The Statesman in Winter: Kissinger on the Ford Years

In 1979 Henry A. Kissinger published his memoir White House Years, dealing with the first term of the Nixon administration, in which he was the president's national security adviser. In 1982 came Years of Upheaval, dealing with the year and a half of Nixon's foreshortened second term, in which Kissinger was both national security adviser and, from October 1973, secretary of state. Now Kissinger has finally completed the trilogy with Years of Renewal, dealing with the two and a half years in which he served President Ford, first in the same two jobs and then, from November 1975, only as secretary of state. In this new volume Kissinger also reflects at length, and with more distance, on the time with Nixon that so deeply shadowed everything Kissinger would do afterward.

No American statesman has done more to document and explain what he did and why he did it. Not only has he now produced nearly 4,000 pages of memoirs, but Kissinger has also set the standard for recording every policy-related utterance while in office. His phone conversations were monitored and meticulous notes were made of his meetings, internal and external. Kissinger eventually installed a taping system to relieve weary staffers and transfer the burden of drafting transcripts to a night shift. (This taping system, analogous to the one Lyndon Johnson used, was quite separate from Nixon's own, about which Kissinger says he was ignorant until shortly before it was disclosed to all in 1973.) The products of these extraordinary efforts -- which extended beyond the usual official practice of tracking conversations with foreigners to include contacts with anyone, including government colleagues and the president -- are quoted frequently in Years of Renewal but without any notation of the source.

Kissinger argues, correctly, that for all its preoccupation with secrecy, the Nixon administration is the most thoroughly documented and recorded presidency in American history. But why did they do it? Kissinger writes:

For Nixon, it was an extension of his permanent nightmare that, in the end, all his efforts -- the self-discipline, the strong decisions wrung from nagging self-doubt -- would vanish into thin air, defeated by the hostility of contemporaries and the indifference of historians. At regular intervals, Nixon would send me lengthy memoranda on how to interpret for posterity the various actions in which he had been involved. The purpose of these memoranda was less to affect immediate publicity -- they were too complex for that -- than to influence the judgment of history by becoming part of the permanent record.

So too for Kissinger's even lengthier memoranda, these memoirs.

SELF-PORTRAIT OF A MIND

Every account of Kissinger allows that he is very intelligent. Those hostile to him then add other adjectives like vain or devious. His admirers use those adjectives too -- but return to the intelligence.

What really were Kissinger's extraordinary gifts? Kissinger himself argues that he (and Nixon) stood out against a background of utopian zealots, both liberal and conservative, because of their realistic analysis of national interests. (Kissinger grants Nixon great strategic insight but portrays him here as given to constant musing, throwing off sparks of brilliance and foolishness in almost equal measure. It was thus left to Kissinger and H. R. Haldeman, the priests at the oracle, to interpret the rumblings and judge what should actually be done.)

In the author's preferred paradigm of intelligence -- one of utopian crusaders vs. cool realists -- Indochina is a prime example. Kissinger writes that he and Nixon "never blamed our predecessors for the mess" in Vietnam, but he certainly blames them now: "Wilsonianism had involved the United States in Indochina by means of universalist maxims which had proved successful in Europe and were now applied literally in Asia. . . . Wilsonianism rejects peace through balance of power in favor of peace through moral consensus. It sees foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil. . . ." Kissinger says that he and Nixon knew instead that these ideals were worthy but impractical and saw "foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point" in which they would be guided by "a concept of the national interest," and a "realistic assessment of our own and others' interests."

This self-portrait is largely false, however much Kissinger may believe in it. Yet its falsity actually makes Kissinger more interesting.

To begin with, the Wilsonianism he describes is a cartoon originally drawn by Wilson's popularizing worshipers and polemical detractors. Kissinger's use of this label blurs together Wilson and William Jennings Bryan, Harry S Truman and Henry Wallace, John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson. And it hardly seems to fit the principal architects of Indochina policy, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara. As the former said to the latter about Vietnam in October 1963, "You're going to have an authoritarian regime, and the question is whether they make asses of themselves." Not terribly Wilsonian -- and not so objectionable to the younger Kissinger, who privately wrote to Bundy in 1965 that the administration's course in Vietnam was "just right -- the proper mixture of firmness and flexibility."

Kissinger offers himself as a model of cool analysis of the national interest. In this book he proudly quotes his first foreign policy report to Congress: "Our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around." Yet nowhere was this credo followed less than in Indochina, the problem that consumed more blood and treasure than any other on Kissinger's watch and drove so much of his agenda with his main adversaries, Russia, China, and Congress.