For some, the treatment in this volume of controversial matters, especially the Vietnam war, will be the view from a side of the barricades unfamiliar to them. It is put forward here as honestly as possible, with the intention to reconcile, not to score retrospective debating points. As a nation we can transcend our divisions only by recognizing that serious people manned both sides of those barricades.
When an historian deals with previous centuries, the problem is to find sufficient contemporary material; when he writes of modern diplomacy, the problem is to avoid being inundated by it. If a scholar of impeccable credentials and unassailable objectivity were given free run of the millions of documents of any modern four-year period, he would have the greatest difficulty knowing where to begin. The written record would by its very volume obscure as much as it illuminated; it would provide no criteria for determining which documents were produced to provide an alibi and which genuinely guided decisions, which reflected actual participation and which were prepared in ignorance of crucial events. Before the era of instantaneous communication, instructions to a negotiator had to be conceptual and therefore they gave an insight into the thinking of statesmen; in the age of the teletype they are usually tactical or technical and therefore are silent about larger purposes and premises. Official files of our period would not necessarily disclose what decisions were taken by “backchannels” bypassing formal procedures or what was settled orally without ever becoming part of the formal record. A participant’s account of conversations can easily be ex post facto self-justification. (Dean Acheson once said that he never read a report of a conversation in which the author came out second best in the argument.) By a selective presentation of documents one can prove almost anything. Contemporary practices of unauthorized or liberalized disclosure come close to ensuring that every document is written with an eye to self-protection. The journalist’s gain is the historian’s loss.
As we finished, the smile left Rockefeller’s face and his eyes assumed a hooded look which I later came to know so well and which signaled that the time for serious business had arrived. He said: “I did not bring you gentlemen down here to tell me how to maneuver in Washington — that is my job. Your job is to tell me what is right. If you can convince me I will take it to the President. And if I can’t sell it to him I will resign.”
I had been part of a typical Rockefeller venture. Of all the public figures I have known he retained the most absolute, almost touching, faith in the power of ideas. He spent enormous resources to try to learn what was “the right thing” to do. His national campaigns were based on the illusion that the way to win delegates at national political conventions was to present superior substantive programs. He spent an excruciating amount of time on his speeches. Untypical as he might seem to be, he was in a way quintessentially American in his boundless energy, his pragmatic genius, and his unquenchable optimism. Obstacles were there to be overcome; problems were opportunities. He could never imagine what a wrong could not be righted or that an honorable aspiration was beyond reach. For other nations utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is no farther than the intensity of their commitment. He possessed in abundance the qualities of courage and vision that are the touchstones of leadership.
In countries with aristocratic traditions — in Great Britain, for example, until well after WW2 — an upper class moved in and out of high office convinced that public responsibility was theirs by right. Merit was assumed. But in the US, the scions of great families are extremely sensitive to the charge of acquiring power through the visible exercise of influence or wealth; they believe that they must earn their office in their own right. But no more than a beautiful woman can be sure of being desired “for her own sake” — indeed, her own sake is inseparable from her beauty — can a rich man in America be certain that what brought him to his station in public life. If he is lucky he learns in time that it makes little difference. In high political office he will be measured by the challenges he met and the accomplishment he wrought, not by his money or the motives of those who helped him get there. History will judge not the head start but the achievement.
The contrast with the style of Richard Nixon could not have been greater. In contemporary America, power increasingly gravitates to those with an almost obsessive desire to win it. Whoever does not devote himself monomaniacally to the nominating process, whoever is afraid of it or disdains it, will always be pursuing a mirage, however remarkable his other qualifications. With candidates for the highest office, as with athletes, everything depends upon timing, upon an intuitive ability to seize the opportunity. Convention delegates live the compressed existence of butterflies. For a brief period they are admired, wooed, pressured, flattered, cajoled, endlessly pursued. The day after they have chosen, they return to oblivion. They are therefore uniquely sensitive to any candidate’s self-doubt.
The qualities required to grasp the nomination of for the American Presidency from such a transient body may have little in common with the qualities needed to govern; indeed, as the demands of the nominating process become more intensive with each election the two may grow increasingly incompatible. The nominating procedure puts a premium on a candidate skilled at organization, who can match political expression to the need of the moment, a master of ambiguity and consensus, able to subordinate programs to the requirement of amassing a broad coalition.
For the outgoing, the transition (as I later learned) is a somber time. The surface appurtenances of power still exist; the bureaucracy continues to produce the paperwork for executive decision. But the authority is slipping away. Decisions of which officials disapprove will be delayed in implementation; foreign governments go through the motions of diplomacy but reserve their best efforts and their real attention for the new team. And yet so familiar has the exercise of power become that its loss is sensed only dimly and intermittently. Days go by in which one carries out one’s duties as if one’s actions still matter.
I have one piece of advice to give you, Professor. Read the columnists, and if they call a member of your staff thoughtful, dedicated, or any other friendly adjective, fire him immediately. He is your leaker.
The journalist has comparably interested motives in his contacts with the official. He must woo and flatter the official because without his goodwill he will be deprived of information. But he cannot let himself be seduced — the secret dream of most officials — or he will lose his objectivity. A love-hate relationship is almost inevitable. Officials are tempted to believe that social relationships lay the groundwork for compassionate treatment; journalists often prove their “objectivity” by attacking precisely those who shower them with attention. If both sides are realistic and mature they will establish a mutual respect. The official will recognize that not seduction but the journalist’s personal integrity is the ultimate guarantee of fairness. The journalist will accept that to the official duty is paramount, and that its requirements are not always identical with providing scoops. If both the markers of policy and its interpreters can respect each other’s vital function, the resulting working relationship can be one of the strongest guarantees of a free society.
A French sociologist has written that every executive below the very top of an organization faces a fundamental choice: he can see himself as the surrogate of the head of the organization, taking on his shoulders some of the onus of bureaucratically unpopular decisions. Or he can become the spokesman of his subordinates and thus face the chief executive with the necessity of assuming the sole responsibility for painful choices. If he takes the former course he is likely to be unpopular in the bureaucracy — at least in the short run — but he helps bring about cohesion, a sense of direction, and ultimately high morale. If he places the onus for every difficult decision on his superior — if he insists on playing the “good guy” — he may create goodwill among subordinates but he will sacrifice discipline and effectiveness; ultimately a price will be paid in institutional morale. Such a course, moreover, invites the very buffeting it seeks to avoid; it focuses attention on obstacles rather than on purposes.
It was probably unfair to appoint to the senior Cabinet position someone whose entire training and experience had been in other fields. Rogers had been a distinguished Attorney General. But the old adage that men grow into office has not proved true in my experience. High office teaches decision-making, not substance. Cabinet members are soon overwhelmed by the insistent demands of running their departments. On the whole, a period in high office consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make. And the less the know at the outset, the more dependent they are on the only source of available knowledge: the permanent officials. Unsure of their own judgment, unaware of alternatives, they have little choice except to follow the advice of the experts.
They are intelligent, competent, loyal, and hardworking. But the reverse side of their dedication is the conviction that a lifetime of service and study has given them insights that transcend the untrained and shallow-rooted views of political appointees.
The procedures of the State Department are well designed to put a premium on bureaucratic self-will. Despite lip service to planning, there is a strong bias in favor of making policy in response to cables and in the form of cables. The novice Secretary of State thus finds on his desk not policy analyses or options but stacks of dispatches which he is asked to initial and to do so urgently, if you please. He can scarcely know enough about all the subjects to which they refer, or perhaps about any of them, to form an opinion. In any event, he will not learn from these draft cables what alternatives he has. Even if he asserts himself and rejects a particular draft, it is likely to come back to him with a modification so minor that only a legal scholar could tell the difference. When I later became Secretary I discovered that it was a herculean effort even for someone who had made foreign policy his life’s work to dominate the State Department cable machine. Woe to the uninitiated at the mercy of that extraordinary and dedicated band of experts.
Like the overwhelming majority of high officials I had strong views and did not reject opportunities to have them prevail. What makes the tension and exhaustion of high office bearable and indeed exhilarating is the conviction that one makes a contribution to a better world. To what extent less elevated motives of vanity and quest for power played a role is hard to determine at this remove; it is unlikely that they were entirely absent.
In bureaucratic dispute the side having no better argument than its hierarchical right is likely to lose. Presidents listen to advisers whose views they think they need, not to those who insist on a hearing because of the organization chart.
Acheson frequently emphasized that while he felt free to disagree vigorously with President Truman he never put him into a position that seemed to test his authority nor would he ever join a cabal of other Cabinet members to bring pressure on the President. A President needs substantive advice, but he also requires emotional succor. He must know that his advisers are strong and self-confident, but he must also sense that they have compassion for the isolation and responsibilities of his position and will not willfully add to his psychological burdens.
Erlichman learned the hard way that there are dimensions of political science not taught at the universities and that being right on substance does not always guarantee success in Washington.
He had lived through the 1960s when young system analysts had been brought into the Pentagon to shake up the military establishment by questioning long-held assumptions. Intellectually the system analysts were more often right than not; but they soon learned that the way a question is put can often predetermined an answer, and their efforts in the hallowed name of objectivity frequently wound up pushing personal preconceptions.
Misuse of systems analysis apart, there was a truth which senior military officers had learned in a lifetime of service that did not lend itself to formal articulation: that power has a psychological and not only a technical component. Men can be led by statistics only up to a certain point and then more fundamental values predominate. In the final analysis the military profession is the art of prevailing, and while in our time this required more careful calculations than in the past, it also depends on elemental psychological factors that are difficult to quantify.
But soon they found they had qcquiesced in a plan that gathered its own momentum. As withdrawal schedules became part of the military budget, they could be slowed down only at the price of giving up weapons modernization.
High military officers must always strike a balance between their convictions and their knowledge that to be effective they must survive to fight another day.
No one is promoted through the ranks to Director of CIA who is not tempered in many battles; Helms was strong as he was wary. His urbanity was coupled with extraordinary tenacity; his smile did not always include his eyes. He had seen administrations come and go and he understood that in Washington knowledge was power. He was presumed to know a lot and ever disabused people of that belief. At the same time I never knew him to misuse is knowledge or his power. He never forgot that his integrity guaranteed his effectiveness, that his best weapon with Presidents was a reputation for reliability.
In my experience the CIA developed rationales for inaction much more frequently than for daring thrusts.
There exists no regular staff procedure for arriving at decision; instead, ad hoc groups are formed as the need arises. No staff agency to monitor the carrying out of decisions is available. There is no focal points for long-range planning on an inter-agency basis. Without a central administrative focus, foreign policy turns into a series of unrelated decisions — crisis-oriented, ad hoc and after-the-fact in nature. We become the prisoners of events.
When I was appointed, I did not have any organizational plan in mind. My major concern was that a large bureaucracy, however organized, tends to stifle creativity. It confuses wise policy with smooth administration. In the modern state bureaucracies become so large that too often more time is spent in running them than in defining their purposes. A complex bureaucracy has an incentive to exaggerate technical complexity and minimize the scope of importance of political judgment; it favors the status quo, however arrived at, because short of an unambiguous catastrophe the status quo has the advantage of familiarity and it is never possible to prove that another course would yield superior results. It seemed to me no accident that most great statesmen had been locked in permanent struggle with the experts in their foreign offices, for the scope of the statesman’s conception challenges the inclination of the expert toward minimum risk.
The complexity of modern government makes large bureaucracies essential; but the need for innovation also creates the imperative to define purposes that go beyond administrative norms. Ultimately there is no purely organizational answer; it is above all a problem of leadership. Organizational remedies cannot by themselves remove the bias for waiting for crises and for the avoidance of long-term planning. We set ourselves the task of making a conscious effort to shape the international environment according to a conception of American purposes rather than to wait for events to impose the need for decision.
My unhappy experience as a regular but outside consultant to President Kennedy proved invaluable. I had learned then the difference between advice and authority. Statesmanship requires above all a sense of nuance and proportion, the ability to perceive the essential among a mass of apparent facts, and an intuition as to which of many equally plausible hypotheses about the future is likely to prove true. And authority is essential — the strength to take charge of a consequence of events and to impose some direction. Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves. Before I served as a consultant to Kennedy, I had believed, like most academicians, that the process of decision-making was largely intellectual and that all one had to do was to walk into the President’s office and convince him of the correctness of one’s views. This perspective I soon realized is as dangerously immature as it is widely held. To be sure, in our system the President has the authority to make final decisions; he has larger scope for discretion than the chief executive of any other large country — including probably even the Soviet Union. But a President’s schedule is so hectic that he has little time for abstract reflection. Almost all of his callers are supplicants or advocates, and most of their cases are extremely plausible — which is what got them into the Oval Office in the first place. As a result, one of the President’s most difficult tasks is to choose among endless arguments that sound equally convincing. The easy decisions do not come to him; they are taken care at lower levels. As his term in office progresses, therefore, except in extreme crisis a President comes to base his choices more and more on the confidence he has in his advisers. He grows increasingly conscious of bureaucratic and political pressures upon him; issues of substance tend to merge in his mind with the personalities embodying the conflicting considerations.
A Presidential decision is always an amalgam of judgment, confidence in his associates, and also concern about their morale. Any President soon discovers that his problem is not only to give an order but to get it implemented, and this requires willing cooperation. Bureaucratically unpopular orders can be evaded in a variety of ways. They can be interpreted by skilled exegesis to yield a result as close as possible to what the department most concerned wanted in the first place; there can be endless procrastination in its implementation; leaks can sabotage a policy by sparking a controversy. And there is the intangible human quality; cut off from most normal contacts, Presidents are acutely uncomfortable with unhappy associates, and seek to avoid the problem if at all possible.
To be helpful to the President the machinery for making decisions must therefore meet several criteria. It must be compatible with his personality and style. It must lead to action; desultory talk without operational content produces paralysis. Above all, it must be sensitive to the psychological relationship between the President and his close advisers: it must enable the President’s associates to strengthen his self-confidence and yet give him real choices, to supply perspective and yet not turn every issue into a test of wills. It must give scope for genuine Presidential discretion without promoting megalomania that often develops in positions where one encounters few equals. At the same time, if every single decision is funneled into the President’s office, he will lose the benefit of the technical competence and accumulated experience of the permanent officials.
If key decisions are made informally at unprepared meetings, the tendency to be obliging to the President and cooperate with one’s colleague may vitiate the articulation of real choices. This seemed to me a problem with decision-making in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. On the other hand, if the procedures grow too formal, if the President is humble enough to subordinate his judgment to a bureaucratic consensus — as happened in the Eisenhower Administration — the danger is that he will in practice be given only the choice between approving or disapproving a single recommended course. Since he is not told of alternatives, or the consequences of disapproval, such a system develops a bias toward the lowest common denominator. It sacrifices purpose to administrative efficiency. This may be relieved by occasional spasms of Presidential self-will meant to convince others (and himself) of his authority, but such erratic outbursts are bound to prove temporary since his refusal to accept the agreed recommendation leaves him with no operational alternative.
Permitting the President to make a real choice seemed to me essential, not only to establish genuine Presidential authority but also to enhance his leadership by giving him the self-assurance that comes from knowing that he had considered all the valid alternatives. Putting before the President the fullest range of choices and their likely consequences was indeed the main job of the national security adviser. No President can avoid failures on some problems sometime in his term; I never wanted it said that they occurred because of events which were foreseeable but had never been considered.
The first to be heard from was Laird, who in the process initiated me to his patented technique of bureaucratic warfare: to throw up a smokescreen of major objections in which he was not really interested but which reduced the item that really concerned him to such minor proportions that to refuse him would appear positively indecent. Applying this tactic, Laird spoke with me and then submitted a memorandum that identified some fundamental disagreements with the proposed new system. He objected to the intelligence community’s lack of direct access to the President; he feared an NSC staff monopoly of the right to initiate studies; somewhat contradictorily, he asked for assurances against senior officials’ “going around the NSC and directly to the President as a regular practice.” (His chief worry here was to prevent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from exercising too literally his legal prerogative as principal military adviser to the President.) But when I met with Laird for dinner at the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel in Washington to discuss his memorandum, it turned out that he sought no more than the participation of the CIA Director at NSC meeting and the right to propose the initiation of studies. These requests were easily accommodated.
The moment of responsibility is profoundly sobering, especially for one trained as an academic. Suddenly forced to make the transition from reflection to decision, I had to learn the difference between a conclusion and a policy. It was no longer enough to be plausible in argument; one had to be convincing in action. Problems were no longer theoretical; the interlocutors were not debaters but sovereign countries, some of which had the physical power to make their views prevail.
Any statesman is in part the prisoner of necessity. He is confronted with an environment he did not create, and is shaped by a personal history he can no longer change. It is an illusion to believe that leaders gain in profundity while they gain experience. As I have said, the convictions the leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office. There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.
When I entered office, I brought with me a philosophy formed by two decades of the study of history. History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situation are in fact compatible. No academic discipline can take from our shoulders the burden of difficult choices.
I had written a book and several articles on the diplomacy of the 19th century. My motive was to understand the processes by which Europe after the Napoleonic wars established a peace that lasted a century; I also wanted to know why that peace collapsed in 1914. But I had never conceived that designs and strategies of previous periods could be applied literally to the present. As I entered office I was convinced that the past could teach us some important lessons. But I was also aware that we were entering a period for which there was no precedent: in the destructiveness of weapons, in the speed of the spread of ideas, in the global impact of foreign policies, in the technical possibility to fulfill the age-old dreams of bettering the condition of mankind.
If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint. But I believed equally that no nation could face or even define its choices without a moral compass that set a course through the ambiguities of reality and thus made sacrifices meaningful. The willingness to walk this fine line marks the difference between the academic’s — or any outsider’s — perception of morality and that of the statesman. The outsider thinks in terms of absolutes; for him right and wrong are defined in their conception The political leader does not have this luxury. He rarely can reach his goal except in stages; any partial step is inherently morally imperfect and yet morality cannot be approximated without it. The philosopher’s test is the reasoning behind his maxims; the statesman’s test is not only the exaltation of his goals but the catastrophe he averts. Mankind will never know what it was spared because once thwarted the consequences can never be proved. The dialogue between the academic and the statesman is therefore always likely to be inconclusive. Without philosophy, policy will have no standards; but without the willingness to peer into darkness and risk some faltering steps without certainty, humanity would never know peace.
History knows no resting places and no plateaus. All societies of which history informs us went through periods of decline; most of them eventually collapsed. Yet there is a margin between necessity and accident, in which the statesman by perseverance and intuition must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people. To ignore objective conditions is perilous; to hide behind historical inevitability is tantamount to moral abdication; it is to neglect the elements of strength and hope and inspiration which through the centuries have sustained mankind. The statesman’s responsibility is to struggle against transitoriness and not to insist that he be paid in the coin of eternity. He may know that history is the foe of permanence; but no leader is entitled to resignation. He owes it to his people to strive, to create, and to resist the decay that besets all human institutions.
I reached high office unexpectedly at a particularly complex period of our national life. In the life of nations, as of human beings, a point is often reached when the seemingly limitless possibilities of youth suddenly narrow and one must come to grips with the fact that not every option is open any longer. This insight can inspire a new creative impetus, less innocent perhaps than the naive exuberance of earlier years, but more complex and ultimately more permanent. The process of coming to grips with one’s limit is never easy. It can end in despair or in rebellion; it can produce a self-hatred that turns inevitable compromises into a sense of inadequacy.
America went through such a period of self-doubt and self-hatred in the late 1960s. The trigger for it was the war in Vietnam. Entered into gradually by two administrations, by 1969 it had resulted in over 31,000 American dead with no prospect of early resolution. It began with overwhelming public and Congressional approval, but this had evolved first into skepticism and then into increasingly hostile rebellion. For too many, a war to resist aggression had turned into a symbol of fundamental American evil. A decade that had begun with the bold declaration that America would pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the survival and success of liberty had ended in an agony of assassinations, urban riots, and ugly demonstrations. The Sixties marked the end of our innocence; this was certain. What remained to be determined was whether we could learn from this knowledge or consume our substance in rebelling against the reality of our maturity.
Our domestic divisions prevented decisive initiatives. America seemed reduced to passivity in a world in which, with all our self-doubt, only our power could offer security, only our dedication could sustain hope.
In my view, Vietnam was not the cause of our difficulties but a symptom. We were in a period of painful adjustment to a profound transformation of global politics; we were being forced to come to grips with the tension between our history and our new necessities. For two centuries America’s participation in the world seemed to oscillate between over-involvement and withdrawal, between expecting too much of our power and being ashamed of it, between optimistic exuberance and frustration with the ambiguities of an imperfect world. I was convinced that the deepest cause of national unease was the realization — as yet dimly perceived — that we were becoming like other nations in the need to recognize that our power, while vast, had limits. Our resources were no longer infinite in relation to our problems; instead we had to set priorities, both intellectual and material. In the Fifties and Sixties we had attempted ultimate solutions to specific problems; now our challenge was to shape a world and an American role to which we were permanently committed, which could no longer be sustained by the illusion that our exertions had a terminal point.
Union from recovering from the war and asserting its new power. Our early postwar success did not equip us for a new era of more complex problems. Our early programs like the Marshall Plan and Point Four expressed our idealism, our technological know-how, and our ability to overwhelm problems with resources. In a sense we were applying the precepts of our own New Deal, expecting political conflict to dissolve in economic progress. It worked in Europe and parts of Asia where political structures existed; it would be less relevant in the scores of new nations. In the relatively simple bipolar world of the Cold War, we held fast against pressure or blackmail in Berlin, in Korea, in Berlin again, and finally during the Cuban missile crisis. These were successes. But in an important sense we had only begun to scratch the surface of the long-term problem of our relationship with the Soviet Union in the thermonuclear age, which would soon produce more ambiguous challenges.
Our deeper problem was conceptual. Because peace was believed to be “normal,” many of our great international exertions were expected to bring about a final result, restoring normality by overcoming an intervening obstacle. The programs for European economic recovery were expected to bring lasting prosperity. Exertions to ensure security were aimed at a conclusive settlement with the Soviet Union. This was implicit in the concept of “containment” that expressed our postwar policy toward the Soviet Union.
In fact, I am inclined to doubt that Stalin originally expected to lock all of Eastern Europe into his satellite orbit; his first postwar steps — such as permitting free elections in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, all of which the Communists lost — suggest that he might have been prepared to settle for their having a status similar to Finland’s. Unexpectedly, we deferred serious negotiations until we had mobilized more of our potential strength. Thus we gave the Soviet Union time — the most precious commodity it needed to consolidate its conquests and to recover from the war.
Our perception of power and diplomacy as distinct and successive phases of foreign policy prevented us from negotiating to settle the Korean War after the landing at Inchon when we were in the strongest military position; it tempted us to escalate our aims. A year later it also caused us to stop military operations except of a purely defensive nature the moment negotiations got under way, thus removing the enemy’s major incentive for a rapid diplomatic settlement. We acted as if the process of negotiations operated on its own inherent logic independent of the military balance — indeed, that military pressures might jeopardize the negotiations by antagonizing our adversary or demonstrating bad faith. Not surprisingly, a stalemate of nearly two years’ duration followed, during which our casualties equaled those we had endured when hostilities were unconstrained. Treating force and diplomacy as discrete phenomena caused our power to lack purpose and our negations to lack force.
Ten years later we encountered the same dilemmas in Vietnam. Once more we became involved because we considered the warfare in Indochina the manifestation of a coordinated global Communist strategy. Again we sought to limit our risks because the very global challenge of which Indochina seemed to be a part also made Vietnam appear as an unprofitable place for a showdown. At every stage we sought to keep our risks below the level which in our estimate would trigger Chinese or Soviet intervention. In short, our perception of the global challenge at the same time tempted us into distant enterprises and prevented us from meeting them conclusively. Once again, a war we had entered with great public support turned into a frustrating stalemate that gradually forfeited public acceptance.
Even as we entered office, it was clear that the agony of Vietnam threatened a new disillusionment with international affairs that could draw America inward to nurse its wounds and renounce its world leadership. This would be a profound tragedy, far more grievous than the tragedy of Vietnam itself. We would be back to our historical cycle of exuberant overextension and sulking isolationism. And this time we would be forsaking a world far more complex, more dangerous, more dependent upon America’s leadership than the world of the 1930s. Crises were symptoms of deeper problems which if allowed to fester would prove increasingly unmanageable. Moral exuberance had inspired both over-involvement and isolationism. It was my conviction that a concept of our fundamental national interests would provide a ballast of restraint and an assurance of continuity. Our idealism had to be not an excuse for irresponsibility but a source of courage, stamina, self-confidence, and direction. Only in this manner would we be able to shape an emerging international system that was unprecedented in its perils, its promise, and its global nature.
The contemporary unrest is no doubt exploited by some whose purpose are all too clear. But that it is there to exploit is proof of a profound dissatisfaction with the merely managerial and consumer-oriented qualities of the modern state and with a world which seems to generate crises by inertia. The modern bureaucratic state, for all its panoply of strength, often finds itself shaken to its foundations by seemingly trivial causes. Its brittleness and the world-wide revolution of youth — especially in advanced countries and among the relatively affluent — suggest a spiritual void, an almost metaphysical boredom with a political environment that increasingly emphasizes bureaucratic challenges and is dedicated to no deeper purpose than material comfort…
In the best of circumstances, the next administration will be beset by crises. In almost every area of the world, we have been living off capital — warding off the immediate, rarely dealing with underlying problems. These difficulties are likely to multiply when it becomes apparent that one of the legacies of the war in Vietnam will be a strong reluctance to risk oversea involvements.
A new administration has the right to ask for compassion and understanding from the American people. But it must found its claim not on pat technical answers to difficult issues; it must above all ask the right questions. It must recognize that, in the field of foreign policy, we will never be able to contribute to building a stable and creative world order unless we first form some conception of it.
The most ominous change that marked our period was the transformation in the nature of power. Until the beginning of the nuclear age it would have been inconceivable that a country could possess too much military strength for effective political use; every addition of power was — at least theoretically — politically useful. The nuclear age destroyed this traditional measure. A country might be strong enough to destroy an adversary and yet no longer be able to protect its own population against attack. By an irony of history a gargantuan increase in power had eroded the relationship of power to policy. Henceforth, the major nuclear powers would be able to devastate one another. But they would also have great difficulty in bringing their power to bear on the issues most likely to arise. They might be able to deter direct challenges to their own survival; they could not necessarily use this power to impose their will. The capacity to destroy proved difficult to translate into a plausible threat even against countries with no capacity for retaliation. The margin of the superpowers over non-nuclear states had been widening; yet the awesomeness of their power had increased their inhibitions. As power had grown more awesome, it had also turned abstract, intangible, elusive.
The military policy we adopted was deterrence. But deterrence is a psychological phenomenon. It depends above all on what a potential aggressor considers an unacceptable risk. In the nuclear age a bluff taken seriously is useful; a serious threat taken as a bluff may prove disastrous. The longer deterrence succeeds, the more difficult it is to demonstrate what made it work. Was peace maintained by the risk of war, or because the adversary never intended aggression in the first place? It is no accident that peace movements have multiplied the longer peace has been maintained. But if deterrence is effectual, then we dismantle the forces that sustain it only at our grave peril.
Nuclear weapons have compounded the political rigidity of a two-power world. The guardians of the equilibrium of the 19th century were prepared to adjust it to changes in the structure of power. The policymakers of the superpowers in the second half of the 20th century have much less confidence in the ability of the equilibrium to right itself after disturbance. The “balance” between superpowers has become both precarious and inflexible. As the world has grown bipolar, it has also lost the perspective for nuance; a gain for one side appears as an absolute loss for the other. Every issue seems to bear on the question of survival. Diplomacy turns rigid; relations are inherently wary.
I did not share the conventional view of de Gaulle. I saw him not as the cause of current difficulties and doubts but as the symptom of deep-seated structural changes in the Atlantic relationship. It was not natural that the major decisions affecting the destiny of countries so rich in traditions, national pride, and economic strength as Western Europe and Japan should be made thousands of miles away. I had urged for years that it was in the American national interest to encourage a sharing of responsibilities. If the US insisted on being the trustee of all the non-Communist areas we should exhaust ourselves psychologically long before we did so physically. A world of more centers of decision, I believed, was fully compatible with our interests as well as our ideals.
By the ironies of history, Marxism has proved attractive to developing nations not because of the economic theory on which it prides itself but because it has supplied an answer to the problem of political legitimacy and authority — a formula for social mobilization, a justification for political power, a means of harnessing resentments against Western cultural and political power as a method of fostering unity. Democracy has less appeal, not because of the West’s sins but because leaders in most developing countries did not undergo the risks of the anticolonial struggle in order to make themselves dispensable. By an historical joke, a materialist philosophy that has solved no country’s economic problems has spread because of its moral claims, while the West, professing an idealistic philosophy, has bemused itself with economic and technical remedies largely irrelevant to the underlying political and spiritual problem.
These, then, were the perceptions about which I had thought and written much as a professor. They would soon be tested by events. For once the oath of office has been taken by a new President, there is no longer time for calm reflection. The policymaker is then like a man on a tightrope; he can avoid a precipitous drop only by moving forward.
Ehrlichman had his hands full, for a Presidential trip is a major logistical undertaking. I understood so little of this for several years that when, during my secret trip to Peking in July 1971, Chou En-lai asked me how large Nixon’s party would be, I guessed at about fifty. It was a demonstration of ignorance that evoked condescending pity from Haldeman. The Secret Service agents alone who accompany the President exceed that number. Then there are the immediate staff, and secretaries and baggage handlers, and the platoons of communicators, since wherever the President travels he and his staff must be able to reach any part of the world instantaneously by teletype or telephone. A President cannot travel, moreover, without the many assistants and departmental representative for whom presence on a Presidential trip is a coveted status symbol, even when they participate in no meetings and scarcely if at all see the President. And the traveling press frequently numbers over three hundred. In total, a typical Presidential party is between six hundred and eight hundred people.
Once aboard Air Force One, Nixon turned assiduously to his briefing papers, which were extraordinary in range and details. Speeches, of course, were already drafted. No matter what the pretense, no President has the time to draft his own speeches. Nixon’s foreign policy speeches all had the same origin: a detailed outline prepared by the NSC staff under my supervision, which Nixon would review and perhaps alter a bit before assigning to a speechwriter. When he had a vital speech to make he might himself rewrite extensively, especially at the beginning and the end, with particular attention to any political implications. If he thought I would approve the rhetorical changes, I might see the final text, but not otherwise. On a fast-moving foreign trip like the one we were launched upon, there would be no time for extensive editing, and the speechwriters would come into their own.
In addition to a folder of speeches, Nixon had voluminous books prepared for him by my staff and the State Department. They included an overall conceptual paper that explained our objectives, the strategy for achieving them, and their relationship to our general foreign policy. In addition there were talking points for each country, discussing the issues likely to be raised and biographical material about the leaders he would meet. In deference to the President’s predilections, the talking points sought to turn each meeting to the greatest extent possible into a set piece. They were broken down into the issues the various leader were likely to raise, they listed the suggested responses and warned about sensitive topics to avoid.
Europeans dreaded at one and the same time the devastation of a nuclear war on their densely populated continent and our apparently growing reluctance to resort to nuclear weapons. They wanted to make the Soviet Union believe that any attack would unleash America’s nuclear arsenal. If the bluff failed, however, they were not eager to have us implemented the threat on their soil. Their secret hope, which they never dared to articulate, was that the defense of Europe would be conducted as an intercontinental nuclear exchange over their heads; to defend their own countries, America was invited to run the very risk of nuclear devastation from which they were shying away.
When we came to office in 1969, the estimate of casualties in case of a Soviet second strike stood at over 50 million dead from immediate effects (not to mention later deaths from radiation).
At the same time, the US was slow in recognizing that the issue was political, and ultimately psychological. It was to be expected that under conditions of incipient parity the nuclear superpowers would attempt to make the nuclear environment more predictable and manageable. But this very attempt was bound to appear to others as a budding condominium: It clearly placed restraints on our decisions to go to nuclear war — upon which Europe based its security. The allies grumbled about inadequate consultation, but their worries would have been scarcely muted by full consultation. Once the US and the USSR each possessed invulnerable retaliatory forces capable of inflicting unacceptable damage, allied cohesion would depend on the ability to make sure that American and European perceptions of vital interests were congruent, and perceived to be so by the Soviet Union.
The strategic debates were thus only the tip of the iceberg. The deepest challenge was that after centuries of Europe’s preeminence, the center of gravity of world affairs was moving away from it. For nations to play a major international role, they must believe that their decisions matter. From the middle of the 18th century onward, the decisions of European powers determined war and peace, progress or stagnation. Conflicts in other continents were often encouraged by European if not fought by them. Economic progress depended upon European capital and European technology. WW1 — senseless in its origin, pointless in its outcome — produced a catastrophe out of all proportion to the issue at stake. Ninety percent of Britain’s Oxford University graduates of 1914 perished as junior officers in the carnage of the Great War. Precisely because the suffering was so vast and so unexpected, after a century’s smug belief in uninterrupted progress, European’s self-confidence was shaken and its economic foundation eroded. WW2 and the period of decolonization completed the process, narrowing horizons further and compounding the sense of impotence. European governments suddenly realized that their security and prosperity depended on decisions made far away; from being principal actors they had become supporting players. Europe after 1945 thus faced a crisis of the spirit that went beyond its still considerable material resources. The real tension between the US and Europe revolved about Europe’s quest for a sense of identity and relevance in a world in which it no longer controlled the ultimate decisions.
Those who argued that Europe would be more willing to share global burdens if they were federally integrated seemed to me to follow too mechanical a concept of history. The reason Europe did not play a global role was not so much shrinking resources as shrinking horizons. I did not think that countries shared burdens merely because they were capable of doing so. Through the greatest part of its history the US had the resources but not the inclination to play a global role; conversely, many European countries continued to maintain overseas commitments even after their resources began to dwindle. The largest colonial empire in the Sixties and part of the Seventies was maintained by Portugal, one of the weakest NATO members. Burden-sharing among the allies was likely only if two conditions were met: Europe had to develop its own perception of international relations, and Europe had to be convinced that we could not, or would not, carry the load alone. Neither condition obtained in the late Sixties. European were absorbed with domestic problems. To the extent that they sought reinsurance against American withdrawal, they did so not by a division of labor with us but in duplicating our strengths, by building strategic weapons of their own. And Europe would need to articulate a policy of its own before it would assume greater burdens of responsibilities.
No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time. A more pluralistic world — especially in relationships with friends — is profoundly in our long-term interest. Political multipolarity, while difficult to get used to, is the precondition for a new period of creativity. Painful as it may be to admit, we could benefit from a counterweight that would discipline our occasional impetuosity and, by supplying historical perspective, modify our penchant for abstract and “final” solutions.
The vitality of free peoples would be tested by the answer they gave to the age-old dilemma of freedom: how to reconcile diversity and unity, independence and collaboration, liberty and security.
Even if desirable, which I doubted, this was impractical. For the special relationship with Britain was peculiarly impervious to abstract theories. It did not depend on formal arrangements; it derived in part from the memory of Britain’s heroic wartime effort; it reflected the common language and culture of two sister peoples. It owed no little to the superb self-discipline by which Britain had succeeded in maintaining political influence after its physical power had waned. When Britain emerged from WW2 too enfeebled to insist on its views, it wasted no time in mourning an irretrievable past. British leaders instead tenaciously elaborated the “special relationship” with us. This was, in effect, a pattern of consultation so matter-of-factly intimate that it became psychologically impossible to ignore British views. They evolved a habit of meetings so regular that autonomous American action somehow came to seem to violate club rules. Above all, they used effectively an abundance of wisdom and trustworthiness of conduct so exceptional that successive American leaders saw it in their self-interest to obtain British advice before taking major decisions. It was an extraordinary relationship because it rested on no legal claim; it was formalized by no document; it was carried forward by succeeding British government as if no alternative were conceivable. Britain’s influence was great precisely because it never insisted on it; the “special relationship” demonstrated the value of intangibles.
One feature of the Anglo-American relationship was the degree to which diplomatic subtlety overcame substantive disagreements. In reality, on European integration the views of Britain’s leaders were closer to de Gaulle’s than to ours; an integrated supranational Europe was as much anathema in Britain as in France. The major difference between the French and the British was the British leaders generally conceded us the theory — of European integration of Atlantic unity — while seeking to shape its implementation through the closest contacts with us. Where de Gaulle tended to confront us with faits accomplis and doctrinal challenges, Britain turned conciliation into a weapon by making it morally inconceivable that its views could be ignored.
My own personal view on this issue is that we do not suffer in the world from such an excess of friends that we should discourage those who feel that they have a special friendship for us. I would think that the answer to the special relationship of Britain would be to raise other countries to the same status, rather than to discourage Britain into a less warm relationship with the US.
The last stop of Nixon’s odyssey was Paris, where we were greeted at the airport by the extraordinary figure of Charles de Gaulle, President of the Fifth French Republic. He exuded authority. Four weeks later, he was to visit Washington fo the funeral of President Eisenhower. His presence at the reception tendered by Nixon was so overwhelming that he was the center of attention wherever he stood. Other heads of government and many Senators who usually proclaimed their antipathy to authoritarian generals crowded around him and treated him like some strange species. One had the sense that if he moved to a window the center of gravity might shift and the whole room might tilt everybody into the garden.
De Gaulle, as the son of a continent covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight, did not accept so institutional an approach. European self-confidence, in his view, required not only the opportunity to consult it; it also depended on the options available in case disagreement was beyond resolution. Therefore, where American spokesmen stressed partnership, de Gaulle emphasized equilibrium. To de Gaulle, sound relationships depended less on personal goodwill and willingness to cooperate than on a balance of pressures and the understanding of the relation of forces.
The art of statesmanship, de Gaulle reasoned, was to understand the trend of history. A great leader may be clever, but he must above all lucid and clear-sighted. To de Gaulle, grandeur was not simply physical power, but strength reinforced by moral purpose. Nor did competition, ins his view, inevitably involve physical conflict. Paradoxically, de Gaulle could see partnership emerge from a contest of wills because only in this manner would each side maintain its self-respect.: “Yes, international life, like life in general, is a battle. The battle which our country is waging tends to unite and not to divide, to honor and not to debase, to liberate and not to dominate. Thus it is faithful to its mission, which always was and which remains human and universal.”
With this philosophy, de Gaulle could not possibly accept the American conviction of the obsolescence of the nation-state. The problem was not that he wished to reactivate Europe’s traditional national rivalries, as so many of his American critics alleged. On the contrary, he passionately affirmed the goal of unity for Europe. But where the American and European “integrationists” insisted that European Unity required that the nation-state be subsumed in a federal supranational structure, de Gaulle argued that Europe’s identity and ultimately its unity depended on the vitality and self-confidence of the traditional European national entities. To de Gaulle, states were the only legitimate source of power; only they could act responsibility: “… it is true that the nation is a human and sentimental element, whereas Europe can be built on the basis of active, authoritative and responsible elements. What elements? The States, of course; for, in this respect, it is only the States that are valid, legitimate and capable of achievement. I have already said, and I repeat, that at the present time there cannot be any other Europe than a Europe of States, apart, of course, from myths, stories and parades.” And: “The States are, in truth, certainly very different from one another, each of which has its own spirit, its own history, its own language, its own misfortunes, glories and ambitions; but these States are the only entities that have the right to order and the authority to act.”
As I have indicated, I never participated in the condemnation of General de Gaulle; in fact, I thought our European policy of the Sixties generally misconceived. We were, it seemed to me, extraordinarily insensitive to the psychological problems of a country like France, which had barely survived two world wars, which had been humiliated in 1940, and which in 1958, 1960, and 1962 had been at the brink of civil war. De Gaulle’s overriding challenge was to restore France’s faith in itself. How well he succeeded was shown by the fact that three years after the end of the Algerian war (which most observers had expected to enfeeble France with internal divisions for decades), the common complaint was that France was conducting a foreign policy more vigorous and assertive than its real capacities should have allowed.
I was persuaded that a Europe seeking to play an international role, even if occasionally assertive, was more in our interest than a quiescent Europe abdicating responsibilities in the guise of following American leadership. Nor did de Gaulle’s attitude toward supranational institutions seem to me extraordinary. Britain had exactly the same view; the chief difference was that British statesmen characteristically expressed their disagreements on more pragmatic grounds and in a less doctrinaire manner. We did not need to insist on structures that enshrined our leadership position because, left to their own devices, Europeans were likely to come to conclusions about their vital interests parallel to ours on most matters affecting the security of the Atlantic area.
He sketched his perception of Europe: of Italy imprisoned in the Mediterranean and isolated by the Alps; of Germany, the source of all Europe’s misfortunes, cut in two and watched by both sides; of France, a continental country with access to sea; of Britain facing the oceans and made for overseas trade. These four countries, the only ones of real weight in Europe, were as different in their language, customs, history, and interests as they were in the geographic location. They, not some abstract conception of integration, were the political reality of a Europe that did not exist beyond them.
De Gaulle stressed that it was imperative for the Soviets to know that the US would stand with its allies in Europe in case of attack. But NATO, the integrated command, was another matter. He did not object to other countries’ willingness to accept an American protectorate. But to France, integration amounted to a renunciation of her own defense. If a war were fought by an integrated NATO, the French people would feel that it was an American, and not a French, war. This would mean the end of national effort, and therefore the end of French national policy. France, thus demoralized, would then quickly revert to a situation where she had thirty political parties. In de Gaulle’s view, France, perhaps paradoxically, rendered the greatest service to the Alliance by being independent.
These views, so contrary to American postwar preconceptions, were those of an ancient country grown skeptical through many enthusiasms shattered and conscious that to be meaningful to others, France had to first of all mean something to herself.
The imposing monolith of totalitarian states often obscures their latent weaknesses. The Soviet system is unstable politically; it has no mechanism for succession. Of the four General Secretaries of the Soviet Communist Party two have died in office; the third has been removed by couplike procedures; the fate of the fourth is unsettled at this writing. Precisely because there is no “legitimate” means of replacing leaders they all grow old together in office. A ponderous bureaucratic machinery and the complexity of collective leadership make it rare that Soviet foreign policy shows great brilliance or even quick responses to fast-moving events.
It is one of the ironies of elaborated Communist states that the Communist Party has no real function even though it permeates every aspect of society. It is not needed for running the economy, for administration, or for government. Rather, it embodies a social structure of privilege; it justifies itself by vigilance against enemies, domestic and foreign — thus producing a vested interest in tension. Sooner or later this essentially parasitic function is bound to lead to internal pressures, especially in a state comprised of many nationalities.
The themes dominant in the West’s perceptions of the Soviet Union have been recurrent: first, that Soviet purposes have already changed and the Soviet leaders are about to concentrate on economic development rather than foreign adventures; second, that improvements in atmosphere and good personal relations with Soviet leaders will help mitigate hostility; and third, that the Kremlin is divided between hawks and doves and that it is the duty of the Western democracies to strengthen the doves by a policy of conciliation.
The obsession with Soviet intentions causes the West to be smug during periods of detente and panicky during crises. A benign Soviet tone is equated with the achievement of peace; Soviet hostility is considered to be the signal for a new period of tension and usually evokes purely military countermeasures. The West is thus never ready for a Soviet change of course; it has been equally unprepared for detente and intransigence.
In the process, more attention was paid to whether we should negotiate than to what we should negotiate about. The dispute over Soviet domestic developments diverted energies from elaborating our own purposes. It caused us to make an issue of what should have been taken for granted: our willingness to negotiate. And it deflected us from elaborating a concrete program which alone would have made negotiations meaningful.
The Kremlin tends to approach a new American Administration with acute wariness. Bureaucracies crave predictability, and the Soviet leaders operate in a Byzantine bureaucratic environment of uncompromising standards. They can adjust to steady firmness; they grow nervous in the face of rapid changes, which undermine the confidence of their colleagues in their judgment and their mastery of events. It was pointless, we concluded, to try to overcome this uneasiness at the start of a new Administration by appeals to a sense of moral community, for the Soviet leaders’ entire training of ideology deny this possibility. Self-interest is a standard they understand better. It is no accident that in relations between the Soviet Union and other societies those Western leaders most bent on showing “understanding” for the Soviet counterparts have been least successful. A Soviet leadership proud of its superior understanding of the objective sources of political motivation cannot admit that it is swayed by transitory considerations. Thus the almost pleading efforts of the Kennedy Administration failed to make progress until a psychological balance was restored, first with the US military buildup after pressures on Berlin and then by the Cuban missile crisis. After these events some progress was made.
Our response depended on our conception of the problem. Our past policy had been one of “confidence building” for its own sake, in the belief that as confidence grew tensions would lessen. But if one took the view that tensions arose as a result of differences over concrete issues, then the way to approach the problem was to begin working on those differences. A lasting peace depended on the settlement of the political issues that were dividing the two nuclear superpowers.
The Soviet leadership would find the new Administration prepared to negotiate lasting settlements reflecting real interests. We believed that there had been too much concern with atmospherics and not enough with substance. In the view of the new Administration there were real differences between the US and the Soviet Union and these differences must be narrowed if there was to be a genuine relaxation of tensions.
The principle of concreteness. We would insist that any negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union deal with the specific causes of tensions rather than general atmospherics. Summit meetings, if they were to be meaningful, had to be well prepared and reflect negotiations that had already made major progress in diplomatic channels. We would take seriously the ideological commitment of Soviet leaders; we would not delude ourselves about the incompatible interests between our two countries in many areas. We would not pretend that a good personal relations or sentimental rhetoric would end the tensions of the postwar period. But we were prepared to explore areas of common concern and to make precise agreements based on strict reciprocity.
The principle of restraint. Reasonable relations between the superpowers could not survive the constant attempt to pursue unilateral advantages and exploit ares of crisis. We were determined to resist Soviet adventures; at the same time we were prepared to negotiate about a genuine easing of tensions. We would not hold still for a detente designed to lull potential victims; we were prepared for a detente based on mutual restraint. We would pursue a carrot-and-stick approach, ready to impose penalties for adventurism, willing to expand relations in the context of responsible behavior.
The principle of linkage. We insisted that progress in superpower relations, to be real, had to be made on a broad front. Events in different parts of the world, in our view, were related to each other; even more so, Soviet conduct in different parts of the world. We proceeded from the premise that to separate issues into distinct compartments would encourage the Soviet leaders to believe that they could use cooperation in an area as a safety valve while striving for unilateral advantage elsewhere.
So strong is the pragmatic tradition of American political thought that this concept of linkage was widely challenged in 1969. It was thought to be an idiosyncrasy, a gratuitous device to delay arms control negotiations. It has seen been repudiated as if it reflected the policy preference of a particular administration. In our view, linkage existed in two forms: first, when a diplomat deliberately links two separate objectives in a negotiation, using one as leverage on the other; or by virtue of reality, because in an inter-dependent world the actions of a major power are inevitably related and have consequences beyond the issue or region immediately concerned.
Linkage, however, is not a natural concept for Americans, who have traditionally perceived foreign policy as an episodic enterprise. Our bureaucratic organizations, divided into regional and functional bureaus, and indeed our academic tradition of specialization compound the tendency to compartmentalize. American pragmatism produces a penchant for examining issues separately: to solve problems on their merits, without a sense of time or context or of the seamless web of reality. And the American legal tradition encourages rigid attention to the “facts of the case,” a distrust of abstractions.
Yet in foreign policy there is no escaping the need for an integrating conceptual framework. In domestic affairs new departures are defined by the legislative process; dramatic initiatives may be the only way to launch a new program. In foreign policy the most important initiatives require painstaking preparation; results take months or years to emerge. Success requires a sense of history, an understanding of manifold forces not within our control, and a broad view of the fabric of events. The test of domestic policy is the merit of a law; that of foreign policy, nuances and interrelations.
The most difficult challenge for a policymaker in foreign affairs is to establish priorities. A conceptual framework — which “links” events — is an essential tool. The absence of linkage produces exactly the opposite of freedom of action; policymakers are forced to respond to parochial interests, buffeted by pressures without a fixed compass. The Secretary of State becomes the captive of his geographic bureaus; the President is driven excessively by his agencies. Both run the risk of becoming prisoners of events.
Linkage, therefore, was another of the attempts of the new Administration to free our foreign policy from oscillations between overextension and isolation and to ground it in a firm conception of the national interest.
It was characteristic of Nixon’s insecurity with personal encounters that he called me into his office four times that day for reassurance that he had done well. He thought there had been a tough confrontation. My impression was rather the opposite — that the meeting had been on the conciliatory side. Or at least it went as on would expect of the opening of a chess game between experts. Each side made moves to maintain the maximum number of options; each side sought to protect itself against some unexpected move by the opponent. I could tell Nixon in good conscience that he had done as well as possible.
When the first interagency options papers came before the Review Group, I told my colleagues that the mind boggled at the possible combinations of negotiating positions and it was not fair to the President to ask him to sort them out. So went back to the drawing board and tried a new approach. We analyzed the possible limitations weapon by weapon, singly and then in combination. The possible limitations were grouped into some seven packages, each of which we thought compatible with our security; these were to serve as building blocks from which to construct specific proposals or to modify them. We were thus in a position to respond flexibly to Soviet ideas without each having to develop a new US position among ourselves. The result was the most comprehensive study of the strategic and verification implications of the control of weapons ever undertaken by our government and probably any government. Our negotiating position would reflect not bureaucratic compromise but careful analysis of consequences and objectives.
An unintended benefit of these studies was the education and bureaucratic backstopping they provided for my later negotiations on SALT with Dobrynin in the White House Channel. It enabled me to tell which options commanded a bureaucratic consensus and yet to maintain the secrecy of the talks. I would thus deal with Dobrynin knowing I was on relatively safe ground.
By whatever standard, the market economies produce more and better goods and services, fulfill more human needs, and create far more pluralist societies than their Communist counterparts. Only in one category have Communist economies scored: the accumulation of military power. Unfortunately, history offers no guarantee that a more humane and beneficent style of life inevitably prevails. Those prepared to deprive themselves over decades may be able to achieve military dominance; sooner or later superior power almost inevitably produces political advantages for the stronger side. This is a challenge the industrial democracies dare not fail to meet.
At the meeting I challenged what seemed to me excessive emphasis on China’s ideology and alleged military; I thought the issue should be posed differently. The interagency paper assumed that American policy had the essentially psychological goal of challenging the minds of the Chinese leadership, to turn Chinese minds from militancy toward conciliation. This ignored China’s role in the power equation. A nation of 800 millions surrounded by weaker states was a geopolitical problem no matter who governed it. Which of our problems with China were caused by its size and situation and which by its leadership? What did we want from China and how could we reasonably influence its decisions? How did we view the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations; how much could we influence them and which side should we favor? I also questioned the view of most Kremlinologists that any attempt to better our relations with China would ruin relations with the Soviet Union. History suggested that it was usually more advantageous to align oneself with the weaker of two antagonistic partners, because this acted as a restraint on the stronger.
The Soviets again give vent to their underlying suspicion that we are trying to flirt with China in order to bring pressure on them. They warn us “in advance” that any such idea can lead to grave miscalculations and would interfere with the improvement of US-Soviet relations. You have already answer this point and I believe there is no advantage in giving the Soviets excessive reassurance. In any case we should not be diverted from our China policy.
We did not consider our opening to China as inherently anti-Soviet. Our objective was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality. There was no reason for us to confine our contacts with major Communist countries to the Soviet Union. We moved toward China not to expiate liberal guilt over our China policy of the late 1940s but to shape a global equilibrium. It was not to collude against the Soviet Union but to give us a balancing position to use for constructive ends — to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us. Such an equilibrium could assure stability among the major powers, and even eventually cooperation, in the Seventies and Eighties.
If it is true that the big problem of the immediate post-WW2 period was to avoid chaos, and if it is true that the big problem of the next 20 years is to build a more permanent peace, then it seems to us impossible to build a peace, which we would define as something other than just the avoidance of crisis, by simply ignoring these 800 million people. Nor do we over-estimate what we can do by unilateral actions towards them. They will make their decisions on the basis of their conceptions of their needs, and of their ideology. But to the degree that their actions can be influenced by ours, we are prepared to engage in a dialogue with them.
Throughout history the political influence of nations has been roughly correlative to their military power. While states might differ in the moral worth and prestige of their institutions, diplomatic skill could augment but never substitute for military strength. In the final reckoning weakness has invariably tempted aggression and impotence brings abdication of policy in its train. Some lesser countries have played significant roles on the world scale for brief periods, but only when they were acting in the secure framework of an international equilibrium. The balance of power, a concept much maligned in American political writing — rarely used without being preceded by the pejorative “outdated” — has in fact been the precondition of peace. A calculus of power, of course, is the only beginning of policy; it cannot be its sole purpose. The fact remains that without strength even the most elevated purpose risks being overwhelmed by the dictates of others.
The political stability of Europe and Japan and the future evolution of the developing countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia would turn on whether the US possessed power relevant to its objectives and was perceived as able to defend its interests and those of its friends. If the war in Vietnam eroded our willingness to back the security of free peoples with our military strength, untold millions would be jeopardy.
In the Soviet Union, by contrast, Khrushchev’s humiliation in Cuba was one cause of his overthrow two years later. The essence of the Soviet response to the Cuban experience is embodied in the pungent remark of Kuznetsov to John McCloy, when these two veteran Soviet and American diplomats negotiated the details of the removal of Soviet weapons from Cuba at the end of 1962: “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again!”
It is, of course, inherent in deterrence that one can never prove what has prevented aggression. Is it our defense posture? Or is it that our adversary never intended to attack in the first place? Paradoxically, the more a given military posture deters aggression, the more arguments it supplies to those wishing to dismantle it.
But in order to pull the teeth of public criticism, Nixon on February 6 asked his Deputy Secretary of Defense to chair an interagency review of the ABM program. His purpose, as he told me, was to make us appear thoughtful. It proved a wrong calculation. As in the case of Vietnam, meeting critics halfway did not allay opposition; it whetted appetites. It encouraged the belief that the same political pressures which had produced the review could cause the Administration to abandon the ABM altogether.
On the other hand, the allegedly ineffective, unreliable, and easily defeated ABM system was considered a menace because it might spark an arms race and in the process might well weaken the deterrent effect of strategic weapons. Building an ABM, it was argued, implied that we might await a Soviet attack and seek to ride it out, while the better strategy was to let the Soviet Union believe we would launch our missiles immediately on warning of an attack: “If I were the Russians,” said Senator Frank Church, “and knew that an immediate counterlaunch of Minutemen would be the American response to any first strike against the US, I would be far more reluctant to launch the attack than if I thought the US might rely upon a defensive system in which I, as a Russian, had contempt. In other words, it seems to me that the very defensive system you are talking about might even lead the Russians to conclude that they might hazard a first strike.” The Senator did not explain why he would feel more secure when the US could protect itself only by a hair-trigger response within the 15-minute maximum warning time available, a strategy that could not work unless the President delegated authority to field commanders to launch on the first warning of Soviet missiles — a warning that later might or might not prove correct.
There were other reasons that caused me to support a limited ABM deployment. It seemed to me highly irresponsible simply to ignore the possibility of an accidental attack or the prospect of nuclear capabilities in the hands of yet more countries. China was only the first candidate; others would follow. Without any defense an accidental launch could do enormous damage. Even a small nuclear power would be able to blackmail the US. I did not see the moral or political value of turning our people into hostages by deliberate choice.
A similar problem existed with respect to tactical nuclear weapons. One might have thought that if our strategic forces tended toward parity with the USSR and if at the same time we were inferior in conventional military strength, greater emphasis would be placed on tactical nuclear forces. This indeed was NATO’s proclaimed strategy of “flexible response.” But there was little enthusiasm for this concept within our government. Civilian officials in the State Department and the Pentagon, especially systems analysis experts, were eager to create a clear “firebreak” between conventional and nuclear weapons and to delay the decisions to resort to any nuclear weapons as long as possible. They were reluctant, therefore, to rely on tactical nuclear weapons, which they thought would tend to erode all distinctions between nuclear and conventional strategy.
A passage from a study on NATO’s military options reflected this state of mind. This particular study was unable to find any use for nuclear weapons in NATO even though our stockpile there numbered in the thousands. The primary role of our nuclear forces in Europe, the study argued, is to raise the Soviet estimate of the expected costs of aggression and add the great uncertainty to their calculations. Nuclear forces do not necessarily have a decisive impact on the likelihood or form of aggression, the study concluded. This was an astonishing statement from a country that had preserved the peace in Europe for over twenty years by relying on its nuclear preponderance. Nor was it clear how forces thought not to have a decisive impact could affect the calculations of a potential aggressor. It was a counsel of defeat to abjure both strategic and tactical nuclear forces, for no NATO country — including ours — was prepared to undertake the massive buildup in conventional forces that was the sole alternative.
In Healey’s judgment NATO’s conventional forces would be able to resist for only a matter of days; hence early use of nuclear weapons was essential. Healey stressed the crucial importance of making the Soviet understand that the West would prefer to escalate to a strategic exchange rather than surrender. On the other hand, NATO should seek to reduce devastation to a minimum. The Nuclear Planning Group was working on solving this riddle; its “solution” was the use of a very small number of tactical weapons as a warning that matters were getting out of hand.
I never had much use for this concept. I believed that the Soviet Union would not attack Western Europe without anticipating a nuclear response. A reaction that was designed to be of no military relevance would show more hesitation than determination; it would thus be more likely to spur the attack than deter it. If nuclear weapon were to be used, we needed a concept by which they could stop an attack on the ground. A hesitant or ineffective response ran the risk of leaving us with no choices other than surrender or holocaust.
When the Nixon Administration came into office, the prevalent doctrine for conventional forces was the “two-and-one-half-war” strategy; according it it the US needed forces sufficient to:
- mount an initial (ninety-day) defense of Western Europe against a Soviet attack
- make a sustained defense against an all-out Chinese attack on either Southeast Asia or Korea
- still meet a contingency elsewhere, for example, the Middle East
Thus, in the midst of an intense domestic debate over defense, we were able to preserve a base from which to build later as the Congressional and public mood changed. We developed a military strategy that fit our capacities for dealing with the more plausible dangers. And we advanced a doctrine for the security of the Pacific area that gave new assurance to our allies and friends. Of all the achievements of Nixon’s first term, I consider the preservation of the sinews of our military strength among the most significant. Without it all efforts at relaxing tensions would have failed. For moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have a choice.
Psychologists or sociologists may explain some day what it is about that distant monochromatic land, of green mountains and fields merging with an azure sea, that for millennia has acted as a magnet for foreigners who sought glory there and found frustration, who believed that in its rice fields and jungles some principle was to be established and entered them only to recede in disillusion. What has inspired its people to fight such flights of heroism and monomania that a succession of outsiders have looked there for a key to some riddle and then been expelled by a ferocious persistence that not only thwarted the foreigner’s exertions but hazarded his own internal balance?
Though he sympathized more with the anguish of the genuine protesters than they knew, he never mustered the self-confidence or the largeness of spirit to reach out to them. He accepted their premises that we faced a mortal domestic struggle; in the process he accelerated and compounded its bitterness.
The Nixon Administration entered office determined to end our involvement in Vietnam. But it soon came up against the reality that had also bedeviled its predecessor. For nearly a generation the security and progress of free peoples had depended on confidence in America. We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one thousand dead as if we were switching a TV channel. Many urged us to “emulate de Gaulle”; but they overlooked that it took even de Gaulle four years to extricate his country from Algeria because he, too, thought it important for France to emerge from its travails with its domestic cohesion and international stature intact. He extricated France from Algeria as an act of policy, not as a collapse, in a manner reflecting a national decision and not a rout.
No serious policymaker could allow himself to succumb to the fashionable debunking of “prestige” or “honor” or “credibility.” For a great power to abandon a small country to tyranny simply to obtain a respite from our own travail seemed to me — and still seems to me — profoundly immoral and destructive of our efforts to build a new and ultimately more peaceful pattern of international relations. We could not revitalize the Atlantic Alliance if its governments were assailed by doubt about American staying power. We would not be able to move the Soviet Union toward the imperative of mutual restraint against the background of capitulation in a major war. We might to achieve our opening to China if our value as a counterweight seemed nullified by a collapse that showed us irrelevant to Asian security. Our success in Middle East diplomacy would depend on convincing our ally of our reliability and its adversaries that we were impervious to threats of military pressure or blackmail. Clearly, the American people wanted to end the war, but every poll, and indeed Nixon’s election, made it equally evident that they saw their country’s aims as honorable and did not relish American’s humiliation. The new Administration had to respect the concerns of the opponents of the war but also the anguish of the families whose sons had suffered and died for their country and who did not want it determined — after the fact — that their sacrifice had been in vain.
Until I emigrated to America, my family and I endured progressive ostracism and discrimination. My father lost the teaching job for which he had worked all his life; the friends of my parents’ youth shunned them. I was forced to attend a segregated school. Every walk in the street turned into an adventure, for my German contemporaries were free to beat up Jewish children without interference by the police.
Through this period America acquired a wondrous quality for me. When I was a boy it was a dream, an incredible place where tolerance was natural and personal freedom unchallenged. Even when I learned later that America, too, had massive problems, I could never forget what an inspiration it had been to the victims of persecution, to my family, and to me during cruel and degrading years. I always remembered the thrill when I first walked the streets of New York City. Seeing a group of boys, I began to cross the other side to avoid being beaten up. And then I remembered where I was.
I therefore have always had a special feeling for what America means, which native-born citizens perhaps take for granted. I could not accept the self-hatred that took every imperfection as an excuse to denigrate a precious experiment whose significance for the rest of the world had been part of my life. I was enormously gratified to have an opportunity to repay my debt to a society whose blemishes I recognized but also saw in a different perspective; they could not obscure for me its greatness, its idealism, its humanity, and its embodiment of mankind’s hopes.
The domestic turmoil of the Vietnam debate therefore pained me deeply I did not agree with many of the decisions that had brought about the impasse in Indochina; I felt, however, that my appointment to high office entailed a responsibility to help end the war in a way compatible with American self-respect and the stake that all men and women of goodwill had in America’s strength and purpose. It seemed to me important for America not to be humiliated, not to be shattered, but to leave Vietnam in a manner that even the protesters might later see as reflecting an American choice made with dignity and self-respect. Ironically, in view of the later charges of “historical pessimism” leveled against me, it was precisely the issue of our self-confidence and faith in our future that I considered a stake in the outcome in Vietnam.
Unlike most of my contemporaries, I had experienced the fragility of the fabric of modern society. I had seen that the likely outcome fo the dissolution of all social bonds and the undermining of all basic values is extremism, despair and brutality. A people must not lose faith in itself; those who wallow in the imperfections of their society or turn them into an excuse for a nihilistic orgy usually end up by eroding all social and moral restraints; eventually in their pitiless assault on all beliefs they multiply suffering.
I could never bring myself to think of the war in Vietnam as a monstrous criminal conspiracy, as was fashionable in some circles. In my view our entry into the war had been the product not of a militarist psychosis but of a naive idealism that wanted to set right all the world’s ills and believed American goodwill supplied its own efficacy. I had visited Vietnam as a professor. I saw there not ugly Americans — though, as in all wars, there existed too — but dedicated young men facing death daily despite the divisions at home; my recollection was of many idealistic Americans working under impossible conditions to bring government and health and development to a terrified and bewildered people. I thought the country owed something to their sacrifice and not only to the vocal protesters. Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish.
I saw my role as helping my adopted country heal its wounds, preserve its faith, and thus enable it to rededicate itself to the great tasks of construction that were awaiting it.
I was appalled by the direct role the US had evidently played in the overthrow of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, which led to his assassination. This folly committed us to a course we could not foresee while undermining the political base for it; in the purge following, the country was bereft of almost its entire civil administration. For us to be seen to connive in the overthrow of a friendly government was bound to shake the confidence of other allies Southeast Asia.
In the absence of criteria of success, self-delusion took the place of analysis.
Overshadowing everything is a social or maybe even philosophical problem: The Vietnamese have a strong sense of being a distinct people, but little sense of nationhood.
The hard men in Hanoi, having spent their lives in struggle, did not consider compromise a moral category. Driven by the epic saga for Vietnamese history — a history of wars against the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, and now us — they had sustained their undoubted heroism by the dream of victory; they would settle for compromise only on the basis of calculation and necessity. A negotiated peace would result from the reckoning of risks on both sides, not from a burst of sentiment. This judgment would forever separate me from many of the protesters — even when I agreed with their analysis that the war was draining our national strength and had to be liquidated.
It was an act of extraordinary cynicism. No substantive negotiating sessions has been held in Paris with our new delegation, headed by Henry Cabot Lodge; the new Administration could hardly have formed its policy. Whether by accident or design, the offensive began the day before a scheduled Presidential trip overseas, thus both paralyzing our response and humiliating the new President.
I thought that a failure to react to so cynical a move by Hanoi could doom our hopes for negotiations; it could only be read by Hanoi as a sign of Nixon’s helplessness in the face of domestic pressures; it was likely to encourage further military challenges. But the timing bothered me. I did not think it wise to launch a new military operation while the President was traveling in Europe, subject to possible hostile demonstrations and unable to meet with and rally his own government. I also did not relish the prospect of having Vietnam the subject of all our European press briefings or of privately trying to offer explanations to allied governments not always eager to reconcile their private support of our Vietnam efforts with the public stance of dissociation.
Laird was far from a “dove”; in normal circumstances his instincts were rather on the bellicose side. He would have preferred to aim for victory. But he was also a careful student of the public and Congressional mood. He was a finely tuned politician and as such he had learned that those who mount the barricades may well forgo a future in politics; he was not about to make this sacrifice.
We have issued a warning. I will not warn again. And if we conclude that the level of casualties is higher than we should tolerate, action will take place.
Averell Harriman was completing the last regular diplomatic assignment of a distinguished career. I had first met him when he was serving as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs in the early Kennedy Adminstration. The grizzled veteran carried out with extraordinary determination the duties of an office that lesser men would have spurned as a demotion. He was of a generation that considered public office an opportunity to serve the country and not an occasion for personal advancement.
No one could fail to be moved by his dedication, intensity, experience, and wisdom. His endurance was in part due to his stamina, but in a deeper sense the stamina reflected a vital and youthful intellect. He undertook no assignment in which he did not deeply believe; he tended to transform every mission into a personal crusade. If he failed to achieve the highest offices to which his talents unquestionably entitled him, this was partially because of the insecurity his powerful personality evoked in lesser men and partially of his tendency to become a passionate spokesman for his mandate of the moment, sometimes to the exclusion of larger considerations.
Throughout their history, survival for the North Vietnamese had depended on a subtle skill in manipulating physically stronger foreigners; the appearance of weakness was to be avoided at almost all costs, and admitting the possibility of compromise appeared to them as granting some validity to the point of view of the other side, in itself an unacceptable concession. Therefore the Vietnamese style of communication was indirect and, by American standards, devious or baffling. Because the US had become great by assimilating men and women of different cultures and beliefs, we had developed an ethic of tolerance; having had little experience with unbridgeable schisms, our mode of settling conflicts was to seek a solution somewhere between the contending positions. But to the Vietnamese this meant that we were not serious about what we put forward and that we treated them as frivolous. They had not fought for forty years to achieve a compromise. The Vietnamese method of communication was opaque, designed to keep open as many options as possible and to undermine our domestic position. Ours was matter-of-fact and geared to finding formulas to reconcile the irreconcilable, which Hanoi considered either a trick to be resisted or a weakness to be exploited.
But the fundamental problem went deeper still. The North Vietnamese considered themselves in a life-and-death struggle; they did not treat negotiations as an enterprise separate from the struggle; they were a form of it.
From this point of view of negotiation, the best strategy for us would have been to formulate a very generous proposal and then to stand on it without further concessions until there was reciprocity.
For diplomacy to succeed, however, we had to husband our negotiating assets. We needed a strategy that made continuation of the war seem less attractive to Hanoi than a settlement.
It was a poignant scene as Nguyen Van Thieu, for whose country 36,000 Americans had now died but who was not allowed to visit the soil of his powerful ally, stepped jauntily down the steps of his chartered Pan American plane. I felt sorry for him. It was not his fault that he was the focus of American domestic pressures; he was, after all, the representative of the millions of South Vietnamese who did not want to be overrun by the North Vietnamese army. He came from a culture different from ours, operating by different values. But all Vietnamese have an innate dignity, produced perhaps by the cruel and bloody history of their beautiful land. The Vietnamese have not “accepted their fate” as the Western myth about Asians would have it; they have fought for centuries, against outsiders and against each other, to determine their national destiny. And difficult, even obnoxious, as they can be, they have survived by a magnificent refusal to bow their necks to enemy or ally.
As in all my later meetings, I was impressed by their dignity and quiet-assurance. Here was a group of men who had made violence and guerrilla war the profession; their contact with the outside world had been sporadic and shaped by the requirements of their many struggles. But in meeting with the representative of the strongest power on earth, they were subtle, disciplined, and infinitely patient. Except for one occasion — when, carried away by the early success of the spring offensive of 1972, they turned insolent — they were always courteous; they never showed any undue eagerness; they never permitted themselves to appear rattled. They were specialists in political warfare, determined to move only at their own pace, not to be seduced by charm or goaded by impatience. They pocketed American concession as their due, admitting no obligation to reciprocate moderation. They saw compromise as a confession of weakness. They were impressed only by their own assessment of Hanoi’s self-interest. They admitted no self-doubt; they could never grant — even to themselves — that they had been swayed, or even affected, by our arguments. Their goal was total power in South Vietnam, or at least a solution in which their opponents were so demoralized that they would be easy to destroy in the next round. They deviated from their quest for victory only after the collapse of their Easter offensive in 1972 left them totally exhausted.
It was never granted that serious men could have been pursuing perhaps misguided but honorable purposes over a decade ago. The doves have proved to be a specially vicious kind of bird.
In serving Nixon one owed it to him to discriminate among the orders he issued and to give him another chance at those that were unfulfillable or dangerous. This one was in the latter category. I knew that Nixon was planning to take no action on November 1. To utter a dire threat followed by no action whatever would depreciate our currency. So I waited to see whether Nixon would return to the theme. He did not.
No new President can really know what kind of a “team” he has until faced with such a crunch. Its essence is the need to make high-risk decisions quickly and under pressure. In normal conditions it is never clear whether senior advisers are giving their own convictions or simply reflecting the consensus of their bureaucracies. It is easier to play safe. A reputation for moderation or wisdom can be picked up cheaply because success or failure is determined only after an interval when cause and effect have been obscured. But a crisis casts an immediate glare on men and policies. It illuminates above all those who husband their reputations and those willing to take the heat. A President is in a sense lucky if he is faced with a crisis early on; it enables him to shake down his team.
It cannot be said that the new Nixon Administration met the test with distinction. It was not so much that the wrong decision was made, though I believe it was. It was above all that our deliberations were banal or irrelevant; we rarely addressed the central issue. The NSC system became a device to accumulate options without supplying perspective or a sense of direction.
All the principals were so fascinated by the process of decisionmaking thatthey overlooked its purposes in ordering priorities for action. Like many new administrations, they were more concerned to avoid the charges they had made against their predecessors than to decide the issue on its merits.
Later on, we were to learn that in crises boldness is the safest course. Hesitation encourages the adversary to persevere, maybe even to raise the ante. In retrospect it is clear that we vastly overestimated North Korea’s readiness to engage in a tit-for-tat. This being still early in the Administration, I confined myself that first day to presenting the options; I made no recommendation.
For Americans, contracts and laws are prime guarantors of social peace. The Japanese depend less on legal and formal rules to preserve social harmony than on the quality of human relationships and on unstated patterns of consensus and obligation.
Japan became more like a family than a nation, governed less by its laws (which regulated only the surface phenomena and the grossest violations) than by an intricate set of understandings which assigned each Japanese a specific role. The feudal values and obligations that in other countries were confined to a small upper class permeated the entire society. On these crowded islands men and women came to understand that survival depended on discipline and cooperation and thus on taking the edge off all confrontations. The exquisite Japanese form of communication depends on never putting forward a proposition that can be refused; on conveying the most delicate shades of meaning in a manner that permits retreat without loss of face, and that at the same time imposes consideration for the other point of view. Words in their subtle Japanese shadings are only a small part of that delicate process. Every gesture is invested with a symbolic significance — from the bow as a greeting whose fine gradations indicate a hierarchy, to the arrangements of flowers on a table.
The amazing thing is that the Japanese respect for the past and sense of cultural uniqueness have not produced stagnation. Other societies have paid for the commitment to tradition by growing irrelevance to the currents of modernity. Japan turned its feudal past into an asset by permeating its entire society with such a sense of shared respect that its internal differences could never mar the essential unity with which it faced foreigners. This spirit of uniqueness proved more serviceable than, for example, China’s belief in its cultural superiority. Japan lost no face in adopting the methods of other societies; it could afford to adopt almost any system and still retain its Japanese character, which depended neither on forms of government nor on methods of economics but on a complicated, imbued, shared set of social relationships. Far from being an obstacle to progress, tradition in Japan provided the emotional security and indeed the impetus to try the novel.
Of course, to some degree Japan benefited at first from massive American aid and then from low spending on defense, made possible by its reliance on the Security Treaty with the US. But the success is above all a tribute to the cohesion of its institutions and the talent of its people. The resilience Japan demonstrated in the 1973 energy crisis underlines the point. Within two years a nation depended upon imports for 90 percent of its oil had dug itself out of its balance-of-payments deficit and restored its surplus by an awesome feat of national will. In my view Japanese decisions have been the most farsighted and intelligent of any major nation of the postwar era even while the Japanese leaders have acted with the understated, anonymous style characteristic of their culture.
The hardest thing for us to grasp is was that the extraordinary Japanese decisions were produced by leaders who prided themselves on their anonymous style. To be sure, there were great prime ministers. But they worked unobtrusively, conveying in their bearing that their policies reflected the consensus of a society, not the idiosyncrasy of an individual. They might perform their duties with greater or lesser ability. In the final analysis, however, they were the product of a continuous tradition, which could determine its necessities not through dominant personalities but by infusing its purposes throughout the society.
Westerners decide quickly but our decisions require a long time to implement, especially when they are controversial. In our bureaucracy, each power center has to be persuaded or pressured; thus, the spontaneity or discipline of execution is diluted. In Japan this process precede the setting of policy. Decision-making is therefore slow, but execution is rapid and single-minded; and it is given additional impetus because all those charged with carrying out the policy have participated in shaping it.
But the real problem, of course, was deeper, and it is of fundamental importance to the future of all the industrial democracies. While Japan, the US, Canada, and the nations of Western Europe are political and military allies, we are also inevitable economic competitors. As democracies, indeed, our systems disperse economic power as well as the political authority by which decisions are made on economic questions. No government has solved the problem of how autonomous national economic policies can be pursued without growing strains with political allies who are also trade rivals; even less have we solved the challenge of coordinating economic goals to reinforce the cohesion of free peoples. We proclaim independence but we have been reluctant to accept that this involves a measure of dependence.
With implacable adversaries on all its frontiers, Israel’s foreign policy had become indistinguishable from its defense policy; its cardinal and ultimate objective was what for most other nations is the starting point of foreign policy — acceptance by its neighbors of its right to exist. It naturally saw in the territories occupied in the 1967 an assurance of the security that it had vainly sought throughout its existence. It strove for both territory and recognition, reluctant to admit that these objectives might prove incompatible.
This gulf of perceptions — in which, as in all tragedies, both sides represented a truth — is what had given the Arab-Israeli conflict its bitter intractability. When truths collide, compromise becomes the first casualty. Agreements are achieved only through evasions. Progress evaporates as the parties approach specifics.
Sometimes events mocking the intentions of the actors race out of controls. Once the Egyptian army replaced the UN force on its frontier, Israel had no choice but to mobilize, because Israel’s territory was too small to absorb a first blow. And one Israel mobilized, its decision to fight had to be made in a matter of weeks, for its economy could not stand in the indefinite loss of manpower absorbed by the mobilization, and it could not demobilize with the Egyptian army on its border. But international diplomacy operated at its leisurely pace. Exploration followed consultation and reassurance; the world’s statesmen discussed various formulas to overcome the announced blockade of the Strait of Tiran.
There was no little pathos in the emotions underlying each side’s arguments. Israel insisted on a “binding peace.” Only a country that had never known peace could have attached so much importance to that phrase. For what it is a binding peace among sovereign nations when one of the attributes of sovereignty is the right to change one’s mind? For three centuries France and Germany had fought wars in almost every generation; each one was ended by a formal “binding” peace treaty that did nothing to prevent the next war. Nor did “open frontiers” in 1914 prevent the outbreak of a word war which shook Europe to its foundations. Most wars in history have been fought between countries that started out at peace; it was the special lunacy of the Middle East that its wars broke out between countries that were technically already at war.
I had always believed it essential to reduce the scope of Soviet adventurist policies in the Middle East. For that reason the US performance in the Suez crisis of 1956 had struck me as deplorable. We should have understood that our sudden withdrawal of financial support for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam would be the beginning, not the end, of a crisis. And the crisis when it occurred was in my view mishandled. Whatever one’s view of the wisdom of the British and French military action, I was convinced that we would play heavily in the years ahead for our shortsighted playing to the gallery. I did not think that manhandling our closest allies would achieve the lasting gratitude of Nasser or those who admired him; on the contrary, he would probably be confirmed in a course fundamentally inimical to Western interests. The moderate regimes buttressed by British power and prestige, especially in Iraq, were likely to be weakened if not doomed by what they could only see as our siding with the radical elements exemplified by Nasser. Britain and France, their self-confidence and sense of global relevance shattered, would hasten to shed their remaining international responsibilities. The realities of power would then impel us to fill the resulting vacuum in the Middle East and east of Suez and so take on our own shoulders all the moral onus of difficult geopolitical decisions.
When a new Administration comes to office it is taken for granted that it will “tackle” the important world problems; new Presidents always chide their predecessors for leaving issues not yet conclusively “solved.” It is difficult for any American leader to accept the fact that in some conflicts opposing positions are simply irreconcilable. Indeed, when readiness to compromise does not exist, forcing the issue prematurely will magnify insecurity and instability; events that should be slowed down may be accelerated; pressures are generated that cannot be controlled. Every new Administration must learn — often the hard way — that on of the most difficult responsibilities of policymaking is the patience to pick the right moment for decisive action.
At our NSC meeting on February 1 we had to decide how to respond to these initiatives and basically whether to depart from the low-profile policy that had characterized the Johnson years. It rapidly became clear that the State Department was eager to launch an American initiative. What objective or strategy this involvement should serve would be left to emerge in negotiation. State believed that it was out responsibility to help bridge the gap between parties and point them toward compromise under Jarring. Moreover, since the fighting was intensifying, so the argument ran, we could not afford to appear indifferent. All the parties in the area professed to believe that the US held the key to a settlement; hence, the Department argued, we should indeed involve ourselves actively. It was hoped that common ground could probably be achieved among the parties as well as among the outside powers by the sheer momentum of the negotiating process. As for the Soviet problem, the Department contended that since Moscow seemed to gain by exploiting the tensions of the area, a peace settlement was bound to frustrate its strategy. At a minimum such a course would test Soviet intentions.
The new President was about to undergo his first experience of the bureaucratic steamroller. It is the nature of a bureaucracy to move by almost imperceptible stages toward a goal it may itself only dimly perceive. The first move is usually to ask the President or the Secretary of State for authority to “explore” a certain course “in principle,” with solemn assurances that this decision creates neither precedent nor obligation for another step and that the policymakers will retain full control over the process. Invariably the first step implies a series of others; the exploration of a serious object can only reveal its difficulties and spur pressures to overcome them. Soon the President is asked to act to remove an impasse his own policy has created. This is of course exactly what the advocates of an active policy desire; they are only too eager to put forward schemes to break the deadlock. Their eagerness was further stimulated by the cast of mind of some American diplomats that a crisis is somehow not genuine unless we are a party to it. This was the origin of the thought that we must never be perceived (never specifying by whom) as indifferent to emerging confrontations.
I had serious doubts about rushing into negotiations whose objectives we had not defined and for whose outcome we would be held responsible. I also questioned the assumptions underlying the recommendation. It seemed to me unlikely that we would find common ground between the parties.
Probably reflecting the agony he went through over Suez in 1956, he thought the best course was to let the parties work it out themselves. If we became active we would be forced in the end to become an arbiter and then offer the parties our own guarantee of whatever final arrangement emerged. This would keep us embroiled in the Middle East difficulties forever.
Foreign policy decisions rarely emerge from abstract analysis, however. For reasons already described Nixon did not wish to overrule the State Department, antagonize de Gaulle, or rebuff the Soviet Union. Sensing this, I suggested a way to move without committing ourselves irrevocably. Rather than choose between the Four-Power and the Two-Power forums, we could maintain some freedom of action by accepting both. In the Four-Power forum, our European allies would be more hesitant to side with the Soviets against us if they knew we had our own bilateral option.
Except for his intelligence and tenacity, he was an unlikely ambassador. Taciturn, shy, reflective, almost resentful of small talk, Rabin possessed few of the attributes commonly associated with diplomacy. Repetitious people bored him and the commonplace offended him; unfortunately for Rabin both these qualities are not exactly in short supply in Washington. He hated ambiguity, which is the stuff of diplomacy. I grew extremely fond of him though he did little to encourage affection. His integrity and his analytical brilliance in cutting to the core of a problem were awesome. I valued his judgment, often even on matters unconnected with the Middle East, and trusted his motives even when his country’s positions were not always identical with our own. We became good friends and remained so through all the vicissitudes and squabbles that our duties occasionally imposed on us.
Everyone points out that we will be expected to deliver Israel in any negotiation. The Arabs assume — wrongly but irrevocably — that we can make Israel do what we wish. The French and British assume we could do more than we have. Perhaps only the Soviets — who know the limits of their own influence in Cairo and Damascus — realistically understand the limits of our influences in Jerusalem, but they find too much propaganda advantage in our support for Israel to admit the truth publicly.
While we have so far avoided the worst dangers of an unprepared position, the whole burden of the talks could still fall on us — for producing all the substantive proposals and for bringing the Israelis around… A good definition of a equitable settlement is one that will make both sides unhappy. If so, we must have Soviet help, and the Soviets must share the blame for pushing an unpalatable solution.
I have never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language. Sentences poured forth in mellifluous constructions complicated enough to test the listener’s intelligence and simultaneously leave him transfixed by the speaker’s virtuosity. The prose flowed evenly, without high points, rustling along inexorably like a clear mountain stream. To interrupt seemed almost unthinkable, for one knew that one have to do so in an idiom that seemed barbaric by comparison. No American or British personality ever reminded me so acutely that English was for me, after all, an acquired language.
Eban’s eloquence — unfortunately for those who had to negotiate with him — was allied to a first-class intelligence and fully professional grasp of diplomacy. He was always well prepared; he knew what he wanted. He practiced to the full of his maxim that anything less than one hundred percent agreement with Israel’s point of view demonstrated lack of objectivity. Even a most sympathetic position — say ninety percent — was deplored as “erosion,” “weakening,” or “loss of nerve.”
Once I knew him reasonably well I could measure his irritation at what he considered insensitivity or bureaucratic pedantry by the heightening of his legendary courtesy; his use of the honorific “sir” would multiply while he assumed a glacial demeanor. (He, an hereditary monarch, called me “sir” even when I was a mere Presidential Assistant.)
We were back to the strategic controversy with which we had started in February. The advocates of further concessions argued that time was working against us; the longer the deadlock lasted, the more our position in the Arab world would deteriorate. I stressed that the opposite was true. A continuing deadlock was in our interest; it would persuade Egypt to face the reality that Soviet tutelage and a radical foreign policy were obstacles to progress and that only the US could bring about a settlement; it would demonstrate Soviet impotence and in time might impel a fundamental reconstruction of Arab, and especially of Egyptian, foreign policies. I thought it was the Soviets that faced a predicament, since they had no means of achieving their objectives except by our cooperation or through a war their clients stood to lose. If we stayed calm, they would sooner or later have to pay a price for our help, either in the Middle East or elsewhere. Rogers was concerned that the US might be isolated in the Four-Power talks; my view was that this was inherent in the forum and could not be avoided by clever formulas.
She was an original. Her childhood in the Russia of pogroms and her youth as a pioneer in the harshness of Palestine had taught her that only the wary are given the opportunity to survive and only those who fight succeed in that effort. Her craggy face bore witness to the destiny of a people that had come to know too well the potentialities of man’s inhumanity. Her watchful eyes made clear that she did not propose that those she led should suffer the same fate without a struggle. Yet she yearned to see her people realize their dream of peace; her occasionally sarcastic exterior never obscured a compassion that felt the death of every Israeli soldier as the loss of a member of her family. She was a founder of her country. Every inch of land for which Israeli had fought was to her a token of her people’s survival; it would be stubbornly defended against enemies; it would be given up only for a tangible guarantee of security. She had a penetrating mind, leavened by earthiness and a mischievous sense of humor. She was not taken in by elevated rhetoric, or particularly interested in the finer points of negotiating tactics. She cut to the heart of the matter. She answered pomposity with irony and dominated conversations by her personality and shrewd psychology. To me she acted as a benevolent aunt toward an especially favored nephew, so that even to admit the possibility of disagreement was a challenge to family hierarchy producing emotional outrage. It was usually calculated. My wife is fond of saying that some of the most dramatic theatrical performances she witnessed were between Golda Meir and me when we disagreed. Mrs. Meir treated Secretary Rogers as if the reports of his views could not possibly be true; she was certain that once he had a chance to explain himself the misunderstandings caused by the inevitable inadequacy of reporting telegrams would vanish; she then promised forgiveness. As for Nixon, Mrs. Meir hailed him as an old friend of the Jewish people, which was startling news to those of us more familiar with Nixon’s ambivalences on that score. But it gave hime a reputation to uphold.
In order to lower public expectations the first draft had a sentence saying that the Arab-Israeli conflict was “intractable.” The State Department let out a howl of protest, arguing that this gloomy view undercut all their efforts. Rather than do battle, I softened the sentence to read in the final version that the Arab-Israeli problem “has serious elements of intractability.” This mollified the Middle East experts. The literary clumsiness of this phrase reflected the uneasy bureaucratic compromise. No better example could be found of the old maxim that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
But through the diplomatic deadlock the underlying issues were becoming clear. The formal positions of the parties were but the tip of the iceberg. The Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, were clearly not prepared for a real peace expressed in normal relations with Israel or any concrete definition of security. Israel was not willing to return all the territories — probably not even in return for the definition of peace it was putting forward. The conflict between the positions of the parties then was in fact intractable.
But through this turmoil the inherent strength of the American position in the Middle East also gradually emerged. Nobody could make peace without us. Only we, not the Soviet Union, could exert influence on Israel. Israel was too strong to succumb to Arab military pressure, and we could block all diplomatic activity until the Arabs showed their willingness to reciprocate Israeli concessions. If we remained steady and refused to be stampeded, the pivotal nature of our position would become more and more evident. Once it became clear — for whatever reason — that a settlement could not be extorted from us, Arab leaders would gradually learn that Soviet pressures on us and their own intransigence only produced stagnation. They would, I thought, have to come to us in the end.
Every new Administration since 1960 has come into office convinced that its predecessor neglected Atlantic relations, proclaiming it would give high priority to remedying this shortcoming, and promising bold new programs. None brought about the dramatic improvement for which it aimed. Ironically, the greater the energy expended, the more the problems seemed to multiply.
This was no accident. There is a perpetual nostalgia about Atlantic relations that harks back to the Marshall Plan. Then, a bold American proposal elicited an enthusiastic and grateful European response; Atlantic and European institutions emerged in profusion to spell out a grand design. It was the secret dream of US foreign policy come true: American moral leadership evoking a spontaneous and authentic consensus; cooperation without a hint of coercion; the banishment of “outdated” concepts of national interest and power politics.
In the heady exaltation of the postwar years, it was overlooked that European attitudes were perhaps not as novel as they appeared; they were quite compatible with a hard sense of national interests. The practical consequence of the new approach was to enable a prostrate and ravaged continent to gain protection, economic assistance, and technology without any requirement of reciprocity. Yet for a whole generation of American leaders, that experiment represented the ideal pattern of international relations. They never reflected that while generosity makes hegemony bearable it does not render it acceptable. The test would come not in the formative years of the “new” Atlantic relationship, but when its proclaimed goals were being reached. Then, when Europe had regained its economic power and political self-confidence and the European countries were in a position to insist on their own views, when, in other words, real options existed for them, we would know whether we had participated in the birth of a new era or in the refurbishing of traditional patterns.
But new construction in international relations by definition can be undertaken only at long intervals; their very success precludes early repetition. They may, in fact, be jeopardized by attempts to turn a singular tour de force into a stereotype. Inevitably, as postwar Europe took shape, Atlantic relations grew more mundane, the problems less dramatic. Paradoxically, Atlantic cooperation was most successful when it concentrated on housekeeping functions; it turned acrimonious when the goal became “architectural.”
Clearly, Nixon wanted reassurance. He had been raised on the conviction of the generation of Arthur Vandenberg that gave bipartisan support for our unprecedented alliance with Europe. Nixon’s question was of the same category as his occasional musings about possibly not standing for a second term. When he asked about his political future he was really seeking confirmation of his indispensability. With respect to Europe he expected to hear me reaffirm the article of faith of his political apprenticeship: that American leadership remain central.
I had to stretch no conviction to render this verdict; it was the core of my own beliefs. American weight and leadership were still needed, I argued, because for all their economic progress the Europeans plainly had not developed the cohesion, the internal stability, or the will to match the power of the Soviet Union. Alliance unity, I wrote, required three things from the US.
First, we had to remain sober in our own dealing with the Soviet Union. If we became too impetuous the European nations would grow fearful of a US-Soviet deal. This would cause them to multiply their own initiatives, perhaps beyond the point of prudence, to protect themselves by making their own arrangement with the USSR. But paradoxically, the same would happen if the US stayed in the trenches of the Cold War. In that case European leaders would be tempted to appear before their publics as “meditators” between bellicose superpowers. The US had to conduct a careful policy toward the Soviet Union: sufficiently strong to maintain the interest in the common defense; sufficiently flexible to prevent our allies from racing to Moscow.
Second, we had to be meticulous in consultation. Our allies had to be sure that their vital interests would be protected in negotiations such as SALT. Unless our own record was impeccable we could not hold the Europeans to a high standard of interallied consultation in return.
Third, we had to avoid unilateral reductions of American forces in Europe, whether imposed by the Executive’s financial stringencies or by the Congress’s new mood of isolationism. This was a crucial test of our leadership, because significant reductions, whatever their cause, would seriously undermine NATO and foster tendencies of submission to the Soviet Union.
It cannot be said that Nixon and Trudeau were ideally suited for each other. A scion of an old Quebec family, elegant, brilliant, enigmatic, intellectual, Trudeau was bound to evoke all of Nixon’s resentments against “swells” who in his view had always looked down on him. He disdained Trudeau’s clear enjoyment of social life; he tended to consider him soft on defense and in his general attitude toward the East. And yet, when they were together, Trudeau treated Nixon without any hint of condescension and Nixon accorded Trudeau both respect and attention. They worked together without visible strain. They settled the issues before them and did not revert to their less charitable personal comments until each was back in his own capital.
There was about de Gaulle on this occasion a melancholy air of withdrawal, of already being a spectator at his own actions, of speaking in the abstract about a future he knew he would no longer shape — a harbinger of his retirement a few weeks later. He called to mind a poignant story told to me by Chancellor Kiesinger a few weeks earlier in Bonn, on the basis of which he predicted that de Gaulle would not serve much longer as Chief of State. According to Kiesinger, during one of their regular consultations, de Gaulle had characterized Franco-German relations as follows: “We and the Germans have gone through a lot together. We have traversed forests surrounded by wild animals. We have crossed deserts parched by the sun. We have climbed peaks covered by snow, always looking for a hidden treasure — usually competitive, very recently cooperatively. And now we have learned that there is no hidden treasure and only friendship is left to us.”
One might have expected that, after years of complaining about inadequate American attention and insufficient consultation, our allies would have embraced our proposals with enthusiasm. But this ignored the psychological undercurrents. The Alliance’s passion for “consultation” meant in practice the desire to limit America’s freedom of action; not all of our allies were equally prepared to constrain their own. A political planning mechanism ran into France’s quest for “independence” and received a lukewarm reception form the Federal Republic of Germany, advocating a more national policy. The Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society was greeted with the objection that NATO was never designed to address such questions — a far cry from the private expressions of all allied leader during Nixon’s trip to Europe that the common defense was no longer sufficient to inspire the younger generation.
It was clear that Europe was ambivalent about major American initiatives; it welcomed American commitments as long as they did not constraint its own freedom of action. At the same time, the new Administration was beginning to face a growing reluctance in this country to meet, let alone expand, our own commitments to Europe.
He had performed the dramatic feats required by the crises that had brought him to power. He had consolidated new political institutions. He had achieved the decolonization of French Africa while maintaining French self-confidence at home and its prestige in the former colonies. Barely overcoming incipient civil war, he had restored French pride by giving it a central role in the policies of Europe and the Wester Alliance. His challenge to the US had to a great the purpose of inspiring French self-assurance.
But the student upheavals of 1968 had shaken de Gaulle. And the challenges facing him thereafter were not of a magnitude he considered relevant to his vision of himself. To ensure a growing economy, to arbitrate contending claims on limited resources, to organize and manage a bureaucratic state — these were tasks for what he half-contemptuously called “quartermasters,” not for heroic figures. The referenda of April 17 provided the occasion for a dramatic departure instead of the slow erosion of authority that he so feared. Afterward, all was solitude as de Gaulle retired to Colombey. He saw no political figures, made no pronouncements, worked on his memoirs, and awaited his death.
The President would not let “NATO theology” stand in the way of an increase in French military cooperation with the US. Not even the possibility of limited cooperation int he nuclear field was excluded.
As in all my later contacts I found him invariably polite and extremely penetrating, with the slightly sardonic manner of a graduate of one of the grand ecoles — the great educational institutions that have shaped so much of French leadership.
The strategy had been accepted by our European allies with extreme uneasiness and only after a debate extending over five years. They saw it — correctly — as the symptom of growing reluctance by the US to use its nuclear forces. They feared that a demonstrated reluctance to resort to nuclear war might cause the Soviets to seek to exploit the imbalance in conventional forces. They were concerned that a strategy which reduced the danger of nuclear war might make conventional aggression more likely.
Nor was there any prospect that the Europeans would increase their own efforts by anything like the amount necessary to provide a sustained conventional defense. They were under domestic pressure to show progress toward detente; a massive increase in defense spending was politically impossible. And they were convinced that any increase in their conventional forces would only encourage a further reduction of American forces. The result, in the perception, would be lowered nuclear protection at no increase in conventional defense capabilities.
Altogether almost 60,000 troops had been brought home. Some of the equipment of these withdrawn units had been left behind in stockpiles, and periodic exercises were held to demonstrate our airlift capacity to return rapidly. But these steps missed the essential point: Europeans increasingly questioned not the capability but the willingness of the US to carry out the commitment to their defense. They questioned not our airlift capability but our political will.
It seemed to me that Brandt’s new Ostpolitik, which looked to many like a progressive policy of quest for detente, could in less scrupulous hands turn into a new form of classic German nationalism. From Bismarck to Rapallo it was the essence of Germany’s nationalist foreign policy to maneuver freely between East and West. By contrast, American (and German) policy since the 1940s had been to ground the Federal Republic firmly in the West, in the Atlantic Alliance and then the EC.
I had greatly admired Adenauer and his wise insistence on subordinating all other considerations to the need for gaining for his country a reputation for reliability and steadiness. But by the Seventies the Adenauer policies on reunification were bound to bring the Federal Republic into increasing conflict with both allies and the nonaligned. Bonn would have faced a possible crisis with the East practically alone had it held to its earlier course. It was to Brandt’s historic credit that he assumed for Germany the burdens and the anguish imposed by necessity.
On Berlin the negotiating strength of the two sides were too unequal; with the city isolated and East Germany occupied, the Federal Republic needed the support of its allies. Linkage was inherent. If Ostpolitik were to succeed, it had to be related to other issues involving the Alliance as a whole; only in this manner would the Soviet Union have incentives for compromise.
Bahr was a man of great intelligence and extraordinary confidence in his ability to devise formulas to overcome a diplomatic impasse. He was dedicated to improving West Germany’s relations with the East; he believed that good personal relations with Soviet and East German personalities would assist this effort. His vanity caused him to flaunt these contacts and it was no doubt occasionally exploited by his counterparts. His enemies — and they were many — accused him of pro-Soviet sympathies; many distrusted what they interpreted as his deviousness. Though Bahr was a man on the left, I considered him above all a German nationalist who wanted to exploit Germany’s central position to bargain with both sides. He was of the type that had always believed that Germany could realize its national destiny only by friendship with the East, or at least by avoiding its enmity. Bahr was obviously not as unquestioningly dedicated to Western unity as the people we had know in the previous government; he was also free of any sentimental attachment to the US. To him, America was a weight to be added to West Germany’s scale in the right way at the right time, but his priority was to restore relations between the two Germanies above all. As for his alleged deviousness, I tended to share Metternich’s view that in a negotiation the perfectly straightforward person was the most difficult to deal with. I at any rate did not lack the self-confidence to confront Bahr’s tactics.
Communist policy is often described as diabolically clever, complicated, following well-thought-out routes toward domination. This was not my impression. On the contrary, I found Soviet diplomacy generally rigid; nor is subtlety the quality for which Soviet diplomacy will go down in history. The Soviet Union has, in fact, had spectacularly little success in advancing its causes by diplomacy or moral consensus. Almost all of its advances have been due not to diplomatic skill but to the threat or reality of deploying massive military power.
But Soviet diplomacy has one great asset. It is extraordinarily persevering; it substitutes persistence for imagination. It has no domestic pressures impelling it constantly to put forward new ideas to break deadlocks.
By once launched, a diplomatic process cannot be controlled simply by formal declarations — especially from the office of the security adviser in the White House basement. Good policy depends on the patient accumulation of nuances; care has to be taken that individual moves are orchestrated into a coherent strategy. Only rarely do policy issues appear in terms of black and white. More usually they depend on shades of interpretation; significantly policy deviations begin as minor departures whose effect becomes apparent only as they are projected into the future.
The borders of the African’s nations were cruelly drawn by imperial powers on the basis of administrative convenience, cutting across tribal or linguistic ties. National unity within existing frontiers was both constantly at risk and passionately defended. Secession — especially on a tribal basis — threatened to disrupt all established order; once the precedent was established no state would be safe.
The choices being laid before the President hardly opened scintillating new vistas. Here was the standard bureaucratic device of leaving the decision-maker with only one real option, which for easy identification is place in the middle. The classic case, I joked, would be to confront the policymaker with the choices of nuclear war, present policy, or surrender.
He rarely referred to de Gaulle, but when he did the deep injury showed through. I recalled no occasion when he mentioned the positive qualities of his predecessor but several when he spoke of his aloofness and destructive suspiciousness. And yet Pompidou clearly was a President in de Gaulle’s style; he practiced his own aloofness. His bearing was regal, in keeping with the elective monarchy with which the constitution of the Fifth French Republic had endowed its President, who is chosen for a term of seven years (renewable). He was acutely conscious of the prerogatives of his office, seeing in them, with some justice, the symbol of France’s regained unity, self-confidence, and influence.
At the same time, Pompidou had the innate suspicion of many Frenchmen that in the end nothing good could come from the US. Except for untypical representatives — like Nixon and, at the margin, myself — Pompidou really had little confidence that Americans understood international affairs, not to speak of more arcane subjects like political philosophy. He was not a little apprehensive that our characteristic combination of goodwill, great power, and energy might cause the US to destroy more fragile structures such as the EC or risk European’s security by excesses of either hostility or conciliation with Moscow. Like most of his compatriots he did not doubt that we could benefit from French instruction in subtlety. He sought to build counterweights to our presumed impetuosity, even while cooperating to an unprecedented degree in common designs.
In its insistence on conducting a global policy by its own lights, France stood in growing contrast to other European allies, including even Great Britain. Britain still possessed the experience and intellectual resources of a great power and was governed by leaders of vast goodwill toward the US. But with every passing year they acted less as if their decisions mattered. They offered advice, usually sage; they rarely sought to embody it in a policy of their own. British statesmen were content to act as honored consultants to our deliberations. And Brandt in his memoirs prided himself on the fact that his country had purged itself of any aspirations to a global role. Of the NATO allies, therefore, only France aspired to a global policy and tried to assemble the means to carry it out. And, quite contrary to what had been predicted in the Sixties, as the years went on France’s independent policy proved of significant help in far-flung areas. This was especially true in Africa, where it was never seduced by the sentimental illusion that the continent could be insulated from the physical and ideological realities of the contemporary world through the strenuous exercise of goodwill.
To be sure, French history and a Cartesian educational system occasionally produced convoluted theories of the motivations of others, especially Americans, that at times caused French policy to seek reassurance against mirages. But French leaders benefited from a tradition that saw no need to apologize for considerations of national interest. Their country had lost most when it engaged in ideological crusades or relied too much on others; it flourished when it understood the imperatives of the balance of power. The French President and Nixon were on the same wavelength when they reviewed international affairs.
Pompidou went straight to the heart of his concern, which turned out to be Ostpolitik. Like all this colleagues he claimed that he trusted Brandt but feared that Brandt’s policies might unleash nationalistic tendencies that would prove impossible to contain. The streak of impatience in the German character made him uneasy. Defeats in two world wars had not been conclusive because the combined might of the rest of the world had been needed to accomplish them. German nationalism might break forth again and, if through calamity it had learned patience, it might prove even more dangerous.
Probably, Pompidou was above all concerned with the legacy of Richelieu. Preventing a resurgent Germany on France’s borders had a higher priority for him than fear of a more distant Russia, which in the final analysis had to be handled by us.
History is sometimes made of small pieces. The incident reinforced Pompidou’s inherent ambivalence toward the US. He remained intellectually committed to close relations, but emotionally he never ceased considering the incident an insult to France and a grave discourtesy to his wife.
Strangely, Vietnam played a minor role in the visits of European leaders. European public opinion, at least as represented by the media, opposed the war. But European leaders registered no objection. During the entire period of the war I recall no criticism by a European leader in even the most private conversation. They seem paralyzed by the same dilemma that we faced. They wanted the war ended quickly because they traced some of the political unrest in their own countries to contagion from American universities and intellectual circles and because they feared that over time the conflict might sap our capacity to deal with threats to their own security. But they also wanted America’s credibility unimpaired. Brandt and Wilson volunteered no comment and made sympathetic noises when Nixon outlined our Vietnam strategy. Pompidou stressed that as long as America demonstrated its desire to liquidate the war — which in his view we were doing — he would not second-guess our tactics.
Hidden motives may be the stuff of memoirs. The actual expression of views is what influences policy.
As an enlarged European Community moved from theory to reality; it became clear that the more sentimental theories of earlier decades had painted too simple a picture. An economically strong Europe would be more self-reliant; but also a price would have to be paid for it. As the customs union, which was the Community’s most tangible manifestation, began to affect American exports, and Europe came to compete with us in other areas of the world, our business community became restless and its rumbling soon affected governmental decisions. For the first time Atlantic relation became controversial.
I had never shared the notion that a unified Europe would automatically rush to assume our burdens. In my view we had made too one-sided a strategic choice in the Fifties and Sixties. By stressing Europe’s economic unification we had emphasized the dimension in which competition with us was most likely and our interests were most likely to diverge. By discouraging a European community in the defense field — at least after the failure of the initial project in 1954 — we downgraded the area in which Atlantic interests were most likely to overlap. But I preferred European unity in some form to a cacophony of conflicting nationalities whose impotence would sooner or later cause them to abdicate a serious concern with foreign policy and thus become functional, if not actual, neutralists.
But to affect a Presidential decision it is not enough to oppose a recommendation; one must offer an alternative.
“K — It seems to me that we ‘protest’ and continue to get the short end of the stick in our dealings with the Community. Agriculture is a prime example. The Congress is simply not going to tolerate this too passive attitude on the part of our representatives in such negotiations.” Nixon was too much of an Atlanticist to sit out the destructive battle. He appealed to Wilbur Mills, to no avail. The protectionist trend was too strong.
The Western leaders were beginning to come to grips with the fundamental issues. The right questions were beginning to be asked even if it would take some time longer to elaborate commonly accepted answers. Consensus among democracies is inherently more complex than negotiation with authoritarian states. The evolution from tutelage to partnership is never simple. And upon that evolution the Western Alliance was now embarked, to prove that the association of free peoples could flourish in a new generation.
In my talks in Paris with North Vietnamese emissary Le Duc Tho, he rejected neutrality for both Cambodia and Laos, and emphasized that it was his people’s destiny not merely to take over South Vietnam but to dominate the whole of Indochina. The boasts were made in secret but the military moves that expressed these ambitions were plain to see. From an inexhaustible national masochism these sprang the folklore that American decisions triggered the Cambodian nightmare, and the myth survives even today when the Vietnamese, without the excuse of American provocation but with barely a whimper of world protest, have finally fulfilled the ambition of conquering the whole of Indochina.
I read over the 100-page paper, covering it with handwritten questions. Why was it, for instance, that in 1965, 1966, and 1967 I was briefed that the South Vietnamese were making progress? What had changed? Did US advisers know what they were looking at? “I have found,” I wrote, “that the most incompetent ones are those most easily satisfied…. If you have a lower level of incidents, does this mean you are doing well, or is it the enemy’s deliberate intention? If it’s the latter, is it a signal? How do we know what the infrastructure is that we’ve destroyed?”
(1) The North Vietnamese cannot have fought for 25 years only to call it quits without another major effort. This effort could come in many ways, but if they had decided not to make the effort, they would presumably have been more forthcoming with regard to negotiations.
(2) We have not seen proof that ARVN has really improved. It may be that the enemy forces have been hurt rather than ARVN is significantly better than it was in the past.
(3) There could be too much pressure from the top for optimistic reporting…
But no amount of study, however objectively or prayerfully conducted, could solve our basic dilemma. An enemy determined on protracted struggle could only be brought to compromise by being confronted by insuperable obstacles on the ground.
I have always believed that the optimum moment for negotiations is when things appear to be going well. To yield to pressures is to invite them; to acquire the reputation for short staying power is to give the other side a powerful incentive for protracting negotiations. When a concession is made voluntarily it provides the greatest incentive for reciprocity. It also provides the best guarantee for staying power. In the negotiations that I conducted I always tried to determine the most reasonable outcome and get there rapidly in one or two moves. This was derided as a strategy of “preemptive concession” by those who like to make their moves in driblets and at the last moment. But I consider that strategy useful primarily for placating bureaucracies and salving consciences. It impresses novices as a demonstration of toughness. Usually it proves to be self-defeating; shaving the salami encourages the other side to hold on to see what the next concession is likely to be, never sure that one has really reached the rock-bottom position. Thus, in the many negotiations I undertook, I favored big steps taken when they were least expected, when there was a minimum of pressure, and creating the presumption that we would stick to that position. I almost always opposed modifications of our negotiating position under duress.
Walters proposed another secret meeting with me. But the North Vietnamese were not ready then. Meticulous planners, they had not yet made up their minds about the full implications of Nixon’s November 3 speech. Or perhaps since Xuan Thuy was not a policymaker, they saw no point in another meeting at his level. Hanoi felt they had first to reestablish the psychological equilibrium by a show of nonconcern.
Then, on February 16 Walters called to the North Vietnamese compound and informed that our insolent interlocutors accepted a meeting for February 20 or February 21 and after keeping us waiting for over a month they requested our answers within twelve hours. I have regretted ever since that we accepted the date of February 21, within the deadline. In retrospect, there is little question in my mind that to honor this unreasonable demand gave an unnecessary impression of eagerness; it enabled Hanoi to score on one of the psychological points so dear to its heart. It did no lasting damage but it got us off on the wrong foot.
Le Duc Tho, gray-haired, dignified, invariably wore a black or brown Mao suit. His larger luminous eyes only rarely revealed the fanaticism that had induced him as a boy of sixteen to join the anti-French Communist guerrillas. He was always composed; his manners, except on one or two occasions, were impeccable. He always knew what he was about and served his cause with dedication and skill.
It was our misfortune that his cause should be to break the will of the US and to establish Hanoi’s rule over a country that we sought to defend. Our private banter grew longer as our meetings progressed and some limited human contact developed; it revealed that Le Duc Tho’s profession was revolution, his vocation guerrilla warfare. He could speak eloquently of peace but it was an abstraction alien to any personal experience. He had spent ten years of his life in prison under the French. In 1973 he showed me around an historical museum in Hanoi, which he admitted sheepishly he had never visited previously. The artifacts of Vietnamese history — assembled, ironically enough, by the French colonial administration — reminded Le Duc Tho not of the glories of Vietnamese culture but of prisons in the cities or towns where they had been excavated. As we walked through the halls I learned a great deal about the relative merits of solitary confinement in various prisons, the way disguises as a peasant can be discovered by the police, and other tips that will prove invaluable should I ever decide to lead a guerrilla struggle in Indochina.
Le Duc Tho had been sustained through his monumentally courageous exertions by a passionate belief in Leninist discipline and faith in the Vietnamese nation. This transformed supreme personal self-assurance into a conviction that it was Vietnam’s destiny to dominate not only Indochina but all of Southeast Asia. His sense of national superiority made personal hatred of the US irrelevant; we were simply one of the hordes of foreigners whose congenital ignorance over the centuries had tempted them into Indochina, whence it was Vietnam’s mission to expel them (not, I often thought, without driving them mad first).
Le Duc Tho’s Leninism convinced him that he understood my motivations better than I understood myself. His Vietnamese heritage expressed itself in an obsessive suspicion that he might somehow be tricked; I sometimes suspected that the appearance of being outmaneuvered would bother him more than its reality. When the negotiation finally grew serious after four years it would set him off looking for traps in the most innocent of our proposals. At the outset it led him into lectures, which in time grew tiresome, of his imperviousness to capital tricks.
I grew to understand that Le Duc Tho considered negotiations as another battle. Any settlement that deprived Hanoi of final victory was by definition in his eyes a ruse. He was there to wear me down. As the representative of truth he had no category for compromise. Hanoi’s proposals were put forward as the sole “logical and reasonable” framework for negotiations. The North Vietnamese were “an oppressed people”; in spite of much historical evidence to the contrary he considered them by definition incapable of oppressing others. America bore the entire responsibility for the war. Our proposals to reduce hostilities, by de-escalation or ceasefire — so fashionable among our critics — were seen by Le Duc Tho either as tricks or opportunities to sow confusion. In his view, the sole “reasonable” way to end the fighting was American acceptance of Hanoi’s terms, which were unconditional withdrawal on a fixed deadline and the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government. As a spokesman fo the “truth,” Le Duc Tho had no category for our method of negotiating; trading concessions seemed to him immoral unless a superior necessity supervened, and until that happened he was prepared to wait us out indefinitely. He seemed concerned to rank favorably in the epic pantheon of Vietnamese struggles; he could not consider as an equal this barbarian from across the sea who thought that eloquent words were a means to deflect the inexorable march of history. Le Duc Tho undoubtedly was of the stuff of which heroes are made. What we grasped only with reluctance — and many at home never understood — is that heroes are such because of monomaniacal determination. They are rarely pleasant men; their rigidity approach the fanatic; they do not specialize in the qualities required for a negotiated peace.
Luckily for my sanity the full implications of what I was up against did not hit me at that first meeting in the dingy living room in Rue Darthe, or I might have forgone the exercise. At the very least I would have curbed my sense of anticipation — almost of elation — at what I hoped would be the opening move of a dialogue of peace.
I replied sharply that I would listen to no further proposition from Hanoi regarding American public opinion; Le Duc tho was there to negotiate the Vietnamese position. Painful as I found our domestic dissent, I did not think it compatible with our dignity to debate it with an adversary. It took several meetings to get that point across and I never succeeded totally.
In going over the record with the perspective of time, I am astonished by my own extraordinarily sanguine reporting. This was partly due to my desire to keep the channel alive. Aware of Nixon’s skepticism, I fell into the trap of many negotiators of becoming an advocate of my own negotiation. No damage was done, because Hanoi never gave us the opportunity to make a concrete decision. Another reason for our optimism was that were still relative innocents about the theological subtleties of Hanoi’s unrelenting psychological warfare.
The first round of negotiations with Le Duc Tho collapsed because diplomacy always reflects some balance of forces and Le Duc Tho’s assessment was not so wrong.
By one of history’s little ironies, those struggling for independence sometimes inherit the imperial pretensions of their former colonial rulers. Thus the Leninist masters of Hanoi saw themselves as the natural heirs of all that had been ruled by France from the very headquarters they were not occupying.
There is no question bu that the North Vietnamese can overrun Laos at any point in time that they care to, providing they are willing to pay the political and psychological costs of upsetting the 1962 Accords.
Making a flat statement of fact on matters extending over nearly a decade is a certain sign of inexperience. One can never be sure what facts are stacked away in the recesses of bureaucracy that will suddenly appear. I soon was to be given a lesson in the perils of being too categorical.
In leading his country Sihanouk walked a tightrope between East and West in global politics, between the Soviet Union and China in the emerging Communist schism, between the opposing sides in the battle over Vietnam, and between right and left in his own country. Voluble, erratic, fun-loving — “mercurial” is the word usually used — he dexterously kept his country a haven of peace amid the bloody wars that ravaged the rest of Indochina. Finally — suddenly — in 1970, the nimble tightrope walker slipped and fell, and thus doomed his people to a hell far worse than even their neighbors had endured.
These increasingly aroused the nationalist outrage of Cambodians, who over the centuries have seen successive Vietnamese rulers colonize their ancestral lands; indeed, the area around Saigon was taken by Vietnamese from Cambodians only in the early 19th century. Had French occupation not supervened, it is quite possible that all of Cambodia would have suffered that fate. The antipathy of Cambodians for all Vietnamese has ancient roots. Sihanouk’s inability to dislodge the feared North Vietnamese from Cambodian soil undermined his position with every passing month.
This was a game in which Laird was not easily bested. He was a patriot whose every instinct was to win the war; he was also a realist who understood that the prospects for doing so were problematical at best. He was a politician to the core. He was perfectly prepared to support a strong policy so long as he was not identified as its principal author. In crises he was redoubtable. In the run-up to them he produced a blizzard of memoranda that would make it next to impossible to determine either his real intentions or — what was more important to him — his precise recommendation.
Throughout the war there were many exhortations, from within and outside the government, to eschew a military solution and to seek a diplomatic one. But the raw truth was that this distinction not only was unacceptable to our adversary; it was incomprehensible to him. Every time I met with Le Duc Tho, he spent most of our time depicting the hopelessness of our military position. This was the “objective” factor that he assumed would compel our eventual acceptance of North Vietnam’s demands. There was no purely diplomatic alternative. Unless military and political efforts were kept in tandem, both would prove sterile.
We were in danger, I thought, of having a withdrawal program too slow to satisfy our critics but too drastic for our military or political effectiveness. This was not a policy but an abdication; it would make collapse inevitable through the very attempt to postpone it.
As for Nixon’s style of government, he was prepared to make decisions without illusion. Once convinced, he went ruthlessly and courageously to the heart of the matter; but each controversial decision drove him deeper into his all-enveloping solitude. He was almost physically unable to confront people who disagreed with him; and he shunned persuading or inspiring his subordinates. He would decide from inside his self-imposed cocoon, but he was unwilling to communicate with those who disagreed. It was the paradox of a President strong in his decisions but inconclusive in his leadership. Making and enforcing decisions left so many scars on him and others that it sacrificed administrative cohesion on the altar of executive discretion; it perversely created the maximum incentive for strong-willed subordinates to evade his directives. Since Nixon disdained any effort to instill a team spirit and usually kept his designs to himself, his Cabinet was tempted to exaggerate its autonomy. This in turn reinforced his conviction that the bureaucracy did not support him; it surely rarely went out of its way to carry out the spirit of his orders. All this became a vicious cycle in which the President withdrew ever more into his isolation and pulled the central decisions increasingly into the White House, in turn heightening the resentments and defiant mood of his appointees.
Historians rarely do justice to the psychological stress on a policy maker. What they have available are documents written for a variety of purposes — under contemporary rules of disclosure, increasingly to dress up the record — and not always relevant to the moment of decision. What no document can reveal is the accumulated impact of accident, intangibles, fears, and hesitation.
The rescue of the astronauts absorbed a great deal of Nixon’s attention for the week that the pressures on Cambodia were multiplying.
In fact, anything that hastened the collapse of South Vietnam was a blessing in disguise. Some of the opposition, like Senator George McGovern, took this position. Though I considered it against the national interest, it was rational and honest. My intellectual difficulties arose with those who pretended that there was a middle course of action that would avoid collapse in Vietnam and yet ignore the impending Communist takeover in Cambodia.
The President said, “Well, whatever, I want to make sure that Cambodia does not go down the drain without doing something.” He went on: “Everybody always comes into my office with suggestions on how to lose. No one ever comes in here with a suggestion on how to win.”
Momentous decisions are rarely produced by profound discussions. By the time an issue reaches the NSC it has been analyzed by so many lower-level committees that the Cabinet members perform like actors in a well-rehearsed play; they repeat essentially what their subordinates have already announced in other forums. In the Nixon NSC there was the additional factor that every participant suspected that there was almost certainly more going than he knew. As usual, there was also an ambivalence between taking positions compatible with their complicated chief’s designs and fear of the domestic consequences. There was a sinking feeling about anything that could be presented as escalation in Vietnam.
Nixon normally announced his decisions after, not during, an NSC meeting; he would deliberate and then issue instructions in writing or through intermediaries. He did this to emphasize that the NSC was an advisory, not a decision-making, body and to avoid a challenge to his orders.
At this point Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke up. He thought the whole debate irrelevant. Either the sanctuaries were a danger or they were not. If it was worth cleaning them out, he did not understand all the pussyfooting about the American role or what we accomplished by attacking only one.
But I was painfully conscious of the political upheaval that would certainly follow an attack on the sanctuaries as well as the divisions on my staff. I had deliberately recruited the ablest young men and women I could find. I thought it important to tap their vitality and idealism; it seemed to me crucial that the concern so many of their contemporaries expressed in protest find an outlet also in the willingness to work on the more mundane matters by which a government gropes for peace. Three of those closest to me were Tony Lake, Roger Morris, and Winston Lord. They had no great use for Nixon; emotionally, each of them would probably have preferred a Democratic President. I worked hard to maintain their commitment because the problems before our country were not partisan and because I was convinced that they had to learn that in some circumstances morality can best be demonstrated not by a grand gesture but by the willingness to persevere through imperfect stages for a better world. Lake and Morris had already told me in February that they had decided to leave; in view of their ambivalences they were no longer willing to work the long hours required.
In these circumstances it was usually prudent not to argue and to wait 24 hours to see on which of these orders Nixon would insist after he calmed down.
Stennis belonged to that generation of Senate leaders who, having achieved their position by seniority and being secure in their constituencies, embodied in the accumulated experience a sense of continuity. On domestic issues, especially the race problem, they sometimes lagged behind the moral currents of their time, but on national security and foreign policy they were towers of strength. Many were Southerners, sons of a region that had known its own tragedy. They understood, as most other regions of the country did not, that there can be irrevocable disasters, that mankind is fallible, that human perfection cannot be assumed, that virtue without power is impotent. Courtly, wise, and patriotic, Stennis, like his distinguished colleague Richard Russell, was one of the men who mad the separation of powers function despite its intractability. Presidents could rely on his integrity; Cabinet members could count on his respect for their efforts.
Nixon dropped the subject after ten minutes and never returned to it. I do not believe that he was seriously considering the option. But in retrospect I believe that we should have taken it more seriously. The bane of our military actions in Vietnam was their hesitancy; we were always trying to calculate with fine precision the absolute minimum of force of time, leaving no margin for error or confusion, encouraging our adversary to hold on until our doubts overrode our efforts.
Perhaps the most difficult lesson for a national leader to learn is that with respect to the use of military force, his basic choice is to act or to refrain from acting. He will not be able to take away the moral curse of using force by employing it halfheartedly or incompetently. There are no rewards for exhibiting one’s doubts in vacillation; statesmen get not prizes for failing with restraint. Once committed they must prevail. If they are not prepared to prevail, they should not commit their nation’s power. Neither the successive administrations nor the critics ever fully understood this during the Vietnam war. And therein lay the seeds of many of its tragedy.
Nixon said little, and what he said was ambiguous — a sure sign to anyone familiar with his methods that he meant to stick with his decision. He adjourned the meeting, telling his Cabinet officers that they would hear from him shortly. No sooner had Rogers and Laird left than Nixon showered all his frustrations on me. He could not understand why his senior advisers never gave him a strategic argument and wasted his time on their personal political problems.
The final decision to proceed was thus not a maniacal eruption of irrationality as the uproar afterward sought to imply. It was taken carefully, with much hesitation, by a man who had to discipline his nerves almost daily to face his associates and to overcome the partially subconscious, partially deliberate procrastination of his executive departments. It was a demonstration of a certain nobility when he assumed full responsibility. The decision was not made behind the backs of his senior advisers, as has been alleged — though later on others were. Nixon overruled his Cabinet members; he did not keep them in the dark. This is the essence of the Presidency, the inescapable loneliness of office, compounded in Nixon’s case by the tendency of his senior Cabinet colleagues to leave him with the burden and to distance themselves publicly from him.
One morning he showed me a ruled paper from a yellow pad on which he had jotted down the various pros and cons; I pulled a similar yellow sheet from my pocket. We had reached practically the identical conclusions, perhaps because we had rehearsed them so often to each other. But in the days before announcing this most fateful decision of his early Presidency Richard Nixon was virtually alone, sitting in a darkened room in the Executive Office Building, the stereo softly playing neoclassical music — reflecting, resenting, collecting his thoughts and his anger. The Churchillian rhetoric that emerged reflected less the actual importance of the decision than his undoubted sense of defiance at what he knew would be a colossal controversy over a decision he deeply believed to be right, and in the making of which he received little succor from his associates.
I was busy between helping the President and coordinating the implementation of the decision. Once a Cabinet department recognizes that a decision is irrevocable and cannot be altered by artful exegesis or leaks, it can become a splendid instrument, competent, efficient, thoughtful. The WSAG meetings, which in previous weeks had been nightmares of evasion and foot-dragging, now turned crisp and precise. Alexis Johnson, the seasoned Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, produced one of those masterful overall plans that were his specialty, an hourly schedule of tasks for every key individual and department down to and then after zero hour.
Adding rhetoric out of proportion to the subject though not to the stresses of the weeks preceding it, the President emphasized that America would not be “humiliated”; we would not succumb to “anarchy”; we would act like a “pitiful, helpless giant.” Nor would he take “the easy political path” of blaming it all on the previous administrations. It was vintage Nixon. He had “rejected all political considerations”:
“Whether my party gains in November is nothing compared to the lives of 400,000 brave Americans fighting for our country and for the cause of peace and freedom in Vietnam. Whether i may be a one-term President is insignificant compared to whether our failure to act in this crisis the US proves itself to be unworthy to lead the forces of freedom in this critical period in world history. I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe is right than to be a two-term President at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this Nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.”
Repellent as I found the self-righteouness and brutality of some protesters, I had a special feeling for the students. They had been brought up by skeptics, relativists, and psychiatrists; now they were rudderless in a world from which they demanded certainty without sacrifice. My generation had failed them by encouraging self-indulgence and neglecting to provide roots. I spend a disproportionate amount of time in the next months with student groups — ten in May alone. I met with protesters at private homes. I listened, explained, argued. But my sympathy for their anguish could not obscure my obligation to my country as I saw it. They were, in my view, as wrong as they were passionate. Their pressures delayed the end of the war, not accelerated it; their simplifications did not bring closer the peace, of the yearning for which they had no monopoly. Emotions was not a policy. We had to end the war, but in conditions that did not undermine America’s power to help build the new international order upon which the future of even the most enraged depended.
Washington took on the character of a besieged city. A pinnacle of mass public protest was reached by May 9 when a crowd estimated between 75,000 and 100,000 demonstrated on a hot Saturday afternoon on the Ellipse, the park to the south of the White House. Police surrounded the White House; a ring of sixty buses was used to shield the ground of the President’s home.
President saw himself as the firm rock in this rushing stream, but the turmoil had its effect on him as well. Pretending indifference, he was deeply wounded by the hatred of the protesters. He would have given a great deal to gain a measure of the affection in which the students held the envied and admired Kennedys. In his ambivalence Nixon reached a point of exhaustion that caused his advisers deep concern. His awkward visit to the Lincoln Memorial to meet students at 5AM on May 9 was only the tip of the psychological iceberg.
Exhaustion was the hallmark of us all. I had to move from my apartment ringed by protesters into the basement of the White House to get some sleep. Despite the need to coordinate the management of the crisis, much of my time was spent with unhappy, nearly panicky, colleagues; even more with student and colleague demonstrators. I talked in the Situation Room with groups of students from various colleges and graduate schools about the root causes, as I saw them, of their despair, which I thought deeper than anxiety about the war.
The meeting completed my transition from the academic world to the world of affairs. These were the leaders of their fields; men who had been my friends, academicians whose lifetime of study should have encouraged a sense of perspective. That they disagreed with our decision was understandable; I had myself gone through a long process of hesitation before I became convinced that there was no alternative. But the lack of compassion, the overweening righteousness, the refusal to offer an alternative, reinforced two convictions: that for the internal peace of our country the war had to be ended, but also that in doing so on terms compatible with any international responsibility we would get no help from those with whom I had spent my professional life. The wounds would have to be healed after the war was over; in the event, these were not.
Handsome, wealthy, emotionally secure, he was free of that insistence on seeing their views prevail through which lesser men turn public service into an exercise of their egos. His bearing made clear that he served a cause that transcended the life span of an individual; he exuded the conviction that his country represented values that needed tending and that were worth defending. His dignity forswore the second-rate; his understated eloquence confirmed that in persons of quality substance and form cannot be separated. He saw man as uniquely capable of improvement through reason and tact in a world whose imperfections would yield — if only gradually — to patience and goodwill.
Bruce never turned down honorable requests by a President; nor did he evaluate them in terms of personal advantage. For thirty years he served Presidents of both parties, always with distinction. He spoke his mind, if necessary explicitly, but he did not use his own travail as a means of personal advancement. He had, in a word, character.
Few men have had a greater influence on me than David Bruce. On some of my most fateful decisions I instinctively turned to him. I did not always take his advice; I never failed to benefit from his judgment, his sense of humor, his unfailing tact. He kept me from taking myself too seriously; he never failed to inspire me with his conviction that our nation’s future was a serious trust.
There would be little glory for him in Paris; nor did he seek it. But he knew that a nation’s honor is not a trivial matter; we had not come through the centuries to betray those who had relied on our promises.
We were on a long road, certain to be painful. But with David Bruce as a companion its burdens would become more bearable. And any effort to which he was willing to commit himself had a strong presumption of being in the national interest.
The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in moral peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other side consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time even two armed blind men in a room can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.
The problem with US-Soviet relations is not only that there are two competing bureaucracies with their assumptions and guesses; there are also conflicting conceptions of negotiation. Americans tend to believe that each negotiation has its own logic, that its outcome depends importantly on bargaining skill, goodwill, and facility for compromise. But if one side in a negotiation has only a vague mandate coupled with a general desire for agreement, negotiability — an elegance phrase meaning that one knows the other side will accept — becomes an end in itself and the outcome is foreordained: The negotiation will see the constant retreat of the party that is committed to it. Persistence is a negotiating position is disparaged domestically as “rigid,” “stubborn,” or “unimaginative.” No position is ever final. Critics demand greater flexibility; soon the proposition is advanced that the US has an obligation to overcome the stalemate by offering concessions. The other side, aware that we are in effect bidding against ourselves, has the maximum inducement to stand rigid to discover what else we may offer.
The incessant inquiries could yield no positive benefit. If the Soviet Union had a reason for concern, it was unlikely to receive a truthful reply; it was more likely to remind us of our strategic opportunity — this certainly was the result in 1969. Undoubtedly, Dobrynin’s superior in Moscow in their bureaucratic way thought that they could not be blamed fro ignorance about the Warsaw talks if they could produce a record of having asked — with no sense of how insecure this made them appear.
I had always opposed briefing Moscow on our conversations with the Chinese because it gave the Soviets too easy an opportunity to play their version back to Peking to stimulate Chinese fears of a Soviet-American condominium.
Until 1973, when Gromyko and Marshal Grechko joined the Politburo, neither the Foreign nor Defense Ministries, which they headed, had been represented on that body for a decade. Before he was elevated to the Politburo I occasionally had the impression that I was better informed about Soviet military deployments than Gromyko.
Soviet policymaking is thus cumbersome even when the General Secretary is preeminent and the Politburo unified. It tends to become muscle-bound during periods of change in the leadership. In such circumstances, the main lines of policy, once decided, are pursued with a single-minded rigidity reinforced by Russian stubbornness. During power struggles it is quite possible for incompatible course to be pursued, until some crisis imposes the need for a clear-cut decision. The Soviet Union had slid into crises that were substantially unplanned and jeopardized goodwill because some event — such as a forthcoming Party Congress — monopolized the attention of the top leadership or gave greater weight to some part of its huge, complex bureaucratic machinery.
Yet there was no sense in seeking to derail Brandt’s policy; the sole option available to us was to give the inevitable a constructive direction. Brandt’s coalition had been elected on the program he was now implementing. We could abort his Ostpolitik only by massive intervention in German internal politics, the alienation of our allies, and the refashioning of NATO into a German-American alliance for the liberation of Eastern Europe. And we had no alternative to offer. It was their fear of a German “liberation policy” that had caused Pompidou and Harold Wilson to endorse Brandt’s approach publicly and to press us privately to follow suit. Nor would our public opinion understand a policy of insisting on German reunification against the wishes of the German government; we could not be more German than the Germans. On the contrary, we would become increasingly the butt of the charge that we had destroyed hopeful prospects for easing the harsh consequences of the division of Germany.
Time was on our side; we were in a strong position, provided we kept our cool. This did not become apparent immediately to the Soviets, who still considered the agreement with the Federal Republic a major step in selective detente and continued to try to use it to weaken allied cohesion by a series of crises aimed at the US. It took some months of firmness to bring home to the Kremlin the realities with which it would have to deal.
The dominant slogan of all attacks on our defense program was the need to “reorder national priorities” — a euphemism for cutting the defense budget. It was the counterpart of the Vietnam debate in the field of strategy. The plethora of amendments to restrict the use of funds for Vietnam was soon extended to specific weapon systems.
The full NSC met on March 25. As I had feared, the discussion became a series of unrelated ventures by the principals into issues of high science. How did we limit the two sides’ radar networks? And how did we guarantee that SAMs against aircraft would not be covertly upgraded into antimissile ABMs? Since the issues were debated in the abstract and not reduced to discrete negotiating choices, a Presidential decision was not possible.
The discussions of SALT at the NSC meeting of April 8 had all the elusiveness of a Kabuki play. Each department invoked complicated technical arguments in which the same facts were used to produce radically different conclusions. Each of the principals put forward two positions — one he believed in, and a tougher one as an opener that he calculated the Soviet Union would reject. Thus he could prove heh was a “tough bargainer” and at the same time have his preferred proposal as the fallback. All of this feinting and posturing was performed before a President bored to distraction. His glazed expression showed that he considered most of the arguments esoteric rubbish; he was trying to calculate the political impact and salability of the various options, of which only the broad outlines interested him.
The happy task of distilling some recommendations out of this confusion fell on me. I regret to admit that doing so I was swayed by bureaucratic and political considerations more than in any other set of decisions in my period in office. Basically, the security adviser ought not to play this game; he should submit to the President his own best judgment of the merits and leave political and bureaucratic considerations to the President. But in the case of SALT, I knew that my recommendation would carry an unusual weight. Nixon simply would not learn the technical details well enough to choose meaningfully. While I was quite prepared to overrule the departments on issues that the President followed closely, where I was in effect on my own I felt honor bound to exercise my mandate only within the broad limits set by the government consensus.
Gerry Smith, leading our delegation in Vienna and in constant communication with Washington, was engaged with me in internal negotiations that were complex because we understood each other very well indeed. He wanted a freer reign and I was determined to prevent it. On May 20 Smith informed me that the delegation had exhausted its instructions and would need “search warrants” beyond the “holy writ” of the instructions. I was not prepared to agree to such a blank check. I had become aware of the tendency of some of the more passionate members of the delegation to put pet schemes of their own to the Soviets. When one’s Russian counterpart did not respond, either our of bafflement or because he was without instructions, the delegation member would report eagerly to Washington that the Russian “did not disagree” or “showed great interest,” implying that his own preference was clearly the preference also of the Russians. To curb such freewheeling I requested a specific proposal from Smith, as well as the views of the other agencies.
Sooner or later every President since Roosevelt has become convinced that he should take a personal hand in East-West relations through face-to-face meetings with the Soviet leaders. It is human to yearn to make a decisive breakthrough toward peace. And no one is more conscious of the cataclysmic possibilities of nuclear technology than the President who bears the burden of the ultimate decision. Presidents are strengthened in this temptation by an American public that finds it difficult to accept the existence of irreconcilable hostility and tends to see international relations in terms of the play of individual personalities. And a President rarely reaches his eminence without an abnormal ego; nor is his entourage likely to disabuse his estimate of himself. Almost by definition he has enormous confidence in his power of persuasion; after all, it got him where he is. Nor are Presidents unmindful of the political benefits of a well-publicized summit, especially in an election year. It is the ultimate “photo opportunity.”
Nixon was less given to these tendencies than most. He was too skeptical to believe that one meeting could alter the course of events. He was too experienced in international politics not to appreciate that decades-long tensions between great powers are not the result of personal animosities.
The Soviet leaders, luckily for us, had thrown away all this in order to score petty points. This is worth keeping in mind for those who perceive every Soviet action as part of a brilliantly calculated master plan. Moscow recognized well enough the obvious tactical advantage for them Nixon’s eagerness for a summit. But they had been so annoyed by Nixon’s Romanian visit, his snub of Gromyko in 1969, and our aloof Middle East posture, and they were so tempted to squeeze the maximum concessions out of us, that they missed what could have been a great strategic opportunity. They wanted to be paid in advance for agreeing to the summit and then be paid again at the summit. They tried to obtain a de facto alliance against China, a European Security Conference, and a SALT agreement on their terms — all as an entrance price into the summit.
Nixon was not that eager. Nor was he incompetent. He agreed to none of these demands, and the Soviets achieved nothing.
The first test of statesmanship is the accurate assessment of the bargaining relationship.
I had grave doubts about these assumptions and the course they seemed to suggest. My assessment, as I explained to the President in a memorandum, was that Arab radicalism had five sources: Israel’s conquest of territory; Israel’s very existence; social and economic dissatisfactions; opposition to Western interests; and opposition the the Arab moderates. Only the first of these components would be affected by a settlement. The others would remain. Western capitalism would remain anathema to the radicals. Arab moderate regimes would continue to be unacceptable. The causes of social and economic unrest would persist. Israel would still be there for the Arab radicals to seek to erase. And the Israelis understood this. It was precisely because the issue for them was the existence of Israel, and not its particular frontiers, that they were so reluctant to give up their conquests.
We needed to work not just for any solution but also to demonstrate that progress could be achieved best by our friends; that, in other words, the moderates held the key to peace in the Middle East. I was convinced that we were in a strong position to teach this lesson.
In the process we had to learn the painful lesson that events can be dominated only by those with a clear set of goals. A nation gets no awards for confusion masquerading as moderation. For the adversary may mistake goodwill for acquiescence and confuse restraint with weakness. Hey may be genuinely surprised — indeed, feel tricked — when after much travail we finally and grudgingly turn to the defense of our interests. The result is a crisis.
Now that he [Nasser] has turned to Moscow to lean on us to press Israel to stop the bombing, he is about to demonstrate Soviet inability to get him out of his box.
Precisely because Kosygin’s letter seemed so diffuse and asked for nothing that could in fact be done, I began to be convinced that it could not be an isolated move; it had to be part of a larger scheme, almost certainly the precursor of some concrete action in the military field. Its vagueness might be explained by the desire to discourage a response that might interfere with decisions already made. The Kosygin letter was not a warning but a smokescreen.
For on almost all practical issues his unsentimental geopolitical analysis finally led him to positions not so distant from ones others might take on the basis of ethnic politics.
The vindictive reaction was a Presidential order directly to State via Joe Sisco — apparently to avoid going through me — to defer consideration of the Israeli arms package indefinitely. Had I been consulted I would surely have emphasized the inadvisability of punishing a foreign country for the actions of an American minority and tempting the Soviet Union with the prospect of a free ride.
The State Department, when it receives an order of which its bureaucracy approves, is a wonderously efficient institution. When it wishes to exhaust recalcitrant superiors, drafts of memoranda wander through its labyrinthine channels for weeks and even months. But when it receives an instruction it considers wise, paperwork is suddenly completed in a matter of hours and the bureaucracy springs to marvelous action. Hence, within 36 hours of Nixon’s order to Sisco, Rogers sent over a memorandum telling Nixon that he had already prepared and had in hand a scenario to “carry out your decision to postpone for now the question of additional aircraft for Israel.”
There was less to these “concessions” than met the eye. It was a measure of the never-never land of Middle East policy that the suggestion that a peace settlement might establish peace was seriously put forward as a concession. To ask Israel to withdraw from all occupied territories without offering what is normal between most states, namely peace, would have been an absurdity. Nor could a commitment to end guerrilla attacks after peace had been made be described as a sacrifice; nobody could have maintained the opposite proposition.
Mrs. Meir wrote that such a decision would increase the military danger to Israel and encourage further Soviet and Arab aggression at the same time. The sense of “abandonment,” she feared, would increase desperation and the capacity for irrational behavior in Israel: “One cannot overstate the seriousness of the situation that will result.”
More disturbing still, the missiles were accompanied by 1,500 Soviet military personnel. Clearly, this was only the first installment of a major Soviet military move. It marked a unique turn in Soviet policy: Never before had they put their own military forces in jeopardy for a non-Communist country. It was apparent to me that as the Soviets increased their forces, they would develop a vested interest in protecting them and then in showing results for their commitment.
All experience teaches that Soviet military moves, which usually begin as tentative, must be resisted early, unequivocally, and in a fashion that gives Soviet leaders a justification for withdrawal. If this moment is permitted to pass, the commitment grows to too large to be dismantled short of a major crisis. But a strong response when the challenge is still ambiguous is peculiarly difficult to organize. The evidence, by definition, is not likely to be conclusive. Intelligence agencies — contrary to the mythological perception of them as reckless adventurers — tend to play it safe; they generally flock to a cautious hypothesis. In my experience in almost every crisis there has been an initial dispute about whether we faced a challenge at all — a debate that quickly spreads from the Executive Branch to the Congress. Those opposed to a firm response claim that the Administration is “overreacting.” And if the Administration acts in time and averts the danger, they will feel they were proved right. What they fail to consider is that the real choice is between seemingly overreacting (and containing the challenge) or letting events take over. By the time the true dimensions of the threat become unambiguous — when everyone agrees about its overwhelming nature — it is often too late to do anything. And somewhere along the line the question of what causes a Soviet move becomes irrelevant; American policy must deal with its consequences, not with its causes.
The Soviets respect power and strength. They understand military strength best of all. This does not mean, of course, that they are eager to fight, or that they believe in the indiscriminate use of force. But they do not understand restraint; it confuses them, and in the end leads them to conclude that there is room for their own forward movement.
If the US does not support Israel demonstratively with military assistance, the Soviets will ponder why we refuse to do so. Ultimately, they will conclude that we are deterred because of either domestic, political and economic concerns or because the consequences of military escalation.
Precious time was wasted debating irrelevancies. Our intelligence community concentrated on trying to measure whether in precise hardware terms the military balance had in fact been upset. All this missed the essential point. Whatever one’s view about greater Israeli flexibility, we now had first to face down the Soviets and the Arab radicals. Otherwise, Israeli concessions would be perceived as resulting from the introduction of Soviet military personnel. Our position would deteriorate as demands escalated. Once the Soviets established themselves with a combat role in the Middle East and we accepted that role, the political balance would be drastically changed, and the military balance could be overthrown at any moment of Soviet choosing. Israel was not free of responsibility for the present state of affairs, but we would be able to deal with the political problems after mastering the military challenge.
No verbal reassurance could obscure the fact that less than a week after the introduction of Soviet combat personnel into the Middle East, and three days after cancelling the cease-fire discussion with Dobrynin, the US had publicly denied additional planes to Israel. The decision even seemed to imply that the most sophisticated Soviet weapons and Soviet combat personnel did not affect the military balance, and implication that almost invited their augmentation.
But the time was not ripe for such an appraisal. Shaken by public protest, focused on Vietnam, half hoping for a negotiation with Moscow, the Executive Branch was torn between its premonitions and its hopes, between the reality of a Soviet challenge and the nightmare of concurrent crises.
The conventional wisdom is that the Soviets will probably not move, mainly because of the risk of combat with the Israelis. There is, however, some evidence that they are indeed already “inching” forward (the construction sites along the canal). Moreover, it would seem a logical extension of Soviet strategy to do so. The near term Soviet objective in the Middle East is to destroy Western influence. The main enemy is not Israel bu the West in general and the US in particular. The road to the displacement of the West, however, now lies through Soviet demonstration that they cannot protect their clients, but reverse the losses they suffered in 1967.
Warnings alone are not enough. Indeed, since we have presented several serious warnings, the more we present the less credible. Breaking off contacts serves no end, and moving military forces is at least premature… Because the dispatch of aircraft to Israel has become the symbol for measuring our policy, it has, perhaps unfortunately, become the only immediate issue.
Only after demonstrating our willingness to take up this option can we expect to convince Israel of the need to make some political concession and convince the Soviets and Arabs that we are not deterred by their recent actions.
The most accurate, if not elegant, way of describing the reaction is that all hell broke loose. I was accused of by the State Department and pundits in the media of trying to scuttle the peace initiative, of making vainglorious threats beyond our capacity to carry out. The criticisms came from all quarters except the Soviets, who as usually provocative only when they can calculate a wide margin of safety and who had heard these views privately for three months.
These arguments overlooked that a defensive strategy implies a war of attrition, a prospect fundamentally intolerable for a country outnumbered by around thirty to one. Israel was approaching the point of desperation, which might tempt it into preemptive action before the balance shifted irrevocably.
But this is scarcely extraordinary. Two thousand years of suffering have etched the premonition of tragedy deep into the soul of the Jewish people. And Israel’s position as a tiny nation of 2.5 million surrounded by close to one hundred million potential enemies, in a region that has seen empires and states come and go, is a constant reminded to every Israeli of the transitoriness of historical existence. Israel’s margin of survival is so narrow that its leaders distrust the great gesture of the stunning diplomatic departure; they identify survival with precise calculation, which can appear to outsiders (and sometimes is) pettifogging obstinacy. Even when Israeli leaders accept a peace proposal, they first resist fiercely, which serves the purpose of showing that they are not pushovers and thereby discourages further demands for Israeli concessions. And their acceptance is usually accompanied by endless requests for reassurances, memoranda of understanding, and secret explanations — all designed to limit the freedom of action of a rather volatile ally five thousand miles away that supplies its arms, sustains its economy, shelters its diplomacy, and has a seemingly limitless compulsion to offer peace plans.
It is generally unwise in diplomacy to raise an issue when one is not prepared to accept the likely response.
Our actions did not dominate events; they followed them, and often seemed to be overwhelmed by them. And the greatest danger resided in the apparent Soviet misperceptions of our firmness.
Almost inevitably, further crises descended on the Administration in September. Only after we had braved that storm would the various components of our global diplomacy, so laboriously assembled over a year and a half, begin to fall into place.
At the WSAG, opinions varied widely as to the wisdom, and indeed the feasibility, of American military action. If the Jordanian army should lose control over the airports, evacuation of Americans might require the landing of troops, a prospect that filled neither political nor military leaders with great enthusiasm. The problem, and the reluctance, would be even greater should the King ask for American intervention to ensure his continued rule. There was some hesitation even to plan for such contingencies.
Reluctance to think of American military intervention was reinforced by the conviction of many that even if successful it would discredit Hussein in the rest of the Arab world and perhaps be his political death sentence.
In any administration events occur that are not foreseen by intelligence; indeed, they are probably unforeseeable because they also surprise the victim who had the greatest interest in preventing them. The disturbance of the equilibrium may begin as a relatively minor event; its ever-widening ripples turn it into a crisis that either rages out of control or issues into that sudden calm indicating that a new equilibrium has been achieved. During the period of crisis the elements from which policy is shaped suddenly become fluid. In the resulting upheaval the statesman must act under constant pressure. Paradoxically, this confers an unusual capacity for creative action; everything suddenly depends on the ability to dominate and impose coherence on confused and seemingly random occurrences. Ideally this should occur without the use of force; however, sometimes one can avoid the use of force only by threatening it.
Some may visualize crisis management as a frenzied affair in which key policymakers converge on the White House in their limousines, when harassed officials are bombarded by nervous aides rushing in and out with the latest flash cables. Oddly enough, I have found this not to be accurate; periods of crisis, to be sure, involve grate tension but they are also characterized by a strange tranquility. All the petty day-to-day details are stripped away; they are either ignored, postponed, or handled by subordinates. Personality clashes are reduced; too much is usually at stake for normal jealousies to operate. In a crisis only the strongest strive for responsibility; the rest are intimidated by the knowledge that failure will demand a scapegoat. Many hide behind a consensus that they will be reluctant to shape; others concentrating on registering objections that will provide alibis after the event. The few prepared to grapple with circumstances are usually undisturbed in the eye of a hurricane. All around them there is commotion; they themselves operate in solitude and a great stillness that yields, as the resolution nears, to exhaustion, exhilaration, or despair.
We knew that Israel had a policy of never yielding to blackmail. It feared that if it ever yielded, no guerrillas could be held captive; terrorism would be encouraged. Our own view was roughly the same. The European countries involved did not believe that they could adopt such an uncompromising position. We urged them, at a minimum, to negotiate as a group.
Allegations of a “Situation Room syndrome,” sometimes include the accusation that officials manufacture crises in order to fulfill romantic notions of military prowess and machismo. This is nonsense. For one thing, the Situation Room in uncomfortable, unaesthetic, and essentially oppressive. For another, discussions there are usually highly technical. Because of the proximity of the most advanced communications equipment, those deliberating in the Situation Room have instant access to the latest information. Since they are usually sub-Cabinet officers, there is a good chance that decisions will be taken systematically through analysis and referred to higher levels for review.
The risk of rash decisions lies no there but in ad hoc meetings in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, or the personal offices of Cabinet members. There the danger is real that plausibility is confused with truth and verbal fluency overwhelms cool analysis. It is there that in the absence of staff work, decisions may be made which the facts do not support, where individual talk to impress and not to elucidate at a time when precision is crucial. The temptation there is much greater than in the Situation Room to allow a fleeting and superficial consensus to ratify unexamined assumptions. There are the simultaneous risks of paralysis and recklessness. Principals cannot really know the consequences of their recommendations unless those recommendations have been translated into specific operational terms.
The President is crucial in a crisis. He must be close enough to the process to give impetus to the ultimate decisions; yet he should not become so involved in the details that he precludes a thorough examination of alternatives. Kennedy wisely excluded himself from preliminary discussions during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Nixon followed the same procedure during the Jordan crisis of 1970 and almost all other crises of his Presidency. He was, in fact, at his best in such situations. He did not pretend that he was exercising his responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief by nervous meddling with tactical details or formative deliberations; he left the shaping of those to the governmental machinery under my supervision. He would hesitate before committing himself, sometimes in maddening ways. But he had a great sense of timing; he instinctively knew when the moment for decision had arrived; and he would then act resolutely, especially if the could insulate himself form too much personal controversy.
The primary problem was to set a course. In my view successful policy must have at least three components: a careful analysis to determine the realistic range of choice, meticulous preparation, and early seizing of the initiative. Passivity in a crisis leads to mounting impotence; one is forced to react on issues and in contexts contrived to one’s maximum disadvantage. By contrast, the side that has the initiative can occupy its opponent’s energies in analysis. And since the opponent will always assume the worst contingency, even relatively minor moves can have a major cautionary effect, unless they are so palpably bluffing as to encourage contempt. For maximum effectiveness one’s actions must be sustained; they must appear relentless, inexorable; hesitation or gradualism invites an attempt to test one’s resolution by matching the commitment.
If hundreds of hostages were killed on his soil, the collapse of royal authority in Jordan would be plain to all the world to see. Each successive inconclusive crisis had weakened Hussein a little further; matters were drifting toward showdown. Either Hussein in desperation would move against the fedayeen or the fedayeen would overthrow him.
These steps were to be taken without announcement. I was certain that Soviet intelligence, probably aided by the normal process of Pentagon leaking, would cause them to become public. Our silence would give them an ominous quality.
The position of the security adviser when he disagrees with the President is extremely delicate. The President must have the assurance that his adviser will act as his extension and will see to it that his wishes are carried out by the departments. On the other hand, the President must be able to count on being warned if his orders are dangerous. This was especially important for Nixon, given his tendency toward impetuous declarations that he never expected to see implemented. In the Jordan crisis I solved the problem by having two contingency plans prepared simultaneously. The President would the be able to choose when the moment for decision arrived.
The difference between Rogers and me in our approach to crisis management came into focus on that day. Rogers believed it desirable to reassure nervous adversaries that we intended them no harm. My view was the opposite, that once we were embarked on confrontation, implacability was the best as well as the safest course. Rogers thought calming the atmosphere would contribute to its resolution; I believed that it was the danger that the situation might get out of hand which provided the incentive for rapid settlement.
Sisco and Rogers pressed for a public statement forswearing any American military action. I was opposed. Reassuring the fedayeen would simply reward outrageous threats, strengthen their bargaining position, and give us a harder problem later on if we had to act in an emergency. Instead, I favored a communication to Arab governments that the killing of hostages would have serious consequences.
The Kremlin seemed to have assumed its most advantageous course was observing from the sidelines the disintegration of the Kingdom of Jordan and the growing discomfiture of the US.
It proved to be a mistaken calculation. In every crisis a point is reach where one side must decide whether to clinch its first gains or to gamble more. By getting too greedy — by not helping to rein in their clients — the Soviets gave us the opportunity to restore the equilibrium before the balance of forces had been fundamentally changed.
He approved all the deployments enthusiastically; they appealed to his romantic streak: “The main thing is there’s nothing better than a little confrontation now and then, a little excitement.” He could be dissuaded only with difficulty from having all our military movements announced, which would have created too much of a crisis atmosphere; the announcements would have backfired because they would have required too many public reassurances, draining our deployments of some of their effect.
This is why I urged that no reply be returned for the time being. After all, the Soviets had kept us waiting for ten days before responding to our note on standstill violations. Silence was the best middle ground between reassurance, which would be self-defeating, and intransigence, which might turn out to be provocative.
During fast-moving events those at the center of decisions are overwhelmed by floods of reports compounded of conjecture, knowledge, hope, and worry. These must then be sieved through their own preconceptions. Only rarely does a coherent picture emerge; in a sense coherence must be imposed on events by the decision-maker, who seizes the challenge and turns it into opportunity by assessing correctly both the circumstances and his margin for creative action. In crises this agility is akin to an athlete’s. Decisions must be made very rapidly; physical endurance is tested as much as perception because an enormous amount of time must be spent making certain that each of the key figures at home and abroad acts on the basis of the same information and purpose. Whatever bureaucratic games might be played in normal times, during crises I made certain that each agency had the same information and that all principals and their key associates were willing collaborators in the overall design.
In my view what seems “balanced” and “safe” in a crisis is often the most risky. Gradual escalation tempts the opponent to match every move; what is intended as a show of moderation may be interpreted as irresolution; reassurance may provide too predictable a checklist and hence an incentive for waiting, prolonging the conditions of inherent risk. A leader must choose carefully and thoughtfully the issues over which to face confrontation. He should do so only for major objectives. Once he is committed, however, his obligation is to end the confrontation rapidly. For this he must convey implacability. He must be prepared to escalate rapidly and brutally to a point where the opponent can no longer afford to experiment.
It really came down again to a philosophical debate on how to handle crises. Rogers believed in very slow and measured escalation, if any. Nixon, as we as I, believed that this was the most likely way for a crisis to become unmanageable. Rogers was basically opposed to Israeli ground involvement for many reasons, including fear of a confrontation with the Soviets. Nixon and I held that if we wished to avoid confrontation with the Soviets we had to create rapidly a calculus of risks they would be unwilling to confront, rather than let them slide into the temptation to match our gradual moves.
In managing the conclusion of any crisis the problem is to calibrate pressures to produce the maximum incentive for settlement without giving the other side the impression that it has no way of avoiding a confrontation. Paradoxically, perhaps the most critical moment occurs when the opponent appears ready to settle; then it is the natural temptation to relax and perhaps to ease the process by a gesture of goodwill. This is almost always a mistake; the time for conciliation is after the crisis is surmounted and settlement or modus vivendi has in fact been reached. The moderation can be ascribed to generosity and goodwill; before, it may abort the hopeful prospects by raising last-minute doubts as to whether the cost of settlement need in fact be paid. Stopping our military actions in Korea in 1951 when cease-fire talks started almost surely prolonged the talks; in retrospect I would make the same argument about the Vietnam bombing halt in 1968, though I held a different view at the time.
I pointed out that during the course of the year every Soviet note had been followed by an unfriendly action incompatible with it; hence, we simply awaited events. Dobrynin assured me that the Soviet Union had not known of the Syrian plan to invade Jordan. He weakened his case considerably by reassuring me that Soviet advisers had left their Syrian units before the latter crossed the frontier!
Castro had considered Khrushchev’s conduct in the Cuban missile crisis an abject surrender. Relations between Moscow and Havana had deteriorated dramatically. In 1967 Castro even went so far as to attack the Soviet publicly for their failure to give effective assistance to their Arab friends during the Six Day War.
Because the information about Cienfuegos had been restricted, there was no real staff preparation. Opinions therefore gyrated randomly in a conversational style. There was some dispute about whether Soviet activities violated the “understanding”; I reminded the group that in 1962 President Kennedy had reacted not because the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba had been “illegal” — it was, in fact, then technically “legal” — but because he considered it a threat to the security of the US.
I saw the Soviet move as going beyond its military implications; it was a part of a process of testing under way in different parts of the world. I strongly favored facing the challenge immediately lest the Soviets misunderstand our permissiveness and escalate their involvement to a point where only a major crisis could remove the base. I opposed time-wasting moves such as waiting for a Gromyko-Rogers conversation in a month’s time. The Soviets knew that we were photographing Cienfuegos almost daily; if we did nothing they had to assume that we were acquiescing. If we then suddenly confronted them, they might have run out of maneuvering room; the consequence crisis might well be sharpened by their belief that they had been set up for humiliation.
Whenever personal persuasion failed, I appealed to Haldeman, who would convey one’s thoughts faithfully and literally without injecting his own views. It was risky to approach Haldeman, since he was likely to interpret any substantive concern as a sign of emotional instability; he had an invincible faith that there was no difficulty that could not be rectified by good public relations.
We both agreed, however, that to have kept the President waiting for six weeks for an answer to a summit proposed in August for October was an act of discourtesy that did not deserve a personal audience.
Contrary to our carefully planned press guidance, the spokesman of the DoD had filled in every detail when asked a question at his morning briefing. It was a Washington classic of misunderstood instructions.
Dobrynin had no doubt seen the wire reports of my background briefing in the afternoon. My words had been carefully chosen to suggest that the US had not yet made up its mind about the precise nature of Soviet activities in Cienfuegos. I wanted him to understand that this was said only to give his government a graceful opportunity to withdraw without a public confrontation. We considered the construction at Cienfuegos unmistakably a submarine base. Moscow should be under no illusion; we would view continued construction with the “utmost gravity”; the base could not remain. We should not shrink from other measures including public steps if forced into it; if the ships — especially the tender — left Cienfuegos, we would consider it a training exercise.
He came in the next day with two messages, the first a face-saving one, to be shown to Arab clients, expressing satisfaction at my assurance of September 25 that we would not intervene in Jordan if the other countries stayed out. The Kremlin chose to interpret this affirmation of the position from which we had never varied as a constructive contribution, and perhaps presented it to its Arab clients as having been exacted by Soviet diplomacy. I saw no point in disputing this; in diplomacy one collects claims on future restraint where one can.
Whether and to what extent the US should seek to affect domestic developments in other countries is a complicated question, the answer to which depends on a variety of elements, including one’s conception of the national interest. Presidents of both parties have felt the need for covert operations in the gray area between formal diplomacy and military intervention throughout the postwar period.
Soviet-line Communist parties around the world occasionally differ with their senior partner in Moscow on questions of internal Communist policy — as one would expect from strong-willed, power-oriented men who have reached eminence by a ruthless political competition.
In these circumstances it was neither morally nor politically unjustified for the US to support those internal political forces seeking to maintain a democratic counterweight to radical dominance. On the contrary, no responsible national leader could have done otherwise.
What the reader is entitled to know, however, is briefly how in a democratic society we maintained supervision over covert activities to ensure that they remained consonant with our national ethic and purposes.
The mistaken estimate was readily accepted because it led to the most comfortable conclusion; it made it unnecessary to face up to the hard choices we would be compelled to make in the conditions of 1970.
Nothing illustrates more clearly — even tragically — the danger of applying the abstract theories of our better graduate schools to the domestic complexities of foreign societies than the policy toward Chile in the 1960s. The notion that social reform and economic development automatically produced political stability — drawn from the experience of our own New Deal — had only the most limited relevance in a country where two radical parties were determined not to reform but to overthrow the system. Our refusal to face the reality that what was going on was a deadly political struggle and not a debate between economics professors transformed us by 1970 from the dominant element of 1964 into a sort of mother hen clucking nervous irrelevancies from the sidelines.
To complete the process of self-stultification, the Latin American Bureau chose this moment to attack the very concept of covert support for foreign democratic parties, which had for so long been a central feature of our Chilean effort.
In retrospect it is clear that I should have been more vigilant. A security adviser serves his President best by never simply ratifying the bureaucratic consensus; he should always be the devil’s advocate, the tireless asker of questions, the prober of what is presented as self-evident. But Latin America was an area in which I did not then have expertise of my own. I was lulled by the polls that predicted an Alessandri victory and by the consensus of the agencies — a consensus I would never have accepted so readily in an area where I had firsthand knowledge. And in the spring and summer Cambodia claimed most of my attention.
I requested urgent answers to the following questions:
- What policies and goals is an Allende administration likely to espouse? What probable alternative courses are developments in Chile likely to take under an Allende government?
- What is the nature and degree of threat to US interests of these alternatives, both in immediate terms and in terms of impact on our long-range goals and positions?
- What options are open to the US to meet these problems?
By the time of the election, I had come to the view that I had been maneuvered into a position incompatible with my convictions — and, more important, those of Nixon.
The reaction in Washington, where during the summer everyone had taken refuge in consoling polls, was stunned surprise. Officials tend to react to unpleasant prospects by ignoring them in the hope that they will go away. And frequently they do; not all catastrophes predicted do in fact occur. But when conventional wisdom encourages inaction, it leaves no margin fo the irrevocable.
Nixon was beside himself. For over a decade he had lambasted Democratic administrations for permitting the establishment of Communist power in Cuba. And now what he perceived — not wrongly — as another Cuba had come into being during his own Administration without his having been given the opportunity to make a decision.
In a conversation lasting less than 15 minutes, Nixon told Helms that he wanted a major effort to see what could be done to prevent Allende’s accession to power: If there were one chance in ten of getting rid of Allende we should try it; if Helms needed $10M he would approve it. Aid programs to Chile should be cut; its economy should be squeezed until it “screamed.”
I cannot accept the proposition that the US is debarred from acting in the gray area between diplomacy and military intervention, a shadow world in which our adversaries have as instruments a political party, their own infinitely greater foreign resources, and innumerable front organizations to mask their role.
Korry’s recommendation illustrated our policy dilemma. I outlined it to the Senior Review Group on October 17:
If we are publicly or prematurely hostile, our attitude may rally Chilean nationalists behind Allende. If, on the other hand, we are accommodating, we risk giving the appearance of weakness or of indifference to the establishment of a Marxist government in the Hemisphere.
What I got out of the meeting the other day is that no one believes a longterm accommodation is possible. We are faced only with a choice in tactics. The question is whether it would be better if a confrontation were seen to result from Allende’s actions or whether the US should move immediately to a position of military hostility.
To be sure, Allende started from a weak position. The coalition supporting him was fractious; the economy was deteriorating; Chile’s democratic tradition would for a time inhibit moves to establish a totalitarian state; the military distrusted him. “To meet these weaknesses,” I wrote Nixon, “Allende’s ‘game plan’ will almost certainly seek legitimacy and respectability; to reassure the apprehensive or concerned and to move carefully to avoid coalescing opposition to him prematurely; to keep his opposition fragmented and then slice their power bit by bit as he is able. Left to his own game plan and pace he probably had the capacity and skill to consolidate his power and neutralize his opposition in a year or two.”
The main point of the previous 134 meetings had been our relationship to Taiwan, a classic Catch-22 topic: no solution was conceivable so long as US-Chinese hostility persisted, and the hostility would not end so long as the Taiwan issue was unsettled.
None of the agenda subjects was capable of being defined, much less solved, so long as Peking considered the US its principal foreign enemy and Washing viewed China as the fount of all aggression and revolutionary activity in Asia, including in Vietnam.
For 20 years US policymakers considered China as a brooding, chaotic, fanatical, and alien realm difficult to comprehend and impossible to sway. They had been convinced that the Vietnam war was a reflection of Chinese expansionism, and that the Cultural Revolution derived from an obsession with ideological purity alien, and not a little frightening, to the American temperament. The Chinese, for their part, saw the scale of our effort in Vietnam as disproportionate to any objective to be achieved, and hence believed its only rational purpose could be turn Indochina into a springboard for an eventual assault on China.
Too many of them based their views on abstract notions of personal “goodwill,” or even historical guilt, difficult for policymakers to reconcile with the realities of the American national interest — or of the new China. What the Chinese wanted was not vacuous benevolence, or even the practical steps that had been the essence of the previous dialogue, such as recognition, UN membership, claims, exchanges. They wanted strategic reassurance, some easing of their nightmare of hostile encirclement. This the new Administration was prepared to provide, and its much decried unsentimentality was a positive asset because it was in turn with China’s hardheaded needs. But we had to overcome the preconceptions of two decades, the paralyzing grip of experts brought up on different precepts, and the bizarre rivalries within the Administration.
I was not concerned about State’s fear that the Chinese might want to bog us down in protracted, humiliating negotiations in Peking; they could not possibly be wanting to humiliate us; the Peking invitation made sense only if the Chinese were seeking to reduce the number of their enemies. The mere opening of talks would revolutionize the international relationships by demonstrating that we hd options previously thought unavailable, and that we were capable of taking bold initiatives even under the pressure of war in Vietnam.
I disagreed. The visit of an American emissary to Peking was bound to spark a geopolitical revolution; the effect on Hanoi alone would be traumatic.
The prospect of military conflict along the Sino-Soviet border faced us with nightmarish choices. Any improvised response to such a dire event was bound to be erratic and probably inadequate. Throughout 1969 I had sought to elicit contingency plans from the interagency machinery. But the departments and agencies considered our choices too awful to contemplate, and so produced only careful evasions: their ingenious catalogue of eventualities seemed more insurance against accusation of lack of foresight than a set of practical choices for the President.
They consoled Hanoi not with promises of increased support but by the quotation of Chairman Mao’s statement that the US was a “paper tiger,” and that “the vast expanse of China is their reliable rear area.” I told the President: “The Chinese have issued a statement, in effect saying they wouldn’t do anything.”
And as I have indicated before, when Nixon used the phrase “no recourse” it dramatized his uncertainty.
I was, at any rate, too busy to give expression to the excitement I felt. Usually in diplomacy individual events are part of a series; they merge in a continuum whose ultimate significance can only be viewed through the prism of time. As a general rule, turning points are apparent only in retrospect. But the message brought by Hilary was clearly an event of importance. This was not an indirect subtle signal to be disavowed at the first tremors of difficulty.
There was again nothing to do but wait. I used the interval to try to educate myself on China. Between the middle of December and early April I met three times with groups of academic experts on China from various eminent institutions of higher learning. It would be satisfying to report that my former colleagues conveyed to me flashes of illuminating insight. Outside advisers, as I should have remembered, labor under difficulties despite their learning. A policymaker’s greatest need for outside advice is in an intermediate realm between tactics and goals. Tactics are usually so dependent on the immediate situation that outsiders without access to cables can rarely make a significant contribution. At the other extreme, ultimate goals reflect philosophical perceptions and political necessities; while an adviser can provide some insights here, to be effective he must be conversant with the perceptions of the policymaker — changes of course require self-confidence rather more than expert knowledge. The dimension for which outside advice is most useful is the medium term, to carry the policymaker beyond the urgent but short of the ultimate — the perspective of two to five years. Unfortunately, this is normally the routine preoccupation of academicians interested in political problems and they seem to feel themselves cheated, deprived of the excitement of proximity to power, if they are called to Washington to do no more than they can accomplish at home. So instead of focusing on the medium term they tend to flood the policymaker with minute tactical advice or elaborate recommendations as to grand strategy until, glassy-eyed, he begins to feel new and unaccustomed affection for his regular bureaucracy.
Something that we have never done well before is to extract concessions for changes in military deployments that we were going to make anyway. It might not be a bad idea to have this sort of information available for Taiwan.
“Wangled” is almost certainly the wrong word; the Chinese would not have agreed had they not come to Nagoya with firm instructions to befriend the Americans. One of the most remarkable gifts of the Chinese is to make the meticulously planned appear spontaneous.
The whole enterprise was vintage Chou En-lai. Like all Chinese moves, it had so many layers of meaning that the brilliantly painted surface was the least significant part. At its most obvious the invitation to the young Americans symbolized China’s commitment to improved relations with the US; on a deeper level it reassured — more than any diplomatic communication through any channel — that the emissary who would now surely be invited would step on friendly soil. It was a signal to the White House that our initiatives had been noted.
I stressed that it reflected no anti-Soviet intent. This is the conventional pacifier of diplomacy by which the target of a maneuver is given a formal reassurance intended to unnerve as much as to calm, and which would defeat its purpose if it were actually believed.
The relationship between the President and any VP is never easy; it is, after all, disconcerting to have at one’s side a man whose life’s ambition will be achieved by one’s death.
High office often involves harassment, frustrations, petty calculation. Rather than the dramatic peaks of the public imagination it usually means an accumulation of seemingly endless pressures and tensions in which every apparent solution proves to be only a ticket to a new set of problems. The character of leaders is tested by their willingness to persevere in the face of uncertainty and to build for a future they can neither demonstrate nor fully discern. But every once in a while a fortunate few can participate in an event that they know will make a difference. I went home a little later than usual that evening and sat alone reflectively in my study. For over 2 years my nightmare had been that Vietnam would sap our nation’s self-confidence and drain it of its crucial capacity to preserve the free nations and to sustain all hopes for progress. While the postwar world was crumbling and our creative contribution was more than ever indispensable, we stood in danger of consuming our national substance in bitter domestic strife over a corner of Southeast Asia. Whatever happened in Indochina, we would have to begin a new era of international relations — a goal unachievable without national dedication and national consensus. The message from Peking told us above all that despite Indochina we had a chance to raise the sights of the American people to a future of opportunity. For the first time in 2 years I experienced, amid the excitement, a moment of elation and inner peace.
His motives were mixed, as is always the case with political leaders. Only romantic outsiders believe that men who have prevailed in a hard struggle for power make decisions exclusively on the basis of analytical ideas.
That the odds were in our favor is not irrelevant to the loneliness of the choice when it was made; that Nixon was not normally confiding does not change the fact that it took a resolute man to walk along the edge of a precipice with only a single associate.
A Soviet TV commentator had declared on April 25, with respect to US-Chinese relations, that “pressure has no effect on the Soviet Union, and such a policy is doomed to failure.” Countries that proclaim that they are unaffected by pressure are either bluffing or have had the good fortune never to be exposed to it.
Nixon had worried that this might disturb the Chinese. I was less concerned — the demonstration of options is almost always an asset — but thought it an occasion to demonstrate to Peking the advantage of the American connection; we could assure the Chinese directly that the SALT announcement did not imply a US-Soviet condominium.
Let us drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done.
Our foreign policy could never achieve the continuity on which other nations must depend, and our system of government would surely lose all trust if each President used his control of the process of declassification to smear his predecessor or if his discretion of these documents was selective, one-sided, and clearly intended as a weapon of political warfare.
I have always believed that the secret of negotiations is meticulous preparation. The negotiator should know not only the technical side of the subject but its nuances. He must above all have a clear conception of his objectives and the routes to reach them. He must study the psychology and purposes of his opposite number and determine whether and how to reconcile them with his own. He must have all this at his fingertips because the impression of indecisiveness invites hesitation or intransigence; the need for frequent consultation at the negotiating table undermines authority. This is why my associates and I repaired to Key Biscayne over the weekend of June 19-20 to review the briefing papers, which had already been rewritten many times — and were to be rewritten again several times more before we set off.
The papers reviewed Peking’s known attitudes on these issues and sketched the position that I should take. There were a draft of an opening statement and a general paper on the purpose of the trip and the strategy to pursue. The exercise of composing these papers sharpened my own thinking; they could be reviewed by the President, giving him the opportunity to approve and shape the approach.
It is not often that one can recapture as an adult the quality that in one’s youth made time seem to standstill; that gave every event the mystery of novelty; that enabled each experience to be relished because of its singularity. As we grow older we comfort ourselves with the familiar for which we have developed rote responses. In the same measure, as the world becomes more routine time seems to speed up; life becomes a kaleidoscope of seemingly interchangeable experiences. Only some truly extraordinary event, both novel and moving, both unusual and overwhelming, restores the innocence of the years when each day was a precious adventure in defining the meaning of life.
His gaunt, expressive face was dominated by piercing eyes, conveying a mixture of intensity and repose, of wariness and calm self-confidence. He wore an immaculate tailed gray Mao tunic, at once simple and elegant. He moved gracefully and with dignity, filling a room not by his physical dominance (as did Mao or de Gaulle) but by his air of controlled tension, steely discipline, and self-control, as if he were a coiled spring. He conveyed an easy casualness, which, however, did not deceive the careful observer. The quick smile, the comprehending expression that made clear he understood English even without translation, the palpable alertness, were clearly the features of a man who had had burned into him a searing half-century the vital importance of self-possession.
When I met him, he had been a leader of the Chinese Communist movement for nearly 50 years. He had been on the Long March. He had been the only Premier of the People’s Republic had had — nearly 22 years — and for 9 of those years he had also been Foreign Minister. Chou had negotiated with General Marshall in the 1940s. He was a figure of history. He was equally at home in philosophy, reminiscence, historical analysis, tactical probes, humorous repartee. His command of facts, in particular his knowledge of American events and, for that matter, of my own background, was stunning. There was little wasted motion either in his words of in his movements. Both reflected the inner tensions of a man concerned, as he stressed, with the endless daily problems of a people of 800M and the effort to preserve ideological faith for the next generation. How to invite President Nixon in a manner that accommodated all these concerns was clearly a matter of some emotion and difficulty for him.
To us it was the beginning of an advantageous new turn in international relations. For the Chinese it had to be a personal, intellectual, and emotional crisis. They had started as a tiny splinter group, with no hope for victory, endured the Long March, fought Japan and a civil war, opposed us in Korea and then took on the Soviets, and imposed the Cultural Revolution on themselves. And yet here they were — conferring with the archenemy of 25 years while we intervened in what they considered a “war of liberation” on their very border — acting out an encounter of philosophical contradictions.
Even the Chinese seemed to regard him with special reverence, to see him of all their leaders a special human quality. On a visit in late 1975 I asked a young interpreter about Chou’s health; tears brimmed in her eyes as she told me he was gravely ill.
Chou En-lai, in short, was one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met. Urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinary intelligent, subtle, he moved through our discussions with an easy grace that penetrated to the essence of our new relationship as if there was no sensible alternative.
Precisely because there was little practical business to be done, the element of confidence had to emerge from conceptual discussions. Chou and I spent hours together essentially giving shape to intangibles of mutual understanding.
Chou held up his hand: “You will find it not mysterious. When you have become familiar with it, it will not be as mysterious as before.” I was taken aback, but Chou was certainly right. Our concern was not the bilateral issues between us — at least at first. We had to build confidence; to remove the mystery. This was his fundamental purpose with me, as was mine with him.
So it happened that the talks between Chou and Me were longer and deeper than with any other leader I met during my public service, except possibly Anwar Sadat. Two ideological enemies presented their respective views of the world with a frankness rarely achieved among allies and with a depth that one experiences only in the presence of a great man.
The impact of personalities on events is never easy to define. To be sure, China and the US were brought together by necessity; it was not abstract goodwill but converging interests that brought me to Peking; it was not personal friendship with Chou but a commonly perceived danger that fostered the elaboration of our relationship. But that these interests were perceived clearly and acted upon decisively was due to the leadership that — on both sides — skillfully used the margin of choice available.
Of course, Chou and I used each other; that is on one level the purpose of diplomacy. But another of its purposes is to bring about a compatibility of aims; only the amateur or the insecure thinks he can permanently outmaneuver his opposite number. In foreign policy one must never forget that one deals in recurring cycles and on consecutive issues with the same people; trickery sacrifices structure to temporary benefit. Reliability is the cement of international order even among opponents; pettiness is the foe of permanence.
Chou never bargained to score petty points. I soon found that the best way to deal with him was to present a reasonable position, explain it meticulously, and then stick to it. I sometimes went so far as to let him see the internal studies that supported our conclusions. Chou acted the same way; the suicidal method was sharp trading.
Give your two sentences to your President if you wish. I do not want them. You do not have to trade; all you have to do is to convince me why our language is embarrassing.
The Chinese were cold-blooded practitioners of power politics, a far cry from the romantic humanitarians imagined in Western intellectual circles. And yet when Chou died, I felt a great sadness. The world would be less vibrant, the prospects less clearly seen. Neither of us had ever forgotten the our relationship was essential ambiguous or overlooked the possibility that as history is counted our two countries’ paths might be parallel for only a fleeting moment. After that, they might well find themselves again on opposite sides. Should that day come, the Chinese would apply themselves to confrontation with the same determination and shrewdness with which they had practiced cooperation when it served their interests. But one of the rewards of my public life has been that in a moment, however brief in the pitiless measurement of history, I could work with a great man across the barrier of ideology in the endless struggle of statesmen to rescue some permanence from the tenuousness of human foresight.
Neither of us at that first meeting tested the issue by which my trip would be judged: our ability to agree on a Presidential visit. We both acted as if this were a subsidiary matter that would be easily settled. But pushing each other against the deadline, we both sought to demonstrate that we had other options. With courtesy, philosophical digressions, and occasional humor we sought to convey that we could still turn back, that we had not crossed our Rubicon. And yet all the time we knew that the Rubicon was behind us; we had in fact nowhere to go but forward.
Whereas the Soviets often flaunted their knowledge of these secret talks, Chou professed to be unaware of them; he confined himself to asking probing questions. It was a good device to avoid being pressed to take a position.
Accompanied by Huang Hua, we were guided through its beautifully proportioned courtyards, halls and gardens, awed as many foreign emissaries had been before us by the exquisite architecture of red and gold, the stone carvings and bronze lions, the yellow roofs seeming to tumble like waterfalls into the pools of sands that formed the many squares, the sweeping vistas that were once the residence of Chinese emperors who believed it to be the center of the universe and for long periods turned their pretensions into reality.
With grace masking undoubted anguish, Chou described China as torn between the fear of bureaucratization and the excesses of ideological zeal; he painted the dilemma of a society brought up on faith in a single truth when suddenly many factions representing different truths contended in the streets until the fruits of 50 years of struggle were in jeopardy. He recounted being confined in his office for a couple of days by the Red Guards. He had doubted the necessity of such drastic measures, but Mao had been wiser; he had the vision to look far into the future. In retrospect I doubt that Choul would have raised the point at all had he not wanted to dissociate himself from the Cultural Revolution at least to some extent and to indicate that it was over.
As I have mentioned before, other negotiators, eager to impress superiors or the public, sometimes use the “salami” approach; they try to slice their concessions as thinly as possible over as long a period of time as possible. This method confers an illusory impression of toughness. Since neither side can know which slice of the salami is the final one, each is tempted to wait out the process and thus protract it further. Inevitably, pressure grows for what has absorbed so much time, energy, and commitment to succeed; this can easily carry the negotiator beyond prudent limits. I preferred by far the style the Chinese employed with us, and to which Huan Hua introduced me that morning, which is to determine as well as possible the nature of a reasonable solution, get there in one jump, and then stick to that position. Wherever possible I sought to adapt it to the negotiations I later conducted — it was castigated as the tactic of the “preemptive concession.” In fact, while the initial concessions seem greater than in the salami approach, the overall concessions are almost certainly fewer. The strategy of getting in one jump to a defensible position defines the irreducible position unambiguously; it is easier to defend than the cumulative impact over a long period of a series of marginal moves in which process always threatens to dominate substance.
As we drove up toward the waiting Pakistani plane, he remarked that none of them on the Long March had ever dreamed of seeing victory in their lifetimes. They had thought their struggle was for future generations. With the Chinese artistry in making the carefully planned appear spontaneous, just as we reached the foot of the steps he said, “Yet here we are and here you are.”
For Asia and for the world we need to demonstrate that we are enlarging the scope of our diplomacy in a way that, far from harming the interest of other countries, should instead prove helpful to them.
Our dealings, both with the Chinese and others, will require reliability, precision, finesse. If we can master this process, we will have made a revolution.
For some intoxicating weeks we thought that we might have simultaneous breakthroughs toward peace in Vietnam and toward China; Winston Lord and I on the way back from seeing Le Duc Tho had sufficient hubris to speculate on which would be considered historically the more significant achievement.
More serious was the question of how the President would present the joint announcement. All canons of public relations lore counseled one of those dramatic, emotional speeches that punctuated the Nixon Presidency. But I strongly opposed this. We were at the very beginning of a new relationship; the more we embellished it the more we would encumber the delicate diplomacy that would have to give it substance. We would have to placate troubled adversaries; we would be obliged to reassure uneasy friends. The time would come for all these enterprises, but at this early stage we should neither promise nor qualify. Nixon should let the announcement, however brief and stilted, speak for itself.
The next 48 hours passed amidst anxiety as to whether we could keep the secret and in the decompression that follows great exertion. Throughout my public life my own emotions were somewhat out of phase with my surroundings. My moment of elation occurred when it was clear that success in some effort was probable; this was usually days, sometimes weeks, before the public and even some colleagues learned of it. By the time of full public impact I was preoccupied in dealing with the next phase. There are no plateaus in foreign policy; every achievement is purchased by new travail; every advance must be consolidated by additional effort.
It was a touching occasion. Nixon was not boastful; he acted almost as if he could not quite believe what he had just announced. There was a mutual shyness; Nixon was always ill at ease with strangers, and the other guests were not comfortable in approaching a President. In his hour of achievement Nixon was oddly vulnerable, waiting expectantly for recognition without quite being able to bridge the gulf by which he had isolated himself from his fellow men. In this sense the scene at Perino’s symbolized the triumph and tragedy of Richard Nixon.
To the extent that we tried to aggravate rivalry we would lose in other ways. Paradoxically, we might even disquiet Peking by doing so: To speak of a China card implied that for a price we might not play it. The Chinese often expressed the fear that having achieved our objective with Moscow we might find Peking expendable; Mao warned us against “standing on China’s shoulders to reach Moscow.” Any attempt to manipulate Peking might drive China into detaching itself from us, perhaps to reexamine its options with the Soviet Union, to gain control of its own destiny. Equally, any move by us to play the Chinese card might tempt the Soviets to end their nightmare of hostile powers on two fronts by striking out in one direction before it was too late, probably against China, which was weaker and not protected by an American alliance system.
We had a moral and a political obligation to strive for coexistence if it was possible; we would not shrink from confrontation if challenged but the thermonuclear age evokes the imperative of mutual restraint. Critics — some in Peking — might sneer at this quest and proclaim its futility; but, paradoxically, only by pursuing it would we be able to rally our people when we needed to face up to military pressures.
They are too self-centered to submit gracefully to the inevitable pressures of a protracted negotiation. If there is a deadlock, there is no recourse. Summits are, moreover, too brief to permit the meticulous analysis that assures the durability of an agreement.
At a Senior Review Group discussion on March 9 I had indicated my own doubts about the dual-representation formula; if countries were looking for an elegant way out, our various dual-representation gimmicks would serve. But if they were determined to improve their relations with Peking, as we had been, they would vote to ensure Peking’s admission even at the cost of expelling Taiwan. But China representation was the only piece of the action on China under State Department control; it therefore pursued it with unrelenting persistence. There were other incentives for maximum activity. The Department has never gotten over the charge of the Fifties that it had been “soft on Communism” with respect to China; Foreign Service careers had been destroyed by the issue.
When I review the exchanges preceding what we code-named “Polo II,” it is difficult to imagine how we had ever made it to Peking 3 months earlier with only the Pakistani channel. In the interval we had managed to enmesh the new relationship in bureaucratic complexity. The Chinese were astonished at the size of what we called an advance party for the Presidential trip, and the fact that it would need to be followed by a third visit by a yet larger technical team. They were about to learn methods of bureaucratic management unknown even in the country that had invented bureaucracy two millennia earlier.
A few minutes later Chou En-lai mentioned in passing that we should observe Peking’s actions, not its rhetoric; the anti-American propaganda was “firing en empty cannon.”
I have already expressed my appreciation of Chou’s outstanding qualities. I met no leader — with the exception of de Gaulle — with an equal grasp of world events. His knowledge of detail was astonishing, but where many leaders use detail to avoid complexity, Chou also had an extraordinary grasp of the relationship of events. He was a dedicated ideologue, but he used the faith that had sustained him through decades of struggle to discipline a passionate nature into one of the most acute and unsentimental assessments of reality that I have encountered. Chou did not identify leadership with the proclamation of personal idiosyncrasies. He understood that statesmen cannot invent reality, and was fond of quoting an old Chinese proverb: “The helmsman must guid the boat by using the waves; otherwise it will be submerged by the waves.” Statesmanship required a knowledge of what could not be changed as well as an understanding of the scope available for creativity.
I said that I respected Chou’s convictions, but proclamations of infallible doctrine were out of place in a communique. The Chinese would not respect us if we started our new relationship by betraying our old friends; we would not renounce our Taiwan ties. Problems between us had to be solved by history, not force.
After stuffing us with roast duck, Chou submitted his paper in the evening. It was unprecedented in design. It stated the Chinese position on a whole host of issues in extremely uncompromising terms. It left blank pages for our position, which was assumed to be contrary. It was intransigent on Taiwan. At first I was taken aback. To end a Presidential visit with a catalogue of disagreements was extraordinary; it was also, I thought, unacceptable internationally and domestically. But as I reflected further I began to see that the very novelty of the approach might resolve our perplexities. A statement of differences would reassure allies and friends that their interests had been defended; if we could develop some common positions, these would then stand out as the authentic convictions of principled leaders. We would avoid the exegesis of platitudes, which is the bane of the standard communique. And we would not run the risk of contradiction and ill will after the communique was issued and each side explained the meaning of vague language to its own advantage.
It turned into a contest of physical endurance. Lord redrafted the communique while I got 3 hours of sleep. Then he went to bed and I reworked his draft for the remainder of the night. We concentrated on softening the language of the Chinese positions, writing the sections expressing the American position, and developing some common points of agreement. We sought a tone of firmness without belligerence.
The price of survival included being the butt of the crude jokes of whoever was the top Soviet leader; Khrushchev and Brezhnev were alike in this respect. Khrushchev once boasted to a foreign visitor that if Gromyko were asked to sit on a block of ice with his pants down he would do so unquestioningly until ordered to leave it. Brezhnev’s humor, though less brutal, made the same point. Neither left any doubt that in their view one of Gromyko’s great assets was literal adherence to orders as a pliant instrument of arbitrary power.
Normally, Gromyko knew every shade of a subject; it was suicidal to negotiate with him without mastering the record of the issues. He was indefatigable and imperturbable. When he lost his temper, one knew it was carefully planned. Curiously enough, this removed much of the sting; it was obviously never personal. He had a prodigious memory that enabled him to bank every concession, however slight, he believed we had made — or perhaps even hinted at. It would then become the starting point for the next round. Gromyko did not believe in the brilliant stroke or the dramatic maneuver. HIs innate caution and Moscow’s domestic politics were against them. Before he was elevated to the Politburo in 1973 he was an implementer, not a maker, of policy. Afterward, he became visible more influential and self-confident; toward the end of my term in office, he would not hesitate to correct even Brezhnev if he thought his chief had strayed from the established line.
Gromyko’s method of negotiation approached a stereotype. It seemed a reflection of the national character and of Russian history. Just as Russia had expanded over the centuries by gradually inundating the territories on the flat plain surrounding the original Grand Duchy of Muscovy, so Gromyko preferred steady pressure to the bold move. He patiently accumulated marginal gains until they amounted to a major difference. He relied on the restlessness of his opposite number to extract otherwise unachievable advantages. He would hold onto his own concessions until the last possible moment, almost invariably toward the very end of the last scheduled negotiating session. There was no sense wasting them, he seemed to reason, so long as there was the slightest possibility that the other side might yield first. Against inexperienced negotiators — and compared with Gromyko most negotiators were inexperienced — this technique was extremely effective. Once one had caught onto it, however, the tactic tended to be self-defeating. Eventually it dawned that if one could keep one’s composure long enough, Gromyko would reveal he had more in his pocket than he had been prepared to admit.
No doubt the Soviet system shaped Gromyko’s style. He was too experienced not to know that some propositions he advanced were unrealizable even when coupled with his dogged persistence. But most probably he could convince his chiefs, and later his colleagues on the Politburo, only by a succession of prolonged stalemates. Greater flexibility might have seemed suspiciously like ideological impurity, or mere softness.
Every negotiator must decide at what point marginal gains are no longer worth the loss of confidence caused by the kind of haggling that merges with sharp practice. Amateurs think of great diplomats as crafty; but the wise diplomat understands that he cannot afford to trick his opponent; in the long run a reputation for reliability and fairness is an important asset. The same negotiators meet over and over again; their ability to deal with one another is undermined if a diplomat acquires a reputation for evasion or duplicity. But there is no premium in the Soviet system for farsighted restraint. Confidence, if it meant anything at all, depend on a balance of interest that had to be redefined from scratch in each negotiation.
He did not embody a great vision or put forward a compelling model of a world order, but neither did the system he represented. It was not his assignment or his conception of his role to ask the ultimate questions. And he would not have survived so long if he had. Chou En-lai, possessing the sense of cultural superiority of an ancient civilization, softened the edges of ideological hostility by an insinuating sense of manner and a seemingly effortless skill to penetrate to the heart of the matter. Gromyko, as the spokesman of a country that had never prevailed except by raw power, lacked this confidence; he was obliged to test his mettle in every encounter. It was easy to underestimate him. His bulldozing persistence was a deliberate method of operation, not a gauge of his subtlety. He protected his country in times of turbulence and confusion; he masked its weakness; he advanced its purpose. Final greatness eluded him; but he achieved important objectives and he rarely made avoidable errors. There are few foreign ministers to whom one can pay such a tribute.
We had no good evidence concerning the attitudes of Soviet leaders, the jockeying that must be going on among them in anticipation of the Party Congress, and the distribution of power within the Soviet leadership. I counseled against any attempt to play off factions in the Kremlin against each other; we did not know enough to pit doves against hawks. We did best in our relationship with the Soviet Union when we looked after our own interests and let the Soviets define theirs.
By easing tensions with Western European allies while maintaining a hard line toward us, Moscow hope dot encourage division within the Western alliance. To the extent that we were blamed for tensions, NATO could be made to appear in Europe as an obstacle to peace that turned friendship with the US into a source of danger rather than of security. Selective detente was a way of encouraging European neutralism.
The folklore persists that revolutions occur when conditions are desperate. The reality, perceived since Tocqueville, is that most upheavals have taken place when conditions seem to be improving. The completely downtrodden are usually too demoralized to revolt. Violent change is more likely when governments become overconfident, when the population senses that it has some margin for maneuver, and when there is some progress that confirms this expectation.
In the long term I felt a period of international tranquility was bound to present more problems to the Soviet Union than to us since its cohesion was in part maintained by the constant evocation of an external danger. A long period of peace, I was convinced, would unleash more centrifugal tendencies in the totalitarian states than in the industrial democracies. A stagnating economy, restless nationalities, and dissidents would absorb more and more of Soviet energies. The geopolitical prospects of the Soviet Union would become more problematical as China became stronger and Japan threw off the trauma of defeat. Time was not necessarily on the Soviet side.
I knew that there were a debate about the utility of the space program. The early sense of adventure was beginning to be submerged in bickering about national priorities. But I reflected that we needed the space program, scientific arguments aside, because a society that does not stretch its horizon will soon shrink them. The argument that we must first solve al our problems on earth before venturing beyond our planet will confine us for eternity; the world will never be without problems; the will become an obsession rather than a challenge unless mankind constantly expands its vision. Columbus would never have discovered America if 15th-century Europe had applied the facile slogan that it needed first to solve its own problems; and, paradoxically, these problems would thereby have become insoluble and Europe would have suffocated in its won perplexities.
I had known only national boundaries as a child. Space was beyond my imagination. Television was inconceivable. They would be both less constrained and more literal. The horizon was not their limit as it had been mine. Paradoxically, their physical reach was likely to be accompanied by an impoverishment of the imagination. My generation had been brought up on books, which force the reader into conjuring up his own reality; my children’s reality was being presented to them daily on TV screens; they could absorbed passively. And yet they lived in a world in which journeys of hundreds of millions of miles were determined by an impetus given in 10 seconds, and were then in large part unchangeable — a concept beyond my imagination at their age.
Dealing with the Soviets a point is inevitably reached where it is important to make clear brutally that the limits of flexibility have been reached, that the time has come either to settle or to end the negotiation. This is more complex than simply getting “tough.” If the line is drawn too early, the Soviets will in fact break up the negotiation. If the line is drawn too late, the may no longer believe that the challenge is serious. Success in negotiation is a matter of timing, and nowhere more so than with Moscow.
I explored Bahr’s approach with Dobrynin on Monday. He accepted with an alacrity that suggested that he was not hearing it for the first time. I have known no Soviet diplomat — including Gromyko — who would accept a new major proposal without referring it to Moscow.
He decided to blackmail us into a speedy conclusion by making final agreement to a summit conditional on the conclusion of a Berlin agreement. Whether this was because he was genuinely worried, or whether he wanted to acquire some additional kudos in the Kremlin fo sharp marksmanship, the consequence was exactly the opposite of the intention.
The unsentimental approach to Soviet relations was now clearly beginning to pay off. We were beginning to demonstrate that calculations of national interest were better solvents of East-West deadlocks than appeals to a change of heart. Linkage was working even if rejected by theorists; he had kept SALT and Berlin in tandem and substantially achieved our goals. And, of course, the Soviets were reasonably satisfied by Brandt’s concessions; only amateurs believe in one-sided deals.
Obviously, the Soviets considered the prospect of meeting their leaders an irresistible boon to us, worthy of being sold over and over again at a high price.
The new Soviet tactic was obvious. It was to demonstrate that in a trilateral diplomacy Peking gave us a move but not a strategy; Moscow could offer concrete benefits. As Brezhnev was to put it later, Nixon went “to Peking for banquets but to Moscow to do business.” By this approach Moscow attempted to bring home to Peking that it had not real options: Hostility to Moscow had led to a massive buildup on the border; an attempt to open channels to Washington would only lead Moscow to demonstrate once again that it was the side with the greater assets.
There was no reason to disabuse the Soviets of their beliefs. To have the two Communist powers competing for good relations with us could only benefit the cause of peace; it was the essence of triangular strategy. Our road through this maze was to play it straight with all the parties.
We would do nothing, therefore, to further Soviet designs to establish China’s impotence. Indeed, if the worst were to happen, I was convinced that we could not stand idly by in case of a Soviet attack on China — a view few of my colleagues shared.
Whistling past the graveyard, the note asserted that the Soviets were not swayed “by transitory calculations no matter how important the latter may seem.” But just as we could ruin the trilateral relationship by seeming to exploit it, so the Soviets could not escape its consequences by proclaiming its irrelevance.
Gromyko played his part in some bafflement but with the poker face and aplomb that had seen him through decades of the infinitely more lethal Kremlin politics.
Hanoi could not help but be affected by the knowledge that its two great Communist allies were each improving their relationship with Washington despite the war in Indochina.
I have stated here that I do not consider the methods employed desirable in the abstract; certainly, they should not be regularly pursued. But it is difficult for a President to make new departures through the “system.” The departments and agencies prefer to operate by consensus. They like to make policy through a pattern of clearances that obscures who has prevailed — and also any clear-cut direction. They tend to be attracted to the fashionable. They shun confrontation with one another, the media, or the Congress. When thwarted they do not shrink, however, from political warfare against the President by leaks, and, in extreme cases, by the encouragement of Congressional pressures. All Presidents have found necessary some way to avoid being stifled by bureaucratic inertia in the guise of clearance procedures, or by economic agencies pursuing objectives without political guidance.
Its polyglot peoples testify to the waves of conquerors who have descended upon it through the mountain passes, from the neighboring deserts, and occasionally from across the sea. Huns, Mongols, Greeks, Persians, Moguls, Afghans, Portuguese, and at last Britons have established empires and then vanished, leaving multitudes oblivious of either the coming or the going.
Unlike China, which imposed its own matrix of law and culture on invaders so successfully that they grew indistinguishable from the Chinese people, India transcended foreigners not by co-opting but by segregating them. Invaders might raise incredible monuments to their own importance as if to reassure themselves of their greatness in the face of so much indifference, but the Indian peoples endured by creating relationships all but impervious to alien influence. Like the Middle East, India is the home of great religions. Yet unlike those of the Middle East, these are religions not of exaltation but of endurance; they have inspired man not by prophetic visions of messianic fulfillment but by bearing witness to the fragility of human existence; they offer not personal salvation but the solace of an inevitable destiny. Where each man is classified from birth, his failure is never personal; his quality is tested by his ability to endure his fate, not to shape it. The caste system does not attract civilizations determined to seek fulfillment in a single lifetime. It provides extraordinary resilience and comfort in larger perspectives. The Hindu religion is proud and self-contained; it accepts no converts. One is either born into it or forever denied its comforts and the assured position it confers. Foreign conquest is an ultimately irrelevancy in the face of such impermeability; it gives the non-Indian no status in Indian society, enabling Indian civilization to survive, occasionally even to thrive, through centuries of foreign rule.
But it was Britain that gave the subcontinent — heretofore a religious, cultural, and geographic expression — a political identity as well. The British provided for the first time a homogenous structure of government, administration, and law. They then supplied the Western values of nationalism and liberalism. Paradoxically, it was their own implanting of values of nationalism and democracy that made the British “foreign,” that transformed a cultural expression into a political movement. Indian leaders trained in British schools claimed for their peoples the very values of their rulers. And the halfheartedness of Britain’s resistance demonstrated that it had lost the moral battle before the physical one was joined.
As the prospect of nationhood appeared, the polyglot nationalities that the flood of invasions had swept into India now were left alone with their swelling numbers, their grinding poverty, and above all with one another.
For its part, Pakistan, conscious that even the lowest-class Hindus believed themselves part of a system superior to the Moslems, looked on its neighbor with fear, with resentment, and occasionally with hatred.
Few old neighbors have less in common, despite their centuries of living side by side, than the intricate, complex Hindus and the simpler, more direct Moslems. It is reflected in the contrasts of their architecture. The finely carved Hindu temples have nooks and corners whose seemingly endless detail conveys no single view or meaning. The mosques and forts with which the Moguls have covered the northern third of the subcontinents are vast, elegant, romantic, their resplendent opulence contrasting with the flatness of the simmering countryside, their innumerable fountains expressing a yearning for surcease from a harsh environment and a nostalgia for the less complicated regions that had extruded the invader.
In the 1950s and 1960s, America, oblivious to these new countries’ absorption with themselves, sought to fit them into its own preconceptions. We took at face value Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s claim to be neutral moral arbiter of world affairs. We hardly noticed that this was precisely the policy by which a weak nation seeks influence out of proportion to its strength, or that India rarely matched its international pretensions with a willingness to assume risks, except on the subcontinent where it saw itself destined for preeminence.
Using the word “foolish” in the same sentence as “Pakistan” — even to deny that Pakistan was foolish — became a national insult.
On the theory that the subcontinent had been deprived of my wisecracks long enough, I replied: “I would not recognize Pushtoon agitation if it hit me in the face.” The resulting headline: “Kissinger does not recognize Pushtoonistan.”
But Nixon and Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Indian PM and daughter of Nehru, were not intended by fate to be personally congenial. Her assumption of almost hereditary moral superiority and her moody silences brought out all of Nixon’s latent insecurities. Her bearing toward Nixon combined a disdain of a symbol of capitalism quite fashionable in the developing countries with a hint that the obnoxious things she had heard about the President from her intellectual friends could not all be untrue. Nixon’s comments after the meetings with her were not always printable. On the other hand, Nixon had an understanding for leaders who operated on an unsentimental assessment of the national interest. Once one cut through the strident, self-righteous rhetoric, Mrs. Gandhi had few peers in the cold-blooded calculation of the elements of power. The political relationship in substance was thus far better than the personal one.
By 1971 our relations with India had achieved a state of exasperatedly strained cordiality, like a couple that can neither separate nor get along. Our relations with Pakistan were marked by a superficial friendliness that had little concrete content. On the subcontinent, at least, alliance with the US had not been shown to produce significant benefits over nonalignment.
It seemed to require no immediate decisions except annual aid program and relief efforts in response to tragic natural disasters in late 1970. It appeared to be the ideal subject for long-range studies. I ordered 3 of these in late 1970. Two addressed Soviet naval strength in the Indian Ocean and its implications; the third examined our long-term policy toward India and Pakistan, including the objectives of the Soviet Union and Communist China and the interplay between them. Each of these studies were given a due date far ahead; no serious crisis was expected.
In this judgment, too, Yahya proved to be mistaken. Bhutto was undoubtedly the most brilliant man in Pakistani politics; he was also arrogant and strong-willed. Later on he would preside over the recovery of his dismembered country with statesmanship and courage.
Mujib’s version of autonomy seemed indistinguishable from independence. Almost all nations will fight for their unity, even if sentiment in the disaffected area is overwhelmingly for secession.
Secretary Rogers told me he found it “outrageous” that his diplomats were writing petitions rather than reports. But in a favorite device of subordinates seeking to foreclose their superiors’ options, the cables were deliberately given a low classification and hence wide circulation. Leaks to the Congress and press were inevitable.
A tragic victim of the war in Vietnam was the possibility of rational debate on foreign policy.
As usual, the Department placed its preferred option between alternatives so absurd that they could not possibly serve as a basis of policy.
Mrs. Gandhi even admitted to me that the amounts were not the issue, but the symbolism. In other words, India wanted the demoralization of Pakistan through the conspicuous dissociation of the US. I was pressed to cut off not only arms but all economic aid as well. Indian leaders evidently did not think it strange that a country which had distanced itself from most of our foreign policy objectives in the name of nonalignment was asking us to break all ties with an ally over what was in international law a domestic conflict.
I left New Delhi with the conviction that India was bent on a showdown with Pakistan. It was only waiting for the right moment. The opportunity to settle scores with a rival that had isolated itself by its own shortsightedness was simply too tempting.
There simply was no blinking the fact that Pakistan’s military leaders were caught up in a process beyond their comprehension. They could not conceive of the dismemberment of their country; and those who could saw no way of surviving such a catastrophe politically if they cooperated with it. They had no understanding of the psychological and political isolation into which they had maneuvered their country by their brutal suppression.
I doubted that India would give us the time and thus miss an opportunity, which might not soon come again, of settling accounts with a country whose very existence many of its leaders found so offensive. China might then act. The Soviet Union might use the opportunity to teach Peking a lesson.
Nixon left it to me to ensure that his policy was carried out and to bring major disagreements to him. But what we faced was a constant infighting over seemingly trivial issues, any one of which seemed to lightweight or technical to raise to the President but whose accumulation would define the course of national policy. Nixon was not prepared to overrule his Secretary of State on what appeared to him minor operational matters; this freed the State Department to interpret Nixon’s directives in accordance with its own preferences, thereby vitiating the course Nixon had set.
Whatever the merits of this debate, the fact was that Nixon was President and that departments, after having stated their case, should carry out not only the letter but also the spirit of Presidential decisions even if they disagree and even if they have to face outside or Congressional criticisms in doing so.
In retrospect, it would have been nearly impossible to concoct a more fatuous estimate. It was a classic example of how preconceptions shape intelligence assessments.
The Soviet Union had seized a strategic opportunity. To demonstrate Chinese impotence and to humiliate a friend of both China and the US proved too tempting. If China did nothing, it stood revealed as impotence; if China raised the ante, it risked Soviet reprisal. With the treaty, Moscow threw a lighted match into a power keg.
He was a superb analyst of the American scene; he understood international politics without sentimentality. At least toward me he never used the hectoring tone of moral superiority with which Indian diplomats sometimes exhaust if not the goodwill, at least the patience of their interlocutors. I saw him frequently, socially or to exchange ideas — partly because I considered India important in world affairs whether or not we agreed with all its policies, partly because I always learned from his tough-minded analyses.
I could not be more unequivocal in warning that a war between India and Pakistan would set back Indian-American relations for half a decade.
India was not interested in evolution, however. And Yahya did not grasp his peril. Swept up in events beyond his capacity, he complicated our task with one of those truculent moves with which desperate men reassure themselves that they still have a margin for decision. On August 9 Yahya’s regime announced that Mujib would be tried in secret for treason. I have never understood what Yahya hoped to accomplish by this stroke. He was certain to mobilize even greater world pressures against him and fuel Indian intransigence.
Mrs. Gandhi, however, had no intention of permitting Pakistan’s leaders to escape their dilemma so easily. She knew that once discussions between Pakistan and the Awami League started, some sort of compromise might emerge; India might then lose control of events.
Though repeatedly affirming its newfound devotion to detente, it used the budding improvement of relations with us not to prevent an explosion but to deflect the consequences from itself. Moscow was acting throughout like a pyromaniac who wants credit for having called the fire department to the fire he has set.
Dobrynin gave me the same interpretation as Jha had previously, insisting that the treaty had been in preparation for a long time. No more than Jha did he explain why premeditation should assuage our concern. The treaty was not directed against anybody, he said. (This, as I have noted, is the conventional pacifier of diplomacy by which diplomats give a formal reassurance to those they wish to keep in suspense; it is an elegant way of suggesting that one has the capacity to do worse.)
Heads of government rarely make disagreement explicit; they do not want to solidify a deadlock that they have no means of breaking — this would be a confession of either lack of negotiating skill or failing resolution. The inability of heads of government to arrive at a meeting of the minds tends to be reflected in monologues that bear no relationship to what the opposite number has said, and in pregnant silences during both no doubt ponder the political consequences of the impasse. Or else — as happened in the Nixon-Gandhi talks — the key subject is suddenly dropped altogether.
Mrs. Gandhi, who was a formidable as she was condescending, had no illusions about what Nixon was up to. She faced her own conflicting pressures. Her Parliament would be meeting in two weeks, thirsting for blood. Though she had contributed no little to the crisis atmosphere, by now it had its own momentum, which, if she did not master it, might overwhelm her.
My own views of Mrs. Gandhi were similar to Nixon’s, the chief difference being that I did not take her condescension personally. Later on, Nixon and I were accused of bias against India. This was a total misunderstanding; a serious policy must rest on analysis, not sentiment. To be sure, as I have suggested, I did not find in Indian history or in Indian conduct toward its own people or its neighbors a unique moral sensitivity. In my view, India had survived its turbulent history though an unusual subtlety in grasping and then manipulating the psychology of foreigners. The moral pretensions of Indian leaders seemed to me perfectly attuned to exploit the guilt complexes of a liberal, slightly socialist West; they were indispensable weapons for an independence movement that was physically weak and that used the ethical categories of the colonial power to paralyze it. They were invaluable for a new country seeking to vindicate an international role that it could never establish through power alone.
There was no pretense of legality. There was no doubt in my mind — a view held even more strongly by Nixon — that India had escalated its demands continually and deliberately to prevent a settlement.
On December 4 I told Nixon that precisely because we were retreating from Vietnam we could not permit the impression to be created that all issues could be settled by naked force. Though it was now too late to prevent war, we still had an opportunity — through the intensity of our reaction — to make the Soviets pause before they undertook another adventure somewhere else.
I have pointed out in previous chapters that crises can be managed only if they are overpowered early. Once they gain momentum the commitments of the parties tend to drive them out of control. A stern warning to India on the first day, coupled with a plausible threat of an aid cutoff brutally implemented, might possibly have given Mrs. Gandhi pause before she escalated. (It would, of course, have been even better to do so before the attack.)
The winning side in a war is rarely eager for negotiations; the longer the battle lasts, the better will be its bargaining position. The only restraint is the fear that if it overplays its hand it will trigger outside forces that might deprive it of the fruits of its victory.
It was a sad commentary on the state of the UN when a full-scale invasion of a major country was treated by victim, ally, aggressor, and other great powers as too dangerous to bring to the formal attention of the world body pledged by its Chapter to help preserve the peace.
Assurances of future US support were the substitute for immediate material aid. But if anything, this made matters worse. It made it appear as if the US avoided supplying weapons to an ally first by promising later support if the threat materialized and then by welshing on its promises by superclever legal exegesis.
I am not suggesting that we should have blindly set our policy solely because of what our predecessors had said. The decisions of a great power will be shaped by the requirements of the national interest as perceived at the moment of decision, not only by abstract legal obligations whether vague or precise. No country can be expected to run grave risks if its interests and obligations have come to be at total variance with each other. But equally a nation that systematically ignores its pledges assumes a heavy burden; its diplomacy will lose the flexibility that comes from a reputation for reliability; it can no longer satisfy immediate pleas from allies by promises of future action.
Out of context these sounded as if the White House were hell-bent on pursuing its own biases, but they can only be understood against the background of the several preceding months of frustrating and furious resistance by the bureaucracy to the President’s explicit decisions.
But Nixon and I were not being impetuous. We were convinced that India’s nonalignment derived not from affection for the US but from its perception of its national interest; these calculations were likely to reassert themselves as soon as the immediate crisis was over. The issue, to us, was the assault on the international order implicit in Soviet-Indian collusion.
We were playing a weak hand, but one must never compound weakness by timidity. “I admit it’s not a brilliant position, but if we collapse now the Soviets won’t respect us for it; the Chinese will despise us and the other countries will draw their own conclusions.”
Our weakness on the ground forced us to play a bold game; when the weak act with restraint it encourages further pressures and brings home to their opponents the strength of their position. I had no illusion about our assets; but sometimes in situations of great peril leaders must make boldness substitute for assets.
Nixon convened an NSC meeting on December 6 because he had become convinced at last that some discipline was essential. But as usual his efforts to impose it was so ambiguous that they made thing worse. Since Nixon took an essentially passive role, the meeting served only to make explicit the philosophical differences between Rogers and me, exacerbated by personality clashes that did neither of us any credit. Nixon made plain his displeasure with Mrs. Gandhi; but to avoid unpleasantness he gave no operational orders.
This showed the degree of the President’s displeasure; it did not necessarily mean that he wanted to carry out his suggestion. The statement had the additional advantage of establishing an historical record of toughness. It might be used later to demonstrate that one’s associates had wavered while one stood like a rock in a churning sea.
Matskevich was in a splendid position to claim that such matters of high policy were outside his province; nor was Vorontsov, who accompanied him, able to enlighten us. Time was thus gained for a further Indian advance.
He told them that while he did not insist on the State Department’s being loyal to the President, it should be loyal to the US. It was one of the emotional comments Nixon later regretted and that cost him so much support. The Department was being loyal to the US by its lights; it happened to disagree with the President’s policy and it was following the guidelines of its Secretary.
“In foreign policy,” Bismarck once said, “courage and success do not stand in a causal relationship; they are identical.” Nixon had many faults, but in crises he was conspicuously courageous.
When we met on December 11 I told Bhutto that Pakistan would not be saved by mock-tough rhetoric; we had to develop a course of action that could be sustained. We had gone to the limit of what was possible: “It is not that we do not want to help you; it is that we want to preserve you. It is all very well to proclaim principles but finally we have to assure your survival.” The next 48 hours would be decisive. We should not waste them in posturing for the history books.
Bhutto was composed and understanding. He knew the facts as well as I; he was a man without illusions, prepared to do what was necessary, however painful, to save what was left of his country.
And Rogers was not eager to get involved: The outcome of the crisis was not likely to be glorious; success would be the avoidance of catastrophe, hardly an achievement that invites acclaim.
It was unprecedented, the Chinese having previously always saved their message until we asked for a meeting — this was one of the charming Middle Kingdom legacies. We assumed that only a matter of gravity could induce them into such a departure.
Chou En-lai’s analysis was the same as ours. Amazingly, Pakistan, China, and — if Vorontsov could be believed — the Soviet Union, were now working in the same direction under our aegis. But Nixon did not know this when he made his lonely and brave decision. Had things developed as we anticipated, we would have had no choice but to assist China in some manner against the probable opposition of much of the government, the media, and the Congress. And we were still in the middle of the Vietnam war. History’s assessments of Nixon, whatever its conclusions, must not overlook his courage and patriotism in making such a decision, at risk to his immediate political interest, to preserve the world balance of power for the ultimate safety of all free peoples.
And if there was not a cease-fire soon, the Indian army would be in a position to turn on West Pakistan and thus make all our discussions academic.
Next day Mrs. Gandhi offered an unconditional cease-fire in the West. There is no doubt in my mind that it was a reluctant decision resulting from Soviet pressure, which in turn grew out of American insistence, including the fleet movement and the willingness to risk the summit. This knowledge stood us in good stead when Vietnam exploded 4 months later. It was also Chou En-lai’s judgment, as he later told Bhutto, that we had saved West Pakistan. The crisis was over. We had avoided the worst — which is sometimes the maximum statesmen can achieve.
What made the crisis so difficult was that the stakes were so much greater than the common perception of them. The issue burst upon us while Pakistan was our only channel to China; we had no other means of communication with Peking. A major American initiative of fundamental importance to the global balance of power could not have survived if we colluded with the Soviet Union in the public humiliation of China’s friend — and our ally. The naked recourse to force by a partner of the Soviet Union backed by Soviet arms and buttressed by Soviet assurances threatened the very structure of international order just when our whole Middle East strategy depended on proving the inefficacy of such tactics and when America’s weight as a factor in the world was being undercut by our divisions over Indochina.
But an essentially geopolitical point of view found no understanding among those who conducted the public discourse on foreign policy in our country. (By “geopolitical” I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium.) This dramatized one of the root dilemmas of the foreign policy of the Nixon Administration. Nixon and I wanted to found American foreign policy on a sober perception of permanent national interest, rather than on fluctuating emotions that in the past had led us to excesses of both intervention and abdication. We judged India by the impact of its actions, not by its pretensions or by the legacy of 20 years of sentiment. But our assessments depended on conjecture about the wider consequences of India’s assault. To shape events one must act on the basis of assessments that cannot be proved correct when they are made. All the judgments we reached about the implications of an assault on Pakistan were undemonstrable. By the time the implications were clear it would be too late; indeed, there might then be another dispute as to what had actually produced them.
I remain convinced to this day that Mrs. Gandhi was not motivated primarily by conditions in East Pakistan; many solutions to its inevitable autonomy existed, several suggested to us. Rather, encourage by the isolation of Pakistan, the Indian PM decided to use the opportunity to settle accounts with Pakistan once and for all and assert India’s preeminence on the subcontinent.
If shortsighted and repressive domestic policies are used to justify foreign military intervention, the international order will soon be deprived of all restraints. In the name of morality we were lambasted for having supported the losing side and offended the winner — an interesting “moral” argument, not to mention that, historically, prudence and equilibrium usually suggest siding with the weaker to deter the stronger. After 3 years of harassment for insufficient dedication to peace, we were now challenged by one liberal columnist with the mind-boggling argument that war could not always be considered an evil because sometimes it was the instrument for change. The principle seemed to be that if Richard Nixon was for peace, war could not be all bad.
Instead, attention focused on costs. We believed they would prove as temporary as they were unavoidable. We did not think that we had permanently jeopardized our relations with India or driven India irrevocably to the Soviet side, as was so often and passionately claimed. Nor could we ever have competed with what the Soviet Union offered India for this crisis: 6 years of weaponry while we embargoed arms to both sides, military threats against Peking to deter Chinese interference, and 2 vetoes in the Security Council blocking a cease-fire and UN peacekeeping efforts. Nonalignment enabled India to navigate the international passage with a maximum number of options. For that reason we were convinced that India would sooner or later seek a rapprochement with us again if only to keep Moscow from taking it for granted. When the immediate crisis was over I reminded Dobrynin of a comment by the Austrian minister Schwarzenberg after Russian troops had helped put down the Hungarian revolt of 1848: “Some day we will amaze the world by the depth of our ingratitude.”
I felt that if it was true that her goal was to force Pakistan to surrender in the West, there would be serious repercussions on the world scene. It could be a lesson for other parts of the world. The Soviets have tested us to see if they could control events. Of course you have to consider the much bigger stakes in the Middle East and Europe. Part of the reason for conducting our Vietnam withdrawal so slowly is to give some message that we are not prepared to pay any price for ending a war; we must now ask ourselves what we are willing to pay to avert war. If we are not, we have tough days ahead.
The history of the “tilt” is less a tale of Presidential self-will than the complexity of managing a modern government — especially by a President unwilling to lay down the law directly. Who was right in this dispute is irrelevant; Presidents must be able to count on having their views accepted even if these run counter to bureaucratic preconceptions. I have repeatedly stated that the administrative practices of the Nixon Administration were unwise and not sustainable in the long run; fairness requires an admission that they did not take place in a vacuum.
For several weeks Nixon was unavailable to me. Ziegler made no statement of support, nor did he deny press accounts that I was out of favor. The departments were not admonished to cease their leaking against me. Nixon could not resist the temptation of letting me twist slowly, slowly in the wind, to use the literary contribution of a later period. It was a stern lesson in the dependence of Presidential Assistant on their chief. I did not take it kindly — or even maturely — to my first experience of sustained public criticism and Presidential pressures.
All Presidential trips are inevitably presented as grand exercises in diplomacy. Nobody who has traveled with Presidents can take the description seriously for most such journeys. Diplomacy operates through deadlock, which is one way by which two sides can test each other’s determination. Even if they have the egos for it, few heads of government have the time to resolve stalemates; their meetings are too short and the demands of protocol too heavy. Hence, trips by heads of government usually find their principal justification in creating a symbolism, in setting deadlines for lower-level negotiations, and in permitting leaders to take each other’s measure. They are also a way to demonstrate intentions and to emphasize a commitment.
There is, of course, a narrower political bonus. To say that Nixon in deciding on his second European trip was unaware of the glow it might case on the forthcoming Congressional elections would be to deny him the qualities that led him to the Presidency.
Italian politics — which concerned us the most — were outside the purview of formal discussions. In turn, foreign policy issues seemed to the Italian leaders subsidiary to their internal dilemma and irrelevant because they were outside Italy’s capacity to affect. It was no accident that the discussion grew more banal as the circle of participants expanded.
The private meeting was needed to pretend that the Italian PM has the executive authority comparable to the US President or even the British PM. But he has not, except in the rarest of circumstances. Italian PM are chairmen of a coalition of many autonomous forces; they reflected a political equilibrium, not an executive authority. They proceed not by decision but by compromise. In this respect the Italian government is rather similar to the Japanese, though it is more likely to split its differences than to resolve them by consensus.
He understood very well that change can gain its own momentum and transmute the intentions of reformers. Saints prevail by the purity of their motives; institutions are sustained by durable standards. Pope Paul VI in many ways symbolized the travail of his era. Better than almost any leading figure I encountered, he understood the moral dilemmas of a period in which tyranny marched under the banners of freedom, and how “reform” ran the risk of creating soulless bureaucracies.
I never was in his presence without being moved and humbled by the incommensurability between the time frames of political leaders concerned with the attainable and that of an institution committed to the eternal.
It was a small foretaste of what I would later undergo after the India-Pakistan crisis. I was correct on the issue. But I had also been given a lesson in the limit of my authority.
All but forgotten was the fact that Tito had broken with Stalin over the issue of national autonomy, not over the validity of Communist theory. Through all vicissitudes Tito remained a member of the Leninist faith. The requirements of survival forced him to reinsure himself against Soviet aggression; they did not significantly alter the convictions shaped by a lifetime of revolutionary dedication — nor should they have been expected to. Only strong beliefs could have sustained a man through the perils and ordeals of conspiracy and guerrilla warfare. Why should he give these up in his hour of victory?
We did not seek to win Yugoslavia over to our point of view. We recognized that its policy of nonalignment, like India’s, reflected a cold analysis of its self-interest. The serious nonaligned countries — not those which, removed from all danger, traffic in slogans — seek to calculate the margin within which they can manipulate the international equilibrium. They will not hazard their security or well-being in quixotic gestures against us. Nor will they run the risk of becoming too closely associated with us no matter how “understanding” of their proclamations our policy may be. Paradoxically, if we approach too closely, they will have to move away; as we distance ourselves, they will have to move toward us; that is the almost physical law of nonalignment.
Encouraging a democratic Spain after Franco would be a complex challenge in the best of circumstances. Spain’s history had been marked by an obsession with the ultimate, with death and sacrifice, the tragic and the heroic. This had produced grandiose alternations between anarchy and authority, between chaos and a total discipline. Spaniards seemed able to submit only to exaltation, not to each other. There was no precedent in Spanish history for change that was moderate and evolutionary, not to say democratic rather than radical and violent. International ostracism ran the risk of making Spain a prisoner of its own passions.
He was not free of the complexes imposed by Britain’s class history; he rose from modest beginnings to lead a party imbued with Britain’s aristocratic tradition. The ruthlessness necessary to achieve his ambition did not come naturally and was all the more noticeable for that reason. His renowned aloofness was more apparent than real. He was a warm and gentle person who anticipated rejection and fended it off with a formal politeness (punctuated often with a laugh distinguished by its lack of mirth). He was in many respects the most untypical of British postwar political leaders. He had a theoretical bent closer than the rest to that of the continental Europeans, which gave his ideas an abstract cast sometimes verging on the doctrinaire.
And of all the British leaders Heath was probably also the least committed emotionally to the US. It is not that he was anti-American. Rather, he was immune to the sentimental elements of that attachment forged in two wars. For most British leaders, whatever the facts of geography, America is closer than “Europe.”
More important, he knew better than anyone Nixon’s crucial need for regular rest periods; it was the essential guarantee for consistent decisions. In fiercely protecting the President’s schedule — especially the rest periods, for which the euphemism in the press release was “staff time” — Haldeman served the country and contributed to the strong decisions that were the hall-mark of the Nixon Presidency in foreign policy.
As did all the other European leaders, Heath expressed misgivings about the long-term trends in Germany; though like all his colleagues he almost surely did not convey them in Bonn, leaving it to us — if anybody — to bear the onus of expressing what everyone seemed to fear.
In high office competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited. Both the military and the economic dimensions of our European relationship came back to haunt us in 1971.
Mansfield was not a member of a radical fringe but a charter member of the Senate Establishment, one of that small band of patriots who have made our maddeningly delicate system of checks and balances actually work. He was a passionate opponent of the war in Southeast Asia. But his opposition, while fierce, never passed the bounds of the civility and comity that are so vital to a democracy. At heart Mansfield was an isolationist, eager to reduce all American overseas commitments, reflecting the historical nostalgia that sought to maintain America’s moral values uncontaminated by exposure to calculations of power and the petty quarrels of shortsighted foreigners.
That the Congress should play a major role in the conduct of foreign policy was beyond argument. But in the Seventies passion overwhelmed analysis. Our system cannot function when Congress and the President have sharply conflicting goals or when the Congress attempts to prescribe day-to-day tactical decisions. The Congress can and ought to scrutinize the consequences of diplomacy. It cannot carry it out. When it has tried, the results have been unfortunate. The prime function of Congress is to pass law with a claim to permanence: It deals in the predictable. Diplomacy requires constant adjustment to changing circumstance; it must leave a margin for the unexpected; the unpredictable is what always happens in foreign affairs. Nuance, flexibility, and sometimes ambiguity are the tools of diplomacy. In law they are vices; certainty and clarity are the requirements there. Lawmaking and diplomacy are not only starkly contrasted in their methods and consequences; they are done differently. Legislation often emerges from the compromise of conflicting interests; random coalitions form and fade. The coalitions and power centers of Congress shift in response to the stimuli of various pressure groups. Foreign policy requires a consistent view of the national interest. The legislator practices the art of reconciling pressure groups on a single issue; the foreign-policymaker deals with the same international actors over and over again, rarely concluding an issue or terminating a relationship.
The Mansfield amendment resulted from a coalition of frustrations. But it could have had grave consequences long after the coalition that produced it had disintegrated. It illustrates also that Congress is in no position to make coherent tactical decisions because its knowledge of the mosaic of foreign policy is so fragmentary.
Experienced leaders such as John Stennis were convinced that Mansfield had the votes and that only a compromise could head him off. I preferred the Mansfield amendment. All the proposed compromises had the disadvantage of making the Administration a party to the decision to reduce troops in Europe; once we had given that much ground we would soon be driven from one position of disadvantage to another. At the same time, a straight vote would provide and opportunity to demonstrate that the essence of our postwar foreign policy could survive our divisions over Vietnam.
The capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed strait. That frailty did not apply to the figure of Acheson, so out of scale in his achievements and in his passion, in his moral convictions and in his prejudices. I had met him when he had just stepped down from the office he loved into that emptiness which marks the aftermath of a great mission, and into that loneliness known only to those who have lived with exertions for an important cause. Acheson once described his leaving office as akin to the end of a love affair. I had interviewed him in 1953 at his law firm; mustache bristling, he was impeccably tailored, sufficiently bored with the practice of law to be willing to help a graduate student with a research paper on some arcane aspect of the Korean War. I asked scholarly questions that later acquaintance taught me he must have considered recherche and irrelevant. He answered patiently, sometimes acerbically, always precisely. All went tolerably well until I inquired into his reaction to one of MacArthur’s particularly muscular dispatches. “You mean before or after I peed in my pants?” asked this paragon of old-world diplomacy. Our paths did not cross again until he took me to lunch some years later, and gave me this description of a leading figure in a then new administration: “He reminds me of an amateur boomerang thrower practicing his art in a crowded room.”
Acheson was a man of dignity — in his person and in his view of the public process. His exertions were always in the service of ideals that transcended the individual. For the better part of the 3 decades he made a seminal contribution to the shape and design of American foreign policy. He and the President he so loyally served ushered in the transformation from isolationism to the understanding that without America’s strength the world would have no peace, and without our commitment it would know no hope.
On a personal level I can never forget the graceful — I might almost say gentle — way in which Dean Acheson welcomed me to Washington when I arrived as national security adviser, and the wisdom and patience with which he sought thereafter to bridge the gap between the perceptions of a Harvard professor and the minimum requirements of reality. “Can I put it this way?” I once asked him about a particularly ponderous proposal. “Certainly you can put it that way,” said Dean, “but not if you want to get anywhere.”
Dean Acheson prized moral integrity, but he despised those who used the ideal as a device for avoiding the attainable. He would often mock the foibles of man, but he never denigrated the values of his nation. He strove mightily for peace and liberty, but he was too wise to believe that any one man’s efforts could mark more than a stage of an endless journey.
What tragedies might have bene avoided if a permanent bridge could have been built to this group to give inward security to this lonely, complex President? What if the men who had sustained our nation’s policy in their own time had helped Nixon to leave the dark land of his fears and premonitions and transcend that strange sense of his inadequacy? It is a pity it never happened; both sides must share the blame.
Asked why the meeting took so long, he replied, “We are all old and we are all eloquent.”
Its “mere introduction could harm nearly every ongoing negotiating effort by the US and its allies.” And it further argued that “even a narrow defeat for the amendment will shake the confidence of the European allies.”
Nothing illustrates better the inflexibility of the Soviets’ cumbersome policymaking machinery than their decision to stick to their game plan even when confronted with the Mansfield windfall.
And Nixon as usual was his own worst enemy after he had won the battle. Euphoric over the SALT breakthrough and the Senate vote, he used a press conference on June 1 to score a point off his liberal tormentors.
Those who wanted to shake the edifice of American foreign policy now made common cause with those who saw in the enlarged Common Market a challenge to our economic preeminence. Both sought to reduce our international commitments. The criticism of European system of preferences and Japan’s surplus in its trade with us began to mount. Urgency was added by the increasingly apparent plight of the dollar, the world’s reserve currency. A number of factors — inflation, high wage settlements, and a worsening balance-of-payments deficit — combined to cause a wave of dollar selling as the spring began.
From the start I had not expected to play a major role in international economics, which — to put it mildly — had not been a central field of study for me. Only later did I learn that key economic policy decisions are not technical but political. At first I thought that I had enough on my hands keeping watch on the State and Defense Departments and the CIA without also taking on Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture.
Unlike Rogers and Laird, Connally had not had any contact with Nixon during previous crises in Nixon’s life. Nixon therefore did not have with Connally the same fear of not being taken sufficiently seriously; from Connally he did not need the constant reassurance that he was indeed the President. Connally’s swaggering self-assurance was Nixon’s Walter Mitty image of himself. He was one person whom Nixon never denigrated behind his back.
And Connally was indeed the most formidable personality in the Cabinet. Highly intelligent, superbly endowed physically, he looked and acted as if he were born to lead. His build was matched by his ego — bu those who aspire to the apex must not be criticized for that; they could never lead effectively without extraordinary self-confidence. His amiable manner never obscured the reality that he would not hesitate to overcome any obstacle to his purposes. He had a great sense of humor; but even when laughing he never gave the impression that the moment dominated him. He was not timid or lack courage. “You will be measured in this town,” he said to me once, “by the enemies you destroy. The bigger they are, the bigger you will be.” John Connally was never afraid of his opponents; he relished combat in defense of his convictions. Whatever one might think of his views, he was a leader.
Connally saw no reason to treat foreigners with any greater tenderness. He believed that in the final analysis countries yield only to pressure; he had no faith in consultations except from a position of superior strength.
Just as the need for “defense burden-sharing” had become a euphemism for the reduction of American forces and a policy of retrenchment, so the newfound strength of the industrial democracies was invoked as an argument for structural changes in the international monetary system.
Such language had not been heard since the formation of our alliances. It shook the crockery of our bureaucracy almost as much as it did the comfortable assumption of our allies that the doctrine of consultation gave them a veto over unilateral American actions.
It was an extension of his bold strokes in foreign policy to the field of economics. The Bretton Woods agreement, which had regulated international monetary arrangements since 1944, was being made irrelevant. This was to have many, largely unforeseen, consequences as the years went on. The immediate significance of the new program was its effect abroad; it was seen by many as a declaration of economic war on the other industrial democracies, and a retreat by the US from its previous commitment to an open international economic system. The industrial democracies, especially Japan, were in a state of shock because of the suddenness of the announcement, the unilateral nature of some of the measures, and the necessity they imposed to consider a formal restructuring of the entire international economic system. Clearly, we were heading into a period of intense negotiations, conflict, and confrontation.
But in my view the optimum time to settle is when the other side is still suspended between conciliation and confrontation. Once it has decided on confrontation, it cannot yield until the test of strength is far advanced. My preference was, therefore, to go along with hard-nosed negotiating for a time but to stop short of all-out confrontation that would threaten our Alliance relationships.
Since the European and Japanese could not agree among themselves, the practical result was that the import surcharge continued in force, thus raising the danger that sooner or later the other countries would retaliate in about of economic nationalism. Moreover, I feared that if the European countries and Japan suffered a recession which could be ascribed to our actions, there would be no want of voices blaming it on us, and permanent damage would result not only to our foreign policy but to the domestic structures of our allies. No new economic arrangement, however beneficial, could compensate for such a change.
To determine France’s real position I presented the issue to Pompidou in philosophical and political terms. A settlement was necessary and inevitable. It was bound to be reached with some of the European countries, given their ability to arrive at a common position. We would like it best if France would take the lead. My presence as a negotiator guaranteed that we wanted an outcome compatible with the self-respect and needs of each side; it was the only politically viable result. In the establishment of a new international monetary system nobody could afford a “victory,” since the new arrangement could be maintained only be the willing cooperation of all its members. I had come to negotiate, not to impose. It would help me if Pompidou would state his minimum requirements. I would do my best to bring about an understanding response when Nixon discussed them with Pompidou in the afternoon.
Pompidou saw a potential incompatibility between our strategy of nuclear deterrence and the requirements of European security. “We want to be protected, not avenged,” he said. “Revenge would be small consolation to us in a cemetery.”
He explained our policy in the India-Pakistan crisis; Pompidou professed to agree with our analysis. But he left little doubt that since we were making the difficult decisions, France had some scope for cynical opportunism. Since we would protect the equilibrium, France would learn toward India as the stronger and more populous country.
Pompidou’s reactions reflected the basic European ambivalence. In times of tension Europeans advocate detente; in periods of relaxation they dreaded condominium. In crisis they looked to us to maintain the equilibrium outside of Europe, and under the umbrella of the risks we were running they did not hesitate to seek special advantages for themselves.
Heath pursued his favorite theme of European unity and reassured the President that it would be “competitive,” not confrontational. It was an interesting and not entirely reassuring formulation, a considerable step away from the automatic cooperation taken for granted by our own “twin pillar” Atlanticists in the 1960s and by all of Heath’s predecessors.
***A political leader must constantly feed hope — but he must constantly know what he is doing, without illusion.
Month by month the design of our foreign policy was piercing together: Atlantic relationships, the opening to China, the consequent improvement in Moscow’s attitude to serious negotiations. But we had one nightmare that might shatter all we were trying to achieve: the war in Vietnam. We could not end it on terms acceptable to Hanoi without jeopardizing everything else were were doing abroad; we could not pursue it to a decisive military result without risking all cohesion at home. So we navigated between conflicting necessities: holding out hope to our citizens that there would be an end, but posing sufficient risk to Hanoi to induce a settlement compatible with our international responsibilities and our national honor.
But once a final withdrawal date had been established by law, the already narrowing margin for negotiations would evaporate. We would lose the capacity to bargain even for our prisoners, for we would have literally nothing left to offer except the overthrow of a friendly government and the abandonment of millions to a brutal dictatorship. To end the war honorably we needed to present our enemy with the very margin of uncertainty about our intentions that our domestic opponents bent every effort to remove.
The ideal bargaining position would have existed if our public had trusted our goals and our enemy had been uncertain about our tactics. Our domestic discord produced exactly the opposite state of affairs. We faced a constant credibility gap at home while our opponents understood only too well the direction in which we were being pushed.
In the never-never land of Vietnam negotiations, having negotiators from Hanoi listen to a proposal from us was considered progress; I drew from it the naive conclusion that Xuan Thuy might go so far as to consider it.
I made a carefully prepared opening statement that suffered from the professional deformation of all negotiators who are tempted to believe that impasses yield to eloquence.
I ask you once again to take the path of negotiation with us. It is consistent with the self-respect and the objectives of both sides. We recognize the depth of your suspicions but they will not fade as time goes on and the struggle persists. This is the nature of war.
We are nearing the time when the chances for a negotiation settlement will pass. After a certain point you will have in effect committed yourself to a test of arms. I do not want to predict how this test against a strengthened South Vietnam, supported by us, will end nor how long it will last. But you must recognize that it will make any settlement with the US increasingly difficult.
Let us therefore move toward a negotiated settlement while there is still time.
He had seen too much lost through the impatience of the negotiators, even more through their vanity. He was by nature not impatient, and now too old for vanity. He was content to stand on the proposal.
His penchant for hyperbole ensured that almost nothing he could say would live up to the advance billing.
There were never any complaints about bureaucratic prerogatives when the White House assumed responsibility for Vietnam planning; the departments were only too eager to saddle the White House with the onus for the inevitable domestic uproar. I thought it my duty as security adviser not to await disasters passively or simply to gamble on the most favorable hypothesis.
Judging Rogers to be the most likely recalcitrant, Nixon conceived the idea of first maneuvering Laird into the position of proposing what Nixon preferred, and then letting his SecDef become the advocate of the plan within the NSC. He therefore considered it time well spent to preside over a succession of meetings, each covering exactly the same topic. For each meeting one more participant was added — someone whose view Nixon did not know in advance or whom he judged to be potentially hostile. The theory was that any recalcitrant was more likely to go along with a consensus backed by the President than with a free-for-all. By late January I had heard the same briefing at least 3 times and was approaching battle fatigue. Nixon was earning himself high marks for acting ability. He listened each time with wide-eyed interest as if he were hearing the plan for the first time. His questions — always the same — were a proper mixture of skepticism, fascination, and approval designed to convey to the new recruit that his chief was interested and well disposed. And since everybody else had already agreed, it took a strong individual to stand his ground in opposition. No one tried.
Throughout, Nixon made encouraging noises, asking questions with feigned amazement while steering the conversation to its ordained conclusion.
So much time, effort, and ingenuity were spent in trying to organize a consensus of the senior advisers that there was too little left to consider the weaknesses in the plan or to impose discipline on the rest of the government. There was no role for a devil’s advocate.
A President cannot take away the curse of a controversial decision by hesitation in its execution. The use of military force is a difficult decision that must always be made with a prayerful concern for Bismarck’s profound dictum: “Woe to the statesman whose reasons for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.” A leader’s fundamental choice is whether to approve the use of force. If he decides to do so, his only vindication is to succeed. His doubts provide no justification for failure; restraint in execution is a boon to the other side; there are no awards for those who lose with moderation. Once the decision to use force has been made, the President has no choice but to pursue it with total determination — and to convey the same spirit to all those implementing it. Nations must not undertake military enterprises or major diplomatic initiatives that they are not willing to see through.
Except for the last point, Rogers was right on target. Unfortunately, Nixon simply did not believe that his Secretary of State knew what he was talking about. He had heard similar objections the year before over Canada and none of the predicted horrible contingencies had materialized.
It soon became apparent that the plans on which we had been so eloquently and frequently briefed reflected staff exercises, not military reality. As a visitor to Vietnam, I had been impressed that one of the most unambiguous successes of Vietnamization was in exporting to the South Vietnamese our technique of military briefing. The essence of what I came to dub the “idiot briefing” is to overwhelm the victim with so many facts presented with such invincible self-assurance that he is fortunate if he can keep up with the words. His chance of questioning the substance disappears in the insinuating sequence of charts, arrows, and statistics. He is so proud to be able to distill a question out of the welter of material that he loses the faculty of insisting that the answer make sense.
Like so many of his colleagues he had launched himself into Vietnam with self-confident optimism only to withdraw in bewilderment and frustration. Saddled with restriction for which there was no precedent in manuals, confronted with an enemy following a strategy not taught in our command colleges, he soon fell into a trap that has been the bane of American commanders since the Civil War: substitution of logistics for strategy.
With rare and conspicuous exceptions like Douglas MacArthur, our modern generals have preferred to wear down the enemy through the weight of materiel rather than the bold stroke, through superior resources rather than superior maneuvers. In this they reflected the biases of a nonmilitary, technologically oriented society.
Whatever the reason for his failure, Westmoreland lived through the neglect suffered by those who have teetered on the edge of popular acclaim and whom the public then punishes for not living up to their assigned roles. Whoever is at fault, they are consigned to an oblivion all the more bitter for having been just one step away from being cast as hero.
An interesting study of the pathology of military campaigns would be to determine at what point an objective becomes an obsession. Moscow for Napoleon, Verdun and Stalingrad for the Germans, Gallipoli for the British, became magnets that attracted ever-mounting resources long after the original reason for the campaign had disappeared.
But our Saigon command had seen too many hortatory cables from anxious civilians over 6 years of war. The temptation was to ignore the fevered Washington policymakers and to persevere; too many crises had been weathered in this manner to change the mode of operation now.
As for the South Vietnamese, Laos exposed many of their lingering deficiencies. Their planning turned out to be largely abstract. It is formalistically imitated what was taught at our command and general staff schools without adaptation to local conditions. In retrospect I have even come to doubt whether the South Vietnamese ever really understood what we were trying to accomplish. Our objective surely was not Tchepone or any other geographic trophy. It was to slow up North Vietnamese resources and logistics throughout the dry season so as to pull the teeth of the 1972 offensive, when only residual American forces would be left. What Thieu seemed to want — it later emerged — was a quick spectacular, not a long-range strategy. Above all, the South Vietnamese suffered from the flaws inherent in their military organization. They had few reserves; their tolerance for casualties was small, except in defensive battles. Each commander, aware that his political influence depended in part on the strength and morale of the units he commanded, was eager to husband his assets and reluctant to incur losses for what seemed a distant objective.
Gently, they expressed their deep and passionate opposition to the war; but they had no idea how to end it. The problem for me, on the other hand, was to translate inchoate ideas — however deeply held — into concrete policy. Ours was the perpetually inconclusive dialogue between statesmen and prophets, between those who operate in time and through attainable stages and those who are concerned with truth and the eternal.
When I again emphasized that we had nothing to do with Sihanouk’s overthrow, Ducky’s reply added a new dimension to epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge). With a maximum effort at generosity he said: “I temporarily believe that you had nothing to do with the coup in Phnom Penh.” Lest I be carried away by this unprecedented — if limited — declaration of faith in me, Le Duc Tho immediately added that it was an assertion based on politeness rather than on conviction.
Averell Harriman weighed in on July 15 with an article in the NYT to the effect that Madame Binh had given us a “reasonable chance” to end it. Life on July 23 had few doubts: “We hope President Nixon seizes the chance.”
We were constrained from demonstrating that the “chance” was bogus and at variance with the entire record of the secret — and the public — negotiations, for precisely the opposite of the reason alleged by our critics. It was our eagerness to score a breakthrough that made us preserve a secrecy which enabled our cynical adversaries to whipsaw us between a public opinion we dared not rebut and a private record we could not publish.
He usually had to be persuaded to enter them at all; each new visit to Paris was preceded by a more or less protracted internal debate. Once that hurdle was passed, Nixon invariably approved the negotiating plan that I submitted to him. Then, when I was under way, he would deluge me with tough-sounding directives not always compatible with the plan, and some incapable of being carried out at all. The reason may have been is unease with the process of compromise or the fear of being rejected even in a diplomatic forum. A contributing cause was undoubtedly his highly developed sense of the historical record, which tempted him to ensure that he appear tougher than his associates; he was thus protected, whatever happened. And yet he never insisted on these second thoughts; he invariably returned to and backed up the original plan.
“Negotiations,” however, is a relative term in Hanoi. Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy would characterize their proposals as “concrete” and “factual”; ours by contrast were “unrealistic” and “vague” and “abstract,” no matter how specific they might be. “Realism” was measured by correspondence with Hanoi’s point of view. Ducky would treat his presence as a concession, his willingness to discuss our points — if only to reject them — as a sign of goodwill. He would introduce each new demand with the proposition that it was on reason, fact, and history, which he would then explain at excruciating length — causing me on one occasion to remark that if he would emphasize reason and go easier on history we would all gain.
No Martian observing the negotiation could have concluded that the men from Hanoi were presenting an underdeveloped country. The were sinuous, disciplined, superbly skillful in nuances of formulation, endlessly patient. They had earned their place at the conference table by ruthless struggle; they would not give up its fruits for bourgeois notions of compromise, sentimental invocation of goodwill, or liberal ideas of free elections. Unfortunately, only in epic poems are heroes humanly attractive. In real life their dedications makes them unrelenting; their courage makes them overbearing; they are out of scale and therefore not amenable to ordinary mortal intercourse.
With the self-assurance of experts who knew whereof they spoke, Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho never ceased explaining to me that the concept of a free election was meaningless: Whoever controlled the government would win. In terms of Vietnamese history they were substantially right. Liberal democracy has flourished in essentially homogeneous societies where minorities accept the electoral verdict in the hope of one day becoming the majority. But his development has been the product of centuries. Even in the US democratic liberties took over a century to reach the stage of universal adult suffrage. In Vietnam we were seeking to force the developing of a democratic tradition to its culmination in a matter of months, among a people who had been killing each other in a civil war for two decades, in circumstances where loss of political power meant not only giving up office, but risking one’s life.
In the US, a homogeneous society, the appointment of any member of the opposition party to a Cabinet is considered newsworthy as it is extremely rare. The idea that a civil war can be ended by joining the people who have been killing each other in one government is an absurdity. Generally, a coalition government is a gimmick or an excuse, not a solution. It works best where it is least needed.
And then, of course, there was Nguyen Van Thieu. He had not become President by accident. He was unquestionably the most formidable of the military leaders of South Vietnam, probably the ablest of all political personalities. Like most men who reach high office, he represented an amalgam of personal ambition and high motive. Those who do not find the exercise of power a tonic rarely aspire to exercise it and almost never gain it. Equally, those without strong values cannot withstand the ambiguities, pressures, and anguish that are inseparable from great responsibility. Thieu clearly enjoyed his office; in his attribute he was hardly alone among chief executives I have known. But he was also a man of principle; strong anti-Communist, deeply religious and patriotic, highly intelligent, defending his compatriots with great courage against an onslaught from within and without South Vietnam.
With Ky and Minh unwilling to run, the election was then turned into a referendum: voters were given the option of voting for Thieu, defacing their ballots, or boycotting the election. 87% of eligible voters participated in the election, and Thieu received 94% of the ballots cast.
I reiterated that if we overthrew the political structure of South Vietnam either by precipitate withdrawal or by excessive political concessions, friends and adversaries would conclude — after a brief moment of relief — that America’s post-WW2 leadership was giving way to a post-Vietnam abdication. An ignominious end in Vietnam would also leave deep scars on our society, fueling impulses fo recrimination and deepening the existing crisis of authority. I continued to believe that we needed to leave Vietnam as an act of governmental policy and with dignity, not as a response to pressures and a collapse of will.
Senator Muskie responded in a speech on February 2 with a new turn of the screw: The US should cut off all aid to Thieu, even after our unilateral withdrawal, unless he reached a settlement with the Communists. (It was a “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” proposition: Since the only terms available from Hanoi called for his overthrow, Thieu was being given the choice between execution and suicide.)
China was not important to us because it was physically powerful; Chou En-lai was surely right in his repeated protestations that his nation was not a superpower. In fact, had China been stronger it would not have pursued the improvement of relations with us with the same single-mindedness. Peking needed us to help break out of its isolation and as a counterweight to the potential mortal threat along its northern border. We needed China to enhance the flexibility of our diplomacy. Gone were the days when we enjoyed the luxury of choosing the moment to involve ourselves in world affairs. We were permanently involved — but not so physically or morally predominant as before. We had to take account of other power centers and strive for an equilibrium among them. The China initiative also restored perspective to our national policy. It reduced Indochina to its proper scale — a small peninsula on a major continent. Its drama eased for the American people the paint that would inevitably accompany our withdrawal from Southeast Asia. And it brought balance into the perceptions of our friends around the world.
I know of no Presidential trip that was as carefully planned nor of any President who ever prepared himself so conscientiously. The voluminous briefing books (produced under my supervision by Winston Lord and John Holdridge of my staff) contained essays on the trip’s primary objectives and on all subjects of the agenda previously established with the Chinese. They suggested what the Chinese position would be on each topic, and the talking points the President might follow. All of my conversations with Chou in July and October were excerpted and arranged by subject matter. As background material, there were lengthy analyses of the personalities of Mao and Chou, prepared by the CIA and by Richard H. Solomon, a China expert on my staff. There were copious excerpts from articles and books by Western students of China. Nixon read all the briefing books with exquisite care, as we could tell by his underlining of key passages throughout. As was his habit, he committed the talking points to memory and followed them meticulously in his meetings with Chou En-lai while seeking to cultivate the impression that he was speaking extemporaneously.
China’s role in Vietnam was an “imposture”; China would never help Vietnam effectively; the historical animosity toward Vietnam was too deep. The Chinese did not believe in any ideology; they believed primarily in China.
In this manner Nixon was exposed for the first time to the Chinese style of diplomacy. The Soviets tend to be blunt, the Chinese insinuating. The Soviets insist on their prerogatives as a great power. The Chinese establish a claim on the basis of universal principles and a demonstration of self-confidence that attempts to make the issue of power seem irrelevant. The Soviets offer their goodwill as a prize for success in negotiations. The Chinese use friendship as a halter in advance of negotiation; by admitting the interlocutor to at least the appearance of personal intimacy, a subtle restraint is placed on the claims he can put forward. The Soviets, inhabiting a country frequently invaded and more recently expanding its influence largely by force of arms, are too unsure of their moral claims to admit the possibility of error. They move from infallible dogma to unchangeable positions (however often they may modify them). The Chinese, having been culturally preeminent in their part of the world for millennia, can even use self-criticism as a tool. The visitor is asked for advice — a gesture of humility eliciting sympathy and support. This pattern also serves to bring out the visitor’s values and aims; he is thereby committed, for the Chinese later can (and often do) refer to his own recommendations. The Soviets, with all their stormy and occasionally duplicitous behavior, leave an impression of extraordinary psychological insecurity. The Chinese stress, because they believe in it, the uniqueness of Chinese values. Hence they convey an aura of imperviousness to pressure; indeed, they preempt pressure by implying that issues of principle are beyond discussion.
In creating this relationship Chinese diplomats, at least in their encounters with us, proved meticulously reliable. They never stooped to petty maneuvers; they did not haggle; they reached their bottom line quickly, explained it reasonably, and defend it tenaciously. They stuck to the meaning as well as the spirit of their undertaking. As Chou was fond of saying: “Our word counts.”
Every visit to China was like a carefully rehearsed play in which nothing was accidental and yet everything appeared spontaneous. The Chinese remembered every conversation, from those with the lowliest officials to those with the most senior statesmen. Each remark by a Chinese was part of a jigsaw puzzle, even if at first our more literal intelligence did not pick up the design. (Later on Winston Lord and I actually got quite good at it.) On my ten visits to China, it was as it we were engaged in one endless conversation with an organism that recalled everything, seemingly motivated by a single intelligence. This gave the encounters both an exhilarating and occasionally a slight ominous quality. It engendered a combination of awe and sense of impotence at so much discipline and dedication — not unusual in the encounter of foreigners with Chinese culture.
And so it was on Nixon’s visit. By the time we had taken tea, all present felt convinced — just as I had 7 months earlier during my secret visit — that they had been admitted into a very exclusive club, though there had yet to take place a single substantive conversation.
Mao Tse-tung, the ruler whose life had been dedicated to overturning the values, the structure, and the appearance of traditional China, lived in fact in the Imperial City, as withdrawn and mysterious even as the emperors he disdained. Nobody ever had a scheduled appointment; one was admitted to a presence, not invited to a governmental authority. I saw Mao five times. On each occasion I was summoned suddenly, just as Nixon was.
One usually cannot tell when meeting a famous and powerful leader to what extent one is impressed by his personality or awed by his status and repute. In Mao’s case there could be no doubt. Except for the suddenness of the summons there was no ceremony. The interior appointments were as modest as the exterior. Mao just stood there, surrounded by books, tall and powerfully built for a Chinese. He fixed the visitor with a smile both penetrating and slightly mocking, warning by his bearing that there was no point in seeking to deceive this specialist in the foibles and duplicity of man. I have met no one, with the possible exception of Charles de Gaulle, who so distilled raw, concentrated willpower. He was planted there with a female attendant close by to help steady him; he dominated the room — not by the pomp that in most states confers a degree of majesty on the leaders, but by exuding in almost tangible form overwhelming drive to prevail.
Mao’s very presence testified to an act of will. His was the extraordinary saga of a peasant’s son from southern China who conceived the goal of taking over the Kingdom of Heaven, attracted followers, led them on the Long March of six thousand miles, which less than a third survived, and from a totally unfamiliar territory fought first the Japanese and then the Nationalist government, until finally he was ensconced in the Imperial City, bearing witness that the mystery and majesty of the eternal China endured even amidst a revolution that professed to destroy all established forms. There were no trappings that could account for the sense of power Mao conveyed. My children speak of the “vibes” of popular recording artists to which, I must confess, I am totally immune. But Mao emanated vibrations of strength and power and will. In his presence even Chou seemed a secondary figure, though some of his effect was undoubtedly by design. Chou was too intelligent not to understand that the Number Two position in China was precarious to the point of being suicidal. None of his survivor had survived.
Mao, in contrast to all other political leaders I have known, almost never engaged in soliloquies. Not for him were the prepared points most statesman use, either seemingly extemporaneously or learned from notes. His meaning emerged from a Socratic dialogue that he guided effortlessly and with deceptive casualness. He embedded his main observations in easy banter and seeming jokes, maneuvering his interlocutor for opportunities to inject comments that were sometimes philosophical and sometimes sarcastic. The cumulative effect was that his key points were enveloped in so many tangential phrases that they communicated a meaning while evading a commitment. Mao’s elliptical phrases were passing shadows on a wall; they reflected a reality but they did not encompass it. They indicated a direction without defining the route of march. Mao would deliver dicta. They would catch the listener by surprise, creating an atmosphere at once confused and slightly menacing. It was as if one were dealing with a figure from another world who occasionally lifted a corner of the shroud that veils the future, permitting a glimpse but never the entire vision that he alone has seen.
Later on, as I comprehended better the many-layered design of Mao’s conversation, I understood that it was like the courtyards in the Forbidden City, each leading to a deeper recess distinguished from the others only by slight changes of proportion, with ultimate meaning residing in a totality that only long reflection could grasp. In the pleasantries recorded by Nixon there were hints and themes that, like the overture to a Wagner opera, needed elaboration before their meaning became evident.
And since Westerners were notoriously slow-witted, Mao reverted to a recurrent theme of my meetings with Chou: “I think that, generally speaking, people like me sound a lot of big cannons. That is, things like ‘the whole world should unite and defeat imperialism, revisionism, and all reactionaries, and established socialism.’” Mao, seconded by Chou, laughed uproariously at the proposition that anyone might take seriously a decades-old slogan scrawled on every public poster in China.
Not all was strategy, however, in the encounter with Mao. Even in our brief meeting he could not escape the nightmare that shadowed his accomplishments and tormented his last years: that it might all prove ephemeral, that the exertions, the suffering, the Long March, the brutal leadership struggles would be but a brief incident in the triumphant, passive persistence of a millennial culture which had tamed all previous upheavals, leaving little more in their wake than the ripples of a stone falling into a pond. “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world,” said Nixon. “I have not been able to change it,” replied Mao, not without pathos. “I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.”
It was a modest claim after a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot the very essence of his society. In its matter-of-fact resignation it underlined the revolutionary dilemma. The qualities needed to destroy are usually not those needed to sustain: The greater the upheaval, the more it may lead to a new apparatus even more pervasive and usually much more efficient than the one replaced. Revolutions conducted in the name of liberty more often than not refine new tools of authority. This is no accident. Academicians may define human freedom by concepts of human rights; historians understand that freedom resides not only in legal structures but in the general acceptance of institutions and the ease of human relationships. A society not scourged by irreconcilable schisms can practice tolerance and respect human dignity even in the absence of legally defined rights. Tolerance is guaranteed by tradition. But a nation riven by factions, in which the minority has no hope of ever becoming a majority, or in which some group knows it is perpetually outcast, will seem oppressive to its members, whatever the legal pretensions.
The essence of modern totalitarianism is the insistence on a single standard of virtue and the corresponding destruction of all traditional restraints. The effort to make uniform the new morality has given rise to passions unknown since the periods of religious conflict and it has caused governments to arrogate powers to themselves unprecedented in history. To be a true revolutionary one requires a monstrous self-confidence. Who else would presume to impose on his followers the inevitable deprivations of revolutionary struggle, except one monomaniacally dedicated to the victory of his convictions and free of doubt about whether they justified the inevitable suffering? It is the pursuit of this charismatic truth — sometimes transcendental, as often diabolical — that has produced the gross misery as well as the profound upheavals that marked modern history. For “truth” knows no restraint and “virtue” can accept no limits; they are their own justification. Opponents are either ignorant or wicked, and must be either reeducated or eliminated. The more violent the uprooting, the more the need to impose new order by discipline. When spontaneity disappears, regimentation must replace it.
And the primeval resistance of a society grown great by the smothering of shocks evoked ever-greater spasms from that colossal figure, who challenged the gods in the scope of his aspirations.
To Mao, Communism was the truth. But as he achieved the dreams of his youth he — alone among all the fathers of 20th-century Communism — espied a deeper truth. He discovered that the evolution of Communism could wind up mocking its pretension, and that the essence of China might transmute his upheavals into a mere episode in its seemingly eternal continuity. Millions had died for a classless society, but in the hour of its realization it dawned on Mao that the enthusiasm of revolutionary fervor and the stifling controls necessary to transform a society would both in time run up against the traditions of his people whom he both loved and hated. The country that had invented the civil service would turn the Communist bureaucracy into a new mandarin class more confirmed in its prerogatives than ever by the maxims of a true dogma. The nation whose institutions had been shaped by Confucius into instruments for instilling universal ethics would before long absorb and transform the materialist Western philosophy imposed on it by its latest dynasty.
The aging Chairman railed against a fate so cruelly mocked the suffering and meaning of a lifetime of struggle. Unable to bear the thought that the new was turning into a confirmation of what he had sought to destroy, he launched himself into ever more frenzied campaigns to save his people from themselves while he still had the strength. Many revolutions have been made to seize power and to destroy existing structures. Never has their maker undertaken a task so tremendous and possessed as to continue the revolution by deliberate systematic upheavals directed against the very system he has created. No institution was immune. Each decade an assault was launched against the huge, bloated bureaucracies — the government, the Party, the economy, the military. For several years all universities were closed. At one point China had only a single ambassador abroad. Mao destroyed or sought to destroy every Number Two man. In the nature of their position these men were forced to deal with the practical, hence the continuing, issues of Chinese life — the very problems that evoked Mao’s premonition of ephemerality and his all-too-Chinese fear that they would erode the moral distinctiveness of the Middle Kingdom.
And so each decade the fading Chairman would smash what he had created, forgoing modernization, shaking up the bureaucracy, purging its leadership, resisting progress in order to maintain undefiled values that could be implemented, if at all, by a simple peasant society, encapsulating his people in its superior virtue while sacrificing all the means to defend it. And in the process he acted like the emperors whom he replaced and in whose compound he now lived, becoming like them in his practices in the struggle to prevent the return to their values.
One of history’s monumental ironies is that probably no one better understood the built-in tensions of Communism than the titanic figure who made the Chinese Revolution. He had the courage to grapple with the implications of that insight. Pragmatic Communism leads to mandarinism, nationalism, and institutionalized privilege. His critique of Soviet Russia was so wounding to the Russians because it was essentially true. But truly revolutionary Communism leads to stagnation, insecurity, international irrelevance, and the continuing destruction of disciples by new votaries who prefer purity to permanence. Mao in his last decades oscillated between the two choices. Having understood the inherent dilemma of Communism, he would periodically permit a small dose of modernization, only to destroy those who had defiled his vision by carrying out his orders. And these series of planned upheavals still did not preoccupy him so much that the neglected the traditional Chinese statecraft of using one set of barbarians to balance another.
Until his death he was quintessentially Chinese in never doubting the cultural superiority of what he had wrought. He resisted modernization because it would destroy China’s uniqueness, and he fought institutionalization because it banked China’s ideological zeal. It has been said that revolution destroy their makers. The opposite was true of Mao; he was the maker who destroy one revolutionary wave after another. He fought the implications of his own revolution as fiercely as he did the institutions he had originally overthrown. But he had set a goal beyond human capacity. In his last months, bereft of speech, able to act only a few hours a day, he had passion strong enough for one last outburst against the pragmatists, again represented by Teng Hsiao-ping. And then that great, demonic, prescient, overwhelming personality disappeared like the great Emperor Chin Shi Huang-ti with whom he often compared himself while dreading the oblivion which was his fate. And his words to Nixon, like so much of what he said and attempted, had the ring of prophecy: “I have only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.”
When I had experienced this marvel of planning some months earlier, I had asked a Chinese protocol officer how they managed to combine so much precision and latitude without any of the frenzied huffing by which protocol departments of other countries, including our own, demonstrated their virtuosity. It was all very simple, said the Chinese diplomat. Visitors were given only the time of the departure and of return and the places to be visited. They were under no psychological pressure from the detailed minute-by-minute schedule with which the protocol officers usually discipline their charges (and demonstrate the intricacy of their preparations). For their own planning the Chinese broke down the allotted time into segments of 8 minutes (though why 8 remains suitably enigmatic). If guests spent more time in one place than was allowed for, equivalent 8-minute segments were removed from later part of the tour; if less, 8-minute segments could be added.
Chinese protocol thus inspires a strange sense of repose; it conveys both respect and a flattery all the more effective for appearing totally matter-of-fact.
Choul handled the exotic Americans with aplomb. In contrast to the Soviets, with whom no secret negotiation was complete without some attempt to play our various channels off against each other, the Chinese never dropped a stitch. They scheduled the meetings and kept the information compartmentalized as if they had dealt with our strange practices all their lives. It turned out that Chou did not mind keeping his own Acting Foreign Minister Chi Peng-fei otherwise occupied. “He has his limitations,” Chou explained dryly to Nixon.
Two great nations sought cooperation not through formal compacts but by harmonizing their respective understanding of international issues and their interests in relation to them. Cooperation thus became a psychological, not merely a legal, necessity. The focus of discussion was on the requirements of the balance of power, the international order, and long-term trends of world politics. Both sides understood that if they agreed on these elements, a strategy of parallel action would follow naturally; if not, tactical decisions taken individually would prove ephemeral and fruitless.
The communique was thus less subject to misinterpretation or inconsistent elaboration by the two sides than is the case with the normal document that tends to fudge disagreements as well as agreements; the former to convey an impression of harmony, the latter to avoid the charge of collusion. It was more reassuring to our respective allies and friends.
In the 20 hours Chiao Kuan-hua and I needed to resolve these conflicting approaches, just as on my secret trip, each side pushed the other against the time limit to test whose resiliency was greater. Determination was masked by extreme affability. The best means of pressure available to each side was to pretend that there was no deadline. Conciliatory conduct would heighten the sense of urgency without producing personal strain. Yet while pressure is inescapable in any negotiation, the talks were also conducted with unusual delicacy. Each side took care not to make irrevocable demands or to bargain as if a move by one required a concession by the other. For different reasons Taiwan involved issues of principles for both countries. And to suggest that principles have a price can be offensive. This is why the two sides conducted themselves as if we had to solve a common problem not by a sharp bargain but by a joint understanding. We took pains to explain our domestic necessities to each other with great frankness, because we knew that the communique would not survive if negotiated through trickery or found unacceptable at home. We recognized that on some issues the only thing negotiators can achieve is to gain time with dignity. On Taiwan it was to leave the ultimate outcome to a future that in turn would be shaped by the relationship which would evolve from the rest of the communique and by the manner in which it was negotiated.
As nuclear superpowers, we had indeed an obligation to reduce the threat of nuclear confrontation. Peking would no doubt have preferred a simpler pattern of overt hostility between Washington and Moscow. This would have eased its calculations and improved its bargaining position. Our necessities were more complicated. Peking’s domestic imperatives pushed it toward confrontation; our imperative was to demonstrate to our public and to our allies that we were not the cause of conflict, or else the Congress would dismantle our defenses and our allies would dissociate from us. Only from a conciliatory platform could we rally support for firm action in a crisis.
It was a three-dimensional game, but any simplification had the makings of catastrophe. If we appeared irresolute or leaning toward Moscow, Peking would be driven to accommodation with the Soviet Union. If we adopted the Chinese attitude, however, we might not even help Peking; we might, in fact, tempt a Soviet preemptive attack on China and thus be faced with decisions of enormous danger.
I was convinced that we had made our breakthrough. In every negotiation a point is reached where both sides have gone too far to pull back. Accumulated mutual concessions create their own momentum; at some stage retreat puts into question the judgment of the negotiators. Mao had put this same principle in his usual indirect fashion while pretending to Nixon that agreement was not essential: “… if we fail the first time, then people will ask why we are not able to succeed the first time? The only reason would be that we have taken the wrong road. What will they say if we succeed the second time?” Mao was quite right. An initial failure was bound to blight a later success: “What use is there if we stand in deadlock?”
On the plane to Hangchow the State Department experts were given the communique, in the preparation of which they had no part. Predictably, they found it wanting. It is the price that must be paid for excluding the professionals from a negotiation. Unfamiliar with the obstacles overcome, those not participating can indulge in setting up utopian goals (which they would have urged be abandoned during the first day of the negotiation had they conducted it) and can contrast them with the document before them. Or they can nitpick at the result on stylistic grounds, pointing out telling nuances, brilliantly conceived, which the world was denied by their absence.
Before us lay the immense city of Shanghai, with just a few flickering lights barely suggesting the presence of close to 11M people. All else was blackness. The mass of China lay before us, all-pervasive but invisible.
For all their charm and ideological fervor, the Chinese leaders were the most unsentimental practitioners of balance-of-power politics I have encountered. From ancient times Chinese rulers have had to contend with non-Chinese neighbors and potential conquerors. They have prevailed, often from weakness, by understanding profoundly — and exploiting for their own ends — the psychology and preconceptions of foreigners.
While the Nixon Administration came into office, two Chinese governments claiming legitimacy were dealing with their foreign problems by startlingly similar methods. Chiang Kai-shek dealt with us from a position of weakness; Mao maneuvered the Soviets also from a position of weakness. Both were doing well.
Emotional slogans, unleavened by a concept of the national interest, had caused us historically to oscillate between excesses of isolation and overextension. The new “morality” was supposed to extricate us from excessive commitments. But moral claims lent themselves as easily to crusades as to abstinence; they had involved us in the distant enterprises to begin with. This American volatility unsettled the international equilibrium and those who relied on us. It was ultimately dangerous to the maintenance of peace. What the intellectual community’s loathing of Nixon kept them from understanding was that we agreed with their professed desire to relate ends to means and our commitments to our capacities. We parted company with many of them because we did not believe it sensible to substitute one emotional excess for another. Indeed, one reason why the Vietnam debate grew so bitter was that both supporters and critics of the original involvement share the same traditional sense of universal moral mission.
Values and principles would inspire our efforts and set our direction. But it was no use rushing forth impetuously when excited or sulking in our tent when disappointed. We would have to learn to reconcile ourselves to imperfect choices, partial fulfillment, the unsatisfying tasks of balance and maneuver, given confidence by our moral values but recognizing that they could be achieved only in stages and over a long period of time.
It was a hard lesson to convey to a people who rarely read about the balance of power without seeing the adjective “outdated” precede it. It was not one of the least ironies of the period that it was a flawed man, so ungenerous in some of his human impulses, who took the initiative to lead America toward a concept of peace compatible with its new realities and the awful perils of a nuclear age, and that the foreign leaders who best understood this were the two grizzled veterans of the Long March, Mao and Chou, who openly expressed their preference for Richard Nixon over the wayward representatives of American liberalism.
For sovereign nations, predictability is more crucial than spasmodic brilliance or idiosyncratic moralistic rhetoric. They must gear their actions to the performance of others over extended period of time; their domestic survival and international security alike may depend upon it. And it was on this level of shared geopolitical interest transcending philosophies and history that the former Red-baiter and the crusaders for world revolution found each other.
On one occasion Mao went so far as to advise me to make sure that when I visit Asia I spend as much time in Tokyo as in Peking; Japan’s pride should be respected. I accepted the recommendation. The Chinese, indeed, came to stress that US-Japanese relations were more important than US-Chinese relations. One of the advantages of our relationship with Peking has been that neither we nor the Japanese have been pressured by China to make a choice of priorities or induced to jockey for Peking’s favor.
It would be dangerous in the extreme to assume that Chinese objectives and ours are in all respect identical. Peking would prefer to see us so embroiled with the Soviets that it need pay no price at all for a collaborative relationship with Washington. In such conditions, the protection afforded by the American option would be “free.” Chinese leaders unquestionably would aspire to a clear-cut alignment rather than an American policy of equidistance between Moscow and Peking that titled toward Peking only because it was the weaker and more threatened of the Communist giants. For our part, we did not have any illusions about the permanence of the new relationship. Peking and Washington were entering a marriage of convenience transformed into an emotional tie primarily by Chinese psychological skill and American sentimental recollection of a China that no longer existed, if ever it had. Once China becomes strong enough to stand alone, it might discard us. A little later it might even turn against us, if its perception of its interests requires it. Before then, the Soviet Union might be driven into a genuine relaxation of tensions with us — if it has not first sought to break out of its isolation by a military assault on China. But whatever China’s long-term policy, our medium-term interest was to cooperate, and to support its security against foreign pressures.
We enjoyed diplomatic ties in all but name; we had throughout a regular channel of intimate communication at the highest level and more frequent exchanges than had most of the Western governments which had recognized Peking many years earlier.
Once more, though, we encountered the curious phenomenon that success seemed to unsettle Nixon more than failure. He seemed obsessed by the fear that he was not receiving adequate credit. He constantly badgered his associates to press a public relation campaign that would call more attention to the China visit. He followed the press carefully, so that any criticism could be immediately countered.
Some of Haldeman’s descriptions were on the marks; others were bizarre; the whole concept was irrelevant. Leaders do best by emphasizing performance; surely this is all that history cares about. The conviction that Nixon’s standing depended less on his actions than on their presentation was a bane of his Administration. It conveyed a lack of assurance even during his greatest accomplishments. It imparted a frenetic quality to the search for support, an endless quest that proved to be unfulfillable. It made it impossible for him ever to trust the momentum of events. It caused him to seek to embellish his most incontestable achievements, or to look for insurance in the face of even the most overwhelming probability of success. It was the psychological essence of the Watergate debacle.
There were larger stakes. If we collapse in Vietnam, the patient design of our foreign policy would be in jeopardy. The Moscow summit would take place — if at all — against the background of two successful assaults on American interests made possible by Soviet weaponry. Our negotiating position in the eyes of the cold calculators of power in the Kremlin would be pathetically weak. China might reconsider the value of American ties. Allies, whatever they thought of the merits of our Vietnam policy, would question our judgment and our mastery of events. In other parts of the world, those who believed in the arbitrament of arms would be emboldened; this might unhinge the Middle East. The grave consequences that we thought would flow from a political surrender would be aggravated by a military collapse. We were determined to prevent this disaster; we would blunt the offensive and conclude the war on honorable terms. The last, but perhaps the most painful, ordeal of the Vietnam war was upon us.
March thus turned into a period of waiting and decisions that reflected the national schizophrenia: Withdrawals were combined with reinforcements; threats of retaliation alternated with fleeting moments of hope that maybe for once Hanoi was bluffing. We were neither anxious nor confident, but rather resigned to events.
And their talk took place in a spirit of “friendship and comradely frankness,” which in Communist parlance generally means some disagreement.
We were in complete agreement that there could be no Soviet summit if the North Vietnamese offensive succeeded. He could not go to Moscow after humiliation imposed by Soviet arms.
Nixon saw in diplomacy a sign of potential weakness; I considered it a weapon.
We pointed out that Peking could be under no misapprehension about the profound importance of the issue for the US. Indeed, we emphasized that it could not be in the long-term interest of China for the US to be humiliated in Indochina. The note warned that “major countries have a responsibility to use a moderating influences on this issue and not to exacerbate the situation.” Attempts to “impose a military solution upon the US can only lead to unfortunate consequences.”
Concerned by the budgetary costs, eager to use the offensive to settle the fate of Vietnamization, the Pentagon civilians on the whole maintained that the forces in the field were already sufficient. This might have been accurate enough by the sophisticated calculations of system analysis; it was not adequate for the political goal of bringing maters to a head and overawing outside intervention. If we wanted to force a diplomatic solution, we had to create an impression of implacable determination to prevail; only this would bring about either active Soviet assistance in settling the war or else Soviet acquiescence in our mounting military pressures, on which we were determined should diplomacy fail.
But as I told the President, if we failed, not even 10 speeches would do us any good.
Clearly, Moscow was getting nervous. I warned Dobrynin that we would no longer agree to talk while the fighting was going on. We would insist on an end to the offensive or we would take even more serious measures. He did not bristle at this threat. The Soviets rarely bully when they believe the opponent to be strong and serious.
As I have pointed out in other chapters describing crises, once embarked on confrontation it is more dangerous to stop than to proceed. A pause in one’s moves causes the other side to wonder whether it has seen the limit of the response and to test whether the status quo can be sustained. Confrontations end when the opponent decides that the risks are not worth the objective, and for this the risks must be kept high and incalculable. We therefore continued to raise both the diplomatic and military stakes.
But it did so in an uncharacteristically halfhearted way that showed profound confusion. It suggested April 27 for resuming the plenaries and May 6 for the secret meeting; May 6 was chosen, the note said, to give Le Duc Tho time to travel. Rarely before had Hanoi answered so rapidly or offered an explanation for any of its decisions.
The departure time had been chosen, as on almost all of my trips, to permit me to arrive in Moscow too late in the evening for serious talks. This reduced the effects of jet lag by guaranteeing a night’s rest before important conversations. Twice when I violated this principle and went straight from an overnight flight to negotiations with Le Duc Tho, I paid a psychological price. When I went directly from a transatlantic flight into talks, I found I was on the verge of losing my temper at North Vietnamese insolence — nearly falling into their trap by playing the role they had assigned me.
I favored secrecy because it freed me from the necessity of living up to criteria set beforehand by the media and critics. When we gave briefings after the event, we would be able to do so in the context of whatever had been achieved, not what other people expected or desired or invented.
In 1972 the State Department’s report referred to the President 172 times, to Rogers 96 times, and to me once — in reprinting the text of the announcement of the President’s trip to China, from which I simply could not be deleted. It included four photographs of the President, eight of Rogers, none of me. This was not much to show for a year in which it was revealed that I had made a secret trip to China and engaged in 7 secret sessions with the North Vietnamese, not to mention the SALT breakthrough and the Berlin agreement. Someone on my staff counted the references; I do not which was more petty, State’s snub or my noticing it.
Mao and Cho represented a society with the longest uninterrupted experience in the art of government, a nation that had always been culturally preeminent in its region. China had absorbed conquerors and had proved its inward strength by imposing its social and intellectual style on them. Its leaders were aloof, self-assured, composed. Brezhnev represented a nation that had survived not by civilizing its conquerors but by outlasting them, a people suspended between Europe and Asia and not wholly of either, with a culture that had destroyed its traditions without yet entirely replacing them. He sought to obscure his lack of assurance by boisterousness, and his sense of latent inadequacy by occasional bullying.
To be sure, no one reached the top of a Communist hierarchy except by ruthlessness. Yet the charm of the Chinese leaders obscured that quality, while Brezhnev’s gruff heavy-handedness tended to emphasize it. The Chinese even amid the greatest cordiality kept their distance. Brezhnev, who had physical magnetism, crowded his interlocutor. He changed moods rapidly and wore his emotions openly. These contrasting styles seemed also to be reflected in Chinese and Russian food. Chinese cuisine is delicate, meticulous, and infinitely varied. Russian meals are heavy, straightforward, predictable. One eats Chinese food gracefully with chopsticks; one could eat most Russian food with one’s hands. One walks away from a Chinese meal satisfied but not satiated, and looking forward to the next experience. After a Russian meal one is stuffed; one can barely face the prospect of the next round.
The fact that in 60 years there had been only 4 Soviet leaders tells much about the Soviet system — or maybe any Communist one. No Communist state has solved the problem of regular succession. Every leader dies in office, or is replaced by couplike procedures. Honorific retirement is rare and nonexistent for the supreme leader. No Soviet leader’s reputation, except Lenin’s, has survived his death. In every Communist state a leadership group seize power, grow old together, and are eventually replaced by successors whose ability to reach the pinnacle depends on their skill in masking their ambitions. They live uncertainly on the way to the top, and they are aware of impermanence when they have supreme power — for they know that they will probably be denied by their successors the accolade of history, which is the incentive of most statesmen. In an ultimate paradox the political system based on historical truth defines historical significance to its votaries. They gain a long tenure in office at the price of oblivion.
Brezhnev was, in short, not only head of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union but quintessentially Russian. He was a mixture of crudeness and warmth; at the same time brutal and engaging, cunning and disarming. While he boasted of Soviet strength, one had the sense that he was not really all that sure of it. Having grown up in a backward society nearly overrun by Nazi invasion, he might know the statistics of relative power but seemed to feel in his bones the vulnerability of his system. It is my nightmare that his successors, bred in more tranquil times and accustomed to modern technology and military strength, might be freer of self-doubt; with no such inferiority complex, they may believe their own boasts and, with a military establishment now covering the globe, may prove far more dangerous.
Equality seemed to mean a great deal to Brezhnev. It would be inconceivable that Chinese leaders would ask for it — if only because in the Middle Kingdom tradition it was a great concession granted to the foreigner. To Brezhnev it was central.
Flattery can be effective only if it is graced with some plausibility.
Brezhnev lead a nation that after nearly 60 years of horrible exertions still lagged behind Wester Europe in technology and standard of living. He seemed in awe of American technology; he backed off in a crisis whenever we confronted him unambiguously with American power. The Soviet Union had acquired a tremendous military potential; it was a superpower; it had to be taken seriously. But it could not avoid the reality — perhaps even the premonition — that the Communist system is incompatible with the human spirit, that a modern economy cannot be run efficiently by total planning, that man cannot flourish without freedom. The state that sought to abolish the contradictions of the capitalist system emerged with a contradiction at once consoling to us and menacing: It could not possibly flourish with its existing structure because it stifle all creativity in a soulless bureaucracy. But its single-minded concentration on the one thing it did well, the accumulation of raw military power, gave it the means to disturb every equilibrium and the incentive to seek foreign success, even as its core grew more and more hollow. It thus faced us with the grave danger that its leaders at some point might seek to escape their historical perplexities by using the weapons they had so implacably accumulated over the decades.
I read a novel once, based on the proposition that each human being has a finite amount of qualities like courage and endurance and wisdom, and that life consists of expending these ever-dwindling resources. Something like that seemed to have happened to Brezhnev. When I met him he had gone through the Stalin purges of the Thirties (indeed, his first big jump up the ladder took place then), WW2, a new wave of purges, the power struggle following the death of Stalin, and the intrigue that led to the overthrow of Khrushchev and catapulted Brezhnev to the top. He seemed at once exuberant and spent, eager to prevail but at minimum risk. He had enough excitement for one lifetime. He spoke often, and on occasion movingly, about the suffering and trauma of WW2. None of this, of course, changed the realities of Soviet power, which he was augmenting energetically. And this would have to be balanced by our strength, whatever Brezhnev’s intentions or professions. Detente could never replace a balance of power; it would be the result of equilibrium, not a substitute for it. And I therefore consistently spurred the strengthening of our own defenses. Maybe Brezhnev’s performance was all theater, though I believe outsiders exaggerate busy leaders’ capacity for sustained dissimulation. I thought he was genuine in his desire for a respite for his country. What I was unsure of was the price he would be willing to pay for it. Was he prepared for an end to the constant probing for openings and the testing of every equilibrium? Was he ready to begin a true period of coexistence? Or was it all a tactical maneuver to weaken our vigilance before the next round of pressures would be exerted with growing power?
This statement convinced me that Brezhnev would go to great lengths to avoid canceling the summit. And nothing could reveal better the Soviet fixation with China than Brezhnev’s apparent assumption that something that helped China would by definition be anathema to us. The “Chinese menace” had become second nature; it supplied its own justification even when cited to an American who, not 2 months previously, had drafted a communique in Peking whose condemnation of hegemony was clearly aimed at Soviet expansionism. This obsession also accounted for the compulsive manner in which the Soviet leaders kept raising China, oscillating between seeming uneasiness and the unshakable conviction that sooner or later — if they only keep at it long enough — we would join them in a condominium to stifle what they considered the overwhelming threat from the East.
Nations do not generally transmit offers with whose rejection they intend to associate themselves. Brezhnev’s low-key treatment of Vietnam, his refusal to seek to soften our threats or contest our tough demands, was further indication that we could go quite some distance between the Soviets would jeopardize the summit. This was crucial intelligence for the crisis that would be ahead, either if the North Vietnamese refused the May 2 meeting or if it failed.
One of Brezhnev’s most striking characteristics, as of almost all Soviet negotiators, was his anxiety to get matters wrapped up once he had decided on a breakthrough. He could haggle and stall for months, even years. But one his own cumbersome machinery had disgorged a design, his domestic standing seemed to depend on his ability to get it implemented rapidly.
The episode is significant precisely because it was so petty. Anything that could conceivably be gained by such a crude maneuver must surely be outweighed by its powerful reminder that in dealing with Soviet leaders one must be constantly on one’s guard. It is illustrative of the Soviet tendency to squander goodwill for marginal gains and of a nearly compulsive tendency to score points meaningful only, if at all, in terms of the Politburo’s internal rivalries.
After that stormy sessions, all was again serene and jovial, as is the way of Soviet negotiators when they have at last discovered what the negotiating limits are.
In my view one of the worst mistakes in a negotiation is to ask for something that is clearly unfulfillable. However tough such a demand sounds, it changes the psychological balance in a perverse way. Since the other side may not wish to admit the limitations of its power or influence, it may invent reasons for the refusal that sour the entire relationship. And the party that has put forward the proposal will be faced with either breaking off the negotiation or, if it proceeds, suggesting that its demands need not to be taken seriously.
He was convinced that he had been defeated in 1960 by two foreign policy events above all: his restraint on Cuba in the debate with Kennedy, and Khrushchev’s cancellation of Eisenhower’s projected Moscow summit. Nixon wanted to be the one to cancel, if it came to that; this would be less humiliating than having the Soviets knock the summit out from under him in an election year.
As usual, it was part of the Assistant’s task — expected by Nixon — to winnow out those “decisions” that he really did not mean to have implemented. A good rule of thumb was that the President’s seriousness was in inverse proportion to the frequency of his commands and the emphasis with which they were put forward.
My first secret meeting with the North Vietnamese in nearly 8 months, the object of so many weeks of effort, thus consisted of nothing more than Hanoi’s reading its public position to me without explanation, modification, or attempt at negotiation. I suggested that there was really nothing left to discuss. Le Duc Tho thought otherwise. In his view I had been deprived for too long of his epic poem of American treachery and Vietnamese heroism and he now made up for this neglect.
But it served a useful purpose in enabling Presidents to escape the claustrophobic tension of the White House. For the White House imprison as well as exalts. The combination of living quarters and office in the same building may produce a sense of isolation as if the President and his aides were alone in the midst of a hurricane. The White House has a tendency to evoke simultaneous overconfidence and paranoia in its occupants; periodic release from its pressure is a necessity. The Sequoia provided a quick sanctuary; it was handier than Camp David, easier for casual, informal discussions. It is a shame that it was later dispensed with. It was made to order for the fateful discussions now to take place.
I had gone along with Nixon’s preliminary decision in deference to his superior knowledge of the domestic political consequences. But when the Cabinet officer generally believed to have the best political brain in the Administration considered cancellation a domestic liability, I guiltily realized that on the Sequoia I had fallen to that cardinal sin of Presidential Assistants: permitting oneself to be seduced by arguments because they comported with Presidential preference. My duty was to speak unambiguously to those subjects for which I had responsibility.
The analytical side of the CIA, never the group of wild-eyed Cold Warriors that media and Congressional investigators later suggested, generally reflected the most liberal school of thought in the government. They had long since given up on Vietnam; they tended to believe that nothing could work. At a minimum they knew that they could suffer great damage by making hopeful predictions that turned out to be wrong; they ran few risks in making pessimistic forecasts. They now provided the analytical rationale for what Laird had suggested.
Abrams responded through Bunker that his forces were sufficient — making him unique among American military leaders, whose readiness to request additional forces, if only as an alibi should failure follow their refusal, is usually insatiable.
I acknowledged to Winston Lord that all we had patiently put together over three years might go down the drain in a 20-minute speech. But we had no choice. Seeing the President toasting Brezhnev while we were being defeated by Soviet arms in Vietnam would not be understood by Americans whose sons had risked or given their lives there. It would be better to stand firm, gain respect, and pick up the pieces later.
With these preparations on track, all was quiet. I sat in my office, knowing that the next few days would determine the fate of our foreign policy and perhaps of the Nixon Administration. I felt like a boxer in the hours before a championship fight, unable to do anything further to improve his chance for success. To ease the tension I spent most of the interval making personal phone calls to friends who must have been astonished by my uncharacteristic solicitude. Some of them complimented me afterward on my “cool.” They gave me too much credit. I was fatalistic; unknowingly they did me a great kindness by helping me pass the time, providing me with a personal warmth that would not be in plenty supply when the storm broke and that would help sustain me in the trials ahead. And in one or two cases they gave me a last glimpse of a relationship that would shortly be sundered forever.
But it was a dialogue of the deaf. The distinguished Ivy League presidents were not interested in the merits of the issues in dispute between us and North Vietnam. They were there as spokesmen of an emotion. One of them stated that none of the students would really care if Saigon fell. Another allowed that our principles might be “persuasive,” including the principle of “not letting one group dominate another,” but since we did not help people in similar circumstances elsewhere, why did we have to do it in Vietnam? In other words, unless we defended every moral purpose everywhere we had no right to defend any principle anywhere. But the real problem boiled down to a more practical concern. One of them admitted: “I don’t see how we can continue to run our universities if the war escalates… What will we face in September?” Against this line of reasoning no persuasion was possible.
Consideration of the issues was dismissed; the profound emotion that now dominated the campuses was beyond rational analysis. The idea that the President of the US was responsible for keeping order in our universities was novel, especially coming from liberal academicians. It was the ultimate expression of the abdication of institutional leaders in our society, of the abasement of the middle-aged before the young, of the dismissal of rational discourse by those with the greatest stake in reason.
Correctly he lamented that the military, abused for years by civilian leadership, proved unable to respond imaginatively when given a freer hand. (Al Haig, he granted, “certainly is an exception.”)
Nixon had a meeting with Austria’s shrewd and perceptive Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who had parlayed his country’s formal neutrality into a position of influence beyond its strength, often by interpreting the motives of competing countries to each other. That he could bring off this balancing act was a tribute to his tact, his intelligence, and his instinct for the scope — and the limits — of indiscretion. He was much traveled; his comments on the trends and personalities were invariably illuminating. He had a great sense of humor and far more geopolitical insight than many leaders from more powerful countries. One of the asymmetries of history is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries (PM Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore is another good contemporary example).
There was about the arrival ceremony the quintessential Soviet mixture of brute strength and surface efficiency, coupled with the latent sense that some minor problem could make the whole splendid machinery grind to a halt.
With great power goes great responsibility. It is precisely when power is not accompanied by responsibility that the peace is threatened. Let our power always be used to keep the peace, never to break it.
We should recognize further that it is the responsibility of great powers to influence other nations in conflict or crisis to moderate their behavior.
And the Soviets leaders were psychologically too insecure and insensitive to intangibles to trust themselves in theoretical discussions. They had reached eminence by the cold elimination of rivals who were also colleagues. They could hardly trust a capitalist statesman more than they trusted one another. Collective leadership aggravated the unease. A mistake made collectively could be survived; a setback caused by an individual’s excessive trust seemed unforgivable. Soviet leaders therefore reinsured themselves over and over again by documents and written interpretations. Philosophical discussions made them visibly nervous; they considered them either a trick or a smokescreen; they maneuvered them as rapidly as possible in the direction of some concrete result that could be signed. The result was that even written agreements were achieved by so much haggling along the way that they stood alone and on their own terms; they left little residue of goodwill. One had the sense that only the literal meaning of document would be observed (if at all) and that was not written down had no significance whatever. The “spirit” of a document was a meaningless phrase to the Soviet leadership.
This meant in practice that the discussion between Nixon and the Soviet leaders lacked a central theme. There was one dramatic meeting on Vietnam. For the rest the Soviet leaders met with Nixon at irregular intervals, discussing a grab bag of subjects, including Europe, the Middle East, and economic relations, without achieving either precise conclusions or profound political insight.
On the other hand, Kosygin’s capacity for survival may well have derived from the fact that he never aspired to the very summit of power. Successive leaders beginning with Stalin had valued his competence; none had seen him as a potential rival. His main career having been on the governmental side, he lacked, in any event, the power base within the Party machinery from which to aim for the pinnacle. At the same time, Kosygin could neither have reached so near the top nor maintained himself there for so long if he were entirely unskilled in Kremlin politics. He must have played one of the key roles in the palace revolt that overthrew Khrushchev, for example. But his longevity was due to the fact that his actions were not in service to personal ambition. His commitment to duty was vividly illustrated when his wife was fatally ill; Kosygin went ahead with his day’s chores, even continuing to stand on Lenin’s tomb to review a Red Square parade after the message of her death reached him.
Kosygin was shrewd in assessing character — obviously a requirement for survival in the Soviet system. Brezhnev seemed to play on the aspirations, ambitions, and weaknesses of his interlocutors by instinct; Kosygin gave the impression of doing so on the basis of skillful calculation.
Suddenly the thought struck me that for all the bombast and rudeness, we were participants in a charade. While the tone was bellicose and the manner extremely rough, none of the Soviet statements had any operational content. The leaders stayed well clear of threats. Their so-called proposals were the simple slogans of the Paris plenary sessions, which they knew we had repeatedly rejected and which we had no reason to accept now that the military situation was almost daily altering in our favor. The Soviet leaders were not pressing us except with words. They were speaking for the record, and when they had said enough to have a transcript to send to Hanoi, they would stop.***
Seriousness surfaced, however, when Brezhnev advanced the proposition that, despite the late hour, Gromyko and another senior Soviet official were waiting for me in Moscow to resume SALT negotiations. I was not eager, after the motorcade, the hydrofoil ride, the brutal Vietnam discussion, and the heavy meal, to meet a fresh Soviet team headed by the indefatigable Gromyko. Though it was already past midnight Nixon, feeling no pain, made me available. This meant that I now faced the prospect of serious talks beginning at about 1AM. Kosygin said that if I failed, Lake Baikal would be too good for my exile.
He, much more than Nixon, who had achieved his triumph simply by arriving in Moscow, needed a success. As in Peking, I therefore slowed down the process of negotiations to test whose nerves would prove to be stronger.
In the silence of that early morning I walked through the vast, empty squares of the Kremlin, seized by one of those rare moments of hope that makes the endless struggle with the contingent endurable for statesmen. Though we were not yet agreed, the tone of the meeting made it likely that we would be able to negotiate a treaty within the guidelines approved by Nixon. There was a chance that we were participating in an event that would give mankind a breathing space, and with luck start a process that could lead to a more tranquil future.
At the airport stood a slight, erect figure, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shahanshah Aryamehr, imperial by title, imperious by bearing. America has little to be proud of in our reaction to his overthrow many years later. History is written by the victors; and the Shah is not much in vogue today. Yet it hardly enhances our reputation for steadfastness to hear the chorus today against a leader whom 8 Presidents of both parties proclaimed — rightly — a friend of our country and a pillar of stability in a turbulent and vital region.
As time went on and I got to know the Shah better, I realized that he was not by nature a domineering personality. Indeed, he was rather shy and withdrawn. I could never escape the impression that he was a gentle, even sentimental man who had schooled himself in the maxim that the ruler must be aloof and hard, but had never succeeded in making it com naturally. His majestic side was like a role rehearsed over the years. In this he was a prisoner, I suspect, of the needs of his state, just as he was the ultimately the victim of his own successes.
Basically, the Shah was applying axioms of all the more “advanced” literature of the West. Even his neglect of political institutions had roots in Western thinking about the relationship between economic development and political stability. Much of the American theory about economic development reflected the experience of the Marshall Plan. Political stability was supposed to follow from economic advance; it was assumed by many Western economists, and believed by the Shah, that the government which raised the standard of living would thereby gain public approbation. In other words, economic progress was itself a contribution to political stability. This theory proved to be disastrously wrong and misguided.
In Europe and Japan, where political institutions and a functioning bureaucracy had developed over the centuries, the threat to stability was indeed the gap between reality and expectation; there, economic progress enhanced the acceptability of the government that brought it about. But in undeveloped countries economic growth tends to have the opposite effect; it compounds political unrest. Established institutions are undermined, and if it happens before new ones are put in their place upheaval is inevitable. The mass migration from the countryside into the cities separates the workers from traditional patterns of life before new relationships can take their place. Precisely when economic development gains its greatest momentum, the existing political and social structures grow most fragile and the accepted values of tradition are most threatened. Fortunate is the country that can manage a transition to new political forms without turmoil. Wise is the ruler who understands that economic development, far from strengthening his position, carries with it the imperative of building new political institutions to accommodate the growing complexity of his society.
Perhaps it is history’s tragic lesson that only two kinds of structure seem able to survive the stresses of modernization: either totalitarian governments imposing their will and national discipline, or else democratic governments where pluralism and a constitutional tradition were already in place before industrialization began. Regrettably, the recent period finds few new examples of democratic evolution in the developing world. For developing countries, one of the attractions of Marxism (or, now, reversion to theocracy) is that it provides a rationale for the exercise of power and a rigid structure of discipline and authority amidst the disintegration of traditional forms.
He quoted an observation of President Eisenhower that, whatever their differences, one thing all successful political leaders seemed to have in common was “the ability to marry above themselves.” He then proposed a toast to the Shah and “to his lovely Empress, who has been by his side…” The King of Kings looked off into the distance with melancholy.
We were willing enough to have the Shah cooperate with us as friend and ally for 37 years; we impress no one by condemning him now. We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
The root dilemma was that whatever course we chose, whether confrontation or conciliation, would run up agains the reality that Atlantic relations had reached a plateau. The postwar generation’s goals of security and prosperity had substantially been met. Remaining was a residue of tactical problems imposed by events; there was lacking an agreed strategy for either confrontation or conciliation, for either long-term security or the attainment of other long-range purposes. These would now have to grow out of a dialogue with allies much better able to insist on their own perceptions than ever before.
My aim was to produce a stalemate until Moscow urged compromise or until, even better, some moderate Arab regime decided that the route to progress was through Washington.
Disengagement had not chance of success as long as it had to be negotiated together with an overall settlement. And if there was no chance of success, I saw no reason for us to involve ourselves. Our ace in the hole was that if we played our cards right, we could produce tangible progress in diplomacy while the Soviets could promise only help in war. But for this strategy to work we had to be effectual; we could not waste our prestige on futile maneuvers. To succeed, an interim agreement therefore had to be separated from the comprehensive settlement; if they were linked, we would merely dissipate our influence by chasing a mirage that had all the difficulties of the comprehensive schemes it purported to replace and that we were no more able to produce than Moscow.
In the absence of agreed objectives it proved impossible to bridge the gulf between the two sides’ conceptions by procedural legerdemain. At various time each side was led to believe that we sympathized with its version of the interim concept; disillusionment, frustration, and stalemate were the inevitable result.
My idea was to use an interim agreement to break the impasse. Once achieved, such a step would ease the way to further advances.
In an astute analysis, Hal Saunders wrote me on May 19 that he feared Sadat might have been counting on Rogers to deliver a Canal agreement; Sadat, who had just carried out the massive purge of pro-Soviet elements in his government, probably needed diplomatic progress “to make his policy work and survive politically. The door is open for a major letdown if there is no movement now.”
I told both Gammal and Rabin that if I decided to engage myself, their respective governments would have to face up to the hard decisions required. Egypt would have to give up its precondition of a commitment to total withdrawal; Israel would have to be prepared to put forward a reasonable package. The only point in staking Presidential prestige was to make progress.
Even with the new negotiating channels, I saw no need for haste. We had always wound up granting Israel’s requests, but only after political disputes at home that did not advance negotiations, yet made the Administration appear impotent.
The bane of Soviet diplomacy is its persistent quest for maximum advantage. Sometimes the constant pressure erodes resistance; but often it backfires by removing any incentive for a serious dialogue.
Dobrynin had replied that Moscow also had the option to increase its military presence in Egypt dramatically. I was skeptical: first, because I was convinced that Moscow would stop well short of committing its own forces in what could easily escalate into a direct confrontation with the US; second, and principally, because I began to sense that our strategy was beginning to work, at least with respect to Egypt.
I told Nixon my impression was that the Soviets were holding Sadat at arm’s length, fearful of the risks of all-out support, and awaiting my talks with Dobrynin. As usual, they wanted everything: Egyptian subservience, minimum risk, and the complete Arab program. But diplomacy rarely works that way: Those who grab for everything, who forget that politics is the art of the possible, in the end may lose all.
We calculated that the prospect of a meeting after the summit would serve as a greater incentive for restraint than an earlier talk which in the nature of first contacts was bound to be inconclusive.
On May 22 I sent Nixon my assessment that the relationship between Sadat and the Soviets was now one of a worried client to his patron rather than that of equal partners with confident in each other.
Later on, I came to know Sadat as one of the few truly outstanding leaders I have met. He possessed that combination of insight and courage which marks a great statesman. He had the boldness to go to a war no one thought he could sustain; the moderation to move to peace immediately afterward; and the wisdom to reverse attitudes hardened by decades. But in 1972 none of this was apparent.
But, still handicapped by my underestimation of the Egyptian President, I never guessed that he would settle the issue with one grand gesture, and unilaterally. My first reaction on hearing the news was that he had acted impetuously and forfeited an important negotiating asset, for no return.
Our demonstrations of firmness on India-Pakistan and on Vietnam must have convinced the Kremlin that one more crisis would overload the circuit. Coupled with this firmness, our conciliatory posture in Moscow and the prospect of further moves on trade helped produce Soviet restraint.
With amazing chutzpah, Brezhnev’s letter argued that the Soviet departure from Egypt was in part an implementation of the troop withdrawal proposal presented by Gromyko to Nixon in September 1971; a down payment, as it were, on the offer to withdraw Soviet forces! Thus, it was argued, the US was now under an obligation to fulfill its part of the bargain, namely to influence Israel toward a settlement “whose centerpiece should be the liberation of all Arab territories occupied by it in 1967.” I saw no point in debating this mind-boggling demand; I repeated my offer to explore the Moscow principles. It was the best way to gain time to find out what Cairo was thinking.
It was all, as I would come to realize, vintage Sadat. His negotiating tactic was never to haggle over detail but to create an atmosphere that made disagreement psychologically difficult. He (like Chou En-lai) laid stress on a philosophical understanding, recognizing that the implementation of agreements between sovereign states cannot be enforced; it requires a willingness on both sides. Agreement on concepts is sometimes more important than on details. I cannot say that I fully understood Sadat’s insight then. Great men are so rare that they take some getting used to.
The big issue is to define practical measures to accomplish this. It serves nobody’s interest to make empty promises. This is the meaning of the term realistic.
The two sides, meeting in a spirit of goodwill, should explore all possibilities with a view to beginning a continued exchange of serious and open views.
In meetings with both the President and me he repeated the standard Soviet line as if absolutely nothing had changed. He was loath to abandon sacramental positions, even though he had no idea how to implement them. He deprecated an interim settlement, claiming that Egypt would reject it. (We knew better.)
Many consider negotiations as a sign of weakness. I always looked at them as a weapon for seizing the moral and psychological high ground. Some treat willingness to talk when there is no pressure as an unnecessary concession; to me it is a device to improve one’s strategic position, because one’s interlocutor is aware that one faces no necessity to make concessions.
Our goal was honor; we could run a risk for peace. But Thieu’s problem was survival; he and his people would be left indefinitely after we departed; he had no margin for error.
Whereas 50K American combat troops were still stationed in Korea, we proposed to withdraw all our troops from Vietnam, which had much longer and much less easily defended frontiers and an even more implacable enemy.
Thieu certainly complicated matters by never making his objections explicit. Instead, like Le Duc Tho in Paris, he fought with characteristic Vietnamese opaqueness and with a cultural arrogance compounded by a French Cartesianism that defined any deviation from abstract, unilateral proclaimed principles as irreconcilable error.
Insolence is the armor of the weak; it is a device to induce courage in the face of one’s own panic. But that is clearer to me now than it was then. In September 1972 a second Vietnamese party — our own ally — had managed to generate in me that impotent rage by which the Vietnamese have always tormented physically stronger opponents.
Thus if Hanoi decided to settle before the election, we had, in my view, an opportunity that might be unlikely to return. After November 7, whichever course we chose — endurance or escalation — would have to be pursued without a deadline on Hanoi; we would be pushed against the grindstone of Congressional pressures. We might not even be able to count on Soviet and Chinese acquiescence indefinitely, or we might be asked to pay some price for it in our relations with them. I thought it wiser to exploit a unique conjunction of circumstances that put us in the strongest domestic, military, and international positions in many years. It was time to seek to extract the maximum concessions from Hanoi.
All these views of Paris passed by as I paced its streets, lost in reflection. We stood within sight of an exhilarating goal; a great deal would depend on what I did and recommended and pursued over the next few days.
And in this manner I would have repaid a small part of the debt I owed to the country that had sheltered my family and me from persecution, hatred, and tyranny.
After our just-completed marathon, having averaged about 3 hours sleep a night for 4 days, they were to spend 10 straight hours the following afternoon and evening on painstaking, nitpicking technical and linguistic issues. The rest of us on the return journey were suspended between euphoria and exhaustion.
But Thieu never engaged in a conceptual discussion. Instead, he fought in the Vietnamese manner: indirectly, elliptically, by methods designed to exhaust rather than to clarify, constantly needling but never addressing the real issue — methods by which through the centuries the Vietnamese have sought to break the spirit of foreigners before tackling them physically in one of their heroic charges. One cannot say that it has not worked; unfortunately, in inspires little confidence; it is especially tough on allies. But then no Vietnamese, North or South, would believe that confidence or trust or friendship is decisive. They have survived foreigners for centuries not by trusting but by manipulating them.
Their nightmare was not this or that clause but the fear of being left alone. For Saigon’s leaders a cease-fire meant the departure of our remaining forces; they could not believe that Hanoi would abandon its implacable quest for the domination of Indochina. In a very real sense they were being left to their own future; deep down, they were panicky at the thought and too proud to admit it. And they were not wrong. We have considered the presence of American forces in Korea essential for the military and psychological balance on that peninsula.
As on my secret visit to Moscow in April, I now found myself locked into a communications cycle with Washington that made an effective exchange of views extremely difficult and, as events speeded up, produced escalating misunderstanding, all compounded by the pressures of deadlines, the large stakes involved, and the emotion connected with the homestretch of the war.
It was hardly surprising that I began to develop the classic neurotic syndrome that comes sooner or later to all those diplomats who work in the field. There were times when Washington seemed to me more interested in positioning itself over what had already happened than in sharing responsibility for our critical decisions.
Ever since the US asked me to resign and bargained with me on the time of my resignation, had I not been a soldier I would have resigned. Because I see that those whom I regard as friends have failed on me. However great the personal humiliation for me I shall continue to fight. My greatest satisfaction will be when I can sign a peace agreement. I have not told anyone that the Americans asked me to resign, since they would share my humiliation, but have made it appear voluntary on my part.
In the period before us I think it is absolutely imperative that we not show any nervousness. Everyone should exude optimism and give the impression that we may be very close to an agreement. If we are hard pressed by questions we should simply say that technical details always arise in the last stage of negotiations. And if we are really pressed to the wall we should concentrate on the question of North Vietnamese forces in the South. At all cost we must avoid letting Thieu become the object of public scorn, not for his own sake but for our own. If Thieu emerges as the villain, even if we finally overcome his objections, everything that we have done for the past 8 years will be thrown into question.
We proposed this way back in back in October 1970 and again in January 1972 and May 1972. What else were these plans going to lead to except precisely the situation we now have?
Many wars have been lost by untoward timidity. But enormous tragedies have also been produced by the inability of military people to recognize when the time for a settlement had arrived.
As yet as his hour of triumph approached, Nixon withdrew ever more, even from some of his close advisers. His resentments, usually so well controlled, came increasingly to the surface. It was as if victory was not an occasion for reconciliation but an opportunity to settle the scores of a lifetime.
But to ask for resignations en masse within hours of being elected, to distribute forms obviously mimeographed during a campaign in which many of the victims had been working themselves to a frazzle, was wounding and humiliating. It made removal from office appear to be not the result of Presidential reflection about the future but a grudge from the past. Nixon’s later troubles had other immediate causes, of course; yet he surely deprived himself of much sympathy then by conveying in his hour of triumph an impression of such total vindictiveness and insensitivity to those who were basically well-disposed to him.
I was struck by how restless Nixon was, now that he had achieved the overwhelming electoral approval which had been the ambition of a lifetime. It was almost as if it had been sought for its own sake; as if, standing on the pinnacle, Nixon no longer had any purpose left to his life.
He was difficult to reach. We spoke occasionally on the telephone. To others he was totally inaccessible. The leader who had just won 61 percent of the popular vote cut himself off from his own people. At a moment when, by reaching out, he might have engraved himself in America’s heart, as he already had left his mark on its mind, he withdrew into a seclusion even deeper and more impenetrable than in his years of struggle. Isolation had become almost a spiritual necessity for this withdrawn, lonely, and tormented man who insisted so on his loneliness and created so much of his own torment. It was hard to avoid the impression that Nixon, who thrived on crisis, also craved disasters.
Af the secret trip to China I became much more visible, and this hit the White House on its rawest never: public relations. Of course, every President carefully nurtures his own image; the obsessive pursuit of it, after all, brought him to where he is. No Chief Executive would take kindly to an appointee who is cast by the media as the source of all constructive actions. In Nixon’s case this was compounded by his conviction that he faced a lifelong conspiracy of the old Establishment determined to destroy him and that all media attention was ultimately due to public relations, in which, inexplicably, his staff was sadly deficient.
Coming on top of a year of successful negotiations on a wide array of subjects with different countries, it was for me a moment of unusual pride not leavened by humility. Fallaci caught that mood even if she took liberties with my pronouncements (which I cannot prove). She wrote history in the Roman style; she sought psychological, not factual, truth.
He asked for an unambiguous answer.
But lack of ambiguity was precluded by Vietnamese culture and Thieu’s personality. Thieu followed the procedure that had by now become stereotyped. He met with Haig on November 10, listened thoughtfully to his explanation of the President’s letter, asked intelligent questions, and promised to think about it overnight. Then on November 11 he confronted Haig and Ambassador Bunker with his entire NSC and flatly turned down our suggestion to establish priorities among the textual changes he sought. He insisted on all of them.
He urged us to make concessions because great powers could afford a generous attitude: “One should not lose the whole world just to gain South Vietnam.” On the other hand, no one should be humiliated. Chiao’s line was an even softer version of what we had come to recognize as the standard Chinese position: sympathy for Hanoi, but no expenditure of Chinese capital on its ally’s behalf. (Except for slightly cruder tactics, this was exactly Moscow’s attitude.)
The interval had not been kind to either of us. To a group of men so morbidly suspicious as his colleagues in the Hanoi Politburo, Le Duc Tho must have appeared guilty of the unforgivable sin of having been tricked by a wily capitalist.
This proved to be a major tactical mistake. The list was so preposterous, it went so far beyond what we had indicated both publicly and privately, that it must have strengthened Hanoi’s already strong temptation to dig it heels and push us against our Congressional deadlines. I put them forward in order to avoid the charge that we were less than meticulous in guarding Saigon’s concerns — and to ease the task of obtaining Thieu’s approval. As often happens when one acts for the record, we achieved neither objective. Since there was no possibility whatever of obtaining this many changes — as we had warned Thieu — every one we abandoned he could use to demonstrate our lack of vigilance and as another pretext for recalcitrance. And once we started the process of retreat we tempted Hanoi to delay in order to see what other concessions might be forthcoming.
Nixon meanwhile had changed his mind again. He now thought I should keep the talks going. He had sent me a “suggestion” to that effect late on November 24 after the recess had already been agreed. It was uncharacteristic of Nixon and showed how isolated he was at Camp David. No political leader I have met understood the dynamics of negotiations better than Nixon. He knew that the process of talking rarely produces solutions by itself; only a balance of incentives and penalties can produce progress.
I had begun to be seized with a premonition of disaster independent of the issues involved. An experienced negotiator develops a sixth sense for when the other side is ready to settle. The signals are usually matters of nuance: Some issues are not pressed to the absolute limit; some claims are marginally modified; the doors to compromise are always kept tangentially ajar. None of these indicators appeared in the November round of talks; indeed, all the signs were contrary: Hanoi’s concessions were marginal and inconclusive; they kept the goal of a settlement always tantalizingly out of reach. One telltale sign was Tho’s persistent reluctance to let experts from both sides discuss the protocols — documents that were to spell out in detail the arrangements for implementing general clauses in the main agreements.
Predictability, Washington proved inhospitable to incipient failure. It is a city that thrives on tales of prominence and decline. The raw material of its social life and day-to-day conversation is the rise and fall of the powerful. I had been protected for nearly 4 years — except for a brief storm during the India-Pakistan crisis — by the unambiguous support fo the President. I had been associated with a whole series of successful negotiations. The media had treated me perhaps excessively gently — partly as a contrast to Nixon. I was now to suffer the corresponding penalty.
And not even my severest critics have accused me of excesses of humility, the lack of which is bound to invite challenges when vulnerability appears.
The President, in fact, thought my proposed talking points were somewhat “too soft.” He wanted to show me how to achieve a clear-cut result. Having no experience with the Vietnamese negotiating style, he did not appreciate that it avoids showdown, that is pliant obtuseness often makes it impossible to determine the precise nature of the issue or what exactly has been agreed.
So that’s how it looks to us. I know it looks different to you. I am sure we can spend the whole week discussing history, good will and serious intent. But what we need now is wisdom to see whether we can settle in the short term because we understand the long term already. We will make a maximum effort. You may not consider this enough. I actually think we could settle very quickly. We have two plans, one for war and one for peace. There is no sense giving you our plan for war. We have talked about this often enough. Let me tell you about our plan for peace.
The central issue is that Hanoi has apparently decided to mount a frontal challenge to us such as we faced last May. If so, they are gambling on our unwillingness to do what is necessary; they are playing for a clearcut victory through our split with Saigon or our domestic collapse rather than run the risk of a negotiated settlement. This is the basic question; the rest is tactics. If they were willing to settle now, I could come up with acceptable formulas and would not need to bother you. Assuming they are going the other route, we are faced with the same kind of hard decisions as last spring.
Nixon’s reply directed me to open the next meeting with a series of questions much in the style of a prosecuting attorney, to try to pin Hanoi to a series of intransigent positions to strengthen the record in case the talks should recess or break up. I was then to invite Hanoi to make its final offer. Nixon’s approach had merit, though I thought he vastly overrated my ability to pin down Le Duc Tho to unambiguous answers.
Le Duc Tho changed his style somewhat. He abandoned the obvious stonewalling of the previous sessions. He started giving some ground — but always made sure to keep the conclusion of the text just out of reach. He adamantly refused to allow the experts to discuss the protocols; this gave him another means to prevent a conclusion and also added a surrealistic abstractness to the main negotiations. And a bullying tone crept into his presentations, indicating that he thought Hanoi was gaining the upper hand psychologically.
I was correct in cabling Nixon that we might well achieve one or two of our minimum additions in another session, but it was also true that this was precisely where Le Duc Tho wanted us: tantalizingly close enough to an agreement to keep us going and prevent us from using military force, but far enough away to maintain the pressure that might yet at the last moment achieve Hanoi’s objectives of disintegrating the political structure in Saigon.
Fundamentally, Nixon’s and my attempts to shift responsibility back and forth were as meaningless as they were unworthy. If the negotiations succeeded, there would be the same scramble for credit as there was now to avoid blame. If they failed, I was the logical victim — and justifiably so whatever the merits of my analysis. I had pushed the course that had produced the existing situation; Presidential associates have an obligation to protect their chief. I had incurred a special responsibility in this regard by my solitary procedure.
Reflections such as these were, of course, of little help in Paris. My dilemma was that I was caught between Saigon’s obstreperousness, the subtle insolence of Hanoi, and a soggy set of perceptions in Washington, which, by trying to keep negotiations going at nearly all cost, was depriving us of the leverage to bring matters to a head.
A bluff in which the gap between the formal position and what one will accept is so wide cannot work.
But self-pity, whatever the cause, could not be more than a transient indulgence. Somehow we had to master events, not simply deplore them.
I received incredibly bitter letters from erstwhile friends, from angry citizens. (None of them wrote me in January when the agreement was reached.) Charges of immorality and deception were thrown around with abandon; “barbaric” was another favorite adjective. It seemed to be taken for granted that North Vietnam was blameless and that we were embarked on a course of exterminating civilians.
But we still did not have the agreement of that doughty little man in Saigon, President Thieu. Nixon was determined to prevail. “Brutality is nothing,” he said to me. “You have never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn’t go along, believe me.”
I have therefore irrevocably decided to proceed to initial the Agreement on January 23 and to sign it on January 27 in Paris. I will do so, if necessary, alone. In that case I shall have to explain publicly that your government obstructs peace. The result will be an inevitable and immediate termination of US economic and military assistance which cannot be forestalled by a change of personnel in your government. I hope, however, that after all our two countries have shared and suffered together in conflict, we will stay together to preserve peace and reap its benefits.
Triumph seemed to fill Nixon with a premonition of ephemerality. He was, as he never tired of repeating, at his best under pressure. Indeed, it was sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that he needed crises as a motivating force — and that success became not a goal but an obsession so that once achieved he would not know what to do with it. The festivities surrounding the Inauguration were large but not buoyant. Participants acted as if they had earned their presence rather than as if they shared in a new common purpose. Through it all Richard Nixon moved as if he were himself a spectator, not the principal.
Only rarely in history do statesmen find an environment in which all factors are so malleable; before us, I thought, was the chance to shape events, to build a new world, harnessing the energy and dreams of the American people, and mankind’s hopes.
He was alone in his moment of triumph on a pinnacle, that was soon to turn into a precipice. And yet with all his insecurities and flaws he had brought us by a tremendous act of will to an extraordinary moment when dreams and possibilities conjoined.