For the Record: Selected Statements, 1977-1980

...Kissinger's eight years in Wash ington have not slaked his thirst for power, and he admits as much...

...Kissinger's sense of responsibility- which I do not wish to impugn- induces him to introduce his arguments with many a ponderous "on the one hand, on the other hand...

...Collections like these of miscellaneous utterances and articles can still repay a skimming, at least, if there are nuggets of insight to be found by an alert reader-think of a volume in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, for example...

...Many of the articles are repetitious, which is perhaps not surprising: Anyone who lectures or orates as much as Kissinger must of oecessity use stock paragraphs to make the same point to successive audiences...

...For the most part these speeches and articles deal with current policy problems: They contain little historical or philosophical reflection, and certainly none that we have not read of elsewhere (for example, Kissinger's admiration for Bismarck...

...His personal charm served his needs but did not attenuate his ruthlessness or diminish his guile: Men as different as William Rogers and Daniel Patrick Moynihan fell victim to his bureaucratic ambushes...

...There is no small irony in the story of Henry Kissinger's rise...

...This collection contributes to the image of a tried and steady statesman that Kissinger obviously wishes to culti vate...

...This is not to defend the past administration or downplay the disasters it facilitated, but merely to note a continuity of policy that Kissinger's easy denunciation-typical of many academic critics of American foreign policy-ignores...

...One should therefore pass by this work of Kissinger the politician, and await a second volume from Kissinger the memoirist...

...12.95 by Eliot Cohen it is unfair, perhaps, to expect this volume of Henry Kissinger's speeches and articles to match his brilliant memoirs, but even so, we must admit that For the Record is a haphazard and tedious collection...

...Kissinger self-consciously wears and refuses to doff the mantle of the elder statesman...

...but: We cannot accept a definition of security for the Soviet Union that makes everybody else absolutely insecure...

...Chronological order, not coherence, is the organizing principle, a fact that reflects ill on a man who rightly prides himself on his conceptual understanding of policy problems...

...At times this leads to such analyses as the following: Nobody should deny the Soviet Union its legitimate security concerns...

...The burden of fact remains that since the time of our emergence as a great power in 1945, our foreign policy has been fundamentally consistent...

...In practice the West must allow such evils as the subjugation of Eastern Europe to continue-but why give them the sanction of legitimacy...

...His memoirs unconsciously reveal his feline sensitivity to the weaknesses and desires of those he worked with-from Ehrlichman's "public relations experts" to journalists bewitched by the prospect of being in the confidence of a genius...

...There is a contradiction here, for the nature of the Soviet regime is such that to survive it must expand or threaten to do so: The loss of Poland (or at this point, Afghanistan) would fatally endanger the Soviet state, as indeed in the long run does the very existence of a free, prosperous, and self-confident West...

...In fact, a number of historical references are embarrassingly faulty- Kissinger incorrectly asserts that the United States "accounted for very little in world economics during the nineteenth century," and claims that eighteenth-century European ruler* could not conscript their subjects...

...To repeat, there are no new themes in this book: As in White House Years Kissinger condemns America's historical oscillation "between brooding isolation and crusading intervention" and again, as in the memoirs, he promulgates a doctrine of geopolitics or balance of power, which "has always been unfashionable in America...

...Unfortunately, however, For the Record is no such book...

...Kissinger's views often make a good deal of sense, as when he urges Western rearmament and a policy of containment vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, but the heavy sobriety which pervades the book means that there is little to disagree with, and equally little to stimulate thought...

...Bismarck did not have to tame one totalitarian power, let alone several...

...There is not even much of an effort to defend the Kissinger record against attack from either Right (e.g., on the overselling of detente) or Left (e.g., Vietnam...

...Kissinger's criticisms of American foreign policy may contain some portion of the truth, but they require argument, not mere pronouncement...

...The speeches appear at first glance not only prudent and wideranging, but reassuringly compli cated and dull, for this is a book meant to be purchased, not read...

...In general, where the memoirs are often impassioned or humorous these speeches are stolid and stupefyingly serious...

...On the second point, Kissinger fails to elaborate his conception of geopolitics, or reconcile it with the differences between the relatively homogeneous European world system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the fractured world of today...

...These indictments, though they have some merit, gain nothing from mere reassertion...

...His accession to the unofficial vice-presidency for foreign policy owed much to his indubitable academic brilliance, but owed even more, I think, to skills and attributes not often associated with professors...

...The speeches about statesmen-Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, Nelson Rockefeller-lack the penetration and charm of the character sketches in White House Years...

...The author juxtaposes eulogies to Golda Meir and Nelson Rockefeller with pronouncements on SALT, the future of international business, and the Iranian revolution...

...American policy changes far more in speech than action: To take one recent example, it was the Carter administration which created the Rapid Deployment Force and began obtaining bases for it near the Persian Gulf...

...Even his denunciation of the Carter administration's foolish and craven treatment of the Shah begins on an incongruously Olympian note of injured innocence...