CRISIS AND CONFRONTATION
By Henry Kissinger
WHITE HOUSE YEARS: PART 3
War in Jordan. Should the U.S. intervene, or should it give Israel the go-ahead to help King Hussein with attacks against the Syrian invaders? "I have decided it," says Richard Nixon in a dawn phone conversation with Henry Kissinger. "Don't ask anybody else. Tell him [Israel's Yitzhak Rabin], 'Go.' "
War on the Indian subcontinent. Would the Chinese jump in on Pakistan's side? Would the Soviets then move against China? "We were on the verge of a possible showdown. If the Soviet Union threatened China, we would not stand idly by. A country we did not recognize and with which we had had next to no contact for two decades would obtain some significant assistance."
These are among the dramatic moments described by Kissinger in this final installment of TIME's excerpts from his forthcoming memoirs, White House Years. Kissinger muses on the statesman's craft ("Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited"); assesses Charles de Gaulle, the Shah of Iran, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin; and sums up the philosophy that he believes should guide U.S. foreign policy. He concludes with a moving essay on the role of faith in a technocratic age.
White House Years will be published on Oct. 23 by Little, Brown (1,521 pages; $22.50). It covers Kissinger's service as National Security Adviser during Nixon's first term and ends with the signing of a Viet Nam peace agreement in January 1973. A second volume will recount the period up to January 1977, during most of which he was Secretary of State.
MIDDLE EAST MANEUVERS
"As 1970 began, "writes Kissinger, "the gods of war were inspecting their armaments, for it was clear they would soon be needed." Israeli bombers were conducting "deep penetration " raids on Cairo and the Nile Delta. Moscow was installing its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles near the Nile and the Suez Canal, and at least 15,000 Soviet combat personnel were in Egypt to operate and defend the sites. Despite the growing danger of an Egyptian-Israeli war, however, the biggest blowup of 1970 occurred in Jordan. Twice in three months, Palestinian guerrillas tried to assassinate Jordan's King Hussein. When the King's troops began retaliating against the fedayeen, it looked as if the Soviet-backed regimes of Iraq and Syria might intervene. To complicate matters further, guerrillas hijacked four foreign airliners in early September and directed three of them to a dirt airstrip 30 miles from the Jordanian capital of Amman: there they held hundreds of passengers as ransom for imprisoned fedayeen. "Black September," the climactic clash between Hussein and the guerrillas who increasingly threatened his rule, was beginning to unfold. To weigh the situation, Kissinger activated his crisis committee, the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG). At the group's urging, the U.S. began placing airborne infantry units on alert and moving planes and ships into the eastern Mediterranean to discourage meddling by the Soviets or their clients.
If the Soviet Union had pressed for the release of hostages and a cease-fire around Sept. 10, the gain for the fedayeen would have been massive; the authority of the King would have been gravely weakened. Instability in Jordan would have been added to insecurity along the Suez Canal; Soviet prestige would have been demonstrated and reinforced. But 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.
At the end of the second week in September, the Palestinians had destroyed all four airplanes but had achieved no basic concessions either from the U.S. or from Israel. Our tone had become increasingly firm; we were almost hourly augmenting our military forces in the area. At this point, whether because our readiness measures had given him a psychological lift or because he was reaching the point of desperation, Hussein resolved on an all-out confrontation with the fedayeen.
Late on Sept. 15, Dean Brown, our newly arrived Ambassador to Jordan, sent in an urgent cable from Amman that Hussein had decided to re-establish law-and-order in his capital. After surrounding the city with loyal troops, Hussein on Sept. 17 boldly ordered his army into Amman. Large-scale fighting broke out, spreading also to the north of Jordan around Irbid.
Now that civil war had erupted in Jordan, a rapid deployment of U.S. forces was vital to discourage any temptations. I discussed this at great length with Nixon. 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."
Invasion from Syria
In the face of the U.S. military moves, the Soviets seemed to grow nervous. On Sept. 18 they sent a reassuring note. Kissinger was encouraged, but not his boss.
Nixon expressed his doubts; whenever the Soviets volunteered reassurance, he said, something sinister was afoot. He proved to be right.
On the morning of Sunday, Sept. 20, Syrian tanks invaded Jordan. At about 6 a.m. Washington time, both the King and Zaid Rifai, his close adviser, reported to Ambassador Brown two major incursions of Syrian tanks. Hussein requested American assistance, without being specific. At 12:30 p.m. Rifai, on behalf of the King, asked for U.S. reconnaissance to determine whether the Syrians were bringing up additional forces. At about the same time two more Syrian armored brigades crossed into Jordan and attacked on a broad front.
I had no doubt that this challenge had to be met. To make a final recommendation to the President, I called a meeting of the WSAG for 7 p.m. that evening. From then on until the National Security Council meeting the next morning, the crisis for us in Washington took the form of almost uninterrupted meetings and telephone calls.
At about 8:20 p.m., we heard from the British that the King was requesting immediate air strikes. The British message reinforced our predisposition in favor of standing aside for an Israeli move. We did not possess enough intelligence or target information to respond rapidly with American forces. At the same time, to discourage Soviet intervention, we would have to accelerate our readiness; we would thereby heighten the perception that intervention was threatening.
At 9:27 p.m., I asked Assistant Secretary of State Joe Sisco to join me in conveying our recommendations to the President; as the official who sat at the nexus of all the cable traffic, it was crucial for Sisco to understand the nuances of White House thinking. First we had to find the President. With the aid of the Secret Service we tracked him to an obscure bowling alley in the basement of the Executive Office Building. Nixon calmly listened to our report and approved the recommendations while incongruously holding a bowling ball in one hand. It was one of the few occasions that I saw Nixon without a coat and tie. He said that whatever was done must succeed; he was determined to stop the Syrian attack.
In Jordan, the northern town of Irbid fell. Kissinger called Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin to request Israeli reconnaissance and to raise the possibility of air strikes and ground action.
I went home and to bed at 2 a.m., Monday, Sept. 21. At 5:15 a.m., I was awakened by Al Haig [then Kissinger's second in command on the NSC], who had just received a call from Rabin: the Israelis thought ground action might also be necessary. Israel would appreciate the American view in two or three hours.
At 5:35 a.m., I phoned and awakened the President to tell him of Rabin's preliminary response. I urged him to defer a decision and to call a meeting of his senior advisers for 7:30 in the morning. But Nixon soon called back and said: "I have decided it. Don't ask anybody else. Tell him [Rabin] 'Go.' "
I was not about to let the President run the risk of a major confrontation with the Soviet Union without consulting his senior advisers. An Israeli ground operation could produce a Middle Eastern war. I called Sisco, who said he agreed with the President's decision. I next called Secretary of State William Rogers, who had serious reservations, especially in the absence of a formal Jordanian request for ground support. Defense Secretary Mel Laird was ambiguous; he wanted to consider the intelligence. At 7:10 a.m. I urged the President again to call a meeting of his senior advisers in view of the differences of opinion among them. He now reluctantly agreed.
Our Government was united on approving Israeli air attacks; there was a difference of opinion as to Israeli ground operations. I did not think the issue required an immediate resolution. Israeli mobilization would take at least 48 hours. And Israel could not afford not to mobilize because it could not permit a Syrian victory, whatever our reaction. Thus we had a breathing space--if the King could hold on--during which pressures on Syria would mount, perhaps to the point where the crisis resolved itself.
Calculus of Risks
The NSC met at 8:45 a.m., Monday, Sept. 21. Though the discussion concerned mainly our attitude toward ground operations, it really came down again to a philosophical debate on how to handle crises. Those who believed in very slow and measured escalation feared a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Nixon, as well as I, believed that this was the most likely way for a crisis to become unmanageable: if we wished to avoid a showdown 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. Rogers wanted to make the ultimate decision depend on whether the Syrians moved south from the occupied town of Irbid; in my view the crisis could be ended only by full Syrian withdrawal from its "liberated zone" in northern Jordan. Nixon finally decided that Sisco could inform Israel that the U.S. agreed to Israeli ground action subject to consultation prior to a final decision.
What started out as an imminent Jordanian collapse was beginning to reverse itself. Tuesday, Sept. 22, brought good news. The Jordanians, emboldened by our moves and by the fact that the Syrian air force (under a general named Hafez Assad) pointedly stayed out of combat, were beginning to attack Syrian tanks around Irbid from the air. The estimate was that Syria had lost 120 tanks. The Iraqi forces [17,000 of them were still encamped in east Jordan three years after the Six-Day War that had brought them there] remained inactive. Egypt informed us that the Soviets had made a serious effort to get Syria to reconsider its course in Jordan. Israeli forces on the Golan Heights continued to increase. To maintain the pressure, we increased our own readiness further.
In managing the conclusion of any crisis, perhaps the most critical moment occurs when the opponent appears ready to settle; then it is the natural temptation to relax. This is almost always a mistake; the time for conciliation is after the crisis is surmounted and a settlement or modus vivendi has been reached.
Otherwise moderation may abort the hopeful prospects by raising last-minute doubts as to whether the cost of settlement need be paid. Stopping offensive military actions in Korea in 1951 when cease-fire talks started almost surely prolonged the talks; I would make the same argument about the Viet Nam bombing halt in 1968, though I held a different view at the time.
That is why, even though a Syrian withdrawal was probable, I pressed for an augmentation of our forces in the Mediterranean. Sept. 23 would be critical. If the Syrian forces did not withdraw--if, for example, they simply dug in--the point of maximum pressure would pass. Israel would either intervene with the attendant consequences or we would be seen to be bluffing. Then the war might start up again--or else the Syrians would maintain a "liberated zone" in Jordan, mortgaging the King's survival. Four more destroyers were therefore authorized to head for the Mediterranean; two attack submarines were slated to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar. Contingency planning against Soviet intervention continued.
At 2:50 p.m. on Sept. 23, we received conclusive word thai Syrian tanks were withdrawing. The crisis was over.
TILT! THE INDIA-PAKISTAN WAR
In 1971 Pakistan was disintegrating. The Bengali-dominated East, separated by 1,000 miles of India from the less populous but long-dominant West, was moving toward autonomy, if not outright independence. Civil war loomed. The East's 75 million people had been under martial law since 1969. Now Pakistani President Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan's troops, most of them Punjabis from the West who were offended by the East's separatist demands, went on a murderous rampage. Bengali refugees began streaming into India, eventually numbering some 8 million. India's Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, protesting that the refugees were placing an intolerable burden on her country, soon began hinting strongly at a move against Pakistan. In Kissinger's view, the refugee situation was merely a pretext for Mrs. Gandhi to seize the opportunity to dismember her hated neighbor. (Kissinger points out that the U.S. gave some $92 million in refugee aid, far more than any other single country.) The U.S. objective, says Kissinger, was "an evolution that would lead to independence for East Pakistan." But India, he adds, was too impatient to accept so gradual a solution. In August, "nonaligned" New Delhi aligned itself with Moscow by signing a Soviet-Indian Friendship Treaty. "With the treaty," writes Kissinger, "Moscow threw a lighted match into a powder keg." By November, when Mrs. Gandhi visited Nixon in Washington, rumors of an India-Pakistan war were rampant.
Nixon and Mrs. Gandhi, 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 for a symbol of capitalism quite fashionable in 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 meetings with her were not always printable.
Without a doubt the two most unfortunate meetings Nixon had with any foreign leader were his conversations in the Oval Office on Nov. 4 and 5 with Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi began by expressing admiration for Nixon's handling of Viet Nam and the China initiative, in the manner of a professor praising a slightly backward student. Her praise lost some of its luster when she smugly expressed satisfaction that with China Nixon had consummated what India had recommended for the past decade.
Nixon had no time for Mrs. Gandhi's condescending manner. Privately, he scoffed at her moral pretensions, which he found all the more irritating because he suspected that in pursuit of her purposes she had in fact fewer scruples than Nixon.
He considered her, indeed, a cold-blooded practitioner of power politics. On Aug. 11 Nixon had admitted to the Senior Review Group that in Mrs. Gandhi's position he might pursue a similar course. But he was not in her position--and therefore he was playing for time. He, as did I, wanted to avoid a showdown. A war would threaten our geopolitical design, and we both judged that East Pakistani autonomy was inevitable, if over a slightly longer period than India suggested.
Mrs. Gandhi had no illusions about what Nixon was up to. She faced her own conflicting pressures. 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. Her dislike of Nixon, expressed in the icy formality of her manner, was perhaps compounded by the uneasy recognition that this man whom her whole upbringing caused her to disdain perceived international relations in a manner uncomfortably close to her own.
My own views of Mrs. Gandhi were similar to Nixon's, the chief difference being that I did not take her condescension personally. To be sure, 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, the moral pretensions of Indian leaders seemed to me perfectly attuned to exploit the guilt complexes of a liberal, slightly socialist West.
All the reasons that led Nixon to play for time led Mrs. Gandhi to force the issue. The inevitable emergence of Bangladesh [the Bengali name for East Pakistan] would eventually accentuate India's centrifugal tendencies. It might set a precedent for the creation of other Moslem states, carved this time out of India. This dictated to New Delhi that its birth had to be accompanied by a dramatic demonstration of Indian predominance on the subcontinent.
Attack in the East
Yahya made numerous concessions at the urging of the U.S., most important his agreement to restore civilian government in East Pakistan before the end of 1971; this in turn would surely lead to autonomy. To calm the situation, he also agreed to withdraw his troops from the borders with India. Yet New Delhi rejected the moves as inadequate. On Nov. 22, just 17 days after Mrs. Gandhi left Washington, Pakistani broadcasts reported that India had launched "an all-out offensive against East Pakistan. " I was sure that we were now witnessing the beginning of an India-Pakistan war and that India had started it. 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. To be sure, Pakistani repression in East Bengal had been brutal and shortsighted; and millions of refugees had imposed enormous strain on the Indian economy. But what had caused the war, in Nixon's view and mine, was India's determination to establish its pre-eminence on the subcontinent.
Yet our paramount concern transcended the subcontinent. The Soviet Union could have restrained India; it chose not to. It had actively encouraged India to exploit Pakistan's travail in part to deliver a blow to our system of alliances, in even greater measure to demonstrate Chinese impotence. Since it was a common concern about Soviet power that had driven Peking and Washington together, a demonstration of U.S. irrelevance would severely strain our precarious new relationship with China.
Nor were we defending only abstract principles of international conduct. The victim of the attack was an ally--however reluctant many were to admit it--to which we had made several explicit promises concerning precisely this contingency.
Clear treaty commitments reinforced by other undertakings dated back to 1959. One could debate the wisdom of these undertakings, but we could not ignore them. Yet when Pakistan invoked the 1959 bilateral agreement between us as the basis for U.S. aid, the State Department was eloquent in arguing that no binding obligation existed. The image of a great nation conducting itself like a shyster looking for legalistic loopholes was not likely to inspire other allies who had signed treaties with us.
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 already being undercut by our divisions over Indochina.
There was no question of "saving" East Pakistan. Both Nixon and I had recognized for months that its independence was inevitable; war was not necessary to accomplish it. We strove to preserve West Pakistan as an independent state, since we judged India's real aim was to encompass its disintegration. We sought to prevent a demonstration that Soviet arms and diplomatic support were inevitably decisive in crises.
It was nearly impossible to implement this strategy because our departments operated on different premises. They were afraid of antagonizing India; they saw that Pakistan was bound to lose the war whatever we did; they knew our course was unpopular in the Congress and the media. If there was a "tilt" in the U.S. Government at this stage, it was on the side of India.
In this atmosphere the Washington Special Action Group assembled on Dec. 3 to chart a course. It was a meeting memorialized in transcripts that were leaked to Columnist Jack Anderson. Out of context these sounded as if the White House was 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. "I've been catching unshirted hell every half-hour from the President, who says we're not tough enough," I commented in what I thought was the privacy of the Situation Room. "He really doesn't believe we're carrying out his wishes. He wants to tilt toward Pakistan, and he believes that every briefing or statement is going the other way." That was of course a plain statement of the facts.
My sarcasm did nothing to affect departmental proclivities. When I transmitted the President's instruction to cut off economic aid to India, State suggested a similar step toward Pakistan--in spite of the President's view that India was the guilty party. This provoked me in exasperation into another "tilt" statement: "It's hard to tilt toward Pakistan, as the President wishes, if every time we take some action in relation to India we have to do the same thing for Pakistan."
Dismembering the West?
On Dec. 7 Yahya informed us that East Pakistan was disintegrating. The issue had gone far beyond self-determination for East Pakistan. A report reached us, from a source whose reliability we have never had any reason to doubt, that Prime Minister Gandhi was determined to reduce even West Pakistan to impotence: she had indicated that India would not accept any U.N. call for a cease-fire until Bangladesh was "liberated"; after that, Indian forces would proceed with the "liberation" of the Pakistani part of Kashmir and continue fighting until the Pakistani army and air force were wiped out. In other words, West Pakistan was to be dismembered and rendered defenseless. Mrs. Gandhi also told colleagues that if the Chinese "rattled the sword," the Soviets had promised to take appropriate counteraction. Other intelligence indicated that this meant diversionary military action against China in Xinjiang (Sinkiang). Pakistan could not possibly survive such a combination of pressures, and a Sino-Soviet war was not excluded.
Against this background I gave a press briefing in which I emphasized that we had not condoned the Pakistani repression in East Bengal in March 1971; military aid had been cut off, and major efforts had been made to promote political accommodation between the Pakistani government and Bangladesh officials in Calcutta. In our view India was responsible for the war. The resolution we supported at the U.N., calling for cease-fire and withdrawal of forces, won overwhelming backing, passing 104 to 11. Here was an issue on which we enjoyed more support in the world community than on practically any other in a decade. But neither our briefings nor the overwhelming expression of world opinion softened media or congressional criticism.
On Sunday morning, Dec. 12, Nixon, Al Haig and I met in the Oval Office, just before Nixon and I were to depart for the Azores to meet with French President Georges Pompidou. It was symptomatic of the internal relationships of the Nixon Administration that neither the Secretary of State nor of Defense nor any representative of their departments attended this crucial meeting, where, as it turned out, the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship was taken.
At 11:30 a.m. we sent a message over Nixon's name on the hot line to Moscow--its first use by the Nixon Administration. (Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev later used it during the October 1973 Middle East war.) Actually, this Moscow-Washington telegraphic link worked more slowly than did the communications of the Soviet embassy. But it conferred a sense of urgency and might speed up Soviet decisions. The one-page hot line message declared that the President had "set in train certain moves" in the U.N. Security Council that could not be reversed. It concluded: "I cannot emphasize too strongly that time is of the essence to avoid consequences neither of us want."
Just when we had finished dispatching the hot line message, we received word that Huang Hua, then China's U.N. Ambassador, needed to see me with an urgent message from Peking. It was unprecedented, the Chinese having previously always saved their messages until we asked for a meeting--a charming Middle Kingdom legacy. We assumed that only a matter of gravity could induce them into such a departure. We guessed that they were coming to the military assistance of Pakistan. If so, we were on the verge of a possible showdown. For if China moved militarily, the Soviet Union--according to all our information--was committed to use force against China.
Nixon understood immediately that if the Soviet Union succeeded in humiliating China, all prospects for world equilibrium would disappear. He decided--and I fully agreed--that if the Soviet Union threatened China we would not stand idly by.
A country we did not recognize and with which we had had next to no contact for two decades would obtain some significant assistance--the precise nature to be worked out when the circumstances arose. To provide some military means to give effect to our strategy and to reinforce the message to Moscow, Nixon now ordered an aircraft carrier task force that had been alerted earlier to proceed through the Strait of Malacca and into the Bay of Bengal.
In the event, the Chinese message was not what we expected. On the contrary, it accepted the U.N. procedure and the political solution I had outlined to Huang Hua during a secret trip to New York City 48 hours earlier--asking for a ceasefire and withdrawal, but settling for a standstill ceasefire. 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.
Margin of Uncertainty
Our fleet passed into the Bay of Bengal and attracted much media attention. Were we threatening India? Were we seeking to defend East Pakistan? Had we lost our minds? It was in fact sober calculation. We had some 72 hours to bring the war to a conclusion before West Pakistan would be swept into the maelstrom. It would take India that long to shift its forces. We had to give the Soviets a warning. We had to be ready to back up the Chinese if they came in. Moving the task force into the Bay of Bengal created precisely the margin of uncertainty needed to force a decision by New Delhi and Moscow.
On the return flight from the Azores meeting I said to the press pool on Air Force One that Soviet conduct on the subcontinent was not compatible with the mutual restraint required by genuine coexistence. If it continued, we would have to re-evaluate our entire relationship.
The message got through to Moscow. By the morning of Dec. 16, we were receiving reliable reports that the Soviets were pressing New Delhi to accept the territorial status quo in the West, including in Kashmir. Later that 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. The crisis was over. We had avoided the worst--which is sometimes the maximum statesmen can achieve.
'The India:Pakistan war of 1971 was perhaps the most complex issue of Nixon's first term. What made the crisis so difficult was that the stakes were so much greater than the common perception of them. I remain convinced to this day that Mrs. Gandhi was not motivated primarily by conditions in East Pakistan. India struck in late November; by the timetable that we induced Yahya to accept, martial law would have ended and a civilian government would have taken power at the end of December. This would almost surely have led to the independence of East Pakistan--probably without the excesses of brutality, including public bayoneting, that followed.
Our conduct was attributed to personal pique, anti-Indian bias, callousness toward suffering, or immorality. Had we acted differently, Pakistan, after losing its eastern wing, would have lost Kashmir and possibly Baluchistan and other portions of its western wing--in other words, it would have disintegrated.
The crisis also demonstrated the error of the myth that Nixon, aided by me, exercised an octopus-like grip over a Government that was kept in ignorance of our activities. The reality was the opposite of the folklore: not widening White House dominance but bitter departmental rearguard resistance; not clear-cut directives but elliptical maneuvers to keep open options; not the inability of the agencies to present their views but the difficulty faced by the Chief Executive in making his views prevail. 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.
Nixon deserves great credit for tough decisions taken in the face of enormous public pressures; for his strategic grasp; for his courage. His administrative approach was weird and its human cost unattractive, yet history must also record the fundamental fact that major successes were achieved that had proved unattainable by conventional procedures.
KISSINGER ON STATECRAFT
Having entered office as a self-described "apprentice statesman, " Henry Kissinger departed an acknowledged master. Herewith some of his observations on the statesman's craft.
The Art of Decision Making
The old adage that men grow in office has not proved true in my experience. High office teaches decision making, not substance. It 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.
The inclination of all Cabinet departments is to narrow the scope for presidential decision, not to expand it. They are organized to develop a preferred policy, not a range of choices. If forced to present options, the typical department will present two absurd alternatives as straw men bracketing its preferred option--which usually appears in the middle position. A totally ignorant decision maker could satisfy his departments by blindly choosing Option Two of any three choices submitted to him.
A President cannot take away the curse of a controversial decision by hesitation in its execution. Use of military force 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.
There are no awards for those who lose with moderation. Nations must not undertake military enterprises or diplomatic initiatives that they are not willing to see through.
If key decisions are made informally at unprepared meetings, the tendency to be obliging to the President and cooperative with one's colleagues may vitiate the articulation of real choices. This seemed to me a problem 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 under Eisenhower--the danger is that he will in practice be given only the choice between approving or disapproving a single recommended course. This may be relieved by occasional spasms of presidential self-will, but such erratic outbursts are bound to prove temporary since his refusal to accept the agreed recommendation leaves him with no operational alternative.
All societies of which history informs us went through periods of decline; most eventually collapsed. Yet there is a margin between necessity and accident in which the statesman must choose. 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.
A large bureaucracy, however organized, tends to stifle creativity. It confuses wise policy with smooth administration. In the modern state, more time is often spent in running bureaucracies than in defining their purposes. A complex bureaucracy favors the status quo, 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 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.
Despite lip service to planning, there is a strong bias in the State Department toward making policy in response to cables and in the form of cables. The novice Secretary finds on his desk not policy analyses or options but stacks of dispatches which he is asked to initial and urgently, if you please. Even if he asserts himself and rejects a draft, it is likely to come back with a modification so minor that only a legal scholar could tell the difference. When I became Secretary I found it was a herculean effort even for someone who had made foreign policy his life's work to dominate the Department's cable machine. Woe to the uninitiated at the mercy of that band of experts.
The State Department, when it receives an order of which its bureaucracy approves, is a wondrously efficient institution. When it wishes to exhaust recalcitrant superiors, drafts of memoranda wander through its labyrinthine channels for weeks and months. But when it receives an instruction it considers wise, paperwork is suddenly completed in a matter of hours.
Backchannels and Backbiting
Essentially, a backchannel is a communication system that seeks to circumvent normal procedures; it requires, however, somebody's facilities. Usually the excluded party was the State Department, which had victimized itself by technology and habit: by technology because its computers automatically distribute even the most sensitive cables by pre-established criteria; by habit because diplomats live on trading information and are infinitely ingenious in getting around formal restrictions. This is why even the State Department has set up its own internal back-channels and why almost every modern President has sought to evade State's formal communications machinery.
The Nixon method of government worked well when a military problem was relatively straightforward and could be carried out in one daring move, as in Cambodia. It was effective also for purposeful solitary diplomacy such as in the opening to China, the Viet Nam negotiations and various moves toward the Soviet Union. Difficulties arose when a sustained military effort was need or when the diplomacy was too complex to be handled by the Security Adviser's office, as in the India-Pakistan crisis. Then the absence of consensus or even understanding inhibited coherence and commitment. When only a very small group knew what the President intended and only part of that group agreed with the purposes, an inordinate amount of time would be consumed later by wrangling dissociation or attempts (usually in vain) to impose discipline
Advising a President
I have become convinced that a President should make the Secretary of State his principal adviser and use the National Security Adviser primarily as a senior administrator and coordinator. If the Security Adviser becomes active in the development and articulation of policy, he must inevitably diminish the Secretary of State and reduce his effectiveness. Foreign governments are confused and, equally dangerous, given opportunity to play one part of our Government off against the other; the State Department becomes demoralized and retreats into parochialism. If the President does not have confidence in his Secretary of State he should replace him, not supervise him with a personal aide. In the Nixon Administration this pre-eminent role for the Secretary of State was made impossible by Nixon's distrust of the State Department bureaucracy, by his relationship with Rogers, by Rogers' inexperience and by my own strong convictions. Rogers' understandable insistence on the prerogatives of his office had the ironical consequence of weakening his position. In a bureaucratic dispute, the side having no better argument than its hierarchical right is likely to lose.
High military officers must strike a balance between their convictions and their knowledge that to be effective they must survive to fight again. Their innate awe of the Commander in Chief tempts them to find a military reason for what they consider barely tolerable. They rarely challenge the Commander in Chief; they seek excuses to support, not to oppose him.
Far from being the hawkish band of adventurers portrayed by its critics the Central Intelligence Agency usually erred on he side of the interpretation fashionable in the Washington establishment. In my experience the CIA developed rationales for inaction much more frequently than for daring thrusts Its analysts were aware that no one has ever been penalized for not having foreseen an opportunity, but that many careers have been blighted for not predicting a risk. Therefore the intelligence community has always been tempted to forecast dire consequences for any conceivable course of action, an attitude that encourages paralysis rather than adventurism.
Confronting and Managing a Crisis
In negotiations I always tried to determine the most reasonable outcome and then get there rapidly. This was derided as a strategy of "pre-emptive 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--with the Vietnamese and others--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.
Some may visualize crisis management as a frenzied affair in which key policymakers converge on the White House in limousines, when harassed officials are bombarded by nervous aides rushing in with the latest flash cables. I have found this not to be accurate; periods of crisis, to be sure, involve great tension they are also characterized by a strange tranquillity All the petty day-to-day details are 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 concentrate 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 i a great stillness that yields, as the resolution nears to exhaustion, exhilaration or despair.
During fast-moving events, those at the center of decisions are overwhelmed by floods of reports compounded of conjecture, knowledge, hope and worry. 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 opportunity by assessing correctly both the circumstances and his margin for creative action. In crises this agility is akin to an athletes. 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 the key figures act on the basis of the same information and purpose.
Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deterred is a problem avoided; more often it is a crisis invited.
FACING A DIFFERENT WORLD
"Whereas in the 1920s we had withdrawn from the world because we thought we were too good for it, the insidious theme of the late 1960s was that we should withdraw from the world because we were too evil for it." So writes Kissinger. What, then, should be the philosophy behind U.S. foreign policy?
Richard Nixon was President when the conventional wisdom decried the exercise of power; his critics asserted that America would prevail if at all because of the purity of its motives. But it was precisely the unpredictable, idiosyncratic nature of a policy founded on this illusion that needed to be overcome. Emotional slogans, unleavened by a concept of the national interest, had caused us 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. What the intellectuals' loathing of Nixon kept them from understanding was that we agreed with their professed desire to relate ends to means and commitments to 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 Viet Nam debate grew so bitter was that both supporters and critics of the original involvement shared the same traditional sense of universal moral mission.
What made the Nixon Administration so "unAmerican" was its attempt to adjust to a world fundamentally different from our historical perception. The impulses to lurch toward either isolationism or global intervention had to be cured by making judgments according to some more permanent conception of national interest. 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.
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 perils of a nuclear age, and that the foreign leaders who best understood this were Mao and Chou, who openly expressed their preference for Richard Nixon over the wayward representatives of American liberalism. It was on the level of shared geopolitical interest transcending philosophies and history that the former Red baiter and the crusaders for world revolution found each other.
At the Threshold
On Jan. 23, 1973, the night Nixon announced the Viet Nam peace agreement, Kissinger pondered what lay ahead.
We stood, I fervently hoped, at the threshold of a period of national reconciliation that would be given impetus by the unique opportunity for creativity I saw ahead. 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. I was grateful for the opportunity I had enjoyed to help prepare the ground. And I was at peace with myself, neither elated nor sad.
Stretching Man's Horizons
Visiting Cape Kennedy in January 1971 for a moon shot, Kissinger reflected on man's need for challenges--and faith.
We needed the space program; a society that does not stretch its horizons will soon shrink them. The argument that we must solve all our problems on earth before venturing beyond our planet will confine us for eternity. The world will never be without problems; they 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 slogan that it needed first to solve its own problems; paradoxically, these problems would have become insoluble and Europe would have suffocated in its own perplexities.
Faith has provided the motive force for mankind's checkered odyssey. But how does one dream in a technocratic age? How do a people regain the faith that caused small peasant societies to build cathedrals with spires reaching toward the heavens, edifices that it would take centuries to complete, enshrining in stone a testimonial to the perseverance and sweep of their aspirations?
It seemed to me as I stood at Cape Kennedy with my daughter Elizabeth, then aged eleven, and my son David, aged nine, that they would live in a world at variance with mine. I had known only national boundaries as a child. Space was beyond my imagination. Television was inconceivable. 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 on television screens; they could absorb it passively. Yet they lived in a world in which journeys of hundreds of millions of miles were determined by an impetus given in ten seconds, and were then in large part unchangeable.
For better or worse, I thought I was now one of those who had the power to provide an initial impetus, making future gen erations into passengers on journeys they had not selected. If our aim was wrong, even the most skilled navigator would not be able to correct it. We had to find a trajectory toward a world where no one had ever been; but we also were in danger of hurtling toward a void. Our most important decisions would be whether to start a journey, and the crucial quality we needed was faith in a future created in part through the act of commitment.
Copyright (c) 1979 by Henry A. Kissinger
Golda Meir
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 occasionally sarcastic exterior never obscured a compassion that felt the death of every Israeli soldier as the loss of a member of her family. Every inch of land for which Israel 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.
Mrs. Meir treated Secretary of State William 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, startling news to those of us more familiar with Nixon's ambivalences on that score. But it gave him a reputation to uphold. And he did much for Israel if not out of affection then out of his characteristically unsentimental calculation of the national interest.
Fast-Food Fan
During one Nixon visit to Europe, the President of Italy gave a luncheon in the tower room of the Quirinal Palace, overlooking the lush roofs and beautifully proportioned squares of the Eternal City. In this glorious setting, because of Nixon's tight schedule, an exquisite meal was served in about 55 minutes --proving to him that one of his obsessions was clearly capable of fulfillment. For nearly two years his associates had heard him complain about the ineffable boredom of state dinners. He had cajoled and threatened to speed up the serving of White House meals in order to reduce the time he had to spend in small talk with his visitors. He had given personal attention to those courses that expedited service, and those that might be eliminated altogether. On some occasions he had even arranged for the interpreter to arrive late, as a means of cutting down the time for conversation. But the fastest service he had ever attained, even under the merciless prodding of H.R. Haldeman--the world record for White House dinners, so to speak--was an hour and 20 minutes. The Quirinal luncheon set a new standard that he never permitted the White House staff to forget. Alas, like many Roman achievements, it proved impossible to emulate. Even Haldeman could not succeed in reducing the White House service by more than another ten minutes. The Quirinal retained the speed-in-serving championship by a good 15 minutes, to the perpetual and vocal annoyance of the President.
Shah of Iran
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 eight Presidents of both parties proclaimed--rightly--a friend of our country and a pillar of stability in a turbulent and vital region. 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 come 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 ultimately the victim of his own successes.
The Shah was--despite the travesties of retroactive myth --a dedicated reformer. He was "progressive" in the sense that he sought to industrialize his society; one of the prime causes of his disaster, in fact, was that he modernized too rapidly and that he did not adapt his political institutions sufficiently to the economic and social changes he had brought about.
Basically, the Shah was applying axioms of all the more "advanced" literature of the West. Political stability was supposed to follow from economic advance; it was assumed by many Western economists, and believed by the Shah, that the government that raised the standard of living would thereby gain public approbation. This theory proved to be disastrously wrong. Wise is the ruler who understands that economic development carries with it the imperative of building new political institutions to accommodate the growing complexity of his society. It cannot be said that either the Shah or his friends possessed this wisdom; but neither did his enemies.
Yitzhak Rabin
Except for his intelligence and tenacity, he was an unlikely ambassador. He had been a hero of Israel's war of independence, and as Chief of Staff of Israel's defense forces, he was an architect of the victory of the Six-Day War. 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.
Rabin had many extraordinary qualities, but the gift of human relations was not one of them. If he had been handed the entire U.S. Strategic Air Command as a free gift, he would have (a) affected the attitude that at last Israel was getting its due, and (b) found some technical shortcoming in the airplanes that made his accepting them a reluctant concession to us.
Up in Smoke
A presidential visit to the Vatican in 1970 led to one of those scenes that are comic in retrospect but mortifying when experienced. Our advancemen had conceived the extraordinary idea that the President should leave for the Sixth Fleet from St. Peter's Square in a U.S. helicopter. The Curia, feeling that this represented enough martial trappings for one day, suggested that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird not be included in the audience that the Holy Father would offer. However, as the official party was moving into the papal chamber for the general audience, Laird, a politician of considerable ingenuity, suddenly appeared, chewing on his ubiquitous cigar. Asked what he was doing there, he mumbled something about looking for the helicopters, though it was not clear what he thought these might be doing inside the Vatican when they were so conspicuously parked in St. Peter's Square. I urged Laird at least to do away with the cigar.
The group was placed in two rows at right angles to Nixon and the Holy Father, who were seated side by side. The Pope was making a graceful little speech when suddenly smoke came pouring out of Laird's pocket. To quell the fire caused by his cigar, he started slapping his side. Some of the others whose angle of vision prevented them from grasping the full drama of the Secretary of Defense immolating himself in front of the Pope took Laird's efforts at fire extinguishing as applause, into which they joined. Only wisdom accumulated over two millenniums enabled the Vatican officials to pretend that nothing unusual was going on.
Charles de Gaulle
When he visited Washington in 1969 for President Eisenhower's funeral, he was the center of attention. At the reception tendered by Nixon, other heads of government and Senators who usually proclaimed their antipathy to authoritarian generals crowded around him. 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.
Nixon and De Gaulle met in the Oval Office. There was about De Gaulle a melancholy air of withdrawal, of already being a spectator at his own actions--a harbinger of his imminent retirement. He called to mind a story told by West Germany's Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger on the basis of which he predicted that De Gaulle would not serve much longer. According to Kiesinger, De Gaulle had said Franco-German relations: "We and the Germans have gone through a lot together. We have traversed forests surrounded by wild animals. We have crossed the deserts parched by the sun. We have climbed peaks covered by snow, always looking for a hidden treasure--usually competitively, very recently cooperatively And now we have learned that there is no hidden treasure and only friendship is left to us "
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