The Statesman in Winter: Kissinger on the Ford Years

Little analysis of the American national interest in Vietnam and Cambodia can be found in Years of Renewal. At the time Kissinger frequently invoked fears about the loss of American credibility. But that argument's force has faded over the years, as history has revealed few ripples beyond the watershed of the Mekong, and it is barely mentioned here. Vietnam had its greatest effect on America not in causing foreign dominoes to fall but in changing the way Americans thought of themselves.

Instead, Kissinger stresses again and again the need to maintain the national honor of the United States. Discussing the war's agonizing denouement, he emphasizes that "neither the Ford nor the Nixon administration ever invoked a legal obligation to assist Vietnam. What we insisted on was something deeper -- a moral obligation."

This is not the rhetoric of a dispassionate geopolitical chess player. A chess player does not sacrifice half his pieces to defend a vulnerable rook out of moral obligation. But then, Kissinger never was an especially dispassionate person. As a supervisor and colleague he was hot-tempered; as a statesman and friend he was often sentimental, even if the sentiment was filtered through his usual sardonic mask.

Where his emotions are touched so deeply, Kissinger's memoir-writing is at its worst. His chapters on the fall of Cambodia and Vietnam are fierce indictments of those who opposed more U.S. intervention or aid. Yet these same chapters include practically no analysis of the violations by all sides of a 1973 peace accord that few thought would bring peace, of the internal pathologies that so limited the military effectiveness of the Thieu government in South Vietnam, and of the proposed aid's likely impact. The administration's requests for aid, therefore, look like palliatives for a bad conscience.

But Kissinger reminds readers that others should have bad consciences as well, and here his Cambodia chapter is especially wrenching. Some of his opponents in Congress and the media, for example, professed a belief that communist victories would bring a peaceful political settlement. The New York Times reported the approach of the Khmer Rouge to the gates of Phnom Penh under the headline, "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life." Those who check Kissinger's footnote will learn that the author of the Times article was Sydney Schanberg, who would later come to prominence as a leading American witness to Cambodia's "killing fields."

REGARDING HENRY

Kissinger's great gifts as a statesman, at least from the evidence in these pages, lay less in analyzing the national interest -- where he was neither particularly original nor innovative -- than in two other spheres.

First, Kissinger had a great talent for cutting through reams of information to find the operational essence within. He could see the real issues in time, moving backward or forward, and envision the next sequence of bureaucratic and diplomatic moves. It was by harnessing this ability that Kissinger was able to turn abstract wishes into concrete policies. This was, for example, his singular achievement in the opening to China. He found a halting and ineffectual American policy driven mainly by shifts in Chinese politics. Urged on by Nixon's geopolitical musings, Kissinger crafted channels and opportunities for movement.

By the time of the events described in this memoir, however, the Sino-American relationship had been hollowed out by lack of substance and the turmoil of Chinese politics during Mao's last years. In this book the best illustration of Kissinger's operational skill comes in his chapter on the Cyprus crisis of 1974. The analysis of American interests is ordinary, but the analysis of how they could actually be advanced is illuminating, as Kissinger deals first with the Greek moves and then the Turkish response, all the while limiting damage and avoiding ill-considered commitments.

Kissinger's chapter on the Angolan debacle is also well done. He conscientiously raises and addresses his critics' arguments while tracing the destructive interaction between his diplomatic strategy to restrain Cuban and Soviet military intervention, the congressional cutoff of U.S. covert aid, and Soviet political and military calculations. The memoir shows how Kissinger's perceptiveness could lead to frustration: he and Ford set a general direction for U.S. policy -- covert aid -- but, given the battered leadership at the CIA, lacked subordinates capable of operationalizing their abstract wishes and addressing the policy's temporizing drift. Kissinger had the insight to see it was not working even before Congress killed the program, but had no one with sufficient will or capacity to fix it.

Kissinger's second great gift was an acute intuitive ability to assess other people, situate them in their political environment, and adapt himself to their needs -- at least if they were foreigners. This gift is displayed best in the chapters on his Middle East diplomacy, which are gems.

They are gems, it is worth pointing out, not necessarily because the diplomatic efforts they recount were especially successful. It is a common fallacy to judge a statesman by policy outcomes, which are actually influenced by many variables, rather than by the quality of thought brought to bear on the circumstances he could reasonably have understood. The passage of time has helped Kissinger become more detached, producing some of his finest writing to date. He reflects not only on his own constraints but on those facing Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat. He shows exceptional sensitivity to the situation of embattled Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And he recounts the determined and courageous struggle, with very narrow room for maneuver and with his own star waning in Washington, to achieve what became the 1975 Sinai II accord.