extraordinary care to avoid abusing these powers against the local population by those under his command. Following the conclusion of World War II, Kissinger remained in the Army until he was reassigned to teach at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King in 1946 and subsequently continued to serve in this role as a civilian employee following his separation from the Army.

Notes 1. An extensive account of Kissinger’s early life can be found in Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: Volume 1, 1923–1968: The Idealist (New York: Penguin Books, 2015). See also Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, updated, 2005) and ­Marvin L. Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1974). 2. “Die Kissingers in Bad Kissingen” (in German). Bayerischer Rundfunk. June 2, 2005. ­Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. 3. Isaacson, Kissinger, pp. 22–23.

The Early Years  • 13 4. Kissinger’s brother is reported to have said this shyness was because he only talked and never listened. Kissinger is also quite adept at turning his German accent “on” and “off” as it suits the occasion and even varying the intensity as he sees fit. 5. For a time Ann (she changed the earlier spelling of her name Anne to Ann, but throughout this book we use the spelling ‘Ann’) was also dating Kissinger’s friend Walter Oppenheim, who was more polished and a better dresser, although she decided to date Kissinger exclusively much to the surprise of her friends. Ann was seen as “deep” and “aloof ”—which also could have been said about Kissinger. See Ralph Blumenfeld, Henry Kissinger (New York: New American Library, 1974). 6. When Kissinger departed for the Army in South Carolina, it was the first time in his life he was not living within a German-Jewish community. 7. Henry A. Kissinger, Remembrances: Fritz Kraemer, October 8, 2003, available at www.­ henryakissinger.com/eulogies/100803.html. 8. Ibid.

chapter

2

Harvard and New York

After returning to the U.S. in July 1947 Kissinger received his A.B., summa cum laude in political science at Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandel Elliott, whose patronage gave him a great boost beyond his undergraduate years. Kissinger subsequently received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1952 and 1954, respectively. His doctoral dissertation, “Peace, Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium (A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich),” was not simply a subject of graduate study, but an understanding of realpolitik that deeply influenced his world view and shaped his approach to foreign policy throughout his career. Few other students saw these historic figures from nineteenth century diplomacy as relevant to the atomic age. In 1952, while still at Harvard, Kissinger served as a consultant to the director of the psychological strategy board, a committee formed to coordinate and plan for psychological operations during the Truman administration. The board had members drawn from the Departments of State and Defense as well as the Central Intelligence Agency to help with covert activities during the Korean War. This association served to keep Kissinger’s hand in the intelligence and covert operations area even as a graduate student. On finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard, Kissinger looked at the academic options open to him as a new degree holder and was offered beginning faculty posts at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania—­ both prestigious schools. He had tentatively accepted the Chicago offer when the one from Penn came with more money but, as he later wrote, less prestige. Ultimately, he took neither of these academic offers but rather a position in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.

16  •  Henry Kissinger

This position came out of a relationship with Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. whom Kissinger happened to see one day at Harvard and who asked him to look at a paper on nuclear weapons attacking the doctrine of “massive retaliation”—a subject of lifelong interest to Kissinger. The result of this interaction was not only the set of notes that Kissinger provided to Schlesinger, but also his subsequent article on the subject, published in Foreign Affairs.1 The arguments in this early article were that the Eisenhower doctrine of massive retaliation was increasingly obsolete as the Soviet Union had become a nuclear power and that the threat of an “all out” nuclear war with the Soviets was no longer a credible deterrent to stop them from expanding into what Kissinger called the “grey areas” of the world. Here he argued that the proposed “all or nothing” nuclear policy would paralyze diplomacy and that a realistic alternative was required to fight more localized “little wars” around the globe. Kissinger was at the forefront of a theory which held that the U.S. should be prepared for fighting “limited nuclear wars” which was to become the foundation of the Kennedy administration’s strategy of “flexible response” and an impetus for the development of intermediate range delivery systems later deployed in Europe by NATO. Kissinger’s article was also important in securing him the job offer at the Council on Foreign Relations, which put him on his way from being an unknown graduate student to a leading nuclear strategist.

The Council on Foreign Relations Kissinger decided against moving to the University of Chicago and instead accepted a position at the Council on Foreign Relations that would keep him away from academics for at least a while and engaged in the power politics of New York City. At the Council he directed a study group that would ultimately produce a book. Kissinger was also coming to realize that he had personal ambitions far greater than life as an academic and wanted to be much closer to the true center of world power than the distinguished environment that even Harvard provided. He believed he was destined for more than being a teacher like his father and grandfather before him. At the Council he was able to attend lectures and talks, and to mingle with many of New York’s powerful elite who were themselves looking for bright young men to associate with. Frequently attending the Council events were visiting world leaders and other important guests of great interest to Kissinger. Most important for him, however, were the Council’s study groups, which often included about a dozen members and worked for about a year exploring some specific topic in depth.

Harvard and New York  • 17

Each of these study groups included a study director, who was most often a rising star in the academic world, and here Kissinger was asked to direct a group looking into “nuclear weapons and foreign policy” in November 1954. This assignment could not have been a better fit for his interests. Other than Kissinger, the group included Gordon Dean, former head of the atomic energy commission; Paul Nitze, former State Department policy planning director; Robert Bowie, also a former State Department policy planning director; David Rockefeller, who was about to become Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank as well as the Council; and General James Gavin, a great believer in nuclear technology. Nitze had long been critical of the doctrine of massive retaliation and “mutually assured destruction” (or MAD) originally articulated by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at a Council dinner in January 1954. Even before Kissinger arrived at the Council, Nitze suggested a strategy whereby the U.S. would be able to fight in smaller regional conflicts, referred to as “limited wars,” possible with smaller nuclear weapons. This concept—that the U.S. should be able to fight not only conventional and all-out nuclear wars but “limited nuclear wars,” using tactical nuclear weapons—was one that Kissinger would later go on to make famous. Even before he formally signed on to direct this Council study group, Kissinger was a guest at a meeting in February 1955, where the group discussed the possibility of the U.S. utilizing nuclear weapons in Indochina. Subsequently Kissinger agreed to direct the study group and by April 1955 had formulated a specific set of questions for the group to address. Relations between Kissinger and Nitze were difficult on both personal and professional levels. Twenty years Kissinger’s senior, Nitze was a wealthy patrician whose family came to America from Germany at the time of the Civil War and had donated the Park Avenue mansion that housed the Council. He had already held senior government positions and was highly regarded in both Washington and New York and saw Kissinger as far too arrogant and self-important.2 Kissinger, on the other hand, was a brash young Jewish refugee who had just completed a Ph.D. and was largely unknown to the policy elite. By August 1955 Kissinger had suspended meetings of the study group as a whole and transformed the study into a set of subgroups to advise him on specific questions. This was the first time in the Council’s history that this had been done—and apparently received little if any objection from the group’s members. He had converted the group into a staff that was assisting him in writing his book. Apart from the actual study issues this position gave Kissinger the opportunity to interact with a group of highly regarded and influential individuals, learning a set of personal skills that would serve him throughout

18  •  Henry Kissinger

his career. These were people of power—some born rich and others who had made their way into the elite. Here he learned how to deal with each of them and bring them to his way of thinking in various ways, including flattery and tales of his youth. As part of his efforts with the Council study group, Kissinger invited experts from academia and the government to address group meetings. One of these was his own Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy, who later served as national security advisor during the Kennedy administration and promoted the “flexible response” strategy in that role.3 At the Council meeting Bundy and Nitze engaged in an exchange on the topic of nuclear use and retaliation where Bundy first called for a strategy that went beyond simple massive retaliation and a graduated application of power and a more flexible policy. At this point Kissinger reluctantly took Nitze’s point of view that at least for the foreseeable future the U.S. would need to rely on nuclear ­weapons—even in a limited war. It bothered Kissinger that such limited use would automatically escalate into an “all-out” nuclear conflict. Along with Nitze he was searching for a concept of graduated deterrence that saw the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons in limited wars.4 The Council study group was not alone in considering this critical aspect of national security strategy. For its part the government had engaged an august group of experts under the auspices of the RAND Corporation. Begun as “Project RAND” under the direction of General Henry “Hap” Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces, RAND was moved from being a government project to a contract operation of the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1946, and later as a federal research center under the sponsorship of the newly formed Air Force.5 RAND was established with the objective of looking into long-range planning of future weapons, and nuclear weapons in particular. Early RAND studies, often done to produce research reports, involved important strategic thinkers of the time, such as Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Rowan, Andrew Marshall, Fred Ikle, Herman Kahn, Bernard Brodie, James Schlesinger and others, most of whom would later serve in various government positions. Initially located in an old Douglas Aircraft hangar in Santa Monica, California, the RAND group was well out of the orbit of the New York elite at the Council. While Kissinger was aware of this work, none of the RAND experts was invited to address the study group in New York.6 The Council study group met for the last time in early 1956, and Kissinger then turned to taking the various inputs and turning them into the book that he had been hired to produce. This effort took his full time and attention through the spring and summer of 1956, when he basically

Harvard and New York  • 19

locked himself into the study of his New York apartment to complete the draft of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a 450-page volume that articulated the doctrine of limited nuclear war.7 Prior to the publication of the book itself, Kissinger used some of these materials for three articles published in the Council’s magazine, Foreign Affairs.8 What Kissinger was addressing, both in the earlier Foreign Affairs articles as well as the subsequent book, was the paradigm change that was taking place in both foreign policy and military strategy as the result of nuclear weapons becoming a reality. As always, he began with the understanding that foreign policy and strategy were closely linked, and that the prospects of nuclear warfare had radically changed the nature of warfare for all times with the possibility of national annihilation and strategy needed to reflect this. Even though the Soviet Union began acquiring nuclear weapons in 1949, U.S. strategy for dealing with this fact was still slowly evolving by the mid-1950s. Kissinger was not alone in his belief that avoiding war was not the only objective of foreign policy, and that at a minimum it needed to be tied to at least the threat of the use of force. He saw President Eisenhower’s statement that “there is no alternative to peace” as highly problematic, arguing that while the enormity of modern nuclear weapons made the thought of war repugnant, refusing to acknowledge that simply sticking to the massive retaliation strategy would run other risks and “amount to giving the Soviets a blank check.”9 At the time, the national security establishment within the government along with Kissinger and others were struggling with a U.S. decision to limit the set of options to either a conventional limited war, presumably with the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies, or an all-out nuclear war with nothing in between. Underlying this concept was an evolving theory of deterrence based on massive retaliation which Kissinger saw as having a basic flaw.10 He argued that as the horror of an all-out nuclear war became greater, it was increasingly less likely that nuclear weapons would actually be used. At the same time Kissinger also argued that U.S. policy was largely based on what he believed to be the false assumption that a war with the Soviets would most likely to begin with a surprise attack. Indeed, the U.S. was now investing heavily in intelligence systems and retaliatory military capabilities based on this assumption.11 What was largely left out of consideration was the Soviet preference for internal subversion and limited wars. Kissinger’s view led him and others to conclude to that it was necessary for the U.S. to develop the capacity to use nuclear weapons in fighting limited wars and break the taboo against this approach.12 Such a position was not without its own problems as there was little assurance that such “limited” use of nuclear weapons would not mushroom out of control resulting

20  •  Henry Kissinger

in mutual destruction, and at a point when a war turned nuclear, there were no rules to prevent such a rapid escalation. While clearly aware of these problems, Kissinger clung to his belief that “limited nuclear war represents our most effective strategy” and at the same time would provide the Soviets with the opportunity to decide when the first nuclear strike would take place. Later Kissinger backed away from this position largely due to discussions as to how such a limited conflict might be contained and the practical problems of precisely how it would work. His thinking here was influenced by at least two members of the study group—Nitze and Gavin—as well as some outside this group, especially Bernard Brodie.13 Publication of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957 not only integrated Kissinger’s ideas at that time, but also brought some unanticipated surprises. A book on defense policy by a largely unknown scholar became a bestseller and created a bit of a storm. It was read and quoted by such notables as vice president Richard Nixon and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as well as the famed nuclear scientist Edward Teller. The debate that the book stirred even got front-page attention in the New York Times, which reported that government officials at the highest levels were now showing interest in “limited war” and citied Kissinger as having taken the lead in this debate.14 Not all reviews of the book were complementary. Most notably Paul Nitze, who had been the key member of the Council study group, harshly criticized Kissinger in a review, accusing him of “embarking on a flight of fancy of cosmic theory without understanding the military realities that underlay the argument.”15 Here Nitze called out many passages where he claimed that Kissinger’s facts or logic were wrong, and many authorities have since found many of these criticisms strangely off base for someone as knowledgeable as Nitze. He misread Kissinger’s argument about limited warfare entirely and made various technical comments about the destructive power of nuclear weapons claiming that they might be too destructive for the purposes envisioned by Kissinger.16 Most important, however, was Nitze’s criticism—held by others as well—that Kissinger had no concept of how a limited war, once under way, would remain limited. The rift between Nitze and Kissinger was never fully resolved, even when in later years Kissinger hired him back into the government as an arms control negotiator. Theirs remained a complex relationship, and at one point Kissinger threatened to sue Nitze for libel, and at another attempted to smooth over the relationship by writing a rebuttal to Nitze’s review.17 As is often his style, Kissinger made efforts to court and convert his critics, but in this case it did not work, resulting in a grudge against Nitze that Kissinger carried for many years.

Harvard and New York  • 21

Nelson A. Rockefeller Even before his work at the Council wrapped up and the book was published Kissinger managed to acquire a patron who would change his life forever—Nelson A. Rockefeller, the grandson of the oil baron John D. Rockefeller, and a far more powerful and influential figure than any he had previously encountered. In 1955 Rockefeller was serving President Eisenhower as an assistant for international affairs, and in this capacity assembled an outside group of experts to discuss national security policy. This meeting at the Quantico Marine Base near Washington provided an opportunity for the participating experts to give Rockefeller their views on how best to accomplish a set of foreign policy objectives. As Kissinger recalled this first interaction, Rockefeller told him “what I want you to tell me … is not how to maneuver. I want you to tell me what’s right.”18 Thus began a highly beneficial relationship between two very different men who admired one another. Rockefeller was already a well-known figure from one of America’s most prestigious families, who had been born with great privilege and held significant political ambitions. Kissinger was largely unknown, with the book still not published, and from a family of Jewish refugees. He is reported as once saying of Rockefeller: “He has a ­second-rate mind but a first-rate intuition about people … I have a firstrate mind but a third-rate intuition about people.”19 The result of the Quantico meeting was a report, largely drafted by Kissinger, that called for far greater defense spending, a message that was not well received by Eisenhower. Rockefeller resigned his position with the Eisenhower administration, in part because of this report but also because he was now interested in running for governor of New York State. To support his own bid for the governorship Rockefeller launched his own special studies project that would explore the “critical choices” facing America.20 In March 1956, Kissinger agreed to take the position of director of the Rockefeller special studies project which included a host of distinguished luminaries as well as a supporting staff of over 100 and some additional advisory panels.21 Only 32 at the time, Kissinger had never had this type of assignment and it often brought out the worst in him. He constantly terrorized the staff, perceiving slights at the most trivial things, and was short-tempered with his subordinates, often referring to them as idiots and morons. He had yet to learn how to control his frequent tantrums. Kissinger personally wrote most of the report on the work of the panel on international security, calling for the development of tactical nuclear weapons and promoting the concept of home bomb shelters in preparation for a “limited” nuclear war. Rockefeller mentioned this volume in an appearance on NBC’s Today show, offering to give away copies—to which

22  •  Henry Kissinger

NBC had more than 250,000 requests for the free book within two days and was forced to cut off the offer. With the completion of this report and the work of the Rockefeller project Kissinger ended his full-time employment with Rockefeller but remained a part-time consultant to Rockefeller personally, even after his return to Harvard and until he joined Richard Nixon’s staff in late 1968. During this period Rockefeller made two attempts to secure the Republican presidential nomination, in 1964 and 1968, relying heavily on Kissinger in the foreign policy area.

Kissinger’s Return to Harvard Kissinger’s return to Harvard in the Fall of 1957 was not simply a recent Ph.D. and junior faculty member coming home but stemmed from an interaction he had with the Dean of Harvard’s faculty, McGeorge Bundy, and Bob Bowie then at the State Department heading the policy planning staff for secretary John Foster Dulles. At the time Bowie, who had been a member of the Law School faculty, was himself planning a return to Harvard to direct a new research institute—the Center for International Affairs. Bundy wanted Kissinger to take the position as Associate Director of the new institute and pressed Bowie to offer him the job. The return to Harvard was not without some reservation, as Kissinger believed that he was not universally liked within the Government Department and that at least some of his former colleagues would not welcome him back. Certainly, his personal style and writings did not engender total approval from the faculty, although Bundy as dean was able to persuade him to come back and got the faculty to vote unanimously in favor of it. Kissinger was brought back to Harvard with the non-tenured position of “lecturer” and no firm agreement on any teaching responsibilities or work outside of the newly formed research institute working with Bowie. Harvard’s new Center for International Affairs, initially dubbed “CIA” was soon referred to as “CFIA” to avoid any confusion with the government intelligence service. Even though it had a sterling leadership and set of prestigious research associates, the institute never met the great expectations that Harvard had for it, which was surprising given the need for such an institution and the ability of Harvard to support one and attract the best minds for it. The deep personal animosity that soon developed between Kissinger and Bowie didn’t help. As a member of Dulles’ State Department, Bowie had been key in the development of the doctrine of “massive retaliation,” which Kissinger had just spent the previous two years attacking. Aside from the intellectual dispute, personal relations between Kissinger and

Harvard and New York  • 23

Bowie went from bad to worse, and there were times when they were not only not speaking but each would not come into their adjacent offices if the other was present. Some have gone so far as to describe Kissinger as being paranoid about the disputes.22 Neither Kissinger or Bowie were teaching at Harvard during the 1957– 58 academic year and the expectation was that they would devote their time to getting the new CFIA under way. Instead Kissinger spent much of his time in New York working on various projects for Rockefeller providing a constant source of irritation for Bowie who was largely left on his own to get the CFIA started. Bowie later accused Kissinger of exploiting his connection with the center for self-promotion. In one episode the CFIA was slated to produce a book on Germany and Western Europe which would be a set of essays from various authors, edited with an introduction by Kissinger. Kissinger neither wrote the introduction nor edited the essays, and the center wound up paying the authors for a book that was never produced. Complaints by several Harvard faculty associated with the CFIA also did not help and the center failed to meet the expectations that Bundy had when he brought Kissinger and Bowie together for it. Aside from the personality differences, Bowie lacked Kissinger’s sheer brilliance, and Kissinger could never bring himself to see himself as Bowie’s subordinate. He was willing to accept a subordinate role to major figures such as Rockefeller and Nixon, but not to a Harvard colleague he saw, at best, as an equal. Kissinger’s work for Rockefeller placed large demands on his time, and he was spending as much as three days a week at Rockefeller’s apartment in New York and not in Cambridge working on the CFIA, as Harvard had hired him to do. Even for Kissinger this situation had become overly stressful. Rockefeller was in the process of ramping up his own political career, running for governor in New York. Rockefeller won the New York governorship, assuming office in 1959 and relying heavily on Kissinger for policy support. Harvard seldom hires junior faculty on a “tenure track” as do most universities, and Kissinger’s official position as a lecturer came with only an implicit assurance from Bundy that he might be considered for a tenured professorship. There was intense competition at the time for tenured professorships within the Government Department with such notables as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stanley Hoffmann and others competing for them. Some of the faculty evaluating Kissinger’s scholarly work found it “interesting” but faulted him for not doing a great deal of original primary research and relying far too much on secondary sources. His critics also saw him as too tied to the Washington policy community and his influential

24  •  Henry Kissinger

friends in New York and having a personality that was very arrogant and abrasive—even by Harvard standards. For a young professor seeking tenure in Harvard’s highly competitive environment these were problems indeed.23 When the prospect of giving Kissinger a tenured chair did come up there was an intense battle within the Government Department and a strong opposition to giving such a chair to one who was so political and given to policy formulation, rather than based on scholarly works. Adam Ulam and other faculty members objected to Kissinger’s book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy as not being appropriate as an academic endeavor. Ultimately, Kissinger did gain tenure within the department, when Bundy, who was still Dean of the Faculty, obtained Ford Foundation funding for partial chairs in the Government Department for professors who would be spending half their time on other duties. Kissinger’s part-time work with the CFIA made him an ideal candidate and he was given tenure with the rank of associate professor in July 1959 and promoted to the rank of full professor three years later.24 For years Kissinger’s signature course “Principles of International Relations” drew several hundred students for whom he put on quite a show, combining a newly found sense of humor, charm, as well as tales about his rich and famous friends. At the same time, he constantly berated president Kennedy and his administration for a grossly mismanaged foreign policy, suggesting his own solutions to the various troubles around the world. Some found Kissinger pompous and the class a waste of time, while others saw it as truly enlightening. Others were simply uninterested. While the CFIA had not been a success, Kissinger managed to take over the Harvard Defense studies program in 1958, which included a graduate-­ level course; independent studies projects; and most importantly a vehicle to invite guest lecturers. Most often these were influential or rising stars from Washington who gave a lecture followed by a polite discussion with Kissinger. He continued to oversee this program until he left Harvard for the Nixon White House in 1969. This same approach was used for a seminar on Western Europe and Kissinger arranged for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to sponsor a series of visiting speakers, using the fund to invite people who were either in power or aspiring to power in Europe. One of his visiting speakers was Gerald Ford, a young Michigan congressman, who greatly enjoyed this opportunity and meeting Kissinger—a chance meeting that played no small part in Kissinger’s being kept on years later in the Ford White House. This was a good example of the young Kissinger at his best and did give rise to a certain amount of jealousy among the Harvard faculty who often saw him as arrogant, insecure and mean spirited.

Harvard and New York  • 25

Even so Kissinger was widely respected for his brilliance, creativity, and the fact that, when he needed to, he was able to exude charm and apply a self-deprecating wit. He also had a sincere need to be liked and appreciated, and craved intellectual respect, cultivating people that he thought worthy of his friendship.25 He was also somewhat paranoid about those he considered to be his enemies, not the least of which were the national security strategists at RAND, whom he saw as snubbing him.26 On the Harvard campus Kissinger was largely absorbed with his own self-importance and had little time for students or matters he considered trivial. He was always busy with something he considered gravely important. Even as a professor he continued to work with not only Rockefeller, but also several government agencies, serving as a consultant to the National Security Council and other government offices, and was never at a loss for projects. During the Harvard years he was also a prolific writer, publishing several important books and a number of articles in Foreign Affairs and other publications.

Rockefeller’s 1964 Run for President Kissinger’s study work at the Council and for Rockefeller brought him in touch with many of the elite who were concerned about foreign policy, and a number who had served various positions in government related to policy. It did not, however, bring him sufficiently close to actually making the foreign policy he was concerned about. For that he needed a clear path to the White House and ready access to the President. A decade earlier, the National Security Act of 1947 radically restructured how policy in this critical area was made. Among other things, this landmark act created the Department of Defense, the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and most importantly for Kissinger the National Security Council. The NSC came to be headed by a member of the President’s staff, informally known as the National Security Advisor.27 For Kissinger the only possible candidate was his good friend Nelson Rockefeller who had managed to get himself elected as governor of New York, which has previously been a stepping-stone to the presidency. For a long time Rockefeller had entertained presidential ambitions and was seriously interested in the 1960 Republican nomination.28 He was certainly qualified for the presidency and his position not only as governor but as a moderate Republican and a highly personable individual were good reasons for his candidacy. Unfortunately, it was an uphill battle for the nomination against Richard Nixon, the sitting vice president who had enjoyed two terms in office under President Eisenhower and was the logical Republican candidate.29

26  •  Henry Kissinger

In a very close contest Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to the Democratic candidate, then Senator John F. Kennedy—the closest presidential election since 1884 and one that many believe was “stolen” by Kennedy through voter fraud in Illinois and Texas.30 After the election Kissinger remained at Harvard as Kennedy took office, but did not lose the Rockefeller patronage, as Rockefeller himself looked forward to another White House bid in 1964. Rockefeller had been re-elected governor of New York in 1962 and was testing the waters about his candidacy as he visited Republicans in the Midwest in the spring of 1963 and was encouraged by the response. Unfortunately, Rockefeller’s popularity declined when he remarried that May, after being divorced the previous year, but he decided to move ahead anyhow and focused on the first primary in New Hampshire. The other leading contender in the 1964 primary race was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who was leading in some opinion polls among Republicans. Rockefeller challenged Goldwater to a debate on “how our party can best deal with the vital issues before the American people today,” which Goldwater declined. President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22 also shook the Republican field, with Vice President Lyndon Johnson becoming President and now standing for election. Rockefeller took a one-month period of mourning while other Republican leaders looked to see if Goldwater could win, thinking that Goldwater would likely lose in the northeast but would split the South with Johnson. Goldwater announced his candidacy at the start of 1964 and did win the Republican nomination as a serious “conservative” with many in the party increasingly concerned over the conduct of the Vietnam War, again ending Rockefeller’s bid for the presidency. Running against Johnson, the incumbent President, Goldwater went on to the worst electoral defeat in recent American politics. Even Kissinger, a registered Democrat at the time, recalls having voted for both Kennedy and Johnson, taking great exception to the vision for the conduct of the Vietnam war that Goldwater and his running mate General Curtis LeMay were offering.

Government Work and Arms Control Throughout the 1960s there was a growing community of experts within the government, government research contractors, as well as academia focused on the evolving problems of arms control.31 During this period the weapons and their associated delivery systems grew increasingly complex while nuclear stockpiles in the U.S. and Soviet Union mounted. These weapons, which included both lower-yield fission weapons (in the

Harvard and New York  • 27

20-kiloton range) to far larger thermonuclear weapons (in the 25-megaton range), that could now be delivered by medium-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as well as long range bomber aircraft and submarines.32 This growing arms control community included political scientists, such as Kissinger as well as nuclear engineers and physicists, who were often at cross purposes. The most prominent of the groups outside the government itself was the Harvard-MIT arms control group whose members dominated thinking in the area for decades, with many of the prominent members later serving in various administrations. Never burdened with modesty, Kissinger later claimed that his own work was the centerpiece of arms-control thinking. Including both “hawks” and “doves,” the group had a decided liberal bent and supported such concepts as missile-­ defense systems and opposition to building a new generation of strategic ­bombers—concepts for which Kissinger generally had little use.33 Kissinger’s ideas about arms control as well as broader national security strategy and diplomacy came together in a new book, The Necessity for Choice, published shortly after Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 Presidential election.34 This book was welcomed by the incoming Democrats, as Kissinger had long been critical of Eisenhower policies and warned of a missile gap with the Soviets.35 In The Necessity for Choice Kissinger quietly revised his position about limited wars or regional conflicts and the need for options that included tactical nuclear weapons. Admitting this change, he argued that due to technology developments and “practical problems” it would be close to impossible to define what a “limited nuclear war” would entail, and now argued for a clear line that would keep any limited war from escalating from a conventional conflict to a nuclear one, writing that “[t]he dividing line between conventional and nuclear weapons is more familiar and easier to maintain.”36 At the same time Kissinger also argued for the further development of “tactical” nuclear weapons since the Soviets might do so as well but advised that the U.S. should refrain from any “first use.”37 This policy which Kissinger and others advocated, was in fact U.S. and NATO policy well into the 1980s, and the ability to deter a Soviet invasion with the threat of tactical nuclear weapons was a basic policy tenet. Throughout this period and thereafter the limited wars that did take place, in Vietnam and elsewhere were all kept from escalating to the nuclear level. By all measures Kissinger was an ideal candidate for a post in the new Kennedy Administration. He was a registered Democrat; his increasingly well-known ideas on foreign policy were appealing to the Kennedy team; and many of the personalities he had cultivated while at Harvard were

28  •  Henry Kissinger

moving into key positions in the new administration. Not the least of which was McGeorge Bundy, his Harvard dean who became national security advisor, as well as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., his friend that was also one of Kennedy’s favorites.38 Kissinger was sounded-out by Dean Rusk with respect to an unspecified post at the State Department, and even invited to meet with Kennedy who claimed to have read his book and asked him to join the White House NSC staff under Bundy, who finally offered him a part-time job as a consultant. Clearly disappointed, Kissinger nonetheless accepted the post, which at least kept him at the edge of power and afforded him access to both key figures in the policy realm as well as his security clearance and classified materials that would otherwise have not been available to him. Between 1961 and 1968 Kissinger remained on the Harvard faculty, teaching his signature course, but was largely focused on his work as an adviser to those in real power—Kennedy, Johnson as well as his old patron Rockefeller. Being a consultant was not without its drawbacks. Scheduling of travel and meetings was always a problem, and a partial outsider had limited access. For his part Bundy largely blocked Kissinger’s access to the President, and Kissinger used Schlesinger to end-run Bundy and get his ideas to Kennedy.39 Bundy became fed up with Kissinger and came to see him as more of an annoyance than a source of assistance, as Kissinger would come into Washington for two days and just talk with anybody that would listen. Before Bundy could fire him, however, a major crisis erupted over Berlin and it was felt that his expertise would be useful. At Kennedy’s direction Kissinger was assigned to a panel headed by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson although he did not accept Acheson’s view of the situation. Schlesinger requested that Kissinger draft a separate memo for Kennedy, opposing Acheson’s belligerent approach and suggested a less hostile line that Kennedy could take with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was threatening to cut off West Berlin, and Acheson was urging that an American military division be sent there on the autobahn, driving through the Soviet satellite East Germany. This crisis served to illustrate the point Kissinger had been making, regarding a need for a “flexible response” strategy that was a realistic alternative between fighting a conventional war and an all-out nuclear war.40 Soon after the Soviets erected the Berlin Wall, cutting the city in two, markedly altering the nature of the crisis. Kissinger saw Kennedy’s response as too weak and argued for stronger action that would test Soviet resolve and convince West Germany that the U.S. took its security seriously. Aside from policy differences, Kissinger didn’t fit in with the style of the Kennedy White House and the “cast of Camelot” that surrounded JFK.

Harvard and New York  • 29

At best, Kissinger was on the outside looking in which bothered him immensely and, as he noted, “I consumed my energies offering unwanted advice and, in our infrequent contact, inflicting on President Kennedy learned disquisitions about which he could have done nothing in the unlikely event that they aroused his interest.”41 Kissinger’s NSC consultancy came to an end on October 1961 with a perfunctory “thank you” letter from Bundy and no public announcement. A critical lesson Kissinger learned from this experience is that the President does not need a lot of people around him telling him what he cannot do—it is far better to be one telling him what he can do, or at least offering preferable alternatives.42 Kissinger again returned to Harvard in 1962 full-time and turned to writing critiques of U.S. foreign policy, mostly for Foreign Affairs.43 Once more he argued for tactical nuclear weapons, distinguished from strategic nuclear weapons, that might be useful in limited war scenarios. Now Kissinger stuck to this position, opposing their elimination even years later in the 1980s. This was also a time when he further refined his philosophy of realpolitik, which was the basis for his fundamental approach to foreign policy. By then Kissinger had finally converged on a terminology and position that he retained for good, writing about “tactical” nuclear weapons that were for battlefield use as compared to “strategic” ones that were intercontinental in range. He proposed using such tactical weapons in his 1962 Foreign Affairs article stating that “the most effective method for employing nuclear weapons in a limited manner appears to be their tactical use to stop a battle.”44 Much of what he wrote about in the 1960s reflected his mistrust of the Europeans as reliable allies, particularly when it came to nuclear matters.45 For Kissinger and others these were still the early days of evolving nuclear employment policy, and the virtual impossibility of “limited” and “tactical” nuclear use had not been full considered. In 1949, during his second year at Harvard, Kissinger finally married Ann Fleischer, who had been his girlfriend since their early teenage years in New York. This marriage lasted for fifteen years, until 1964, when they were divorced, and was typical of life among Harvard students and young faculty. They were somewhat surprised when their closest friends, Klaus and Elizabeth, began having children before they were financially secure and delayed having children of their own for several more years until Kissinger was assured of tenure and was earning an additional $8,000 annually from work for Rockefeller. Their first child, Elizabeth, was born in March 1959, followed by David two years later. By then Kissinger was no longer an observant Jew, although he and Ann became affiliated with the Ethical Cultural Society as an alternative

30  •  Henry Kissinger

to practicing Judaism. When David was born, he did have the traditional Jewish Bris, and, at age thirteen, celebrated his Bar Mitzvah with Kissinger and Ann, who were then divorced but on amicable terms. The Kissinger divorce was largely the result of his constant work and desire not to be disturbed, and often ordered Ann to just leave food outside the door of his study and not bother him. For her part Ann was a devoted housewife who worked with Germanic efficiency taking care of the house and preparing for dinner parties two or three times a week for faculty colleagues and visiting guests such as a foreign leader or Nelson Rockefeller.46 She took great pride in her husband’s work, keeping scrapbooks of every article that mentioned him, and amassed a Christmas card list with hundreds of names that might be useful in his career. Over time they just grew further apart, with Kissinger’s desire for privacy increasing and having little to discuss with Ann at all any more. Even though Ann liked music and art, Kissinger was moving into a more glamorous scene and it seemed that she just didn’t fit in, such as with the Kennedy or Rockefeller crowd. For Ann, Kissinger was not fitting in with her concept of an ordered home life. They decided to separate at the end of 1962, following a trip to Europe, and were finally divorced in August 1964.47 They remained on amicable terms, particularly with respect to the children with whom Kissinger has always been close.

The 1964 Presidential Campaign It was difficult for Kissinger to resist aiding his patron Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican primary campaign, where he unsuccessfully challenged Senator Barry Goldwater for the nomination. Most of Kissinger’s work here consisted of sending speeches down to Rockefeller from Cambridge and later work on the Republican Party’s platform committee. Attending the 1964 Republican Convention, he was given the task of crafting a foreign policy platform plank that was acceptable to both the Rockefeller and Goldwater forces, which he successfully managed to do. His other major accomplishment at the convention was to renew an acquaintance with a young Rockefeller researcher, Nancy Sharon Maginnes, who was to become his steady date for the next decade and ultimately his second wife. Newly divorced from his first wife Ann he was again a single man with a renewed interest in single women. She was not his only date for this decade, but when they finally wed in March 1974 it was marriage that has endured ever since. Despite his ability to gain acceptance of his foreign policy plank, Kissinger had little use for the vulgar politics at the Republican convention

Harvard and New York  • 31

and way in which the Goldwaterites booed Rockefeller. Although he considered himself a moderate Republican at the time, he voted for Lyndon Johnson in the general election without hesitancy. After Goldwater’s defeat Johnson remained in office for a full term, during which Kissinger provided some limited assistance in the foreign policy arena.

Looking to Vietnam Until 1962 all of Kissinger’s attention and writings had been on the issues of nuclear warfare, arms control, and the defense of Western Europe. The growing problem of Vietnam, and indeed all of Southeast Asia, had not been on his intellectual radar. He saw this as a Soviet effort to back North Vietnam in conquering South Vietnam and at the time seemingly accepted Walt Rostow’s explanation that 10,000 American “advisors” could deal with the problem. In reality he was still of two minds, expressing qualms about the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam but with others a view that the U.S. needed to stand firm against Soviet aggression, and supported Johnson’s decision to send combat troops into Vietnam in 1965 calling it the right mixture of “firmness and flexibility.”48 Kissinger’s personal involvement, which spanned more than a decade, began in October 1965 when ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge asked him to visit Vietnam as a consultant. He came away with major reservations about U.S. tactics and saw the South Vietnamese government as inept and corrupt with no viable concept on the part of the U.S. as to how the war might ever end. Sanctuaries for the Vietnamese communist forces in Laos and Cambodia, as well as infiltration and supply routes through these adjacent nations, stood in the way of complete victory and bombing the North was inadequate and only served to mobilize world opinion against the U.S.49 At the same time he thought withdrawal from Vietnam would harm American credibility. Kissinger also expressed his deep reservations about U.S. policy in Vietnam privately to friends and colleagues while his public statements generally reflected a position of standing firm against communist aggression and has been called out for his hypocrisy for opposing this policy privately and supporting it in public statements and interviews. This was a subject that increasingly dominated his attention through the 1960s and would be a major part of his life when he finally entered the Nixon White House in 1969. He was concerned both with the South Vietnamese government, which he saw as inept and corrupt, as well as U.S. tactics, which he saw as far too inadequate to achieve any decisive victory and devoid of any real longterm goal that could be achieved. In July and October 1966 Kissinger made

32  •  Henry Kissinger

two more trips to Vietnam and received briefings that confirmed his worst suspicions, later giving a press conference in Saigon that managed to enrage the president. Even when Kissinger denied the statements attributed to him, Bundy had difficulty calming him down. On a second trip to Vietnam in July 1966 he was given “evidence” that he did not see as credible of areas being “pacified,” and he remained critical of U.S. tactics seeing now President Johnson’s tying of U.S. policy to what he saw as the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu, for which he had little regard. He did not believe, as did many in the Johnson administration, that a military victory in Vietnam was possible and saw negotiations to end the conflict as inevitable. At the same time, he supported a continuation of the fight so that enough territory could be held to create a stronger negotiating position.50 Above all, however, was Kissinger’s concern about U.S. credibility and how any abandonment of an American commitment would be seen, even if the objective itself was not a vital one to national security or that could not be achieved—such as dealing with what he saw as a “third class communist peasant state.” Kissinger’s first foray into the world of secret diplomacy and negotiating with the North Vietnamese came largely by accident in 1967 while attending a conference in Paris. He came across a French scientist who by chance had a friend who had known North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Min since his own days in exile Paris in the 1940s. Kissinger proposed using the two Frenchmen as intermediaries to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, with the idea that they should go to Hanoi with a proposal that the U.S. significantly change its position on U.S. bombing North Vietnam. After the first secret meeting in Hanoi the North Vietnamese repeated their position that the bombing be stopped “unconditionally” so that negotiation could follow. With Johnson’s approval Kissinger crafted language that appeared to drop the U.S. insistence on negotiations as a precondition for a bombing halt, if the North would not take advantage of the situation to introduce more troops into the South. Kissinger himself began to shuttle between Paris, Washington, and his duties at Harvard awaiting an answer from Hanoi. Ultimately, the North Vietnamese rejected Johnson’s offer and both sides became hung up on the semantics about what conditions would be needed for negotiations to begin. Kissinger attempted to mediate the dispute but couldn’t find a mutually acceptable semantic formulation.51 After this initial failure Kissinger went to see Johnson and got his reluctant consent for another try. Johnson’s national security team were divided on the subject of a halt in the bombing, with Defense Secretary McNamara and others including Bundy actually supporting the idea of the halt. In the end this so-called “Pennsylvania Channel” collapsed although the new

Harvard and New York  • 33

position with respect to a halt in the bombing became the official U.S. position. Soon afterwards the infamous 1968 Tet Offensive brought on a new wave of domestic opposition to the war in Vietnam with Johnson himself withdrawing from the 1968 U.S. presidential race.52 This experience led Kissinger to conclude that although negotiations were the only way in which the Vietnam War could ultimately be concluded, and that continued secret negotiations were the path to this end, they could only become productive after a “decent interval” had passed.53

The 1968 Presidential Campaign As the 1968 presidential election approached the political landscape in the U.S. grew increasingly chaotic, in ways unseen in many decades. Mounting casualties from an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam led to growing protests across America—and some on university campuses that turned violent.54 This election year was highly tumultuous and marked by the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., followed by assassination riots nationwide and the assassination of candidate for the Democratic nomination Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles on the night he won the California primary. On the Republican side Kissinger’s patron Nelson Rockefeller initially decided to sit out the 1968 race, having alienated the party’s right wing in 1964 by opposing Goldwater, and backed George Romney for the nomination and offered Kissinger’s services to Romney. The Romney campaign was a disaster, with Romney dropping out of the race before the primaries. With Romney out, Rockefeller reconsidered his position despite repeated statements that he was not a candidate. At a secret meeting in New York in April 1968 Kissinger offered to provide as much time to Rockefeller as might be needed.55 Following this meeting Rockefeller jumped into the race but did so after months of indecision and at a time when it was simply far too late to overcome the lead of front-runner Richard Nixon. In terms of policy, the Vietnam War had become the singular polarizing factor in the nation, but Rockefeller’s own position was far too fuzzy, which was repeatedly pointed out by the press. Kissinger provided Rockefeller with the concept that there were no military solutions to the Vietnam War and that the war should be turned over to the South Vietnamese. The plan largely authored by Kissinger called for a phased withdrawal of the U.S. from Vietnam designed to end the war over a six-month period. When the Rockefeller team arrived at the Republican convention in Miami Beach there was virtually no chance of Rockefeller being nominated. Once again Kissinger’s talents were moved to working on a party platform

34  •  Henry Kissinger

position on Vietnam which would be an acceptable compromise. He did so using both Nixon’s campaign rhetoric as well as Rockefeller’s key points— that he had previously drafted. Kissinger’s critics saw this as an effort on his part to worm his way into the Nixon camp. Kissinger did manage to establish a personal relationship with the young Richard Allen, then Nixon’s foreign policy advisor who admired Kissinger’s brilliance if not all his policy positions. At the time Kissinger saw Nixon as “shallow” with a “dangerous misunderstanding of foreign policy.” After Nixon won the nomination Kissinger was seen as being in a state of despair and depression, believing that only Rockefeller could have united the country. In one interview he called Nixon a “disaster” and expressed the opinion that he could never be elected and told a number of friends that “that man is unfit to be president.”56 The prospect of a change in administration had an enormous appeal to Kissinger, even if Nixon were to become the president. He deferred an offer of a visiting fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford awaiting the results of the election and the possibility of a position in the new administration in the event Nixon was to win, even though he had no agreement with Nixon that he would be offered a post.

Notes 1. Henry A. Kissinger, “Military Policy and Defense of the Grey Areas.” Foreign Affairs, April 1955, pp. 416–428. 2. Nitze was quoted as saying: “Henry managed to convey that no one had thought intelligently about nuclear weapons and foreign policy until he came along to do it himself.” Strobe Talbot, Master of the Game (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 65. 3. Bundy was another Boston patrician, having attended Groton and Yale, and like Kissinger had also served as an intelligence officer in World War II. At the age of thirty-­four he became the youngest dean in Harvard history, and was well liked by faculty and students alike. A Republican, he nevertheless served in the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations as National Security Advisor and is known as a strong proponent of the Vietnam War. 4. Kissinger told the group that one of the most critical problems facing the U.S. was to “develop a doctrine for the graduated employment of force.” See Stephen Richards Graubard, Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), p. 104. 5. See Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), Thomas, Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Stephen B. Johnson, The United States Air Force and the Culture of Innovation 1945– 1965 (Darby: Diane Publishing, 1991). Several RAND personalities did publish their own books. See, for example, Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), and Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). 6. One explanation is that much of the RAND work was classified, and not suitable for the unclassified environment of the Council. Another is that neither the Council nor the government was interested in paying the travel expenses involved. Yet one more is that Kissinger was simply not interested in competition. Doubtless many in the Cambridge-­New

Harvard and New York  • 35 York-Washington power elite viewed the RAND contractors with some disdain and saw Santa Monica as an intellectual backwater. 7. Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957). 8. These include: “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” Foreign Affairs, April 1956; “Reflections on American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, October 1956; and “Strategy and Organization,” Foreign Affairs, April 1957. See Ralph Blumenfeld, Henry Kissinger (New York: New American Library 1974). 9. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, p. 7. 10. Deterrence theory is the subject of an extensive literature. The seminal work is Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age. Another key contribution to the field is Thomas C. Schelling, “The Diplomacy of Violence,” in Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). Schelling argues that strategy can no longer be defined as the science of military victory, but is now more, the art of coercion, of intimidation and deterrence. To be coercive or deter another state, violence must be anticipated and avoidable by accommodation. Bargaining power is the foundation of deterrence theory and is most successful when it is held in reserve. Many have attempted to adjust deterrence theory to consider the reality that humans are not fully rational decision makers. See, for example, Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson, 1999). 11. See William E. Burroughs, Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (New York: Random House, 1987). 12. See Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 13. Bernard Brodie, “Nuclear Weapons: Strategic or Tactical?” Foreign Affairs, January 1954. See also, Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), and Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). 14. Russell Baker, “U.S. Reconsidering Small War Theory,” New York Times, August 11, 1957, p. 1. See also, “The Cold War and the Small War,” Time, August 26, 1957, p. 14. 15. Paul Nitze, “Limited Wars or Massive Retaliation,” The Reporter, September 5, 1957. See also Strobe Talbot, The Master of the Game (New York: Knopf, 1988). 16. Later in government Kissinger argued for the development of lower-yield nuclear weapons, which ultimately became a key element of U.S. defense strategy. 17. Nitze soon quit the arms control position over policy differences with Kissinger and theirs remained a chill relationship for some three decades. They even engaged in a bitter debate on television over the need to keep short-range missiles in West Germany. See Bruce ­Mazlish, Kissinger: The European Mind in American Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 18. Kissinger Eulogy for Nelson Rockefeller, February 2, 1979, Rockefeller family archives. Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 90. Both the Kissinger and Rockefeller accounts of the Quantico meeting confirm that Kissinger attended. Other documents from this meeting assert that he was not there, an anomaly that has never been resolved. 19. Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 91. 20. The Rockefeller special studies project was paid for by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, rather than by Nelson Rockefeller alone, and Kissinger remained on the payroll of the fund through 1958, after his return to Harvard, when his part-time consulting work was then covered by Rockefeller personally. When Kissinger finally left the Rockefeller payroll and entered the government in 1969 he was given a $50,000 severance gift—not an insubstantial amount at the time. 21. In 1956 Nelson Rockefeller created the Special Studies Project, a major seven-panel planning group directed by Kissinger and funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund created to define the central problems and opportunities facing the U.S. in the future, and to clarify

36  •  Henry Kissinger national purposes and objectives. The project came into national prominence with the release of its military subpanel’s report, recommending a large military build-up to counter a then-perceived Soviet military superiority. The report was released two months after the October 1957 launch of Sputnik, and its recommendations were fully endorsed by President Eisenhower in January 1958. See Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908–1958 (New York: Doubleday, 1996). 22. Interviews with Harvard faculty Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin cited in Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 96. 23. At the time Harvard’s Government Department had some twenty tenured positions, and when one opened up a search committee was formed to find a replacement, with preference given to junior faculty who had been hired on a tenure track appointment. Kissinger’s appointment as a “lecturer” did not qualify. 24. Subsequently Kissinger did get a position as a tenured professor at Harvard but took leave of this position when entering the Nixon Administration and sought to return following his departure as Secretary of State. Harvard refused, as his eightyear absence was beyond the normal two-year time limit. Any such return would have required a new “faculty search” which was opposed by some in the Government ­D epartment who opposed Kissinger. Another option was an exalted University ­P rofessorship which was opposed by Harvard president Derek Bok. As a result, he never returned to Harvard, and his pique was such that he donated his personal ­p apers to Yale. 25. See David Landau, Kissinger: The Uses of Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972). 26. William Kaufman, then at RAND, wrote an exceedingly harsh review of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Kissinger tried to have his colleague Tom Schelling arrange for him to visit RAND so that he could “convert” his critics—a visit that never took place. Kissinger never got over his distrust of the RAND “Mafia” although he later brought several of them into government service. 27. The National Security Act formally created the position of Executive Secretary as the statutory head of the NSC staff. Also, what few realized is that under the Act the Central ­Intelligence Agency reports directly to the National Security Advisor, and not a directly to the President. This is a fact that Kissinger took great advantage of in his tenure in that post. 28. See Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller. 29. Historically, however, very few sitting vice presidents have ever been elected to the presidency. For his part Nixon was not a particularly popular or personable individual and it is quite possible Rockefeller might have won the 1960 presidential election against then Senator John F. Kennedy had he been nominated. 30. In the popular vote, Kennedy won by just 112,000 votes out of 68 million cast, or a margin on 0.2 percent, and defeated Nixon in the Electoral College, by a margin of 303 to 219, with the remaining 15 electors voting for segregationist Democrat Harry Byrd. Only 269 were needed to win in 1960. Some argue that massive fraud in Illinois by Chicago Mayor Richard Daly delivered Illinois for Kennedy (Kennedy won Illinois by just 8,858 votes) and fraud attributed to Lyndon Johnson delivered Texas for Kennedy (Kennedy won Texas by only 46,627 votes). If Nixon had flipped Illinois and Texas he would have won. See D ­ avid Greenberg, “Was Nixon Robbed? The Legend of the Stolen 1960 Presidential election,” Slate, October 16, 2000. 31. Along with RAND there were several parallel federal research centers, including the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) and a growing number of “Beltway bandits” or firms working under often classified contracts with the Defense Department, CIA and other agencies. Most academic institutions were unwilling to undertake any classified work and as the Vietnam War progressed refused to even take government funds. 32. See, for example, Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

Harvard and New York  • 37 33. See Henry A. Kissinger, “Missiles and the Western Alliance,” Foreign Affairs, April 1958. This concept became part of U.S. and NATO policy until 1987 when a Regan-Gorbachev agreement removed these missiles from Europe—which Kissinger opposed. 34. Henry A. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960). Apart from the substance, which was highly appealing to the incoming Democrats, the book led to a bitter and final dispute with Bowie over whether it would be published as a CFIA document, in which case Kissinger would get no royalties. 35. Failure to recognize the missile gap was a major failing by not only Eisenhower but the entire U.S. Intelligence Community. See, George Kistiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). Kissinger was not the only one to point out this massive failure but did so in a way that had great appeal to the incoming Kennedy administration. 36. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice, p. 89. 37. Ibid. 38. The relationship between Kissinger and Bundy was far from ideal, and Kissinger saw Bundy as polite but condescending, as one might expect from an upper-class Bostonian looking down on the Jewish immigrant. See Richard Aldous, Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). 39. Kennedy soon saw what was going on and stopped this, insisting Kissinger work through Bundy with any ideas he had. See Marvin L. Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1974), p. 63. 40. Kennedy agreed with Kissinger’s argument and speaking about Berlin stated a need to meet “all levels of aggressor pressure …with whatever levels of force are required.” Kennedy went on the say: “We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action” (Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 112). 41. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 63. 42. Landau, Kissinger: The Uses of Power. 43. See, for example, Henry A. Kissinger, “The Unsolved Problems of European Defense,” Foreign Affairs, July 1962. 44. Ibid. 45. Henry A. Kissinger, The Troubled Partnership (New York; McGraw-Hill, 1965); Henry A. Kissinger, “Strains in the Alliance,” Foreign Affairs, January 1963; Henry A. Kissinger, “Coalition Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” Foreign Affairs, July 1964. These short-range nuclear missiles he advocated remained in Europe until they were withdrawn by President Bush in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. 46. According to one friend, Marian Schlesinger, “He tended to treat Ann as a hausfrau and he never paid much heed to anything she might have to say at the table.” 47. After the divorce Kissinger became more stylish, bought better clothes, lost weight, and bought himself a Mercedes—clearly looking for another woman in his life. Ann later remarried to Saul Cohen, a distinguished chemistry professor at Brandeis University. 48. Letters from Kissinger to McGeorge Bundy, March 30, 1965 and April 13, 1965. Lyndon B. Johnson Library, National Security Files, Kissinger Folder. 49. See Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), pp. 46–48, and Landau, Kissinger, p. 157. 50. See Henry A. Kissinger, “What Should We Do Now,” Look, August 9, 1966. 51. Sometimes these word games worked and sometimes not. Often Kissinger was accused or talking out of both sides of his mouth and misleading people, leaving important disagreements unresolved. See here George Herring (ed.), The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983). 52. Negotiations with the North Vietnamese did not resume until well after the Tet Offensive was over. Having earned the trust of Johnson’s security team Kissinger was kept informed on the progress of the secret talks, an asset which would later serve him in establishing his relationship with the incoming president, Richard Nixon.

38  •  Henry Kissinger 53. See Richard Pfeiffer (ed.), No More Vietnams (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 12–13. 54. The incumbent Johnson was the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination but withdrew from the race after anti-Vietnam War candidate Eugene McCarthy finished second in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and Vice President Humphrey emerged as the three major candidates until Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 with Humphrey winning the 1968 presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention. 55. See Joseph Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1982). 56. See Richard Safire, Before the Fall (New York: Doubleday, 1975).

chapter

3

National Security Advisor

With his patron Nelson Rockefeller out of the running for the Republican Party nomination for president in the 1968 election Kissinger, who had now transitioned from being a Democrat to a “Rockefeller Republican,” was not seriously involved in the 1968 campaign. After the Republican convention Kissinger declined an invitation from Richard Allen to serve on Nixon’s foreign policy advisory board and only offered to provide private advice from behind the scenes.1 Initially Kissinger did not think that Nixon could win the election and most likely wanted to keep open the option of working with an incoming Humphry administration. Nixon campaigned on a theme to restore “law and order,” which appealed to voters angry with the hundreds of violent riots that had taken place across the country in the previous few years. At one point President Johnson had to call out the U.S. Army to protect lives and property from burning buildings a few blocks away from the White House. Humphrey criticized the “law and order” issue, claiming that it was a subtle appeal to white racial prejudice.2 After the Democratic convention Humphrey trailed Nixon by double digits in most polls, and his chances seemed hopeless. In October, ­Humphrey—who was rising sharply in the polls—began to distance himself from the Johnson administration on the Vietnam War, calling for a bombing halt. A critical turning point for Humphrey came when Johnson officially announced a bombing halt in Vietnam, and even a possible peace deal, the weekend before the election. The prospect of a “Halloween peace” gave Humphrey’s campaign a badly needed boost. The Nixon campaign had anticipated a possible “October surprise,” a peace agreement resulting from the Paris negotiations, to boost Humphrey

40  •  Henry Kissinger

and thwart any last-minute chances of a “Halloween peace.” Nixon attempted to sabotage an early end to the war using Anna Chennault as an emissary to South Vietnam’s President Thieu, enraging Johnson who said that Nixon had “blood on his hands.” Others agreed with Johnson that such action was “treason” and considered the moves an illegal violation of the Logan Act, calling it a “covert action” which “laid the skullduggery of his presidency.”3 One former White House staffer claimed to have “a double agent working in the White House who kept Nixon informed.” Kissinger who was friendly with both campaigns and likely to hold a job in either a Humphrey or Nixon Administration, also predicted Johnson’s “bombing halt” based on his earlier work for Johnson, although it remains uncertain precisely how much assistance he provided to the Nixon campaign on this matter. By some reports Kissinger provided substantial information to the campaign on the state of the Paris negotiations, through Allen and Haldeman, as well as to Nixon directly.4 What is known is that Kissinger was briefed by members of the Paris delegation, including Daniel Davidson and Richard Holbrooke, and was aware in early October that a breakthrough in the Paris peace talks was imminent whereby Hanoi would now make concessions to obtain the bombing halt. Kissinger got the news from Davidson, who related the information to Allen so that it would be passed on to Nixon. What Kissinger did not know at the time was that Nixon had a better source on the Paris negotiations within the White House who was also passing along information as well as other data he obtained through Anna Chennault. Nixon himself stated that Kissinger “was completely circumspect” and never revealed any classified details of the Paris talks. What he did provide was warning to the Nixon camp that movement was about to occur. Johnson learned of the Nixon-Chennault effort through NSA surveillance of communications in Vietnam. Johnson had ordered the NSA surveillance of Chennault and wire-tapping of the South Vietnamese embassy as well as the Nixon campaign. The intercepted information was not leaked to the public as Johnson did not want to “shock America” with the revelation, nor reveal that the NSA was collecting communications in Vietnam.5 South Vietnam withdrew from the peace negotiations, whereupon Nixon offered to go to Saigon to help. What promised to be a “peace bump” ended up in “shambles” for the Democratic Party. Contrary to Kissinger’s initial expectations at the convention, Nixon won the general election in November 1968, which proved to be extremely close, at least in the popular vote, and it was not until the following morning that the television news networks were able to declare Nixon the winner. Despite the narrow (0.7 percent) difference in the popular vote, Humphrey only took 35.5 percent of the electoral vote.

National Security Advisor  • 41

Kissinger’s reluctance to become openly involved with either campaign stemmed both from a disdain for both candidates, which he did not publicly express, as well as a conviction that he would be offered a top position with whoever won. By some accounts he was playing both sides and offered to provide the files on Nixon that the Rockefeller team had compiled to the Humphrey team but never followed through to do so. Some years later Humphrey stated that had he won he would have made Kissinger his National Security Advisor. His expectation was that this would either be the senior policy planning post at the State Department or the International Security Affairs (ISA) position at the defense department.6 In the end he was offered neither, but the offer that did come was for something far better.

Meeting the President-Elect and the Job Offer It would have been hard to imagine an administration more different from the “Camelot” of the Kennedy era or even Johnson’s administration than the incoming Nixon team. Nixon lacked the Kennedy star quality and the team he brought from California was anything but one of Boston Brahmans or other east coast elites that dominate these prior administrations, with only a few exceptions. While Kissinger had met Nixon only once before he was elected, at a New York Christmas party, his worldview and personability would become a good fit for Nixon’s dark, conspiratorial nature.7 Nixon spent some time discussing Kissinger’s book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, while Kissinger found Nixon far more thoughtful and intelligent than he had expected. During the campaign Nixon mentioned the possibility of giving Kissinger the post of National Security Advisor to at least one reporter who brought it up with a shocked Kissinger. This idea was also supported by Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s running mate in 1960, although there were no further meetings or discussions with Kissinger prior to the November 1968 election. Lodge had known Kissinger from Harvard and greatly admired him and his grasp of world events and security strategy, meeting with Kissinger after the election and relaying his thoughts to President-­ Elect Nixon. In late November Kissinger was in a meeting with Rockefeller and his senior staff discussing what post Rockefeller might be offered in the Nixon administration when a call came for Kissinger—not Rockefeller to meet with Nixon about a position. In a meeting at the Pierre Hotel that ran some three hours, Nixon expressed his belief that the State Department, for which he had little respect, should be pushed aside and foreign policy be run directly from the White House. This was to become the most significant change in U.S. foreign policy making in generations. Kissinger

42  •  Henry Kissinger

told Nixon he agreed entirely and would set up a strong National Security Council staff that would take over the development of policy options from the State Department.8 Notwithstanding the fact that he very much wanted this position and seemed to have found a soul mate in Nixon, Kissinger went through the motions of consulting his colleagues both at Harvard and a wider community about taking the offer and whether he would have their “moral support” if he did so. Bundy, who had previously held the position advised against it, and suggested he seek a policy planning post at State. Others urged him to accept, knowing that they would have a high-ranking friend in Washington. Some on the Rockefeller team saw him as a “whore” although Rockefeller himself urged him to take the offer and gave him a significant parting gift of $50,000 to help with his children’s education down the road.9 The duplicity and deceit the two men shared were quickly evident. Announcing Kissinger’s appointment to the press Nixon stated that Kissinger would only deal with long-range policy rather than tactics or operations, and that he would not set himself up as a wall between either the Secretary of State or Defense. Indeed, Nixon stated,“I intend to have a strong Secretary of State.” Nothing was further from the truth. It was an early example of Nixon’s conspiratorial nature and desire to run things covertly, which was right up Kissinger’s alley.10 Nixon had no problem stating the opposite of what he believed, and Kissinger had no problem going along. The Kissinger appointment was met with widespread approval in the press and by many academics who knew Kissinger. The New York Times noted that Kissinger had taken his doctorate under Bundy, which only served to enrage Kissinger, while others lavished praise on his abilities and the belief that he would be a major positive influence on Nixon. Ultimately it was a strange couple—as Nixon recalled “the grocer’s son from Whittier and a refugee from Hitler’s Germany.” At a December meeting of the incoming cabinet Nixon asked Kissinger for his views on Vietnam and he would only say that his job was to present options, providing information, and that providing policy advice would be left to the Cabinet. As history shows, none of this was true.11 Nixon himself would often remark about how different he and Kissinger were, and in several ways, he was correct, this was certainly an odd couple. But, they were both proponents of realpolitik and like Bismarck unencumbered by moral scruples or sentiment, basing foreign policy on a realistic assessment of strength. For the two much of the world’s problems were seen in terms of a power game with solutions forged by manipulating antagonisms, pitting enemies against each other and often saw sinister motives to anyone who challenged them. While they often worried about each other, they most often focused on perceived mutual enemies.

National Security Advisor  • 43

Apart from some major personality differences, both Kissinger and Nixon had a penchant for secrecy and a major interest in foreign policy. They were both unwilling to share information with subordinates or give them credit for much of anything. Often they both reveled in surprising members of their own administration as well as foreign governments, which were in key cases not shared in advance with the State Department—­ such as negotiations with Vietnam, the opening to China as well as major arms control efforts. The two spent large amounts of time talking together both in person as well as on the telephone, which regularly happened four or five times a day. Ultimately, they “bonded as co-conspirators against the bureaucracy and a hostile world.”12 The two were also distinguished by major differences. Kissinger was acutely sensitive to what his critics might say and always attempted to woo them. Nixon hated his critics and always sought to get even. When Kissinger was angry, he rampaged at subordinates, while Nixon avoided confrontation and was reclusive, often hiding for days on end and looking for revenge. Kissinger was an absolute master of details while Nixon often ignored them and preferred to focus on the larger picture and policy options. At the outset Nixon was somewhat in awe of Kissinger and thought he must be good since he was coveted by Rockefeller, who could afford the very best and had long kept Kissinger on his payroll. Now that he had been elected president, he could pry away one of Rockefeller’s “crown jewels” and took some delight in it. For Nixon, Kissinger was also somebody who had been embraced by the East Coast policy elite, even though he was never a true insider. This group never had much use for Nixon at all and had snubbed him for years. Nixon was not without his reservations about Kissinger and did not entirely trust him even though he thought he would be very useful in his administration. He was concerned about Kissinger’s insecurity, paranoia, ego, and megalomania. Nixon also reveled in fomenting rivalries, and none pleased him more than the ongoing feud between Kissinger and William Rogers, Nixon’s Secretary of State.13 Over the more than five years Kissinger worked for Nixon Nixon’s suspicion grew and he came to suspect Kissinger of disloyalty. Theirs became a love-hate relationship as Nixon’s dependency on Kissinger grew. For his part Kissinger came to see Nixon as a shy and lonely man who simply didn’t enjoy people. He privately wondered why Nixon had entered politics in the first place, and often ranted about Nixon in carefully guarded moments and referred to him as “our drunken friend.” In more public times he would often praise Nixon’s courage and heroism, extolling his virtue in times of crisis. In reality when Nixon was forced to deal with a major crisis, such as intervention in Cambodia, he would retreat to Camp

44  •  Henry Kissinger

David with his drinking buddy Bebe Rebozo. Again, in the nuclear alert after the 1973 October War in the Middle East, Nixon was largely out of touch due to other matters including Watergate, and operations were left to Kissinger. Long before he ever arrived at the Nixon White House, Kissinger had learned how to cultivate powerful people, and had little problem gushing over Nixon to his face while denigrating him behind his back. His praise for his boss included notes, phone calls, press interviews and everything in between. Observers point out that in Nixon’s presence Kissinger’s entire demeanor would change and he was a totally different person—even in his own home when Nixon would call on the phone. Like Haldeman, when Nixon would make some outrageous statement or demand, Kissinger would remain deferential and tell Nixon his statement was profound— only to ignore him later on. Both Haldeman and Kissinger learned early on to ignore Nixon’s most crackpot orders, which apparently worked well for both of them. One area of major concern was the highly derogatory statements Nixon made about Jews and blacks, where Kissinger—himself a Jew—would avoid fighting with Nixon and focus on things that he though really mattered.14 Years later questions remain as to whether Kissinger facilitated Nixon’s darker deeds and was acting at his direction. Many believe that Kissinger served to reinforce Nixon’s dark side by catering to him. Others feel Nixon would have been Nixon with or without Kissinger. There is, however, universal agreement that opposing Nixon on petty matters was a deadly enterprise and in the words of John Ehrlichman “he’d cut you dead. He wouldn’t see you or return your memos … It would have been crazy to challenge Nixon to take a heroic stand against his prejudices.” Given Nixon’s tendency to make anti-Semitic remarks there is some question as to whether at times he had a problem “relying on a Jew,” but little evidence to support this.15

Changing the Policy-Making Structure Nixon’s statements to Kissinger about changing the fundamental nature of the foreign policy process at their initial Pierre Hotel meeting was not just idle chatter—he was absolutely intent on directing foreign policy from the White House and avoiding the existing bureaucracies at the state and defense departments. Specifically, this would centralize power in the hands of Nixon, Kissinger and a small White House staff. His cabinet appointments were largely run-of-the-mill types who would not fight him. At the White House he had Kissinger and a few other major academic minds and a “palace guard” of Haldeman and Ehrlichman—often referred to as his

National Security Advisor  • 45

Prussian foot soldiers. In off moments Kissinger would refer to them in a Germanic tone as “Hans und Fritz.” Nixon had good reason for undertaking the most significant change in foreign policy making in U.S. history. Apart from the fact that the bureaucrats at State and other agencies held him in contempt, this was something that needed to be done. The national security bureaucracy had clearly failed the U.S. and brought the nation into what many saw as a senseless war in Vietnam, grossly misjudging the nation’s national interests and the nature of the Vietnam conflict itself. Further, the entrenched establishment largely ignored the split between the Soviet Union and China; watched a massive military buildup in the Soviet Union with no coherent approach to arms control; and utterly failed to come up with an approach to conflict in the Middle East. The existing system was one that placed a premium on the status quo and utterly rejected anything that smacked of creativity. Anything like a new policy required the unlikely concurrence of desk officers and their bosses at State, CIA, defense as well as other agencies as well. Both Nixon and Kissinger understood this and were from the outset united in the belief that a major paradigm change was needed—ripping the entire policy process from the bureaucrats.16 The mechanism for executing this plan was through the National Security Council (NSC), which had been created in 1947 as a means for providing coherent and integrated support to the President, although the specific duties of the National Security Advisor and the NSC Staff were not clearly defined.17 Presidents before Nixon had used the NSC and the National Security Advisor largely in an advisory staff capacity; Bundy, and later Walt Rostow, had significant power and influence with Johnson. Equally important was the growth in importance of the NSC staff, which became a small bureaucracy of its own, with the ability to analyze intelligence and policy options and to carry out operations in support of the president—­ often without informing the other departments or their principals. This is precisely what Nixon and Kissinger wanted. The NSC staff would become their own “in house” policy operation, shifting as much power as possible from the State and Pentagon bureaucracies to the NSC staff, which in turn would make policy and issue orders of their own. To make this more effective Kissinger, adopted suggestions from one of his former Harvard teaching assistants, Morton Halperin, who advised applying systems analysis techniques to the NSC system. Halperin also came up with a proposal for giving the National Security Advisor the authority to issue what were called National Security Study Memoranda (NSSMs) that would effectively direct what State and Defense did on a specific issue.18 This allowed the National Security Advisor to conduct negotiations secretly and

46  •  Henry Kissinger

later just tell State or Defense what had been done and became the mechanism to achieve what Nixon and Kissinger wanted. In late December Nixon met with his designated secretaries of State and Defense, William Rogers and Melvin Laird, to discuss Kissinger’s plan without telling them, in true Nixon fashion, that he had already approved it the day before. Rogers, who was largely oblivious to Kissinger’s machinations, failed to appreciate that his power as secretary was being stripped away even before he took office. A week later his incoming Undersecretary, U. Alexis Johnson, explained this to him, but any appeal to Kissinger and Nixon was in vain. Nixon signed an order implementing Kissinger’s plan and told anyone who objected that they should resign.19 The new national security apparatus was now in place, designed for foreign policy making that would enable bold new approaches, as well as secrecy, surprise and the ability to maneuver when needed. At the same time, it was not highly transparent and didn’t provide much for public consensus building and had very little in the way of institutional checks on a president often given to acting on impulse. On January 20, 1969 Nixon took the oath of office as president and Kissinger had already drafted the first three decisions memos—NSDM-1, NSDM-2, and NSDM-3—which effectively centralized authority for national security policy in his hands.20 As he still needed Rogers’ approval to use the State Department communications channels to transmit them, even though signed by Nixon, he located Rogers in the reviewing stands and Rogers signed off on these without question. Later that day Kissinger drafted a series of letters to world leaders without informing State and had them hand delivered to the respective embassies in Washington, avoiding the existing State Department communications systems.21 Thus began the long history of Kissinger-Nixon secret negotiations behind Rogers’ back. As incoming president, Nixon was faced with foreign problems in four major areas. Most importantly he inherited an ill-conceived Vietnam war which was not “winnable” and where withdrawal was seen as difficult. U.S. fatalities had already gone past 31,000, and clearly the prior administration had totally misread the Vietnamese Communists as well as their support from China and the Soviet Union. A way out had to be found. Second, China itself had been misread by prior administrations and the Intelligence Community, and there was an evolving split between the two major communist powers—China and the Soviet Union. This unappreciated rift had brought these two nations to the brink of war while Johnson and Kennedy had totally failed to exploit the situation. For Nixon and Kissinger this spelled a major opportunity.

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Third, the Cold War had brought about a major arms race between with the Soviet Union that did not serve the interest of either side. Larger nuclear arsenals had rendered the old policy of “containment” no longer credible. The arms control process that was in effect was seen as largely useless, and a bold new approach needed to be found along with corresponding polices for nuclear employment in the event deterrence failed. Fourth, the still unresolved problems of the Middle East threatened the U.S. position in the region and the security of America’s key ally Israel. Following the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states, the U.S. lost much of the influence it had with any of the Arab states while the Soviets aggressively supported the regimes in Egypt and Syria. It was an increasingly unstable situation that was likely to lead to yet another Arab– Israeli conflict.22 Nixon and Kissinger would go on to work in each of these key areas, and others that came along during the five and a half years of the Nixon administration, utilizing the new national security structure they had just put in place. Secrecy, deception, and reliance on “back channels” became the new norm. For them it was not only efficient, it avoided dealing with the Congress, the press, the public, and their own cabinet as well. In many cases it worked, but some historians in retrospect claim that this was “not the American way.”

Building the NSC for the Nixon Administration Operationalizing the concept Kissinger and Nixon had for wresting foreign policy decision-making from the established bureaucracy required far more than study memoranda (NSSMs) sent to the bureaucrats at state, defense, and CIA. Indeed, the NSSMs were largely intended to deflect the bureaucrats they saw as largely useless while creative minds at the NSC did their own analyses and crafted bold new solutions. This required Kissinger to assemble an NSC Staff that met this description. Nixon gave Kissinger wide latitude in assembling the NSC Staff, although he did impose his own choice of Richard Allen to be Kissinger’s deputy. Allen had been the one who initially brought Kissinger to Nixon and Kissinger did not fight the appointment even though he saw Allen as a member of what was called the “sandbox right” and told confidants that Allen would be gone within a year. Kissinger did his best to exclude Allen from important meetings; keep him away from Nixon; and otherwise demean him. Not unexpectedly, Allen resigned in August, far short of a year in the post. Morton Halperin and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Kissinger protégés and serious intellectuals who had been brought in by Kissinger, vied for

48  •  Henry Kissinger

the deputy job after Allen’s departure. Some have described their interactions as a “love-hate competition.”23 The other key figure on the early NSC staff was Kissinger’s military assistant, Colonel Alexander Haig, described by Kissinger as “my other great discovery.” Haig was not an ideological soul mate of Kissinger’s but was “an organizer, enforcer, stroker and steadying force.” Kissinger also entrusted Haig with the most sensitive materials and secrets. Haig also had the advantage of an office next to Kissinger in the basement of the White House’s West Wing, and far greater access to Kissinger than the others. More importantly, Kissinger was convinced that Haig would never become a threat to his own relationship with Nixon—he was not a strategic thinker and believed in the chain of authority. It was not until the Watergate era years later that Kissinger learned he was seriously mistaken about Haig’s ambition and loyalty. Kissinger made sure that none of the staff had access to the President and tried to keep them away from the press and foreign diplomats as much as possible. Sonnenfeldt later remarked that this was “a manifestation of his insecurity.” Kissinger went to great lengths to juggle schedules and meetings so that he alone would see Nixon, and there was increasing petty friction among the staff. These efforts were not entirely successful as Nixon spent large amounts of time at his “hideaway” office in the Old Executive Office building and ran into staff members regularly. Apart from loyalty and intellect, Kissinger made enormous demands on the NSC staff in terms of working hours and productivity. His personal assistant Lawrence Eagleburger suffered a nervous breakdown on the job and was transferred to a less stressful post at NATO. Other just left. Of the initial twenty-eight who joined Kissinger at the outset, ten left by September 1969 and by 1971 only seven of the original twenty-eight remained. In part this was due to Kissinger’s demands and in part due to the fact that he treated the staff as menials. As one former staffer observed, “It reflected his tremendous mixture of ego and insecurity.” The long hours and overbearing demands served to undermine morale, particularly when the staff was treated this way and cut off from any chance to even meet the president, or even other principals for that matter. Kissinger’s disorganized management undermined the staff, and his personal style, which was also very conspiratorial and secretive—never open and inclusive—did not help. He didn’t like large meetings and often the staff were lined up outside his office door to see him individually, as he made his Harvard students do. This wasn’t a strategy by Kissinger, but rather a fundamental part of his personality. He had the innate ability to create a sense of intimacy with whoever was meeting with him at the moment and was often charming and witty, making the person sincerely

National Security Advisor  • 49

believe his or her advice was important. At the same time this charm was often two-faced and an effort by Kissinger to co-opt a wide range of people. This private and secret approach enabled him to tell each person exactly what he wanted them to hear. He had one line for liberals, one for conservatives and, as one staffer noted, “all the time he’d swear you to secrecy—what I’m about to tell you is the highest classification ­information—and he’d give you some bullshit, and he’d give somebody else the opposite.”24 Nixon was aware of this practice and it infuriated him. As Haldeman noted, “We knew Henry as the ‘hawk of hawks’ in the Oval Office,” but “in the evenings a magical transformation took place. Touching glasses with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would magically become a dove.”25 This also caused problems on Capitol Hill where Kissinger would often hold meetings with senators holding widely divergent views and telling each what they wanted to hear. No matter how secretive Kissinger was, the Congressional staff talk constantly among themselves and they had his number. As a result his credibility on the Hill suffered. Kissinger aide John Lehman, who served as his liaison, remarked: “You can’t for long convince both [Senator J. William] Fulbright and [Senator John] Stennis, Katherine Graham and [Senator] Jesse Helms that you are secretly their soul brother.” Trading stories about Kissinger’s deceits became a popular theme at Washington dinner parties. Most often, however, Kissinger was smart enough to avoid outright lies and was aware that they could backfire. He was able, if challenged, to point to shades and distinctions or show that some statement was ambiguous. Kissinger turned subtle coloration of the truth into an art form. Privately he often referred to his listeners as “idiots” and “maniacs.” Kissinger’s style was also marked by his enormous temper. He saw most of those around him as incompetent, despite the fact he had hired some of the best people in the nation deriding them without mercy and frequently stomping on the papers they had written with his feet. He was more tolerant of honest mistakes than what he saw as sloppy thinking or poor analysis. Those who remained on the staff eventually learned how to deal with his never-ending tantrums and took them in stride. Kissinger’s sense of humor often tempered the situation and he understood, at least sometimes, that there was a need to deflate the situation.26 For all of his faults, however, Kissinger was able to assemble one of the most outstanding staffs in Washington, populated by experts who actually engaged in independent thinking and were able to engage with Kissinger in analytic argument. The NSC under Kissinger was one of the very few places where intellectual honesty was prized and for those able

50  •  Henry Kissinger

to withstand Kissinger’s abuse and personality it was an exciting pace and time to be working on these critical issues. To be sure, Kissinger held the staff to higher than any other in the government. There was intellectual excitement and challenge, as well as the chance to work beside a truly brilliant boss who not only had the ear of the president but was making foreign policy in an environment radically different from any that had come before.

Vietnam—Finding a Way Out Kissinger had become deeply engaged with the problem of the Vietnam war long before he entered the Nixon White House, both as a scholar and someone involved at least peripherally with the situation and prior negotiations. Writing at the time in Foreign Affairs, he reiterated his view that this was a guerrilla war that was inherently unwinnable, particularly after the 1968 Tet Offensive, and specifically that the U.S. “could no longer achieve its objectives within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to the American people.”27 At the same time Kissinger was clear in his belief that the U.S. could not simply cut-and-run from Vietnam, even though in his view the war could not be won and that supporting the South Vietnamese government was a largely hopeless enterprise. The basis of Kissinger’s argument had to do with U.S. “credibility” which pervaded his thinking not only here but in all other situations he saw facing the nation throughout his career. While he saw U.S. entry into Vietnam as a bad idea in the first place, he saw a precipitous withdrawal as one that would undermine the U.S. position throughout the world. Apart from the briefings he received on earlier trips to Vietnam, his work with the Johnson administration had been focused on negotiations with respect to a U.S. bombing halt of the North. The Hanoi government still held fast to the position that under the 1954 Geneva accords Vietnam was one nation and that the government in the South was an “aberration,” like North and South Korea or East and West Germany, that had been imposed by the French—who had lost their own war there.28 When the U.S. entered the conflict after France had departed it was within the Cold War context of preventing the spread of communism rather than a rejection of the concept of a single nation of Vietnam, and in particular “to keep South Vietnam from Chinese hands.” Nixon himself knew from the outset that a military solution in Vietnam was not feasible, telling one staff member in 1968 that “there’s no way to win this war” but adding the caveat “but we can’t say that of course,” and publicly stated the opposite if only to keep bargaining leverage. Shortly

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after winning the election he confided to Haldeman that he did not want to end up like Johnson and saying, “I’m going to stop that war fast.”29 Nixon was not specific as to how fast this would happen or specifically how it would be accomplished. Early on he looked to Kissinger and the NSC Staff for a path to this goal that they both sought. Even before entering the Nixon administration, Kissinger had changed his position, now believing that the war could not be won and the need for credibility, with the proposition that a “decent interval” would be needed between the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam and a communist takeover of Vietnam which he saw as inevitable.30 Before and after he entered the Nixon White House, Kissinger did not subscribe to concepts previously put forth about a “domino theory” that the fall of Vietnam to the communists would lead to the rest of Southeast Asia falling to the communists as well, or that major U.S. national security interests were at stake in the jungles of Vietnam. Here he stuck to the idea that it was just a matter of American credibility and that an early U.S. pullout would cause the rest of the world to respect the U.S. less. For Kissinger the decent interval was the best possible solution, and he understood well that the North would not stop the war without achieving its military aims. As he later noted “they had not fought for 40 years to achieve a compromise.” A military settlement could not be separated from a political settlement over the rule of the South.31 In an effort to develop a set of policy options and alternatives for the new administration Kissinger called upon Henry Rowan, then president of the RAND Corporation, to have a team of RAND analysts undertake this effort. Kissinger was never a great fan of either Rowan or RAND but understood that they were able to undertake this effort at a classified level and had analysts who could do the work.32 Rowan picked Daniel Ellsberg, RAND’s leading Vietnam expert, to lead the team. Ellsberg later leaked the classified Pentagon Papers study to the New York Times, providing a major subject of media celebrity at the time.33 This also led to an attempt by the Nixon administration to censor publication and a major Supreme Court decision upholding freedom of the press in New York Times v. United States (1971). This classified, five-volume study contained an extensive history of the Vietnam conflict and presented seven options for moving forward, ranging from military escalation to negotiation of a victory at the other. In the military sphere the options included both air and ground operations in neighboring Cambodia as well as a campaign of greater bombing in North Vietnam, including Hanoi and the mining of the harbor at Haiphong. What was termed “Option One” had as its objective “to destroy the will and capability of North Vietnam to support insurgency” in the South.

52  •  Henry Kissinger

The other extreme considered the impact of the unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam which went even further than what the Democrats had suggested at their convention and was based on the concept that the war was “unwinnable” and that the U.S. needed to cut its losses. Addressing Kissinger’s concern about credibility, this option held that other nations would see that the U.S. met any commitments through a large investment of men and resources and had now accepted the reality of the situation. Kissinger immediately rejected the option of unilateral withdrawal, with the most dovish one left being a substantial reduction of the U.S. presence while seeking a compromise settlement. This would require getting approval of the Saigon government to reduce U.S. forces and a corresponding build-up of the South Vietnamese army to take over the fight. At the time it would have seemed absurd to envision a policy that included a mix of extreme options, that included unrestricted bombing of the North to beat Hanoi into submission; invasion of Cambodia; and at the same time engaging in significant troop withdrawals.34 As history would have it, this is exactly what happened in the Nixon administration. Nixon once spoke of the “madman theory,” where he discussed with Haldeman his idea that one aspect of the solution would be to get Hanoi to fear U.S. threats and that he would do anything to stop the war. This would play on Nixon’s long-time obsession with communism, that he now had his hand on the nuclear button—and that the staff could not restrain him from acting. Kissinger bought into the madman theory, with the further thought that the Soviets might think that Nixon might act this way and could not be constrained. Nixon later commented that this was a good-cop, bad-cop routine with Kissinger being the reasonable one who could not control the president’s warlike actions. For Kissinger this was useful in supporting his fundamental belief that in the realist political tradition diplomacy must be backed up by the threat of force. This was to be a constant theme in Kissinger’s tenure at the White House. A key point in the Pentagon Papers was that there was division among the various agencies about the basic facts as well as the policy options with respect to Vietnam. Kissinger liked a suggestion made by Ellsberg that the different agencies be tasked to study the various options and National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM-1), was signed out on Inauguration Day January 1969, in part because he thought it would tie up the bureaucracy for a year in responding to the 28 major topics and 56 questions it set out, giving Nixon time to sort things out himself irrespective of what the bureaucrats would ultimately say.35 Ultimately the agency responses to NSSM-1 did not provide any new answers. CIA, Defense, State and others could not agree on whether the

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“domino theory” was correct or how overblown it might be. Similarly, they could not agree on the effectiveness of the bombing with B-52s on the North and whether it might have had the opposite effect of mobilizing support for the communist war effort. Another key question was the utility of bombing or invading neighboring Cambodia to interdict important supply routes the North was using to support the war effort in the South. There was substantial disagreement between the military who saw the bombing as largely ineffective, and the U.S. Embassy in Saigon—who supported the bombing, and CIA that strongly disagreed with the embassy assessment along with main State in Washington.36 At the outset of the Nixon administration, Kissinger stated and actually believed that he would be able to reach a peace settlement quickly—and said that it could be accomplished within six months. He told one group of Quaker protesters “if we haven’t ended the war by then, you can come back and tear down the White House fence.” Kissinger’s six-month estimate was clearly overly optimistic. In the end it took some four years of not only difficult negotiations but an invasion of Cambodia and extensive bombing of the North before an agreement was finally reached. When Kissinger began these negotiations, the U.S. was demanding the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the South, and that the Thieu government in the South be replaced through free elections. The North Vietnamese were demanding a unilateral U.S. withdrawal and an end to the “puppet” government in the South. It took Kissinger until the end of 1972 to get to a point where he could concede on the first point—the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and get the North to agree to the “decent interval” he wanted on abandoning U.S. support for the Thieu government in the South. Both Nixon and Kissinger believed at the outset that the Soviets could be an important element to solving the Vietnam problem. While Kissinger was somewhat more skeptical than Nixon at the outset, both saw a possibility in “linkage” to the increasingly critical problem of arms control with the Soviet Union based on a belief that the Soviets could significantly influence Hanoi to come to a more acceptable agreement with the U.S. given sufficient incentives.37 Contrary to this concept most of the government agencies responding to the question posed in NSSM-1 agreed that Hanoi was becoming increasingly independent of both the Soviet Union and China and that this approach would not work.38 But Nixon and Kissinger still believed that trading concessions on trade or arms control with Moscow could move Soviet policy in Hanoi. Secretary of State and Rogers also saw linkage as an impediment to arms control and improved relations with the Soviets. Nixon did not want to confront Rogers on the issue, so he instructed Kissinger to proceed

54  •  Henry Kissinger

in secret, without informing Rogers or others beyond the White House. Kissinger’s plan was to send Cyrus Vance, who had been Johnson’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and a party to Johnson’s negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris, on a secret mission to Moscow, and he proposed the beginning of arms control talks if the Soviets could expedite Vietnamese peace talks. Vance would be authorized to offer an immediate cease fire, withdrawal of all U.S. forces, and a political solution that would include a role for the communists (National Liberation Front) in governing the South—an offer that went far beyond the U.S. position at the time. The alternative was increased U.S. military activity in Vietnam and a cooling of U.S.–Soviet relations. Kissinger gave the plan directly to Soviet Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoli Dobrynin, who never came back with a response.39 It was Kissinger’s hope that this mission would be a good test of his idea that the war could be ended with a good bottom-line offer that was backed up with a serious threat. Unfortunately, the proposed Vance mission never got off the ground, and Kissinger had no better luck in his multiple attempts in 1969 to engage the Soviets through Dobrynin on the subject of Vietnam.40 Years later experts concluded that Kissinger and Nixon had greatly overestimated Moscow’s ability to influence Hanoi. Fortunately, the Nixon administration did move ahead later in 1969 and 1970 with arms control and SALT negotiations, with no reference to Vietnam at all. Indeed, the North Vietnamese increased their military activity at the time causing some to think that there was a “reverse linkage” in effect.41 Despite Kissinger’s initial thought that peace in Vietnam might be achieved within six months, this was not to be the case, and the war dragged on for two years as the U.S. intensified operations against North Vietnam with the bombing of Hanoi and mining of Haiphong harbor in May 1972. This stronger action against the North did serve to mute the North’s offensive and left things largely as they had been after the 1968 Tet Offensive. Apart from the war itself, Kissinger had made progress in dealings with both China and the Soviets who were more concerned about war between each other than supporting their North Vietnamese client.42 While neither communist superpower was willing or able to pressure Hanoi on behalf of the U.S., they weren’t doing much to support the war effort either. Hanoi denounced both China and Russia for their lack of serious support. The 140,000 North Vietnamese troops in the South were facing Saigon’s army of 1.2 million supported by U.S. air power and had little chance of victory, causing Hanoi to finally seek a negotiated settlement.43 For two years Kissinger had been engaged in what were still secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris who now dropped their

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demand that the Thieu government be replaced immediately. As the U.S. had drastically reduced its force level to 27,000 down from 543,000 there was little left to negotiate, and it appeared that it would be relatively simple to negotiate an agreement that included the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces from Vietnam and cessation of air support to the South Vietnamese. Kissinger did want an agreement that showed some meaning to the loss of American lives in Vietnam and had at least some chance of allowing the Thieu government to survive. Nixon had come into office pledging to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam, which he had largely accomplished. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger had any real use for the corrupt Thieu government and had no expectation it could survive in the long term. It was all about saving some face and credibility. For Nixon and Kissinger, the major concern was when the deal would be struck, and they were divided on this, with the critical issue being the November 1972 presidential election. Kissinger pressed for a deal and ceasefire before the election believing that the U.S. would be in a stronger bargaining position. The communists also wanted a quick deal, fearing what Nixon might unleash if re-elected. Nixon, pressed by his political advisors, wanted to wait until after the election, and as advisor Charles Colson noted “any agreement we reached before the election would appear to be a political ploy.” Kissinger took an opposite view thinking that an agreement before the election would help to assure Nixon’s re-election.44 Nixon did not share Kissinger’s faith in the negotiations, and understanding this Kissinger kept sending back optimistic reports which Nixon read with considerable skepticism. Thieu was even more skeptical of Kissinger, and Kissinger simply cut him off from all information about the negotiations. Thieu wanted to be fully involved and treated as an equal, which was not going to happen. Given Kissinger’s ego it didn’t help that Thieu treated him and Haig as “mere messenger boys” most often refusing to see them personally. Kissinger saw Thieu as “insolent.” What he did tell Tieu was largely disingenuous and frequently at odds with what had been secretly agreed to, particularly with respect to North Vietnamese troop withdrawals from the South. The deadlock in Paris was breaking and he didn’t need Thieu to derail an agreement after all these months and years, as Hanoi was now ready to offer a ceasefire and leave Thieu in place.45 What remained for the October 1972 Paris negotiations was to craft language so that the electoral commission for the South looked like the “interim coalition government” the communists demanded—a plan Thieu had already rejected. Nixon also rejected this idea initially and wanted to resume bombing of the North, but finally agreed to Kissinger’s approach. A proposal from the North for a “Government of National Concord”

56  •  Henry Kissinger

would be set up after the ceasefire but not replace the Thieu government. Kissinger’s task was to fudge the distinction between this proposal and the “Committee of National Reconciliation” that his team had offered, and fudging such differences was one of Kissinger’s great talents. Le Duc Tho, the negotiator for the North, put forward a new plan designed to produce a breakthrough which was celebrated by Kissinger and was the basis for the final peace accords.46 As Kissinger saw it, this would save the honor of those Americans who had died in Vietnam and saw this as the most thrilling moment of his entire career. Others in the Kissinger delegation were less optimistic and saw nothing but trouble coming from Saigon. Notwithstanding Nixon’s desire to hold any agreement until after the election, and Thieu’s refusal to accept anything looking like a coalition government or a ceasefire not linked to North Vietnamese withdrawals, Kissinger forged ahead in haste without consulting either of the two presidents. He sent a cryptic cable to Haldeman asking him to tell Nixon only that “progress had been made.” His cable to Saigon through Ambassador Bunker was downright misleading and referred only to the possibility that “the other side may surface a cease-fire proposal.”47 In a marathon session on October 11 Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a final agreement along the lines initially offered by Hanoi three days earlier. The war would end, the U.S. would withdraw from Vietnam, and the POWs would be freed. Kissinger was unable to secure North Vietnamese troop withdrawals, but got an assurance of no further infiltration while both would be able to resupply their respective allies. His fudged political formulation for the South was accepted by Hanoi, and he tossed in a pledge on the part of the U.S. for aid to “heal the wounds of war” without using the term reparations. While Kissinger tried, the ceasefire would not apply to Laos or Cambodia although Hanoi agreed to try and seek one in Laos and claimed that their influence with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was not good. Apart from some minor details, this was the deal that Kissinger had been seeking and he planned a secret trip to Hanoi to initial the agreement. What he hadn’t made clear to Le Duc Tho was that this was contingent on Thieu’s approval. In fact he failed to send the agreement he had just negotiated to Saigon or bother to inform Thieu that the agreement had been reached. To made matters even worse he sent a cable to Bunker deliberately misleading him and hiding the fact that Le Duc Tho had accepted the ceasefire deal as a package. He did instruct Bunker to press Thieu to “regain as much territory as possible” quickly in anticipation of a ceasefire. Kissinger’s strategy was to ultimately frighten Thieu with the prospect of an even worse agreement that might immediately oust him from power.

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Thieu’s greatest nightmare had come true. Kissinger had negotiated a deal behind his back and was now ready to impose it on him. Nixon on the other hand was delighted with the deal and approved it as outlined by Kissinger and saw it as a “major capitulation by the enemy.” Nixon’s only caveat was that if Thieu objected they should just wait until after the election.48 As the North Vietnamese were planning a ceremony within two weeks this presented a problem, and Kissinger had failed to inform them that the schedule might have to be delayed. Nixon agreed with Kissinger that it was best to surprise Thieu and hoped that he would like the idea of being spared a forced coalition government as a pre-condition. It seems that they both misread Thieu, who had received a copy of the draft treaty from his intelligence services and saw this all as an appalling betrayal.49 Kissinger’s trip to Saigon to obtain Thieu’s approval was both insulting and disastrous. While Nixon got Roger’s wholehearted support for the agreement, Gen. William Westmoreland suddenly became critical of a plan that did not require North Vietnamese withdrawal and became even more adamant that Thieu not be forced to accept the accord, or in a way that would cause him to publicly object before the election. In a cable to Kissinger, Nixon said: “The essential requirement is that Thieu’s acceptance must be wholehearted so that the charge cannot be made that we forced him into a settlement.” Kissinger was concerned that slowing down the process would produce and explosion from Hanoi which expected a signature in a few days.50 Apart from Kissinger’s deceit and theatrics, the South Vietnamese had two fundamental problems with the proposed agreement, in that it permitted the communists to keep control of territory they held and that it created the political entity Kissinger had fudged as an electoral commission which looked to them as a coalition government. When threatened by Kissinger that the U.S. would “go out on its own” Thieu refused to sign, and Kissinger told him that this was “the greatest failure of his diplomatic career.” In reality the specifics didn’t matter to Thieu—he did not want an agreement of any kind and was not ready for a ceasefire at a time when it appeared Hanoi’s military offensive was being turned back. Kissinger cabled Haig in Washington: “Thieu has just rejected the entire plan or any modification of it and refuses to discuss any further negotiations on the basis of it …” He also sent a cable to Nixon about Thieu telling him: “His demands verge on insanity.” Thieu was likely correct in that the plan would probably have cost him his power and brought an end to his government. Before Kissinger returned to Washington Nixon was also being counseled by others to resume bombing of North Vietnam, which Kissinger strongly resisted, as he did not see the breakdown as being

58  •  Henry Kissinger

Hanoi’s fault. On his return to Washington he found Nixon had little interest in the details of the impasse and was largely concerned about keeping it quiet for the two weeks until the election. Much to Nixon’s dismay, Kissinger began leaking to the press that an agreement had been achieved with Hanoi and that “a cease-fire could come very soon.” Hanoi reported that Kissinger had accepted the agreement, only to have it scuttled by Saigon. With Nixon’s approval Kissinger held a press conference where he attempted to reaffirm to both Saigon and Hanoi that the U.S. was committed to the framework achieved in Paris and uttered the sound bite that “We believe … that peace is at hand.”51 He claimed that he had warned Le Duc Tho that the agreement required Saigon’s assent, but that Hanoi believed that the U.S. could simply impose any solution on Thieu. Despite his approval Kissinger’s of press conference, the statements enraged Nixon who saw the bargaining position as being seriously eroded. Thieu was similarly unhappy and reiterated his minimum demand that the North Vietnamese Army troops withdraw to North Vietnam. Kissinger was left to try and put back the pieces. Nixon won the 1972 election with over 60 percent of the popular vote— the second largest landslide in American history. He was elated. Kissinger was still unhappy that peace was not at hand and dispatched Haig to Saigon to see where he could get to with Thieu—talking soldier-to-soldier. Haig returned with a list of sixty-nine modifications Thieu wanted to the accord reached in October which Kissinger took to Paris in late November for another meeting with Le Duc Tho. He indicated that these were Saigon’s demands and noted “the list was so preposterous … that it must have strengthened Hanoi’s already strong temptation to dig in its heels.” In four days of talks the North Vietnamese were only interested in cosmetic changes. Kissinger cabled Nixon that there were only two options: accept the treaty as it was, and cram it down Saigon’s throat, or break off the talks and resume the bombing of the North. With Haig along, Kissinger was in a sour mood and repeatedly sent cables telling Nixon that it was time to break off the talks, resume the bombing and “damn the consequences.” Much of what transpired after these meetings was a battle between Kissinger and Nixon, often with Nixon’s key staff Haldeman and Ehrlichman about who would announce the breakdown in the talks and a resumption of bombing to the American people and what impact this would have on Nixon. Kissinger was adamant that the president needed to do this, and Nixon was equally adamant that it be Kissinger who could take the blame and was still outrage by his “peace at hand” statement before. The talks finally broke down on December 13 and Kissinger headed back to Washington. Interestingly the Soviets got word to Kissinger that they

National Security Advisor  • 59

thought they could convince Hanoi to go back to the October agreement—­ that Kissinger had accepted, although by this time both Kissinger and Nixon were convinced this accord was no longer good enough aside from what Thieu thought. As Haig noted, the only option left was to resume large-scale bombing of Hanoi and the rest of North Vietnam, and Kissinger referred to the North Vietnamese as “just a bunch of shits … they make the Russians look good.”52 At a meeting which included only Kissinger, Haig and Nixon the decision was made to undertake a major bombing assault on the North, with the key issues revolving around the nature of the strikes and whether urban centers of Hanoi and Haiphong would be hit. Previously B-52 bombers had only been used against supply routes and now Nixon wanted to use them directly on Hanoi.53 The idea was to provide a major shock to the North Vietnamese that would bring them back to the bargaining table. Some experts, including many in the military, argued against this strategy, thinking it would be unproductive and not worth the costs involved, let along highly adverse public reactions.54 It was also argued, unsuccessfully, that the real problem here was not Hanoi, which had agreed with Kissinger, but rather Saigon that had rejected the proposal. At Haig’s suggestion, Nixon ordered every B-52 available, 129 in all, be sent to Vietnam for a series of daily, relentless assaults on Hanoi, Haiphong and other targets in the North. The operation code-named LINEBACKER II and known to the rest of the world as the “Christmas Bombing campaign” began on December 18.55 Nixon also got his way in that this would be announced by Kissinger two days before the bombing was to begin using a statement largely drafted by Nixon. Ignoring most of what Nixon had drafted, he told the press that “We have not reached an agreement that the president considers just” and made no mention of the decision to undertake B-52 strikes on Hanoi. By Hanoi’s count some 2,000 civilians were killed during the bombing campaign in Hanoi and Haiphong, a number moderated by evacuations in these areas, and very low in comparison to the U.S. strategic bombing in World War II of Dresden or Tokyo. Even so, this campaign has been the subject of great discussion. Some have characterized it as the indiscriminate carpet bombing of civilian areas.56 It was not, and considerable care was to target military facilities. Others have claimed that the campaign was “immoral” by any standard, and it is a decision that has haunted the U.S. for many years. This campaign was undertaken to force Hanoi into making changes in an agreement that he U.S. had already seen fit to accept—and indeed Kissinger was about to fly to Hanoi to sign it the prior October. The changes that the U.S. was now asking for, at Saigon’s urging, were so minor that even Kissinger was later unable to recall what they were and at the

60  •  Henry Kissinger

time called them preposterous. Kissinger and Nixon undertook the bombing campaign largely to force the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table, and to make what were purely cosmetic changes in the October agreement previously reached that would enable Saigon to save face. Critics later argued that the North Vietnamese paid a high price for something that was essentially not their fault. Images of children killed at Hanoi’s Bach Mai hospital and other areas were devastating, and the damage to America’s prestige and Kissinger’s reputation were terrible and for some his role in the Christmas bombing was an action for which he never recovered. Some in the press saw this as a “crime against humanity” and an action never to be forgotten. The bombing campaign was halted by Nixon on December 30 when Hanoi agreed to return to the bargaining table. Publicly Kissinger blamed the bombing on the intransigence of both Saigon and Hanoi. Years later Kissinger conceded that “the December bombing” as he called it was not worth it, and he “would have preferred to have taken the October 8 agreement.” Haig thought it should have been used to get North Vietnamese troops out of the South, which did not happen. John Negroponte, another Kissinger aide, commented that, “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.” In an interview with James Reston of the New York Times Kissinger shifted the blame for the bombing on Nixon, which infuriated him; he refused to take Kissinger’s phone calls and was giving serious consideration to firing both Kissinger and Rogers during New Years. The president told Admiral Elmo Zumwalt: “I’m going to fire the son of a bitch.”57 Kissinger returned to Paris in January 1973 meeting again with Le Duc Tho, and immediately told him, “It was not my fault about the bombing.” The parties quickly got down to business and concluded an agreement by the end of the following day—January 9. He reported this to Nixon who cabled back: “What you have done today is the best birthday present I have had in sixty years.” The Kissinger–Nixon relationship appears to have improved. The January 1973 agreement was fundamentally the same as the one reached the previous October; a ceasefire would go into effect; the U.S. would withdraw; North Vietnam’s troops would remain in the South; Thieu would remain in power; and both sides would administer the territories they held, as the National Council of National Reconciliation would be established to perform nebulous functions that were the residual of Kissinger’s fudging the issue. Kissinger claimed that there had been a major concession by Hanoi regarding the demilitarized zone (DMZ) as to whether this was a temporary demarcation line or an international border. This went to the heart of the

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conflict, as Thieu saw Vietnam as two nations and Hanoi saw it as a single nation, which Kissinger had already conceded. Here Kissinger followed the 1954 Geneva Accords, which proclaimed the unity of Vietnam and saw a temporary separation by a military demarcation line. Kissinger’s genius came in disguising this as a concession and adding a dash of ambiguity. Responding to Hanoi’s demand for “reparations” Kissinger offered a package of aid for “reconstruction” that was included in the Paris accord, although the exact nature of this aid was kept secret from Thieu and only contained in a letter from Nixon.58 Even in the end it was necessary to prepare two versions of the agreement, with one recognizing the existence of the Viet Cong’s Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), which was signed by Washington and Hanoi only, and another signed by Saigon that omitted any mention of the PRG. Also, in the end, Thieu was forced to accept an agreement that he feared and loathed. Kissinger and Nixon just didn’t care what he thought. The January agreement did bring an end to the Vietnam War; the troops and POWs came home, and ultimately the Thieu government was eliminated as Kissinger and Nixon had expected in the first place. A major question repeatedly asked by Kissinger was whether extending the war for four more years after 1969 was worth it. Hanoi’s “ten-point program” of 1969 is almost identical to the January 1973 accord that ended the war. The one significant difference is that the 1973 agreement did not include Hanoi’s demand in 1969 that the Thieu government be replaced by a coalition approved by the communists before there could be a ceasefire. Was it worth more four years of war to sustain the Thieu government that Kissinger knew would never last? This was done at a cost of 20,552 additional American lives and several thousand Vietnamese lives, not to speak of domestic unrest and the spread of war to Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger has noted that the alternative would have been for the U.S. to leave Vietnam in 1969, proclaiming that the America had honored its commitment to South Vietnam, and not tried to engage in negotiations on behalf of Saigon. The limited number of POWs that were held by Hanoi in 1969 most likely would have been released following a U.S. withdrawal. How much harm this would have done to U.S. “credibility” is uncertain, but likely it would have been limited when compared to the costs incurred. All of this is clearly in hindsight, but Kissinger believed that a negotiated settlement could be done quickly, and Nixon agreed that it should not be done by abandoning the Thieu government. At best the “decent interval” which Kissinger thought might extend over two years turned into four with a major cost to the nation. Even with the January 1973 Paris agreement signed, ending the war was not simple. The ceasefire was repeatedly violated, Congress passed a law

62  •  Henry Kissinger

forbidding all air operations in Indochina, and Nixon was forced from office in the aftermath of Watergate. The new president, Gerald Ford, had been one of those who supported the bombing cutoff in 1973 and had no interest in getting involved in Vietnam again, and clearly the American people wanted nothing more to do with Vietnam.

Secret Bombing and Invasion of Cambodia The Vietnam War was not limited to Vietnam, and increasingly the North Vietnamese utilized sanctuaries for its forces in neighboring Cambodia, along with routes through Cambodia as well as Laos to supply guerilla forces in the South through the famed Ho Chi Min Trail. While the U.S. bombed the supply routes in Vietnam and in Laos, it avoided striking the communist bases in Cambodia, a nation that was not involved in the conflict.59 Nixon and Kissinger began reconsidering this policy during the January 1969 transition period before entering the White House. They looked at options for destroying the communist build-up there that had been largely immune from U.S. strikes. Even though infiltration of the South through Cambodia was increasing, the military opposed resumption of bombing of either North Vietnam or Cambodia largely due to a fear of major public reaction.60 A specific concern of the military was the location of the communists Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) where the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were coordinating their activities. Intelligence identified a likely location at Base Area 353—one of the border sanctuary camps located in an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook.61 General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Abrams, Commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, supported the idea of a bombing raid on this site with a strike of 60 B-52 bombers in one hour that would minimize killing of Cambodian civilians. Kissinger set up a breakfast to discuss the proposal with Laird and Wheeler and the resulting contingency plan was given the code name BREAKFAST. As usual, Kissinger insisted on the strictest secrecy. Rogers and almost none in the military were briefed on the proposed operation. Kissinger and Laird, supported by Nixon, did not want to undertake the mission without some specific provocation from the North Vietnamese. This came in March 1969, soon after the North launched a major offensive that doubled the American casualty rate, outraging Kissinger since Hanoi had not even waited to see what the new administration would propose. Nixon shared the outrage and ordered the Fish Hook sanctuary be bombed as soon as possible. Kissinger was obsessed with keeping this operation covert and looked for a way that it would not even be reported in the normal military chain of command.62

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Aside from great concern over secrecy there was no serious discussion of the morality of bombing a neutral nation. It was accepted that since the North Vietnamese had violated the border area of Cambodia the U.S. was justified on doing so as well. Nixon later commented that he had little patience for “moral prissiness” and that American use of military power not be constrained by old concerns about morality and international law. Despite the high level of secrecy Kissinger imposed, Rogers and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon became aware of the contingency planning for the Cambodian raid. A tug-of-war ensued for two weeks, with Kissinger pushing for the raid and Rogers pressing Nixon to back down. Nixon initially listened to Rogers, but when the North Vietnamese resumed shelling of Saigon, which had not been done since the October 1968 bombing halt, Nixon was furious. He ordered the immediate bombing of the sanctuaries in Cambodia and threatened to fire anybody who dissented.63 At a meeting of the NSC the following day, including Laird, Rogers and Wheeler, those attending were not informed that the decision had already been made, and as Kissinger later wrote, “he felt it necessary to pretend that the decision was still open.” This led to hours of discussion, which Nixon found highly distasteful. Later Nixon largely gave up on holding full NSC meetings at all. Kissinger’s major concerns in the operation were the possibility of Cambodian and Soviet protests; public outcry; and military retaliation by the North Vietnamese. None of these came to pass. The bombing campaign was shrouded in extraordinary secrecy and continued for over a year.64 On March 18, 1969 48 of the B-52s executed Operation BREAKFAST, although there were disputes over the raid’s effectiveness. The COSVN was not eliminated while several U.S. Green Berets on a covert mission inside Cambodia code named DANIEL BOONE were killed in the process. When the raid failed to bring any outcry from Cambodia, there were further bombing raids on the Cambodian sanctuaries.65 Operation BREAKFAST became MENU as an elaborate set of procedures was put in place to keep it all covert, with few top officials informed at all and no effort was made to inform the Congress as required by law. A set of false reports was sent through the regular Pentagon channels and a secret set of books kept on the actual targets. The Secretary of the Air Force and State were totally kept in the dark. Even the Senate Armed Services Committee was told in closed session that there “was no B-52 bombing of Cambodia of any kind during entire year 1969”—a total lie.66 The initial plan of a single raid evolved into a secret bombing campaign over Cambodia which extended over 14 months, where U.S. B-52s flew 3,875 sorties dropping 108,823 tons of bombs on six base camps in the border area. The MENU bombing campaign ended largely because it was unsuccessful. The COSVN headquarters was never eliminated and

64  •  Henry Kissinger

the sanctuaries remained a threat. Ultimately Nixon ordered a full-scale ground invasion of Cambodia to deal with the problem. At the same time the campaign had some beneficial effect in reducing the number of American deaths by half and led to a dispersal of North Vietnamese personnel and supplies. The political questions related to the Cambodian bombing were always difficult and uncertain. Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had long turned a blind eye to the U.S. bombing and sought to maintain a publicly neutral stance in the Vietnam conflict, avoiding a war that had already engrossed both Vietnam and Laos. The Khmer Rouge, a Cambodian guerilla movement, numbered less than 5,000 in 1969 and wasn’t seen as an immediate threat. At the same time the camps maintained in the Cambodian border areas by North Vietnam had little impact on the Cambodian people despite the violation of neutrality.67 Kissinger and others in the Nixon administration defended the legality of the bombing both on the basis that North Vietnam had initially violated Cambodian neutrality with the sanctuaries there and also that Prince Sihanouk did not object to the bombing. To the contrary, he restored diplomatic relations with the U.S. in July 1969 in the midst of the bombing campaign. Some, such as Kissinger aide Peter Rodman, even argued that the U.S. was defending Cambodian neutrality—not violating it. This is a historical debate that has never been fully resolved. Certainly, the Sihanouk government never formally asked for U.S. assistance, and the bombing was kept secret so that Sihanouk was never publicly put on the spot. It is also the case that had the bombing been made public there would have likely been a public uproar in the U.S. that Kissinger and Nixon wanted to avoid. The steps taken—secrecy, false records, lies to Congress—were not taken just to protect Sihanouk but mostly to head off the potential public reaction feared by the Nixon administration.68 Laird, who supported the bombing, felt the obsessive secrecy was wrong and had to be ordered to do this by Nixon over his objections. In the end the secrecy appeared to become more important to Kissinger and Nixon than the bombing itself, as they looked for leaks and moles and paid limited attention to the results of the ongoing bombing sorties. It was not expected that Sihanouk would be ousted as Cambodia’s leader, but while on a trip to China for medical care a coup led by his prime minister, Lon Nol, a right-wing military man replaced him. Many, including the North Vietnamese, incorrectly saw this as a CIA operation.69 It is possible that Lon Nol thought he would get U.S. backing, which happened in the end, but Kissinger and Nixon did not initially want to prejudge the situation or compromise Cambodian neutrality. Nixon did press CIA to

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develop a plan for maximum assistance to “pro U.S. elements” in Cambodia, which again was to be done with the utmost secrecy.70 After taking power Lon Nol ordered the North Vietnamese and Vietnamese communists to leave Cambodia immediately, which caused the latter to launch an assault on the Cambodians who were ill-equipped to handle this. Cambodia pleaded for emergency support and the U.S. military advocated for intervention presenting Nixon with what some see as the most fateful military decision of his presidency.71 In late April 1970 Nixon abandon any pretense of keeping a distance from Lon Nol’s right-wing government and told Kissinger in a memo that “I think we need a need a bold move in Cambodia to show that we stand with Lon Nol” and, with respect to the North Vietnamese, added, “They are romping in there, and the only government in Cambodia in the last 25 years that had the guts to take a pro-Western and pro-American stand is ready to fall.” Nixon had made up his mind. A full NSC meeting—­including Laird, R ­ ogers and Helms—considered three options including watching and waiting; attacking the communist sanctuaries in the border area using South Vietnamese troops support by U.S. air strikes; and sending in American troops. The military were pressing for further action in the Fish Hook area, where they were still convinced the elusive COSVN could be located and eliminated as well as a sanctuary area known as Parrot’s Beak. Nixon’s initial decision was to go with the second option of sending South Vietnamese forces into Parrot’s Beak with minimal air support. Curiously Vice President Agnew, who seldom spoke at the NSC, urged that if the sanctuaries needed to be cleaned out, then the U.S. should get on with the job. Nixon, who hated to be seen as less-tough than his advisors was taken aback and reconsidered. He ordered Kissinger to set up meetings with Helms and the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Moorer— who both favored a U.S. invasion. Kissinger remarked to an aide “Our peerless leader … has flipped out.”72 Nixon began issuing orders directly to the military behind the back of the Secretary of Defense, Laird, and demanded Helms and Moorer draw up plans for a U.S.–South Vietnamese invasion of the Fish Hook area in addition to the one for Parrot’s Beak. Kissinger told Laird about this as an option. Laird was unhappy and wanted it discussed at a full NSC meeting, which was scheduled and then cancelled by Nixon.73 Kissinger’s staff took a less emotional and more systematic approach, with one arguing that the same resources could be better used in South Vietnam, and another that you just don’t invade a sovereign country. It was also argued that the human costs could be devastating in terms of the civilian population. These arguments failed to persuade Kissinger who believed that a full-scale invasion of the sanctuaries by U.S. forces was the answer.

66  •  Henry Kissinger

Cambodia was still the path for massive communist infiltration and resupply. A limited operation was pointless, as it would result in domestic protest and have no effect on North Vietnam—the worst of both worlds. For Nixon there was no longer any question over sending U.S. troops into Cambodia. He was now talking about implementing the DUCK HOOK plan, which incorporated the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong Harbor as well. Nixon believed that as long as the public was going to get hysterical, all of these should be included. Kissinger was unsure whether or not Nixon was serious but managed to deflect him for a time by assuring Nixon that the military had enough on its agenda now and to leave aside a more expansive plan. With his decision made, Nixon could no longer avoid a full NSC meeting and appear to consult with the secretaries of State and Defense. He expected opposition from Rogers and Laird, who had been cut out of the discussion on bombing. The meeting was a charade set up to discuss “options” and those present were in the end informed of a decision that had already been made. Nixon made up his mind, once again, to authorize the two-pronged invasion of Cambodia calling Laird and Rogers into the Oval Office to inform them—without Kissinger present. He wanted the two secretaries to know that he was acting alone “against the advice of the secretaries of state and defense.” He noted to them that “Dr. Kissinger was leaning against” this action, but this claim was patently false. Kissinger had supported the use of U.S. troops all along.74 Nixon, as well as his critics, characterized this as a bold and brazen expansion of the war effort, which was launched with a televised presidential address.75 Addressing the nation Nixon went beyond hyperbole into an outright lie. “For five years, neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against these enemy sanctuaries because we did not want to violate the territory of a neutral nation.” No mention was made of the secret MENU bombings, then in their thirteenth month. Kissinger himself said the same thing in a background briefing to the press, and later tried to get NBC to delete this from their show. On May 1, the following day, more than 31,000 U.S. and 43,000 South Vietnamese troops poured over the border into the Fish Hook and Parrot’s Beak areas. Nixon visited the Pentagon with Kissinger in tow making some off-hand remarks about protests and “these bums blowing up campuses.” At the Pentagon he asked about taking out all of the sanctuaries with references to Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill and a need for “bold action” finally shouting “Lets go blow the hell out of them.” While some domestic protest was expected, what took place was not, and the relative calm that came with initial troop withdrawals was shattered. A tragedy at Kent State University saw several student deaths as other demonstrations

National Security Advisor  • 67

erupted around the country. Kissinger was unable to sleep in his own apartment and moved into the White House basement.76 Nixon’s “madman strategy” appeared to be backfiring, and he appeared unhinged in the eyes of the nation. The North Vietnamese were winning the greatest public relations victory in the U.S. since the 1968 Tet Offensive, winning over many more American hearts and minds. In military terms there were certainly marginal gains, but the Cambodian invasion deepened the nation’s political divisions to a point where sustaining a war in Southeast Asia was becoming impossible. Both Nixon and Kissinger did not regret the invasion and thought that they had not gone far enough. Nixon later expressed regret for not going with his idea of bombing and mining in North Vietnam as well, writing “we took enormous heat on Cambodia” and thought if the U.S. had acted even more forcefully the U.S. could have “broken their backs” and been able to get an agreement far sooner. Kissinger too regretted that he had not taken Nixon’s suggestion more seriously and felt that “the bane of our military actions in Vietnam was their hesitancy.”77 The elusive COSVN headquarters was never located although the operation captured some 40 percent of the communist stockpiles in Cambodia and for two years there was a decline in military activities in the border areas, with the number of American casualties falling precipitously. At the same time communist forces were killing even more, although these were increasingly South Vietnamese forces as U.S. troop withdrawals continued. For Cambodia the invasion began a decent into hell, and the results were worse than even the most pessimistic had predicted. North Vietnamese forces expanded their control to over half that nation. The local pro-communist Khmer Rouge, which started at some 5,000, grew in numbers and savagery, increasing to a force of 70,000 by 1975, slaughtering large numbers of their own people to establish a strange type of communist society. Apart from some 500,000 deaths before the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, they were responsible for horrific genocide that took the lives of over three million Cambodians, turning that nation into gigantic killing field. While some have tried to blame this on Nixon and Kissinger, the opposite is a more likely case in that Kissinger strongly opposed the Khmer Rouge and their North Vietnamese supporters. U.S. policy here was focused on avoiding exactly the type of bloodbath the ultimately took place in Cambodia. The takeover of Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would likely have occurred in any event. The invasion did, however, bring both the U.S. and North Vietnam into another nation that had tried to remain peaceful.78 Without question the catastrophe that befell Cambodia could hardly have been worse.

68  •  Henry Kissinger

Washington’s Social Scene and Hollywood Starlets When Kissinger arrived in Washington in January 1969, he had not planned on becoming the sex symbol of the Nixon administration although he was far from unhappy that it headed that way. Washington is a one-industry town where everything revolves around power or access to it. Single women in Washington often judge men on how powerful they are rather than how handsome, wealthy or other factors more relevant elsewhere. As one columnist noted: “Henry is certainly attractive to some people, if it not for his Tarzan physique, then certainly for his gifted mind, quick wit and adaptability.”79 Kissinger was clearly the most powerful single man in the incoming Nixon administration. This gave him social standing and appeal that he never imagined, and he actively cultivated a “swinger” image in an effort to humanize himself and secure pictures in the society columns. The epicenter of Washington’s social scene is Georgetown where the elite and powerful gathered for endless dinners and parties to plan, plot, gossip and even work overtime for the government and the community that surrounded it. For the Georgetown hostesses things had become pretty boring since the Kennedy days and they searched the new Nixon arrivals for interesting people.80 Kissinger was at the top of the list and quickly fit in to this new environment. Also central to this social world were the media elite, whom Nixon despised, but Kissinger cultivated endlessly. Among Kissinger’s closest friends were columnist Joseph Alsop and his wife Susan Mary. A host of other reporters and columnists were also cultivated by Kissinger, and his long-time girlfriend Nancy Maginnes when she was in town, and he spared no effort to share confidences and become a media darling.81 Strangely for a person who sought and admired luxury, Kissinger’s own home was a small, cramped two-bedroom apartment near Rock Creek that was poorly furnished, resembling a 1950s Holiday Inn. The few furnishings he did have were ones that his secretary bought for him at discount stores, and the mess he kept there was barely cleaned once a week by his cleaning lady. By any standard this was not the ideal “bachelor pad” for the most eligible man in town. Kissinger never entertained at home—it would be an embarrassment, and he never cooked even for himself. When he did entertain friends, he would often take them to a local Chinese restaurant he liked that had a large private room, or for other events, he would borrow the home of friends, such that of as the Bradens in Chevy Chase, which had a dining room large enough to seat 32. Otherwise Kissinger ate out, frequently in trendy restaurants such as Rive Gauche, where he might be seen by other

National Security Advisor  • 69

important people and columnists, often asking for a “better table” near the front where he was more likely to be seen. For any patrons who wanted to shake his hand or get his autograph he was happy to accommodate them, and truly enjoyed being a celebrity. Notwithstanding his long-term relationship with Nancy Maginnes, his newly found power and prestige enabled him to date Hollywood celebrities and other A-list women. For the former Harvard professor who was seen as short, fat, and “dumpy” after his divorce—not the ideal date for the leading ladies of Cambridge—this was too much for him to resist. The most prominent of Kissinger’s starlet relationships was with actress Jill St. John, whom he had met in 1970 and dated more than any other starlet. In fact, he dated her so much that Kissinger’s father worried he might marry a non-Jew, but was relieved to find out that her real name was Jill Oppenheim and that she was Jewish.82 The relationship with St. John was largely a West Coast thing, and they would dine out in fancy Los Angeles restaurants such as the Bistro in Beverly Hills where they were sure to be seen by the media. While Kissinger certainly enjoyed her company, he craved the media attention which this relationship attracted between a Hollywood star and the “playboy of the west wing” and was known to have contacted the press in advance to advise them of where he would be eating and with whom. Like others in Hollywood, St. John opposed the Vietnam war and argued with Kissinger about it, who finally convinced her to at least support Nixon in the 1972 election.83 Other stars Kissinger dated during this period included Samantha Eggar, Shirley MacLaine, Marlo Thomas, Candice Bergen, and Liv Ullmann. Apart from these well-known stars he also had an eye for beautiful, lesser-known actresses including one Hollywood stunt woman best known for her ability to fall off motorcycles and drive into brick walls. For Kissinger this was not only a means to enhance his celebrity, but also to give him recognition that he truly enjoyed. Ultimately Kissinger moved beyond this star-dating phase of his life, along with constant trips to Los Angeles, and finally proposed to Nancy who was far better suited to be the wife that Kissinger needed. Well-­ educated, experienced, and a veteran of the Rockefeller study group she could relate to Kissinger on multiple levels, and coming from a prestigious and socially-prominent New York family could hold her own in any social setting. Above all, she adored and worshipped Kissinger. Neither family was happy with the proposed union. Nancy’s parents were unhappy that she was going to marry a Jew, even though he was the Secretary of State and one of the most powerful men on earth, and Kissinger’s parents were equally unhappy that he was marrying a non-Jew.

70  •  Henry Kissinger

Their actual wedding was postponed several times owing to trips Kissinger needed to make as Secretary of State, and they were finally married at a small private ceremony in March 1994 in Arlington, Virginia attended by only a few friends. Kissinger’s parents did not attend, largely due to the problem that this was on the Jewish Sabbath and they would need to walk to the ceremony.84 Following the ceremony, the newlywed Kissingers went on a honeymoon to Acapulco, Mexico, borrowing Nelson Rockefeller’s airplane for the trip. Far be it from Kissinger to lower himself to travel on a commercial aircraft as a mere mortal. For Henry and Nancy Kissinger it has been a marriage that has endured ever since.

Notes 1. Some authorities claim that previously Kissinger had provided private advice to Nixon in his campaign against Democrat Hubert Humphry, although this remains a matter of dispute. 2. Lewis L. Gould, 1968: The Election That Changed America (2nd edn) (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010). 3. Peter Baker, “Nixon Tried to Spoil Johnson’s Vietnam Peace Talks in ’68, Notes Show,” The New York Times, January 2, 2017. Nixon is reported to have Haldeman find a way to secretly “monkey wrench” the peace talks in Vietnam fearing that progress toward ending the war would hurt his chances for the presidency and gave instructions that they should keep “working on” South Vietnamese leaders to persuade them not to agree to a deal before the election. The Nixon campaign’s clandestine effort to thwart Johnson’s peace initiative fall has long been a source of controversy and scholarship. Evidence has emerged documenting the involvement of Nixon’s campaign. Haldeman’s notes appear to confirm longstanding suspicions that Nixon himself was directly involved, despite his later denials. 4. The strongest argument is contained in Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). Kissinger has denounced the Hersh book as “slimy lies” while Nixon himself wrote that Kissinger “was completely circumspect” and did not reveal any classified details of the Paris talk. See Richard M. Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985). 5. Johnson did make information available to Humphrey who was convinced that he was going to win the election and did not reveal the information to the public. Humphrey later regretted this as a mistake. NSA surveillance of Americans in Vietnam ultimately became a major issue, later seen with respect to actress Jane Fonda’s trip to Vietnam and growing concerns led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978. Nixon’s meddling at the time could have been viewed as a Logan Act violation, although this 1799 statute has never resulted in a conviction, with the only two indictments taking place in 1802 and 1852. 6. The ISA position at defense was given to former Congressman Robert Ellsworth, who had served with Nixon in the House and remained a long-time confident. In effect ISA served as a “mini state department” for Nixon who trusted Ellsworth far more than his own secretary of state. Also a friend of Ford, Ellsworth was promoted to Deputy Secretary of Defense when Ford became president. 7. Congresswoman Claire Booth Luce, who hosted the party, later remarked: “I knew that if Henry spent an hour talking to Nixon, the two men would get along famously.” Clearly, she was correct. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 17. See also, C.L. Sulzberger, The World and Richard Nixon (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987).

National Security Advisor  • 71 8. At this historic meeting at the Pierre Hotel Nixon strangely failed to offer Kissinger the position, apparently by mistake, which was rectified a day later by John Mitchell who was to become Nixon’s attorney general. Mitchell also related that Nixon preferred that Rockefeller remain as Governor of New York and was not offered a position at the time. 9. Landau, Kissinger, p. 134. Rockefeller told Kissinger that he needed to call Nixon immediately and accept the post, and that the president should not be treated this way and kept waiting. 10. Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 16. At the time Haldeman produced a memo which stated, “Richard M. Nixon intends at this time not to allow his personal White House Staff to dominate the functions or control the direction of the major agencies and bureaus of the government.” Further, “he plans to organize the White House staff in a way that will encourage and not inhibit direct communications between his Cabinet officers and the President.” As it turned out, nothing could have been further from the reality of the Nixon Administration. Nixon held the State Department officers in contempt, in large part a response to how they had treated him when he had been Vice President. He also disliked the process he had witnessed then when President Eisenhower was only given options that State had approved. 11. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 16. See also, Richard M. Nixon, RN (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1978). 12. Steven Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962—1972 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 233. See also George Ball, Diplomacy for a Crowded World (Boston: Little Brown, 1976). One state department veteran astutely observed: “Both were incurably covert, but Kissinger was charming about it. Both abhorred bureaucracy, but Nixon was reclusive about it. Both were inveterate manipulators, but Nixon was more transparent. Neither was widely admired for truthfulness, but Kissinger excelled at articulation. Neither worshipped the First Amendment but Kissinger mesmerized the press.” Thomas Hughes, “Why Kissinger Must Choose Between Nixon and Country,” New York Times Magazine, December 30, 1973. 13. See Henry Brandon, Special Relationships (New York: Atheneum, 1988). Ultimately what sealed their relationship was Nixon’s constant desire for flattery and Kissinger’s unabashed penchant for providing it. 14. Both Kissinger and Haldeman came to think that challenging Nixon head on was a futile enterprise, and even Nancy Kissinger, a devoted spouse, was concerned about Kissinger’s willingness to play along with Nixon’s prejudices. 15. H.R. Haldeman and Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978). Nancy Kissinger, Henry’s second wife, had been a member of the Rockefeller team and was offended by Nixon. Many of Nixon’s remarks were indeed anti-Semitic and racist and did not like Kissinger being subject to them. Kissinger elected to let them pass for the greater good. 16. See Henry A. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). Here Kissinger recognized the problem almost a decade before he entered the Nixon Administration. 17. Establishment of the NSC was only one feature of the highly significant National Security Act of 1947, which also established the Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. See Stephen A. Cambone, The National Security Act of 1947– 26 July 1947: A New Structure for National Security Policy Planning (Washington: CSIS, 1998), and Charles A. Stevenson, “The Story Behind the National Security Act of 1947.” Military Review 88.3 (2008). The actual title of National Security Advisor was not specified in the Act and initially this was an informal title. Kissinger began as “special assistant” to the President and had this upgraded to “deputy to the president for national security.” 18. In the first year of the Nixon administration the NSC budget more than tripled over what it has been under Walt Rostow as national security advisor. In the first three years Nixon

72  •  Henry Kissinger signed off on 138 numbered NSSMs, drafted by Kissinger and the NSC Staff, leading to 127 formal decisions. See John P. Leacacos, “Kissinger’s Apparat,” Foreign Policy, Winter 1971–1971, pp. 3–27. 19. Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 83–85. 20. While some accounts refer to the first three NSSMs, there were in fact seven, signed then and actually dated January 21, 1969. These first three were NSSM-1 (Vietnam); NSSM-2 (Middle East); and NSSM-3 (Military Posture). Leacacos, “Kissinger’s Apparat,” p. 25. 21. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 3. See also Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace (New York: Viking, 1978). Use of official (secure) government communications systems was a concern of Kissinger for many years. Long before the Internet there were three such major systems— run by State, Defense, and CIA. Kissinger’s concerns were not only with outgoing “cables” but ones sent to him and how many others were on automated distribution. He once ordered a study to see how few other recipients saw his cable traffic—even when marked “eyes only.” His idea for a “backchannel” to avoid State and Defense was to privately use CIA’s classified cable system and have CIA hand deliver the incoming traffic to him. This did avoid prying eyes at state, but the traffic did have an audience at CIA. 22. See Seyom Brown, The Crisis of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 23. This was described as a self-destructing demolition derby between Halperin and Sonnenfeldt to be Kissinger’s deputy. The one left standing was Haig, who did not engage in the intellectual competition, but was a military man loyal to Nixon and could protect Kissinger on his vulnerable right flank. 24. What he was not obviously aware of is that many on his staff, as well as others in Washington, made a hobby of comparing notes on their individual meetings with Kissinger. Frank Shakespeare, who headed the U.S. Information Agency, noted “Kissinger can meet with six different people, smart as hell, learned, knowledgeable, experienced of very different views, and persuade all six of them that the real Henry Kissinger is just where they are.” Ralph Blumenfeld, Henry Kissinger (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 271. 25. Haldeman and DiMona, The Ends of Power, p. 94. See also, Nixon, RN, p. 734. 26. His humor was often self-deprecating, and he once remarked “Since English is my second language, I didn’t know that maniac and fool were not terms of endearment.” 27. See Henry A. Kissinger, “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs, January 1969, p. 214. 28. See Kenneth T. Young, The 1954 Geneva Conference: Indo-China and Korea (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1968). 29. Haldeman and DiMona, The Ends of Power, p. 81. 30. Landau, Kissinger, pp. 157–158. Kissinger had supported the “domino theory” at least through the mid-1960s. Presumably his travels to Vietnam and more information led to his changing his mind. 31. See Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 32. See Neil Sheehan. The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), and Daniel Ellsberg. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002). 33. The entire text of the study can now be found at The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 5 vols. See also Neil Sheehan, The Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg’s own account can be found in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Aside from work on the Pentagon Papers Ellsberg serve as a consultant to Kissinger until his unsuccessful prosecution for the leak of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Ellsberg was unsuccessfully prosecuted for his leak of the Pentagon Papers. For his part Rowan, who lied to the FBI in the process, was allowed to resign as RAND’s President and not prosecuted. 34. See Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 125, and Nixon, RN, p. 384. 35. Even though a classified document, NSSM-1 was inserted by Congressman Ron Dellums into the Congressional Record May 10, 1972.

National Security Advisor  • 73 36. On most such questions the U.S. Embassy in Saigon thought the war was “going well” while the CIA, the defense department civilians and many at state in Washington disagreed. See Hersh, The Price of Power, p. 50, and Kissinger, White House Years, p. 238. 37. See Henry A. Kissinger, “The Vietnam Negotiations.” Foreign Affairs, January 1969. 38. The linkage idea had great intellectual appeal to Kissinger who was always willing to see possible connections between various disconnected and far-flung events. 39. See Anatoly Dobrynin. In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986) (New York: Random House, 1995). It is not clear why there was no Soviet response at all. Possibly the Soviets had not yet assessed Kissinger’s role and the major change in the U.S. foreign policy-making process that had just taken place. Kissinger even showed Dobrynin Nixon’s own notes on this but this apparently made no difference. 40. For his view, see Dobrynin, In Confidence. 41. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 265–268. 42. See Harrison E. Salisbury, War Between Russia and China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969). 43. See Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), and Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1301. 44. Nixon thought he would be in a stronger position following the 1972 election was unhappy with Kissinger and told Colson “You have to get Henry to slow down.” Haldeman recalled that Kissinger “was obsessed with having a peace accord by election day.” See C.L. Sulzberger, The World and Richard Nixon (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987). 45. According to one observer Kissinger “would figure out in his own mind the best possible outcome of a situation, but he tended to be insensitive to the importance of making sure that all of the other players felt fully informed and that their concerns were taken into account.” Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 445. 46. The key points of the agreement being an immediate ceasefire without Thieu being ousted first; unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. forces from South Vietnam and North Vietnamese implicitly allowed to remain; return of all prisoners of war; some limitation on further infiltration of the South; the right of the U.S. to continue aid to the South and Hanoi to similarly aid the Viet Cong; and an Administration of National Concord” that would organize elections in the South but not displace either the Thieu government or the communist Provisional Revolutionary Government in the areas they controlled. 47. Bunker was not able to see Thieu with this message, as Thieu refused the meeting offering a lame excuse that he had gone waterskiing and hurt his foot. 48. Nixon was not particularly interested in the details and was largely focused on the election coming in less than a month as well as the fallout from the Watergate fiasco involving many of his key staff. See Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, All The President’s Men (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1974). Neither Kissinger nor Nixon had any long-term interest in what happened to Thieu and the South Vietnamese government, and just wanted out. Haldeman later reported that Kissinger was out of line in accepting the October accord without consulting Nixon. 49. Interestingly this draft had been captured from a low-level North Vietnamese cadre in Da Nang province. While the U.S. held this draft agreement very closely, the North Vietnamese were widely distributing it. Kissinger later found that the CIA station in Saigon had also captured a similar copy. 50. With Kissinger in Saigon his deputy Haig was in Washington and not been particularly helpful, warning Nixon that the peace plan might threaten Saigon’s security and that there could be a “murderous bloodbath” in the aftermath as Thieu was being pressed to accept. Haig was about to depart his post at the NSC for one as Army Vice Chief of Staff, with a major promotion, and had become more loyal to Nixon than Kissinger. 51. These short quotes were widely reported in the press at the time, including the New York Times. See, for example, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/october-surprises-dont-­ necessarily-sway-elections-or-occur-in-october.html (accessed April 18, 2019).

74  •  Henry Kissinger 52. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 412. See, also Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1445. 53. Kissinger favored the use of smaller and more precise fighter-bombers including F-111 and F-4 aircraft. 54. There is an extensive literature on the subject of “strategic bombing” dating from studies of Allied bombing during World War II, with a key argument that bombing in urban and industrial areas can have an opposite effect and strengthen resolve of the target population. 55. Nixon and others have pointed out that despite this widely used term, he ordered that no bombing take place on Christmas day. 56. The term “carpet bombing” comes from the fact that the B-52 drops bombs from 35,000 feet in what amounts to a rectangle target area and it is not possible to precisely align where they fall. The results are never quite so clean as the planners would like. 57. Hersh, The Price of Power, p. 612. Herb Klein, Making it Perfectly Clear (New York: Doubleday, 1980). 58. Nixon’s letter noted that the aid package would “be implemented by each member in accordance with its own constitutional provisions” which enabled Kissinger and Nixon to tell Congress that there were “no secret deals” involved in the agreement. 59. See Virginia Brodine and Mark Selden. Open Secret: The Kissinger-Nixon Doctrine in Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), and Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg. Inside the VA and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam’s Armed Forces (New York: Columbine, 1992). 60. See William Shawcross, Sideshow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979). 61. Gen. Earle Wheeler and Gen. Creighton Abrams, Bombing in Cambodia, Hearings Before the Senate Armed Service Committee, July and August 1973. 62. Laird supported the plan but was confused by the great secrecy Kissinger was demanding. He felt it would be difficult to keep the bombings covert for long, and to the contrary, if it made sense to take out COSVN and the sanctuaries this could be justified publicly. Laird did not prevail at the time and the bombing of Cambodia was kept secret for a long time. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 243–244; Hersh, The Price of Power, p. 60, and Nixon, RN, p. 380. 63. Recognizing the problem with Rogers, Nixon ordered “State is to be notified only after the point of no return,” and shortly after added “this order is not appealable.” Kissinger, White House Years, p. 245. 64. Fearing leaks Kissinger convinced Nixon to order FBI wiretaps of White House aides suspected of leaking. For all his brilliance and desire for secrecy, Kissinger lacked a thorough understanding of the various “secure” government communications systems and how leaks took place. He was also unaware that Laird had ordered NSA to keep tabs on all communications related to Kissinger from the various systems and deliver all such messages directly to him. 65. The North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia were located in sparsely populated areas and the bombing resulted in relatively few Cambodian casualties. 66. Bombing in Cambodia, Hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, July—­ August 1973. See also Department of Defense Report on Selected Air and Ground Operations in Cambodia and Laos, submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee, September 10, 1973, and Hersh, The Price of Power, pp. 61–65. 67. An argument has been made that the 1969 bombing of Cambodia and the subsequent U.S. invasion led to the destruction of that country and a later takeover by the Khmer Rouge. See Shawcross, Sideshow, for the strongest statement on this. Kissinger’s view can be found in Kissinger, White House Years, p. 251. 68. Kissinger’s memoirs contain the disingenuous statement with respect to the bombing that had it been announced “it would surely have been supported by the American public.” Highly unlikely. Nixon’s memoirs on this subject are more realistic where he notes Sihanouk’s difficult position and states: “Another reason for the secrecy was the problem of domestic antiwar protest.”

National Security Advisor  • 75 69. In fact, the opposite was true. Nixon and Kissinger faulted the CIA for not providing any warning that such a coup was in the works. At the time CIA did not even have a station in Cambodia. Nixon ordered the CIA top open one which they ignored for weeks. When Nixon found out he was justifiably outraged. 70. Even the NSC’s “40 Committee,” which oversaw covert operations, was not to be informed. 71. April 1970 was a bad month for Nixon. Secret negotiations Kissinger was having with the North Vietnamese in Paris had broken off and no end to the war was in sight. Soviet military advisors were pouring into Egypt; efforts to arrange a summit with the Soviets got nowhere; the Senate had rejected two of his Supreme Court nominees; and to top things off Nixon had to cancel attending his daughter Julie’s college commencement from Smith amid threats of protests. Kissinger recalls Nixon as been under great stress then, and on occasion mentions that he was frequently drunk. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 154. 72. Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, p. 157. See also, William Safire, Before the Fall (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 182. 73. Three of Kissinger’s staff urged a policy whose goal would still be a neutral Cambodia, and Lon Nol encouraged to come to a private understanding with Hanoi so that they could continue use of the border areas as before, and that cross-border skirmishes and bombing—as under Sihanouk be permitted. Kissinger could not see the moral distinction between a full invasion and cross-border skirmishes. The staff argued that the one would risk dragging Cambodia into the conflict and engulf the entire country into the war. 74. Nixon still portrayed this as a mission to eliminate the COSVN command center and necessary to sustain the continuation of the Vietnamization program. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 502. As Kissinger was not present in the room, notes were taken by John Mitchell, the Attorney General who was present. 75. It could have been announced by the U.S. military in Saigon as cross-border operations intended to clear out the sanctuaries, with some public protest, but not the explosion that resulted. 76. Strangely Nixon paid an early morning visit to the Lincoln Memorial, meeting with protestors, and engaged in a discussion of college football, the importance of travel, and his goals in Vietnam. Logs show him leaving the White House at 4:42 am with only his valet and a single Secret Service agent along. 77. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 488. 78. Kissinger’s later testimony is insightful. “Our guilt, responsibility, or whatever you may call it toward the Cambodians is that we conducted our operations in Cambodia primarily to serve our purposes related to Vietnam, and that they have now been left in a very difficult circumstance.” Henry A. Kissinger, The Vietnam-Cambodia Emergency, House International Relations Committee, April 18, 1975, Part I, p. 152. 79. Quote from an article titled ‘Henry Kissinger in the Swinging Seventies’ written by the staff of Women’s Wear Daily. See www.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/celebrating-­ henry-kissinger-6967416/ (accessed April 18, 2019). 80. As one hostess put it, “Henry was the only interesting one in the new White House … and he played it to the hilt. So this little, round, obscure professor who claims to be a secret swinger became the darling of the Georgetown set.” Another noted Henry is always friendly, particularly with women. Whether on the telephone, at parties or in person, this man who commands more of the president’s attention than almost any other living person, is gentle, boyish, even a bit insecure. And he pays rapt attention to every question as though he had nothing in the world more pressing to consider.” Gloria Steinem noted, “Henry’s the only interesting person in the whole Nixon Administration and he’s not afraid of hostile reporters. I enjoy talking with him. He’s the only person on the Nixon team who can talk” and added “If this were the Kennedy administration nobody would pay attention to him … if it weren’t for a vacuum of news, Henry would be forgotten.” 81. Included here are NBC’s David Brinkley, Roland Evans, and Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post.

76  •  Henry Kissinger 82. One press report stated that they were secretly married, which both Kissinger and St. John quickly denied. Interviewed years later St. John stated that “It has been a great friendship and still is. It has not been and will never be a great romance.” Women’s Wear Daily, April 13, 1990. 83. At one Hollywood party for Nixon during the 1972 campaign Kissinger brought St. John as his date where she told reporters “Henry has been trying for three years, and he’s finally gotten me to support the president” to which Kissinger responded, “And you guys thought I’d been wasting my time out here in Hollywood.” New York Times, August 28, 1972. See also, Blumenfeld, Kissinger, p. 216. 84. Nixon did not attend the ceremony either but called Nancy to congratulate her. On a long call Nixon discussed their forthcoming honeymoon to Acapulco and advised her to watch out for snakes, and what to do if she were bitten.

chapter

4

China, Communism, and Arms Control

China was not seen as an immediate problem at the outset of the Nixon administration although both Kissinger and Nixon recognized the official U.S. policy was seriously antiquated. The U.S. and China had no diplomatic relations and many in the policy community, including the State Department, still stuck with the nonsensical notion that the nationalist government on Taiwan would someday retake the mainland. The communist government of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) had also become a nuclear power in 1964 and could easily have taken Taiwan, but was not interested in provoking a war with the U.S. Understanding that the status quo needed to change at some point, Kissinger was delighted to receive a secret message from the Chinese in June 1971 inviting him to come to China and discuss a possible Nixon trip, telling the president that this message was the most important communication that had come to an American president since the end of World War II. Quite likely Kissinger was correct, and this played to Kissinger’s strong suit—he loved secret messages and secret trips. The idea was also what Kissinger and Nixon sought from their initial meeting at the Pierre Hotel—a bold and dramatic stroke that would bring about the most significant change in U.S. foreign policy in decades. The crusty old bureaucrats and China hands at the State Department could never have pulled this off. Kissinger later wrote that this initiative had transformed the structure of international politics. Indeed, it did, as the bipolar world of U.S.–Soviet relations that had dominated international relations became a triangular one offering new opportunities for diplomacy and leverage.1

78  •  Henry Kissinger

Kissinger’s secret dealings with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao Zedong enabled him to play China off against the Soviets outside the normal diplomatic channels, which was much Kissinger’s style. Even before they had diplomatic relations, both the U.S. and China shared a common view of the Soviet threat. Nixon also saw the benefits of a triangular relationship that would be stabilizing for the world, and later wrote: “We moved toward China … to shape global equilibrium. It was not to collude against the Soviet Union but to give us a balancing position to use for productive ends—to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us.”2 The Sino–Soviet rift that brought those to powers to the brink of war in 1969 certainly figured in the prospects for improved U.S.–Chinese relations. Getting there was a different story. Even though Rogers supported Nixon’s desire for an opening with China, talks with Chinese had been handled by State Department bureaucrats since 1954 and had produced nothing, and Kissinger was sure they never would. It was necessary to again cut Rogers and the State Department out of the loop. Kissinger’s efforts to open a back-channel with the Chinese had not yet been successful, even with sending General Vernon “Dick” Walters to Paris to establish contact.3 The breakthrough came when Nixon gave an interview to Time in September 1970 where he mentioned he would like to visit China someday, and Mao gave an interview to Edgar Snow for Life saying that he “would be happy to talk to him, either as a tourist or as president.”4 The channel finally used was through Pakistan, where Nixon had established a relationship with Pakistani President Yahya Kahn who met with Nixon in the Oval Office and later went on to Beijing. What followed were a series of handwritten notes that led to the invitation from Premier Zhou Enlai for “a special envoy of President Nixon” to visit Peking.5 Kissinger typed his response on a plain sheet of paper that was handed to the Pakistani ambassador to be given to the Chinese stating that he would be willing to come to discuss “a broad range of issues” facing the two nations.6 Once again neither Rogers nor the State Department were informed of this message. Little was heard back from the Chinese through the early part of 1971. In one of the strangest stories in all of diplomacy, a member of the American ping-pong team competing in Japan befriended the captain of the Chinese team, giving him a T-shirt as a gift. The Chinese saw this as a policy signal orchestrated by Washington and invited the American team to Beijing the following week where Zhou Enlai hosted them at the Great Hall of the People. A week later another message arrived through the Pakistani channel reaffirming the invitation for a Kissinger visit—or the Secretary of State or even the President for a direct meeting.

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 79

Nixon seriously considered going himself, without any advance visit by Kissinger, but Kissinger managed to dissuade him from this with the argument that an “unprepared presidential trip to China was much too dangerous.”7 On May 9 Kissinger responded that he would serve as the special envoy, and that one purpose of the visit would be to arrange for a subsequent visit by the president. On June 2 the Chinese responded that Zhou Enlai had approved the trip and expressed Chairman Mao’s “pleasure” at the prospect of a future meeting with Nixon. The arrangement was for Kissinger to use a Pakistani aircraft, flying from Islamabad to Beijing. Nixon made extensive efforts to preserve as much glory as possible for his own Chinese visit for himself. Nixon repeatedly ordered Kissinger to keep his name out of any announcements of the trip. Kissinger saw this as absurd, and just ignored these orders. Once again this was a highly secret operation, although Nixon decided that Rogers needed to be informed at some point, over Kissinger’s objection. In the end Rogers was not told until the last moment.8 Here there was good reason to keep State in the dark as the conservative foreign policy establishment inside the department would likely have mobilized opposition to subvert the plan. Nixon noted that “we never could have done it if we had not kept it secret.”9 On July 1, 1971 Kissinger departed on what was identified as a fact-­ finding tour in Asia along with a small entourage and no reporters. What was reported was that Kissinger was in Nathiagali, Pakistan and was resting, after feeling “slightly indisposed.” Kissinger never went to Nathiagali where a fake motorcade awaited him, changing planes secretly in Islamabad onto a Pakistani aircraft with Chinese navigators aboard for the flight to Beijing. M.F.H. Beg, a journalist for the London Telegraph, spotted Kissinger at the airport and asked an airport official where he was going. When he was told “China” he immediately called his editor in London with what could have been the scoop of the century, but the editor, assuming Beg was drunk, killed the story. Kissinger’s party, which included three NSC staff and two Secret Service agents, arrived in Beijing on July 9 and were taken to a State guesthouse where Kissinger was met by Zhou Enlai. As Kissinger recalls, Zhou “was equally at home in philosophic sweeps, historical analysis, tactical probing and light repartee.”10 Over two days Kissinger held seventeen hours of talks with Zhou, although Kissinger had only one piece of actual business—­arranging the invitation for Nixon to visit China for a summit. The rest of the time was spent in conceptual discussions and avoiding mundane matters. Kissinger noted that this was “like a dialogue between two professors of political philosophy,”11 although the most substantive discussions were on a shared distrust of the Soviets.12

80  •  Henry Kissinger

After much discussion Zhou agreed to the Nixon visit early in 1972, and further negotiations were needed to agree upon a communiqué acceptable to both sides. “Knowing of President Nixon’s expressed desire to visit the People’s Republic of China” he was being invited “to seek the normalization of relations” and “to exchange views on questions of concern to the two sides.” No mention was made of Taiwan. Upon this agreement a single codeword was sent back to the White House—“Eureka.” Returning to the U.S. Kissinger provided Nixon with a 40-page report on his 49 hours in China. As he told the President, “We have laid the groundwork … for you and Mao to turn a page in history.”13 This was announced by Nixon on a short, televised appearance on July 15, with no advance warning given to the networks what this was about. In one short moment Nixon had confounded all of his enemies— the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, the press, and the liberal Democrats. It remains as the master stroke of his presidency. There was at least one adverse consequence of this secret negotiation, in that the U.S. had failed to inform the Japanese in advance despite assurances that they would not undertake any initiative with China without prior consultation. Kissinger had vetoed the idea of sending Rogers to Japan as he was worried about a possible leak.14 The breakthrough with China also had a positive effect on relations with the Soviets who had put off Nixon’s suggestions for a summit and promptly dispatched Dobrynin to the White House asking for one before Nixon’s China trip. Kissinger was delighted and wrote: “To have the two communist powers competing for good relations with us could only benefit the cause of peace” and saw that “it was the essence of triangular strategy.”15 Nixon’s announcement also made Kissinger an international celebrity and it became Nixon’s nightmare—Kissinger was now the darling of the press, stealing the show from the biggest success of the Nixon presidency. No matter how much Nixon ordered Kissinger to stay away from the press it just didn’t work.16 Kissinger returned to China in October, in a public visit, to draft the communiqué that Nixon and Zhou would issue following the planned February 1972 summit in China. This was not a simple task and ultimately Kissinger worked with Zhou’s proposal that the statement point to common interests largely resisting Soviet hegemony, as well as points of disagreement. They converged on a draft which avoided points that were too explosive for either side. Nixon’s trip to China, which included meetings with Zhou as well as Chairman Mao was well-choreographed, and the communiqué Kissinger had previously negotiated with Zhou led to the resumption of relations between the two nations, long overdue, and a new chapter in U.S. foreign policy.

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 81

Historians argue that a rapprochement between the U.S. and China was likely during the 1970s regardless of who was president, largely because of major international developments such as the Sino–Soviet rift and U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Nevertheless, it was Kissinger and Nixon who made this happen, and deserve credit for it, along with Zhou whose vision and personal chemistry with Kissinger enabled the breakthrough at a pace that would never have happened if left to the State Department and normal diplomatic process.17 Kissinger’s intellect and sophistication made this work. Rogers never would have been able to accomplish this. The breakthrough with China also had a major impact on the Vietnam conflict, which was increasingly looking like an historic artifact—for the U.S., China, and the Soviets. The Chinese were far more concerned about the Soviet threat than the problems of North Vietnam. The Soviets similarly were becoming far more interested in detente with the West than supporting a war that antagonized the U.S. and did nothing for them. The original U.S. rationale for the war—stopping the spread of the communist Chinese menace in Asia—now seemed less compelling.18 The opening with China also serves to change perceptions of U.S. foreign policy, which was no longer seen as simply a contest between good and evil—the U.S. vs. the Soviet Union. The process Kissinger and Nixon put in place was far different, and it was no longer the case that it was the U.S. role to “defend good” but rather it was a more complex set of relationships involving more parties with varying degrees of morality and one where the U.S. would have to balance a competing set of interests for the sake of international stability. This was far different and far less comfortable for Americans who were not used to balance-of-power diplomacy.

Chile, Cuba, and Communism in the Western Hemisphere Kissinger was not a Latin America specialist, and neither was Nixon at the outset of the administration, although Nixon had built his political career as a staunch anti-communist. Concerns about the possible spread of communism to the nations of Latin America and Soviet influence there became matters of interest to the new administration. Previously the Soviet introduction of medium-range missiles into communist Cuba led to the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and a potential outbreak of war with the Soviet Union, and although war was averted there were new concerns over Soviet military activities in Cuba. Prior to the Cuban revolution, relations with the U.S. had been excellent. The U.S. purchased Cuban sugar, and the beaches and casinos of Havana were a popular vacation spot for American tourists. Fidel Castro was

82  •  Henry Kissinger

not overtly communist when he led the Cuban revolution in 1969, overthrowing the authoritarian government of president Fulgencio Batista, and the U.S. did not become involved. Castro’s 26th of July Movement later reformed along communist lines, becoming the Cuban Communist Party.19 The Kennedy Administration made several abortive attempts to assassinate Castro, and the CIA became involved in a failed attempt to overthrow the communist Castro government with Brigade 2506, counter-­ revolutionary military group made up of mostly Cuban exiles in April 1961 at the famed “Bay of Pigs.” A far larger problem for Kennedy arose when Castro permitted the Soviets to base intermediate-range missiles in Cuba armed with nuclear warheads and capable of reaching the U.S., sparking one of the largest crises of the Cold War. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis and the removal of the Soviet missiles, the U.S. saw little chance of changing Cuba’s communist government and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America was focused on stopping the spread of communism to other nations in the Western Hemisphere. Much of what took place with respect to Chile and Cuba came during September 1970, at the same time the Kissinger and Nixon administration were also dealing with a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Meir to Washington, a new peace plan from the Viet Cong, and PLO operations in Jordan to overthrow the king during what was known as “Bloody September.” Much of this took place within one hectic week as Nixon was leaving for a trip to Europe. Added to this was Kissinger’s tendency to see linkages, either real or imagined, between all of these far-flung events. The NSC was also operating with a limited staff and was forced to depend on analytical support from CIA, particularly when it came to Latin America. Even though the Soviets had removed their land-based nuclear missiles from Cuba in 1962, there was new concern over construction of new barracks and port facilities at Cienfuegos that would support basing of Soviet submarines there, which was revealed by photo reconnaissance from U-2 spy planes. This intelligence also showed an unusual flotilla of Soviet ships headed for Cuba including ships that would service nuclear submarines, and Kissinger ordered daily U-2 flights to keep watch on the Soviet ships.20 Despite Kissinger’s concern over the Soviet construction of a new supply base in Cuba for their nuclear submarine force, Nixon was not interested in another Cuban missile crisis as he was about to depart on an extended trip to Europe, and Rogers called Kissinger asking him to “avoid high level tension” over Cuba now. Kissinger disagreed with Rogers, and with CIA support continued to press the matter with the WSAG and scheduled a full NSC meeting on the topic, finding himself in a more hawkish position than Nixon and arguing that there was a critical need to show U.S. military resolve.

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 83

At the WSAG meeting the Cuba matter was second to Chile, and Kissinger’s arguments for strong actions did not prevail, and were seen as a grey-area challenge—which Kissinger had written about years before. Rogers argument was that the Soviets had done nothing illegal or violated the 1962 agreement but had merely done something contrary to U.S. national interests.21 A follow-up phone call Kissinger made to Nixon at Camp David failed to change Nixon’s mind and he urged Kissinger to play down the problem, telling him that he didn’t want some senator demanding a blockade of Cuba. At the full NSC meeting, Rogers strongly opposed any action on Cuba, as it would stir up another crisis the U.S. did not need. It was one of the few battles Rogers won, and Nixon ordered everyone to say nothing about it for the time being. For the Nixon administration Chile was a far different matter, and they had inherited a situation going back many years. During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. had several programs and strategies ranging from funding political campaigns to propaganda aimed at impeding the presidential campaigns of the perennial Marxist candidate Salvador Allende and successfully stopping Chile’s left-wing parties from gaining power.22 Since 1962 the CIA had been covertly funding opponents of Allende, who was a top contender in the 1964 election. The CIA spent $3 million campaigning against him, before and after the election, largely for radio and print advertising. The U.S. saw electing contender Eduardo Frei Montalva as vital, fearing that his predecessor’s economic failures would lead the people to support Allende.23 Allende was also feared due to his warm relations with communist Cuba and his open criticism of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion where the U.S. attempted to oust the communist Castro government from Cuba. In the September 1970, election Allende won a narrow plurality (36.2 percent) in a three-way race and Kissinger tasked the 40 Committee under National Security Study Memorandum NSSM-97 for analysis of where the U.S. stood in terms preventing Allende from taking power. Nixon feared that Chile could become “another Cuba” and the U.S. cut off foreign aid to Chile and supported Allende’s opponents during his presidency, hoping to encourage Allende’s resignation, his overthrow, or his defeat in the 1976 election.24 The U.S. feared that Allende would seek to create a socialist state in Chile that would eliminate U.S. significance there and create a close relation between Chile and other socialist countries such as Cuba and the Soviet Union. They also worried that U.S. investments in Chile would be lost and that that Chile could become a platform for other countries in the Western Hemisphere becoming socialist. Responding to Kissinger’s directive from Kissinger under NSSM-97, an inter-agency Ad Hoc Working Group on Chile prepared a set of strategy papers covering a range of possible sanctions and pressures against the

84  •  Henry Kissinger

new Allende government, including a possible diplomatic effort to force Chile to withdraw—or be expelled—from the Organization of American States as well as consultations with other regional nations “to promote their sharing of our concern over Chile.”25 The NSSM-97 options paper also laid out U.S. objectives, interests and potential policy toward Chile where U.S. interests were defined as preventing Chile from falling under Communist control and preventing the rest of Latin America from following Chile “as a model.” Of these, Nixon chose option C—maintaining an “outwardly cool posture” while working behind the scenes to undermine the Allende government through economic pressures and diplomatic isolation. Covert CIA operations and options were separately classified and not included in NSSM-97. The 40 Committee decided it was unlikely that the U.S. could influence the election outcome against Allende. CIA director Helms was also concerned about Allende supporters in the Chilean military who he felt would support Allende in the event of a coup. Now the 40 Committee wanted a cost/benefit analyses of: (1) organizing a Chilean military coup; and (2) organizing future oppositions to Allende to topple his influence through political maneuvering or outright force. Kissinger also demanded that the U.S. embassy in Santiago provide him with a “cold blooded assessment” of the chances for a military coup, to which the embassy cabled back “Opportunities for further significant U.S. government action with the Chilean military are nonexistent.” The 40 Committee did authorize $250,000 for “covert support” to try and buy votes in the Chilean congress to stop ratification of Allende’s election, an effort which failed. Prior to Allende taking office in September 1970, Nixon gave the order to overthrow Allende, Chile’s democratically elected president. Kissinger had advised Nixon against peaceful coexistence with Allende and instead advocated one of two approached to fighting Marxism as represented by Allende. The first, known as “Track I,” was a State Department initiative to thwart Allende by subverting Chilean-elected officials within the bounds of the Chilean constitution, and it excluded CIA. Track I expanded to encompass a number of policies whose ultimate goal was to create the conditions that would encourage a coup.26 The second, known as “Track II,” was a covert CIA operation overseen by Kissinger and Thomas Karamessines, CIA’s deputy director of plans, which totally excluded the State and Defense Departments and has as its goal finding and supporting Chilean military officers that would support a coup. Under Track II the CIA initiated project FUBELT to find military officers willing to support a coup and then call new elections in which Allende could be defeated.27 In an oval office meeting that lasted only thirteen minutes Nixon met alone with Kissinger, Helms and Mitchell,

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 85

and authorized $10 million for the Track II initiative to stop Allende from coming to power or unseat him. For the operation CIA used agency operatives to approach Chilean military officers who would carry out the coup. The first step in overthrowing Allende required removing General René Schneider, Chile’s army commander, who was a constitutionalist and would oppose a coup d’état. The CIA plan was to kidnap Schneider using a group led by a retired general, Roberto Viaux who was considered unstable and had been discouraged from attempting a coup alone. The CIA encouraged Viaux to join an active duty general, Camilo Valenzuela, and retired Admiral Hugo Tirado. Viaux went ahead with the plan to kidnap Schneider, who drew a handgun to protect himself, shooting Schneider who died three days later. After Schneider’s death, the CIA recovered submachine guns and money it had provided for the operation. Both Valenzuela and Viaux were arrested and convicted of conspiracy after Schneider’s death. One member of the coup plotters that escaped arrest requested assistance from the CIA, and was paid $35,000, so “the CIA did, in fact, pay ‘hush’ money to those directly responsible for the Schneider assassination—and then covered up that secret payment for thirty years.”28 The attempted kidnapping and death of Schneider shocked the Chilean public and had the opposite effect to the expected outcome of a coup with the Chilean people rallying around Allende who’s election was overwhelmingly ratified in November 1970. U.S. efforts to mount or support a coup in Chile continued, with the intelligence network continuing to report on coup-plotting activities in 1972 and 1973 and the CIA station continued to monitor a group that might mount a successful coup spending significantly more time and effort penetrating this group which had come to the station’s attention in October 1971. By January 1972 the station had successfully penetrated it and was in contact through an intermediary with its leader. It is clear that CIA received regular reports on planning of the group which carried out the successful September 1973 coup. In the September 1973 Chilean coup, Augusto Pinochet came to power, overthrowing the democratically elected president Salvador Allende who committed suicide shortly after being deposed under what the Washington Post described as “mysterious circumstances.” A subsequent CIA report in 2000, using declassified documents, found that the CIA “probably appeared to condone” the 1973 coup, but that there was “no evidence” that the U.S. actually participated in it, a view challenged by some historians, who believe that CIA covert support was crucial to the coup preparation, the coup itself, and consolidation of the regime afterward.29 An investigation of these events in 1975 by the Senate’s Church Committee, which had broad access to the relevant classified materials, stated

86  •  Henry Kissinger

that during the period leading up to the coup, the CIA received information about potential coup plots, but found no evidence that the U.S. was directly involved in the 1973 coup in Chile.30 Now that most of the relevant documents have been declassified, there is still no hard evidence of direct U.S. assistance to the 1973 coup, despite frequent allegations of such aid.31 Rather the U.S.—by its prior action during Track II, its opposition to Allende, and the nature of its contacts with the Chilean military—probably at least indicated that it would not look with disfavor on a military coup. Further, various U.S. officials before 1973 may not always have succeeded in walking the thin line between monitoring indigenous coup plotting and actually stimulating this operation to some extent. The transcript of a call between Kissinger and Nixon reveals that they didn’t have a hand in the final coup, although they take credit for creating the conditions that led to the coup. Kissinger stated that “they created the conditions as great as possible.” Nixon and Kissinger also discussed how they would play this event with the media and lamented the fact that, if this were the era of Eisenhower, then they would be seen as heroes. It has also been argued that the role of the CIA was crucial to the consolidation of power that followed the 1973 Chilean coup and that the CIA helped fabricate a conspiracy against the Allende government, which Pinochet was then portrayed as preventing.32

Arms Control Negotiations and SALT Kissinger had been deeply concerned with the issues related to nuclear weapons since his days at Harvard and publication of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. His interest continued with a series of articles in Foreign Affairs.33 A decade later he was now in the White House and charged with developing actual policies that would control the proliferation of these weapons and bring some stability to a full-blown arms race the Nixon administration had inherited. Arms control was different from other foreign policy and national security areas facing Kissinger and Nixon. Kissinger later admitted to several major errors. Nixon had virtually no interest in the subject at all, and his eyes glazed over when the subject came up. It was also an area not amenable to total secrecy, as it involved ongoing negotiations with the Soviets in a formal setting and dealt with several highly technical subjects that required help and advice from experts. Kissinger had been criticized at Harvard for a lack of serious technical understanding and now at the NSC he called in a group of outside experts including Paul Doty (Harvard), Marvin Goldberger (Princeton), Sidney

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 87

Drell (Stanford) and others for regular meetings, although one commented: “It was a case of Henry cultivating his academic friends, wanting to be loved.” He also drew on internal experts, largely from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), for monthly meetings on the issues.34 The first of the major debates within the government was not over the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) but on the number of nuclear warheads on each missile, referred to as MIRV’s—shorthand for Multiple Independently-Targetable Reentry Vehicles. Putting MIRVs on a mission was a low-cost way to achieve firepower without building more missiles and it became a major factor in the arms race. That the Nixon administration failed to halt MIRVs before they were deployed when they likely could have gotten Soviet agreement to do so remains a critical failure of the time. Soviet deployment of MIRVs made the U.S. far more vulnerable to Soviet attack and greatly decreased stability, undermining the strategic balance that had existed.35 Kissinger understood the arguments on MIRVs and their destabilizing nature, and was not happy with the concept, although he found that since the technology had been tested it would be politically very difficult to include an outright MIRV ban in the arms control package.36 Acting on advice from both Kissinger and the Pentagon, Nixon approved the U.S. MIRV program in May 1969. What Kissinger most wanted to accomplish was a negotiated limit with the Soviets on another key technology, the antiballistic missile (ABM) system which employed a ground-based interceptor designed to shoot down incoming enemy missiles. The Pentagon had already taken a strong stand on MIRVs and was not about to put up much of a fight on two systems at the same time. Thus negotiations with the Soviets on the ABM issue became the central focus of arms control negotiations.37 Even Kissinger’s own staff felt that negotiating arms control where both sides had unconstrained MIRVs was “nutty” and provided no strategic rationale. The session of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) scheduled for April 1970 posed a requirement for a comprehensive proposal to the Soviets. Kissinger, in an approach uncharacteristic of his style, requested options from the various agencies involved. The result was a proliferation of options and Kissinger asked ACDA experts to sort them out. Although there was still time to include a serious consideration of MIRVs in the package Kissinger elected not to, and the four options on the table largely dealt with the number of ABM sites each side might have (ranging from one to twelve) and a ceiling on offensive missiles—not MIRVS. None of the options banned either ABM sites or MIRVs. When the U.S. presented its package at the SALT negotiations that April the Soviets were actually surprised that it contained no mention of

88  •  Henry Kissinger

MIRVs, and as one Soviet negotiator later told his U.S. counterpart, “We had been hoping you would make a serious MIRV proposal.”38 A serious MIRV proposal would have covered three phases of the program—testing, production and deployment. The U.S. did propose dealing with testing and deployment, although not continued production, which the Intelligence Community saw as far too hard to verify and enforce. The production loophole was unacceptable to the Soviets. The U.S. delegation thought of proposing a ban on everything, which Kissinger rejected.39 In the other key area the U.S. offered to limit ABM deployment to a single site in each nation, which the Soviets quickly accepted, and Kissinger saw this as a major error on the part of the U.S., as likely the public would not tolerate defending only Washington. He spent much of the following year trying to undo the mess he had created here in back-channel negotiations with Dobrynin, trying to clarify the language the U.S. was using about a “limited” agreement rather than a “comprehensive” one—­limited here referring only to ABM systems, and comprehensive including offensive ones as well. The Soviets were largely interested on constraints on ABM systems and were happy with the single site each protecting the respective capital cities. By mid-1971 arms control was a mess, while the Soviets were producing land and submarine-based missiles and the U.S. had no similar new programs under way, having decided to use MIRVs instead. Kissinger had missed the chance to limit offensive systems over an acceptable ABM deal. To their embarrassment Kissinger and Nixon offered the Soviets a new deal covering four ABM sites when they had already agreed on one-percountry. It was up to Kissinger to unravel the mess. Moving entirely to secret back-channel discussions with Dobrynin, Kissinger constructed a complex set of linkages that offered the Soviets the ABM solution they wanted, but in turn asked for not only an agreement on offensive systems and tied this to an agreement about Berlin, which the Soviets were also anxious to resolve. In addition to guarantees of Western access to Berlin, the Soviets were given a relationship that would be acceptable to the communist government in East Germany. Kissinger also linked this to further agreements with the Soviets on grain sales, scientific exchanges, and a promise that the Soviets would be more helpful on Vietnam. Once again Rogers, the State Department, and the arms control negotiators were totally excluded.40 Kissinger and Dobrynin had come close to a back-channel agreement relinking ABM talks to offensive systems when a leak on the Soviet side brought this into the open. While the leak outraged Kissinger, the two were able to repair the damage and come up with an acceptable agreement that both sides jointly announced on May 20 as a “breakthrough.” Here both

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 89

sides would try to agree on an ABM treaty “together with” measures limiting offensive systems.41 In effect this was an agreement to agree, but did lead to the SALT 1 accord—a major accomplishment of the Nixon administration. For the first time both sides had come to an actual agreement, even though imperfect, that now limited on unconstrained arms race and provided a workable path to future negotiations and further reductions in strategic weapons. Gerard Smith—then ACDA Director and lead arms negotiator—and others question whether it was necessary to use secret back-channel negotiations or whether the established diplomatic process could have produced the same or even a better result using the team of experts at their disposal, and as he said about the May 20 agreement: “The bulk of the American national security leadership was never consulted.”42 Some have also argued that in May 1971 Kissinger was way overextended and unable to focus all needed attention on these complex issues. Kissinger himself admitted that the decision to use a secret back-channel for the SALT and Berlin talks came at a high price in terms of damage to the democratic policy-making process. It was also disruptive of departmental morale, something Kissinger never really cared about very much. The results of the SALT I negotiations were the agreement on over ABM systems, and further discussions brought the negotiations to an end in May 1972, when in Moscow Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed both the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and interim agreement covering offensive strategic arms as well.43 This additional year of negotiations gave the sides time to also include limits on submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that had been totally ignored in earlier discussions. Kissinger later saw the failure to include limits on SLBMs as a major error, as they were soon to become the most potent force in the nuclear arsenal. For Kissinger these were accomplishments that the State Department would never been able to achieve and argued: “But it worked … the results should be judged on their merits.”44 As a result, Kissinger had become not only the nation’s top strategist, but its top diplomat as well. He had extended his reach in policy execution as well as no White House official ever had before.

Notes 1. For years U.S. policy makers wrongly believed that the Vietnam War could be attributed to expansionism by “Red China,” as the PRC was called at the time. This opening also provided an opportunity to clear up some of this thinking as the U.S. was trying to extricate itself from Vietnam and came to understand that the Chinese had little, if any, influence there. A few years later China and Vietnam managed to get into their own war, which is given little note in history now.

90  •  Henry Kissinger 2. Kissinger had been thinking this way for years and had written a speech for Rockefeller in 1968 where he stated, “I would begin a dialogue with Communist China … in a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union, we can ultimately improve our relations with each—as we test the will for peace of both.” Nixon also thought along these lines well before the 1968 election. See Richard Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs, October 1967, p. 121. See also Safire, Before the Fall, pp. 366–367. Nixon had long been fascinated with the idea of a trip to China and as a lawyer tried to accept an invitation on a trade mission, only to be refused a visa by the Johnson State Department. 3. Vernon A. Walters, Silent Missions (New York: Doubleday 1978). Walter’s official role was as Deputy Director of CIA but was ideal in his role as a back-channel and for these secret missions. He had a mastery of many languages and a unique ability to convey exactly what his principal, Kissinger or Nixon, wanted. In travels abroad, he shunned official vehicles and an entourage, most often taking a local bus and dressing either in local garb, or has he said, “looking like a bum.” Apparently, this worked for him. In years of abroad he was never kidnapped or killed. 4. Edgar Snow, “A Conversation with Mao,” Life, April 30, 1971. See also Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 688–732. 5. The ostensible purpose of the Kissinger visit was to discuss Taiwan, which was for show and a way out for the Chinese in the event that the mission failed. 6. On the subject of Taiwan, Kissinger added: “With respect to the U.S. military presence on Taiwan … the policy of the United States government is to reduce its military presence in the region of East Asia and the Pacific as tensions in this region diminish.” 7. The Chinese message only referred to a “special envoy” and not Kissinger by name. Nixon tortured Kissinger by suggesting others including David Bruce, Henry Cabot Lodge, George Bush and even Nelson Rockefeller. There remains a dispute as to whether there was any discussion of sending Rogers. Nixon finally announced, “Henry I think you will have to do it.” 8. Laird was not to be informed as well, but as he had access to the supposedly secret cable channel to Pakistan through NSA he was well aware of the operation but avoided making any fuss about it. 9. The Chinese did not quite understand Kissinger’s need for extreme secrecy and at onepoint thought Kissinger might be ashamed with going to China, although he did his best to explain it all to them and assure them that it was needed to keep conservatives at bay. 10. Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, p. 344. 11. Ibid., p. 345. 12. Kissinger took the extraordinary step of sharing with the Chinese highly classified intelligence he had brought along regarding Soviet military activities, including communications intercepts and satellite images of Soviet facilities along the Chinese border. 13. Ibid., p. 246. 14. Kissinger could have sent one of his staff to Tokyo after the Beijing meeting to brief the Japanese, which he later saw as a breach of etiquette writing: “This would have combined secrecy with a demonstration of special consideration for a good and decent friend. It was a serious error in manners.” The Japanese were not totally uninformed, as Laird had made a visit there and let them know what was happening since he had this information from the NSA as well as his “mole” Navy Yeoman Radford inside the Kissinger operation. 15. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 779. 16. Apart from cultivating the rich and powerful, Kissinger had long cultivated his relationships with key reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC and others. As a single man he had even dated some. After the July 15 Nixon announcement Kissinger embarked on a briefing frenzy which Haldeman and others were unable to stop. Quite possibly this is why Nixon wrote Kissinger a memo on July 19 listing important points he should make in any discussions with the press, stressing all the reasons why he (Nixon) was uniquely suited for this important mission.

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 91 17. Even after Kissinger and Nixon “went public” with this, state was excluded from any participation in the drafting of the U.S.–China communiqué issued at the summit. 18. Isaacs, Without Honor, pp. 27–29. After Kissinger’s visit to China, Zhou went to Hanoi to assure the North Vietnamese that China would not sell them out but he did pressure them to accept a compromise Kissinger wanted to accept a settlement that did not immediately require removal of the Thieu government. Hanoi subsequently issued press reports about how they had been betrayed by China and managed to get in their own war with China in the late 1970s. 19. Jules R. Benjamin. The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). The failed invasion was a major failure for U.S. foreign policy helped to strengthen the position of Castro’s leadership, making him a national hero. It also strengthened the relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union. This eventually led to the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. See Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision, Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999). 20. Apart from the port facilities the U-2 photos showed the construction of a soccer field, which Kissinger thought would be for Soviet seamen, as he didn’t think Cubans had much interest in soccer. He insisted on showing Nixon the photos and claimed that the Soviets were testing the “fuzzy margins” of the 1962 agreement taking a CIA analyst’s report and did a Paul Revere ride through the West Wing with it, slamming Haldeman on his way into the oval office. 21. In response to Kissinger’s requests for supporting analyses the state department reported that the Soviet actions were largely symbolic, and that Rogers could take up the matter with Gromyko later at the U.N. The Defense Department saw the Cuban base as a stopover facility giving the Soviets greater capability in the Gulf of Mexico, which was not enough to get Nixon to change his mind and the problem was deferred. 22. During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. had several programs and strategies ranging from funding political campaigns to funding propaganda aimed at impeding the presidential campaigns of leftist (Marxist) candidate Salvador Allende and successfully impeded the left-wing parties from gaining power. In the 1958 presidential election, Jorge ­A lessandri—­a nominal independent with support from the Liberal and Conservative parties—defeated Allende to become president and his laissez-faire policies, endorsed by the U.S. were regarded as the solution to Chile’s inflation problems. Unlike other South American nations, Chile had a democratic tradition dating back to the early 1930s, and it is difficult to assess how successful CIA tactics were in swaying voters. 23. In addition to clandestine aid to Frei, the U.S. promised $20 billion in public and private assistance in the country for the next decade. In direct terms, the U.S. contributed $20 million to the campaign and also sent in about 100 people with assigned tasks to prevent Allende’s victory. According to the Church Committee Report, covert U.S. involvement in Chile between 1963 and 1973 was extensive and continuous. The CIA spent $8 million between 1970 and the coup in September 1973 with over $3 million in 1972. CIA activity was present in every election in Chile between 1963 and 1973. 24. Immediately after the Allende government came into office, the U.S. sought to place pressure on his government to prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to U.S. and hemispheric interests, such as Allende’s nationalization of several U.S. corporations and the copper industry. Nixon directed that no new bilateral economic aid commitments be undertaken with the government of Chile. 25. Documents show that the Nixon administration engaged in an invisible economic blockade against Allende, intervening at the World Bank, and the Export–Import bank to curtail or terminate credits and loans to Chile before Allende had been in office for a month. 26. The Track I plan was also designed to persuade the Chilean congress, to confirm conservative runner-up Jorge Alessandri as president. Alessandri would resign shortly after, rendering former President Frei eligible to run against Allende in new elections.

92  •  Henry Kissinger 27. See Central Intelligence Agency Memorandum, Genesis of Project FUBELT, September 17, 1970 (Secret/Sensitive/Eyes Only, declassified 1995). The memorandum notes that the CIA must prepare an action plan for Kissinger within 48 hours. A special task force under the supervision of CIA deputy director of plans, was established, headed by veteran agent David Atlee Phillips. U.S. Ambassador Korry, the State Department, the Defense Department and even the 40 Committee were never told about Track II. 28. Schneider’s family later sued Kissinger for arranging Schneider’s 1970 murder because he would have opposed a military coup. CIA documents indicate that while the agency CIA had sought his kidnapping, his killing was never intended. Kissinger said he had declared the coup “hopeless” and had “turned it off” although CIA later claimed that no such “stand-down” order was ever received. See David A. Philllips, The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service (Athenium, 1977; various pages). 29. According to the report CIA Activities in Chile, September 18, 2000, during the summer of 1973, the CIA station in Chile suggested that the U.S. commit itself to support for a military coup. In response, CIA headquarters reaffirmed to the station that “there was to be no involvement with the military in any covert action initiative; there was no support for instigating a military coup.” The day before the coup, a Chilean military officer reported to a CIA officer that a coup was being planned and asked for U.S. government assistance and was told that the U.S. would not provide any assistance because this was strictly an internal Chilean matter. See Central Intelligence Agency Memorandum, Genesis of Project FUBELT, September 17, 1970 (Secret/Sensitive/Eyes Only, declassified 1995). 30. United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Actions in Chile—1963–1973 (Church Committee) (1975). See also Tim Wiener, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007). 31. The declassified documents are collected in Peter Kornbluh (ed.), Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 8. See also Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003) who argues that the U.S. was extensively involved and actively “fomented” the 1973 coup. Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (London: Verso, 2001) similarly argues the case that U.S. covert actions actively destabilized Allende’s government and set the stage for the 1973 coup. 32. Peter Winn, Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1972–2002 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Winn argues that the coup itself was possible only through a three-year covert operation by the CIA, and that the U.S. imposed an “invisible blockade” designed to disrupt the economy under Allende, contributing to the destabilization of the regime. See also Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, who similarly argues that U.S. covert actions actively destabilized Allende’s government and set the stage for the 1973 coup, and Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (New York: Lexington Books, 2009). 33. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. In a famous quote Kissinger notes: “Our generation has succeeded in the fire of the gods, and it is doomed to live with the horror of its achievement.” See John G. Stoessinger, Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), p. 21. 34. Nominally ACDA is part of the State Department, whose bureaucracy was an anathema to Kissinger, but functioned with relative independence from Rogers and his people. Those who came from ACDA were largely nuclear engineers and physicists, not career diplomats or bureaucrats, and later were key staff on the SALT negotiations. 35. There was no general agreement on the utility of MIRVs. The Joint Chiefs favored the technology as it gave them far greater firepower and targeting flexibility. Others in the arms control community such as John McCloy, Dean Rusk, and Harold Brown opposed this and particularly the testing of MIRVs. Gerard Smith, Nixon’s chief arms control negotiator, also opposed MIRV testing but did so far too late in the game.

China, Communism, and Arms Control  • 93 36. Kissinger later came to see this as a major blunder on his part, writing: “I would say in retrospect that I wish I had thought through the implications of a MIRVed world more thoughtfully in 1969 and 1970 than I did.” See Gerard Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of SALT I (New York: Doubleday, 1980). 37. There is an extensive literature on these negotiations. See, for example, Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation (Washington: Brookings, 1985), and John Newhouse, Cold Dawn (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973). Garthoff was on the SALT delegation and has often been critical of Kissinger. 38. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, p. 135. 39. Another ill-considered concept was to limit the number of missiles rather than warheads, which would have the effect of promoting the use of MIRVs for a greatly increased number of deployed warheads. In addition the U.S. was ready to produce MIRVs while the Soviets had not yet tested such a system. 40. By this time Kissinger was aware that the secure state and CIA channels were not safe, and had a super-secret channel set up through Frankfurt. He still was unaware that NSA was watching this, and informing Laird and the Joint Chiefs, and did not know that the Navy Yeoman Charles Radford on his own staff was also informing Laird. Fortunately, Laird was not much interested in Berlin, nor in informing Rogers. 41. Nixon assigned Haldeman and Mitchell to explain to Rogers why he had been lied to and came up with a bogus story that Nixon had received a sudden letter from Brezhnev with the offer. There was no such letter and Rogers never asked to see it. 42. Gerard Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of SALT I (New York, Doubleday, 1980), p. 158 43. The SALT I interim agreement froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers (ICBMS) at existing levels and provided for the addition of new submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) after the same number of older ICBM and SLBM launchers had been dismantled. The interim agreement also limited the number of SLBM-capable submarines that NATO and the U.S. could operate to fifty with a maximum of 800 SLBM launchers between them. SALT II continued these talks from 1972 to 1979 seeking to limit the manufacture of strategic nuclear weapons. A major breakthrough came at the Vladivostok Summit meeting in November 1974, when President Gerald Ford and came to an agreement on the basic framework for the SALT II agreement. Even though signed by the two sides, the SALT II treaty was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, although both sides respected the agreed upon limits. 44. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 37.

chapter

5

Secretary of State

William Rogers was not Nixon’s first choice for Secretary of State. He had already been rebuffed by Robert Murphy, a retired diplomat, and William Scranton, the former governor of Pennsylvania. Nixon and Rogers had been friends since the 1940s, but not close friends as their respective wives Pat and Adele were. When Nixon had been snubbed in New York, Rogers was one of the few who was polite to him. In picking him for State, Nixon felt he would be comfortable with him, but in reality it didn’t matter, as he and Kissinger had already planned to wrest foreign policy making from State and didn’t think Rogers would be a source of trouble as he had little experience in foreign policy.1 Their original assessments of Rogers were wrong. He refused to obey Nixon’s orders he disagreed with unless he discussed them personally with Nixon, as he believed quite correctly they had been drafted by Kissinger and his NSC staff. Nixon abhorred confrontation and immediately looked for ways to avoid Rogers, an approach that played into Kissinger’s hands, who was the only good alternative to speaking to Rogers directly. It was not expected that a deep personal animosity would rapidly evolve between Rogers and Kissinger but initial attempts at regular meetings between the two quickly failed. As Kissinger later noted “Rogers was too proud, I intellectually too arrogant, and we were both too insecure to adopt a course which would have saved us much unneeded anguish.” While Nixon enjoyed the competition between the two it was rapidly getting out of control. Kissinger’s constant derogation of Rogers to Nixon and anyone else around became a steady stream of remarks about how lazy, inept and incompetent Rogers was. Nixon told one reporter that “it’s really rather deep-seated. Henry thinks Bill isn’t very deep, and Bill thinks Henry is power crazy,” adding “they’re both right.”2

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Kissinger’s relationship with Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was far different. Laird came to the post with extensive experience in Congress and far better understanding than Rogers of both the issues as well as the politics involved.3 While Laird defended his prerogatives as Defense Secretary, he could often be as devious as Kissinger with whom he developed a reasonable personal relationship, and he had enough good connections with his friends in Congress to outflank Kissinger at times. He was one of the few in the administration capable of beating Kissinger at his own game. When Kissinger tried using the NSC Defense Program Review Committee to try and control the Pentagon budget, Laird flooded him with staff papers that confused Kissinger and his NSC staff to the point that they gave up—much to Nixon’s amusement. Obsessed about leaks, Kissinger tried to cut Laird off from information but failed in the effort.4 Unknown to Kissinger, Laird had instructed the National Security Agency (NSA) to provide him with copies of every back-channel message Kissinger sent, even though the State and Defense Departments were deliberately kept in the dark. NSA was also providing Laird copies of CIA cable traffic related to Kissinger and his goings on.5 For his various “back-channel” activities Kissinger avoided using State’s communications facilities, opting for CIA’s, and later the military cable system, although none fully served the private ends he was seeking, and Laird saw virtually all of them. Laird was also aware of Kissinger’s secret air travels, as he ordered reports from the Air Force office that ran the White House planes.6 From the outset Nixon disliked full NSC meetings which included the secretaries of State and Defense, and a need to deal personally with their objections, ordering Haldeman to reduce these meetings to monthly, if at all. This had the practical effect of elevating Kissinger’s role, as well as that of his NSC staff, and now most foreign policy matters were decided by Kissinger and Nixon alone. The other NSC members were lucky if they were even informed as their meetings became a mere formality. A major source of Kissinger’s power was control over the NSC Senior Review Group and the other key NSC committees, including the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG) that covered crises, the verification panel set up to monitor treaty compliance, the Defense Program Review Committee looking at weapons funding, the Vietnam Special Studies Group, and the 40 Committee responsible for CIA’s covert actions. This committee structure effectively decided which issues should reach the President and what options were available for his decision.7 Another key component of the Kissinger operation to bypass the State Department and other agencies was extensive use of so-called “back-­channel” communications with foreign leaders and others. Use of

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secretive and informal channels was not new, and were used by Harry Hopkins during the Franklin Roosevelt administration, but became the normal course of business for Nixon and Kissinger.8 It enabled decisions to be made without bureaucratic involvement or public scrutiny, and whether this was a good thing in American democracy has been the subject of controversy. In several cases it worked, and Kissinger has often argued that without this secretive approach accomplishments would not otherwise have been possible, such as the SALT agreement, the opening to China, the Berlin accord, the Moscow summit, and the Vietnam peace treaty. This approach also had downsides, including the fact that the Soviets often played information from one channel against the other, and the internal problems created for the NSC staff in generating fake copies of memos, and in trying to keep track of who had been told what. At some point, Kissinger was accused of crossing the line from secrecy to deceit in giving Nixon memos with one version of a position and different versions to other officials.9 Kissinger’s continued obsession with Rogers ultimately got on Nixon’s nerves and Nixon assigned Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Mitchell to find a way of dealing with the problem and “handling Henry.” The efforts of the so-called “Henry handling committee” were largely unsuccessful with Kissinger frequently telling the press and friends that he was ready to quit over the issues with Rogers. At one point he told a group that “The man is a positive danger to the peace of the free world.” By 1973 Nixon had concluded that the only way to keep Kissinger in government and to have him respect the Secretary of State was to make him the Secretary of State.10

Changes in the Nixon Administration By May 1973 the fallout of the Watergate scandal was consuming Nixon and the people around him. At the end of April Nixon’s two top aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, were forced to resign over their involvement in the Watergate cover-up.11 Nixon called on General Alexander Haig, who had recently left the White House for the Pentagon to become the Army Vice Chief of Staff to replace Haldeman as chief-of-staff. Haig was almost the only person Nixon felt could deal with the growing White House crisis over Watergate as well as with Kissinger. This was not without some drama, as Nixon said he would not make the Haig appointment without Kissinger’s approval, and Haig said he would not accept the job Nixon was offering without Kissinger’s blessing. As Watergate problems increased and became a national tragedy, Kissinger and Haig again began to work in harmony dealing with the

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myriad of problems that arose. To the surprise of many Haig even became protective of Kissinger.12 Quite a few expected Kissinger to become yet one more casualty from the rapidly dwindling Nixon administration. Although he had no role in Watergate, it was past time for Rogers to go. Nixon was not immediately inclined to elevate Kissinger to the post, despite Kissinger’s threats to resign if he did not get to be Secretary of State. Nixon’s first two choices to replace Rogers were Kenneth Rush and John Connolly, but for various political reasons Nixon did not ask them. Apart from Kissinger’s threats, Nixon felt that he could not afford to lose Kissinger as he later noted in an interview: “With the Watergate problem … I didn’t have any choices.” Nixon was also sensitive to the fact that Kissinger would not tolerate intellectual competition and the only person who wouldn’t compete with Kissinger was himself—so he got the job.13 Following a surprisingly gentle Senate hearing Kissinger was confirmed as Secretary of State by a 78 to 7 vote on September 21, 1973 and was sworn in the following day at a White House ceremony. As this was a Saturday, Kissinger’s Orthodox Jewish parents walked from their hotel to the White House to attend. Nixon’s remarks at the ceremony seemed quite bizarre to Kissinger, who later commented that Nixon seemed to “be driven by his own demons” and went into a rambling discussion that was factually incorrect and made little sense. Unlike any of his predecessors or successors, Kissinger retained his post as National Security Advisor in addition to being Secretary of State, although the responsibility for day-to-day NSC operations fell to his deputy Brent Scowcroft, an air force general known for having a balanced and broad view and the ability to keep things in perspective. This was a relationship that worked well for both. Kissinger took several of his top aides with him to State, including Helmut “Hal” Sonnenfeldt, and brought back Lawrence Eagleburger who had collapsed from exhaustion at the NSC early in 1969.14 Shortly after becoming Secretary of State, Kissinger and North Vietnamese Premier Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the Vietnam accords, even though the ceasefire was already falling apart. This award was not without controversy as several members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest and the New York Times criticized it as being “the Nobel War Prize.” Le Duc Tho rejected the prize stating that “peace has not yet been established in South Vietnam,” while Kissinger did not accept the prize in person and sent the U.S. Ambassador to Norway to the ceremony in this place. Kissinger’s real problem in moving to State was that both he and Nixon had built a foreign policy process that circumvented the State bureaucracy and all that it stood for. Kissinger’s entire mode of operation was as a lone cowboy acting in secret because his notion of the need for “revolutionary

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changes” in the process of diplomacy. True to his style, Kissinger found a way to fudge this transition as well, now talking about a “new phase” and a need to institutionalize some of the changes that had been made during Nixon’s first term, As he moved to State he made various pledges to abandon this one man show and began writing that the “theatrical and personalized policy making” that he had been practicing since he entered the White House would now change.15 After becoming Secretary of State Kissinger made some effort to change and rely more on the State bureaucracy although his personal need for control could not be avoided. It was a fundamental part of Kissinger’s personality. In October 1973, shortly after Kissinger took office, war broke out in the Middle East and Kissinger was at it once again, charging off alone to work on the problem without the bureaucracy in concert to work on an Arab–Israeli disengagement.

The October 1973 Middle East War The 1967 Arab–Israel War, often called the “Six Day War,” ended with an Israeli military victory but no peace agreement among the parties. Various efforts by the U.N. and the U.S. to put forth an acceptable peace plan in the years following this conflict were largely unsuccessful. In the first two years of the Nixon administration this area was left for Rogers while Kissinger was dealing with other critical matters.16 In early 1970 Egypt broke the cease-fire by launching a round of artillery duels with Israeli forces. Rogers pursued a peace plan while the Egyptians escalated a war of attrition against Israeli forces at the Suez Canal with the assistance of three brigades of Soviet troops in an attempt to inflict maximum casualties on Israeli forces. In June 1970 a second Rogers cease-fire plan was accepted by Egypt and Israel. Violations of this agreement by Egypt and a failure to achieve anything approaching a peace agreement made another major war inevitable.17 Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser attempted to negotiate with the U.S. and reduce his country’s reliance on the Soviets, while his successor Anwar Sadat in a surprise move, expelled Soviet advisers from Egypt in July 1972 and again signaled to Washington his willingness to negotiate. Nixon authorized Kissinger to set up a back-channel to the Egyptians, again secret from the State Department. This arrangement was set up with Sadat’s National Security Advisor Hafiz Ismail, but was short-lived and ended in failure, in part due to an inability of the Egyptians to keep a secret, and because they had already agreed with the Syrians to launch a pre-emptive war against Israel.18 On October 6, 1973 Kissinger, who was in New York, was awoken early and told of the surprise attack on Israel by Egypt and Syria, often referred

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to as the Yom Kippur War, coming on the Jewish High Holy Day of Yom Kippur. Although the war was initially seen as a major intelligence failure by Israel, it was the case that the Israeli intelligence services had good information prior to the attack while Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and her government failed to act.19 Meir’s excuse for not pre-empting the Arab attack when she had good intelligence was that she did not want to be seen by Nixon and the U.S. as having launched another war on the Arab states, but never contacted Kissinger or Nixon prior to the outbreak of hostilities. These failings led to high Israeli casualty levels and losses during the first days of the war and what some describe as a state of panic within Israel’s political and military leadership that were pressed on Washington. Kissinger quickly returned to Washington and convened a meeting of the NSC crisis committee, the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG), to deal with Israel’s emergency request for military supplies. Issues surrounding resupply to Israel during this war were to dominate discussions for the first week of the war. Experts advised that there was “no real shortage” and post-war studies confirmed this. Repeated requests from Israel were largely based on early use rates, and actual supplies of most items were far from exhausted. The Pentagon was strongly opposed to the initial Israeli requests as the new Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger argued against any immediate shipments, fearing that it would compromise the U.S. position as an “honest broker” in trying to end hostilities. Nixon was not very involved with the war and was largely preoccupied with the mounting problems of the Watergate affair, the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew for accepting bribes when he had been Governor of Maryland and into his vice presidency, as well as the resignations of Attorney General Elliott Richardson, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, and the firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox and others in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Certainly, this gave Kissinger freedom of action in dealing with the war.20 In his tenure as Vice President Agnew had little do to with foreign policy, or much of anything else. Historians have debated the nature Kissinger’s role in the war, and the feud between Kissinger and Schlesinger over policy and issues related to the Israeli resupply effort.21 Often blamed as well was William Clements, Deputy Defense Secretary, who was a Texas oil man with strong pro-Arab sentiments and seen widely as anti-Israel.22 One version of the saga blames Kissinger for holding back on the arms resupply to Israel to create a better climate for diplomacy, blaming the Pentagon when talking to Jewish leaders and the press, and later taking credit for the delays when speaking with the Soviets and the Arabs. Kissinger initially assumed that the Israelis would win quickly and thought that the appearance of major U.S. support could hamper a subsequent settlement

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and told Schlesinger that it would be OK if Israeli “came out a little ahead” but wanted the U.S. to “stay clean.” As Kissinger noted, “the strategy was to prevent Israel from humiliating Egypt again” with a hope that this might lead to an opening with Egypt, preserve détente with the Soviets, and a negotiated settlement with Israel. Kissinger’s hope was that after a few days Israel would push Egypt and Syria back to the 1967 lines, and possibly further, where he could propose a ceasefire at the original lines that would not reward the Arab states for initiating the war.23 In terms of resupply Kissinger and Schlesinger agreed early on to provide Israel with Sidewinder missiles and ammunition, which were to be picked up secretly in Virginia by unmarked Israeli (El Al) planes in keeping with Kissinger’s desire to maintain as low a profile as possible. The U.S. military had not been told of the program and refused to permit the Israeli planes to land. This caused a significant problem for Kissinger, who got an explosive call from Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz.24 The transport problem was not resolved for several days until Nixon forced a plan for the use of U.S. military aircraft on Schlesinger and the Pentagon. Things did not go as Kissinger had hoped and by the fourth day of the war Israel was in trouble. The Israeli cabinet decided to put their ­Jericho missiles, armed with nuclear weapons on alert and Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered Dinitz to call Kissinger immediately and advise him that “­Israel was being defeated.” Dinitz woke Kissinger in the middle of the night as ordered but did not make the Israeli use of nuclear weapons explicit—­a lthough it was clear from the discussion.25 Dinitz also proposed that Meir make a secret trip to Washington to plead with Nixon for more weapons, which Kissinger rejected. Kissinger presided over a WSAG meeting later that day which considered a range of resupply options considering the situation Dinitz described. Much of the argument was over Israel’s survival and defending its right to control territories taken during the 1967 War. Later Kissinger conferred alone with Nixon who approved a “low key” resupply effort including fighter jets as well as ammunition, and a pledge to replace all of Israel’s losses after the war. There was still no approval for an American airlift, and Israel would need to pick up the supplies in keeping with Kissinger’s desire for a low-key approach and avoid too much of a pro-Israeli tilt in the media. Schlesinger did not object to the resupply this time but had serious issues with the refusal to use U.S. military aircraft for the mission. In hindsight this was a major error on Kissinger’s part as the Israelis had only seven transport planes, and a solution that involved hiring commercial transports ran into problems which were insurmountable. To make matters worse the five new

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F-4 Phantom fighters Nixon had promised Israel were not yet delivered, causing an outraged Nixon to tell Kissinger “It should have been done” and “Do it now.” Kissinger blamed the Pentagon for this delay, telling Nixon: “I thought it was done, and every day they find another excuse not to do it.”26 The optics of the situation improved somewhat when the Soviets began their own modest resupply effort for Syria on October 10, but the critical problem of transport was not solved, and it was necessary to abandon Kissinger’s concept of a commercial option despite his order to the Pentagon to charter twenty planes—none of the charter companies would take the job, which they saw as too dangerous. Dinitz came to see Kissinger at the White House with a claim that Israel’s situation was dire, and that they would be out of ammunition within three days. Schlesinger now concluded that if the U.S. was going to resupply Israel there was no choice and that U.S. military aircraft needed to be used—immediately.27 Acting on a late-night call from Kissinger, Schlesinger went to the Pentagon at 3:00 am to review options and found that they could get three C-5A transports—the largest the U.S. owned—off to Israel along with ­fourteen new F-4 Phantoms. At dawn Nixon ordered him to “do it now” and Kissinger did not object. Over the next 32 days operation NICKEL GRASS, the strategic airlift operation to Israel, brought 22,325 tons of tanks, artillery, ammunition, and supplies to Israel.28 Nixon noted at the time that there was no reason to hold back on the airlift once it had begun—­“It’s got to be the works … we are going to get blamed just as much for three planes as one hundred.”29 From the outset Kissinger had sought to link U.S. actions with those of the Soviets and using the established back-channel to Dobrynin wanted to trade off some of the Israeli demands with Soviet desires for most-­ favored-nation (MFN) status on trade. He asked the Soviets to show “some restraint” on the war and got back as message from Soviet Premier Brezhnev stating, “We feel we should act in cooperation with you.”30 In return Kissinger asked Jewish leaders to withdraw their support for a Senate bill limiting trade with the Soviets—which they reluctantly did. When the U.S. airlift to Israel finally began, the Soviets saw this not as a provocation but as a response to the limited one they had initiated with Syria. This was a useful, although unintended, consequence of the delay in arranging the transport. Further, another message arrived from Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev inviting Kissinger to Moscow “in an urgent manner” to help negotiate an immediate cease-fire. This fit nicely into Kissinger’s strategy as it would give the Israelis two or three more days to make more gains while Kissinger rode off on another secret journey the way he had done with Vietnam and China. This time he flew to Moscow with Dobrynin in tow.

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Negotiating the ceasefire became a juggling act for Kissinger on multiple fronts. He was avoiding Nixon’s idea that a joint U.S.–Soviet comprehensive peace plan should be imposed on Israel and the Arabs, preferring step-by-step negotiations between the Israelis and the Arabs with the U.S. in between. The Soviets were happy with a simple cease-fire resolution “between the parties concerned” and asked Kissinger for suggestions on the technical details. Acting as he had with South Vietnam, he was negotiating without consulting Israel, later blaming this on communications problems and their failure to keep him informed about the military situation. These negotiations resulted in U.N. Resolution 338, which Kissinger proudly presented to Golda Meir as a ceasefire that did not require any Israeli withdrawals and did call for direct Arab–Israeli negotiations. Using the excuse that this needed consent of the Israelis, Kissinger stalled the actual U.N. vote for a few more days giving the Israelis more time for progress in the war. By this time the tide had turned markedly in Israel’s favor, creating an impediment that Kissinger had not expected. Israel was on the verge of surrounding the Egyptian Third Army in the Sinai as a cease-fire was about to take effect and while Kissinger had stalled for Israeli progress he did not want an Arab debacle that would impede his diplomatic efforts.31 While Kissinger thought that there could be some “slippage” in the ceasefire taking effect, he was thinking in terms of hours—not days. In effect Israel violated the cease-fire to Kissinger’s chagrin, as he received an angry response from the Soviets and the Egyptians with a note directly from Brezhnev. At the same time Meir became furious with Kissinger, accusing him of colluding with the Soviets and the Egyptians against Israel. For Kissinger the situation also posed a serious problem for détente. The operational problem now became one of restoring the cease-fire and supplying the Third Army now cut off in the Sinai without the introduction of Soviet forces into the fray. Egypt had asked for Soviet and U.S. peacekeeping troops but withdrew this request in favor of a U.N. force that did not include any troops from Security Council members. Brezhnev supported this along with a request that they be called “nonmilitary observers.” Kissinger saw that détente had been preserved. Kissinger was still faced with the increasingly critical problem of Egypt’s Third Army and Israel’s continued refusal to allow convoys of food, water and medical supplies to resupply the Egyptians.32 The solution came from an Egyptian suggestion that not only broke the impasse but provided a path to peace as an unintended consequence. Sadat offered to engage in direct Egyptian-Israeli talks at the military level to resolve the problem of access to the Third Army on the Cairo–Suez road, looking for a single convoy to keep his men alive. Israel accepted the offer and the first negotiations

104  •  Henry Kissinger

took place in the Sinai at the now-famed Kilometer 101 between Egyptian General Abdel Gamasy and Israeli General Ahron Yariv, the first direct Egyptian–Israeli talks since Israel’s independence in 1948. Negotiations had now replaced armed conflict in the Arab–Israeli dispute.33 For Kissinger this was a diplomatic success, in that his strategy resulted in a military situation that required further and intricate negotiations. The Soviets had lost influence in the region although Dobrynin and Brezhnev had been key to the solution. They did not complain because détente had been preserved. Kissinger had managed to maintain good relations with the Soviets while reducing their influence in the Middle East at the same time. Even though Egypt and Syria had lost militarily, they avoided total humiliation as in 1967 and gained some political leverage. The Arabs were now able to look forward to negotiations that might lead to recovery of at least some territory lost to Israel in 1967.34 Kissinger looked forward to a December 1973 conference in Geneva to address settlement issues, moving from the October 22 ceasefire line to a disengagement agreement that would pull Israeli forces back from the Suez Canal and talks “under Soviet and American auspices,” which kept Moscow engaged and involved direct political-level talks between Israel and the Arabs. Most important for Kissinger was that he saw this as beginning the “step-by-step” process he wanted and not an effort at an immediate, comprehensive solution which could not be achieved. Major issues such as the Palestinian problem, Israel’s final borders, and the status of Jerusalem would be deferred in favor of specific bi-lateral accords that were possible. To get these plans under way Kissinger undertook his first trip to Egypt and Syria to get their agreement. In Egypt he found Sadat willing to go for a full disengagement and looked for restoration of diplomatic relations with the U.S., paving the way for Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy that was to come, and began the step-by-step process that led to Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem four years later. Again, Kissinger had failed to consult with the Israelis or even go there personally, sending aides Joe Sisco and Hal Saunders in his place, where they were forced to negotiate a private memorandum to meet Israeli concerns. Unexpectedly the military talks at Kilometer 101 were going better than anyone could have imagined and outpaced the diplomatic talks. Kissinger, as always driven by his ego, faced the problem of the generals coming to a serious agreement on disengagement, but he would not get credit for this success. Once the generals solved the matter of the roads for access to the Egyptian Third Army, they turned their efforts to a full-scale separation of forces agreement and were doing this without American involvement. The generals were moving toward exactly the type of agreement that Kissinger wanted to negotiate himself, and that threatened his personal

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vanity and ego in the process. Their efforts also threatened to pre-empt what Kissinger hoped to achieve in Geneva, before the planned opening of the conference. Kissinger asked both Sadat and Meir to rein in their respective generals at the Kilometer 101 talks, so that he could control the critical negotiations himself.35 Despite an otherwise productive trip to Damascus, he was unable to secure Syrian participation in the Geneva conference. Kissinger ultimately came to see the Syrian refusal to attend as a blessing in disguise and noted that “we were better off without Syria.” There were no great accomplishments at the Geneva conference, but it was significant for the fact that it initiated the process of face-to-face peace negotiations between Israel and the Arab states.36 It also marked a point at which the U.S. became recognized as the paramount force in the Middle East, where Kissinger was the key to progress.

Shuttle Diplomacy A major hallmark of the Kissinger style of diplomacy was his repeated use of what became known as “shuttle diplomacy,” where he would engage in negotiations almost single-handedly by flying back and forth between contesting nations with only a few trusted staff along. In January 1974, a month after the Geneva Conference, the Israelis gave Kissinger a proposal for a disengagement plan along with the suggestion that he personally fly to Egypt and present it to Sadat.37 At their meeting Sadat suggested that Kissinger fly directly to Jerusalem to follow up, hoping for a quick agreement, leading to a military disengagement in the Sinai with an Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal, marking the first time since 1956 that Israel had withdrawn from captured Arab territory. Surprisingly Sadat’s reaction to the Israeli proposal, known as the Dayan Plan, was quite positive and limited the changes he wanted to the location of the front line, and the number of battalions of troops each side would be permitted. In Israel Kissinger was told by Yigal Allon that the Israeli leadership couldn’t decide among themselves the number of battalions to ask for and essentially left it to Kissinger to get the best deal he could. In the end both Sadat and Allon came to believe that Kissinger was working on behalf of their respective sides.38 The actual accord was signed by the military chiefs of Egypt and Israel at Kilometer 101. Further both sides provided side letters to the U.S. and received back assurances from the U.S. that supported their agreement.39 Beginning with this Egyptian–Israeli shuttle, it grew over the next two years into eleven trips to the Middle East for Kissinger and four major rounds of negotiation. The May 1974 disengagement with Syria proved to

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be a far more demanding task for Kissinger who went to Jerusalem 16 times and Damascus 15 times over a 34-day marathon negotiation, on 41 flights logging 24,230 air miles. Syria’s President Hafez Assad was not the visionary that Sadat was and had no immediate interest in peace with Israel. In addition, he had no army cut off from supplies by the Israelis, so he was not desperate for peace, but he had not captured any new territory in the 1973 October War. In fact, Israel occupied about 190 square miles of Syria and had troops ­ ssad wanted to negotiate something he within sixty miles of Damascus. A had been unable to obtain in battle. Kissinger’s view was that to enable progress Israeli would need to return all land captured in the 1973 October War, and some symbolic token of land captured during the 1967 Six Day War as well in the Golan Heights. The Sinai was in Israeli hands before and after the 1973 conflict and although Israel had crossed the Suez Canal during the war in an operation led by General Ariel “Arik” Sharon that cut of the Egyptian Third Army, they had no interest in remaining in Egypt “proper” and the Israeli cabinet discussed how quickly they would withdraw from this situation that they saw as untenable—both militarily and politically. At the outset both sides were nowhere near a compromise.40 Israel felt that because Syria had started the war and lost territory it should not be rewarded with a settlement that brought the line even closer to Israel than before the war, and Kissinger found it difficult to convince them otherwise at the start. Unlike the Sinai, the Golan Heights were highly significant to Israel in terms of the casualties incurred there and the proximity to Israeli farms below that had been subjected to Syrian shelling for years. The key to breaking the impasse with Syria was provided by Egypt’s Sadat, who suggested to Kissinger that he focus on the deserted border town of Quneitra that might be returned to Syrian control and told Kissinger that if this could be included: “I can sell it to the whole Arab world and save face for Hafiz Assad.”41 In Israel, Meir and Dayan privately agreed this could be done safely and offered a plan for dividing Quneitra that made little sense. For the next several weeks Kissinger’s shuttle between Jerusalem and Damascus largely focused on how Quneitra could be dealt with and the step-by-step process degenerated into street-by-street haggling. Even Kissinger became frustrated with this, feeling it was demeaning for the Secretary of State.42 As these negotiations dragged on, at one point there was a shouting match between Kissinger and Dayan over a map over where a military line might be as opposed to a sovereignty line, Israel was able to come to an agreement over the specifics surrounding Quneitra and the surrounding areas both sides could live with—and they did for more than forty years following. Looking back at the step-by-step process and the shuttle diplomacy Kissinger used it is important to note that he preferred this method.

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He believed a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement was impossible at the time. It was critical to deal with immediate issues such as captured land and disengagement of forces without including such issues as the future of the Palestinians. He personalized diplomacy, capitalizing on his own good will and personal relationships with others.43 Kissinger’s critics often claim that these dealings were also marked with duplicity and deceit, using trickery and shadings of the truth to achieve his ends. He was never on a campaign to upgrade the morality of foreign policy. He would argue that there is a fine line between diplomacy and duplicity—and one that he did not mind crossing when it served a greater good. In keeping with his brilliance and sense of humor he avoided outright duplicity and double-dealing, shading his words carefully so as not to contradict himself explicitly.44 As was his style Kissinger, could often withhold information and kept things secret but tried to avoid outright lying most of the time. On balance Kissinger most often came across as charming and was widely known to shade the truth to suit his audience at the time, although for him it was more than simply a negotiating tactic and again his critics see this as a fundamental character flaw. In any event, it worked, and agreements were reached that would not have been achieved otherwise, or possibly with another person at the helm. Certainly, Egypt had once again been crushed by Israel in battle and Sadat was looking for peace, which may have been possible with someone other than Kissinger in the middle, but his actions brought about a process between the warring parties that had never been achieved before. One downside to the shuttle diplomacy was that Kissinger took the State Department with him on the plane, insisting on making all major decisions himself. The Washington Post referred to this as “the biggest permanent floating foreign policy establishment in history.” The problem was compounded both by the fact that he still retained his post as National Security Advisor and needed to manage the NSC machinery, as well as the fact that Kissinger was a bad manager who was not able to delegate well. He was unclear in issuing orders, unable to keep a schedule, and retained his volatile temper and contempt for the bureaucracy he now headed.45

Reassessment of U.S. Middle East Policy—March 1975 The historic Egyptian and Syrian agreements of 1974 left out Jordan, which many see as a major mistake on Kissinger’s part. Jordan had lost control of the West Bank area to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War and had not participated in the 1973 October War, so he saw no need to immediately negotiate any newly captured territory or deal with Israel’s religious and historic claims to Jerusalem and these areas also known as Judea and Samaria.

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The prospect of a Jordanian shuttle was also foreclosed by Yitzhak Rabin, who had replaced Meir as Israel’s Prime Minister and his refusal to discuss Jordan, and an Arab summit in Morocco where the PLO showed up to negotiate on behalf of the West Bank rather than Jordan.46 Kissinger also saw a pressing need for a second Sinai agreement that would further the peace process, pulling Israeli forces further back from the Egyptian front in return for guarantees of improved relations with Cairo. He planned on a new shuttle for March 1975 based on Rabin’s assurance that Israel would pull back another ten to fifteeen kilometers in the Sinai, behind the Mitla and Gidi passes—two key mountain gaps that would amount to withdrawal from about one-third of the Sinai. The proposed agreement hung up on an Israeli demand for a warning station in the middle of the passes. After two weeks of an unsuccessful shuttle the talks broke down and to their chagrin the Israelis received a cable from President Ford, who had replaced Nixon in August 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, in a telling of his dismay in the breakdown, and that it would cause the U.S. to “reassess” U.S. Middle East policy overall “including our policy towards Israel.”47 Ford’s ultimatum was seen by a shell-shocked Israeli cabinet. Rabin met with Kissinger at the Jerusalem’s King David Hotel where he was treated to one of Kissinger’s temper tantrums, and later gave the entire cabinet one of his “Doomsday speeches” telling them that they have ended step-by-step diplomacy, both for Jordan and now for Egypt. He further stated that the U.S. would be losing control, and that the Soviets would now return to the stage and that they would soon be dealing with the Palestinians. Kissinger dismissed a suggestion from Israeli Foreign Minister Yigal Allon that the shuttle be restarted in a few weeks and that the Israelis were damaging the entire peace process over an item that would look trivial in a few years. “An agreement would have enabled the U.S. to remain in control of the process. Compared to that, the location of a line eight kilometers one way or another frankly does not seem very important.”48 Kissinger took this rejection by the Israelis very personally and for weeks was raging about Rabin’s cabinet as lunatics and formalized Ford’s “reassessment” by ordering a National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM-207) on America’s Middle East Policy. While Kissinger stated that this reassessment of policy was not directed at Israel, the opposite was the case. He did note that this presented a major problem stating at a press conference: “With the end of the step-by-step approach, the U.S. faces a period of more complicated diplomacy … and consequently, a reassessment of policy is necessary.”49 Despite criticism that the “reassessment” was largely an exercise for show, to push the Israelis, Kissinger took it seriously and had a series of

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external and internal study groups look at three options. First was to reconvene the Geneva conference accompanied with a U.S. statement that it considered the solution to be Israel’s return to the 1967 borders, with minor modifications for their security—a position for which there was little support in Israel. The second involved complete Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai and negotiating a separate peace with Egypt.50 A third option was a return to the step-by-step shuttle diplomacy, which Kissinger preferred. Kissinger had little interest in reconvening the Geneva conference and letting the Soviets back into the process while Israeli’s strong opposition to any return to the 1967 borders made this option intractable. Despite the wise words from colleagues he had assembled to consider the options he saw no real choice other than to return to his shuttle diplomacy. The Israelis also served to complicate the reassessment process with a concurrent request for weapons that far outstripped Nixon’s earlier assurance that the U.S. would replace any Israeli losses from the October 1973 War. What Israel presented in 1974 was not only an “urgent” list of military requirements, but a far more extensive list termed Matmon B, that would meet Israel’s future military requirements for the next ten years as they saw them.51 The study of this request Kissinger and Ford ordered (NSSM-207) as well as a supporting review by the Pentagon saw this as an excessive “wish list” which was not only costly in the procurement phase but posed exceedingly high operational and maintenance costs for the future which the U.S. would be asked to fund.52 President Ford ultimately approved some $2 billion in Israeli military aid funding a large portion of the Israeli request. The Israeli lobby led by the American–Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) became deeply involved in the reassessment process ­waging a non-stop campaign against Kissinger and the Pentagon. This effort included a letter to Ford signed by 76 senators supporting Israel and demanding that “the U.S. acting in its own national interest stands firmly with Israel,” which enraged both Kissinger and Ford who later wrote: “The Israeli lobby, made up of patriotic Americans, is strong, vocal and wealthy, but many of its members have a single focus.” It took a year before Kissinger resumed the shuttle in August 1975, and when he returned to Jerusalem he was received with considerable public hostility with mobs outside his hotel chanting “Jew boy! Jew boy! Jew boy go home.” They knew it would drive Kissinger mad and they were correct. What saved the negotiations this time was actually an agreement worked out before the shuttle began to have U.S. personnel man the warning stations in the middle of the Mitla and Gidi passes in the Sinai, which enabled an Israeli withdrawal to the East. Even so this small modification required twelve days of further shuttle diplomacy to tie up the Sinai II agreement.

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Of far greater long term importance was an understanding attached to the agreement whereby the U.S. pledged $2.6 billion in future military aid to Israel, including some advanced equipment and new F-16 fighter ­aircraft—a huge payoff to Israel.53 Despite Kissinger’s great frustration at the time and the extraordinary efforts needed to achieve this agreement the progress achieved led to subsequent Israeli withdrawal from all of Sinai and ultimately a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel as well as sustained U.S. military support to Israel at levels previously never imagined, and peace that has endured for over 40 years.

The Fall of Vietnam and Cambodia – 1975 The Paris peace agreement Kissinger had so painstakingly achieved in January 1973 for Vietnam began to unravel almost as soon as it was signed as Hanoi violated the accord with a major infiltration of troops and supplies into the South. The Thieu government in South Vietnam blocked the establishment of the “National Council” Kissinger had insisted on as the compromise to a future coalition government and the U.S. that in 1975 was now under President Ford had no interest in restarting the war. The final communist offensive began in January 1975 in light of what Hanoi saw as opportune political and military timing. By April both North Vietnamese regular forces and their Viet Cong allies were closing in on Saigon and the U.S. realized that the situation for Thieu was largely hopeless.54 Nevertheless Kissinger and Ford sent General Frederick Weyand, Army Chief of staff, to Vietnam for his assessment, and he returned with a recommendation that the U.S. resume bombing of North Vietnam (now prohibited by law) as well as $722 million in immediate aid to South Vietnam. Even so, Weyand did not claim that this could save the South Vietnamese army from collapse and appealed to Kissinger’s line that this would only serve to support U.S. credibility around the world and simply prolong the war. 55 Defense Secretary Schlesinger, who was not popular with either Kissinger or Ford, and was later fired by Ford, had been excluded from the White House discussions but nevertheless opposed resumption of the bombing as well as the proposed aid package seeing the South Vietnamese army in a hopeless situation. While Kissinger and Ford also saw this situation the same way, they initially went forward with the $722 million aid request to Congress as an “honorable course” and used the credibility argument once again. Kissinger put it like this: “We are facing a great tragedy … in which there is involved something of American credibility, something of American honor, something of how we are perceived by other people in the world.”56

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By the time the aid request went forward to Congress Ford had already toned-down Kissinger’s credibility language, and the request largely fell on deaf ears from both sides of the aisle. Congress and the American public were not interested in supporting further fighting in Vietnam.57 In a speech at Tulane University, Ford categorically stated that as far as the U.S, was concerned the Vietnam War was over.58 Although Ford seldom disagreed with Kissinger on foreign policy, he avoided letting Kissinger see the final draft of this speech knowing that he would not agree with the blunt language. As might be expected Kissinger was fuming when he saw Ford the following day and even Ford had difficulty in calming him down. Ford later wrote: “The line about the war being finished—Henry didn’t like that sentence … I knew he wanted to keep fighting for more aid and that he blamed Congress.” Ford had only been president for a short time but had spent twenty-­five years in Congress and understood how things worked there where Kissinger didn’t. Ford recalled: “That’s where Henry and I disagreed. And I was right. I understood the system better.”59 The aid package got nowhere. In a last-ditch diplomatic effort Kissinger sent Ambassador Graham Martin to see Thieu to suggest that he step down, which could be used as a bargaining chip with the Soviets and might assist in saving some American lives. Thieu did resign and in doing so condemned the U.S. for abandoning his government in “an inhumane act by an inhumane ally.” Thieu’s resignation did not stop the communist advance and on April 29 Ambassador Martin was given the order to execute operation FREQUENT WIND, which would get the U.S. personnel and their dependents out of Saigon. It was an ugly scene with helicopters shuttling people from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and other locations while Vietnamese who had been loyal to the U.S. tried to climb aboard. Some Vietnamese refugees were evacuated by C-130 aircraft from Tan San Nhut airbase amid rocket fire from the Vet Cong. It was a scene of pandemonium that was a final, lasting wound of the Vietnam War and a decade long debacle for America. One observer exclaimed: “The good news is the war is over … the bad news is that we lost.” Kissinger later wrote that “For the first time in the postwar period … America abandoned to eventual communist rule a friendly people who had relied on us.” For many Americans this was a war they never understood or saw as futile. The U.S. suffered 58,022 deaths and the January 1973 Paris peace agreement was seen as little more than a disguise to cover the American pullout. Neither the peace nor the honor Kissinger claimed that year was long lasting. The extent to which the Vietnam debacle damaged U.S. credibility in the long-term remains a matter of debate among historians. Certainly, keeping commitments and resisting adversaries is an important factor, but questions will always remain as to how long, and at what cost in the face of forces that are too difficult to

112  •  Henry Kissinger

resist over time. Later in life Kissinger reflected that “we probably made a mistake” in Vietnam and “we perhaps might have perceived the war more in Vietnamese terms rather than as the outward thrust of a global conspiracy.”60 Kissinger never bought into the theory that the Soviet Union, China and the communists in Vietnam and elsewhere in Indochina were engaged in a conspiracy. Unlike the national security team that preceded him he was not a believer in the domino theory holding that the fall of South Vietnam to the communists would lead to communist regimes in the other nations of Indochina. While Cambodia and Laos had their own communist factions, they were often at odds, and later at war, with a unified Vietnam. Unlike Vietnam, the January 1973 Paris peace agreement did nothing for Cambodia where there was no ceasefire or fictional peace accord, and where the communist Khmer Rouge continued their assault on the Lon Nol government. In the spring of 1973 Kissinger argued for increased B-52 bombing of the Vietnamese infiltration routes in Cambodia as a way of enforcing the ceasefire in Vietnam, which had little support from U.S. military commanders who saw this as largely useless. They had already dropped 250,000 tons of bombs in the previous six months while no regions were recaptured by Cambodian government forces. Starting in August 1973 Congress banned all airstrikes anywhere in Indochina, so this option was out. Communist forces in both Vietnam and Cambodia were building toward a major offensive in each nation and most U.S. officials, including Kissinger thought they were working in concert. They were not, and there were deep rifts between the two as the Khmer Rouge accused the North Vietnamese of selling out to the U.S. while border clashes between Cambodia and Vietnam later led to a full-scale war in 1978.61 Kissinger correctly assumed that there were tensions between the North Vietnamese communists and Chinese and hoped to capitalize on this. He also assumed, incorrectly, that the Chinese would want to stop a Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia which might represent a victory for Hanoi and their Soviet supporters. Kissinger briefly floated a plan to the Chinese for a coalition government in Cambodia led by the ousted Prince Sihanouk. The Chinese had little interest in the plan, because they knew that the Khmer Rouge communists and the North Vietnamese were rivals and had no real influence over either. Indeed, in 1979 the Chinese and the North Vietnamese managed to get into a separate war with each other.62 The final Khmer Rouge offensive in Cambodia began on New Year’s Day 1975 as refugees began to flood into the capital Phnom Penh. A few in the U.S. military expressed some optimism although this was not widely shared.63 On the ground the Cambodian army was doing little more than squandering the supplies that the U.S. was providing, and in five years with $5 billion in U.S. military aid had accomplished nothing and were losing badly to the ill-equipped Khmer Rouge rebel force.

Secretary of State  • 113

As he had with Vietnam, President Ford asked Congress for $222 million in additional military aid for Cambodia “to facilitate an early negotiated settlement.” This request lacked credibility since no negotiations were under way that could buy any time. There was no convincing case to be made and both parties in Congress rejected the request, seeing it as an attempt by the administration to blame Congress for an inevitable disaster. Hawks and doves were both angered, but as one senator put it: “It saddens all responsible Americans to see Cambodia collapse … but it is just impossible to convince rank-and-file Americans that there is any end to this.”64 Congress delayed a vote on the Cambodian aid until after a recess, which by then was too late. At the same time American were watching TV coverage of the South Vietnamese army being routed in a neighboring war, and the end of the war in Cambodia became a sideshow to what was going on in Vietnam. Defense Secretary Schlesinger tried in one interview to link the survival of Cambodia to that of the South Vietnamese, or at least have their case heard on its own merit, an argument that got no reception.65 Kissinger made a last-ditch diplomatic effort by asking U.S. Ambassador George H.W. Bush in Beijing to talk to Sihanouk, now in exile there, and ask him to return to Cambodia and take over. Sihanouk understood that the Khmer Rouge would never stand for this and declined the invitation saying that he “would never betray” the rebels this way. On April 11 operation EAGLE PULL was executed to get the final group of Americans out of Cambodia. Lon Nol had already fled the country and the U.S. offered his replacement Sirik Matak the chance to escape with the U.S. Ambassador on a helicopter. Matak declined the offer and noted that “I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans” and was beheaded by the Khmer Rouge along with other government leaders a few days later.66 The conquest of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge was just the beginning of the horror that was to come. Within days they forced the total evacuation of this city of three million, as hospitals were emptied and even the limbless forced into the street. Any who hesitated were shot as they were forced to march into the countryside, which became known as the killing fields. The fanatics of the Khmer Rouge purged any last vestige of civil administration from Cambodia.

The End of Détente A hallmark of the Kissinger and Nixon approach to foreign policy was détente, which served to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union and had widespread support within the U.S. Increasing trade as well as agricultural exports were appreciated along with a positive approach to arms control in

114  •  Henry Kissinger

an era of escalating nuclear weapons. This was a balancing act of various economic, political and military factors that appeared to serve both superpowers at a time when the U.S. was recovering from the Vietnam debacle. Unfortunately for Kissinger, and Ford who succeeded Nixon after he resigned in disgrace over Watergate, a strange coalition of groups increasingly opposed détente for a number of divergent reasons. Some Democrats, along with Jewish leaders and human rights activists, attacked the 1972 trade agreements with the Soviets and wanted to link these to restrictions the Soviets had placed on the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union. A number of labor union leaders who were traditionally anticommunist also opposed increased trade with the Soviets as they saw it in terms of a loss of American jobs.67 Several senators as well as Defense Secretary Schlesinger had problems with the SALT process, which they saw as giving the Soviets an advantage in terms of heavy missiles. Still others objected to détente on moral grounds and saw it as a realpolitik concession to the Soviets at the expense of human rights values and American ideals. What coalesced was a combination of conservatives who were strongly anticommunist, along with liberals who opposed Nixon, that Kissinger saw as “a rare convergence, like an eclipse of the sun.”68 It was clearly a case where politics makes strange bedfellows. The conservatives were convinced that not only could the Soviets not be trusted, but that détente was only lulling the U.S. into complacency, and that it had failed to prevent a crisis—such as the 1973 October War. Kissinger and Nixon were called “sellouts” and that the Helsinki treaty would be similar to the 1945 Yalta Conference where the U.S. had previously sold out Eastern Europe and the Baltic states to the Soviets.69 Apart from the traditional conservatives a new group of “neoconservatives” or “neocons” emerged to join them. Many of the neocons were former liberals and other who came from the antiwar peace movement who were joined by some Jewish leaders and strong supporters of Israel who saw Israel in peril without a strong U.S. world presence.70 This group had long been suspicious of Kissinger and his efforts during the 1973 October War, when he went to Moscow sooner than the hard-liners would have wanted to arrange a cease-fire, which they saw as too accommodating to the Soviets and not as pro-Israel as they would have had it. Efforts by Kissinger in 1975 to arrange another Sinai accord and the subsequent reassessment of U.S. policy, which they blamed on Kissinger, was also seen as anti-Israel and a way to punish Israel for the initial failure of this mission made matters worse. Kissinger noted that the “assaults on détente stemmed from accusations that I was abandoning Israel.” This coalition of conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberals all came to see the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger approach to foreign policy and détente

Secretary of State  • 115

based on realpolitik and establishing a balance of power with the Soviets and seeming to abandon human rights ideals and fundamental American values. Later, President Jimmy Carter took up this human rights attack on détente, which was one key theme to his winning the presidency over the incumbent Ford in 1976. In the 1976 presidential election, Ford was also not helped by his pardon of Nixon following his resignation. Kissinger’s conception of peace was based on linkages, where Soviet concessions in one area could be tied to things that they wanted in others and a common desire to avoid confrontation in a nuclear-armed world.71 Kissinger and Nixon did not see this as extending to internal matters such as human rights, and as Nixon told China’s Chairman Mao in their 1972 meeting: “What is important is not a nation’s internal political philosophy … what is important is its policy toward the rest of the world and toward us.”72 The big problem for Kissinger, Nixon and, later, Ford, was selling détente politically as it contained the dual concepts of containment and coexistence, at a time when many in the U.S. wanted to see things in black and white—peace or war, good or evil, friend or foe. Americans were also wary of anything looking like foreign intervention after Vietnam and were ready to resist policies that appeared to look like resistance to Soviet meddling around the world, and many would have liked to change Soviet domestic policy. Clearly domestic support for détente was dwindling. Possibly the largest problem Kissinger and Ford faced in defending détente came from efforts in the Senate led by Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Washington State Democrat, and in the House by Ohio Democrat Charles Vanik linking trade with the Soviets to emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union.73 Jackson was able to unite an anti-détente coalition of conservatives, neocons, cold war liberals, labor leaders, human rights activists and the American Jewish community, and also built an alliance with other congressional leaders as well as the Jewish lobby—AIPAC in support of an October 1972 proposal that focused on the Soviet “education tax” that effectively limited Jews from emigrating to Israel. Soviet policy did not explicitly mention Jews, but was framed to limit emigration of Soviets that had received significant higher education, at state expense, which disproportionately affected Jews seeking to leave. Just as Kissinger had tried to use linkage, the so-called Jackson–Vanik amendment tied Kissinger’s goal of giving the Soviets most-favored-­nation (MFN) status to lifting restrictions on the emigration of Soviet Jews.74 This could not have come at a worse time for Kissinger who thought he had a firm deal with the Soviets linking MFN to Soviet assistance in dealing with North Vietnam. The Soviets did rescind the education tax, but ­Jackson still sought a guarantee from the Soviets in the number of exit visas granted to Jews, which Kissinger failed to see as a vital U.S. national security interest.

116  •  Henry Kissinger

While Kissinger viewed this as morally laudable, he did not want to sacrifice what he saw as true American interests in trade and economic leverage in arms control for the sake of Soviet Jewery—the entire point of détente. Despite his own background in Germany at the hands of an oppressive anti-Semitic regime, Kissinger did not think that it was “legitimate” to use diplomacy to influence the internal affairs of another nation this way.75 Of even greater importance, Kissinger felt that a breakdown of détente could lead to a need for the U.S. to spend far more on weapons and confront the Soviets around the world, returning to the worst Cold War conditions. The October 1973 Middle East War and Kissinger’s efforts to resupply Israel gave him some temporary leverage over Jackson and his associates and Nixon invited a group of them to the White House seeking their support. Kissinger also asked visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to seek the support of American Jewish leaders and their friends in Congress, hoping that they would withdraw their support for the Jackson–Vanik amendment in exchange for a better deal for Israel later on.76 Jackson and his colleagues were outraged by Kissinger’s actions, and he was finally forced back into another round of shuttle diplomacy between Washington and Moscow in 1974 to get sufficient Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration to satisfy Jackson. Jackson was looking for about 100,000 Jews being permitted to leave the Soviet Union annually, while the Soviets thought about 45,000 would be acceptable. Ford, who had taken over for Nixon in August 1974 was more sympathetic to the Jackson group than Nixon had been and became personally involved in the discussions with the Soviets. Meeting with Kissinger and Dobrynin they came to an oral agreement that 55,000 would be an acceptable number, although Jackson was still not satisfied and was looking for 60,000. Meanwhile Soviet hardliners were pressing Brezhnev for lower numbers and they informed Kissinger that Dobrynin’s prior tacit assurances were not authorized by the Kremlin. The result was an exchange of private letters with Jackson that outlined the assurances, which were unfortunately leaked to the public, causing an enormous headache for Kissinger and a nasty attack on Kissinger by Soviet Foreign Minister Andre Gromyko who stated that these letters “created a distorted picture of our position as well as what we told the American side on this matter.” Gromyko proposed in a letter to decrease the number of exit visas for Jews that Kissinger did not send back to the State Department or share with President Ford—a mistake on Kissinger’s part.77 Keeping both the President and the rest of the State Department out of the loop on the letters only served to cause confusion and embarrassment on both side. By 1975, less than three years after the Moscow summit, détente was clearly collapsing. Improved Soviet–American trade relations were not happening, and the Soviets had rejected the MFN status they had sought,

Secretary of State  • 117

thinking that the MFN status would no longer serve their interests. The Jackson–Vanik amendment was now law, and the Soviets now felt no obligation to pay off debts to the U.S. from the World War II lend-lease program, and more importantly the linkage Kissinger had sought from the Soviets for assistance in Vietnam was gone as “The collapse of the MFN deal led to a break with the Soviets and removed a restraint on Hanoi” which then attacked a provincial capital in the South for the first time. Kissinger was correct in that the Jackson–Vanik amendment backfired, as the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union fell from 35,000 in 1973 to 14,000 in 1975 and 1976—much to the detriment of both détente and Soviet Jewery—but did grow in later years.78 In addition to his fights with Kissinger over trade with the Soviets and Jewish emigration Jackson was also battling over arms control and the U.S. approach to SALT, arguing for a future agreement based on numerical “equality” rather than throw weight—the lift capacity of a missile which determined how many warheads could be carried by each missile. Jackson found an ally in his opposition to a new SALT agreement in Defense Secretary Schlesinger, who had been Kissinger’s classmate at Harvard, but who turned into his principal foe until he was fired by Ford two years later.79 The arguments over the “throw weigh issue” drove Kissinger wild and Schlesinger enjoyed doing it. As planning for the SALT II negotiations moved ahead Kissinger increasingly left the planning to technical experts from ACDA and the Pentagon, who worked out proposals based on a concept of “equal aggregates” that permitted each side to have the same number of weapons in specific categories. At one level this seems fair but didn’t reflect that the U.S. and the Soviets had different types of arsenals and each emphasized different types of weapons. The U.S. did not have a land-based missile force that matched the Soviets and was not planning to build one. Since the U.S. had already MIRVed most of its missiles, Kissinger hoped to stop the Soviets from doing the same through a complicated deal and other trade-offs, which he termed “offsetting asymmetries.” Kissinger explored several approaches with the Soviets on a trip to Moscow in October 1974 and found them amenable to either plan and left it up to Ford to decide. Brezhnev invited Ford to a summit at Vladivostok the next month to work things out. Back in Washington Kissinger and Ford retreated and accepted the “equality” approach being pushed by Schlesinger and Jackson, although Kissinger noted in retrospect that: “It was a mistake to accept equal numbers … but we accepted the Jackson amendment and the Vladivostok position because of domestic political pressure.”80 When Kissinger and Ford arrived in Vladivostok for the November 1974 summit things went surprisingly well with the two leaders getting along at a personal level and the Soviets accepting the U.S. “equality” proposal

118  •  Henry Kissinger

quickly. The basic framework called for an agreement that limited each nation to a total of 2,400 missiles and bombers, and a limit on MIRVed missiles to 1,320. The expectation was that a final treaty with additional details could be worked out within a few months. The Vladivostok framework was grudgingly accepted by Schlesinger, who had been excluded from the summit trip, and the House and Senate both passed supporting resolutions even though Jackson continued a campaign of criticism.81 More problematic, however, were technical details such as whether the 2,400 aggregate limit would apply to new U.S. cruise missiles—which were not ICBMs. The matter of cruise missiles was not covered in the framework and the issue was never resolved during the balance of the Ford administration. Another issue was the development of the Soviet “Backfire” bomber, which the Soviets insisted was not a “strategic” weapon covered by the framework, in that it was not a long-range weapon that could potentially strike the U.S. The Soviets claimed that it was a medium-range weapon designed for use in Europe and Asia. Kissinger agreed with the Soviet position on the Backfire, but was strongly opposed by the Pentagon, and as a result no progress was made in overcoming these issues. The SALT II treaty was never completed during Kissinger’s tenure in government, and as the 1976 election was getting under way Ford decided to shelve the SALT process in favor of other pressing issues, which he later regretted. As it happened, both détente and arms control fell victim to domestic politics and attacks from both the left and the right.82

Notes 1. One problem soon arose in that Rogers did not go along and looked down on Nixon and didn’t like the idea of working for him. John Ehrlichman later noted that, “Nixon was too jealous and resentful of Rogers.” This ultimately played into Kissinger’s hands. Rogers looked at things like the lawyer he was, and these were “cases” rather than having any personal grasp of international strategy, as both Kissinger and Nixon did. 2. Hersh, The Price of Power, p. 108. See also, Safire, Before the Fall, p. 406. 3. Strangely Laird had the incorrect public perception of being a “hawk” on Vietnam but fought successfully for steady troop withdrawals and unsuccessfully against most of the bombing, mining and invasion proposals Kissinger was pushing. Kissinger later wrote that: “While Laird’s maneuvers were often as Byzantine as those of Nixon … he accomplished with verve and surprising good will what Nixon performed with grim determination and inner resentment.” 4. See Herb Klein, Making It Perfectly Clear (New York: Doubleday, 1980). 5. For all his brilliance Kissinger never fully understood the various “secure” government communications systems of the time and what access was possible, or what the automatic distribution was on any cables. Years later he was astonished to find out how many copies of “eyes only” cables went officially to others, let alone what NSA and CIA were doing with his messages off-the-books.

Secretary of State  • 119 6. There was also the case of a Navy Yeoman Charles Radford serving on Kissinger’s staff who was involved in a scandal in 1971 and accused of spying for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was spying for both Secretary Laird as well as the JCS. For all their love of secrets, Kissinger and Nixon were never quite sure who knew them. 7. Nixon was pleased with this new structure and commented as to how well it worked. See Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 8. Kissinger later noted that: “Nixon increasingly moved sensitive negotiations into the White House where he could supervise them directly, get the credit personally, and avoid the bureaucratic disputes or inertia that he found so distasteful.” There was no official mechanism as a “back-channel” and this often involved use of CIA secure communications, hand-carried letters and personal emissaries such as Gen. Vernon “Dick” Walters. NSA surveillance of these systems rendered their secrecy less complete than either Nixon or Kissinger knew. 9. As one staffer explained: “They tried not to let anyone else have a full picture, even if it meant deceiving them.” Others have suggested “the Channel” was done largely to feed Kissinger’s ego and vanity, and Kissinger himself noted on this that “it is unlikely that they were not entirely absent.” Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 202, citing an interview with Lawrence Eagleburger (June 25, 1990). 10. See Safire, Before the Fall, p. 170. 11. See Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men, for the most extensive discussion of Watergate. See also Steven E. Ambrose, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). There were many others fired and replaced as well, including Attorney General John Mitchell who later went to prison for his role in Watergate and was replace by Elliott Richardson. 12. See Elmo Zumwalt, On Watch (New York: Quadrangle, 1976). 13. Haig, who had replaced Haldeman as chief-of-staff, was given the task of informing Rogers that he was being fired after Haldeman had failed in an earlier attempt, whereupon Rogers told Haig “Tell the president to go fuck himself ” and that if Nixon wanted his resignation he needed to ask personally. Nixon finally did so in August 1973 at a Camp David meeting and later issued a public statement that he was accepting Rogers’ resignation “with the greatest reluctance and regret.” 14. Years later after Kissinger entered private life both Scowcroft and Eagleburger joined him at the Kissinger Associates consulting firm. 15. Kissinger later argued that the major initiatives of the Nixon administration in the first term required this personalized type of diplomacy, with reference to China, and that the traditional ways of doing business had to be avoided. 16. See Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), and David A. Korn, “US–Soviet Negotiations of 1969 and the Rogers Plan,” The Middle East Journal, winter 1990. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yitzhak Rabin conferred with Nixon in late 1969 about Rogers’ efforts. Israel rejected the Rogers proposal on December 10, 1969, calling it “an attempt to appease [the Arabs] at the expense of Israel.” The Soviets dismissed it as “one-sided” and “pro-Israeli.” Egypt’s President Nasser rejected it because it was a separate deal with Israel even if Egypt recovered all the Sinai. 17. The Rogers agreement required for both sides not to change “the military status quo within zones extending 50 km to the east and west of the cease-fire line.” While expressly forbidden in the ceasefire agreement, Egypt immediately moved anti-aircraft batteries into the zone. By October 1970 there were about 100 Egyptian SAM sites in the zone, and Rogers made no diplomatic effort to secure their removal and was convinced there would be no violations. When asked about this, Kissinger thought this was absurd and ordered satellite reconnaissance of the Sinai to monitor any possible Egyptian violations. 18. See Mohammad Heikal, The Road to Ramadan (New York: Times Books, 1975).

120  •  Henry Kissinger 19. There is also the question as to what advance intelligence the U.S. had about the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack, and much of the relevant information is still not declassified. By some accounts NSA had good information, which was never properly briefed to Kissinger or any other senior officials. See Abraham R. Wagner, Crisis Decision-Making: Israel’s Experience in 1967 and 1973 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), and Uri Bar-Joseph, The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012). The Israeli government appointed an official commission of inquiry, known as the Agranat Commission to investigate the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the See Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (New York: Random House, 2004). 20. At the outset of the 1973 October War Kissinger got Haig to keep Nixon in Key Biscayne longer than planned so that he would be away and not involved, although Haig asked Kissinger to make sure the press was advised that Nixon was engaged and on top of it all. 21. See Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, pp. 540–478 for an account more sympathetic to Kissinger, as well as Henry A. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 1973–1977 (Boston: Little Brown, 1982). Schlesinger’s view is reflected in Edward Lutwak and Walter Laquer, “Kissinger and the Yom Kippur War,” Commentary, September 1974, Matti Golan, The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger: Step-by-Step Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Quadrangle, 1976), and William Quandt, Decade of Decisions (Berkeley: University of California, 1977). 22. Seldom reported is the fact that Schlesinger couldn’t stand Clements, wouldn’t speak to him, and had the door between their adjacent offices in the Pentagon sealed. Any role Clements might have had is likely to be overstated. Also, in the mix were comments that Kissinger was Jewish, and seen as inherently pro-Israel, while Schlesinger who had been born Jewish and converted to Christianity had become anti-Israel and possibly an anti-­ Semite as well. 23. See Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner. The Lessons of Modern War: Volume II: The Middle East Wars (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996). Kissinger had a more complex agenda, realizing that the Arabs would never give back territory they had lost in 1967 and now retaken. He noted: “There was no hope for a cease-fire status quo ante …. but I wanted to get the Israelis to sign on to the principle, so we could use it against them if they turned the war around.” 24. Dinitz played a problematic role during the war. He had previously been an assistant to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and was not seen as having that stature of a major ambassador—­referred to in Israel as “the shoeshine boy.” During the war he was frequently the source of leaks to the Washington Post, often complaining about delays in resupply— both real and imagined. On one occasion he was chastised by Schlesinger’s military assistant, Gen. Gordon Sumner, for complaining to the Washington Post about delay in an Israeli arms request before he delivered his request to the Pentagon. He did, however, have a good personal relationship with Kissinger. 25. Israel’s “secret” nuclear weapons program, which that nation still refuses to discuss decades later, was estimated to have some twenty warheads although it was uncertain how many would work since no testing program had been undertaken. According to a 2013 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which cited U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency figures, Israel began the production of nuclear weapons in 1967, when it produced its first two nuclear bombs. See Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), and Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option (New York: Random House, 1991). Kissinger and his team viewed this implicit threat as nuclear blackmail. 26. Kissinger got both Scowcroft and Haig, generals themselves, to work on the problem, telling them “The Israelis are going wild.” Scowcroft got two Phantoms off to Israel the next day and a total of 40 during the war. There is some evidence that Clements was responsible for the delay and Schlesinger was unable to fix the problem earlier. As Kissinger told Dinitz: “The big obstacle … has been that some of the defense people did not want to move anything because of their obsession with Saudi Arabia.” Presumable he was referring to Clements.

Secretary of State  • 121 27. Kissinger was unhappy with Schlesinger’s reversal, telling Haig “How can he fuck everything up for a week—he can’t now recoup it the day the diplomacy is supposed to start” and still believed they hadn’t tried to charter the planes—“You know goddamn well they didn’t try.” The memoirs of the two differ markedly. Schlesinger wrote that Kissinger flew off the handle and “as Israel began to fall apart … Henry began to fall apart.” Kissinger on the other hand noted that the two “were pretty much in agreement.” 28. Cordesman and Wagner, Lessons of Modern War. See also William B. Quandt, Soviet Policy in the October 1973 War (Santa Monica: Rand Corp., May 1976). Quandt gives the airlift total as approximately 12,500 tons and the sealift total as approximately 63,000 tons. A comprehensive study is contained in, WSEG Report 249, Assessment of the Weapons and Tactics Used in the October 1973 Middle East War (Washington: Institute for Defense Analysis and Center for Naval Analysis, October 1974). Originally Top Secret, and declassified 2011. 29. Cordesman and Wagner, Lessons of Modern War, p. 187. 30. Matti Golan, The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger: Step-by-Step Diplomacy in the Middle-East. New York: Quadrangle, 1976, p. 215. 31. As the result of a bold offensive hotly debated in Israel Gen. Ariel “Arik” Sharon’s forces had crossed the Suez Canal and cut off the 25,000-man Egyptian Third Army force in the Sinai from all support and supplies. 32. Meir was defiant and charged “in order that Egypt may announce a victory of her aggression.” Increasingly frustrated, Kissinger noted that his responsibility “was as the U.S. Secretary of State of the United States, not as a psychiatrist to the government of Israel.” He made some tough demands on Dinitz, in Nixon’s name, noting “We cannot permit the destruction of the Egyptian army under conditions achieved after a cease-fire was reached in part by negotiations in which we participated.” 33. Nobody would have guessed that these generals, Egypt’s Gamasy and Israel’s Yariv, would become close friends and push ahead faster with disengagement than the politicians. Decades later a generation of Egyptian and Israeli military officers have worked closely together, after diplomatic relations and commercial progress became established, with both nations coordinating in the fight against terrorism and Egypt working to help resolve ongoing problems in Gaza. 34. See Edward Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger (New York: Readers Digest Press, 1976), and Quandt, Decade of Decisions. 35. Kissinger also called Dinitz and told him: “What is Yariv selling there? Tell him to stop.” Dinitz recalls: “He [Kissinger] was very upset when he found that things were actually being settled by the generals at Kilometer 101. We had to make them stop. Ego was a weakness of his. But it was also the source of his greatness.” Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger, pp. 79–91. 36. Addressing the conference Kissinger stated: “Thus in the land of Arabs and Jews, where the reality of mistrust and hate so tragically contradicts the spiritual message which originates there, it is essential for the voice of reconciliation to be heard.” Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 792–795. 37. The plan which Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan give Kissinger proposed an Israeli withdrawal to a line about 20 kilometers east of the Suez Canal, with a U.N. buffer zone of 10 kilometers, as well as limits on the numbers of troops, tanks, and missiles in an area forty kilometers behind each line and a re-opening of the Suez Canal. Sadat initially rejected the 40-kilometer pullback, but it began the process and an agreement was reached and most importantly led to an ongoing peace process. 38. Sadat took the unprecedented step of drafting a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Meir, endorsing Kissinger’s role writing “When I talk of peace now I mean it” and “We have never had contact before. We now have the services of Dr. Kissinger. Let us use him and talk to each other through him.” Replying to Sadat, Meir wrote: “It is indeed extremely fortunate that we have Dr. Kissinger who we both trust and is prepared to give of his wisdom and talents in the cause of peace.”

122  •  Henry Kissinger 39. Even though besieged by Watergate, Nixon was unhappy about being cut out of the process and ordered Kissinger back to Washington before any agreement was reached. Kissinger ignored him and made an excuse that leaving the region at this critical time could cause the entire deal to unravel. Nixon did announce the agreement and took some glory. For their part the Soviets were also unhappy about being entirely cut out of the deal and thought that it violated the agreement reached in Geneva. They were correct, but Kissinger ignored this as well. Kissinger did meet with the Soviet Foreign Minister in Cyprus during the period to try and smooth over the issue although this was largely cosmetic. 40. Syria’s opening demand was for all territory Israel had captured in October 1973 plus one-half of the Golan Heights. Israel’s initial offer was to return one-third of the territory captured in October 1973 and none of the Golan Heights. Assad was adamant at the beginning, telling Kissinger: “If my line is unacceptable, we won’t reach an agreement … I am not going to accept one meter less.” 41. Edward Sheehan. The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger, New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976, p. 120. 42. Kissinger declared: “I am wandering around here like a rug merchant in order to bargain over one hundred or two hundred meters … like a peddler in the market! I am trying to save you, and you think you are doing me a favor when you give me a few extra meters. As if I were a citizen of Quneitra!” Even though preoccupied with Watergate, Nixon did nudge the process a bit by threatening the Israelis that if they could not accept what Kissinger was proposing he was ready to cut off their military aid. Presumably this got their attention. 43. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin saw this as “a kind of relationship that forced people in a way to be committed to him.” Richard Valeriani, Travels with Henry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 193. It was also part of Kissinger’s personality, as he “loved to excite the sentiment of friendship particularly when it was accompanied by bargaining.” Sheehan. The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger, p. 120. As much as Kissinger hated being called a “rug merchant” he often enjoyed behaving like one. 44. Rabin noted about Kissinger: “He didn’t lie. He would have lost credibility. He didn’t tell the whole truth.” Rabin’s successor Shimon Peres later told Rabin: “With due respect to Kissinger, he is the most devious man I have ever met.” 45. Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, p.  557. Kissinger was abroad more than any Secretary of State in history. Left at the Department in Washington during his travels was Deputy Secretary Kenneth Rush, whom Kissinger didn’t trust on any substantive matter or empowered to make any significant decisions. 46. See Richard Ulman, “After Rabat,” Foreign Affairs, January 1975. See also Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 1135–1141. 47. Kissinger told the Israelis that he was not responsible for Ford’s cable. This was not true, as he was responsible for drafting it. 48. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 214. Apart from the March 1975 collapse of the Sinai II negotiations this month was a bad one for Kissinger and the U.S. A final North Vietnamese offensive had gotten under way, the city of Hue had fallen in Vietnam, the U.S.-backed government in Cambodia was under assault by the Khmer Rouge, a U.S.-backed coup in Portugal against the leftist government had failed, and a civil war had broken out in Angola backed by Cuban forces and Soviet aid. 49. Spoken by Kissinger at a news conference on March 26, 1975, which appeared excerpted in The New York Times on March 27, 1975. 50. This result is what ultimately happened after Kissinger had left government. The Camp ­David Accords were signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in September 1978, following secret negotiations at Camp David. The second of these frameworks (A Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel) led to the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. See William B. Quandt, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1986).

Secretary of State  • 123 51. Kissinger ordered a review of the Matmon B request in NSSM-207 (Israeli Future Military Requirements). The Israeli Matmon B request was considered at a meeting of the NSC Special Review Group in August 1974 chaired by Kissinger, with the key participants being Gen. Vernon “Dick” Walters and Assistant Defense Secretary Robert Ellsworth. Notes of the meeting are contained in Ford Library, NSC Institutional Files, Meeting Minutes-SRG Originals, August 1974, classified Top Secret, Sensitive, Eyes Only (declassified 2001). See Allan M. Edward (ed.), Foreign Relations of the United States: 1969–1976, Vol. XXVI, Arab– Israeli Dispute 1974–1976 (Washington: USGPO, 2001), p. 411. 52. The classified Pentagon analysis of the Matmon B request and future funding requirements was leaked to the Israel lobby, namely the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (­A IPAC), which immediately complained to Kissinger. AIPAC was in a strange position, illegally possessing classified data that showed a huge future cost to the American taxpayers that would be detrimental to their cause. AIPAC’s president complained to several U.S. government officials that allowing the American public to see the full cost of Israel’s aid request would be highly detrimental to their cause. 53. One cynical commentator called this “the best agreement money could buy.” Richard Valeriani, Travels with Henry, p. 241. On the other hand, President Ford issued a statement calling it “one of the greatest diplomatic achievements of this century” to which Kissinger responded “Why this century?” 54. See Frank Snepp, Decent Interval (New York: Random House, 1977) for a good account of the fall of Saigon. See also Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor. 55. One of Ford’s advisors, David Kennerly, who was along on the Weyand trip, reported back to Ford that any hope that South Vietnam could be saved was “bullshit.” In an off-moment Kissinger quipped to Ford’s press secretary about the South Vietnamese: “Why don’t these people die fast? The worst thing that could happen would be for them to linger on.” 56. Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, p. 641. 57. See Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). 58. In the Tulane University speech Ford stated: “America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” Asked aboard Air Force One if Kissinger had read the speech in advance or anything to do with it, Ford shouted: “No … Nothing at all.” 59. Robert Hartmann, Palace Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), pp. 321–323. See also John Casserly, The Ford White House (Boulder: Colorado University, 1977), p. 80. 60. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 369. See also Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts. The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington: Brookings, 1979), and Stephen Rosenfeld, “Kissinger’s Postwar Confusion,” The Washington Post, May 9, 1975. 61. The North Vietnamese army eventually entered Cambodia in 1979 and threw out the Khmer Rouge regime which by then had killed over three million of its own citizens. 62. See Chen C. King, China’s War with Vietnam 1979 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1987). 63. The most outrageous assessment came from Gen. Howard Fish, Director of the Defense Security Agency, responsible for administering U.S. military aid, who stated: “Overall, the military prognosis for Cambodia is promising.” Some in the Pentagon saw this as a statement required as part of his job, while others thought Fish was just nuts and had no idea what he was talking about. 64. See also Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor, p. 270. 65. Ibid., pp. 270–271. See also Shawcross, Sideshow, pp. 200–395, and Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 335–355. For years Shawcross and Kissinger were in violent disagreement about what took place. 66. See Elizabeth Becker, When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 160. 67. As labor leader George Meany put it: “We’re not interested in seeing cheap goods made by Soviet slave labor pour into this country.”

124  •  Henry Kissinger 68. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 240. See also Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Cooperation (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1985). 69. Leading the attack on the conservative side was California Governor Ronald Reagan, later elected to the presidency. For Nixon, who had a long career as a staunch anticommunist, this was a strange turn of events. 70. Richard Perle, a leader of the neoconservative movement and key staff member for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, noted that: “The Jewish-neoconservative connection sprang from that period of worries about détente and Israel.” Jackson himself was a strong advocate in the Senate for Israel and Soviet Jewery. 71. In a speech to the Society of Pilgrims in London Kissinger stated: “In a world shadowed by the danger of nuclear holocaust … there is no alternative to the pursuit of a relaxation of tensions.” Quoted in Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 980–981. 72. A widely recorded quote from Nixon’s meeting with Mao in China, February 1972. 73. Even though a Democrat, Jackson was a “hawk” and had been offered the job of Secretary of Defense by Nixon. He had been a close friend of John F. Kennedy and had presidential ambitions of his own, with close associations in both parties. His principal aide, Richard Perle, who some called “the Prince of Darkness,” emerged as a leader of the neocons and generally despised by Kissinger. 74. Soviet policy did not mention Jews specifically, but following the 1967 Middle East War the number of Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate increased dramatically and these were the ones subject to the “education tax.” 75. He stated in October 1973 that: “The demand that Moscow modify its domestic policy as a precondition for MFN or détente was never made while we were negotiating … Now it is inserted after both sides have carefully shaped an overall mosaic. Thus, it raises questions about our entire bilateral relationship.” It was also the case that Kissinger’s private diplomacy in this area had been working. Where in 1968 only 400 Jews had been permitted to leave the Soviet Union, this number increased to 13,000 in 1971 and 35,000 by 1973. 76. See Paula Stern, Water’s Edge (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979). 77. Much has been made of this and Kissinger has written: “I was wrong not to show it to Jackson and the others.” He made an excuse that Gromyko had given him the letter on his way to the airport, as he was leaving for India, Pakistan, and Iran and would discuss it when he returned. At the same time, he was hoping that the Soviets had written it for the record, and it would be buried in some classified file and not to be seen for many years. 78. Subsequently the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union varied wildly. In 1979, after SALT II and a wheat deal it, increased to 51,000. In 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it dropped to 21,000. In 1989 after the fall of the Soviet Union the restrictions were lifted and, by 1990, the number rose to 150,000 Jews and 400,000 of all ethnicities. In 1991 President George H.W. Bush waived the Jackson–Vanik amendment. 79. Ford couldn’t stand Schlesinger to begin with and the mention of his name made Ford’s blood boil. Schlesinger’s tenure as Secretary of Defense came to an abrupt end when, in a cabinet meeting, he called Ford an idiot and was fired on the spot by the president. 80. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation, pp. 444–445. See also Ford, A Time to Heal, p. 215. 81. Even though the framework was based on Jackson’s idea of equality, he complained that the ceilings were far too high and failed to limit throw-weight, which would be to the Soviet’s advantage. There was no way the Soviets were going to change to framework to deal with this problem. 82. See Strobe Talbott, Endgame (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Kissinger made a final effort to revive the SALT process with a trip to Moscow in January 1976. While Kissinger was gone Schlesinger called an NSC meeting behind his back, which failed. Ford fired Schlesinger, and replaced him with Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense who, unfortunately, had little interest in SALT. Later, Ford regretted not seeing the SALT process through and felt if he had done it, he might not have lost the 1976 election.

chapter

6

Watergate and Exit from Government

Watergate and the Fall of Richard Nixon The Watergate scandal began following a break-in by five men tied to the Nixon re-election campaign at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington in June 1972, and the Nixon administration’s subsequent attempt to cover up its involvement.1 After the five burglars were caught and the conspiracy was discovered a Congressional investigation followed that Nixon resisted, ultimately leading to a constitutional crisis. By all accounts this was a bungled, third-rate burglary for which there was no good reason—Nixon was well ahead in the polls and largely assured of re-election, which he achieved that year in a landslide victory. In January 1972, G. Gordon Liddy, finance counsel for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP) and Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, presented plan to CRP’s acting chairman Jeb Stuart Magruder, Attorney General Mitchell, and Presidential Counsel John Dean involving various illegal activities against the Democratic Party which marked “the opening scene of the worst political scandal of the twentieth century and the beginning of the end of the Nixon presidency.”2 Mitchell viewed the plan as unrealistic, but two months later approved a reduced version of the plan, including burgling the (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate—ostensibly to photograph campaign documents and install listening devices in telephones. Liddy was nominally in charge of the operation and included former CIA officers E. Howard Hunt and James ­McCord who was also serving as CRP security coordinator. McCord assigned a former FBI agent to carry out the wiretapping and monitor the telephone conversations afterward.

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Two phones inside the DNC headquarters were wiretapped, but despite successfully installing the listening devices, the agents soon determined that they needed repairs and planned a second break-in in order to take care of the situation. A security guard at the Watergate noticed unusual activity and called the police who subsequently apprehended five men, later charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. The following morning, Liddy called Magruder in Los Angeles and informed him that “the men arrested with McCord were Cuban freedom fighters, whom Hunt recruited.” Initially, Nixon’s organization and the White House quickly went to work to cover up the crime and any evidence that might have damaged the president and his reelection. Nixon administration officials were concerned because Hunt and Liddy were also involved in a separate secret activity known as the “White House plumbers” set up to stop security “leaks” and investigate other sensitive security matters. Dean later testified that Ehrlichman had ordered him to “deep six” the contents of Hunt’s White House safe, which Ehrlichman subsequently denied. Ultimately Dean and the FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray destroyed the evidence from Hunt’s safe. Nixon’s initial reaction to the break-in was one of skepticism, and Watergate prosecutors were sure that Nixon had not known in advance of the break-in. However, Nixon subsequently ordered Haldeman to have the CIA block the FBI’s investigation into the source of the funding for the burglary. At a news conference, Nixon stated that Dean had conducted a thorough investigation of the incident, when Dean had actually not conducted any investigation at all. Nixon furthermore said, “I can say categorically that… no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident” all of which were later shown to be false.3 There was nothing of significant value to the Nixon campaign at the DNC offices worth stealing, and to make matters worse the bungling burglars left a satchel of tools, surveillance equipment along with $3,400 in cash. The FBI investigated and discovered a connection between cash found and a slush fund used by the CRP, Nixon’s official campaign organization. Ultimately the break-in accomplished nothing for Nixon’s re-election campaign and managed to destroy the Nixon presidency in the process. Watergate will likely be remembered as the largest political fiasco in American political history, and it would be hard to imagine an otherwise intelligent group of people doing anything dumber. As the nation later learned this was not just some low-level criminals involved, but an operation authorized by highly educated and responsible people employed at the highest level of the U.S. government.4

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After the five burglars were caught and the conspiracy was discovered— chiefly through the work of a few journalists, congressional staffers and an election-finance watchdog official a congressional investigation followed that was resisted by Nixon, ultimately leading to a constitutional crisis and Nixon’s forced resignation. The scandal also led to the discovery of multiple abuses of power by members of the Nixon administration, resulting in the indictment of 69 people, with trials or pleas resulting in 48 being found guilty, many of whom were top Nixon officials. Among these were Nixon’s Chief-of-Staff Haldeman and Attorney General Mitchell. By July 1973, evidence mounted against Nixon’s staff, including testimony provided by former staff members in an investigation conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee. These hearings also revealed that Nixon had a tape-recording system in his offices which had recorded many of his conversations. Nixon fought the release of the tapes in court but lost when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that he was obligated to release the tapes to government investigators. Rather than ending with the conviction and sentencing to prison of the five Watergate burglars in January 1973, the investigation into the break-in and the Nixon Administration’s involvement grew broader. Nixon’s conversations in March and April 1973 revealed that not only did he know he needed to remove Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean to gain distance from them, but he had to do so in a way that was least likely to incriminate him and his presidency.5 Nixon created a new conspiracy—to effect a cover-up of the cover-up—which began in late March 1973 and became fully formed in May and June 1973, operating until his presidency ended. The tapes revealed that Nixon had attempted to cover up activities that took place after the break-in, and to use his staff and other federal officials to divert the investigation. Faced with virtually certain impeachment in the House and conviction by the Senate, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974 and was succeeded in office by Vice President Gerald Ford, who pardoned Nixon a month later. As the Watergate scandal and its fallout increasingly engulfed the Nixon administration Kissinger was the most senior figure not involved, and all around hoped that he would avoid being touched in any way. A consensus existed in Washington that he should be protected, and as Time reported “He is the one figure of stature remaining amid the ruins of ­R ichard ­Nixon’s stricken Administration.”6 Kissinger had no real involvement with the 1972 Nixon re-election campaign and was out of the country when most of the key events in the Watergate scandal took place.7 Beyond the logistics and a desire not to become involved in the re-election campaign, Kissinger had a personal disdain for many of the senior staff around Nixon and wanted to have as

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little to do with them as possible. He saw Nixon’s top staffers Haldeman and Ehrlichman as a Germanic pretorian guard, although he did develop a working relationship with Haldeman—of necessity. Kissinger’s unique relationship with Nixon enabled him to largely avoid dealing with staff and it was Nixon who often called Kissinger on the phone four or five times a day. Kissinger did not learn any details about the scandal until later in the month when he met with Leonard Garment, a former law partner of Nixon’s, who came by his office and mentioned that Nixon himself might be involved. This shocked Kissinger, and when asked that night by Nixon for his opinion gave his agreement to Nixon’s suggestion “that we should circle the wagons around the White House.” After four years of dealing with Nixon, he knew enough not to tell him what he did not want to hear.8 Unrelated to the Watergate scandal was the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in October 1973, due to a bribery and tax investigation related to the time he was Governor of Maryland. While Agnew was not a key player in Kissinger’s world, he was concerned about his possible replacement, and worried that Nixon would pick John Connolly—a choice he found unacceptable. He lobbied for his old patron Nelson Rockefeller to replace Agnew as Vice President, although Nixon ultimately picked Congressman Gerald Ford, a choice Kissinger felt that was one he could live with. The Watergate scandal dragged on for over a year and for most of the time included Kissinger’s appointment at Secretary of State, and after becoming secretary Kissinger tried to stay as far away from the scandal as possible, and away from Washington as well. From the time he became Secretary in October 1973 to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 Kissinger made trips to twenty-eight nations, including six trips to the Middle East. While away, Al Haig, Kissinger’s former deputy who had replaced Haldeman as Nixon’s Chief-of-Staff, kept Kissinger apprised on frequent phone calls. By May 1973 the fallout of the Watergate scandal was consuming Nixon and the people around him. At the end of April 1973 Nixon’s two top aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, were forced to resign over their involvement in the Watergate cover-up.9 Nixon called on Haig, who had recently left the White House to become the Army Vice Chief-of-Staff to replace Haldeman as Chief-of-Staff, and was almost the only person Nixon felt could deal with the growing White House crisis as well as Kissinger. This was not without some drama, where Nixon said he would not make the Haig appointment without Kissinger’s approval, and Haig said he needed Kissinger’s blessing. As Watergate problems increased and became a national tragedy, Kissinger and Haig again began to work in harmony dealing with the

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myriad of problems that arose. To the surprise of many Haig even became protective of Kissinger.10 By July 1974 Kissinger become convinced that Nixon needed to resign and discussed it with Haig, asking him “How long can this go on?” and Haig solicited Kissinger’s advice and assistance in getting Nixon to resign, leading to daily calls between them as to progress in pushing Nixon in the desired direction and possible strategies for getting Nixon to face reality. Kissinger did not bring himself to advise Nixon to resign until August 6—the day before the resignation—when he went into the Oval Office and told Nixon that if he continued his fight it would paralyze the nation and its foreign policy. Later that night Nixon called Kissinger to tell him that he had decided to reject Israel’s request for military aid and had decided to cut off all assistance to Israel immediately unless this American ally agreed to a comprehensive peace with the Arab states and withdrew from all occupied lands immediately. Kissinger saw this as Nixon’s retaliation for advice earlier in the day on resignation from his Jewish Secretary of State and a way to punish him by cutting off Israel. Kissinger ignored Nixon’s order and never sent him the papers to implement it.11 To what extent this represents anti-­ Semitism on Nixon’s part remains an open question. The following day, August 7, Haig called Kissinger to the White House and was told that Nixon was resigning and would do so in a speech to the nation the following night. Nixon wanted to know what foreign leaders would think, and Kissinger told him that “History will treat you more kindly than your contemporaries” to which Nixon replied, “It depends on who writes the history.”12 Nixon called Kissinger back to the White House that night for a discussion that has become a major scene in the lore of the Nixon resignation where to two men alone discussed the various foreign policy triumphs of the administration. Kissinger found Nixon to be “a basket case” and Nixon recalls he cautioned Kissinger not to resign, for reasons that are unclear.13 Looking back there is no question that Kissinger had no direct connection to Watergate, although some have made the claim that he contributed to the mind set that produced it. It is true that his fury over leaks about the Cambodian bombing, the Pentagon Papers and other secrets led to the legitimate FBI wiretaps on staff phones and establishment of the White House “Plumbers Unit” responsible for Watergate, but the illegal and rogue operation that produced Watergate was not of Kissinger’s making. Gerald Ford had known Kissinger since the time he was a speaker at his Harvard seminars in the 1960s and had been treated well; Ford recalled that Kissinger had, in fact, made the visit a very pleasant experience for him, and returned to Harvard for another visit two years later. Later Ford became engaged in Rockefeller’s Critical Choices project that Kissinger

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helped to run and was regularly invited to White House briefings during Nixon’s first term. In March 1974, after Ford had become Vice President, he was quoted in the New Republic as saying that if he ever became president, he would keep Kissinger. During Nixon’s final month in office Kissinger took over the regular foreign policy briefing for Ford as Vice President, paying increasing attention to what Kissinger was telling him. Leaving office Nixon had only one piece of advice for Ford, and that was that he keep Kissinger, telling him: “Henry is a genius … but you don’t have to accept everything he recommends. He can be invaluable and he’ll be very loyal, but you can’t let him have a totally free hand.” Nixon also told one of the staff that: “Ford has just got to realize that there are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts … because sometimes Henry starts to think he’s president. But at other times you have to pat Henry and treat him like a child.” Ford called Kissinger asking him to stay on and assured him, “Henry … I need you … I’ll do everything I can to work with you.” Kissinger responded: “Sir it will be my job to get along with you, and not yours to get along with me.”14 It would be an understatement to say that Ford was a far different person and President than Nixon had been. Ford was decent and straightforward, not deceitful, and had good human instincts. Where Nixon’s staff had to save him from his worst instincts, Ford’s aides needed to save him from his best ones. Nixon had built an administration based on secrecy and conspiracy, and now Ford wanted one based on decency—a major change for the nation. Aside from fundamental decency, Ford came into the office with a long history in Congress looking at foreign affairs and good gut instincts as to what would be acceptable to both Congress and the American people. Unlike Nixon, Ford had an interest in arms control and invited himself into the SALT II discussions with Gromyko on the details of an agreement. A few months later when the North Vietnamese were about to capture ­Saigon and Kissinger was urging that the U.S. become reengaged in Vietnam, Ford refused and flatly told him that the American people wouldn’t stand for it, and that Congress had already cut off all aid. As history proved, Ford was right, and not quite so dumb as some historians picture him. In the time they served together, Ford and Kissinger developed a good working relationship—largely because Ford was a secure man, not threatened by Kissinger or his brilliance. Unlike Nixon, Ford was not bothered by Kissinger’s desire for publicity and recognition and even found that “You get Henry to do better when he’s in his glory.”15 Without question Kissinger was far more relaxed around Ford than he had ever been around Nixon. For all the years and time Kissinger had spent around Nixon he was never comfortable with him, and it was never clear

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that Nixon liked Kissinger but rather that he needed him to accomplish his own ends. Ford, on the other hand, liked Kissinger and truly admired him, making it possible to deal with him openly. It was also the case that Ford understood Kissinger. Further, Nixon had been deeply interested in foreign policy to the point of obsession, while Ford was far less interested and more balanced. It remained to be seen if the secretive Kissinger who has conspired endlessly with Nixon could deal with Ford, or was his personality too much in the way? Kissinger had similar problems in dealing with others such as Bowie at Harvard and some on the Rockefeller staff early on in New York, and it was a fundamental part of his personality. Fortunately, Ford understood this well and saw part of his job as tending to Kissinger’s vulnerable ego, noting: “He’s about as supersensitive to criticism as anyone I know.” There were always conspirators and Kissinger would repeatedly tell Ford: “I have to resign.” Ford would again restore calm: “I would take however long it required … to reassure him and tell him how important he was to the country and ask him to please stay.” Managing such problems was one of Ford’s talents, just as Kissinger’s was managing the world’s problems. It worked for them. In dealing with Ford as the incoming President what gave Kissinger more problems than the big international ones were dealing with the White House staff who he suspected were trying to limit his authority. While he managed to survive Haldeman and Ehrlichman, his former deputy Haig was still there but soon to depart. Ford replaced Haig as Chief-of-Staff because, as he said, “I wanted someone I could totally work with and trust.”16 For Kissinger the thought of a new staff that he did not control and might undermine him was not pleasant, but there was little he could see to do about it—he couldn’t conspire with Ford the way he often did with Nixon and often Haldeman on personnel issues. Ford selected Republican Congressman Donald Rumsfeld to replace Haig as Chief-of-Staff, which did not sit well with Kissinger. Rumsfeld was bright and ambitious, and almost certain to clash with Kissinger. At once Rumsfeld wanted Ford to appear more “presidential” and not look like he was repeating what Kissinger was saying about foreign policy, and let it be known that Ford was seeking a broader spectrum of foreign policy advice.17 Rumsfeld’s efforts to diminish Kissinger’s role and visibility did not abate. At the May 1975 NATO summit Rumsfeld decided that Ford should give the press briefings—not Kissinger—and even kept Kissinger out of the important photos of the NATO leaders. This became a ritual on every similar trip where Kissinger would explode at least once about anti-Kissinger leaks, which he attributed to Rumsfeld and the staff he controlled.18

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On Kissinger’s advice Ford made one major appointment that helped to counterbalance all of the staff rivalries by selecting Nelson Rockefeller to serve as the new vice president. There was no public figure for who Kissinger had greater respect and affection. Kissinger had also married Nancy Maginnes, who was a socially prominent friend of the Rockefellers and had served on the Rockefeller staff. With Rockefeller there, Kissinger was feeling far better than he had in a long time, and in fact was far more comfortable around Ford for the next two years than he had been for the previous five around Nixon.

The 1976 Presidential Election and Exit from Government While Ford had never run for president or vice-president and came into office because of the Nixon resignation, he did run in the 1976 election to remain as president. The two major issues in the 1976 campaign were his pardon of Nixon and an American economy that had been hurt by the Arab oil embargo following the 1973 Middle East War. In what looked to be a close election there were a few foreign policy matters that could tip the balance. There was not a single pressing foreign policy concern, but a collection of issues including détente, human rights, a lack of U.S. morality in foreign affairs, and the secret way Kissinger had been working for years. For many critics the problem wasn’t Ford—it was Kissinger. Ford’s staff did not handle this well and tried to portray Kissinger as a “black sheep” who had been hidden away. Ford’s campaign chairman Rogers Morton told people privately that if Ford were elected Kissinger would probably not have a job, and James Baker, Ford’s campaign manager, added that Kissinger had become a liability.19 Ford went on the record otherwise and after discussing this repeatedly with Kissinger stated in one interview that: “I would like Kissinger to be Secretary as long as I am President.”20 Without question Kissinger wanted to retain the job for as long as possible, as he enjoyed the power as well as the private airplane and other perks of the office. He also feared that John Connolly might be given the post, which he felt would be a disaster. The challenge to Ford in the Republican party came from Ronald Reagan, who attacked the Ford–Kissinger foreign policy as a “sell out” of America and saw every setback—Vietnam, Angola, Portugal, and ­others—as a failure of détente. The attacks on Ford and Kissinger from the conservative right combined a strong denunciation of the Soviets, but at the same time were fairly isolationist and did not advocate the use of force or the full-scale U.S. invasion of anyplace. Their general solution

Watergate and Exit from Government  • 133

was righteous indignation. Kissinger’s attempt to rebut this line of argument did little other than backfire, giving Reagan more press attention. On the campaign trail Ford abandon any defense of détente or use of the word and stated henceforth it would be replaced by the phrase “peace through strength.”21 The Reagan attack on Kissinger also had a personal dimension, pushed by two nominal Democrats who had been fired by the Ford administration, including James Schlesinger, the former Secretary of Defense, and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the retired Chief of Naval Operations. Both were anti-détente from the outset and pushed a theme that America needed to be resolute in the face of Soviet aggression. Zumwalt was also running for the Senate from Virginia and made numerous public appearances deriding Kissinger and his conduct of foreign policy, which he saw as based on pessimism and a need to make a deal—any deal—at the expense of America. At the Republican convention that August Reagan lacked enough delegates to win the nomination, although his political operatives did give Ford a fight over a platform plank on morality in foreign policy, which managed to outrage Kissinger and his allies. In the end, however, it didn’t matter as Ford was nominated as the Republican candidate. What did matter is that Ford came out of the convention as a 30-point underdog to Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee, and was forced to fight a major uphill battle for the entire campaign. Carter continuously campaigned against the “Nixon-Kissinger-Ford” foreign policy, which he described as “covert, manipulative, and deceptive in style” that “runs against the basic principles of this country.” Adding to this insult, much of Carter’s language had been drafted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Kissinger’s old nemesis from Harvard who was now a Carter campaign advisor.22 In one Carter speech written by Brzezinski he stated: “Under the Nixon–Ford administration … there has evolved a secretive ‘Lone Ranger’ foreign policy, a one-man policy of international adventure” based on “secrecy … closely guarded and amoral.” Carter was campaigning on an approach that preached: “Our foreign policy should be as open and honest as the American people themselves.”23 Ford’s biggest error in the campaign was likely his performance at the second debate with Carter on October 6, on the subject of foreign policy, where he gave a seemingly bumbling and inaccurate answer to a question about the Helsinki Summit and the so-called “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” which critics claim gave Eastern Europe to the Soviets. What may have been a silly mistake was seen as ignorance on Ford’s part, in the area of foreign policy where he should have excelled against Carter who had no similar experience. To make matters worse, Ford was shown to not even know that there were Soviet troops in communist Poland.

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For those opposed to détente this was more than just a misunderstanding on Ford’s part, and Kissinger was blamed for getting Ford into a position of having to defend détente and Helsinki—a major political blunder by Kissinger. Many believe this incident cost Ford the election at a time when he had been closing the gap in the polls with Carter. Ford was never able to recover and went on to lose the election by two percentage points in the popular vote.24 Kissinger left office and government service in January 1977 as the new Carter administration took over and allowed himself some personal reflection that “I leave you for a time, the great domain of pubic policy … I would be hypocritical if I pretended to part is easy. I envy you the excitement, the responsibilities, the opportunities.”25

Notes 1. The definitive history of Watergate is found in Woodward and Bernstein, All The President’s Men. See also, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976) and Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983). 2. John W. Dean, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It (New York: Viking, 2014), p. 8. 3. Spoken by Nixon at a news conference on August 29, 1973, and widely reported in the press. 4. In fairness to Nixon, he did not authorize or know of the Watergate break-in beforehand. He was personally involved in the subsequent “cover up,” which ultimately led to an impeachment issue and his resignation from office. See Woodward and Bernstein, All The President’s Men. 5. On Nixon’s orders, Ehrlichman told Attorney General Richard Kleindienst that nobody in the White House had prior knowledge of the burglary and Magruder told U.S. attorneys that he had perjured himself during the “burglars” trial, implicating Dean and Mitchell. Dean believed that he, Mitchell, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman could go to the prosecutors, tell the truth, and save the presidency. Dean wanted to protect the President and have his four closest men take the fall for telling the truth. Dean was totally unaware of Nixon’s knowledge and involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Dean felt he was being recorded and mentioned this to the Senate Watergate Committee, exposing the thread of taped conversations that unraveled the fabric of the conspiracy. This information became the bombshell that helped force Richard Nixon to resign rather than be impeached. 6. Time, December 24, 1973. 7. When the Watergate burglars made their first attempt on May 27, 1972, Kissinger was in Moscow. When the second break-in took place on June 16, 1972, he was on a plane to Beijing. On other key dates he was on a shuttle between Paris and Saigon. At the time of the Saturday Night Massacre (October 20, 1973), when Nixon fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and Attorney General Elliot Richardson, he was again in Moscow negotiating an end to the 1973 October War. 8. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 75–79. 9. See Woodward and Bernstein, All the President’s Men, for the most extensive discussion of Watergate. See also Steven E. Ambrose, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990. There were many others fired and replaced as well, including Attorney General John Mitchell who later went to prison for his role in Watergate and was replace by Elliott Richardson.

Watergate and Exit from Government  • 135 10. See Elmo Zumwalt, On Watch (New York: Quadrangle, 1976). 11. This order was reversed by President Ford four days later. 12. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 1197–1205. See also Nixon, RN, p. 1074. 13. Following this meeting with Nixon, Kissinger returned to his office where Eagleburger and Scowcroft were waiting for him and told them: “Nothing I have been through has ever been so traumatic.” Eagleburger told Kissinger: “At times I’ve thought you were not human … but I was wrong.” Nixon again phoned Kissinger that night and at Kissinger’s order the tapes and transcript of the call were destroyed. See Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 1197–1205. 14. See John Osborne, White House Watch: The Ford Years (Washington: New Republic Books, 1977), Ford, A Time to Heal, pp. 29–30, Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), and Bill Gulley and Mary Ellen Reese Breaking Cover (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980). 15. Robert Hartmann, who served as Ford’s counselor, put it: “He [Ford] knew it was hopeless to fool with Mother Nature. Henry’s vanity was part of his ability to perform well. If he needed more reassurance than the rest of us, Ford gladly gave it.” Robert Hartmann, Palace Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 287. 16. Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford. New York: Harper & Row, 1979 (various pages) and the author’s personal discussions with Ford. 17. In one unfortunate incident Ford’s press secretary leaked a story that Kissinger’s power was being diminished, which enraged Kissinger who again threatened to quit. An embarrassed White House tried to walk back the leak, firing a low-level staffer who was not responsible, to the embarrassment of all involved. 18. See Ron Nessen, It Sure Looks Different From the Inside (Chicago: Playboy, 1978), Hartman, Palace Politics, and Osborne, White House Watch,. 19. See Osborne, White House Watch,. 20. Ford interview with Barbara Walters, Today show, May 17, 1976. Ford continued: “Kissinger, working with me and at my direction, has done some of the most outstanding diplomatic work on behalf of the U.S. and world peace, I think, of any Secretary of State in the history of the U.S.” 21. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation,., p. 548. Even though appalled by Ford’s discarding the term “détente,” Kissinger himself had done so in 1974 in favor of the phrase “the search for a more productive relationship with the Soviet Union.” 22. Much of this was in his article. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, “America in a Hostile World,” Foreign Affairs, Spring, 1975. 23. William Hyland, Mortal Rivals (New York: Random House 1987), p. 176. 24. Ford, A Time to Heal, pp. 420–422. 25. Kissinger’s Farwell Speech to the National Press Club (January 10, 1977). Quoted in ­I saacson, Kissinger, p. 704.

chapter

7

The Later Years

The end of the Ford Administration in January 1977 brought to a close Kissinger’s eight years of full-time Government service, with the Kissingers moving back to New York City. Kissinger did not give up the trappings of power, perks and luxury easily, borrowing Nelson Rockefeller’s private plane for the short flight as he no longer had access to the presidential fleet.1 Unlike any prior Secretary of State, or most presidents for that matter, he wanted to maintain the trappings of grandeur long after he had left office. Kissinger also wanted to maintain his secret service bodyguards, at government expense as a private citizen—a request that was briefly indulged by the Carter administration, but soon cancelled by his successor as National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who ridiculed this as “an expensive ego trip.”2 Kissinger and Brzezinski had been adversaries since their days at Harvard and Brzezinski was in no mood to suffer Kissinger’s demands now that he had replaced him at the White House. Out of government Kissinger still enjoyed a celebrity status, in terms of public recognition and a new social life in New York City with Nancy and a host of celebrities. He cultivated the aura of a highly important person and used it to obtain large speaking fees, consulting fees, and media contracts for both newspaper articles and television appearances.3 In New York the Kissingers bought a fashionable apartment in Manhattan’s River House as well as a country estate in Kent, Connecticut that in the 1970s had become an alternative to the Hamptons for wealthy New Yorkers. The Kissinger’s new life style in New York wasn’t cheap, and the costs of the private security at $150,000 in addition to the two homes and several lawyers still fending off lawsuits from the FBI wiretaps meant that Kissinger needed to make a serious living. Rather than accepting a single

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full-time job, he singed a number of consulting agreements including one with Goldman Sachs & Co. for $150,000 per year; one with NBC as a commentator and consultant for $200,000 per year; an advisory post with Chase Manhattan for $10,000; a part-time post with Georgetown University for $35,000; a fellowship with the Aspen Institute for $20,000 per year; and a number of speeches to be given at $15,000 or more each. While he was not entirely serious about it, Kissinger went through the motions of exploring a return to Harvard, although there are differing stories as to what took place. One version of the story is that Harvard’s Government Department offered to give him back his chair as a professor of international relations, which he vacated for some eight years, although this would have required him to return to Harvard and teach.4 What Kissinger claims to have wanted was one of the five exalted University Professorships which required far less and little—if any—teaching. Derek Bok, Harvard’s president then, had little use for Kissinger and was unwilling to support this offer. Some believe that Kissinger only wanted the offer of this very special chair so that he could decline it. Whatever the precise facts may be, this ended Kissinger’s association with Harvard and not on the best of terms, as evidenced by the fact that years later Kissinger donated his personal papers to Yale. For the first four years after leaving government Kissinger devoted most of his time to writing the first volume of his memoirs, White House Years: 1969–1972, for which he was guaranteed at least $5 million. To accomplish this Kissinger rented an office in Washington and hired three of his former NSC staff members to assist him in going over thousands of pages of documents, memos and files working ten-hour days to produce what in the end was an exhaustive and detailed account of Nixon’s first term. The book’s detailed discussion of Vietnam and Cambodia reflects Kissinger’s brilliance as a scholar and at the end was revised to rebut a book written by British journalist William Shawcross that had been highly critical of Kissinger and Nixon, particularly with respect to bombing in Cambodia.5 Kissinger’s original contract called for a second volume of his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, which took him and the team another three years to finish and was finally published in 1982. Again, this was a lengthy and scholarly volume, covering only the one and one-half years of Nixon’s second term and ending with Watergate and the Nixon resignation. Even though it was not in the original contract, it was expected that Kissinger would produce a third and final volume to the set of memoirs dealing with the years of the Ford administration. It took close to two decades before the third and final volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal, was finally published in 1999.6 This volume starts with Kissinger’s assessment of Nixon’s tortured personality, and goes through the years of the Ford administration, depicting Ford as a

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man of decency, good judgment, and courage. Kissinger details the final U.S. exit from Vietnam, dealing with an increasingly hostile Congress determined to micromanage American foreign policy and the evisceration of the intelligence community. After completing the first two volumes of his memoirs Kissinger increased his writing for the Washington Post and other papers with lengthy op-ed columns as well as major pieces for Newsweek. He also spent more time as a television commentator, initially under his contract with NBC, although his relationship with NBC ended over an interview Kissinger did with David Frost and a hostile exchange about the Cambodian bombing.7 Following the NBC contract, Kissinger moved to ABC and was a frequent guest of Ted Koppel on Nightline, although Peter Jennings, the ABC news anchor was much less of a Kissinger fan and did not use him. Kissinger kept his contract with ABC until 1989 when he joined the board of competitor CBS. In addition to this life in broadcast journalism Kissinger engaged in charitable endeavors as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and returned to the Council on Foreign Relations as a board member and participant in new study groups. What he failed to do was pay any serious attention to his health. Kissinger’s weight increased substantially during his government service—from 155 to 215 pounds and in 1982 required a triple heart by-pass. Fortunately, Nancy stepped in and took control of his diet in an effort to keep him alive. The move to New York also saw a change in the Kissinger’s social life, as they left behind most of their Washington friends in the government and academic circles for a wealthier and glitzier crowd in New York. Nancy is sometimes blamed for this, choosing a social life with a different crowd, but Kissinger had no problem hanging around with prominent jet-setters. In the 1970s and 1980s the Kissingers enjoyed a luxurious life style were frequently seen in Hollywood, New York, and Paris with a host of wealthy and socially prominent people. A former Kissinger girlfriend noted “I think he made up his mind that he had been involved with too much intellectual stuff … He wanted a group that would put him on a pedestal.” This crowd was also the combination of glamour and wealth that Kissinger had long admired and he now had the opportunity to become one of them. While he did interact with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and a few other New York intellectuals, he largely avoided them as they had turned on him over Vietnam and Cambodia.

The Carter Administration Despite his new life as an author, media personality and socialite Kissinger never lost his lust for power and connection to the foreign policy establishment. The Democratic Carter administration that followed him were not

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his greatest fans and had little interest in retuning him to government—in any capacity. His long-standing animosity with Zbigniew Brzezinski who replaced him as National Security Advisor went back to their days as adversaries at Harvard, but he had a far better relationship with Cyrus Vance who replaced him as Secretary of State, going back to their time together on the Council on Foreign Relations. By far Kissinger’s most serious dispute with the Carter Administration came in 1979 when the government of the Shah of Iran was in a state of collapse and the Shah overthrown. Kissinger felt that the U.S. had failed to support its long-time ally the Shah, or even comprehend what was taking place in Iran. Earlier that year Vance had asked Kissinger to try and persuade the Shah to abdicate and find a place for him in exile in the U.S. Having arranged this with the assistance of the Rockefellers and others, the Carter administration refused to honor the plan and did not want him in the country at all, leaving Kissinger indignant.8 Again working with the Rockefellers and John McCloy Kissinger found the Shah a temporary home in the Bahamas and later in Mexico, although when the Shah became seriously ill and the Carter administration relented, admitting him into the U.S. for medical treatment in New York.9 The new Iranian regime reacted violently to this action on the part of the Carter administration leading to the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the capture of the personnel there as hostages. The Iran hostage crisis led to a diplomatic standoff between Iran and the U.S. as 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days after a group of Iranian college students who supported the Iranian Revolution, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for what was as the longest hostage crisis in history. Carter called the hostages “victims of terrorism and anarchy” and stated that the United States would not yield to blackmail. In Iran the seizure of the U.S. embassy and taking of the hostages was viewed as a blow against the U.S. and its influence in Iran, including perceived attempts to undermine the Iranian Revolution and support of the recently overthrown Shah. Diplomatic negotiations failed to free the hostages and Carter ordered a rescue attempt in April 1980, known as operation Eagle Claw, which failed, resulting in the deaths of eight American servicemen and the destruction of two helicopters. Six American diplomats who had evaded capture were eventually rescued by a joint CIA-Canadian effort in January 1980. The remaining hostages were released into U.S. custody just minutes after the new U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, was sworn into office on January 21, 1980. Many analysts cite the Iranian hostage crisis as a major factor in Carter’s downfall and his landslide loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. At the same time the oil crisis, high interest rates and a poor economy also figured significantly in Carter’s loss.

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In Iran the crisis strengthened the prestige and power of Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs who opposed any normalization of relations with the U.S. For Kissinger the Iranian hostage crisis was another case where U.S. credibility was at stake and injured the ability of the country to elicit the trust and support of other nations. Strong U.S. support for the Shah had been a pillar of the Nixon-Kissinger policy and it had now been entirely washed away. The ensuing failure of the Carter Administration to free the hostages held in Iran and the abortive hostage rescue mission in no small part figured in Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.

The 1980 Election and the Reagan Presidency During the 1980 Republican convention Kissinger became involved in a set of negotiations that might have restructured the American presidency and returned him to power as he long sought. Ronald Reagan was clearly destined to be the Republican nominee and was thinking about asking Ford to join the ticket as Vice President—which they saw as the “dream team.” Ford initially rejected the idea but agreed to reconsider his position of taking the vice presidency if it came with some serious responsibilities and a formula for power sharing. Reagan had made up his mind that he wanted Ford and asked for Kissinger’s help in persuading Ford. There were, however, still personal and policy differences between Kissinger and Reagan’s people who had not forgiven the battles of the 1976 campaign when Kissinger was supporting Rockefeller. In spite of these differences, there was an appeal for all Republicans to close ranks and bringing Kissinger into the fold was part of this. To get Ford to sign on with Reagan, Kissinger appealed to his patriotism, even though he had doubts as to whether the proposed Reagan-Ford power-sharing arrangement would actually work. The major sticking point in the proposed Reagan-Ford arrangement was Kissinger. Ford refused to accept the nomination unless Kissinger was guaranteed a top post in the government and Reagan refused—he did not like Kissinger, did not trust him, and thought that he was too soft on the Soviets. It didn’t help things that Richard Allen was now serving as Reagan’s chief foreign policy adviser. Allen had served as Kissinger’s first deputy at the NSC in 1969, at Nixon’s direction, and was badly treated there and driven out in less than a year. Allen made it his mission to ensure Kissinger would have no role in the Reagan Administration. Without Kissinger back as Secretary of State Ford refused to join the ticket and that was the end of it.10

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With the Ford idea out of the way Reagan called on George H.W. Bush who was honored to accept the invitation and joined the ticket as vice president. Bush too had issues with Kissinger, including his poor treatment by Kissinger when he was Secretary of State and Bush had served under him both as U.N. ambassador and as ambassador to China.11 The 1980 presidential election saw Reagan defeat Carter in a landslide and following the election Reagan appointed Al Haig as his Secretary of State. Despite their long history together through the Nixon and Ford years, Haig kept Kissinger at a distance as they remained suspicious of each other and Kissinger still remained convinced that Haig had a “shallow mind.” Haig’s tenure as Secretary of State was fairly short and was often characterized by his clashes with the Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger. Haig, who repeatedly had difficulty with various members of the Reagan administration during his year-and-a-half in office, resigned in June 1982 and was succeeded by George Shultz, who Kissinger liked and admired. Kissinger sang his praises in public. In private, however, Kissinger could not help himself from denigrating Shultz particularly on the subject of the Middle East. For all his brilliance, Kissinger could not seem to grasp the idea that his private comments and intimate insults would soon make it around Washington like wildfire. He did it again and again, it inevitable it would come back to haunt him, as it did when Shultz heard them. Shultz became furious with Kissinger and cut off his courtesy briefings, largely locking him out of the policy circle. In terms of policy Kissinger found problems coming from the right, which had always been critical of his approach to arms control, which sought to limit the number of missiles rather than reducing the number of nuclear warheads. Surprisingly the Soviets now called for real reductions in nuclear arms, leading to an agreement, termed the “zero option” which called for the removal of all medium-range missiles from Europe. Kissinger had supported missile deployment in Europe since the 1950s and saw them as assuring NATO’s ability to deter a major Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Kissinger also had major problems with the Reagan approach to dealing with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev when Reagan appeared to accept the Soviet vision of eliminating all nuclear weapons expressed at the Reykjavik summit in 1986. Even though Reagan came from the conservative far right, he showed an unexpected willingness to embrace the idea that Gorbachev was suggesting an actual end to the Cold War along with major changes in Soviet foreign policy that went well beyond anything Kissinger had envisioned.

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For Kissinger this presented a quagmire as the far right was now firmly in charge of the Republican party, they were his strongest critics, just as the Left and his academic colleagues had been critical of him years before. As always, Kissinger attempted to win over his critics, with a pivot to the right this time, but the hard-core conservatives who had been his foes since the early days of détente could not easily be won over. Reagan’s core conservatives wanted nothing to do with the “internationalist” line Kissinger had been espousing for years and little use for the Eastern establishment leaders like the Rockefellers, who were his patrons and associates. For the right the Council on Foreign Relations, Rockefeller, and the others were seen as “Kissinger baggage” and despite his best efforts to dramatically change his tune, he largely failed.12 Reagan’s team kept Kissinger away for most of their administration, and his only assignment during Reagan’s eight years in office was to head up a bipartisan commission that Reagan appointed in 1983 dealing with Central America. The Kissinger Commission as it became known was largely started to provide political cover for a $110 million aid package for El Salvador and the Reagan administration’s support for the contra rebels that were fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. While he was not thrilled with the task, it was the only thing the Reagan people gave him, and he took it on as a last-ditch effort to again connect with the administration. Even though the commission was a bipartisan effort, Kissinger’s critics were still there. The Left called this out as coming from “the man who gave us the bombing of Cambodia” and, as one Congressman put it, this was now giving the U.S. a rationale for involvement in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The Right also was critical, and one conservative pointed to Kissinger’s track record of losing countries. On balance, however, there was mainstream consensus that recalling Kissinger to duty here was a good idea, and even some Democrats noted that unlike when he was in power, Kissinger was willing to be conciliatory and build consensus. On a trip to Central America the Kissinger commission found that the U.S, was providing aid in El Salvador to an army linked with right-wing death squads. A majority of the commission opposed further aid to the death-squads, the contras and other gross human rights abuses there. In Nicaragua they found that the Sandinista regime the U.S. was trying to overthrow might not be linked to Moscow, although Kissinger still viewed this as part of a larger East–West global competition. Kissinger and the other commission members were not aware of the major covert program under way by the CIA supporting the contra rebels in Nicaragua, which led to the largest scandal of the Reagan administration and criminal conviction of several top administration officials. The Iran

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Contra Affair, as it was known, began with senior Reagan administration officials secretly facilitating the sale of arms to Iran, which was then subject to an arms embargo in the hope they would in turn fund the contras in Nicaragua, and at the same time release several U.S. hostages. Officially these arms shipments were justified as part of an operation to free seven American hostages U.S. hostages being held in by Hezbollah in Lebanon.13 Following several investigations, the sale of weapons to Iran was not deemed a criminal offense but charges were brought against five individuals for their support of the contras which were later dropped because the administration refused to declassify relevant documents for trial. In the end, fourteen Reagan administration officials were indicted, including secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, and the rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned by President George H.W. Bush, who had been Vice President at the time of the affair and claimed to have known nothing about the covert CIA program.14 The Kissinger Commission finally issued what was a consensus report endorsing the Reagan administration’s policy and supporting an immediate request for $400 million in military aid and a longer term $8 billion Marshall Plan for Central America. This report contained at least a tacit endorsement of the contra resistance in Nicaragua and made military aid to El Salvador conditional on ending support to the right-wing death squads. Reagan praised the report and asked Congress for the immediate military and humanitarian aid, although the larger $8-billion request was never taken seriously in either the White House or Congress. The lengthy Kissinger Commission report itself went mostly unread. It remained Kissinger’s one and only official task for the eight years of the Reagan Administration.

The 1988 Election and the George H.W. Bush Presidency While Vice President George H.W. Bush was the likely candidate for the 1988 Republican nomination, two other potential candidates were in the mix that might have brought Kissinger back into government, including Senator Robert Dole and Congressman Jack Kemp. Both of these individuals had good conservative credentials but could have used Kissinger’s foreign policy expertise and he had failed to offend either of them. Bush, on the other hand, had considerable foreign policy expertise although he was not seen as a serious conservative, and of even greater importance did not like Kissinger. Bush went on to win not only the Republican nomination but also the presidency in the 1988 general election defeating Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. In an aggressive campaign, Bush

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concentrated on the economy and, continuing Reagan’s policies, attacked Dukakis as an elitist “Massachusetts liberal.” No candidate since 1988 has managed to equal or surpass Bush’s share of the electoral or popular vote, and in the election, Dukakis won 45.6 percent of the popular vote and carried only ten states. Once again Kissinger fell victim to his past when as Secretary of State, he had treated Bush badly as U.N. Ambassador and withheld important information from him. In one important meeting with Kissinger, Bush stormed out of the room declaring: “I don’t have to take this shit.” In both the U.N. post as well as U.S. ambassador to China, Kissinger had cut Bush entirely out of policy making, and Bush was not inclined to bring Kissinger into his new administration. Adding insult to injury, not only did Bush refuse to offer Kissinger a job in his new administration, he hired two of Kissinger’s top aides away from the Kissinger Associates firm, including Lawrence Eagleburger who was made Deputy Secretary of State and Brent Scowcroft who became National Security Advisor. At least this gave Kissinger some access to two key officials he knew and trusted. For Secretary of State Bush appointed fellow Texan James Baker who shared his pragmatic view of the world and had no use for “the vision thing” they dismissively attributed to Kissinger. Grand geostrategic visions were just not their sort of thing. In terms of future policy Kissinger began to float a concept similar to the plan he devised for the 1972 Moscow summit and the Helsinki summit in 1975. Under this plan a “framework of accommodation” would quietly be reached with the Soviets who would in turn permit some liberalization in Eastern Europe in exchange for an agreement not to exploit these in any way that would threaten Soviet security. Not surprisingly Kissinger suggested that he be the secret envoy to Moscow to present this plan. Once again this was a masterpiece of Kissinger diplomacy based on his themes of spheres-of-influence and balance-ofpower relationships with the Soviet Union. Those opposed to this concept referred to it as “Yalta II.” Kissinger first broached the concept in December 1988 to Bush (as President-Elect) along with Scowcroft and Baker where he stressed that it would be a major step for the Bush Presidency in ending the Cold War. Bush expressed some interest in the idea and authorized Kissinger to explore the concept with Soviet Premier Gorbachev, which he did in January 1989 just a few days before the Bush inauguration. Gorbachev wanted to know if there was some “hidden meaning” here and Kissinger assured him that there was not, and Dobrynin, Kissinger’s old back-channel partner, was once again called upon to assist in further talks with the U.S. if needed.

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Even though Bush had initially liked the idea, Baker did not, and the State Department bureaucracy recoiled at the thought of Kissinger once again handling diplomacy himself. The bureaucrats at state also pointed to the fact that events in Eastern Europe were moving rapidly in this direction already and as one Soviet expert noted: “Why buy what history is giving you for free?” Apart from their intense dislike of Kissinger, they had a good point, as the Cold War was coming to an end and the need for what they saw as the Yalta II scheme was no longer necessary. By February 1989 the State Department had been leaking Kissinger’s plan with some like Kissinger’s nemesis Brzezinski writing op-eds in the Washington Post that this was indeed a new Yalta. Baker himself gave an interview to the New York Times where he talked about Kissinger’s plan stating “I think it’s worthy of consideration because it’s a novel approach” but then went on to point out that it just wasn’t necessary as the trends in Eastern Europe were moving in a favorable direction “so why not let the process move forward for the time being?”15 Kissinger felt angry and betrayed by Baker, writing a defense of his proposal in a newspaper column that was expressly critical of Baker and calling Baker’s view of Eastern Europe flawed because “once there is anarchy and the tanks roll, it is too late for diplomacy.”16 Kissinger’s plan was also seriously flawed since it assumed that both the U.S. and the Soviets had the ability to negotiate serious matters of state affecting their allies which was increasingly not the case. Ultimately Baker was right, as the Eastern European states got their freedom from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact without any concessions from the West—the Soviet Union collapsed in a way Kissinger never anticipated. Kissinger’s plan might have had the opposite effect of preserving the Warsaw Pact, at least for a while, when the forces of history led to its demise. After this exchange Kissinger’s relations with Bush and Baker were decidedly chilly and they never again involved him in any serious policy discussions. Apart from a few occasional talks and courtesy visits Kissinger remained on the outside and never again reentered government in any policy-making or major advisory capacity. He has had the unique honor of one-on-one visits with every president since he left office, although none have ever engaged him on a serious mission or task.

Kissinger Associates In July 1982, Kissinger realized that he did not feel like writing the third volume of his memoirs at the time, and that Ronald Reagan was not going to make him Secretary of State again. He was not a lawyer or a banker, so

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the option of going to a major law firm or financial house was not open to him. Instead he founded the consulting firm that bears his name, Kissinger Associates, which would provide a combination of strategic advice, foreign affairs insight, good connections, and access that came with his name—all at a hefty price. Kissinger set himself up as a “statesman for hire,” providing his foreign policy expertise to corporations and others as a national security adviser to their chairmen and top executives. Unlike many in Washington, he decided that he would never lobby the U.S. government on behalf of any client. He sometimes travelled internationally with a client to open doors and see world leaders who he knew. He was selling his own insight and expertise on foreign policy.17 Taking a $350,000 loan from Goldman Sachs and others, Kissinger opened one office on Park Avenue in New York City and another in Washington, D.C. on K Street. He brought on his former deputy and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft as vice chairman of the board and manager of the Washington office. In 1984 Kissinger brought on another long-time colleague, Lawrence Eagleburger, who had been Under Secretary of State, and made him president of the firm while Kissinger retained the office of chairman.18 By 1987 the annual revenues of Kissinger Associates reached $5 million and almost $10 million by 1990. Clearly their services were in demand. Even though both Scowcroft and Eagleburger left the firm to rejoin the government by 1989, Kissinger continued to hire a highly talented group of economists and foreign policy experts to staff the organization. By the early 1990s, Kissinger Associates had signed up more than two dozen major corporate clients, although the actual client list remained a closely guarded secret. Those who have combed the public filings of major corporations have found that the list includes a long list of prominent U.S. companies as well as several foreign ones. The firm reflected Kissinger’s secretive style. It was not listed in the telephone directory and the New York office had no identification in the building directory or even on the door to their suite. As he had when he went to the NSC, Kissinger treated the staff with both a low level of terror as well as excitement about new projects and travel. They became used to his manner, and at times he would show some good humor and even complement one of them. By and large the staff learned to cope with him.19 Hiring Kissinger required an annual retainer of $200,000 and if any additional projects were involved the cost increased by another $100,000 per month, plus expenses. For this fee corporate client received oral briefings on world events by Kissinger two or three times a year and nothing was put on paper—Kissinger did not want to see his thoughts Xeroxed and passed

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around. Each of the briefings were tailored to the client’s specific interests and what might be expected in the near and longer-terms. Kissinger and his key staff were also available for telephone consultations when needed. Apart from his famous name, Kissinger was able to provide cover for senior executives making some risky decisions, who could later tell their boards they knew they would not look negligent if they’d discussed the situation with Henry beforehand. Given the size of the decisions involved, what they were paying Kissinger was often money well spent. Kissinger disliked being characterized as a glorified fixer, although much of his time was taken up with cutting through red tape and bureaucratic problems that his clients faced in foreign countries. He also tried to refuse any overt “door opening” but a key part of the business was to make introductions and call upon friends he had for help. It couldn’t be avoided and became less of a problem the longer that he was out of public office. Aside from the consulting work at Kissinger Associates he served on a number of corporate boards including American Express, Macy’s, Union Pacific, Continental Grain, CBS, Revlon, and the advisory committees for Chase Manhattan and AIG. Each of these paid him at least $50,000 a year. In addition, Kissinger gave as many as one hundred speeches a year, about half of them for free and others for at least $30,000 each. For some years his annual income reached $8 million, which was far better than what a return to Harvard would have paid.

Kissinger’s Twilight By the 1990s Kissinger had long given up any thought of returning to government and accepted the fact that no current or future president would likely want him back. In 1993, at the age of seventy he still had a great deal of energy, and his life was taken up with the consulting and speaking work, media appearances, as well as many dinner parties in Manhattan society and weekends at his Kent estate with Nancy. Life had taken on a balance of business, media stardom, and jet-set travel that he now actually enjoyed. The only thing missing from Kissinger’s life now was that, even though he was professionally and socially active, much of this was more show than substance. Most of the friends now were rich socialites—who he once referred to as “the bratty rich.” He lacked the intellectual connections that he had at Harvard and in the government. In business he gained considerable wealth, but it was not the statecraft that he enjoyed during his years in the White House. As a young man Kissinger had achieved considerable success in academia and leaving the academic life for government achieved great

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triumphs in Washington and around the world. When Kissinger left government in 1977 at the relatively young age of fifty-four, he found media stardom, business success and membership in New York’s jet-set society. He has done so with a rare mixture of brilliance, an enormous ego, in addition to an abrasive personality combined with insecurity and a secretive way of doing business. All told this has made him a truly historical American.

Notes 1. Kissinger’s belief that commercial air travel was a hassle and far too much of a humiliation for a man of his stature became a subject of amusement among his friends. Kissinger made sure that any speaking or consulting deals included transportation by private plane. 2. There had been bad blood between Kissinger and Brzezinski for years, since their days at Harvard. Kissinger saw this action by Brzezinski as vindictive, and then hired the head of his secret service team and several others as a private guard force with his own funds. 3. At the same time, he was easily offended by the slightest perceived insults, such as when Cyrus Vance, his successor at State, escorted him to the public elevator at the State Department instead of the private one Kissinger had installed when he was there. See Marvin Kalb, “What Will Henry do for an Encore,” New York Times Magazine, April 16, 1978. 4. Another version of this story is that, under Harvard’s rules, after two years absence he would not have been able to return to this chair in the Government Department, and a new search and decision would need to be made—which was blocked by members of the Department who disliked him. In any event, Kissinger was not interested in returning to a full-time teaching post at Harvard. There was some discussion of his taking a position at Columbia, which would have kept him in New York, but he did not pursue this. 5. Shawcross, Sideshow. The feud between Kissinger and Shawcross over the bombing in Cambodia and Vietnam went on for years. Shawcross believed that the U.S. was largely responsible for dragging Cambodia into the Vietnam conflict and the horrible events that followed. Kissinger and Nixon did not see themselves as responsible for the takeover by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and what followed. This was not the only book critical of Kissinger. See Hersh, Price of Power, which was also highly critical of Kissinger’s first four years as National Security Advisor. 6. Henry A. Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999). Of interest in this third volume of Kissinger’s memoirs are the intimate and candid portraits of world leaders, from Mao Zedong to Leonid Brezhnev, as well as a galaxy of European, Middle Eastern, Asian, Latin American, and African leaders. 7. Kissinger insisted that NBC edit out this exchange and Frost demanded it be included. NBC yielded to Frost’s demand and kept it in the broadcast. This action significantly influenced Kissinger’s decision to end his contract with NBC. 8. Kissinger made two calls to see Vance on the matter and also spoke with Brzezinski who suggested he speak directly to Carter—which he did. Carter refused to let the Shah into the U.S., which Kissinger saw as morally wrong and as being treated like a “Flying Dutchman looking for a port of call.” 9. After his overthrow in 1979 the Shah was admitted to the U.S. for cancer treatment. Iran demanded he be returned to stand trial for crimes against Iranian citizens. Following treatment the Shah left the U.S. in December 1979 and was granted asylum in Egypt, where he died from complications of cancer in July 1980. Iran saw the decision to grant him even temporary asylum as American complicity in those atrocities. The Iranian demands were rejected by the U.S., while the U.S. saw the embassy and hostage-taking as an

150  •  Henry Kissinger egregious violation of the principles of international law, which granted diplomats immunity from arrest and made diplomatic compounds inviolable. See Gary Sick, October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1991). 10. In a meeting Reagan told Ford: “I would use him a lot, but not as Secretary of State. I’ve been all over the country the last several years, and Kissinger carries a lot of baggage. I couldn’t accept that. My own people, in fact, won’t accept it.” (Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 720). 11. See William Hyland, Mortal Rivals (New York: Random House, 1987). 12. Kissinger made some attempt to defray this conservative opposition in speeches where he suggested that the U.S. should now focus more on the political difference with the Soviets and less on arms control. See Hyland, Mortal Rivals; Nessen, It Sure Looks Different From the Inside; and Jules Witcover, Marathon (New York: Viking, 1977). 13. The plan was for Israel to ship weapons to Iran, and then the U.S. would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the hostages. However, the secret arms sales to Iran began in 1981, before the first hostage was taken in Lebanon, ruling out the “arms for hostages” explanation of the Reagan administration. This was later complicated when Lt. Col. Oliver North of the NSC, diverted proceeds from the Iranian weapon sales to fund the contras against the socialist government of Nicaragua in late 1985. See Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1988). 14. It seems strange that George H.W. Bush, who had previously served as CIA Director, would claim that he knew nothing about this covert CIA program and was not cleared or “read on” to the program as would normally be the case. In any case, this is what he claimed. 15. Thomas Friedman, “Baker, Outlining World Views, Assesses Plan for Soviet Bloc,” New York Times, March 28, 1989, and Henry A. Kissinger, “Reversing Yalta,” Washington Post, April 16, 1989. 16. James Baker, interview with Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 28, 1989. 17. See Leslie Gelb, “Kissinger Means Business,” New York Times Magazine, April 20, 1986, and Jeff Gerth and Sarah Bartlett, “Kissinger and Friends and Revolving Doors,” New York Times, April 30, 1989. 18. Many credit Eagleburger, who was a likeable individual, for turning the firm into a major enterprise. Eagleburger left the firm in 1988 to join the George H.W. Bush administration. Scowcroft also left the firm in 1989 to join the government as well as National Security Advisor. 19. As one member of staff noted: “There was a sense of indulgence at times, as if they were dealing with an exceedingly gifted but temperamental child. There was also a deep sense of loyalty, which seemed to come more from respect, even affection, than from fear” (Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography, p. 735).

Epilogue On the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy

While Kissinger, now in his mid-nineties, remains in the background and others have taken on the roles of National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, his wealth of ideas, writings and policies stand as a constant landmark to the ongoing process of U.S. foreign policy making.

Reality and Morality in Foreign Policy From his earliest days at Harvard Kissinger was a firm believer in realpolitik, namely a foreign policy based firmly on the political realities of the time and not some idealized concept of a world that was to be. This was not a popular concept immediately following World War II when he was criticized by his Harvard colleagues and others for clinging to the nineteenth century views of Castlereagh, Metternich, and Bismarck, which were the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Academics and policy makers of the post-World War II era were looking to a new world order and a United Nations that would put aside conflict and nuclear weapons for a better future for all. Kissinger knew better, arguing for policies, strategies, and weapons that were applicable for the real-world problems facing the nation. Kissinger had a fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature and always thought that power was the ultimate key in resolving international problems. In large part he rejected what he saw as idealistic arguments based on morality, justice, and humanity rights and thought national interests could best

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be protected by projecting power and credibility. For him the goal of statecraft was found in a balance of power with major adversaries, such as the Soviet Union. The concept of reality vs. idealism was not new or unique to Kissinger, and for the U.S. can be traced back to the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton at the time of the nation’s founding, with Jefferson seeing the nation’s role as an idealistic one and Hamilton being the advocate of realpolitik in his time.1 Following the American revolution the Jeffersonian view of democracy largely prevailed, and it was easy for the young nation to maintain an isolationist stance separated from Europe and Asia by two large oceans. This liberal, idealistic notion of America’s role in the world prevailed even after World War I when Woodrow Wilson proclaimed his desire to “make the world safe for democracy” and looked to new legal and moral institutions such as the League of Nations to solve the world’s problems. Wilson’s idealism and what transpired in Europe after World War I demonstrated to Kissinger that this approach was wrong, as the Kissinger family fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and witnessed this failure first-hand. After World War II Kissinger was also critical of president Franklin Roosevelt who he thought failed to recognize the reality of the Soviet threat and was overly enthusiastic about idealistic and moral values for the U.S. Moreover Kissinger saw this as a fundamental flaw in the national character and wrote that “Americans … are comfortable with an idealistic tradition that espoused great causes, such as making the world safe for democracy, or human rights.”2 Kissinger did not see most Americans as ready to deal with the reality of imperfect alliances and maintaining an essential balance of power. Seeking moral perfection rather than dealing with messy reality led to national policy that went back and forth from isolation to intervention, such as in World War I and Vietnam, and which then caused the nation to later step back from the chaos that resulted from these conflicts.3 Central to Kissinger’s approach to reality as he saw it were the use of military force and displays of power—bombings, invasions, clandestine operations, aircraft carriers and other displays of might. Some of his critics, including other realists who also look to economic factors and ways of maintaining political stability see this as an over-­ emphasis on military force. Kissinger’s greatest successes in diplomacy, such as in China and the Middle East came where threats of force were minimal or non-existent, and his biggest failures, such as in Vietnam and Cambodia were ones where significant force was involved.4 Another key tenet of Kissinger’s realism approach was his constant appeal to “credibility” and the need to show allies that the U.S. would not

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abandon its commitments to them. In Vietnam, for example, the reality which Kissinger saw early on was that the war was not winnable and was not worth winning. Even as Saigon was falling in 1975 Kissinger sought to maintain some semblance of American credibility as the South Vietnamese government collapsed. Kissinger’s brand of power-oriented realism has also been criticized for a lack of support for democratic forces and human rights movements in several authoritarian countries. On a personal level he appears to have been more comfortable dealing with the often-despotic rulers of the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Chile, Cuba, Egypt and Syria than the more democratic nations such as Israel and in Western Europe. Both in office and later he refused to get involved with what he saw as moral crusades in the U.S. pressing for domestic reforms in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, once stating “Why is it our business how they govern themselves?” Presumably he had a different view of Nazi Germany that he fled as a youngster. This type of realism based on power and focus on national interests was also seen as overly dismissive of morality. Kissinger’s greatest critics still point to the secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia; the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam; destabilization in Chile and other brutal actions as antithetical to what many American see as basic to foreign policy. Lacking here is any respect for human rights, international law, democracy and other idealistic values. In every case his metric was what did the outcome mean for the U.S., not what it did for some other population. Would some U.S. action enhance or detract from the credibility of America as seen by our allies who were essential in the larger global struggle? Clearly this failed miserably in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and Iran. Since Kissinger left office in 1977, all subsequent administrations have faced similar problems and have had to make hard choices between a foreign policy based on idealism or realism. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union left the bipolar world that troubled Kissinger for much of his career in the past, but new problems have arisen around the globe. The post-9/11 world saw the George W. Bush administration dealing with a new set of problems in the Middle East dominated by the rise of Iran and Muslim terrorist organizations leading to U.S. involvement in what many see as idealistic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.5 In both cases the nation became engaged in wars based on faulty or misstated intelligence for reasons that had no serious impact on U.S. national security. The Obama administration inherited the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts from Bush but had no serious plan for ending them. Under considerable pressure from the Pentagon to continue these struggles Obama supported ongoing military efforts in both places for another eight years but managed

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to significantly reduce U.S. force levels and casualties in both conflicts. In other foreign policy areas Obama largely rejected the Kissinger worldview, often pushing a human rights narrative as a basic tenet of foreign policy.6 Key accomplishments for Obama include cooperation with allies and efforts such as the 2015 Paris Agreement on global climate change, a nuclear deal with Iran to halt the Iranian nuclear weapons program, and normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba—none of which Kissinger would have supported. Conservatives, including senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham accused Obama of being timid and ineffectual in wielding ­American influence while some liberals, such as former president Carter accused Obama of cynicism and heavy-handedness, charging that he pursued imperialistic policies like those of his predecessor, George W. Bush. The Obama foreign policy was conducted through the bureaucratic apparatus of the State Department, with Secretaries Hillary Clinton and John Kerry playing notable roles. In a tour of African nations, for example, Clinton met with rape survivors and announced a $17 million plan for addressing sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Obama Administration issued numerous statements addressing gender-­ based violence and other human rights abuses with the goal of improving the status of women worldwide hoping to influence the domestic policies in several foreign nations. The Trump Administration which took office in January 2017 tried to shift to a new vision of reality in American foreign policy as they saw it, rejecting what they saw as Obama’s “globalism” and years of putting what Trump claimed were the interests of other nations ahead of ­America’s. Trump’s statements during the 2016 campaign and after reflect what Kissinger might have said if he were in government, but lack the nuance and serious understanding of many world situations that Kissinger had. Trump often defines American global interests in economic terms, reflecting his business background, but also looked to the U.S. roles as a peacekeeper, and as a provider of a nuclear deterrent against adversaries like North Korea. Most foreign policy issues are reduced to questions of economic benefit to the U.S. Trump shared Kissinger’s view of the need for a strong military and strongly criticized Obama for failing to maintain the needed strength, stating that “our military is a disaster,” and described the U.S. armed forces as “depleted and in horrible shape.” Trump sought to provide strong diplomacy in an effort to restore “respect” for the U.S. around the world where he chastised Obama for being an apologist for America, stating, “We Americans are laughed at around the world for losing a hundred and fifty billion dollars year after year, for defending wealthy nations for nothing, nations that would be wiped off the face of the earth in about 15 minutes if it weren’t for us. Our ‘allies’ are making billions screwing us.”7

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The concept of “recognizing reality” has become a Trump hallmark, such as in the Middle East where he became the first president to honor the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act and recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. Embassy there as the Act required. Looking at the growing problem of nuclear weapons in North Korea he took a widely criticized action in meeting with that nation’s leader in a summit that he hoped would lead to denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, much in the way Kissinger had engineered Nixon’s visit to China.

The Kissinger Legacy No National Security Advisor or Secretary of State can come near matching Kissinger’s voluminous writings, and few can match his sheer brilliance and ability to see the relationship between different events and their consequences.8 His supporters view him as being intellectually honest where his critics see him as being deceitful and using his brilliance to manipulate those around him. Kissinger did, however, always tried to consider various ideas and strove to surround himself with bright people who did not always share his political philosophy; and he challenged them relentlessly to produce the very best they could. He wanted those who could withstand his temper to challenge him as well. Almost none on the staff produced papers that were focused entirely on what they thought Kissinger wanted to hear. Critics of the Kissinger approach have argued whether he was a tactician rather than a brilliant strategist, plotting steps for each situation rather than actually having a “grand vision.”9 In fact he was both, and had the ability to consider small details as well as major considerations to achieve his ends. As he considered each situation an overriding concern was how any solution would fit in with historic forces and attempted to craft geostrategic solutions that would endure over time, whether it was with the Soviets, the Middle East, or China. There is no question that Kissinger’s style and philosophy stem from his early years in what became Nazi Germany and what he saw as the need for stability. This was a world that did not engender trust, and it gave him an inherently pessimistic view of human nature that was fundamental to his idea of realpolitik. For Kissinger power was far more important than righteousness in determining the world order, and nations needed to act on their own national interests rather than on the basis of ideology and some concept of moral justice. Throughout his life Kissinger was always suspicious of people’s goodness and looked to power rather than righteousness in resolving foreign affairs, firmly believing that nations that operated on the basis of their own interests were less dangerous and easier to deal with than those that worked on the basis of ideology or their perceptions of moral justice.

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A major factor in how Kissinger operated was his unique personality, which combined a basic insecurity with a significant arrogance that likely came from his childhood in Germany where he was far smarter than those around him but not allowed to excel. This did not end when he was at Harvard and felt that he was smarter than any of those around him and was not reluctant to let them know. Yet according to some he was even paranoid about adversaries—both real and imagined and was exceedingly sensitive to personal slights no matter how small. His insecurity led him to be secretive and often deceitful in dealing with policy matters, although this behavior can also be linked to the policies he pursued. If he had sought an idealistic or moral approach it would have been far easier to do so openly. Since he looked for ambiguous compromises, power plays, and covert operations, secrecy and deception were essential to his mode of operation. He also had a realistic fear that much of what he was promoting would not have been popular with either Congress or the American public. Kissinger was not alone here, and much of this reflected Nixon’s own character and desire for secrecy, deceit, and distrust for the established bureaucracy and democratic values, preferring to plot in private and fearful of leaks. There was also a practical aspect of Kissinger and Nixon cutting the bureaucracy out of the action in many cases, as they believed that the linkages and deals that they wanted to make could only be done through back-channel negotiations and could not be made the subject of the normal policy process. Whether China, Vietnam or the Middle East, Kissinger felt a need to keep the State Department in the dark or he believed nothing could have been accomplished. At the same time that he achieved some remarkable successes, this approach was also at a cost, as this generated an atmosphere of distrust that undermined bureaucratic support that would be needed in the future. It ultimately led to a backlash. On balance Kissinger’s wit, charm, and intelligence led to success, even though he developed a reputation for duplicity.10 Morton Halperin, one of Kissinger’s first aides who later sued him over the FBI wiretaps, noted: “In deciding whether to say something, truth had little bearing.” Kissinger’s personal brand of diplomacy combined his charm along with flattery, seduction, and duplicity. In the Middle East this was at the heart of his shuttle diplomacy that worked with the leaders of Egypt, Syria, and Israel.11 It remains to be seen how Kissinger will ultimately be seen in history. Certainly the concept of peace and world order he promoted places him with the great American statesmen of the past century such as George Marshall and Dean Acheson. He is clearly the leading U.S. negotiator of the past half-century and the leading foreign policy intellectual of the era. His critics will continue to claim that for all his brilliance and understanding

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of foreign affairs he lacked a similar understanding of American values and mores. Others may have put honor above intrigue and idealism over national interest and did not appreciate the utility of secrecy over an open dialogue in the decision-making process.12 Kissinger came into government at a particularly difficult time for U.S. foreign policy, as the nation was recoiling from a poorly conceived involvement in Vietnam and when the cost of a growing strategic competition with the Soviet Union was highly unpopular. The American people were not interested in costly new weapons or involvement in more third world conflict. Kissinger brought in détente, which reduced strategic competition with the Soviets, and at the same time devised a set of linkages which he hoped would provide leverage in other situations such as Vietnam and the Middle East. Looking back, he later claimed that “we perhaps deserve some credit for holding together the sinews of America at a time of fundamental collapse.”13 The basic lines of Kissinger’s policy were followed by administrations of both parties for the next two decades, combining cooperation and containment of the Soviet Union while the internal problems of the Soviet system led to its ultimate demise. The step-by-step process he initiated in the Middle East led to peace agreements between Israel, Egypt and J­ ordan with stability in other regional areas as well. Relations with China improved, and a new global balance was achieved. Kissinger placed great emphasis on realism and national interests but did not see this as a total rejection of moral values. For him it was the only way to achieve a stable world order, which was the ultimate moral imperative in a nuclear world, and one where Soviet expansionism and the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and the Western Hemisphere needed to be stopped. At the same time his brand of realpolitik was not well suited for an open and democratic society which became the objective of American leaders that were to come. Future leaders have had to consider whether their actions that were moral and noble were sufficient to rally a population that is isolationist by nature. For Kissinger the idealistic American spirit was always a weakness that often inhibited actions needed to maintain order in an otherwise messy world. Quite possibly he was correct, and in the years following his service the nation has paid a price for this spirit, when seeking to defend values rather than national interests. The greatest success of the modern era is that democracy triumphed over communism, and this was at least partly the result of a world order Kissinger helped to create. At the same time this success was also due to the values that were offered by the system of democratic capitalism were more attractive than the alternative, and foreign policy reflected the ideals of the people.

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Notes 1. Jefferson wrote at the time, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against any form of tyranny over the mind of man.” For his part Hamilton wrote, “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.” 2. Henry Kissinger, “False Dreams of a New World Order,” Washington Post, February 26, 1991. 3. Looking back, Kissinger wrote “Emotional slogans, unleavened by a concept of the national interest, had caused us to oscillate between excesses of isolation and overextension.” The solution he saw to moderate this was “by making judgments according to some more permanent conception of national interest.” Henry A. Kissinger, “False Dreams of a New World Order,” Washington Post, February 26, 1991. 4. It is also the case that when Kissinger entered the government in 1969 and throughout the 1970s the political will in post-Vietnam America for the use of military force was very low. As both Presidents Nixon and Ford noted, the nation was just not interested in any more wars then. 5. As of this writing the war in Afghanistan is entering its eighteenth year with no end in sight, and no concept of what “winning” would even look like. 6. See Michelle Bentley and Jack Holland (eds), The Obama Doctrine: A Legacy of Continuity in US Foreign Policy? (New York: Routledge, 2016); Martin S. Indyk, Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings, 2012); and James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Penguin, 2012). 7. Thomas Wright, “Trump’s 19th Century Foreign Policy.” Politico (January 20, 2016). Trump has called for allied countries, including Germany, Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea to help in protecting their nations. Trump has been particularly critical of NATO members who have failed to honor their funding commitments for many years and left the financial burden of European defense largely to the U.S. 8. If the publications of all who have held these two key posts are collected the list doesn’t match Kissinger’s alone. It is highly unlikely this record will ever be broken. 9. Leslie Gelb, never a Kissinger fan, wrote that he was a “Don Juan of international diplomacy, romancing and blundering his way through perilous affairs, to win out in the end.” Leslie Gelb, “The Kissinger Legacy,” New York Times, October 31, 1976. See also, Safire, Before the Fall. 10. James Schlesinger, Kissinger’s Harvard classmate and longtime nemesis noted: “Henry enjoys the complexity of deviousness … other people when they lie look ashamed. Henry does it with style, as if were an arabesque.” 11. Contributing to success, particularly in the Middle East, is a national character where people tend to lie to each other about anything and everything. 12. Lawrence Eagleburger, a longtime colleague, put it: “Henry is a balance-of-power thinker … he deeply believes in stability. These kinds of objectives are antithetical to the American experience. Americans tend to want to pursue a set of moral principles. Henry does not have an intrinsic feel for the American political system, and he does not start with the same basic values and assumptions.” 13. Gelb, “The Kissinger Legacy,” New York Times, October 31, 1976.

part

II

Documents

1 Nobel Peace Prize 1973 Acceptance Speech 2 Bipartisan Objectives for American Foreign Policy 3 Between the Old Left and the New Right 4 Military Policy and Defense of the “Grey Areas” 5 Reflections on Containment 6 The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction 7 Eulogy for Senator John McCain

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DOCUMENT

1

Nobel Peace Prize 1973 Acceptance Speech

From the outset of the administration of President Richard Nixon Henry Kissinger was the National Security Advisor to President Nixon and devoted enormous time and energy to negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. Most of Kissinger’s efforts here involved secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese Premier Le Duc Tho conducted in Paris and elsewhere. Their efforts ultimately resulted in an agreement under which U.S. forces withdrew from South Vietnam and the war came to an end. For their effort both Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. That same year Kissinger also became U.S. Secretary of State, retaining his additional post as Presidential National Security Adviser. In his letter of November 2, 1973 to the Nobel Committee, Henry Kissinger expresses his deep sense of this obligation, writing that “I am deeply moved by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, which I regard as the highest honor one could hope to achieve in the pursuit of peace on this earth. When I consider the list of those who have been so honored before me, I can only accept this award with humility… I greatly regret that because of the press of business in a world beset by recurrent crisis I shall be unable to come to Oslo on December 10 for the award ceremony. I have accordingly designated Ambassador Byrne to represent me on that occasion.”1

The Nobel Peace Prize is as much an award to a purpose as to a person. More than the achievement of peace, it symbolizes the quest for peace. Though I deeply cherish this honor in a personal sense, I accept it on behalf of that quest and in the light of that grand purpose. Our experience has taught us to regard peace as a delicate, ever-fleeting condition, its roots too shallow to bear the strain of social and political discontent. We tend to accept the lessons of that experience and work t­ oward

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those solutions that at best relieve specific sources of strain, lest our neglect allows war to overtake peace. To the realist, peace represents a stable arrangement of power; to the idealist, a goal so pre-eminent that it conceals the difficulty of finding the means to its achievement. But in this age of thermonuclear technology, neither view can assure man’s preservation. Instead, peace, the ideal, must be practiced. A sense of responsibility and accommodation must guide the behavior of all nations. Some common notion of justice can and must be found, for failure to do so will only bring more “just” wars. In his Nobel acceptance speech, William Faulkner expressed his hope that “man will not merely endure, he will prevail.”2 We live today in a world so complex that even only to endure, man must prevail—over an accelerating technology that threatens to escape his control and over the habits of conflict that have obscured his peaceful nature. Certain war has yielded to an uncertain peace in Vietnam. Where there was once only despair and dislocation, today there is hope, however frail. In the Middle East the resumption of full scale war haunts a fragile ceasefire. In Indo-China, the Middle East and elsewhere, lasting peace will not have been won until contending nations realize the futility of replacing political competition with armed conflict. America’s goal is the building of a structure of peace, a peace in which all nations have a stake and therefore to which all nations have a commitment. We are seeking a stable world, not as an end in itself but as a bridge to the realization of man’s noble aspirations of tranquility and community. If peace, the ideal, is to be our common destiny, then peace, the experience, must be our common practice. For this to be so, the leaders of all nations must remember that their political decisions of war or peace are realized in the human suffering or well-being of their people. As Alfred Nobel recognized, peace cannot be achieved by one man or one nation. It results from the efforts of men of broad vision and goodwill throughout the world. The accomplishments of individuals need not be remembered, for if lasting peace is to come it will be the accomplishment of all mankind. With these thoughts, I extend to you my most sincere appreciation for this award.

Notes 1. Geir Lundestad. The Nobel Peace Prize 1901–2000. Nobel Foundation (March 15, 2001). 2. William Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Nobel Lectures, Peace 1971–1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Irwin Abrams (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1997).

Source Henry A. Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize 1973 Acceptance Speech. Available at www.nobelprize. org/prizes/peace/1973/kissinger/acceptance-speech/ (accessed April 18, 2019).

DOCUMENT

2

Bipartisan Objectives for American Foreign Policy

In a joint article in Foreign Affairs published before the 1988 Presidential election, two former Secretaries of State (Henry A. Kissinger and Cyrus Vance) who did not agree on all issues shared a common conviction that regardless of the election’s outcome it was essential that the security of the nation depended on a restoration of a bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy. In their joint view they are convinced that the American national purpose must remain fixed and not subject to being redefined—or even subject to redefinition—with every change of administration in Washington. What they fear here is that the U.S. might become a factor of inconstancy in the world. Their hope is that both candidates will describe visions of America’s role in the world and explain which international commitments they would reinforce, reduce or reallocate to others, recognizing that the U.S. has commitments in pursuit of vital interests which cannot be redefined at every election. They are writing at a time when the U.S. is adjusting to new international realities and needs a broad consensus on its primary interests in the world. They fear that domestic ideological extremism, confusion between past and present, internal economic failings, xenophobia or loss of confidence could weaken the central role of America in world affairs.

We have decided to write this article together because of our deep belief that the security of free peoples and the growth of freedom both demand a restoration of bipartisan consensus in American foreign policy. We disagree on some policy choices. But we are convinced that the American

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national purpose must at some point be fixed. If it is redefined—or even subject to redefinition—with every change of administration in Washington, the United States risks becoming a factor of inconstancy in the world. The national tendency to oscillate between exaggerated belligerence and unrealistic expectation will be magnified. Other nations—friends or adversaries—unable to gear their policies to American steadiness will go their own way, dooming the United States to growing irrelevance. We hope the next president will appreciate the value of continuity in American foreign policy. He should know that the country has been well served by maintaining principles which have kept us strong and prosperous for almost half a century under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. In this year of political transition, and in a foreign policy setting where major roles are changing at home and abroad, we believe it vital to identify several crucial bipartisan objectives for the next administration, whether it be Republican or Democratic. In this year’s political campaign, differences of opinion will exist between the candidates about the best ways to achieve these goals, and debate will continue past election day over specific policies and methods of implementation. However, if broad agreement on central foreign policy objectives can be achieved, the 41st president of the United States will be able to start his term with a strong popular mandate for leadership at home and abroad.

II By the end of this century a number of the pillars on which the global order was rebuilt after World War II will have changed significantly. For the United States, our nuclear monopoly will have disappeared and our relative share of the world economy will be less than half of what it was forty years ago. Other countries, playing a variety of roles, already have had a major impact on U.S. interests: the economies of Japan, Western Europe and the “newly industrializing countries” are obvious examples; several countries have nuclear weapons capability and others are able to acquire it quickly. Old East–West security issues persist, but new issues such as state-sponsored terrorism and international drug trafficking have become urgent. At the same time, long-standing problems cannot be ignored: there will be a continuing need of the poorest countries and peoples for humanitarian assistance. A growing list of constraints on American actions also must be considered: despite our vast military power, our ability to shape the world unilaterally is increasingly limited. Even with strong domestic support, we can

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no longer afford financially to do as much internationally by ourselves as was the case in the immediate postwar period. For many of our staunchest friends, the Soviet threat to the free world seems diminished, especially with the accession to power of a reform-minded leadership in the U.S.S.R. This perception tends to reduce Western dependence on America’s dominant role. Thus the United States is called upon to exercise new, subtler and more comprehensive forms of leadership, and especially to play a major role in defining the threats to the alliance. Since 1941, successive generations of Americans have accepted the global responsibilities thrust on the United States. It now appears that a growing number of Americans want the United States to be less active internationally than before. They urge that other nations assume greater risks, responsibilities and financial burdens for the maintenance of world order and international prosperity. We understand the frustration underlying this national mood, and agree that it must be dealt with constructively in the decades ahead. But we are also convinced that it is the duty of our national leadership to prevent international burdens from jeopardizing important American interests and the cause of freedom. Our nation is on the eve of a new international era. At a time of political transition it is important to have a national debate on how and where the United States should spend its diplomatic, military and economic resources in the decades ahead. These discussions should involve Americans from a broad range of occupations, because citizens in all walks of life are vitally concerned not only about their survival, but about the shape of the world in which they will live. At the highest level of our political system, the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates should describe, not specific tactical moves, but their visions of America’s role in the world. We hope that they will explain which international commitments they would reinforce, reduce or reallocate to others. And we hope that they will recognize that the United States has undertaken certain commitments in pursuit of vital interests which cannot be redefined on the basis of transitory fashions. There are other constraints that have evolved in the past twenty years: the legislative branch of the government and the news media have both become increasingly powerful players in the making and implementation of American foreign policy; their roles are appropriate subjects for public discussion. The legislative branch has clearly defined constitutional responsibilities in overseeing and funding U.S. foreign and defense policies. Congress must be well informed about the plans and actions of the executive branch, and no foreign policy is sustainable if a majority of the Congress, reflecting

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public opinion, is adamantly opposed. At the same time, Congress should not manage the tactics of American foreign policy nor should it overburden high administration officials with demands for redundant testimony. Surely there are better ways for the executive and legislative branches to consult than having the secretaries of state and defense spend more than a quarter of their time on repetitive congressional testimony. A relationship of trust between the Congress and the White House is essential, even with policy differences. However, such a relationship does not operate automatically. When there is a vacuum in executive branch leadership, or when the Congress overreaches, the result is an attempt to legislate day-to-day foreign policy, thereby subjecting our national interest to the vicissitudes of short-term swings in the public mood and shifting congressional coalitions. It is equally desirable to have a better appreciation of the considerable impact of the media on U.S. foreign policy decision-making. Some tension will always exist between government, which seeks to use the press to make its case, and the media, which seeks to obtain more information. A more mature relationship is needed on both sides. Most clashes between the media and the government occur when journalists confuse their role with that of governing, or when officials consider favorable press coverage more important than policy results. A measure of restraint and understanding by both sides is essential. As we define our choices we must consult with our closest allies and friends about the course of our deliberations, urge them to do likewise, and then share our findings. It is essential that we explore with our principal partners the pace and shape of the changes we envisage. Once common decisions are reached—as we believe it is possible to do—we should collectively manage change so as to enhance our long-term relations and our publics’ confidence in our determination to remain close. Over time we would anticipate that the American role in some areas of the world may become less conspicuous. For the foreseeable future, however, the United States must continue to play a major and often vital role. Far into the future, the United States will have the world’s largest and most innovative economy, and will remain a nuclear superpower, a cultural and intellectual leader, a model democracy and a society that provides exceptionally well for the needs of its citizens. These are considerable strengths. A United States that adjusts to new international realities and develops a broad consensus on its primary interests in the world will give cause for optimism. Only a combination of domestic ideological extremism, confusion between past and present, internal economic failings, xenophobia or loss of confidence can weaken the central role of the United States in world affairs.

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III For purposes of illustration we shall apply the principles we have discussed to some of the major foreign policy issues, beginning with the core issue of relations with the Soviet Union. U.S.–Soviet relations. The possession of vast nuclear arsenals imposes on the two superpowers a special obligation to maintain world peace. Both have a moral and practical duty to prevent a nuclear holocaust. But this common interest occurs in the context of ideological differences and geopolitical rivalry. America also has an obligation to ensure that the willingness to defend freedom and justice is not impaired by negotiations with the Soviet Union that raise unrealistic expectations. Today the emergence of a rejuvenated Soviet leadership has raised new hopes for Soviet–American relations. We have both met several times with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and have spent considerable time with some of his close advisers. We found Gorbachev highly intelligent and determined to remedy the failures of the Soviet economy with socialist solutions. He is eloquent in arguing that he prefers to live in peace with the West and that he wants to reduce Soviet defense spending so as to transfer resources into the civilian economy. At the same time, we have no doubt that Gorbachev is also firmly committed to defend Soviet international aims. What then is the practical consequence of these observations? What, for example, does Gorbachev mean when he speaks of a “balance of interests”? And how, precisely, would he define legitimate Soviet aims? Our Soviet policy should not be determined by partisan politics in the United States, nor by the internal politics of the Kremlin. Our ultimate concerns must be Soviet foreign policy and our concept of U.S. national interests. No American president can base his policies for dealing with the U.S.S.R. on the presumed intentions of a Soviet general secretary. We cannot predict whether his intentions may radically change under domestic political pressure. A successor may change policies, as has happened before. Nor can we pretend to understand the inner workings of the Kremlin well enough to know whether Gorbachev will succeed or survive. Even glasnost and perestroika, which are intrinsically appealing to the West, should not by themselves fundamentally alter how we conduct our relations with the Soviet Union. There is a significant struggle going on in the Soviet Union between reformers and conservatives in the party and government. But what divides them is, above all, the method of strengthening the Soviet Union. Of course we welcome evidence of greater internal freedom in the U.S.S.R. and the increased emigration of minorities. Quite naturally we favor the

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forces of change, but ultimately the West can only marginally affect the outcome of a struggle that derives from the internal failures and contradictions of the Soviet system and that is over issues not necessarily of direct concern to us. Up to now the major—almost exclusive—object of East–West negotiations has been arms control. The purpose of these negotiations has been to contribute to the lessening of East–West tensions, to improve political relations and to ease communications between Washington and Moscow. Each of us has participated at earlier periods in these negotiations. We agree with the motives underlying them. We continue strongly to support the concept of strategic arms control. At the same time, we would warn against putting too much of a burden on arms control and turning it into the sole barometer of the U.S.–Soviet relationship. The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty will be the first arms agreement ratified by both countries in more than 15 years. Because it covered the simplest and most easily separable elements in the arms control agenda and presented manageable verification problems, the agreement was reached while maintaining the essential elements of Atlantic cooperation. Future agreements with the Soviet Union, however, will be much more difficult to conclude. The Strategic Defense Initiative has helped soften Soviet negotiating positions, but the place of space defenses in a future arms treaty or in future Western defense planning is far from clear. While still of concern to the Soviets, the value of SDI as a bargaining chip for the United States has declined as domestic opposition and budgetary objections to the project have grown. This is a good example of the need to work out a domestic consensus. Though we differ on deployment, research and development in SDI should be continued and gains that have come out of our SDI programs should be preserved. It is imperative that the next phase of arms control concentrate on conventional forces and weapons in Europe. The place of conventional arms and force reductions in any future arms control agreement will be of overriding concern to the West. We believe that NATO must examine its force structure and arms control plans in light of potential negotiations. Neither of us advocates further reductions in the “short-short” (battlefield) nuclear weapons in Europe without reductions in Soviet conventional forces and weapons. Unfortunately, the West has not yet done adequate homework on the key aspects of conventional arms control. There is no agreement on goals, on accurate data or the means of reliable verification of conventional forces and equipment. Even before a new administration takes office, the American government should concentrate its best intellectual and scientific

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resources on the issues surrounding the limitation or reduction of conventional forces. It is clear that any reductions will have to be highly asymmetrical in order to create a stable balance. This factor alone means that conventional arms negotiations are certain to become the most difficult arms control problem for the NATO alliance in the 1990s. We also believe that the time has come to give much greater emphasis to the political dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union. At this writing the Soviets have agreed to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan. If carried out in a manner that permits the Afghan people to determine their own fate we consider this a significant development. The Soviets now rhetorically embrace “mutual” and “collective” security rather than unilateral advantage. In discussions with Western officials, they emphasize that their military strategies and doctrines are “defensive,” and they seem to be more flexible in some discussions on arms control. Nonetheless, the ultimate test of any government’s intentions is not its rhetoric, but the concrete positions it adopts at the negotiating table and the specific actions it takes. Thus some of the issues that require a Soviet response are: international cooperation against state-sponsored terrorism; willingness to accept asymmetrical reductions in Soviet conventional forces so as to eliminate their military advantage in Europe; and steps to help end regional conflicts. Our overall conclusion is that there is a strategic opportunity for a significant improvement in Soviet–American relations. The issue is how to take advantage of what may be a favorable correlation of forces. This requires a concrete American and Western political program. The West should explore, with an open mind, what steps can prudently be taken to reconcile vital U.S. and Soviet interests. In this context, there will be an opportunity for an unprecedented kind of conversation between the next American president and the Soviet general secretary early next year. A new chief executive will be in the White House, and Mikhail Gorbachev will have completed his first four years in office. He will be preoccupied with drafting his country’s 12th five-year plan, which will guide the Soviet economy during the early 1990s. Given the internal problems, and in light of the new balance of international forces, it is likely that the Soviet leadership may conclude that a serious and continuing dialogue with the United States is in its interest. Thus, at the outset of their relationship, the new American president and the Soviet general secretary should initiate a wide-ranging discussion of where they want U.S.–Soviet relations to be at the beginning of the next century and how they propose to contribute to a climate of international restraint. The modalities of the contacts will have to be decided by the new administration, of course. The process could be started by trusted

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representatives of the new president and the general secretary charged with exploring what opportunities and limits each of their principals foresees in the relationship during the period they will both be in office. A dialogue could set the agenda and tone for further, more formal meetings of the leaders themselves devoted primarily to political issues. Beyond this initial phase, we would favor regular U.S.–Soviet summits, so that meetings between the two leaders are not seen as rewards for good behavior or reasons for concessions or pretexts for signing agreements. With the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, interest has revived in the prospects for Soviet–American economic relations. There are probably more opportunities for American commerce with the U.S.S.R., although trade with the West is not likely to alter significantly the pace and direction of the Gorbachev reforms. The American business community is already exploring what it sees as a potentially growing and more open Soviet market. We are not worried that expanded economic ties with the U.S.S.R. may aid in the creation of a serious economic threat. There seems to be no prospect that the volume of Western trade and finance could reach proportions that would radically improve Soviet economic prospects. The modernization goals that Gorbachev has set will not be fulfilled for decades, by which time the Western economies will have grown by even greater rates. Nonetheless, the United States should reflect carefully and act cautiously in shaping its trade policy. First, great care must be taken with respect to technology transfers that would strengthen Soviet military capabilities. The Soviets continue to place the highest priority on acquiring, by whatever means, commercial and militarily sensitive information from the West. We also hope that Western executives will understand that economic reform in the U.S.S.R. does not automatically mean new business opportunities. Indeed, there will continue to be legal, moral and political constraints imposed by each side on economic intercourse. Both of us have had serious doubts about the Jackson-Vanik and Stevenson amendments, which made granting most-favored-nation status and financing facilities for the U.S.S.R. dependent on Soviet emigration procedures. Soviet emigration policy seems to be under review, but we have yet to see whether the changes will be sufficient to consider a modification of the U.S. position. Atlantic relations. Early in his term, the next president will preside over the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Atlantic alliance. NATO is one of the most successful treaty arrangements in history. It has preserved the peace in Europe for four decades—the longest such period since the European state system came into being. It connects America with countries of similar cultural heritage. It must remain the keystone of U.S. policy.

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But conditions have changed vastly since the early days of NATO. The U.S. atomic monopoly of 1945 has given way to nuclear parity with the U.S.S.R.; this situation, as well as other aspects of East–West relations, has aroused doubts in some quarters about America’s continued commitment to the defense of Europe. A second important change since the 1940s has been Europe’s economic recovery and the growing importance of the European Community as an economic and political entity; this tempts more intense economic competition with the United States and raises some broader issues in European–American relations. On both sides of the Atlantic a new generation has matured which shares neither the sense of danger nor the emotional commitment to cooperation that characterized NATO’s early years. Moreover, the era of more active diplomacy with the East that involves both U.S. and allied efforts creates new challenges and risks of competitive, separate approaches to Moscow. In sum, the state of the Atlantic alliance encourages a new impetus in strategy, diplomacy and internal relations. It is time for NATO to redefine its goals and rededicate itself to new missions. Immediately following the U.S. elections, the Atlantic partners should begin a broad reassessment of their mission and plans for the next decade—perhaps by appointing a distinguished group of private citizens to submit a report; such a reassessment should be completed in no more than 12 months. A revised alliance structure and force posture should emerge from this review, as well as clear parameters for conducting the next round of arms control negotiations with the U.S.S.R. The United States must make unequivocally clear that NATO cannot be defended without sufficient quantities and types of both nuclear and conventional weapons, so as to deter a nuclear adversary that continues to enjoy a conventional superiority in some significant categories and to possess nuclear weapons stationed inside its territory capable of reaching all of Europe. It is no service to the alliance to engage in speculation about extreme proposals or fanciful notions—such as the complete denuclearization of Europe, the total elimination of all ballistic missiles, pledges against the first use of nuclear weapons or exaggerated claims that SDI will provide an impenetrable shield. Such utopian visions undermine serious discussions of a common Atlantic strategy and stigmatize the very weapons on which a credible deterrence and effective defense must be based for the foreseeable future. Europe will inevitably play a greater part and have a larger voice in the defense of its own territory. This reflects the reality of Europe’s strength. Accordingly, the relative role of the United States is likely to decline, although not its commitment to defend Europe by all necessary means. Growing intra-European defense cooperation, possibly in the form of a

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European defense entity, should be endorsed. With the European Community moving toward virtual economic integration by 1992, it is especially important that a revised structure for the defense of Western Europe also be in place by then. As the European component in Atlantic defenses continues to develop, the United States will face an alliance whose partners will feel a greater sense of identity. The members of the alliance have often had contrasting views. Differences of views within NATO may not be limited to alliance strategies toward the Warsaw Pact countries. Distinctive West European approaches to crises in the Third World could become more common. We believe, nevertheless, that NATO leaders must understand that if divisions within the Atlantic community over issues outside NATO are permitted to fester, they will threaten the capacity of the alliance for cooperation and mutual defense within the NATO area, and hence the vital interests of each member. We should not be apologetic about discussing openly the need to reform the Atlantic alliance. On the contrary, we should be proud that Europe has gained in strength and that this free association of democratic nations has served our common objectives so well. The alliance can manage change constructively by anticipating and adjusting in ways that are deliberate, rational and supported by public opinion. If NATO waits for a crisis—such as differences over how to respond to major Soviet diplomatic or military moves, or a severe economic recession in the West—the Atlantic framework will change for the worse under the pressure of unfavorable external events. There is no significant political force in the West opposed to the existence of NATO. Political parties sometimes differ on how or when, but not on whether, NATO should be strong and vigilant. Politicians may disagree in their assessments of Mikhail Gorbachev, but the Atlantic alliance cannot base its policies on his fate. Finally, recent events in Poland serve to remind us that a stable relationship between Eastern and Western Europe remains on the agenda. The strengths of the Western alliance derive from its common democratic values and its ability to respond, often in concert, when circumstances change or public attitudes evolve. The West is fully capable of reorganizing itself and thus emerging better prepared to continue to defend its freedoms and prosperity.

IV The world economy. America’s role in the world has become directly dependent on the strength and performance of the U.S. economy. Foreign policy and economic policy have become increasingly interdependent.

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When we served as secretaries of state, only a relatively small portion of our time was spent on international economic issues. Our successors do not have this luxury. Economic strength is today even more central to the way America is perceived by its friends and potential adversaries. U.S. political leadership in the world cannot be sustained if confidence in the American economy continues to be undermined by substantial trade and budget deficits. For these reasons, the weaknesses of the U.S. economy may be among the most serious and urgent foreign policy challenges to the next president. Convincing economic discipline, clear and publicly supported long-term economic strategies, as well as equitable budget reductions, must be applied quickly if we are to halt the erosion of our international position. It is increasingly obvious that our military prowess and even our nuclear capabilities do not by themselves contribute to the struggle for international markets; in this realm competitiveness, education, judicious government intervention, as well as price, wage and currency levels, determine success. The impact of the international economy on the daily lives of all Americans has drawn many more citizens, special interest groups, public and private institutions, businesses and elected representatives into seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy. The persistence of the American budget deficit has become a source of international as well as domestic concern. Great emotion is now attached to discussions of international trade and financial questions in our political debates—especially how we can restore our competitive position. Moreover, our citizens worry that the American standard of living is directly affected by economic decisions taken in foreign capitals that are less politically and militarily powerful than our own. This is not an argument against maintaining adequate defenses; it is to stress that this objective must go hand in hand with reducing our budgetary and trade deficits. The primary responsibility of every president is to defend our national security. Given the range of American commitments and responsibilities, and given a continuing challenge to those interests, defense spending must remain a major budgetary outlay for the indefinite future. But the weaknesses of the American economy threaten to limit the resources available for maintaining our defense, foreign affairs and assistance budgets at adequate levels. Of course, changes in military posture and strategy should be made if assessments of the threat change, negotiations succeed or technological breakthroughs occur. However, too many major modifications of the American force structure now primarily occur not for these reasons but as a result of budgetary pressures. Even when reductions will not produce an abrupt deterioration in our strategic position, in the long run they could well weaken us.

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The budget contraction is already beginning to complicate vital bilateral political relations and call into question whether the United States will be able to maintain some of its foreign military commitments, including those installations which give U.S. forces the ability to defend our interests, and those of our friends, throughout the world. Dramatic cuts in funds available to assist friends in the developing world are provoking serious political and humanitarian aftershocks in many of the poorer countries as well. These reductions, including those in the civilian foreign affairs budget, also weaken the morale and performance of those Americans whose task it is to serve our country overseas. In the State Department, posts and positions are being eliminated not because they are redundant but because we cannot afford them. It is absurd that when the national interest dictates the need for emergency assistance of $200 million for the Philippines, we are hard pressed to find the money somewhere in our $4.5-trillion economy. To sum up: America’s ability to influence events abroad and ensure prosperity at home will be determined in large part by how rapidly we get our economic house in order. Fortunately we can still make these decisions ourselves. We must face the fact that our economy and consumption have become so overextended in recent years that the remedies will involve sacrifice and slower growth in our standard of living. If, however, we ignore these economic realities, American influence abroad will decline significantly and our children will pay the price of our inattention and excesses in weakened security and declining competitiveness.

V Japan. The stunning economic success and political stability that Japan has achieved have placed it in a privileged, but also precarious, position. Tokyo is experiencing what can be fairly described as the “problems of success.” Its major trading partners want Japan to modify its practices of emphasizing its national efforts above all other priorities. This approach may well have been necessary for Japan during the period of postwar reconstruction, but now it is inappropriate for an economic superpower with global reach and impact. Many Japanese would prefer to leave their international economic and security practices intact; some political and business leaders in Tokyo, however, understand the need for changes. There are many shrill and contradictory voices in this country proffering advice on how Japan should change. Some regard Japan’s $60-­billion trade surplus with the United States as the most urgent problem, and they insist that Japan modify its trading rules to reduce that imbalance substantially. Some believe that Japan should concentrate on providing massive economic and financial assistance to the developing world out of

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its substantial foreign exchange surpluses. Still others are convinced that Japan, which is fast becoming the most proficient non-nuclear military power in the world, should relieve the United States of some of its Asian defense burdens and increase defense spending substantially above the present level of one percent of GNP. There can be no debate over the importance of Japanese–American ties. They are based on strong common interests—strategic and political, as well as economic. Preserving this relationship is vital to both countries. What is at issue is how best to proceed, not the value of the relationship itself. The United States needs a national strategy for dealing with our ­Japanese allies before we can ask our friends in Tokyo to work with us on strengthening our partnership. We should start by recognizing that a root cause of the trade imbalance is the current superior productivity and long-range planning of J­ apanese industry. The so-called Japan problem is partly a result of superior ­Japanese competitiveness. The falling dollar has not yet curbed the American taste for Japanese imports, because they are presumed to be of superior quality. In the end, market forces more than governmental intervention will affect the trade deficit. At the same time, Japan needs to accelerate its efforts to stimulate domestic demand and to eliminate unfair discrimination against foreign imports. We warn against any attempt to deal with the deficit by pressing Japan to step up its defense efforts. Of course, Japan has the right to determine its appropriate security requirements. The United States can have no interest in urging Japan to go beyond that. Such a course would generate the gravest doubts all over Asia. It might deflect Japan from a greater economic contribution to international stability, through a cooperative effort by all developed countries to infuse capital into the developing world. We consider it essential that the dialogue with Japan be lifted to a more comprehensive level. Japan will be one of the major powers of the 21st century. We are becoming more and more interdependent. The issue is how to deal with the consequences of interdependency, not how to reverse or change the relationship. The American–Japanese dialogue must not be confined to mutual harassment and recrimination on an industry-by-industry basis. The two countries should seek to establish overall goals and work toward them. One step would be to establish an overall trade balance the United States would find tolerable; within that balance, Japan would have the choice of either reducing its exports or increasing its imports, thus removing the need for sector-by-sector industrial negotiations. Even more important is a broad strategy for contributing to the growth of developing areas. Japanese capital, funneled through international

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institutions, could play a seminal role in this regard. This is also important, especially in Latin America, as a means of alleviating the debt problem. A Japanese commitment to recycle a percentage of its trade surplus toward aid and assistance in the underdeveloped world would be a major achievement. For only in adopting a common course can we sustain the global economic growth without which economic competition between Japan and the United States could degenerate into a disastrous political conflict. China. No relationship has changed more dramatically over the past four administrations, of both parties, than America’s relations with the People’s Republic of China. Sino–U.S. friendship is one of few uncontested achievements of American policy in the past two decades of bitter debates. We are concerned that it not be neglected as we become more involved in a new phase of East–West negotiations. There is a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of developing the relationship further. The broad improvement in Sino–American relations remains grounded in common strategic concerns, supported by a political dialogue. A new element, however, is China’s economic modernization program, inspired by the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. China’s economic reforms offer an avenue for developing stronger and mutually advantageous ties. Given our technological prowess, the United States can play a special role in the development of the Chinese economy without generating fears of U.S. domination. We believe that we should play such a role, for a strong and independent China is in the American interest in sustaining an Asian balance of power and in collaborating on broader global issues. China has already taken decisions that offer opportunities to American economic interests. American business no longer expects profits on the scale originally contemplated during the initial stages of normalizing relations with China. Nevertheless, the existence of a market of over one billion people and an increasingly open economy are reasons for optimism over the long run about the future of our trade and investment in the P.R.C. It is short-sighted and unfair, however, to continue to include the P.R.C. in less favorable categories for the purposes of technology transfer and financing, especially when we encourage China to maintain adequate defenses because of the strong Soviet military presence nearby. Thus we favor the use of discretionary powers to encourage the transfer of technology to China, to assist economic growth. Americans should take the long view, as the Chinese always do. China’s position is changing. Its relations with its northern neighbor in particular, may be improving; this should not be disconcerting for us. We are confident that the Chinese leaders, now and in the future, will have a keen appreciation for China’s geopolitical interests, which we believe will continue to be consistent with our own.

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VI We turn now to two regions where the United States has special interests. The Arab–Israeli conflict. For the past forty years the United States has been the only major country able to engage all of the belligerents in peaceful efforts to solve the Arab–Israeli disputes. No progress toward peace has ever been achieved between warring Israelis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, Palestinians—and now Lebanese—without the personal involvement of an American president and secretary of state, not only in the procedure but also in the substance of the issues. American influence has led to important diplomatic achievements by the administrations we served. Separating the adversaries geographically, negotiating an effective cease-fire between the major armies and then brokering the peace treaty and diplomatic recognition between­ Israel and Egypt were important steps in the direction of a lasting solution. Unfortunately, the peace process has been stalled for the past decade, and the forces of conciliation and compromise in the area have been weakened. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 contributed to the rise of religious extremism, violence and foreign influence in that beleaguered nation. The tolerance of terrorism and the political intransigence of some radical Arab states have inflamed the atmosphere. The economies of the non-oil-producing Arab states—which are among the most moderate— are suffering. A deep political division in Israel over the peace process paralyzes diplomacy. The Palestinians are also divided and have not yet brought themselves to recognize Israel. Moreover, the long-festering, and deeply felt, Arab protests against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza fuel both Arab demands and Israeli reprisals, particularly as a new generation appears on the scene. In the midst of this turmoil and within months of elections in both the United States and Israel, Washington has put forward a new initiative. At the center of this American proposal is the convocation of an international conference. Whatever the structure of the negotiations, we agree with the Administration that Israel should not be asked to negotiate with groups that are unwilling to renounce Israel’s destruction, or that justify acts of terrorism against its population. We believe that Palestinians ready to abjure these goals should have an opportunity to participate fully in any peace process. We differ on the question of an international peace conference, but we agree that the ultimate issue is not procedure but substance. Whatever the negotiating forum, America needs to develop a substantive position on the principal question in addressing the Palestinian issue. This can be summed up in three principles: — Israel should not and cannot stay where it is in the occupied territories. The demographic trends there are running against Israel; the

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militancy of a hostile population will increase; radicalism will grow in the rest of the Arab world. — At the same time, Israel has a right to secure and recognized frontiers. This elementary right was recognized more than twenty years ago in U.N. Resolution 242. Admittedly, in the missile age security cannot be absolute. We believe that a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders would not be compatible with Israel’s survival. We believe, however, that Gaza and parts of the West Bank, including major Arab population centers, should be put under Arab control. — The Palestinians have legitimate rights which should be recognized, provided they in turn unambiguously recognize the right of Israel to live within secure and recognized boundaries. We are in no position to suggest a precise line on the West Bank. But we believe either the current American administration or its successor should develop a concept for a solution, in close consultation with all of the interested parties; coordination with Israel is obviously essential. The objective would be to develop a consensus on the basis for negotiations; if a consensus can be obtained then procedure will become secondary; if not, a stalemate is certain. The choice between the two outcomes will depend importantly on the creativity and purposefulness of whatever administration in Washington does the principal negotiation—almost surely the next one. The western hemisphere. It is no longer possible for the United States to pretend that it alone can determine events from within or deter hostile forces from without in the western hemisphere. Since its own independence, the United States has felt a special concern for developments in the New World, although there has often been too much ignorance and arrogance in our policies and attitudes. The past presence of our missionaries, corporations and, on some occasions, U.S. gunboats and troops, in many of these countries are all part of a difficult heritage for Latin and North Americans. Recent troubles in these relations have made it clear that we must deal with the problems of our region differently than before, and also differently from the way we defend our interests on other continents. While it may be necessary to retrench American commitments in more distant places, it is unthinkable that we should now pay less attention to the western hemisphere. Canada. Canada is a close ally, a friend and an important neighbor. It is often said that Americans pay attention to Canada only when there is a problem between us, e.g., the question of acid rain. Regrettably, the United States does too often take its friendship with Canada for granted, and fails to nurture this crucial relationship. Fortunately, despite this neglect, for more than a century relations between the two countries have

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been exemplary. Our common border is the most open in the world. The recently concluded U.S.–Canadian trade agreement is a historic achievement and a model way for close trading partners to regularize their commerce. We hope that it will be ratified soon. Some observers believe that this bilateral settlement of our trading problems could serve as a broader international model, especially in the western hemisphere. It is symbolic of our special relationship with Canada that President Reagan recently agreed to transfer to Canada sensitive military technology which heretofore had only been available to Great Britain. Mexico. Mexico may well present the most challenging problems for the United States in the western hemisphere. Most Americans appreciate the importance of Mexico to the United States. However, it is very difficult to know how to deal with the complex relationship. Traditional foreign policy approaches are of little use: the usual levers of diplomacy, military power and international economic policies do not apply to a close and friendly neighbor, with which we are connected by so many intangible ties. The issues that we face in Mexico are almost all domestic in character: the flow of people, cross-border trade, energy, culture, education, financial and fiscal matters, drugs. Organizationally, it is important to have a central and high-level coordinator for U.S. policy toward Mexico with good access to the president. The United States has led public and private efforts to provide new financing for Mexico’s debt servicing, and the presidents of both countries have given high visibility to the special ties between the two countries. Mexico has liberalized significantly its trading practices and joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It would be unrealistic to assume that there is a simple, global solution for all of the issues in such a complex problem. We believe, however, that Mexican–American relations deserve high priority. Of particular importance is the handling of the Mexican external debt. How the United States and Mexico deal with the issue will strongly influence the broader question of Latin American debt. The new presidents of the United States and Mexico should meet early and often. Relations with Mexico always will be delicate, and we must provide constant attention to maintaining a high degree of trust in a relationship that is enormously important and interdependent. The two leaders can try to anticipate key issues and particular problems on which they must focus, while encouraging active cabinet-level discussions of all outstanding differences. Central America. The most immediate political concerns that we have in the western hemisphere relate to ending the wars in Central America while strengthening democratic forces and reducing Soviet and Cuban

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influence in the area. Central America provides a conspicuous example of an area where U.S. policy has suffered because of a lack of clear-cut national objectives that could be publicly debated and congressionally mandated. Confusion remains over whether our principal aim should have been to overthrow the Nicaraguan government, halt Nicaraguan support for insurrections elsewhere in Central America, eliminate the Soviet–­ Cuban presence and military assistance in Nicaragua or democratize the Sandinista regime. Now the presidents of five Central American nations have taken on the responsibility for making peace. Is there anything left for the United States to do to promote an acceptable peace in the region? First, it remains very much in the U.S. interest to obtain the withdrawal of Cuban and Soviet military advisers from Nicaragua, significant reductions in the armies and armaments in the region (especially in Nicaragua), a total ban on Sandinista help to guerrillas elsewhere, and the internal democratization of Nicaragua. Second, the situation in Central America can be one measure of U.S.– Soviet relations: whether the Soviet Union is willing to suspend arms shipments into this area of our most traditional relationships. Also outstanding is the issue of the level and scope of our assistance to the area. Four years ago a bipartisan commission appointed by the president unanimously recommended substantial economic assistance to Central America. That recommendation is even more important today and will gain in relevance if the Arias plan succeeds. Such aid should go primarily to regional development rather than to individual countries. The task of the United States should be to reinforce those institutions that give the Central Americans good reason to live productively and peacefully together. Finally, the United States should also continue to support democracy within Nicaragua. Our diplomatic and material aid to those who work for a pluralistic economy and representative political process should be done openly. Preventive diplomacy and preemptive reform can reduce the risks of extremist political infection and radical contamination. When confronted with such situations, the United States must define its interests early on and then develop strategies in cooperation with regional friends that will promote the likelihood of peaceful change and successor governments compatible with our own. Latin American debt. One clear aim of the United States is to increase the likelihood that stable and democratic governments will survive in the region. To this end we must help them resolve critical problems of debt and development.

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Most of the democratic governments that replaced military regimes in South America in recent years are fragile. Extreme leftist guerrilla movements, sometimes encouraged by powerful drug traffickers, pose serious threats to law and order. Violence and urban terrorism have increased while some in the military covet a return to power. Moreover, their massive external debts reduce significantly the capital available for growth and development. At present, the principal Latin American debtors—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela—owe foreign creditors about $350 billion. Interest payments alone on these debts range between 19 percent of export earnings, in the case of Colombia, and 46 percent of export earnings, as with Argentina. These governments cannot expend a major part of their export earnings on servicing their external debts; the key issue is to stimulate economic growth. Western commercial banks alone cannot resolve debt problems of this magnitude. Their governments must become more fully involved, together with international financial institutions. Some new public and private monies must be provided so that Latin America can begin to grow again— which would also make it possible for the region again to absorb significant quantities of U.S. exports. At the same time, the Latin Americans should restructure their economies to promote expansion of investments in the private sector from both domestic and foreign sources. Western nations other than the United States should make a major effort to buy more from these developing countries. For example, over the past several years, the United States has been taking over 60 percent of the manufactured exports from the developing world while Japan—with an economy more than half our size—has been taking only ten percent. We cannot have a single policy for all of the region. We can, however, demonstrate concern and sensitivity for the Latin countries and tailor our strategy to meet individual cases. Many problems of the region can be solved with foresight and resources. If neglected, they will produce dangers to American interests that are much more serious than what has preoccupied us in Central America for the past decade.

VII As is apparent from the foregoing, our next president will be severely challenged to guide us through a period of international transition and to secure a firm place for the United States in a changing configuration of nations. He must focus American resources and energies on areas where precisely defined U.S. national interests are at stake. He must not be

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reluctant to admit that there are important issues, even conflicts, in which the United States has no special role to play because our vital interests are not engaged. But he must not shrink from defending our interests. It is true that this is a more restrictive approach to the defense of ­American objectives than that in the immediate postwar period. We believe, however, that America’s international standing and national security need not be diminished because we adopt more selective and collaborative international strategies based on new realities. Our position can be strengthened by taking into account the growing strength of other regions. We believe profoundly in the resiliency of the American people. They bring qualities to our foreign and national security policies that should reassure our allies and ourselves. Often in the past we have overcome great international challenges thanks to our adaptability and resourcefulness. The dynamic heterogeneity and individualism inherent in our society, which could cause chaos and confusion, have produced an array of talents—social, scientific and moral—that remain a formidable source of national energy. Imaginatively analyzing the new realities affecting America’s role in the world should provide the next administration with prescriptions for its foreign policies. Through such understanding and discipline, our leaders can guarantee that the future security and well-being of the American people will be at least as well defended in the future as they have been in the past.

Source Henry A. Kissinger and Cyrus Vance, Bipartisan Objectives for American Foreign Policy, ­Foreign Affairs, Vol. 66, No. 5 (Summer 1988), pp. 899–921. Available at www.foreignaffairs. com/articles/united-states/1988-06-01/bipartisan-objectives-american-foreign-policy (accessed November 2, 2019).

DOCUMENT

3

Between the Old Left and The New Right

Two decades after he left public office, Kissinger looks back on some of the criticisms of the Nixon and Ford administrations with respect to issues such as human rights and how the distinctions between liberal and conservative, left and right, evolved. At the high point of Nixon’s foreign policy, in 1972, the national consensus broke down, and for the remainder of Nixon’s term, an increasingly acerbic domestic debate over the nature and the priorities of American foreign policy broke out. Liberals moved even further away from Nixon, searching for more sweeping arms control proposals and such moral causes as human rights, and also lost him the support of the traditional Conservatives who would otherwise have gone along with a justification for his policy—a hardheaded strategy for managing the Cold War. When Gerald Ford took over as president, Nixon’s foreign policy had already become controversial, with Liberals chastising him for inadequate attention to human rights while Conservatives depicted him as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of détente. Neoconservatives (“neocons”) insisted that such an approach did not do justice to the moral dynamism of a society that had turned its back on the callous calculations of the Old World. In the process, they put forward a return to a militant, muscular Wilsonianism. The fundamental aim of foreign policy as they saw it was the eradication of the evil represented by the Soviet Union without confusing the issue with geopolitics. At the same time they made significant contributions to American thinking on foreign policy, bringing needed intellectual rigor and energy to the debate, which helped to overcome the dominance of liberal conventional wisdom.

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In Defense of Détente By the summer of 1974, when Gerald R. Ford took over as president, ­ ichard M. Nixon’s foreign policy had become controversial. Liberals R chastised him for inadequate attention to human rights. Conservatives depicted his administration as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of detente, which, in their view, compounded bad policy with French terminology. Each of these criticisms owed something to the discomfort evoked by Nixon’s ambiguous personality, but the overriding cause of the complaints was that his foreign policy raised two fundamental philosophical challenges. Nixon sought to extricate the United States from Vietnam on terms he defined as honorable at a time when most of the intellectual and much of the political community wanted to get out of Indochina essentially unconditionally. Even more important was Nixon’s effort to guide the transition of America’s role in the world from hegemony to leadership. For much of the postwar period, the United States was preeminent because of its nuclear predominance and economic strength. By the time Nixon took office, our nuclear monopoly was dwindling, Europe was regaining vitality, Asia was entering the international arena, and Africa was being swept by independence movements. Dominance reflects power; leadership requires building consensus. But the attempts, inseparable from consensus-building, to balance rewards and penalties ran counter to the prevailing philosophy of Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global moral order through the direct application of America’s political values undiluted by compromises with “realism.” Over two decades later, as these lines are being written, many of the themes of the debates of the 1970s have reappeared in the contemporary argument over America’s role in the post-Cold War world.

Enter Détente A nation’s foreign policy inevitably reflects an amalgam of the convictions of its leaders and the pressures of its environment. To understand the Nixon administration’s approach to East–West relations—and the controversy that bedeviled Ford—it is necessary to describe the situation that Nixon inherited. Richard Nixon took office in the midst of one of the gravest foreign policy crises in American history. Over 540,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam, and the country was tearing itself apart over what Walter A. McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania has brilliantly described as America’s first “Great Society war.” By this he meant that Vietnam was

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the first American war fought for no definable military objective. Rather, the strategic goal was to not lose, thereby giving South Vietnam time to create democratic institutions and social programs that would win the war for the hearts and minds of the population. Such a goal for a divided country independent for only a decade, in a society governed by colonialism for a century, required a time span of stalemated war beyond the psychological endurance of the American public. The Nixon administration was prepared to assume the responsibility for extricating the United States and never blamed our predecessors for the debacle. We would not, however, leave the country for which nearly 40,000 Americans had already died by turning over to communist rule tens of millions who had staked their lives on our word. The strategy adopted by the Nixon administration to extricate America was foreshadowed in an article I had written for Foreign Affairs while still a professor at Harvard. In it, I had urged that the military and political issues be treated separately. The military issues would be negotiated between the United States and the Vietnamese parties, leading to a cease-fire, withdrawal of American troops, exchange of prisoners, and a limitation of armaments. The Vietnamese parties would then negotiate a political process by which the peoples of Indochina would be able to decide the future of their countries. The so-called peace movement insisted that there was only one meaningful issue, which was peace on whatever terms were available, and that the fate of the population was irrelevant to that goal (or, in the argument’s more sophisticated version, that the peoples of Indochina would be better off if we abandoned them). In pursuit of what amounted to unconditional and unilateral withdrawal, the protesters sought to impose their views by mass demonstrations designed to paralyze the government. The protesters considered the very terms “honor” and “credibility” abominations, the empty slogans of a flawed society that would repeat its errors over and over again until it was made to taste the bitter dregs of futility and humiliation. In their view, American presumption and vainglory had caused the tragedy in Indochina. The peace movement rejected the invocation of America’s role in preserving the global equilibrium as a symptom of a national obsession with power, and it denied Nixon’s moral right to invoke the term “honor.” Its challenge was not to specific policies but to America’s worthiness to conduct any foreign policy at all. To be sure, Establishment figures never went quite this far. Paralyzed by the futility of what they had wrought, they simply wished to extirpate the Vietnam War from their consciousness and to submerge their mistakes in collective amnesia. The practical result of their emotional abdication was

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that they would not support any American negotiating position rejected by Hanoi, thereby depriving the American negotiators of a floor on which to stand and, in effect, urging abdication. Pressures from abroad paralleled the domestic ones. Most of America’s North Atlantic allies were extremely skeptical about the war in Indochina. By the time Nixon took office, they had begun to question whether America’s alleged bellicosity might not threaten, rather than safeguard, their own security overall. A number of European leaders felt quite free to present themselves to their publics as apostles of peace whose primary mission was to moderate American intransigence in the conduct of the Cold War. All this was happening less than a year after the Soviet Union had occupied Czechoslovakia in order to overthrow a communist regime aspiring to a measure of autonomy from Moscow. Leonid Brezhnev had proclaimed a doctrine that asserted Moscow’s right to impose ideological orthodoxy on the communist world. Backed by a rapidly growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, the Kremlin was projecting an image of ideological militancy and military strength. Such was the context of stalemate, tension, and frustration inherited by Nixon. When he took office, the American public was drained by 20 years of Cold War exertions and the increasing frustrations with Vietnam. It had lived through two Berlin crises, the Korean War, Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the Cuban missile crisis, and it had already sustained over 35,000 casualties in Indochina. For us to have launched the grandiloquent anti-Soviet crusade that our critics later (though not at the time) chastised us for not undertaking would have driven our domestic crisis out of control and jeopardized our alliances. Throughout his career, Nixon’s critics had portrayed him as an unregenerate Cold Warrior. But now that he was president, both the liberals who dominated Congress and the media urged him to end the Cold War as if he were one of their own. A widespread and vocal consensus, which had many supporters within the bureaucracy, pressed the new administration to initiate immediate negotiations with Moscow on trade, cultural and scientific exchanges, and, above all, arms control. The conservatives remained sullenly silent. Shell-shocked by Vietnam and the domestic upheaval, they provided no counterweight to the liberal onslaught. In the absence of such a counterweight the dominant theme of the public discourse was peace: how to achieve it in Vietnam, how to preserve it in the world at large through immediate East-West negotiations, and how to protect it at home from the Nixon administration’s alleged hard-line proclivities. At that time, of course, the neoconservatives who would later accuse us of softness on communism were still on the radical side of the dividing line, adding their voices to the clamor for accommodation.

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Wilsonianism had involved the United States in Indochina by means of universalist maxims that had proved successful in Europe and were now applied literally in Asia. Wilsonianism rejects peace through balance of power in favor of peace through moral consensus. It sees foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil, in each phase of which it is America’s mission to defeat totally the evil foes challenging a peaceful order. Having prevailed, the United States can then devote itself to fostering the underlying harmony (in the internationalist version) or cultivating its own virtues (in the isolationist version) until the next discrete crisis arises—perceived not as a disturbance of the equilibrium but as a deviation from the moral order. Such a foreign policy tends to be segmented into a series of episodes and not perceived as a continuum requiring constant attention and adjustment, a quest for absolutes rather than the shaping of reality by means of nuances. The Nixon administration strove for a more differentiated approach. Though he admired Woodrow Wilson, nothing in Nixon’s personal experience led him to share the conviction that great ideas could be realized in one grand assault. Nixon and I enlisted our firm anticommunist convictions in the service of a complex strategy destined to achieve our objective in stages, each of which by definition was bound to fall short of the ultimate ideal and could therefore be castigated as insufficiently moral. We viewed foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point, unlike the dominant view seeking a series of climaxes, each of which would conclude its particular phase. The Nixon strategy had the following six components: to extricate the United States from Vietnam under honorable conditions; to confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; to seize the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, the administration would do its utmost to control its dangers and gradually to overcome it; to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including China in the international system; to strengthen our alliances; and, from that platform, to go on the diplomatic offensive, especially in the Middle East. Detente was one aspect of the overall strategy. An unfortunate label implying European antecedents, detente was designed to control a relationship conceived as adversarial, not to conjure up a nirvana from which all tensions had automatically been removed, as later caricatures of it implied. Throughout, Nixon and I considered the Soviet Union ideologically hostile and militarily threatening. At once an empire and a cause, it was the only power capable of intervention globally, the source of most postwar international crises, and the sole country capable of attacking the United States. We strove for a strategy that calibrated the benefits of restraint and the

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penalties of recklessness to keep Soviet leaders from mounting a challenge during the period of our national turmoil. And if the calibration failed, the very effort would at least have demonstrated to the American people that the resulting crisis was caused by the Soviet Union—thereby bolstering support for a strong response. In short, we treated America’s travail over Vietnam as a temporary weakness that, once overcome, would enable us to prevail over the Soviet system when geopolitical isolation and a stagnant economy had exhausted the Kremlin’s ideological zeal. We judged the Soviet Union, seemingly so monolithic and so eager to demonstrate its military power, as in fact being rent by vast systemic upheavals. Such astute observers as Andrei Amalrik (one of whose articles I gave to Nixon to read) were already calling attention to the fact that the Soviet empire was facing profound and congenital vulnerabilities. In the more than 50 years of its history, the Soviet leadership had never managed a legitimate succession. Leaders had either died in office (like Lenin and Stalin) or had been replaced by coup-like procedures (like Khrushchev). In each case, succession was followed by a purge. And the growth of Soviet military potential was draining the economy and driving it into stagnation. This is why, in the Alastair Buchan Lecture in June 1976, I said, “We have nothing to fear from competition: … if there is an economic competition, we won it long ago. … If performance is any criterion, the contest between freedom and communism, of which so much was made three decades ago, has been won by the industrial democracies.” In the process, the Soviet international position was growing more complicated. Tensions between Moscow and Beijing were escalating. Within weeks of Nixon’s inauguration, we learned of military clashes along the ­Ussuri River, which demarcates the boundary between China and the Soviet Union’s maritime provinces at the edge of Siberia. Upheavals in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and a near-revolution in Poland in 1970 dramatized the tenuousness of the Soviet hold over its satellites. In the Middle East, the Soviet Union had been arming its Arab allies for a war it was well within our capacity to prevent them from winning. Therefore, our strategy in the Middle East sought to thwart an Arab military option in order to oblige the Soviet Union and its radical Arab allies to dissociate from each other. Far from conducting detente from a perception of weakness, the Nixon administration was convinced that it had little to fear and much to gain from a flexible diplomacy in which the rigid Soviet system was bound to find itself increasingly at a disadvantage. In light of its vulnerable economy and geopolitical isolation, we intended to maneuver the Soviet colossus into transforming itself from a cause into a state capable of being influenced by traditional calculations of reward and punishment, thereby first easing the Cold War and ultimately transcending it.

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To be effective, a strategic assessment needs to be translated into an operating policy. The then-dominant liberal group viewed negotiation as an end in itself, regardless of content. The very act of dialogue, it argued, “eased the atmosphere”; each agreement facilitated the path for further progress until a spirit of reconciliation had supplanted the suspicions of the Cold War and made some of the issues that had dominated it less central. The Nixon administration rejected this approach. We were prepared for an intense period of negotiation, but we were not willing to let our adversaries choose the agenda or the conditions. Progress on issues of concern to Moscow had to coincide with progress in areas of concern to Washington. Therefore we insisted that individual negotiations on trade or arms control take place in an atmosphere of Soviet political and military restraint, especially with regard to such long-standing trouble spots as Berlin, the Middle East, and Indochina. Unlike the liberals, the Nixon administration did not justify its East–West diplomacy by a presumed change in Soviet motivations. But unlike the conservatives, who feared that agreements might weaken American vigilance, we argued that the Soviet Union was more vulnerable than the free world to a long period of peace and more likely to face fundamental changes as a result of it. By the end of Nixon’s first term, we had vindicated the strategy of moving forward on a broad front. The Soviet Union was being constrained from geopolitical adventures by the stick of our opening to China and the carrot of prospects of increased trade. In 1971, we helped channel West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik into a direction compatible with allied cohesion by linking West German recognition of the East German communist regime to a guarantee of free access to Berlin, thereby ending for the rest of the Cold War Soviet harassment of the city’s access routes. In 1972, we were able to step up military pressure on Hanoi without Soviet interference. The Soviets went ahead with the planned superpower summit despite the mining of Vietnamese harbors and the renewal of bombing of North Vietnam because they prized the benefits of a visit by Nixon more than ideological ties with Hanoi. It was also in 1972 that Soviet military forces were expelled from Egypt—as we had predicted in 1970. By the end of 1973, the United States was dominating Middle East diplomacy. A strategic arms agreement numerically freezing the Soviet missile buildup without modifying any established American program had been negotiated. Linkage had prevailed.

A Reversal From the Left At this high point of Nixon’s foreign policy, the national consensus broke down. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for the remainder of

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Nixon’s term, an increasingly acerbic domestic debate over the nature and the priorities of American foreign policy broke out. With brief interruptions, it has continued to this writing. Many factors combined to produce this state of affairs. Perhaps the most fundamental was that Nixon and I underestimated the impact on the public of the sharp difference between our approach to foreign policy and the Wilsonianism that had become dominant in the twentieth century. For his part, Nixon embittered the emerging debate by stressing in his public speeches (though not in our annual reports to Congress) domestic and political, rather than conceptual, explanations for his foreign policy. Convinced that the best way to isolate his liberal opponents was, in effect, to steal their program, Nixon could not resist rubbing it in that it was he—the despised, ostensibly reactionary Cold Warrior—who had, in fact, fulfilled much of the liberal agenda on negotiating with the adversary and that he had done so on the basis of a strong national defense. This tactic infuriated the liberals, who moved ever further away from Nixon by searching for more sweeping arms control proposals and such moral causes as human rights where they thought Nixon could not follow them. And it lost him the support of the traditional conservatives who might well have gone along with a justification of our policy for what it was—a hardheaded strategy for managing the Cold War—but who viewed co-opting liberal slogans as opportunism. The liberals, having advocated greater East–West contacts, arms control, and increased trade for at least a decade, would normally have been supportive of these policies now that they were actually being implemented. And under the leadership of any president other than Richard Nixon, they might well have eventually endorsed the substance of our policies even while differing with the geopolitical approach on which they were based. But Nixon had been anathema to the liberal community for more than two decades; the blood feud ran too deep. The liberals’ first line of defense was to invoke all their standard critiques. Nixon’s policy, they argued, was not going far enough; indeed, it was a subterfuge for continuing the Cold War. But given the broad front on which Nixon was proceeding, this argument held little attraction for any but confirmed Nixon-haters. So it happened that, in the course of 1972, the liberals’ attack veered in an entirely new direction that let them maintain their traditional moral critique. Though they had hitherto insisted that East-West trade, arms control, and cultural exchanges were vital to ameliorating the superpower conflict and therefore needed to be pursued in their own right, the liberals now declared war on the Soviet internal system. Unembarrassed by their previous rejection of the concept of linkage of foreign policy issues to each

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other, they now resurrected linkage with a vengeance by insisting that all agreements be linked to changes in Soviet domestic practices. Shifts in the editorial position of The New York Times mirrored this metamorphosis. Over the course of a few months in the fall of 1972, the newspaper moved from unconditional advocacy of East–West trade and arms control—and attacks on linkage—to stern criticism of any agreement that did not dismantle the Soviet domestic structure. On September 13, 1972, for instance, the Times espoused its traditional liberal view that expanded trade “is sufficiently beneficial to both sides that it ought to be considered … on its own merits, independent of particular secondary disputes in other areas.” Within two months, on November 25, 1972, in a complete reversal, the Times was cautioning its readers that “it will be a serious mistake if American business, the Nixon administration, or, for that matter, Soviet officials, become so eager to expand Soviet–American trade as to forget the continuing sensitivity of the American people—and of Congress— to Soviet political behavior both inside and outside the USSR’s borders.”

An Echo From the Right The liberals’ reversal of position was soon being echoed by various conservative groups. Convinced that the Cold War was a life-and-death ideological struggle, conservatives had never been comfortable with a wide-ranging negotiation with the Soviet Union because the mere fact of it implied some degree of common interest with the adversary. In their view, so long as communism retained its grip, any hope for restraint in Soviet conduct was chimerical. The conservatives would have been most comfortable with some variation of the original Acheson-Dulles containment posture of waiting behind “positions of strength” for the eventual collapse of communism within the Soviet Union and preferably in China as well. The conservatives’ split from Nixon was a pity because we did not differ with their analysis of the nature of the Soviet system. Where we disagreed was in assessing its implications for American foreign policy. Nixon and I believed that refusing to negotiate with the Kremlin would spread the virulence of the anti-Vietnam protest movement into every aspect of American political life and deeply, perhaps fatally, divide our alliances. Far better, we thought, to seize the initiative and control the diplomatic process. In the meantime, we would keep open the possibility that what on the Soviet side had begun as tactics might evolve into a more reliable pattern of coexistence. What drove conservative disquiet into outright opposition was the emergence of the so-called neoconservatives. That they claimed even part of the conservative label for themselves was something of an anomaly,

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since, nearly without exception, their leading representatives had started out on the liberal side, most of them on its radical wing. They had disdained Nixon, passionately opposed the Vietnam War, objected to our military budgets as too Cold War-oriented, and pressed for a more conciliatory approach toward the Soviet Union. Starting in the summer of 1972 and extending over the period of a year, this group grew disillusioned with the turn American liberalism was taking. They found distasteful the radicalism and lifestyles of the Democratic convention that had nominated George McGovern for president in 1972. And ever since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, they had become increasingly disenchanted with the prospect of accommodation with the Soviet Union. The 1973 Middle East war completed their conversion to geopolitical realities. They interpreted that war as a Soviet–Arab conspiracy against Israel and the industrial democracies and concluded that the challenge was best resisted in the name of opposition to detente. Many of the neoconservatives were (or have become) personal friends. And however painful their critiques might occasionally have proved when I was in office, they made significant contributions to American thinking on foreign policy. They brought a much-needed intellectual rigor and energy to the debate, which helped to overcome the dominance of liberal conventional wisdom. Once they reached office in the Reagan administration, they conducted a strong and successful national strategy which I supported. But there was also a reverse side to the single-mindedness with which they pursued their newfound convictions. When the neoconservatives first appeared on the scene, their defining experience was their own ideological conversion to the pursuit of the Cold War. Tactics bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign policy short of total victory. Their historical memory did not include the battles they had refused to join or the domestic traumas to which they had so often contributed from the radical left. When the neoconservatives moved to the radical right, they packed in their bags their visceral dislike of Nixon, even though technically they were now on the same side. And they distorted the subsequent debate with a touch of amnesia about their own role in the seminal battles of which Vietnam was a symbol, if not a cause. Vietnam accelerated the phenomenon that the United States would have experienced in any event, albeit more gradually: that power in the world was becoming more diffused and isolation for America increasingly impossible. As the 21st century approached, the United States would have to exercise its influence as the single most important and coherent part of an international system, but no longer as the solitary leader it had been at the beginning of the Cold War. The great initiatives of the early Cold War

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had been presented as “solutions” to the challenge they were addressing, often with a terminal date. Henceforth what was needed was a permanent American participation depending more on the ability to accumulate nuances than on engineering final outcomes in a brief period. The realization was dawning that idealism could lead to overextension as easily as miscalculation. But traditional American Wilsonianism rebelled against the verity that great goals in foreign policy must generally be approached in imperfect stages. The radical opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina to moral defects and had preached the cure of abdication to enable the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neoconservatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise, but we also believed that the Wilsonianism of the early 1960s had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of criteria to define the essential elements of our national purpose. Those of us who had been mauled by the Vietnam protests were deeply concerned with avoiding a repetition of this paralysis. We therefore searched for a more sober approach to American foreign policy that would—as we repeatedly stated—avoid the oscillations between abdication and overextension that had marked the previous period.

The Neoconservative Critique The neoconservatives insisted that such an approach did not do justice to the moral dynamism of a society that had turned its back on the callous calculations of the Old World. In the process, they put forward not so much a new dispensation—as they claimed—but a return to a militant, muscular Wilsonianism. The fundamental aim of foreign policy as they saw it was the eradication of the evil represented by the Soviet Union without confusing the issue with geopolitics. Whereas Nixon (and I) saw the greatest danger in creeping Soviet expansionism abetted by Soviet superiority in conventional forces, interior lines of communication, and the umbrella of a vast and growing strategic nuclear force, the neoconservatives’ stated nightmare was some apocalyptic showdown over world domination. The Nixon team viewed the conflict with Moscow as a long-term geopolitical contest in which, together with our allies, we would wear down the Soviet system. The neoconservatives argued that it was possible to overcome communism with a burst of ideological elan. This difference in emphasis was overshadowed and confused by a bitter debate that broke out in 1972 over the first agreement to limit strategic arms, which froze the offensive deployments of the two sides for a period

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of five years. Though these force levels had been chosen by the Pentagon without any reference to arms control, our critics insisted that they left America vulnerable and invented complex scenarios whereby a Soviet attack might reduce our warheads to a “mere” 4,000 while the Soviets would retain three times that number. It was a symptom of the mood of the period that presidents like Nixon and Ford, who had been defense hawks all their lives, could be accused of sanctioning strategic inequality. We took the strategic arms race seriously but we did not believe that the aged leaders of a moribund society were prepared to stake the survival of their society and political system on a number of wild gambles: that they were technically able to launch hundreds of missiles simultaneously even though they had never test-fired more than three at a time and these only from test sites, never from operational silos; that American missiles would not be launched on warning even though there might be a 30- to 45-minute interval in which to determine that an all-out attack was underway; that Soviet operational missiles had the same accuracy as test missiles; that an American president would refrain from using the thousands of warheads which, even under the most pessimistic scenario, would survive a surprise attack. Finally, none of these hypothetical disaster scenarios would be available even to the most demented Soviet leader until about a decade after salt i expired, and then only if we took no countermeasures. To protect against these contingencies, the Nixon and Ford administrations vigorously modernized our strategic forces. In fact the backbone of the strategic arsenal at this writing is composed of weapons developed and put before Congress in the Nixon and Ford administrations: the ­Minuteman III, the MX, the rebuilt B-52, the B-1 and B-2 airplanes, and the Trident submarine. All subsequent administrations, including Reagan’s, adhered to the salt i limits even after the agreement had lapsed. In fact, the total of our strategic forces at the end of the Reagan period ten years later was slightly lower than when salt i was signed. The real issue in our national debate was not the numbers game of arms control discussions. It had to do with the perception of the challenge. Nixon and Ford judged the challenge to be in the nature of a marathon race, and they would not dissipate our strength in a series of sprints designed for the gallery. And they were reinforced in this attitude because Congress was annually legislating cuts in the defense budget over our opposition. Nixon and Ford thought it essential to prove to the American people that crisis and confrontation were a last resort, not an everyday means of conducting foreign policy. Both were convinced that we stood to win the marathon for which we were girding. With its creaky economy, the Soviet Union would,

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in the end, not be able to compete with the coalition we were assembling of all the industrial democracies cooperating with China, the world’s most populous country. And that is essentially what happened. Nixon and Ford were right from the perspective of their time, as was Reagan from the perspective of the 1980s. Unfortunately, the bitter feud between two sides that should have been allies produced both a standoff and diplomatic near-paralysis. The neoconservatives saw far less value in defeating Soviet geopolitical encroachments on distant battlefields, such as Angola or Indochina, than in facing down the Soviet ideological or nuclear threat in some kind of definitive confrontation. This is why most neoconservatives failed to support the Ford administration when liberals in Congress cut off aid to the desperate peoples of South Vietnam and Cambodia and to the African forces resisting the Soviet-Cuban intervention in Angola. The neoconservatives’ need to break with their past made them oblivious to the context in which their prescriptions had to be carried out and made it impossible to incorporate the real lessons of Vietnam into the national consciousness. Even though we granted the neoconservative argument on behalf of the need for moral revival, the United States—just emerging from Vietnam, in the midst of Watergate, and later led by a nonelected president—was not in a position to conduct a crusade; in fact, the attempt to do so would have torn the country apart even further. By depicting the diplomatic strategy of the Nixon and Ford administrations as a form of appeasement and our resistance to communist expansion in various theaters as a diversion from the main struggle, the neoconservatives undercut the real foreign policy debate, which was not with them but with the liberals. Until well into Ford’s term in office, congressional and media pressures came predominantly from the liberal side of the political spectrum. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield periodically led drives to pull American troops out of Europe; Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright challenged the alleged militarization of American foreign policy; Senators Frank Church and Walter Mondale attacked the intelligence community. Some liberal senators, such as Jacob Javits, John Sherman Cooper, and Hubert Humphrey, endorsed our arms control policies but shrank from the defense programs necessary to give us leverage in the negotiations. In the early 1970s, the option of what later became the highly effective Reagan policy did not exist. The obstacle to such a policy was not the Nixon or the Ford administration but the liberal Congress and media. By training their fire first on Nixon and then on Ford, the neoconservatives provided an alibi to those whose pressures had complicated the

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extrication from Indochina, whose legislation then caused its collapse, and who mandated an end to the Soviet/Cuban onslaught in Angola. The focal point of the foreign policy debate for the neoconservatives had been the moment at which they appeared on the scene, and they have so concentrated on largely tactical disagreements with fellow conservatives that they have made it difficult to come to grips with the real lessons of the Vietnam tragedy. Even after the neoconservatives had achieved dominance with the ­Reagan ascendancy, they continued their assault by insisting on a version of history that lures the United States away from the need to face complexity. According to this interpretation, a group of accommodation-prone, ­European-influenced leaders was overcome by the knights-errant who suddenly appeared on the scene and prevailed in short order by proclaiming the distinction between good and evil and the revolutionary role of democratic principles. Reality was more complex then and has become even more so at this writing. Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve vast credit for the denouement of the Cold War. But the United States will not harvest the intellectual lessons of their success if it ascribes its victory in the Cold War to rhetorical posturing. Reagan’s policy was, in fact, a canny elaboration of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford administrations combined with the rhetoric of Wilsonianism—a quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism. In an important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived from a Reaganite variation—not a rejection—of the strategies of the 1970s. However different their tactics, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan conducted policies that sought simultaneously to contain the Soviet Union, shrink its influence, and work with it as this process unfolded. But whereas Nixon had sought to legitimize these policies by their practical success, Reagan proved to have a better instinct for America’s emotions. He justified his course by an appeal to American idealism. Nixon attempted to preach the virtues of the national interest by evoking what he called a “structure of peace;” Reagan understood that the American people are moved more by appeals to purpose rather than structure, and his policy declarations resonated with classic democratic virtue. As a result, he won broader support for high defense budgets and geopolitical reengagement than Nixon was able to achieve—or could have achieved in his time with the same appeal. (Reagan, of course, led a nation that had largely recovered from the ­Vietnam trauma and had grown disgusted with the humiliations of the Iran hostage crisis.) Absent Watergate, a successful Nixon presidency might well have been able to use the high-wire acts of his first term to amalgamate the ideological

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convictions of the neoconservatives with the geopolitical insights of his own approach. As it was, this necessary reconciliation was prevented by our domestic crisis. The fact is that both Reagan’s inspirational approach and Nixon’s geopolitical perspicacity are needed to conduct a long-range foreign policy in the 21st century. Nixon, under the pressure of circumstances and perhaps of his personality, overemphasized the tactical element. But Reagan’s disciples today, neglecting the facts that Reagan inherited a psychologically recovered American people ready for a stronger course as well as a Soviet Union weakened by overextension and by Nixon’s foreign policy legacy, seek to telescope a historical process into one climactic presidency. They thereby postpone both the synthesis without which we will never fully grasp our challenge and the consensus, now more necessary than ever, that would be theirs if they could only leaven their righteousness with an understanding that history did not begin on the date of their conversion.

Source Henry A. Kissinger, Between the Old Left and the New Right, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 3 (May/ June 1999), pp. 99–116. Available at www.jstor.org/stable/20049283 (accessed November 2, 2019).

DOCUMENT

4

Military Policy and Defense of the “Grey Areas”

Early on in his academic career Kissinger began what became a lifelong study of American strategic thinking and it impact on national security matters. Many of Kissinger’s early works, including a seminal book, focused on the military potential offered by nuclear weapons. Only a decade after the first use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. to end World War II in the Pacific, he looked forward in this 1955 Foreign Affairs article to a future where the Soviet Union would have the ability to strike the United States with such powerful weapons, and the types of policies and solutions that would prevent such a horrific conflict. In this key article Kissinger considers not only U.S.–U.S.S.R. conflict but also the problem of conflict in other parts of the world often referred to as “grey areas.” Here Kissinger argues that the U.S. should inhibit aggression by the threat of a general war. He sees that in some areas the U.S. can resist aggression on the ground with conventional forces perhaps backed by nuclear weapons. In other parts of the world, such as “grey areas” Sino–Soviet moves can be prevented only by the threat of a general war which was the rationale for U.S. military policy at the time.

It is surprising how little affected American strategic thinking has been by the fact that within just a few years the U.S.S.R. will have the capacity to deliver a powerful attack with nuclear weapons on the United States. To be sure, advocates of radical solutions propose to cut the Gordian knot by a policy of preventive war. But there has always been an air of unreality about a program so contrary to the sense of the country and the constitutional

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limits within which American foreign policy must be conducted. For the rest, there seems to be such general agreement about the main lines of American strategy that some of the recent transformations in our strategic position are rarely publicly debated. Whether these postulates of American strategic thought are interpreted in Secretary Dulles’ “massive retaliation” speech and subsequent article,[i] in Vice-President Nixon’s reply to Adlai Stevenson of March 13, 1954, or in Mr. Finletter’s lucid book, “Power and Policy,”[ii] they amount to the assertion that the chief deterrent to Soviet aggression resides in United States nuclear superiority. The corollary is that the United States must not exhaust itself in a “war of attrition” in peripheral areas or keep in being a force so large as to drain our economy without adding to our effective strength on A-Day (the hypothetical date of the outbreak of nuclear war).[iii] Since only the threat of “massive retaliation” can deter Soviet aggression, major reliance must be placed on the development of our Strategic Air Force and on increasing the power of our nuclear arsenal. Since the Sino–Soviet bloc possesses interior lines of communication and is therefore able to choose the point of attack, we must not let them lure us into areas where we would be strategically at a disadvantage. Instead, we should inhibit aggression at its source by the threat of a general war. To be sure, there are some areas where we shall resist aggression on the ground, the NATO region for example, and for the defense of these it is considered that conventional forces perhaps backed by nuclear weapons are essential. But in the remainder of the world, the part which Mr. Finletter calls the “grey areas,” Sino–Soviet moves can be prevented only by the threat of a general war. This in substance seems to be the rationale for our present military policy. The argument is persuasive. It has the advantage of fitting in with the historical experience of a nation which, for over a century, felt secure from hostile attack. And it is reinforced by the memory of the Korean conflict which has come to symbolize the frustration experienced in waging peripheral wars. But one of a nation’s most difficult tasks is to interpret its past correctly. However efficacious the threat of a general war may have been during the period of American nuclear monopoly or near-­monopoly, it takes on a different aspect when we consider the soon-to-be atomic stalemate. And however costly the Korean war may have been, it still may prove a better model for our future strategy than an all-out atomic conflict. For the increasing Soviet nuclear capability has transformed power relationships not only quantitatively but qualitatively. While the United States enjoyed an absolute atomic monopoly, even a small number of nuclear weapons had a powerful deterrent effect. But as the Soviet capability to retaliate on American cities becomes imminent a new dimension is added

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to the United States strategic problem. No matter how vast our remaining margin in number and technological refinement of the ultimate weapons, henceforth not only they but we must fear them. In these circumstances a major or exclusive reliance on general war as a deterrent to Sino–Soviet aggression may come dangerously close to a Maginot mentality—a belief in a strategy which may never be tested but which meanwhile prevents the consideration of any alternative. If we accept an all-or-nothing military policy we may well find ourselves paralyzed in the years ahead, when the increasing Soviet nuclear capability undermines our willingness to run the risk of a general war for anything less than to counter a direct attack on the United States. And it would seem the height of folly for the Soviet Union to attack the United States directly and thereby unleash S.A.C. The Soviets can achieve their ultimate goal, the neutralization of the United States, at much less risk by gradually eroding the peripheral areas, which will imperceptibly shift the balance of power against us without ever presenting us with a clear-cut challenge. It may be argued, of course, that they will not attempt to absorb the peripheral areas if it means the destruction of Moscow or Peking. But this is merely begging the principal question—whether as the Soviet supply of nuclear weapons grows, as well as the capacity to deliver them, nuclear war does not become a double-edged sword? The more fearful the weapons, the more risky their use. And the more risky their use, the more the Soviet strategic problem is reduced to presenting its challenges in such a manner that the pressures for solutions short of war will be maximized not only with our European allies but in this country also. If we refused to fight in Indo-China when the Soviet nuclear capability was relatively small because of the danger that a limited war might become general, we shall hardly be readier to risk nuclear bombing for the sake of Burma or Iran or even Yugoslavia. On the contrary, as Soviet nuclear strength increases, the number of areas that will seem worth the destruction of New York, Detroit or Chicago will steadily diminish. There is no doubt that we must have a powerful nuclear arsenal and the best strategic air force, if only to discourage an attack on us. But the power of these should not blind us to their limitations as instruments of the cold war, particularly to the fact that exclusive reliance on them runs counter to a coalition policy even within the NATO area and that there must be a point beyond which development of them will yield diminishing returns. What will be the advantage of accumulating a greater store of fission weapons than would be necessary to destroy every Soviet manufacturing center? Or of improving them to the point where one bomb can destroy an average city twice over? Nor should we overlook that certain technological advances—the atomic submarine, for example—will add much less to

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our effective strategic strength than to that of the Sino–Soviet bloc. Thus for the first time in military history there is the possibility of a stalemate despite an absolute superiority in number of weapons and in technology; and when this point has been reached the American strategic problem is transformed. The Red Army may have been immobilized by the American atomic monopoly, but it may be liberated by the Soviet capacity to retaliate on Washington. It is argued by some that the atomic stalemate is nothing new, that it has in fact existed on the Eurasian continent since 1949. But ­ merican this is surely not the same as saying that it has been part of the A consciousness since then, and this is the crucial factor in determining willingness to engage in a general war. The stalemate on the Eurasian continent has been maintained solely by the relative freedom of action of the United States. That is precisely why our nuclear arsenal is no better than our willingness to use it, and this is in danger of being reduced as the­ Soviet nuclear capacity grows. An all-or-nothing military policy will also sap the vitality of our system of alliances. If we assert that nuclear weapons represent the only deterrents to Soviet aggression, one of two consequences becomes almost inevitable: either our Allies will feel that any military effort on their part is unnecessary, or they may be led to the conviction that peace is preferable to war almost at any price. With the end of the American monopoly of nuclear power our demonstrations of weapons in that field may actually work to Soviet advantage. Thus our explosion of the hydrogen bomb was certainly a factor in deterring British action in Indo-China. Our only policy consistent with a policy of alliances, therefore, is one which minimizes (or seems to minimize) the risks of nuclear war and at the same time offers protection against Soviet occupation through the use of conventional armies. In short, the strategic problem of the United States has two aspects: to create a level of thermo-nuclear strength to deter the Soviet bloc from a major war, or from aggressions in areas which cannot be defended by an indigenous effort; but to integrate this with a policy which does not paralyze the will to resist in areas where local resources for defense do exist.

II But is there any deterrent to Sino–Soviet aggression other than the threat of general war? Does not a policy of peripheral actions run counter to the geographic realities of the situation, specifically to the fact that the U.S.S.R. possesses interior lines of communication and can therefore assemble a superior force at any given point? It must be admitted that we alone cannot possibly defend the Soviet periphery by local actions; nor can we intervene without the cooperation

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of the local governments. Our immediate task must be to shore up the indigenous will to resist, which in the “grey areas” means all the measures on which a substantial consensus seems to exist: a political program to gain the confidence of local populations and to remove the stigma of colonialism from us, together with a measure of economic assistance and similar steps. But though a political program may be essential it will prove useless without an increase in the capacities for local defense. Few political leaders will run the risk of foreign occupation even though liberation is to follow eventually. The promise of victory in a general war will mean little to the leader of a threatened country which is meanwhile to be Sovietized. The strength of this feeling even in the NATO area is best expressed in an editorial in a leading German newspaper which has supported Chancellor Adenauer’s foreign policy: “We must oppose any strategy the basic postulate of which involves giving up our territory. Our partnership in the Atlantic alliance means more to us than that our 12 divisions represent a strategic asset for the West; it includes a demand for the protection of the German people. … A substantial retreat is equivalent to our moral and physical destruction.”[iv] The argument thus runs in a circle: Can the peripheral areas be defended, assuming the willingness of the countries concerned to resist and our readiness to help them? To support a negative answer such factors are cited as the “unlimited” Chinese manpower or the vast distances of the “grey areas” from the centers of our strength. Now to underestimate an adversary may be disastrous, but to overestimate his resources may lead to a needless paralysis of policy. Absolute numbers are important, but only the part which can be utilized effectively is strategically significant. In these terms Chinese manpower is limited by the Soviet–Chinese capacity to equip and train it, and Chinese effectiveness by the difficulty of communications and supply. The vision of hordes of Chinese streaming into the “grey areas” is unrealistic. If it were possible to develop indigenous armies of moderate size but substantial firepower these should be able to fight delaying actions until the arrival of reinforcements, particularly if American air power (perhaps carrier-based) were hampering Chinese movements. Nor can the Chinese keep pouring in men and supplies so far from their centers of production, despite the seemingly contrary lessons of the war in Korea. After the beginning of the armistice negotiations, the Korean war was fought under conditions nearly ideal for an army with inferior technology and air power: actions were always confined to a small segment of the front; they could be delayed until there had been an adequate build-up; they could be broken off when stocks were depleted. The risks were always tactical and not strategic; the penalty for failure was limited by the self-imposed restrictions of the armistice negotiations. “Operation

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Strangle” therefore did not represent a fair test of the Chinese ability to sustain a major effort over a considerable period of time and in the face of superior air power. The only continuous drain on Chinese supplies occurred after the front was stabilized near Suwon in March 1951, and from then until the beginning of the armistice negotiations in June the Chinese were much closer to a decisive defeat than we. Had we committed even four more divisions, indeed even if we had put a time limit on the truce negotiations, we might have achieved a substantial military victory. To be sure, the limitations imposed on the Chinese freedom of manœuvre by the narrow peninsula and the proximity of our bases in Japan gave us an advantage in Korea which probably could not be duplicated in other areas. On the other hand, certain circumstances were propitious for the Chinese also. Korea was close to their main production centers and to the Russian supply lines, and communications between Korea and China were good. Neither of these conditions would be duplicated in, for example, Southeast Asia. We thus might say that these are two prerequisites of effective local action by the United States: indigenous governments of sufficient stability so that the Soviets can take over only by open aggression, and indigenous military forces capable of fighting a delaying action. If these conditions are met, the American contribution to the defense of the “grey areas” will involve the creation of a strategic reserve (say in the Philippines, Malaya or Pakistan) capable of redressing the balance and of a weapons system capable of translating our technological advantage into local superiority. This is difficult but not impossible. Of the countries around the Soviet periphery, only five possess insufficient forces to put up an initial defense: Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Thailand and Indo-China. India and Pakistan are protected by a difficult mountain-barrier and still more by the fact that an attack on them would almost certainly lead to a general war. As for the other countries, the defense of Afghanistan depends on the strength of Pakistan; an attack on Iran would have to reckon with the flanking position of Turkey; India would not look on an attack on Burma with equanimity and might intervene; while the fate of Thailand will be decided in Indo-China, where an all-out American effort may still save at least Laos and Cambodia. It should not be beyond our capabilities, then, to create nucleus defense forces in the three critical countries: Iran (to help Turkey and Pakistan cover the Middle East), Pakistan (to strengthen Afghanistan and to back up Iran and Burma), and the Indo-Chinese states (to protect Malaya and Thailand). If concurrently we develop a supply system perhaps based on existing British facilities in Malaya and develop a political program capable of enlisting the support of the countries concerned, we could bring about situations in which American local action is physically

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and psychologically possible. And once a certain level of indigenous power exists, a Chinese or Soviet attack can occur only after a period of build-up in the border areas which an effective intelligence system should be able to discover and which should give time for us to concentrate our forces or take political steps to avoid the conflict. It is not at all obvious, therefore, that China or even the U.S.S.R. could utilize its interior position to assemble an overwhelming force at any given point around its periphery. But can we counter even the forces they are able to assemble? If we admit the local war thesis, do we not run the risk of having our army always at the wrong place? To be sure, China can pick the initial point of attack, but the greater mobility of her interior position is illusory because of the difficulties of communication. Once the Chinese are committed in an area, they are not able to shift their troops at will against our air power or with greater speed than we shift ours by sea. They cannot, in short, draw us into Indo-China and then attack in Burma with the same army. They can, of course, build up two armies, but we should be able to learn of this in time and then decide to defend one or the other area, or neither, depending on the strategic situation. In any case, the two armies cannot support each other (the classic advantage of interior lines). And this still leaves out of consideration the utilization of tactical nuclear weapons which would further increase the Sino–Soviet risk.[v] But assuming its feasibility, should we permit ourselves to be drawn into a “war of attrition” with China? The ultimate answer will have to depend on local conditions and on the precise circumstances in which the Chinese challenge is presented. But it seems clear that the “war of attrition” argument mistakes the crucial indices of modern war. The significant attrition of modern war is in matériel, and there would appear to be little likelihood that a state with a steel production of less than 10,000,000 tons annually could win a contest with the United States. Soviet help could certainly redress the balance to a degree, but we do not know to what extent the U.S.S.R. is prepared to go to save its Chinese allies in a crisis, above all if Chinese requests for help involve a sacrifice of its own economic goals. Soviet and Chinese difficulties would be increased if we coupled our intentions with face-saving devices and guarantees of the integrity of metropolitan China. Even with Soviet assistance, a protracted, large-scale military effort may lead to the stagnation, if not the exhaustion, of the Chinese régime. A war of attrition is the one war China could not win.

III The ultimate argument for the little war thesis, however, must be in terms of the over-all requirements of United States security. The most

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frequent argument in favor of our maintaining a foothold on the Continent of Eurasia, and specifically in Western Europe, is, in military terms, that our whole strategy depends on the refueling facilities which our allies provide for our strategic air force. But we have a strategic interest in Eurasia independent of the range of our heavy bombers (which can, after all, be increased by technical advances), namely, the geopolitical fact that in relation to Eurasia the United States is an island Power with inferior resources at present only in manpower, but later on even in industrial capacity. Thus we are confronted by the traditional problem of an “island” Power—of Carthage with respect to Italy, of Britain with respect to the Continent—that its survival depends on preventing the opposite land-mass from falling under the control of a single Power, above all one avowedly hostile. If Eurasia were to fall under the control of a single Power or group of Powers, and if this hostile Power were given sufficient time to exploit its resources, we should confront an overpowering threat. At best we would be forced into a military effort not consistent with what is now considered the “American way of life.” At worst we would be neutralized and would no longer be masters of our policy. If this is true, we cannot cast off the “grey areas” without dire consequences. We may be able to win a war without their assistance, but we cannot survive a long period of peace without denying them to the U.S.S.R. If the United States ever became confined to “Fortress America,” or even if Soviet expansion in the “grey areas” went far enough to sap our allies’ will to resist, Americans would be confronted by three-quarters of the human race and not much less of its resources and their continued existence would be precarious. But there is no necessity for this to occur. It should not be forgotten that the defense of the Free World is a problem not only of power but of will. In 1941 Germany alone nearly defeated the U.S.S.R. and today the combination of Western Europe and the United States should be able to contain it. The steel production of Western Europe still equals that of the U.S.S.R. In Asia, China appears as strong as she does at least partly because of the irresolution of her opponents. The task of creating a balance of power would therefore be far from hopeless if one considered nothing but the available resources. But while a balance is attainable along existing lines on the Eurasian continent, it will nevertheless always remain tenuous. As long as ­Soviet armies are poised on the Elbe, Western Europe will be insecure. As long as China strides unopposed through Southeast Asia, the uncommitted Powers will seek their safety in neutralism. The Soviet bloc presents to the outside world a vision of ruthless strength allied with artful cunning, of a constant readiness to utilize force coupled with the diplomatic skill to secure the fruits of such use. The United States, therefore, faces the task not

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only of stemming the Soviet tide but also of reducing the Soviet sphere and demonstrating the limitations of Soviet power and skills. The last is almost as important as the reduction of the Soviet sphere, for to the extent that the Free World, now swayed by a sense of its impotence, realizes that the Soviet bloc, too, behind its façade of monolithic power shrinks from certain consequences, its resolution and its policy will both become stronger. A strategy which admits the possibility of fighting limited actions is more likely to achieve this objective than the threat of a total nuclear war. Since the destructiveness of strategic nuclear weapons has made them useless except for acts of desperation, the threat of massive retaliation will have two consequences: either the Sino–Soviet bloc will consider it a bluff and thus confront us again with the dilemma of Dienbienphu, or it will transform all contests into questions of prestige which will inhibit any concessions. An all-or-nothing military policy therefore makes for a paralysis of diplomacy. By leaving no alternative between total nuclear war and an uneasy armistice, it prevents attempts to ameliorate the situation progressively and supports the Soviet bloc’s pose of moderation. Actions short of total war, on the other hand, may help restore fluidity to the diplomatic situation, particularly if we analyze what is implied by the term “reduction of the Soviet sphere.” The Sino–Soviet bloc can be reduced, short of waging a general war, in two ways: by a voluntary withdrawal or by an internal split. The former is unlikely and depends on many factors outside our control, but the latter deserves careful study. A great deal has been written about it, but this much seems clear: the rift will not come by itself. Too much is to be gained by unity, too many prizes are still to be won, the memory of Tito is still too fresh in the Kremlin, for us to be able to count on Soviet mistakes. A split between the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, and even more a split with China, can come about only through outside pressure, through the creation of contingencies which may force a divergence of views into the open. Thus Tito’s break with the Cominform was due at least in part to his disenchantment over Molotov’s lukewarm support on the Trieste issue, which in turn was caused by the U.S.S.R.’s unwillingness to risk a major war for a peripheral objective. The most fundamental indictment of our present military policy, then, is that its inability to differentiate its pressures may actually contribute to the consolidation and the unity of the Soviet bloc. It is therefore misleading to attack the little war thesis on the ground that it does not offer a military solution to our strategic problem, for its merit is precisely that it may provide a political solution. Had we defeated the Chinese army in Korea in 1951 we would have confronted the U.S.S.R. with the dilemma whether to risk everything for the sake of increasing the power of China; and had we followed our victory with a conciliatory

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political proposal to Peking we could have caused it to reflect whether American good will might not represent a better protection than blindly following the Soviet line. But even if we had failed in our primary task of dividing the U.S.S.R. and China, we would have greatly improved our position towards our allies and even more towards the uncommitted nations in Asia. The best counterargument to the charge of colonialism is political moderation after a military victory. Indo-China gave us a similar opportunity, if under less favorable circumstances, although the Indo-Chinese problem would hardly have assumed its present dimensions had China suffered a decisive reversal in her first military encounter with the United States. Thus, if limited actions are implemented as part of a policy which offers the other side a way out short of total surrender or total war, they may bring about local reversals which may start chain reactions difficult to control and might magnify the tensions within the Soviet bloc. In such a strategy our nuclear superiority and our strategic air force would become a means to permit us to fight local actions on our terms or to shift the opus for a general war onto the Soviet bloc.

IV But what if the local war should become general? Would we then not have isolated ourselves? To pose the question in the abstract is to prejudge the issue because it assumes that the present course will not lead to our isolation, albeit slowly. Something more fundamental is involved—a misapprehension of the nature of collective security. It is often said that the two world wars would have been avoided if the aggressors had been aware of the forces which would eventually be aligned against them. But even granting this proposition, it would be paradoxical if the Power strong enough to resist local aggressions alone were prevented from doing so by a doctrine of collective security. An alliance represents an increase in strength only when its members agree on the nature of the danger. For it is not the fact that an alliance exists which deters an aggressor but the spirit of determination which animates it, as the fate of the French system of alliances in the inter-war period showed. To ask unstable NATO governments which are hard put to play a European rôle to make themselves responsible for what we do in Asia is to demand the impossible. Even if we are able to induce them to support us by economic pressure and by considerations of long-range strategy, we shall certainly undermine their domestic support. Thus it becomes important to consider whether the military assistance they can give us in peripheral wars is worth this price. The only contingency in which an allied military contribution is essential is a general war or an attack on the NATO areas,

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which amounts to the same thing. In local wars we do not need them and should not insist on their assistance if they have no direct interest at stake. This is not to argue that “going it alone” is a virtue in itself. We must in any case be able to count on the support of Britain and the Commonwealth in Southeast Asia. Only we cannot permit the balance of power to be overturned for the sake of maintaining the form of allied unity. The way in which a policy that does not exclude the possibility of fighting local wars affects our strategy in a general war therefore depends on two factors: (a) how the local war comes about; (b) how the general war develops from it. Clearly, the little war thesis is no better than the policy into which it is integrated and clearly American intervention can never take place ad hoc. The efficacy of the little war thesis depends, then, on the nature of our leadership. If we demonstrate that we are able to use our strength with moderation, that we know alternatives other than to talk nuclear war or surrender, we might bring about the psychological climate which will make limited actions supportable.[vi] If such local wars as we may fight come about not as acts of truculence but as a last resort, they need not undermine our relations with our allies; and if then it were the other side which opted for general war the moral basis of our diplomacy would not have been badly prepared. Thus our capacity to fight local wars is not a marginal aspect of our effective strength; it is a central factor which cannot be sacrificed without impairing our strategic position and paralyzing our policy. The risks involved in an all-or-nothing military policy are so fearful that if we follow it our resolution will weaken and leave the initiative to the other side. A military policy which cannot offer the uncommitted nations protection against Sino–Soviet occupation will defeat our attempts to rally them to our side and in time it will even demoralize the NATO alliance. This would be true even if it should be maintained that our present force levels do not absolutely preclude local actions; valid as this contention may be in the abstract it is unrealistic psychologically. The unlikelihood that a chief-of-staff would commit an army of the present size in peripheral actions is demonstrated by General Ridgway’s attitude with regard both to Indo-China and the Chinese offshore islands. The impact of our military policy on Sino–Soviet calculations may prove even more pernicious. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons having made it unlikely that any responsible statesman will lightly unleash a general war, the greatest danger of war—unless the Soviet leaders have become totally reckless—will lie in a miscalculation on their part. This is the only war which it is within our power to avoid, assuming that we leave no doubt about our capabilities and determination. But even this “avoidable” war may break out if the other side becomes convinced that

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we cannot interfere locally and that our threats of instant retaliation are bluff. If that should happen, the other side may then decide, as its nuclear arsenal grows, to absorb the “grey areas” and confront us with the choice between relinquishing them or risking the destruction of American cities. And because the Sino–Soviet leaders may well be mistaken in their assessment of our reaction when faced with such an alternative, our present military policy may bring about the total war which it seeks to prevent. An improvement in our capacity for local war is therefore indicated not only by considerations of national strategy but as our best chance to preserve the peace.

Notes “Policy for Security and Peace,” by John Foster Dulles, Foreign Affairs, April 1954. Thomas K. Finletter, “Power and Policy.” New York: Harcourt, 1954. Finletter, p. 231. Frankfurter Allgemeine, December 2, 1954. For a useful discussion of a tactical nuclear weapons system see “Counter-Force Strategy,” by T. F. Walcowicz, Air Force, February 1955; and “No Need to Bomb Cities to Win War,” by Richard Leghorn, U. S. News & World Report, January 28, 1955. vi. For a discussion of the diplomacy consistent with this conception of the American role see the author’s “American Policy and Preventive War,” The Yale Review, Spring 1955. i. ii. iii. iv. v.

Source Henry A. Kissinger, Military Policy and Defence of the “Grey Areas”, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 33, No. 3 (April 1955), pp. 416–428. Available at www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/71182/henry-akissinger/military-policy-and-defense-of-the-grey-areas (accessed March 14, 2014).

DOCUMENT

5

Reflections on Containment

George Kennan’s “X” article, published in Foreign Affairs in 1949, outlined for the United States a “doctrine of perpetual struggle” against communist ideology. The “containment” strategy optimistically assigned the American people the task of redeeming their Soviet rival. As long as the Kremlin remained wedded to its ideology, negotiation was futile. The struggle could only end with the collapse and conversion of the Soviet system. Critics assailed the policy as too global, reactive and moralistic for a nation possessed of no authority to undertake a crusade. Containment nonetheless guided American policy, and Kennan came closest, and earliest, in his prediction of the fate that would befall Soviet power.

The Success and Pain of the Strategy No matter what Wilsonian-minded American statesmen called them, by late 1945 spheres of influence were emerging across Europe, and they were to remain in place until the collapse of communism four decades later. Under U.S. leadership, the Western occupation zones of Germany were consolidated, while the Soviet Union turned the countries of Eastern Europe into its appendages. The erstwhile Axis Powers—Italy, Japan, and, after 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany—gradually moved toward alliance with the United States. The Soviet Union cemented its dominance over Eastern Europe by means of coercion. At the same time, the Kremlin tried its utmost to interrupt the process of Western consolidation by fostering a guerilla war in Greece and by encouraging mass demonstrations by West European communist parties, especially in France and Italy.

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American leaders concluded that they had to resist further Soviet expansion. But their national tradition caused them to seek to justify this resistance on nearly any basis other than as an appeal to the traditional balance of power. In doing this, American leaders were not being hypocritical. When they finally came to recognize that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vision of a peaceful globe guarded by the four policemen (the United States, The Soviet Union, Britain and China) could not be implemented, they preferred to interpret this development as a temporary setback on the way to an essential harmonious world order. Here they faced a philosophical challenge. Was Soviet intransigence merely a passing phase, which Washington could wait out? Were the Americans, as former Vice President Henry Wallace and his followers suggested, unwittingly causing the Soviets to feel paranoid by not adequately communicating their pacific intentions to Stalin? Did Stalin really reject postwar cooperation with the strongest nation in the world? Did he not want in the end to be America’s friend? As the highest policymaking circles in Washington considered those questions, a document arrived on February 22, 1946, from an expert on Russia, one George Kennan, a relatively junior diplomat at the American embassy in Moscow that was to provide the philosophical and conceptual framework for interpreting Stalin’s foreign policy. Rarely does an embassy report by itself reshape Washington’s view of the world, but what later came to be known as the “Long Telegram” empathically did. Kennan maintained that the United States should stop blaming itself for Soviet intransigence; the sources of Soviet foreign policy lay deep within the Soviet system itself. For Kennan, communist ideology was at the heart of Stalin’s approach to the world. Staling regarded the Western capitalist powers as irrevocably hostile. The friction between the Soviet Union and America was therefore not the product of some misunderstanding or faulty communication between Moscow and Washington but was inherent in the ­Soviet Union’s perception of the outside world. From time immemorial, argued Kennan, the Russian tsars had sought to expand their territory. They had sought to subjugate Poland and turn it into a dependent nation. They had regarded Bulgaria as within Russia’s sphere of influence. And they had sought a warm-water port on the Mediterranean, mandating control of the Black Sea Straits: At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful, agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people;

212  • Documents for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.

This historical insecurity was, according to Kennan, given a new sense of urgency by communist dogma: In this [communist] dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand …Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced [their] country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes …

America, Kennan argued, had to hunker down for a long struggle; the goals and philosophies of the United States and of the Soviet Union were irreconcilable. In a top-secret study dated September 24, 1946, Truman adviser Clark Clifford fell in with this view: “The main deterrent to Soviet attack on the United States, or to attack on areas of the world which are vital to our security, will be the military power of this country.” By now, this had become conventional wisdom. But Clifford used it as a springboard from which to proclaim a global American security mission, embracing “all democratic countries which are in any way menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R.” It was not clear what was meant by “democratic.” Did this qualification limit America’s defense to Western Europe, or was it a courtesy that extended to any threatened area and thus required the United States to defend simultaneously the jungles of Southeast Asia, the deserts of Middle East and densely populated Central Europe? In time, the latter interpretation became dominant. Clifford rejected any similarity between the emerging policy of containment and traditional diplomacy. In his view, the Soviet–American conflict was not caused by clashing national interests—which by definition might be negotiated—but by the moral shortcomings of the Soviet leadership. Therefore, the goal of American policy was not so much to restore the balance of power as to transform Soviet society. Just as in 1917 Wilson had blamed the need for a declaration of war on the Kaiser rather than on the threat Germany posed to American security, so Clifford now ascribed Soviet–American tensions to “a small ruling clique and not the Soviet people.” A significant Soviet change of heart, and probably a new set of Soviet leaders, was required before an overall Soviet–­A merican agreement would be possible. At some dramatic moment, these new

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leaders would “work out with us a fair and equitable settlement when they realize that we are too strong to be beaten and too determined to be frightened.” Neither Clifford nor any subsequent American statesman involved in the discussion of the Cold War ever put forward specific terms to end the confrontation or to initiate a process that would bring about negotiations to do so. So long as the Soviet Union maintained its ideology, negotiations were treated as pointless. After a Soviet change of heart, a settlement would become nearly automatic. In either case, spelling out the terms of such a settlement in advance was deemed to inhibit America’s freedom of action—the same argument that had been used during World War II to avoid discussion of the postwar world. America now had the conceptual framework to justify political and military resistance to Soviet expansionism.

Truman Expands the Concept Since the end of the war, Soviet pressures had followed historical Russian patterns. The Soviet Union controlled the Balkans (except for Yugoslavia) and a guerilla war was raging in Greece, supported from bases in communist Yugoslavia and the Bulgarian Soviet satellite. Territorial demands were being made against Turkey, along with a request for Soviet bases in the Straits—very much along the lines of what Stalin had wanted from Hitler on November 25, 1940. Ever since the end of the war, Great Britain had supported both Greece and Turkey, economically as well as militarily. In the winter of 1946–1947, the Attlee Government of Britain informed Washington that it could no longer shoulder the burden. Truman was prepared to take over Great Britain’s historical role of blocking a ­Russian advance toward Mediterranean, but neither the American public nor Congress could countenance the traditional British geopolitical rationale. Resistance to Soviet expansionism had to spring from principles based strictly on the American approach to foreign policy. This imperative became apparent at a key meeting held on February 27, 1947, in the Oval Office. Truman, Secretary of State Marshall and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson sought to persuade a congressional delegation led by Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) of the importance of aid to Greece and Turkey—a formidable assignment, since the traditionally isolations Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Marshall led off with a dispassionate analysis setting forth the relationship between proposed aid program and American interests. He elicited stereotypical grumblings about “pulling Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire,” the iniquities of the balance of power and the burdens of foreign aid.

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Recognizing that the administration was about to lose its case, Acheson asked Marshall in a whisper whether this was a private fight or whether anyone could join in. Given the floor, Acheson proceeded, in the words of one aide, “to pull out all the stops.” Acheson boldly presented the group with visions of a bleak future in which the forces of communism stood to gain the upper hand: “Only two great powers remained in the world … [the] United States and the Soviet Union. We had arrived at a situation unparalleled since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth … For the United states to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or communist subversion … was to protect the security of the United States –it was to protect freedom itself.” When it became evident that Acheson had roused the congressional delegation, the administration stuck to his basic approach. From that point on, the Greek–Turkish aid program was portrayed as part of the global struggle between democracy and dictatorship. When, on March 12, 1947, Truman announced the doctrine that would later be named after him, he dropped the strategic aspect of Acheson’s analysis and spoke in traditional Wilsonian terms of a struggle between two ways of life: “One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedoms.” Had Soviet leaders been more aware of American history, they would have understood the ominous nature of what the president was saying. The Truman Doctrine marked a watershed because, once America had thrown down the moral gauntlet, the kind of realpolitik Stalin understood best would be forever at an end, and bargaining over reciprocal concessions would be out of the question. Henceforth, the conflict could only be settled by a change in Soviet purposes, by the collapse of the Soviet system, or both. Truman had proclaimed his doctrine as “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Inevitably, criticism of the objective of defending democracy appeared at both ends of the intellectual spectrum: some protested that America was defending countries that, however important, were morally unworthy; others objected that America was committing itself to the defense of societies that, whether free or not, were not vital to American security. It was an ambiguity that refused to go away, generating debates that have not ended to this day about American

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purposes in nearly every crisis. Ever since, American foreign policy has been obliged to navigate between those who assail it for being amoral and those who criticize it for going beyond the national interest through crusading moralism. Once the challenge had been defined as the very future of democracy, America could not wait until a civil war actually occurred, as it had in Greece. On June 5, less than three months after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, Secretary Marshall in a commencement address at Harvard committed America to the task of eradicating the social and economic conditions that tempted aggression. America would aid European recovery, announced Marshall, to avoid “political disturbances” and “desperation,” to restore the world economy and to nurture free institutions. Therefore, “[any] government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States government.” In other words, participation in the Marshall Plan was open even to governments in the Soviet orbit—a hint taken up in Warsaw and Prague and just as quickly squelched by Stalin. Only a country as idealistic, as pioneering and as relatively inexperienced as the United States could have advanced a plan for global economic recovery based solely on its own resources. And yet the very sweep of that vision elicited a national commitment that would sustain the Cold War generation through its final victory. The program of economic recovery, said Secretary Marshall, would be “directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” Just as when the Atlantic Charter had been proclaimed, a global crusade against hunger and despair was found to be more persuasive to Americans than appeals to immediate self-interest or the balance of power.

The X Article At the end of all these more or less random initiatives, there emerged a document that would, for over a generation, serve as the bible of the containment policy, indeed which supplied it with its very name. All the various strands of American postwar thought were brought together in an extraordinary article published in July 1947 in Foreign Affairs. Though it was anonymously signed by “X,” the author was later identified as George F. Kennan, by then the head of the policy planning staff of the State ­Department. Of the thousands of articles written since the end of the Second World War, Kennan’s “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” stands in a class by itself. In this lucidly written, passionately argued literary adaptation of his “Long Telegram,” Kennan raised the Soviet challenge to the level of philosophy of history.

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By the time Kennan’s article appeared, Soviet intransigence had become the staple of policy documents. Kennan’s distinctive contribution was to explain the ways in which hostility to the democracies was inherent in the Soviet domestic structure and why that structure would prove impervious to conciliatory Western policies. Tension with the outside world was inherent in the very nature of communist philosophy and, above all, in the way the Soviet system was being run domestically. Internally, the Communist Party was the only organized group, with the rest of society fragmented into an inchoate mass. Thus the Soviet Union’s implacable hostility to the outside world was an attempt to gear international affairs to its own internal rhythm. The main concern of Soviet policy was “to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.” The way to defeat Soviet strategy was by “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.” Like almost every other contemporary foreign policy document, Kennan’s “X” article disdained the elaboration of a precise diplomatic goal. What he sketched was the age-old American dream of a peace achieved by the conversion of the adversary, albeit in language more elevated and far more trenchant in its perception than that of any contemporary. But where Kennan differed from other experts was when he described the mechanism by which, sooner or later, through one power struggle or another, the Soviet system would be fundamentally transformed. Since that system had never managed a “legitimate” transfer of power, Kennan thought it likely that, at some point, various contestants for authority might reach down into these politically immature and inexperienced masses in order to find support for their respective claims. If this were ever to happen, strange consequences could flow for the Communist Party: “For the membership at large has been exercised only in the practices of iron discipline and obedience and not in the arts of compromise and accommodation … If, consequently, anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” No other document forecast quite so accurately what would in fact take place after the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. And in the aftermath of so total a collapse of the Soviet Union, it may seem carping to point out just how back-breaking an assignment Kennan had prescribed for his people. For he had charged America with combating Soviet pressures for the indefinite future all around a vast periphery that embraced the widely differing circumstances of Asia, the Middle East and Europe. The Kremlin was, moreover, free to select its point of attack, presumably only where it

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calculated it would have the greatest advantage. Throughout subsequent crises, the American political objective was deemed to be the preservation of the status quo, with the overall effort producing communism’s final collapse only after a protracted series of ostensibly inconclusive conflicts. It was surely the ultimate expression of America’s national optimism and unimpaired sense of self-confidence that as sophisticated an observer as George Kennan could have assigned his society a role so global, so stern and, at the same time, so reactive.

The Ingredients of Containment This stark, even heroic, doctrine of perpetual struggle committed the American people to endless contests with rules that left the initiative to the adversary and confined America’s role to strengthening the countries already on its side of the dividing line—a classic policy of spheres of interest. By abjuring negotiations, the containment policy wasted precious time during the period of America’s greatest relative strength—while it still had the atomic monopoly. Indeed, given the premise of containment—that positions of strength had yet to be built—the Cold War became both militarized and imbued with an inaccurate impression of the West’s relative weakness. The redemption of the Soviet Union became the ultimate goal of policy; stability could emerge only after evil had been exorcised. It was no accident that Kennan’s article concluded with a peroration instructing his impatient, peace-loving compatriots about the virtues of patience and interpreting their international role as a test of their country’s worthiness: The issue of Soviet–American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations … The thoughtful observer of Russian–American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

One of the outstanding features of these noble sentiments was their peculiar ambivalence. They rallied America to a global mission but made the task so complex that America would nearly tear itself apart trying to fulfill it. Yet the very ambivalence of containment seemed to lend an extraordinary impetus to American policy. Though essentially passive with respect to diplomacy with the Soviet Union, containment evoked tenacious creativity when it came to building “positions of strength” in the military and

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economic realms. This was because in containment were merged lessons derived from the two most important American experiences of the previous generation: from the New Deal came the belief that threats to political stability arise primarily from gaps between economic and social expectations and reality, hence the Marshall Plan; from the Second World War America learned that the best protection against aggression is having overwhelming power and the willingness to use it, hence the Atlantic alliance. The Marshall Plan was designed to get Europe on its feet economically. NATO was to look after its security.

The Critiques of Containment As containment slowly took shape, the criticism it encountered emerged from three different schools of thought. The first came from the “realists,” exemplified by Walter Lippmann, who argued that the containment policy led to psychological and geopolitical overextension while draining American resources. The spokesman for the second school of thought was Winston Churchill, who objected to the postponement of negotiations until after positions of strength had been achieved. Finally, there was Henry Wallace, who denied America the moral right to undertake the policy of containment in the first place. Postulating a fundamental moral equivalence between both sides, Wallace argued that the Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe was legitimate and that America’s resistance to it only intensified tension. He urged a return to what he viewed as Roosevelt’s policy: to end the Cold War by American conciliation. As the most eloquent spokesman for the realists, Walter Lippmann rejected Kennan’s proposition that Soviet society contained the seeds of its own decay. He considered the theory to be too speculative to serve as the foundation of American policy: containment, argued Lippmann, would draw America into the hinterlands of the Soviet empire’s extended periphery, which included, in his view, many countries that were not states in the modern sense to begin with. Military entanglements that far from home could not enhance American security and would weaken American resolve. Containment, according to Lippmann, permitted the Soviet Union to choose the points of maximum discomfiture for the United States while retaining the diplomatic, and even the military, initiative. Lippmann stressed the importance of establishing criteria to define areas in which countering Soviet expansion was a vital American interest. Without such criteria, the Untied States would be force to organize a “heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets,” which would permit America’s newfound allies to exploit containment for their own purposes. The United States would be trapped into propping up

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nonviable regimes, leaving Washington with the sorry choice between “appeasement and defeat and the loss of face, or… support[ing] them [U.S. allies] at incalculable cost.” It was indeed a prophetic analysis of what lay ahead for the United States, though the remedy Lippmann proposed was hardly congenial to the universalist American tradition, which was far closer to Kennan’s expectation of an apocalyptic outcome. Lippmann asked that American foreign policy be guided by a case-by-case analysis of American interests rather than by general principles presumed to be universally applicable. In his view, American policy should have been aiming less at overthrowing the communist system than at restoring the balance of power in Europe, which had been destroyed by the war. Containment implied the indefinite division of Europe, whereas America’s real interest should be to banish Soviet power from the center of the European continent: For more than a hundred years all Russian governments have sought to expand over Eastern Europe. But only since the Red Army reached the Elbe River have the rulers of Russia been able to realize the ambitions of the Russian empire and the ideological purposes of communism. A genuine policy would, therefore, have as its paramount objective a settlement which brought about the evacuation of Europe … American power must be available, not to ‘contain’ the Russians at scattered points, but to hold the whole Russian military machine in check, and to exert a mounting pressure in support of a diplomatic policy which as its concrete objective a settlement that means withdrawal.

From among its intellectuals, America was able to draw on the thinking of both Lippmann and Kennan while they were at the height of their powers. Kennan correctly understood communism’s underlying weakness; Lippmann accurately foretold the frustrations of an essentially reactive foreign policy based on containment. Kennan called for endurance to permit history to display its inevitable tendencies; Lippmann called for diplomatic initiative to produce a European settlement while America was still preponderant. Kennan had a better intuitive understanding of mainsprings of American society; Lippmann grasped the impending strain of enduring a seemingly endless stalemate and of the ambiguous causes that containment might lead America to support.

The Most Compelling Alternative In the end, Lippmann’s analysis found a substantial following, though mainly among the opponents of confrontation with the Soviet Union. And their approbation was based on only one aspect of Lippmann’s argument, emphasizing as they did its critique while ignoring its prescriptions. They

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noted Lippmann’s call for more limited objectives but overlooked his recommendation for more aggressive diplomacy. Thus it happened that in the 1940s the most compelling alternative strategy to the doctrine of containment came from none other than Winston Churchill, then leader of the Opposition in the British Parliament. Churchill supported containment, but for him it was never an end in itself. Unwilling to wait passively for the collapse of communism, he sought to shape history rather than rely on it to do his work for him. What he was after was a negotiated settlement. His “iron curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri had merely hinted at negotiations. On October 9, 1948, at Llandudno, Wales, Churchill returned to his argument that the West’s bargaining position would never be better than it was at that moment. In a much-neglected speech, he said: No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period of time before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement. We ought not to go jogging along improvident, incompetent, waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for something bad for us to turn up. The Western nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian communists have got it too.

Two years later, Churchill made the same plea in the House of Commons: the democracies were quite strong enough to negotiate, and would only weaken themselves by waiting. Defending NATO rearmament on November 30, 1950, he warned that arming the West would not by itself change its bargaining position, which, in the end, depended on America’s atomic monopoly: [W]hile it is right to build up our forces as fast as we can, nothing in this process, in the period I have mentioned, will deprive Russia of effective superiority in what are now called the conventional arms. All that it will do is to give us increasing unity in Europe and magnify the deterrents against aggression …Therefore I am in favour of efforts to reach a settlement with Soviet Russia as soon as a suitable opportunity presents itself, and of making those efforts while the immense and measureless superiority of the United States atomic bomb organization offsets the Soviet predominance in every other military respect.

For Churchill, a position of strength was already in place; for American leaders, it had yet to be created. Churchill thought of negotiations as a way of relating power to diplomacy. And though he was never specific, his public statements strongly suggest that he envisaged some kind of diplomatic ultimatum by the Western democracies. American leaders recoiled before employing their atomic monopoly, even as a threat. Churchill wanted to

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shrink the area of Soviet influence, but was prepared to coexist with Soviet power within reduced limits. The American leaders had a nearly visceral dislike of spheres of influence. They wanted to destroy and not to shrink their adversary’s sphere. Their preference was to wait for total victory and for the collapse of communism, however far off, to bring about a Wilsonian solution to the problem of world order. The disagreement came down to a difference between the historical experiences of Great Britain and America. Churchill’s society was all too familiar with imperfect outcomes; Truman and his advisers came from a tradition in which, once a problem had been recognized, it was usually overcome by the deployment of vast resources. Hence America’s preference for final resolutions and its distrust of the sort of compromise that had become a British specialty. The American view prevailed, because America was stronger than Great Britain, and because Churchill, as the leader of the British Opposition, was in no position to press his strategy.

Henry Wallace and the Radical Tradition In the end, the most vocal and persistent challenge to American policy came from neither the realist school of Lippmann nor Churchill’s balanceof-power thinking, but from a tradition with roots deep within American radical thought. Whereas Lippmann and Churchill accepted the Truman administration’s premise that Soviet expansionism represented a serious challenge and only contested the strategy for resisting it, the radical critics rejected very aspect of containment. Henry Wallace, vice president during Roosevelt’s third term, former secretary of agriculture, and secretary of commerce under Truman, was its principal spokesman. A product of America’s populist tradition, Wallace had an abiding Yankee distrust of Great Britain. Like most American liberals since Jefferson, he insisted that “the same moral principles which governed in private life also should govern in international affairs.” In Wallace’s view, America had lost its moral compass and was practicing a foreign policy of “Machiavellian principles of deceit, force and distrust,” as he told an audience in Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946. Since prejudice, hatred and fear were the root causes of international conflict, the United States had no moral right to intervene abroad until it had banished these scourges from its own society. The new radicalism reaffirmed the historical vision of America as a beacon of liberty, but in the process, turned it against itself. Postulating the moral equivalence of American and Soviet actions became a characteristic of the radical critique throughout the Cold War. The very idea of America having international responsibilities was, in Wallace’s eyes, an example of the arrogance of power. The British,

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he argued, were duping the gullible Americans into doing their bidding: “British policy clearly is to provoke distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III.” To Wallace, Truman’s presentation of the conflict as one between democracy and dictatorship was pure fiction. In 1945, a time when Soviet postwar repression was becoming increasingly obvious and the brutality of collectivization was widely recognized, Wallace declared that “the Russians today have more of the political freedoms than they ever had.” He also discovered “increasingly the signs of religious toleration” in the U.S.S.R. and claimed that there was a “basic lack of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.” Wallace thought that Soviet policy was driven less by expansionism than by fear. In his speech at Madison Square Garden in August 1946, Wallace laid down a direct challenge to Truman, which caused the president to demand Wallace’s resignation: We may not like what Russia does in Eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States. But whether we like it or not the Russians will try to socialize the sphere of influence just as we try to democratize our sphere of influence … Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the world. Our ideas of free enterprise democracy will govern much of the rest. The two ideas will endeavor to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance.

In a curious reversal of roles, the self-proclaimed defender of morality in foreign policy accepted a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe on practical grounds, while the administration he was attacking for cynical power politics rejected the Soviet sphere on moral grounds. Wallace’s challenge collapsed after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade and the invasion of South Korea. As a presidential candidate in 1948, he gained only one million votes against more than 24 million for Truman, placing him fourth. Nevertheless, Wallace managed to developed themes that would remain staples of the America radical critique throughout the Cold War and move to center stage during the Vietnam conflict. These emphasized America’s moral inadequacies and those of the friends it was supporting; a basic moral equivalence between America and its communist challengers; the proposition that America had no obligation to defend any area of the world against largely imaginary threats; and the view that world opinion was a better guide to foreign policy than geopolitical concepts. When aid to Greece and Turkey was first proposed, Wallace urged the Truman administration to put the issue before the United Nations. If “the Russians exercised their veto, the moral burden would be on them … [W]hen we act independently … the moral

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burden is on us.” Seizing the moral high ground meant more than whether America’s geopolitical interests were being safeguarded. Though Wallace’s radical critique of American postwar foreign policy was defeated in the 1940s, its basic tenets reflected a deep strain of American idealism that continued to tug at the nation’s soul. The same moral convictions that had conferred such energy on America’s international commitments also had the potential to be turned inward by disillusionment with the outside world, or with America’s own imperfections. In the 1920s, isolationism had caused America to withdraw on the grounds that it was too good for the world; in the Wallace movement and its heirs, it revived itself in the proposition that America should withdraw because it was not good enough for the world.

The Complexity of Containment One result of the containment policy was that the United States relegated itself to an essentially passive diplomacy during the period of its greatest power. That is why containment was increasingly challenged by yet another constituency, of which John Foster Dulles became the most vocal spokesman. His constituents were the conservatives who accepted the premises of containment but questioned the absence of urgency with which it was being pursued. Even if containment did in the end succeed in undermining Soviet society, these critics argued, it would take too long and cost too much. Whatever containment might accomplish a strategy of liberation would surely accelerate. By the end of Truman’s presidency, the containment policy was caught in a crossfire between those who considered it too bellicose (the followers of Wallace) and those who thought it too passive (the conservative Republicans). This controversy accelerated because, as Lippmann had predicted, international crises increasingly moved to peripheral regions of the globe, where the moral issues were confused and direct threats to American security were difficult to demonstrate. America found itself drawn into wars in areas not protected by alliances and on behalf of ambiguous causes and inconclusive outcomes. From Korea to Vietnam, these enterprises kept alive the radical critique, which continued to question the moral validity of containment. Thus surfaced a new variant of American exceptionalism. With all of its imperfections, the America of the nineteenth century had thought of itself as the beacon of liberty; in the 1960s and 1970s, the torch was said to be flickering and would need to be relit before America could return to its historical role as an inspiration to the cause of freedom. The debate over containment turned into a struggle for the very soul of America. As early as 1957, even George Kennan had come to reinterpret

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containment in this light when he wrote: “To my own countrymen who have often asked me where best to apply the hand to counter the Soviet threat, I have accordingly had to reply: to our American failings, to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes, or that worry us; to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.” A decade earlier, before he had become disillusioned by what he considered the militarization of his invention, George Kennan would have recognized that no such choice existed. A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security. It was a measure of Kennan’s achievement that, by 1957, the free world’s parapets had been manned, his own views having made a decisive contribution to this effort. The parapets were in fact being manned so effectively that America permitted itself to indulge in a heft dose of self-criticism. Containment was an extraordinary theory—at once hardheaded and idealistic, profound in its assessment of Soviet motivations yet curiously abstract in its prescriptions. Thoroughly American in its utopianism, it assumed that the collapse of a totalitarian adversary could be achieved in an essentially benign way. Although this doctrine was formulated at the height of America’s absolute power, it preached America’s relative weakness. Postulating a grand diplomatic encounter at the moment of its culmination, containment allowed no role for diplomacy until the climactic final scene in which the men in the white hats accepted the conversion of the men in the black hats. With all of these qualifications, containment was a doctrine that saw America through more than four decades of construction, struggle, and ultimately, triumph. The victim of its ambiguities turned out to be not the peoples America had set out to defend—on the whole successfully—but the American conscience. Tormenting itself in its traditional quest for moral perfection, America would emerge, after more than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controversies, yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do.

Source Henry Kissinger, Reflections on Containment, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 3 (May–June 1994), pp. 113–130. Available at www.jstor.org/stable/20046662 (accessed March 12, 14).

DOCUMENT

6

The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction

Kissinger was initially trained as an intelligence officer and while at Harvard educated in Government and strategic studies. In his government career he often had limited use for international judicial procedures and as this article shows had considerable skepticism for both those who practiced it and the results.

In less than a decade, an unprecedented movement has emerged to submit international politics to judicial procedures. It has spread with extraordinary speed and has not been subjected to systematic debate, partly because of the intimidating passion of its advocates. To be sure, human rights violations, war crimes, genocide, and torture have so disgraced the modern age and in such a variety of places that the effort to interpose legal norms to prevent or punish such outrages does credit to its advocates. The danger lies in pushing the effort to extremes that risk substituting the tyranny of judges for that of governments; historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witch-hunts. The doctrine of universal jurisdiction asserts that some crimes are so heinous that their perpetrators should not escape justice by invoking doctrines of sovereign immunity or the sacrosanct nature of national frontiers. Two specific approaches to achieve this goal have emerged recently. The first seeks to apply the procedures of domestic criminal justice to violations of universal standards, some of which are embodied in United Nations conventions, by authorizing national prosecutors to bring offenders into their jurisdictions through extradition from third countries. The second approach is the International Criminal Court (ICC), the founding

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treaty for which was created by a conference in Rome in July 1998 and signed by 95 states, including most European countries. It has already been ratified by 30 nations and will go into effect when the total reaches 60. On December 31, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the ICC treaty with only hours to spare before the cutoff date. But he indicated that he would neither submit it for Senate approval nor recommend that his successor do so while the treaty remains in its present form. The very concept of universal jurisdiction is of recent vintage. The sixth edition of Black’s Law Dictionary, published in 1990, does not contain even an entry for the term. The closest analogous concept listed is hostes humani generis (“enemies of the human race”). Until recently, the latter term has been applied to pirates, hijackers, and similar outlaws whose crimes were typically committed outside the territory of any state. The notion that heads of state and senior public officials should have the same standing as outlaws before the bar of justice is quite new. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the many atrocities committed since, major efforts have been made to find a judicial standard to deal with such catastrophes: the Nuremberg trials of 1945–46, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the genocide convention of 1948, and the anti-torture convention of 1988. The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, signed in Helsinki in 1975 by President Gerald Ford on behalf of the United States, obligated the 35 signatory nations to observe certain stated human rights, subjecting violators to the pressures by which foreign policy commitments are generally sustained. In the hands of courageous groups in Eastern Europe, the Final Act became one of several weapons by which communist rule was delegitimized and eventually undermined. In the 1990s, international tribunals to punish crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, established ad hoc by the U.N. Security Council, have sought to provide a system of accountability for specific regions ravaged by arbitrary violence. But none of these steps was conceived at the time as instituting a “universal jurisdiction.” It is unlikely that any of the signatories of either the U.N. conventions or the Helsinki Final Act thought it possible that national judges would use them as a basis for extradition requests regarding alleged crimes committed outside their jurisdictions. The drafters almost certainly believed that they were stating general principles, not laws that would be enforced by national courts. For example, Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, referred to it as a “common standard.” As one of the negotiators of the Final Act of the Helsinki conference, I can affirm that the administration I represented considered it primarily a diplomatic weapon to use to thwart the communists’ attempts to pressure the Soviet and captive peoples. Even with respect to binding undertakings such as the genocide convention, it was

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never thought that they would subject past and future leaders of one nation to prosecution by the national magistrates of another state where the violations had not occurred. Nor, until recently, was it argued that the various U.N. declarations subjected past and future leaders to the possibility of prosecution by national magistrates of third countries without either due process safeguards or institutional restraints. Yet this is in essence the precedent that was set by the 1998 British detention of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet as the result of an extradition request by a Spanish judge seeking to try Pinochet for crimes committed against Spaniards on Chilean soil. For advocates of universal jurisdiction, that detention—lasting more than 16 months—was a landmark establishing a just principle. But any universal system should contain procedures not only to punish the wicked but also to constrain the righteous. It must not allow legal principles to be used as weapons to settle political scores. Questions such as these must therefore be answered: What legal norms are being applied? What are the rules of evidence? What safeguards exist for the defendant? And how will prosecutions affect other fundamental foreign policy objectives and interests?

A Dangerous Precedent It is decidedly unfashionable to express any degree of skepticism about the way the Pinochet case was handled. For almost all the parties of the European left, Augusto Pinochet is the incarnation of a right-wing assault on democracy because he led a coup d’état against an elected leader. At the time, others, including the leaders of Chile’s democratic parties, viewed Salvador Allende as a radical Marxist ideologue bent on imposing a Castro-­style dictatorship with the aid of Cuban-trained militias and Cuban weapons. This was why the leaders of Chile’s democratic parties publicly welcomed—yes, welcomed—Allende’s overthrow. (They changed their attitude only after the junta brutally maintained its autocratic rule far longer than was warranted by the invocation of an emergency.) Disapproval of the Allende regime does not exonerate those who perpetrated systematic human rights abuses after it was overthrown. But neither should the applicability of universal jurisdiction as a policy be determined by one’s view of the political history of Chile. The appropriate solution was arrived at in August 2000 when the Chilean Supreme Court withdrew Pinochet’s senatorial immunity, making it possible to deal with the charges against him in the courts of the country most competent to judge this history and to relate its decisions to the stability and vitality of its democratic institutions. On November 25, 1998, the judiciary committee of the British House of Lords (the United Kingdom’s supreme court) concluded that “international law has made it plain that certain types of conduct . . . are not acceptable

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conduct on the part of anyone.” But that principle did not oblige the lords to endow a Spanish magistrate—and presumably other magistrates elsewhere in the world—with the authority to enforce it in a country where the accused had committed no crime, and then to cause the restraint of the accused for 16 months in yet another country in which he was equally a stranger. It could have held that Chile, or an international tribunal specifically established for crimes committed in Chile on the model of the courts set up for heinous crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was the appropriate forum. The unprecedented and sweeping interpretation of international law in ex parte Pinochet would arm any magistrate anywhere in the world with the power to demand extradition, substituting the magistrate’s own judgment for the reconciliation procedures of even incontestably democratic societies where alleged violations of human rights may have occurred. It would also subject the accused to the criminal procedures of the magistrate’s country, with a legal system that many be unfamiliar to the defendant and that would force the defendant to bring evidence and witnesses from long distances. Such a system goes far beyond the explicit and limited mandates established by the U.N. Security Council for the tribunals covering war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as the one being negotiated for Cambodia. Perhaps the most important issue is the relationship of universal jurisdiction to national reconciliation procedures set up by new democratic governments to deal with their countries’ questionable pasts. One would have thought that a Spanish magistrate would have been sensitive to the incongruity of a request by Spain, itself haunted by transgressions committed during the Spanish Civil War and the regime of General Francisco Franco, to try in Spanish courts alleged crimes against humanity committed elsewhere. The decision of post-Franco Spain to avoid wholesale criminal trials for the human rights violations of the recent past was designed explicitly to foster a process of national reconciliation that undoubtedly contributed much to the present vigor of Spanish democracy. Why should Chile’s attempt at national reconciliation not have been given the same opportunity? Should any outside group dissatisfied with the reconciliation procedures of, say, South Africa be free to challenge them in their own national courts or those of third countries? It is an important principle that those who commit war crimes or systematically violate human rights should be held accountable. But the consolidation of law, domestic peace, and representative government in a nation struggling to come to terms with a brutal past has a claim as well. The instinct to punish must be related, as in every constitutional democratic political structure, to a system of checks and balances that includes other elements critical to the survival and expansion of democracy.

The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction  • 229

Another grave issue is the use in such cases of extradition procedures designed for ordinary criminals. If the Pinochet case becomes a precedent, magistrates anywhere will be in a position to put forward an extradition request without warning to the accused and regardless of the policies the accused’s country might already have in place for dealing with the charges. The country from which extradition is requested then faces a seemingly technical legal decision that, in fact, amounts to the exercise of political discretion—whether to entertain the claim or not. Once extradition procedures are in train, they develop a momentum of their own. The accused is not allowed to challenge the substantive merit of the case and instead is confined to procedural issues: that there was, say, some technical flaw in the extradition request, that the judicial system of the requesting country is incapable of providing a fair hearing, or that the crime for which the extradition is sought is not treated as a crime in the country from which extradition has been requested—thereby conceding much of the merit of the charge. Meanwhile, while these claims are being considered by the judicial system of the country from which extradition is sought, the accused remains in some form of detention, possibly for years. Such procedures provide an opportunity for political harassment long before the accused is in a position to present any defense. It would be ironic if a doctrine designed to transcend the political process turns into a means to pursue political enemies rather than universal justice. The Pinochet precedent, if literally applied, would permit the two sides in the Arab–Israeli conflict, or those in any other passionate international controversy, to project their battles into the various national courts by pursuing adversaries with extradition requests. When discretion on what crimes are subject to universal jurisdiction and whom to prosecute is left to national prosecutors, the scope for arbitrariness is wide indeed. So far, universal jurisdiction has involved the prosecution of one fashionably reviled man of the right while scores of East European communist leaders—not to speak of Caribbean, Middle Eastern, or African leaders who inflicted their own full measures of torture and suffering—have not had to face similar prosecutions. Some will argue that a double standard does not excuse violations of international law and that it is better to bring one malefactor to justice than to grant immunity to all. This is not an argument permitted in the domestic jurisdictions of many democracies—in Canada, for example, a charge can be thrown out of court merely by showing that a prosecution has been selective enough to amount to an abuse of process. In any case, a universal standard of justice should not be based on the proposition that a just end warrants unjust means, or that political fashion trumps fair ­judicial procedures.

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An Indiscriminate Court The ideological supporters of universal jurisdiction also provide much of the intellectual compass for the emerging International Criminal Court. Their goal is to criminalize certain types of military and political actions and thereby bring about a more humane conduct of international relations. To the extent that the ICC replaces the claim of national judges to universal jurisdiction, it greatly improves the state of international law. And, in time, it may be possible to negotiate modifications of the present statute to make the ICC more compatible with U.S. constitutional practice. But in its present form of assigning the ultimate dilemmas of international politics to unelected jurists—and to an international judiciary at that—it represents such a fundamental change in U.S. constitutional practice that a full national debate and the full participation of Congress are imperative. Such a momentous revolution should not come about by tacit acquiescence in the decision of the House of Lords or by dealing with the ICC issue through a strategy of improving specific clauses rather than as a fundamental issue of principle. The doctrine of universal jurisdiction is based on the proposition that the individuals or cases subject to it have been clearly identified. In some instances, especially those based on Nuremberg precedents, the definition of who can be prosecuted in an international court and in what circumstances is self-evident. But many issues are much more vague and depend on an understanding of the historical and political context. It is this fuzziness that risks arbitrariness on the part of prosecutors and judges years after the event and that became apparent with respect to existing tribunals. For example, can any leader of the United States or of another country be hauled before international tribunals established for other purposes? This is precisely what Amnesty International implied when, in the summer of 1999, it supported a “complaint” by a group of European and Canadian law professors to Louise Arbour, then the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The complaint alleged that crimes against humanity had been committed during the NATO air campaign in Kosovo. Arbour ordered an internal staff review, thereby implying that she did have jurisdiction if such violations could, in fact, be demonstrated. Her successor, Carla Del Ponte, in the end declined to indict any NATO official because of a general inability “to pinpoint individual responsibilities,” thereby implying anew that the court had jurisdiction over NATO and American leaders in the Balkans and would have issued an indictment had it been able to identify the particular leaders allegedly involved. Most Americans would be amazed to learn that the ICTY, created at U.S. behest in 1993 to deal with Balkan war criminals, had asserted a right to investigate U.S. political and military leaders for allegedly criminal

The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction  • 231

conduct—and for the indefinite future, since no statute of limitations ­applies. Though the ICTY prosecutor chose not to pursue the charge—on the ambiguous ground of an inability to collect evidence—some national prosecutor may wish later to take up the matter as a valid subject for universal jurisdiction. The pressures to achieve the widest scope for the doctrine of universal jurisdiction were demonstrated as well by a suit before the European Court of Human Rights in June 2000 by families of Argentine sailors who died in the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands War. The concept of universal jurisdiction has moved from judging alleged political crimes against humanity to second-guessing, 18 years after the event, military operations in which neither civilians nor civilian targets were involved. Distrusting national governments, many of the advocates of universal jurisdiction seek to place politicians under the supervision of magistrates and the judicial system. But prosecutorial discretion without accountability is precisely one of the flaws of the International Criminal Court. Definitions of the relevant crimes are vague and highly susceptible to politicized application. Defendants will not enjoy due process as understood in the United States. Any signatory state has the right to trigger an investigation. As the U.S. experience with the special prosecutors investigating the executive branch shows, such a procedure is likely to develop its own momentum without time limits and can turn into an instrument of political warfare. And the extraordinary attempt of the ICC to assert jurisdiction over Americans even in the absence of U.S. accession to the treaty has already triggered legislation in Congress to resist it. The independent prosecutor of the ICC has the power to issue indictments, subject to review only by a panel of three judges. According to the Rome statute, the Security Council has the right to quash any indictment. But since revoking an indictment is subject to the veto of any permanent Security Council member, and since the prosecutor is unlikely to issue an indictment without the backing of at least one permanent member of the Security Council, he or she has virtually unlimited discretion in practice. Another provision permits the country whose citizen is accused to take over the investigation and trial. But the ICC retains the ultimate authority on whether that function has been adequately exercised and, if it finds it has not, the ICC can reassert jurisdiction. While these procedures are taking place, which may take years, the accused will be under some restraint and certainly under grave public shadow. The advocates of universal jurisdiction argue that the state is the basic cause of war and cannot be trusted to deliver justice. If law replaced politics, peace and justice would prevail. But even a cursory examination of

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history shows that there is no evidence to support such a theory. The role of the statesman is to choose the best option when seeking to advance peace and justice, realizing that there is frequently a tension between the two and that any reconciliation is likely to be partial. The choice, however, is not simply between universal and national jurisdictions.

Modest Proposals The precedents set by international tribunals established to deal with situations where the enormity of the crime is evident and the local judicial system is clearly incapable of administering justice, as in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, have shown that it is possible to punish without removing from the process all political judgment and experience. In time, it may be possible to renegotiate the ICC statute to avoid its shortcomings and dangers. Until then, the United States should go no further toward a more formal system than one containing the following three provisions. First, the U.N. Security Council would create a Human Rights Commission or a special subcommittee to report whenever systematic human rights violations seem to warrant judicial action. Second, when the government under which the alleged crime occurred is not authentically representative, or where the domestic judicial system is incapable of sitting in judgment on the crime, the Security Council would set up an ad hoc international tribunal on the model of those of the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda. And third, the procedures for these international tribunals as well as the scope of the prosecution should be precisely defined by the Security Council, and the accused should be entitled to the due process safeguards accorded in common jurisdictions. In this manner, internationally agreed procedures to deal with war crimes, genocide, or other crimes against humanity could become institutionalized. Furthermore, the one-sidedness of the current pursuit of universal jurisdiction would be avoided. This pursuit could threaten the very purpose for which the concept has been developed. In the end, an excessive reliance on universal jurisdiction may undermine the political will to sustain the humane norms of international behavior so necessary to temper the violent times in which we live.

Source Henry Kissinger, The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 80, No. 4 (July–August 2001), pp. 86–96. Available at www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/­a rticle/163/28174. html (accessed March 14, 2014).

DOCUMENT

7

Eulogy for Senator John McCain

On September 1, 2018, Henry Kissinger joined with Senator John ­McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain and former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, eulogizing the late Senator at his funeral at Washington’s National Cathedral. Kissinger had been instrumental in ending the ­Vietnam War during the Nixon administration, a war in which McCain so famously served as a naval officer. During the Vietnam War McCain served as a Navy pilot and his plane was shot down by the North Vietnamese over Hanoi in 1967. McCain survived the crash with severe injuries and was held as a prisoner of war in Hanoi for several years and tortured by the North Vietnamese. As the son of Admiral McCain he was offered a release by the North Vietnamese but refused unless his fellow prisoners were released with him. Kissinger negotiated the release of all American POWs in March 1973 as part of the Paris Agreement with the North Vietnamese for which he received the Nobel Peace prize in 1973. Following his military service McCain was elected to two terms in the United States House of Representatives and then to the Senate from Arizona where he served for many years and was highly regarded and widely respected as a statesman on national security and military affairs. McCain was also the Republican nominee for president 2008 election, losing to Democrat Barack Obama. The 95-year-old Kissinger once recalled that he had met McCain in Vietnam in 1973 when the young soldier was released by the North after more than five years as a prisoner of war. “I had been in Hanoi that day and they had offered to let me take him on my plane back to the United States and he refused on the grounds that nobody should get special treatment.”

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Our country has had the good fortune that at times of national trial a few great personalities have emerged to remind us of our essential unity and inspire us our sustaining values. John McCain was one of those gifts of destiny. I met John for the first time in April 1973 at a White House reception for prisoners returned from captivity in Vietnam. He had been much on my mind during the negotiation to end the Vietnam War, oddly also because his father, then commander in chief of the Pacific command, when briefing the president answered references to his son by saying only “I pray for him.” In the McCain family national service was its own reward that did not allow for special treatment. I thought of that when his Vietnamese captors during the final phase of negotiations offered to release John so that he could return with me on the official plane that had brought me to Hanoi. Against all odds, he thanked them for the offer but refused it. When we finally met, his greeting was both self-effacing and moving. “Thank you for saving my honor.” He did not tell me then or ever that he had had an opportunity to be freed years earlier but had refused, a decision for which he had to endure additional periods of isolation and hardship. Nor did he ever speak of his captivity again during the near half century of close friendship. John’s focus was on creating a better future. As a senator, he supported the restoration of relations with Vietnam, helped bring it about on a bipartisan basis in the Clinton administration and became one of the advocates of reconciliation with his enemy. Honor, it is an intangible quality, not obligatory. It has no code. It reflects an inward compulsion, free of self-interest. It fulfills a cause, not a personal ambition. It represents what a society lives for beyond the necessities of the moment. Love makes life possible; honor and nobility. For John it was a way of life. John returned to America divided over its presidency, divided over the war. Amidst all of the turmoil and civic unrest, divided over the best way to protect our country and over whether it should be respected for its power or its ideals. John came back from the war and declared this a false choice. America owed it to itself to embrace both strengths and ideals. In decades of congressional service, ultimately as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John was an exponent of an America strong enough to its purpose. But John believed also in a compassionate America, guided by core principles for which American foreign policy must always stand. “With liberty and justice for all” is not an empty sentiment he argued, it is the foundation of our national consciousness. To John, American advantages had universal applicability. I do not believe he said that there’s an errant exception any more than there is a black exception or an Asian or Latin exception. He

Eulogy for Senator John McCain  • 235

warned against temptation of withdrawal from the world. In this manner John McCain’s name became synonymous with an America that reached out to oblige the powerful to be loyal and give hope to the oppressed. John lives of all these battles for decency and freedom. He was an engaged warrior fighting for his causes with a brilliance, with courage, and with humility. John was all about hope. In a commencement speech at Ohio’s Wesleyan University John summed up the essence of his engagement of a lifetime: “No one of us, if they have character, leaves behind a wasted life.” Like most people of my age I feel a longing for what is lost and cannot be restored. If the happy and casual beauty of youth prove ephemeral, something better can endure and endure until our last moment on Earth and that is the moment in our lives when we sacrifice for something greater than ourselves. Heroes inspire us by the matter of factness of their sacrifice and the elevation of the root vision. The world will be lonelier without John McCain, his faith in America and his instinctive sense of moral duty. None of us will ever forget how even in his parting John has bestowed on us a much-needed moment of unity and renewed faith in the possibilities of America. Henceforth, the country’s honor is ours to sustain.

Source Henry A. Kissinger, Eulogy for Senator John McCain, funeral for Senator John McCain, Washington National Cathedral, September 1, 2018. Available at www.townandcountrymag. com/society/politics/a22892548/henry-kissinger-eulogy-for-john-mccain-full-transcript/ ­(accessed November 26, 2018).

Selected Bibliography

Newspapers and Unpublished Sources Gerald R. Ford Papers, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Public Papers of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, August 1974–January 1977, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. Richard M. Nixon Papers, Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Yorba Linda, California. New York Times The Washington Post The Kissinger Telcons, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 123, Edited by Thomas Blanton and Dr. William Burr. TELCON, “The President/Mr. Kissinger,” 8:18 p.m., April 27, 1971. Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Archives and Records Administration, National Security Files, Box 1031, Exchanges Leading Up to HAK Trip to China, Dec. 1969–July 1971. Audio clip: Conversation 2–52, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, 8:18 p.m., April 27, 1971. White House Tapes, Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Archives and Records Administration.

Published Sources Books by Henry A. Kissinger (listed chronologically) Confluence V1, No. 4, December, Literary Licensing, 1952. A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace. 1812–22, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1957. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. Foreign Economic Policy for the Twentieth Century (ed.). Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Study Project, New York: Doubleday, 1958. The Necessity for Choice, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961. Problems of National Strategy (ed.). New York: Praeger, 1965. The Troubled Partnership: A Re-Appraisal of the Atlantic Alliance, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.

238  •  Selected Bibliography American Foreign Policy (essays), New York: Norton, 1969, revised 1974. White House Years, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1979. For the Record: Selected Statements 1977–1980, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1981. Years of Upheaval, 1973–1977, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1982. Observation, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1985. Diplomacy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Years of Renewal, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Does America Need a Foreign Policy? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Foreign Policy Crises, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America’s Involvement in and Extrication from the ­Vietnam War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. On China, New York: New York: Penguin Books, 2012. World Order, New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

Selected Articles by Henry A. Kissinger (listed chronologically) “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant.” Undergraduate thesis, unpublished. Widener Library, Harvard University, 1951. “Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich.” American Political Science Review, ­December 1954. “American Policy and Preventive War.” Yale Review, April 1955. “Military Policy and the Defense of Grey Areas.” Foreign Affairs, April 1955. “Limitations of Diplomacy.” The New Republic, May 6, 1955. “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age.” Foreign Affairs, April 1956. “Reflections on American Diplomacy.” Foreign Affairs, October 1956. “Strategy and Organization.” Foreign Affairs, April 1957. “Controls, Inspections and Limited War.” The Reporter, June 13, 1957. “U.S. Foreign Policy and Higher Education.” Current Issues in Higher Education, March 1958. “Missiles and the Western Alliance.” Foreign Affairs, April 1958. “Nuclear Testing and the Problems of Peace.” Foreign Affairs, October 1958. “The Policymaker and the Intellectual.” The Reporter, March 5, 1959. “The Search for Stability.” Foreign Affairs, July 1959. “Arms Control, Inspection and Surprise Attack.” Foreign Affairs, July 1960. “Limited War: Nuclear or Conventional? A Reappraisal.” Daedalus, Fall 1960. “The New Cult of Neutralism.” The Reporter, November 24, 1960. “For an Atlantic Confederacy.” The Reporter, February 2, 1961. “The Unsolved Problems of European Defense.” Foreign Affairs, July 1962. “Reflections on Cuba.” The Reporter, November 22, 1962. “Strains on the Alliance.” Foreign Affairs, January 1963. “NATO’s Nuclear Dilemma.” The Reporter, March 28, 1963. “Reflections on Power and Diplomacy.” In E.A.J. Johnson (ed.), Dimensions in Diplomacy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964. “Classical Diplomacy.” In John Stoessinger and Alan Westin (eds.), Power and Order: Six Cases in World Politics. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964. “Coalition Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age.” Foreign Affairs, July 1964. “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy.” Daedalus, April 1966. “NATO: Evolution or Decline? Texas Quarterly, Autumn 1966. “Bureaucracy and Policymaking.” Security Studies Paper #17, University of California, Los ­A ngeles, 1968. “Central Issues of American Foreign Policy.” Agenda for the Nation, Washington, DC: ­Brookings, 1968. “The Vietnam Negotiations.” Foreign Affairs, January 1969.

Selected Bibliography  • 239 “The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction.” Foreign Affairs, January 1969. “Bipartisan Objectives for American Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1988. “Reflections on Containment.” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1994. “Between the Old Left and the New Right.” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999. “The Future of U.S.–Chinese Relations.” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2001.

Other Books and Articles Ahlberg, Christine and Alexander Wieland (eds.). Foreign Relations of the United States, ­1969–1976, Volume XXXVIII, Part 1, Foundations of Foreign Policy, 1973–1976. ­Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012. Alroy, Gil. The Kissinger Experience: American Foreign Policy in the Middle East. New York: Horizon, 1975. Ambrose, Steven E. Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973–1990. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Ambrose, Steven E. Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962–1972. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Ambrose, Steven E. Rise to Globalism. New York: Penguin, 1985. Ambrose, Steven E. “The Christmas Bombing.” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (Winter 1992). Anderson, Jon Lee. “Does Henry Kissinger Have a Conscience?” The New Yorker (August 20, 2016). Andrew, Christopher. For The President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Andrianopoulos, Gerry A. Kissinger and Brzezinski: The NSC and the Struggle for Control of US National Security Policy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Anson, Robert Sam. Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Aron, Raymond. Peace and War. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Atwood, William. The Twilight Struggle. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Avner, Yehuda, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership. New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2010. Badri, Hassan, et al. The Ramadan War. New York: Hippocrene, 1978. Baedeker, Karl. Southern Germany, 13th ed. Leipzig: Baedeker, 1929. Ball, George. Diplomacy for a Crowded World. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1976. Ball, George. The Past Has Another Pattern. New York: Norton, 1982. Bell, Coral. The Diplomacy of Detente: The Kissinger Era, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. Bellow, Saul. To Jerusalem and Back. New York: Viking, 1976. Berman, Larry. Planning a tragedy. New York: Norton, 1982. Bill, James. The Eagle and the Lion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Blackwill, Robert D. “In Defense of Kissinger.” National Interest (January–February 2014). Blumenfeld, Ralph, and reporters of the New York Post. Henry Kissinger. New York: New ­A merican Library, 1974. Brandon, Henry. The Retreat of American Power. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Brandon, Henry. Special Relationships. New York: Atheneum, 1988. Brodine, Virginia and Mark Selden. Open Secret: The Kissinger–Nixon Doctrine in Asia. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Brown, Seyom. The Crisis of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Survival. New York: Random House, 1988. Burr, William. The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000. Burroughs, William E. Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security. New York: Random House, 1987.

240  •  Selected Bibliography Bush, George, with Victor Gold. Looking Forward. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Caldwell, Dan (ed.). Henry Kissinger: His Personality and Policies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983. Callahan, David. Dangerous Capabilities. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Casserly, John. The Ford White House. Boulder, CO: Colorado University, 1977. Central Intelligence Agency, The Evolution of Soviet Policy in the Sino–Soviet Border Dispute. April 28, 1970 (declassified May 2007). Chester, Lewis, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page. An American Melodrama. New York: ­Viking, 1969. Christison, Kathleen. “Kissinger: Years of Renewal (Review).” Journal of Palestine Studies. 29. No 1 (1999/2000). Clifford, Clark, with Richard Holbrooke. Counsel to the President. New York: Random House, 1991. Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Colby, William and Peter Forbath. Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. Collier, Peter and David Horowitz. The Rockefellers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. Colodny, Len and Robert Gettlin. Silent Coup. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Colson, Charles. Born Again. Lincoln, VA: Chosen Books, 1976. Cordesman, Anthony H. and Abraham R. Wagner. The Lessons of Modern War: Volume II: The Middle East Wars. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Dallek, Robert. Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. New York: Harper-Collins, 2007. Dallek, Robert. The American Style of Foreign Policy. New York: Knopf, 1983. Dayan, Moshe. Story of My Life. New York: Morrow, 1976. Del Pero, Mario. The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Destler, I.M., Leslie Gelb, and Anthony Lake. Our Own Worst Enemy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Dickson, Peter W. Kissinger and the Meaning of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Diem, Bui, With David Charnoff. The Jaws of History. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Dobrynin, Anatoly. In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986). New York: Random House, 1995. Dowty, Alan. Middle East Crisis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Drew, Elizabeth. Washington Journal: 1973–74. New York: Random House, 1975. Eban, Abba. An Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1977. Ehrlichman, John. Witness to Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. El-Khawas, Mohamed and Barry Cohen. The Kissinger Study of Southern Africa. Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1976. Elliott, William. Western Political Heritage. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1949. Evans, Rowland and Robert Novak. Nixon in the White House. New York: Random House, 1971. Eveland, Wilbur. Ropes of Sand. New York: Norton, 1980. Fahmy, Ismail. Negotiating for Peace in the Middle East. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1983. Fallaci, Oriana. Interview With History. New York: Liverwright, 1976. Ferguson, Niall. “The Kissinger Diaries: What He Really Thought About Vietnam.” Politico. ­October 10, 2015. Ferguson, Niall. Kissinger: Volume 1, 1923–1968: The Idealist. New York: Penguin Books, 2015. Ferguson, Niall. “The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered.” Foreign Affairs. (September/October 2015). Ferguson, Niall and Todd Gitlin. “Henry Kissinger: Sage or Pariah.” New York Times. February 13, 2016.

Selected Bibliography  • 241 Findling, John E. Dictionary of American Diplomatic History. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Ford, Gerald R. A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Freedman, Lawrence. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. Friedrich, Carl. Inevitable Peace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Friedrich, Carl (ed.). The Philosophy of Kant. New York: Random House, 1949. Frost, David. I Gave Them a Sword. New York: Morrow, 1978. Frye, Alton. A Responsible Congress: The Politics of National Security. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. Gaddis, John Lewis. The Long Peace. New York: Oxford, 1987. Garnett, John. Makers of Nuclear Strategy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Garnett, John. Strategies of Containment. New York: Oxford, 1982. Garthoff, Raymond. Détente and Confrontation. Washington, DC: Brookings, 1985. Garthoff, Raymond. “Negotiating SALT.” Wilson Quarterly. Autumn 1977. Gavin, Philip. The Fall of Vietnam. New York: Lucent Press, 2003. Gelb, Leslie and Richard Betts. The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked. Washington, DC: Brookings, 1979. Gentry, Curt. J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Norton, 1991. George, Alexander and William Simons. The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Ghanayem, Isaq and Alden Voth. The Kissinger Legacy: American Middle East Policy. New York: Praeger, 1984. Goh, Evelyn. Constructing the U.S. Rapprochement with China: 1961–1974. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2004. Golan, Galia. Yom Kippur and After. New York: Cambridge, 1977. Golan, Matti. The Road to Peace: A Biography of Shimon Peres. New York: Warner, 1989. Golan, Matti. The Secret Conversations of Henry Kissinger: Step-by-Step Diplomacy in the Middle-­East. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. Goldman, David and Erin Maha (eds.). Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume VII, Vietnam, July 1970–January 1972. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 2010. Goodman, Allan. The Lost Peace. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1978. Graubard, Stephen Richards, Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind. New York: W.W. Norton, 1973. Gray, Christine. International Law and the Use of Force. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Grose, Peter. Israel in the Mind of America. New York: Knopf, 1983. Gulley, Bill with Mary Ellen Reese. Breaking Cover. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. Haig, Alexander. Caveat. New York: Macmillan 1984. Haldeman, H.R. and Joseph DiMona. The Ends of Power. New York: Times Books, 1978. Halliburton, Rachel. “Henry Kissinger’s World Order: The Outer Edge of What is Possible.” ­Independent, September 26, 2014. Halperin, Morton. Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings, 1974. Halperin, Morton. Limited War in the Nuclear Age. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963. Hammond, William. Public Affairs: The Military and The Media. Department of the Army’s Center for Military History, forthcoming. Hanhimäki, Jussi, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hanson, Thomas E. “A Raid Too Far: Operation Lam Son 719 and Vietnamization in Laos and Invasion of Laos, 1971.” Military Review (January–February 2015). Hartmann, Robert. Palace Politics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Head, Richard, Frisco Short, and Robert McFarlane. Crisis Resolution: Presidential Decision-­ Making in the Mayaguez and Korean Confrontation. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1978. Head, Tim, et al. (including John Ehrlichman). The Rigby File. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989.

242  •  Selected Bibliography Heikal, Mohammed. The Road to Ramadan. New York: Times Books, 1975. Herring, George. America’s Longest War: The United States in Vietnam, 1950–1975. 5th ed. ­Boston, MA: Knopf, 2014. Herring, George (ed.). The Pentagon Papers: Abridged Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Herring, George (ed.). The Secret Diplomacy of the Vietnam War. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1983. Hersh, Seymour M. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option. New York: Random House, 1991. Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy. London: Verso, 2001. Hodgson, Godfrey. America in Our Time. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Hoffmann, Stanley. Dead Ends. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1983. Hoffmann, Stanley. Primacy or World Order. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978. Hoffmann, Stanley. “The Case of Dr. Kissinger.” New York Review of Books, December 6, 1979. Hone, Alistair, Kissinger 1973, The Crucial Year. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Hunebelle, Danielle. Dear Henry. New York: Berkley, 1972. Hung, Nguyen Tien, and Jerrold Schecter. The Palace File. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Hyland, William. The Cold War Is Over. New York: Random House, 1990. Hyland, William. Mortal Rivals. New York: Random House 1987. Isaacs, Arnold. Without Honor. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Isaacson, Walter. Kissinger: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, updated, 2005. Johnson, U. Alexis, with Jeff McAllister. The Right Hand of Power. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1984. Joiner, Harry. American Foreign Policy: The Kissinger Era. Huntsville, AL: Strode, 1977. Judis, John. William F. Buckley, Jr. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Kalb, Marvin L. and Kalb, Bernard, Kissinger. Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1974. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Doubleday, 1966. Kant, Immanuel. Fundamental Principles of Metaphysics of Morals. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking, 1983. Kaufmann, William. The McNamara Strategy. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. Keens-Soper, Maurice, G.R. Berridge, and T.G. Otte (eds.). Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Klein, Herb. Making It Perfectly Clear. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Klinghoffer, Arthur. The Angolan War. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Kraslow, David and Stuart Loory. The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1968. Kutler, Stanley. The Wars of Watergate. New York: Knopf, 1990. Kurtz, Evi, The Kissinger Saga: Walter and Henry Kissinger, Two Brothers from Furth, Germany. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009. Kwinty, Jonathan. Endless Enemies. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1984. LaFeber, Walter. The American Age. New York: Norton, 1989. Lake, Anthony. The Tar Baby Option. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Lake, Anthony. (ed.). The Vietnam Legacy. New York: New York University Press, 1976. Landau, David. Kissinger: The Uses of Power. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Lanning, Michael Lee and Dan Cragg. Inside the VA and the NVA: The Real Story of North ­Vietnam’s Armed Forces. New York: Columbine, 1992. Lauren, Paul G., Gordon A. Craig, and Alexander George. Force and the Limits of Military Might. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Leacacos, John P. “Kissinger’s Apparat.” Foreign Policy, Winter, 1971–1972. Lehman, John. Command of the Seas. New York: Scribner’s, 1988.

Selected Bibliography  • 243 Liska, George. Beyond Kissinger: Ways of Conservative Statecraft. Baltimore, MD: Johns ­Hopkins University Press, 1975. Logevall, Frederick. Choosing War: The Last Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in ­Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Lukas, J. Anthony. Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years. New York: Viking, 1976. Magill, Frank N. (ed.). Great Lives From History: American Series. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1987. Mailer, Norman. St. George and the Godfather. New York: Arbor House, 1972. Marchetti, Victor and John Marks. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. New York: Knopf, 1974. Marcum, John. The Angolan Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Mazlish, Bruce. Kissinger: The European Mind in American Policy. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Meir, Golda. My Life. New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1975. Merli, Frank J. and Theodore A. Wilson (eds.). The Makers of American Diplomacy: From ­Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Kissinger. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974. Montgomery, John D. “The Education of Henry Kissinger.” Journal of International Affairs, 29, no. 1 (1975), Morris, Roger. Haig: The General’s Progress. New York: Playboy, 1982. Morris, Roger. Uncertain Greatness. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Moynihan, Daniel. A Dangerous Place. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1975. Neff, Donald. Warriors Against Israel. Battleboro, VT: Amana, 1988. Nessen, Ron. It Sure Looks Different From the Inside. Chicago, IL: Playboy, 1978. Newhouse, John. Cold Dawn. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. Newhouse, John. War and Peace in the Nuclear Age. New York: Knopf, 1989. Nicolson, Harold. The Congress of Vienna. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946. Nitze, Paul. From Hiroshima to Glasnost. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989. Nixon, Richard M. In the Arena. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Nixon, Richard M. Leaders. New York: Warner, 1982. Nixon, Richard M. No More Vietnams. New York: Arbor House, 1985. Nixon, Richard M. RN. New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1978. Nutter, G. Warren. Kissinger’s Grand Design. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975. Oren, Michael. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Osborne, John. White House Watch: The Ford Years. Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1977. Oudes, Bruce. From the President: Richard Nixon’s Secret Files. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Palmer, Bruce. The 25-Year War. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1984. Parker, Richard B. (ed.). The October War. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2001. Parmet, Herbert. Richard Nixon and His America. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1990. Persico, Joseph. The Imperial Rockefeller. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Pfeiffer, Richard (ed.). No More Vietnams. New York; Harper & Row, 1968. Porter, Gareth. Vietnam: The Definitive Documentation of Human Decisions. Stanfordville: Earl Coleman, 1979. Powers, Thomas. The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. New York: Knopf, 1979. Powers, Thomas. Vietnam: The War at Home. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1984. Prados, John. Keepers of the Keys. New York: Morrow, 1991 Price, Raymond. With Nixon. New York: Viking, 1977. Quandt, William B. Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1986. Quandt, William B. Decade of Decisions. Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1977. Quandt, William B. “Kissinger and the Arab–Israeli Disengagement Negotiations.” Journal of International Affairs, 9, no. 1 (1975). Rabin, Yitzak. The Rabin Memoirs. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1979.

244  •  Selected Bibliography Ranelagh, John. The Agency. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Rather, Dan and Gary Paul Gates. The Palace Guard. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Record, Jeffrey. The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998. Reeves, Richard. A Ford, Not a Lincoln. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. Reston, James. Deadline. New York: Random House, 1991. Riad, Mahmoud. The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East. New York: Quartet, 1981. Ross, Dennis. Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.–Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama. New York: Straus and Giroux, 2015. Rovosky, Nitza. The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe. Cambridge, MA: The Harvard Semitic Museum, 1986. Rowan, Roy. The Four Days of the Mayaguez. New York: Norton, 1975. Rubin, Barry. Paved With Good Intentions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Sadat. Anwar. In Search of Identity. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Safire, William. Before the Fall. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Saunders, Harold. The Other Walls. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1985. Schell, Jonathan. The Time of Illusion. New York: Knopf, 1976. Schell, Jonathan. The Village of Ben Suc. New York: Knopf, 1967. Schlafly, Phyllis and Chester Ward. Kissinger on the Couch. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1974. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. A Thousand Days. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Schulzinger, Robert D. Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy. New York, Columbia University Press, 1989. Sebenius, James K., R. Nicholas Burns, and Robert H. Mnookin, Kissinger the Negotiator: ­Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level. New York: Harper Collins, 2018. Serewicz, Lawrence W. America at the Brink of Empire: Rusk, Kissinger and the Vietnam War. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Shawcross, William. The Quality of Mercy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Shawcross, William. The Shah’s Last Ride. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Shawcross, William. Sideshow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Sheehan, Edward. “How Kissinger Did It: Step by Step in the Middle East.” Foreign Policy 22 (1976). Sheehan, Edward. The Arabs, Israelis and Kissinger. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976. Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie. New York: Random House, 1988. Sheehan, Neil. The Pentagon Papers. New York: Bantam Books, 1971. Sherrill, Robert. The Oil Follies of 1970–1980. New York: Doubleday, 1983. Shipler, David. Arab and Jew. New York: Times Books, 1986. Sick, Gary. All Fall Down. New York: Random House, 1985. Sick, Gary. October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random House, 1991. Sihanouk, Norodom with William Burchett. My War With the CIA. New York: Monthly Review, 1973. Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab–Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. Smith, Gerard. Doubletalk: The Story of SALT I. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Smith, Michael J. Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State ­University Press, 1986. Smith, Richard Norton. The Harvard Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Snepp, Frank. Decent Interval. New York: Random House, 1977. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. New York: Knopf, 1928. Starr, Harvey. Henry Kissinger: Perceptions of International Politics. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1984. Stern, Paula. Water’s Edge. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Stockwell, John. In Search of Enemies. New York: Norton, 1978.

Selected Bibliography  • 245 Stoessinger, John G. Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power. New York: W.W. Norton & ­Company, 1976. Strong, Robert J. Bureaucracy and Statesmanship: Henry Kissinger and the Making of American Foreign Policy. Lanham: University Press of America, 1986. Sullivan, William. The Bureau. New York: Norton, 1979. Sulzberger, C.L. The World and Richard Nixon. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987. Synnott, Marcia. The Half-Open Door. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Szulc, Tad. “How Kissinger Did It: Behind the Vietnam Cease-Fire Agreement.” Foreign Policy 15 (1974). Szulc, Tad. The Illusion of Peace. New York: Viking, 1978. Szulc, Tad. Then and Now. New York: Morrow, 1990. Taheri, Amir. Nest of Spies. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Talbott, Strobe. Deadly Gambits. New York: Knopf, 1984. Talbott, Strobe. Endgame. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Talbott, Strobe. The Master of the Game. New York: Knopf, 1988. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on ­Vietnam. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971. Thompson, Nicholas, et al. “Henry Kissinger: Good or Evil?” Politico, October 10, 2015. Thornton, Richard. The Nixon–Kissinger Years. New York: Paragon, 1989. Tivnan, Edward. The Lobby. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Toynbee, Arnold. A Study of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946 and 1957. Trager, James. The Great Grain Robbery. New York: Ballantine, 1975. Truscott, Lucian, IV. Dress Gray. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Valeriani, Richard. Travels With Henry. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Viorst, Milton. Sands of Sorrow. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Wagner, Abraham R. Crisis Decision-Making: Israel’s Experience in 1967 and 1973. New York: Praeger, 1974. Walters, Vernon A. The Mighty and the Meek: Dispatches from the Front Line of Diplomacy. London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2001. Walters, Vernon A. Silent Missions. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 5th ed. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Westmoreland, William. A Soldier Reports. New York: Doubleday, 1976. White, Theodore. America In Search of Itself. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. White, Theodore. Breach of Faith. New York: Atheneum, 1975. White, Theodore. The Making of the President, 1972. New York: Atheneum, 1973. Wiener, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Wills, Garry. Nixon Agonistes. New York: Mentor Books, 1971. Wise, David. The American Police State. New York: Random House, 1976. Witcover, Jules. Marathon. New York: Viking, 1977. Womack, Brantly. China and Vietnam: The Politics of Asymmetry. New York: Cambridge ­University Press, 2006. Woodward, Bob and Carl Bernstein. All The President’s Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. Woodward, Bob and Carl Bernstein. The Final Days. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. Yergin, Daniel. The Prize. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Zumwalt, Elmo. On Watch. New York: Quadrangle, 1976.

U.S. Government Reports Agreement on Limitations of Strategic Offensive Weapons. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings, June–July 1972. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 1975.

246  •  Selected Bibliography Background Information Relating to Southeast Asia and Vietnam. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dec. 1974. Bombing as a Policy Tool in Vietnam. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Oct. 12, 1972. Bombing in Cambodia. Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, July–Aug. 1974. Covert Action in Chile. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 1975. Department of State Bulletin, 1969–77. Détente. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Aug.–Oct. 1974. Dr. Kissinger’s Role in the Wiretapping. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings, July–Dec. 1974. Impeachment of Richard M. Nixon. House Judiciary Committee hearings, Aug. 1974 Intelligence Activities. Senate Government Operations Committee hearings, 1975. Middle East Agreements. House International Relations Committee hearings, Sept.–Oct. 1975. National Bipartisan Report on Central America. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Feb. 1984. Nomination of Henry A. Kissinger. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, Sept.–Oct. 1973. Nomination of Nelson Rockefeller to be Vice President. House Judiciary Committee hearings, 1974. Seizure of the Mayaguez. House International Relations Committee hearings, May 1975–Oct. 1976. Situation in Indochina. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings, Feb.–Mar. 1973. Transmittal of Documents from the NSC to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Senate Armed Services ­Committee hearings, Feb.–Mar. 1974. U.S. Foreign Policy for the 1970’s, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973. U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. National Security Policy vis-à-vis Eastern Europe (“The Sonnenfeldt Doctrine”). House ­International Relations Committee hearings, April 1976. U.S.–Soviet Union–China: The Great Power Triangle. House International Relations Committee, 1975–1976. The Vietnam–Cambodia Emergency 1975. House International Relations Committee hearings, Mar, 1975–May 1976. Vietnam Policy Proposals. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Feb.–Mar. 1970. The War Powers Resolution. House International Relations Committee, 1976.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abrams, General Creighton 62 Acheson, Dean 28, 156, 213, 214 Acheson-Dulles containment posture 191 Ad Hoc Working Group on Chile 83, 84 Adenauer’s foreign policy 202 Administration of National Concord 73n46 Afghanistan 153, 158n5, 203 African leaders 229 Aggregate limit 118 Agnew, Spiro 65, 100, 128 Agranat Commission 120n19 AIG 148 Air Force 25 Air operations in Indochina 62 Alastair Buchan Lecture (June 1976) 188 All Souls College 34 Allen, Richard 34, 39, 47, 141 Allende, Salvador 83–6, 91n24, 92n32, 227 Allesandri, Jorge 91n22 All-or-nothing military policy 201 Allon, Yigal 105, 108 Alsop, Joseph 68 Alsop, Susan Mary 68 Amalrik, Andrei 188 American airlift to Israel 101 American credibility in Vietnam 51 American Express 148 American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 109, 115, 123n52 American-Japanese dialogue 175 American Jewish community 115, 116

American ping pong team in Japan 78 American POWs in Vietnam 233 American values and mores 157 “American way of life” 205 Angola 132, 195 Anti-Vietnam protest movement 191 Antiballistic missile (ABM) system 87 Antiballistic missile (ABM) Treaty (1972) 89 Appeasement 195, 219 Arab oil embargo 132 Arab-Israeli conflict 177, 229 Arab-Israeli disengagement 99 Arab-Israeli dispute 104 Arab-Israeli negotiations 103 Arbour, Louise 230 Arms control 26, 113, 117, 118, 168 Arms Control Negotiations and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) 87, 92n34 Arms Control Negotiations and SALT 86–9 “arms for hostages” 150n13 Arms race 89 Arnold, General Henry “Hap” 18 Aspen Institute 138 Assad, Hafez 106 Atlantic alliance see NATO Atlantic Charter 215 Atlantic community 172 Atlantic relations 170 Atlantic strategy 171 Atomic monopoly 199

248  • Index Atomic stalemate 201 Atomic submarine 200 Axis powers 210 B-52 bombers used against Cambodia 62, 63, 112 B-52 bombers used against North Vietnam 59, 112 Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi 60 “Backchannel” communications 72n21, 96, 119n8 “Backchannel to the Egyptians” 99 “Backchannel” with the Chinese 78 “Backchannel” with the Soviet Union 88 “Backfire” bomber 118 Baker, James 145, 146 Balkans 230 Ball, George 71n12 Base Area 353 see also Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) Batista, Fulgencio 82 Battle of the Bulge 12 “Bay of Pigs” (April 1961) 82 Beacon of liberty 223 Beg, M.F.H 79 Begin, Menachem 122n50 Bergen, Candice 69 Berlin accord 97 Berlin blockade 222 Berlin crises 186 Berlin Wall 28 Bipartisan objectives for foreign policy 164 Bipolar world 153 Bismarck 151 Bistro Restaurant, Beverly Hills, California 69 Black Sea Straits 211 “Bloody September” see PLO operations in Jordan Bok, Derek 138 Bombing of Cambodia 51, 74n66, 138, 139 Bombing of Haiphong 59 Bombing of Hanoi 54, 59 Bombing of North Vietnam 51, 58, 59, 189 Borders (1967) 109 Bowie, Robert 17, 22, 23, 131 Braden home in Chevy Chase, Maryland 68 Brandt, Willy 189 BREAKFAST operation 62, 63 Brezhnev, Leonid 89, 102, 103, 116, 186 British action in Indochina 201 British facilities in Malaya 203 Brodie, Bernard 18, 20

Bruer’s Synagogue 10 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 135n22, 137, 140, 146, 149n2 Bulgaria 211 Building the NSC for the Nixon Administration 47–50 Bundy, McGeorge 18, 28, 34n3, 42, 45 Bunker, Ellsworth 56, 63 Burma 203 Bush, George H.W. 113, 142, 144; as CIA Director 150n14; as President-elect 145 Bush, George W. administration 153 C-5A transports 102 C-130 aircraft 111 Cairo-Suez road 103 Cambodia, Vietnamese communist forces in 31 Cambodian army 112 Cambodian bombing see Bombing of Cambodia Cambodian border areas 64 Cambodian invasion 67 Cambodian neutrality 64 Camp Croft, Spartanburg Pennsylvania 11 Camp David 119n13 Camp David accords (September 1978) 122n50 Canada 178 “Carpet bombing” of civilian areas 59 “Carpet bombing” studies see “strategic bombing” studies” Carter, Jimmy 115, 133 Carter administration 134, 139–41 Carthage 205, 214 Castlereagh 151 Castro, Fidel 81 Castro’s 26th of July Movement 82 CBS 148 Center for International Affairs (CFIA) 22, 23 Central America 143, 179, 180 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 15, 25 Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) 62, 63, 65, 67 Changes in the Nixon Administration 97–9 Changing the Policy-Making Structure 44–50 Chase Manhattan 138, 148 Chennault, Anna 40 Chile 153, 227, 228 Chile, Cuba and Communism in the Western Hemisphere 81–6 Chilean coup 1973 86, 227

Index  • 249 China 153, 157, 176 China, Communism and Arms Control 77–95 Chinese Army in Korea 206 Chinese offshore islands 208 “Christmas bombing campaign” see LINEBACKER II operation Church, Frank 195 Churchill, Winston 220 Church Committee Report 85, 91n23, 92n30 CIA-Canadian effort to free hostages 140 CIA station in Chile 92n29 CIA station in Saigon 73n49 CIA support of contra rebels in Nicaragua 143 Cienfuegos, Cuba 82 City College of New York (CCNY) 3, 11 Clements, William 100, 120n22 Clifford, Clark 213 Clinton, Hillary 154 Clinton, William 234 Clinton administration 234 Cold War 47, 82, 116, 142, 146 Colson, Charles 55, 73n44 Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP) 125, 126 Communist bases in Cambodia 62 Communist ideology 211 Concessions on trade or arms control with Moscow 53 Congregation K’hal Adeth Jeshrun 10 Containment 210–24 Containment and coexistence 115 Connolly, John 98, 132 Continental Grain 148 Contra affair 144 Contras in Nicaragua 144 Cooper, John Sherman 195 Council on Foreign Relations 4, 15, 16, 139, 140, 143 “Containment” policy 47 Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) 12 Cox, Archibald 100, 134n7 “Crime against humanity” 60 Critical Choices Facing America study 21 Critiques of Containment 218–19 “Credibility” of U.S. in Vietnam 61, 110, 111, 152, 185 Cruise missiles 118 Cuba 153 Cuban forces in Angola 122n48 Cuban military advisers 180 Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) 81, 82

Cuban Revolution 81, 82 Czechoslovakia 186, 222 Damascus 106 DANIEL BOONE operation 63 Dayan, Moshe 105, 106, 121n37 Dayan Plan 105 Dean, Gordon 17 Dean, John 125, 126 “Decent interval” 33, 51, 53, 61 Defense Studies Program at Harvard 24 Del Ponte, Carla 230 Dellums, Ron 72n35 Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) 60 Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters 125 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 154 Department of Defense 25 Détente 81, 114–18, 132, 143, 184, 187 Deterrence and effective defense 171 Deterrence theory 19, 35n10 Dinitz, Simcha 101, 102, 120n24, 121n32, 121n37 Dobrynin, Anatoly 54, 73n39, 88, 102, 116, 145 Dole, Robert 144 “domino theory” 51, 53, 112 Doty, Paul 86 Drell, Sidney 86–7 DUCK HOOK plan for bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong 66 Dukakis, Michael 144, 145 Dulles, John Foster 17, 20, 22, 199 EAGLE CLAW operation 140 EAGLE PULL operation 113 Eagleburger, Lawrence 48, 119n14, 135n13, 145, 146, 150n18, 158n12 East Coast policy elite 43 East Germany 28, 50, 88 East-West diplomacy 189 East-West global competition 143 East-West relations 184 East-West security issues 164 East-West trade 190 Eastern establishment 143 Eggar, Samantha 69 Egypt 153, 156 Egypt–Israel peace treaty 110 Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack 120n19 Egyptian Third Army 103, 104, 106 Egyptian-Israeli shuttle 105 Egyptian-Israeli talks 103, 104

250  • Index Ehrlichman, John 44, 58, 97, 118n1, 125–8, 131, 134n5 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 19, 21, 25 El Salvador 143 Elbe River 205 Elliott, William Yandel 15 Ellsberg, Daniel 51, 52, 72n33 Ellsworth, Robert 70n6, 123n51 End of Détente 113–18 Enlai, Zhou 78–80, 91n18 Ethical Cultural Society 29 “Equal aggregates” 117 “Equality” approach 117 European-American relations 171 European Command Intelligence School 4, 12 European Court of Human Rights 231 Exit visas for Jews 116 Extradition procedures 229 “Eyes only” cables 118n5 F-4 Phantom fighters 102 F-16 fighter aircraft for Israel 110 Falklands War 231 Fall of Vietnam and Cambodia 110–13 Faulkner, William 162 FBI investigation into Watergate 126 FBI wiretaps of White House aides 74n64, 156 February 1972 summit in China 80 Federal Republic of Germany 210 Fish Hook sanctuary area in Cambodia 62, 65, 66 Fish, General Howard 123n63 Fleischer, Anneliese see Kissinger, Ann “Flexible response” strategy 18, 28 Ford, Gerald R. as President 24; interest in resuming bombing 110; military aid for Cambodia 113; pardon of Nixon 127; replacement of Nixon 108; relationship with Kissinger 130; replacement of Haig 131; refusal to join Reagan ticket 141; SALT II negotiations 93n43; support for bombing cutoff in 1973 62; take over from Nixon 116 Ford administration 3, 137, 138 Ford Foundation 24 Ford White House 24 Foreign Affairs 16, 19 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) 70n5 “Fortress America” 205 “framework of accommodation” 145 Franco, General Francisco 228

French system if alliances 207 FREQUENT WIND operation 111 Frost, David 139, 149n7 FUBELT project 84, 92n27 Fulbright, J. William 49, 195 G-2 (intelligence) section 11 Gamasy, General Abdel 104, 121n33 Garment, Leonard 128 Garthoff, Raymond 93n37, 135n21 Gavin, General James 17, 20 Gaza 177 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 179 General war 207, 208 Geneva Accords 1954 50, 61 Geneva Conference (December 1973) 104, 105 George Washington High School 3, 10 Georgetown social scene 68 Georgetown University 138 German Weimer Republic 9 Global order after World War II 164 “Globalism” of Obama 154 Golan Heights 106, 122n40 Goldberger, Marvin 86 Goldman Sachs & Co. 138, 147 Goldwater, Barry 26 Gorbachev, Mikhail 142, 145, 167, 169, 170, 216 Government Department see Harvard Government Department Government of National Concord 55 Graham, Katherine 49 Graham, Lindsey 154 Gray, L. Patrick 126 Greece 213, 215, 222 “Grey Areas” 198, 202, 203, 209 Great Hall of the People 78 “Great Society war” 184 Greece 210 Greek-Turkish aid program 214 Green Beret covert operation in Cambodia see DANIEL BOONE operation Gromyko, Andrei 91n21, 116, 124n77, 130 Ground invasion of Cambodia, possibility of 64 Guerilla war in Greece 213 Haig, General Alexander 48, 57, 59, 72n23, 119n13, 120n26, 121n27; as Deputy National Security Advisor 73n50; as Army Vice Chief of Staff 73n50; as Chief of Staff 97, 128, 129, 131; as Secretary of State 142

Index  • 251 Haldeman, H.R. “Bob” 44, 49, 51, 52, 58, 70n3, 71n10, 73n48, 93n41, 97, 119n13, 126, 127, 128, 131, 134n5 Halperin, Morton 45, 47, 72n23, 156 “Halloween Peace” 39 Hamilton 152 Hamptons 137 Hanoi government 50, 110 Hanoi’s demand for “reparations” 61 Hanoi’s “ten point program” of 1969 61 Hartman, Robert 135n15 Harvard Government Department 22, 23, 36n23, 138, 149n4 Harvard University 3, 15, 138, 156 Helms, Jesse 49 “Henry handling committee” 97 Helms, Richard 65, 84 Helsinki Final Act 226 Helsinki summit 133, 134, 145, 226 Helsinki treaty 114 Hezbollah in Lebanon 144 Ho Chi Min Trail 62 “Honorable course” in Vietnam 110 Hollywood 139 “hostes humani generis” (“enemies of the human race”) 226 Human rights 132, 153, 184, 228 Human rights activists 114, 115 Human Rights Commission 232 Human rights narrative 155 Humphrey, Hubert H. 39, 195 Hunt. E. Howard 125, 126 Hydrogen bomb 201 Idealistic American spirit 157 Ikle, Fred 18 Indochina 112, 195, 203 Intelligence community 195 Intelligence system 204 Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) 168 Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 27, 118 “interim coalition government” (Vietnam) 55 International Criminal Court (ICC) 225, 230, 231 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 230 International drug trafficking 164 International law 153 Intervention in Cambodia 43 Invasion of Cambodia 53 Iran 153, 203

Iraq 153 Iranian hostage crisis 140, 141 Iranian regime 140 Iranian Revolution 140 “Iron curtain” speech 220 Islamabad, Pakistan 79 Ismail, Hafiz 99 Isolationism 223 Israel 156 Israel-Egypt peace agreement 157 Israel’s emergency request for military supplies 100 Israel’s Independence (1948) 104 Israel’s “secret” nuclear weapons program 120n25 Israeli (El Al) planes 101 Israeli invasion of Lebanon (1982) 177 Israeli lobby see American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal 105 Israelitsche Realschule 9 Jackson, Henry “Scoop” 115, 117, 118, 124n70 Jackson-Vanik amendment 115–17, 124n78 January 1969 Presidential transition 62 January 1973 Paris agreement 60, 61, 111, 112 Japan 174, 181 Japanese-American ties 175 Javits, Jacob 195 Jefferson, Thomas 158n1, 221 Jeffersonian view of democracy 152 Jennings, Peter 139 Jericho missiles 101 Jerusalem 107, 109 Jewish leaders 114 Jews emigrating to Israel 115, 116 Johnson, Lyndon B. as President 32, 38n54; as Vice President 26; support to Humphry 70n5 Johnson’s “bombing halt” 40 Johnson, U. Alexis 46 Jordan 107, 108, 157 Jordanian shuttle 108 Judea and Samaria 107 Kahn, Herman 18 Kahn, Yahya 78 Karamessines, Thomas 84 Kemp, Jack 144 Kennan, George 210, 211, 216, 218, 219, 223 Kennedy, John F. as President 28, 36n30; as Senator 26

252  • Index Kennedy, Robert 33 Kennedy administration 16, 27, 75n80; attempt to kill Castro 82 Kennedy White House 28 Kennerly, David 123n55 Kent Connecticut 137, 148 Kent State University demonstrations 66 Kerry, John 154 Key Biscayne 120n19 Khmer Rouge in Cambodia 56, 64, 67, 112, 113, 149n5 Khomeini, Ayatollah 141 Khrushchev, Nikita 28 Kilometer 101 talks 104, 105 King, Jr., Martin Luther 33 King David Hotel 108 Kissinger, Ann (Anneliese Fleischer) 10, 29–30 Kissinger Associates 145–8 “Kissinger baggage” 143 Kissinger Commission 143, 144 Kissinger, David (son) 29–30 Kissinger, Elizabeth (daughter) 29 Kissinger, Henry A. 9; as Jewish Secretary of State 129; as National Security Advisor 39–76; as “playboy of the West Wing” 69; as secret envoy to Moscow 145; as Secretary of State 95–124; as “statesman for hire” 147; Beijing meeting with Chinese 90n14; contempt for bureaucracy 107; derogation of Rogers 95; “doomsday speeches” 108; duplicity and doubledealing 107; enormous temper 49; 69; “grand vision” 155; heart bypass 139; involvement in Watergate 127; lifestyle in New York 137; meeting the PresidentElect and the Job Offer 41–4; July 19, 1971 memo to Nixon 90n16; Moscow trip 117; “reality vs. idealism” 152; social life in New York 139; successes in diplomacy 152; support for “domino” theory 72n30; swinger image 68; threats of force 152; use of “backchannel” communications 72n21; wedding to Nancy Maginnes 69 Kissinger Legacy 155–7 Kissinger, Lewis (father) 9 Kissinger, Nancy (wife) 30, 68, 69, 71n15, 137, 139, 148 Kissinger, Paula (mother) 9 Kissinger Associates 5 Kissinger-Nixon relationship 60 Kissinger-Nixon secret negotiations 46 Kissinger’s Orthodox Jewish parents 98 Kissinger’s Twilight 148–9

Kleindienst, Richard 134n5 Koppel, Ted 139 Korea 203 Korean Peninsula 155 Korean War 186, 199, 202 Kraemer, Fritz 11 Krefeld (Germany) 12 Kremlin 116 Kremlin’s view of world affairs 211 Lafayette College 11 Laird, Melvin 46, 62, 65, 66, 74n62, 96, 118n3 Land-based missile force 117 Laos 31 Latin American debt 180 Launch on warning 194 Legality of bombing in Cambodia 64 League of Nations 152 Lehman, John 49 LeMay, General Curtis 26 Liddy, G. Gordon 125, 126 “Limited” nuclear war 16, 17, 19, 20, 21 Linkage 189 Lippmann, Walter 218–20 Little war thesis 204, 208 LINEBACKER II operation 59, 60, 153 Local war 207 Lodge, Henry Cabot 31, 41 Logan Act of 1799 40, 70n5 Lon Nol see Nol, Lon “Lone Ranger” secretive foreign policy 133 “Long Telegram” 211, 215 Looking to Vietnam 31–3 Luce, Claire Booth 70n7 McCain, John 154, 233–5 McCloy, John 140 McCord, James 125, 126 McGovern, George 192 Machiavellian principles 221 MacLaine, Shirley 69 McNamara, Robert S. 32 Macy’s 148 Maginnes, Nancy Sharon see Kissinger, Nancy Maginot mentality 200 Magruder, Jeb Stuart 125, 126, 134n5 “Make the world safe for democracy” 152 Malaya 203 Mansfield, Mike 195 Mao Zedong see Zedong, Mao Marshall, George C. 2, 156, 213, 215 Marshall Plan 218 Marshall Plan for Central America 144

Index  • 253 Martin, Graham 111 Matak, Sirik 113 Massive retaliation 17, 19. 199 Matmon B plan 109, 123n51 May 1974 disengagement with Syria 105 Meany, George 123n67 Medium-range ballistic missiles 27, 142 Meir, Golda 82, 100, 103, 105, 119n16, 121n32 MENU operation see BREAKFAST operation Metropolitan Museum of Art 139 Metternich 151 Mexico 179 Middle East peace agreement 107 Min, Ho Chi 32 Mining of Haiphong harbor 51, 54, 189 Missile defense systems 27 Missile gap, with the Soviet Union 27 Mitchell, John 84, 93n41, 97, 119n11, 125, 127, 134n5, 134n9 Mitla and Gidi passes 108, 109 Mondale, Walter 195 Montalva, Eduardo Frei 83 Moorer, Admiral Thomas 65 Morality in foreign affairs 132 Morality of bombing 63 Morton, Rogers 132 Moscow summit 97, 116, 145 Most Favored Nation (MFN) status on trade 102, 115–17, 124n75 Multiple Independently-Targetable Reentry Vehicles (MIRV’s) 87, 92n35, 117, 118 Murphy, Robert 95 Mutually assured destruction (MAD) 17 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 99, 119n16 Nathiagali, Pakistan 79 National Council 110 National Liberation Front 54 National Security Act of 1947 25, 36n27, 71n17 National Security Advisor 25 National Security Agency (NSA) 96 National Security Council (NSC) 4, 25, 45 National Security Decision Memorandum 1 (NSDM-1) 46 National Security Decision Memorandum 2 (NSDM-2) 46 National Security Decision Memorandum 3 (NSDM-3) 46 National Security Study Memoranda (NSSMs) 45, 72n20 National Security Study Memorandum 1 (NSSM-1) 52, 72n35

National Security Study Memorandum 97 (NSSM-97) 83 National Security Study Memorandum 207 (NSSM-207) 108, 123n51 NATO 27, 142, 171, 199, 200 NATO air campaign in Kosovo 230 NATO force structure 168 NATO rearmament 220 NATO summit (My 1975) 131 Nazi Germany 152, 153, 155 NBC 138, 139, 149n7 Negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris 54 Neoconservative Critique 193–7 “neoconservatives” or “neocons” 114, 186, 192, 193, 196 Nessen, Ron 135n18 New Deal 218 New international realities 166 New radicalism 221 New York City social life 137, 139 New York intellectuals 139 New York jet-set society 149 New York Times 51, 60, 73n51, 98, 146, 191 New York Times v. United States 51 Newsweek 139 Nicaragua 143, 180 NICKEL GRASS operation 102 Nightline 139 Nitze, Paul 17, 18, 20, 35n17 Nixon administration 2, 75n80; and arms control 86, 185, 187, 189 Nixon foreign policy 189 Nixon, Julie (daughter) 75n71 Nixon, Richard M. approach to foreign policy 113; as President 4, 20, 22; as Vice President 25; efforts to spoil 1968 Vietnamese Peace talks 70n3; final month in office 130; foreign policy legacy 197; in Key Biscayne 120n19; resignation 129; reactionary Cold Warrior 190; “structure of peace” 196; visit to China 80; visit to Lincoln Memorial 75n76 “Nixon-Kissinger-Ford” foreign policy 133 Nixon’s “madman theory” 52, 67 Nixon-Kissinger policy 141 Nixon re-election campaign 125, 126 Nixon resignation 138 Nixon strategy 187 Nixon’s trip to China see February 1972 summit in China Nixon White House 24 Nobel, Alfred 162

254  • Index Nobel Peace Prize (1973) 4, 98, 161 Nol, Lon 64, 65, 113 North Korea 50, 154, 155 North, Oliver 150n13 North Vietnam 31 North Vietnamese Army 58, 110 NSA see National Security Agency NSA “mole” inside Kissinger operation 90n14 NSA surveillance of communications in Vietnam 40 NSA surveillance of Kissinger’s communications 74n64 NSC see National Security Council NSC “40 Committee” 75n70, 83, 84, 92n27, 96 NSC budget 71n18 NSC Defense Program Review Committee 96 NSC Senior Review Group 96 NSC Staff 45, 96, 97, 138 NSDM see National Security Decision Memorandum NSSM see National Security Study Memorandum Nuclear-armed world 115 Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy 17, 19, 24, 41, 86 Obama, Barack 153, 154, 233 Obama foreign policy 154 Objectives for American foreign policy 163 Occupied territories 177 October 1968 bombing halt 63 October 1972 Paris negotiations 55 October 1973 Middle East War 2, 44, 99–105, 114, 116, 120n20 October 8, 1972 agreement 60 October 22, 1973 cease-fire line 104 “October Surprise” 39 “Offsetting asymmetries” 117 Opening to China 43 “Operation Strangle” 202–3 Organization of American States (OAS) 84 Pakistan 78, 203 Pakistani channel to China 78 Palestinian problem 104 Palestinians 107, 108, 177, 178 Paris 139 Paris Agreement (2015) 154 Parrot’s Beak sanctuary area in Cambodia 65, 66 “Peace at hand” statement 58 Peace movement 185 “Pennsylvania Channel” 32

Pentagon 109 Pentagon Papers 51, 52, 72n33 Peoples Republic of China (PRC) 2, 80, 89n1, 176 Peres, Shimon 122n44 Perle, Richard 124n70 Philippines 174, 203 Phnom Penh 112, 113 Pierre Hotel meeting 41, 71n8, 77 Pinochet, Augusto 85, 86, 227, 229 PLO operations in Jordan 82 “Plumbers unit” responsible for Watergate 129 Pol Pot takeover of Cambodia 67 Poland 133, 172 Portugal 132 Post-9/11 world 153 Post-World War II era 151 Power-oriented realism 153 POWs in Vietnam 56, 61 Prague 215 Presidential election of 1972 55, 58, 69 Presidential election of 1976 115, 118, 132–4 Presidential Election of 1980 and the Reagan Presidency 141–4 Presidential Election of 1988 and the George H.W. Bush Presidency 144–6 “Principles of International Relations” Kissinger course at Harvard 24 “Pro-U.S. elements” in Cambodia 64 Project FUBELT see Track II Psychological Strategy Board 4 Quantico Marine Base 21 Quneitra 106, 122n42 Rabin, Yitzhak 108, 116, 119n16, 122n43 Radford, Navy Yeoman Charles 90n14, 93n40, 119n6 Radical tradition 221 RAND Corporation 18, 25, 36n31, 51 Rapprochement between U.S. and China 81 Reagan, Ronald 124n69; as California Governor 124n69, 132, 133, 140; victory in 1980 election 141 Reagan administration 144 Reagan-Ford “dream ticket” 141 Reagan-Ford power-sharing arrangement 141 Realists 218 Reality and Morality in Foreign Policy 151–5 “Reality vs. idealism” 152 realpolitik 4, 29, 42, 115, 152, 155, 157 Reassessment of U.S. Middle East PolicyMarch 1975 107–10, 114

Index  • 255 Reciprocal concessions 214 “recognizing reality” 155 Red Army 201 “Red China” see Peoples Republic of China “reduction of the Soviet sphere” 206 Reform-minded leadership in the U.S.S.R. 165 Republican convention (1980) 141 Republican Convention in Miami Beach (1968) 33 Resupply effort to Israel 116 Reston, James 60 Revlon 148 Reykjavik summit 142 Richardson, Elliott 100, 119n11, 134n7 Ridgway, General Matthew 208 Right-wing death squads 143, 144 Rive Gauche Restaurant 68 River House 137 Rockefeller, David 17 Rockefeller, John D. 21 Rockefeller, Nelson A. 4, 21, 23; as Vice President 128, 132 Rock Creek apartment 68 Rockefeller Brothers Fund 24, 35n20 Rockefeller Critical Choices project 129 Rockefeller Special Studies Project see Rockefeller Study Group Rockefeller Study Group 35n20, 35n21, 69 Rockefeller Presidential Campaign (1964) 25–6 Rockefellers assistance to Shah of Iran 140 Rogers, William 43, 46, 53, 62, 63, 65, 66, 79, 82, 95–7 Rogers cease fire plan (1970) 99, 119n17 Rome 214 Rome Conference (1998) 226 Romney, George 33 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 97, 152, 211 Roosevelt, Teddy charging up San Jan Hill 66 Rostow, Walt 31, 45 Rowan, Henry 51 Ruckelshaus, William 100 Rumsfeld, Donald 124n82, 131 Rush, Kenneth 98 Rusk, Dean 28, 32 Russia’s sphere of influence 211 Russian tsars 211 Rwanda 226, 228, 232 Sadat, Anwar 99, 103–5, 107, 121n38, 122n50 Saigon fall (1975) 153 St. John, Jill 69, 76n82 Sale of weapons to Iran 144

SALT I accord (interim agreement) 89, 93n43, 194 SALT negotiations 54, 87, 93n43, 114 SALT II negotiations 117, 124n82, 130 SALT II treaty 118 Sandinista government in Nicaragua 143 Sandinista regime 143 “Saturday Night Massacre” 100 Saunders, Hal 104 Schlesinger, Jr. Arthur 16, 28, 139 Schlesinger, James 18, 100–2, 110, 113, 114, 118, 120n22, 121n27, 124n79, 133, 158n10 Schneider, General Rene 85, 92n28 Scowcroft, Brent 98, 120n26, 135n13, 145, 147 Scranton, William 95 Secret Bombing and Invasion of Cambodia 62–7 Secret message from China 77 Secretary of the Air Force 63 Secure communications, use of 72n21, 118n5 Security Council see U.N. Security Council Senate Armed Services Committee 63 Senate Watergate Committee 134n5 Separation for forces agreement 104 September 1973 Chilean coup 85 Shah of Iran 140, 141, 149n8 Shakespeare, Frank 72n24 Sharon, General Ariel “Arik” 106, 121n31 Shawcross, William 138, 149n5 Shelling of Saigon 63 “short-short” (battlefield) nuclear weapons 168 Shultz, George 142 Shuttle diplomacy 105–7, 109 Siberia 188 Sino-Soviet aggression 201 Sino-Soviet bloc 199, 206 Sino-Soviet leaders 209 Sino-Soviet occupation 208 Sino-U.S. friendship 176 Sisco, Joseph 104 Sihanouk, Prince Norodom 64, 112, 113 Sidewinder missiles 101 Sinai 106, 109 Sinai II agreement 109, 114, 122n48 Sino-Soviet rift 78, 81 Six Day War (1967) 101, 106, 107 Sonnenfeldt, Helmut “Hal” 47, 48, 72n23, 98 “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine” 133 South Africa 228 South Korea 50 South Vietnam 31, 110 South Vietnamese army 113 South Vietnamese government 31

256  • Index Soviet-American relations see U.S.-Soviet relations Soviet deployment of MIRVs 87 Soviet advisers in Egypt 99 Soviet-American relations 217 Soviet bloc 205–7 Soviet conventional forces 168 Soviet-Cuban intervention in Angola 195 Soviet “education tax” 115 Soviet expansionism 193 Soviet facilities along the Chinese border 90n12 Soviet hardliners 116 Soviet internal system 190 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia 192 Soviet Jewery 116, 117 Soviet meddling 115 Soviet military advisers 180 Soviet missile buildup 189 Soviet missiles, removal from Cuba 82 Soviet policy in Hanoi 53 Soviet resupply effort for Syria 102 Soviet threat 152 Soviet Union, arming Arab allies 188 Soviet Union collapse 146, 216 Soviet Union, strategic competition 157 Smith, Gerard 89 Spanish Civil War 228 Split between the Soviet Union and China 45, 46 Spread of war to Laos and Cambodia 61 Stalin, Joseph 211, 214 State Department, posts and positions 174 State-sponsored terrorism 164 Status of Jerusalem 104 Stennis, John 49 “Step-by-step” process 104, 106, 108, 109, 157 Stevenson, Adlai 199 Strategic Air Command (SAC) 200 Strategic Air Force 199 Strategic arms race 194 Strategic bombers 27 “Strategic bombing” studies 74n54 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) 168 Strategic force modernization 194 Steinem, Gloria 75n80 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) 87 “strategic” weapons 118 Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) 89, 93n43 Suez Canal 106 Supply routes in Vietnam and Laos (See Ho Chi Min Trail) 62

Surprise attack on Israel 99 Surprise attack by the Soviet Union 19 Syria 153, 156 Tactical nuclear weapons 18, 21, 27, 29 Tan San Nhut airbase 111 Telegraph (London) 79 Tet Offensive (1968) 33, 37n52, 50, 54, 67 Thailand 203 The 1964 Presidential Campaign 30–1 The 1968 Presidential Campaign 33–4 “The December Bombing” see “Christmas bombing campaign” “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” see “X” article in Foreign Affairs The Necessity for Choice 27, 37n34 Thieu, Nguyen Van 32, 40, 55, 57, 58, 61, 110, 111 Thieu Government in South Vietnam 53, 55, 61, 110 Thieu’s resignation 111 Tho, Le Duc 56, 58, 98, 161 Thomas, Marlo 69 “Throw weight” issue 117 Time 127 Tirado, Admiral Hugo 85 Tito 206 Total nuclear war 206 “Track I” initiative to thwart Allende 84, 91n26 “Track II” covert CIA operation to thwart Allende 84, 85, 92n27 Trade Agreements (1972) 114 Trade policy 170 Triangular strategy 80 Trieste issue 206 Truman, Harry 213, 222 Truman administration 15, 222 Truman Doctrine 214, 214 Trump, Donald 155, 158n7 Trump administration 154 Tulane University speech 111, 123n58 Turkey 213, 222 Two-pronged invasion of Cambodia 66 U-2 photos of Cuba 91n20 U-2 spy planes, in Cuba 82 U.N. Resolution 242 178 U.N. Resolution 338 103 U.N. Security Council 103, 228, 232 U.S. Ambassador to Norway 98 U.S. atomic monopoly 171 U.S. bombing of North Vietnam 32 U.S.-Canadian trade agreement 179 U.S. economy 173

Index  • 257 U.S. Embassy in Saigon 73n36, 111 U.S. Embassy in Tehran 140 U.S. hostages in Lebanon 144 U.S. exit from Vietnam 139 U.S.-China relations 78 U.S. peacekeeping troops 103 U.S. relations with Cuba 155 U.S.-Soviet comprehensive peace plan 103 U.S.-Soviet relations 77, 167, 169 U.S. strategic bombing in World War II 59 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam 81 Ullman, Liv 69 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 226 Universal jurisdiction doctrine 225 University of Chicago 15, 16 University of Pennsylvania 15 Union Pacific 148 United Nations 151, 222, 225 Ussuri River 188 Vance, Cyrus 54, 140, 149n3, 163 Vandenberg, Arthur 213 Valenzuela, Camilo 85 Vanik, Charles 115 Verification 168 Viaux, Roberto 85 “Victims of terrorism and anarchy” 140 Viet Cong 62, 110, 111 Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) 61, 73n46 Vietnam peace treaty 97 Vietnam Special Studies Group 96 Vietnam War 2, 89n1 Vietnam-Finding a Way Out 50–62 Vietnamese communists in Cambodia 65 Vietnamese communist forces in Laos 31 Vietnamese infiltration routes 112 Vietnamese peace talks 54 Vietnamese peace talks 1968 70n3 Vietnamization program 75n74 Vladivostok summit (November 1974) 117 Vladivostok framework 118 Wallace, Henry 211, 221–3 Walters, Barbara 135n20 Walters, General Vernon “Dick” 78, 90n3, 119n8, 123n51 War crimes 228 “War of attrition” with China 204

Warsaw 215 Warsaw Pact 19, 146, 172 Washington Heights 10 Washington Post 85, 107, 120n24, 139, 146 Washington’s Social Scene and Hollywood Starlets 68–70 Washington Special Action Group (WSAG) 82, 83, 96, 100 Watergate 2, 62, 73n48, 97, 100, 108, 114, 125, 134, 138, 196 Watergate and Exit from Government 125–35 Watergate and the Fall of Richard Nixon 125–32 Watergate cover-up 127 Weinberger, Caspar 142, 144 West Bank area 107, 108, 177 West Berlin 28 West European communist parties 210 Western Hemisphere 157, 178 Westmoreland, General William 57 Weyand, General Frederick 110 Wheeler, General Earle 62 White House basement 67 White House Years: 1969–1972 138 Wilson, Woodrow 152, 187 Wilsonianism 187, 193, 214 Wohlstetter, Albert 18 World economy 172 Women’s Wear Daily 76n82 World War I 152 World War II lend-lease program 117 World War III 222 WSEG Report 249 121n28 “X” article in Foreign Affairs 210, 215, 216 Xiaoping, Deng 176 Yale University 138 Yalta Conference (1945) 114 “Yalta II” concept 145 Yariv, General Ahron 104, 121n33 Years of Renewal 138, 149n6 Years of Upheaval 138 Yom Kippur War see October 1973 Middle East War Yugoslavia 213, 226, 228, 232 Zedong, Mao 78, 79, 115 “zero option” 142 Zhou Enlai see Enlai, Zhou Zumwalt, Admiral Elmo 60, 133