Practicing History: Selected Essays

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

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

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

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

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

  He talks a lot about honor in these pages. “American honor” and “American innocence” are terms that recur as often as “realities” and “realpolitik,” with which they consort oddly. The United States is said to have entered Vietnam “in innocence, convinced that the cruel civil war represented the cutting edge of some global design.” One fails to comprehend why containment of communism is described as innocence. Elsewhere he says we entered the war out of “naïve idealism,” which sounds strange coming from Henry Kissinger, the unsentimental dealer in hard realities. Why is he trying in this book to make himself appear something he is not, to wear a Roman toga, as it were, over a coat of mail? Perhaps, with an eye on office, it is to legitimize himself with those on the right.

  The vicious tyranny that has descended upon Chile, with the assistance of the United States, belongs to the period after this book closes in January 1973 and presumably will be dealt with in Kissinger’s next volume. Here he includes a chapter on the decision by the so-called 40 Committee, of which he was chairman, to authorize expenditures by the Central Intelligence Agency to influence the Chilean elections of 1970. Here we come to an outright instance of American illegality in a cold-war cause, even if in the first instance it was ineffectual.

  With copper and ITT in the background, Kissinger eschews reference to American innocence and concentrates instead on making a fervent case of the danger represented by Salvador Allende, who is credited with the “patent intention” to accomplish the transition to communism. His predicted electoral victory (by a plurality but minority vote) would establish another Castro in the Western hemisphere. He “would soon be inciting anti-American policies, attacking hemisphere solidarity, making common cause with Cuba, and sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union,” with profound effect “against fundamental American national interests.”

  If such was the case—and Kissinger can be very persuasive—a legitimate question arises. In the national interest, was it not an American duty to do what it could to fend off a second communist state in Latin America? The answer, in this case, must be no, for, whatever the threat, Allende’s approaching presidency was to be accomplished by constitutional means. For the United States to interfere in the domestic affairs of a neighboring state in an attempt to thwart their legitimate operation is intolerable. We have come a long way from the election of 1888, when the British Ambassador to the United States advised a correspondent in a private letter to vote for Grover Cleveland and, on this being leaked to the press, the Ambassador’s recall was demanded for interference in American politics. I do not believe that international relations can be guided by morality, but I believe in obeying as far as possible the rules we have worked out for the social order, otherwise society slides back into anarchy—which is as dangerous for the right wing as for the left.

  In Nixon circles Kissinger was an ambivalent figure, suspect on the right for friendship with Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Harvard background, entree in Georgetown, and flexibility on Russia. Yet, as agent of a President farther to the right than any since McKinley, he accomplished progress in important areas: in China, in the Middle East, even in détente with Russia and in the Stygian labyrinths of strategic-arms limitation.

  One thing that the overwhelming detail of the book succeeds in demonstrating is the breadth of subject matter Kissinger dealt with, the unrelenting hard work it demanded, and the fierce schedule he maintained. Japanese textiles, Common Market, Ostpolitik, ABMs and MIRVs, Palestinian hijacking, Soviet submarines in Cuba, Soviet missiles in Egypt, channels to China, Nixon to Romania, Polish riots, crisis in Jordan, war in Pakistan, summit in Moscow, the Year of Europe, the death of Nasser, visit to the Shah, and through it all, secret and subsequently formal conferences in Paris with the North Vietnamese. It was no job for a self-doubter, which Kissinger is anything but. All this seemed to him to require his personal presence. He was continually in motion, talking, traveling, which may not have been the most creative use of his time. Once, in the years before prominence, when a colleague asked him what he thought of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, he thought for a moment and replied, “He travels too much.”
r />   Kissinger did contribute creative policy to the Middle East in his rejection of that dream of never-never land, the “comprehensive” solution. He understood that disengagement between Israel and Egypt had no chance of success if it had to be negotiated as part of an overall settlement and, as he points out with admirable common sense, “if there was no chance of success I saw no reason for us to involve ourselves” in the attempt. He preferred to try for an interim agreement to break the impasse and open the way to further advances. Thus originated the step-by-step process, to be dramatized by the Kissinger shuttle in the next term, that eventually achieved progress where none had been registered for thirty years.

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

  Throughout the interminable talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris, Kissinger kept rediscovering that Hanoi did not want a compromise settlement, that Hanoi “had no intention of withdrawing its own forces” from the South, that Hanoi “would be satisfied only with victory,” that, in short, good terms from our point of view were unobtainable. The only bargaining lever left to us was to make continuation of the war a greater risk to Hanoi than a settlement would be. Hence the bombing and the offensive against North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. Military action was not pursuit of a military solution but an argument by force that would bring Hanoi to an agreement to leave Saigon in place and allow the United States to depart looking strong.

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

  Kissinger acknowledges none of this. Even less does he understand the domestic dissent of the time, although it is a constant theme in the book and clearly the factor that most deeply disturbed him. He treats it as a perverse opposition that, by encouraging Hanoi to stall, frustrated his negotiations. He quotes the Wall Street Journal statement that “Americans want an acceptable exit from Indochina, not a deeper entrapment” and the New York Times statement that bitter experience had “exhausted the credulity of the American people and Congress” and the Milwaukee Journal statement that “if [the South Vietnamese] can’t stand on their own feet now it is too late. The U.S. can no longer stand the internal frustrations and disruptions that the bloody, tragic and immoral war is costing,” but he does not absorb the message. His comment is that the national debate was “engulfed in mass passion,” not that it was telling him something he should have listened to. Apropos of the congressional vote to terminate action in Cambodia that finally blocked the Executive in 1973, he writes that Cambodia was the victim of “the breakdown of our democratic political process,” when in fact what was taking place was the functioning, not the breakdown, of that process. It is unsafe to have high office filled by someone who does not know the difference.

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

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  New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1979.

  Mankind’s Better Moments

  FOR A CHANGE from prevailing pessimism, I should like to recall some of the positive and even admirable capacities of the human race. We hear very little of them lately. Ours is not a time of self-esteem or self-confidence—as was, for instance, the nineteenth century, when self-esteem may be seen oozing from its portraits. Victorians, especially the men, pictured themselves as erect, noble, and splendidly handsome. Our self-image looks more like Woody Allen or a character from Samuel Beckett. Amid a mass of worldwide troubles and a poor record for the twentieth century, we see our species—with cause—as functioning very badly, as blunderers when not knaves, as violent, ignoble, corrupt, inept, incapable of mastering the forces that threaten us, weakly subject to our worst instincts; in short, decadent.

  The catalogue is familiar and valid, but it is growing tiresome. A study of history reminds one that mankind has its ups and downs and during the ups has accomplished many brave and beautiful things, exerted stupendous endeavors, explored and conquered oceans and wilderness, achieved marvels of beauty in the creative arts and marvels of science and social progress; has loved liberty with a passion that throughout history has led men to fight and die for it over and over again; has pursued knowledge, exercised reason, enjoyed laughter and pleasures, played games with zest, shown courage, heroism, altruism, honor, and decency; experienced love; known comfort, contentment, and occasionally happiness. All these qualities have been part of human experience, and if they have not had as important notice as the negatives nor exerted as wide and persistent an influence as the evils we do, they nevertheless deserve attention, for they are currently all but forgotten.

  Among the great endeavors, we have in our own time carried men to the moon and brought them back safely—surely one of the most remarkable achievements in history. Some may disapprove of the effort as unproductive, too costly, and a wrong choice of priorities in relation to greater needs, all of which may be true but does not, as I see it, diminish the achievement. If you look carefully, all positives have a negative underside—sometimes more, sometimes less—and not all admirable endeavors have admirable motives. Some have sad consequences. Although most signs presently point from bad to worse, human capacities are probably what they have always been. If primitive man could discover how to transform grain into bread, and reeds growing by the riverbank into baskets; if his successors could invent the wheel, harness the insubstantial air to turn a millstone, transform sheep’s wool, flax, and worms’ cocoons into fabric—we, I imagine, will find a way to manage the energy problem.

  Consider how the Dutch accomplished the miracle of making land out of sea. By progressive enclosure of the Zuider Zee over the last sixty years, they have added half a million acres to their country, enlarging its area by eight percent and providing homes, farms, and towns for close to a quarter of a million people. The will to do the impossible, the spirit of can-do that overtakes our species now and
then, was never more manifest than in this earth-altering act by the smallest of the major European nations.

  A low-lying, windswept, waterlogged land, partly below sea level, pitted with marshes, rivers, lakes, and inlets, sliding all along its outer edge into the stormy North Sea with only fragile sand dunes as nature’s barrier against the waves, Holland, in spite of physical disadvantages, has made itself into one of the most densely populated, orderly, prosperous, and, at one stage of its history, dominant nations of the West. For centuries, ever since the first inhabitants, fleeing enemy tribes, settled in the bogs where no one cared to bother them, the Dutch struggled against water and learned how to live with it: building on mounds, constructing and reconstructing seawalls of clay mixed with straw, carrying mud in an endless train of baskets, laying willow mattresses weighted with stones, repairing each spring the winter’s damage, draining marshes, channeling streams, building ramps to their attics to save the cattle in times of flood, gaining dike-enclosed land from the waves in one place and losing as much to the revengeful ocean somewhere else, progressively developing methods to cope with their eternal antagonist.