Kissinger II: Henry Kissinger and Years of Upheaval
Kaplan, HJ.
taste so savory; immerse them in the choicest grease--it will do no good. After the wireless has been installed and the TVs are in place, news from godless and gorgeous America will wobble...
...History has been cruel to this notion, as our good professor must know, but for decent liberal people it remains an article of faith...
...He lists his present occupatioa as grandfatber...
...There is a quality in Kissinger's writing that betrays the outsider, nonetheless, the refugee from Fiirth, Germany, who can never forget that he is an intellectual, a scholar, not really a typical American man of action, as if the whole situation were some cosmic joke...
...and Hoffmann seems less moved than bemused by his erstwhile colleague's achievement, as if astounded that so ugly a duckling could have evolved into a swan...
...and for its "progressive" wing, as Hoff mann shows, these suspicions were amply confirmed...
...But does it really follow from this proposition that Kissinger, as his Harvard colleague ends by suggesting, was a "dogmatist" who fell prey to "dubious self-vindication" and to "a kind of cosmic pomposity...
...To be sure, they take issue (again, each in his way) with the author's views: on d~tente, on the Middle East, on Vietnam, on arms control...
...and Hoffmann goes and does likewise in the New York Review of Books for April 29, only occasionally showing the strain of his determination to give the devil his due...
...Whether a village eminence has a wife as strong as a water buffalo or a dozen nubile daughters to sell, there will still be days when he secretly sighs beneath the burning sun and dreams of discoing like mad in nocturnal Manhattan...
...He was so skillful a n e g o t i a t o r he forgot that some things were simply not negotiable and that given the nature of the adversary the very idea of accommodation was a trap...
...Fundamentally, the source of The Resentment is that question presciently raised by Sam Lewis and Joe Young in the title of their 1919 anthem, "How You Gonna Keep 'Era Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree...
...But the fact remains that the "vital foreign policy" preserved in the Nixon debacle was his own, and we approach volume III in the expectation that he will be allowed to carry it forward, despite the congressional watchdogs who have tasted blood and will now be baying in pursuit...
...What he says about the nature of the Soviet state, about the American national character, about the intentions of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, about the purposes and prospects of our " d e facto alliance with China," and so on, generally strikes me as pertinent and true...
...They not only doubt the solidity of the "structure of peace" which Kissinger presents as his grand design, but regretfully pronounce it a failure...
...Each side won a few and 10st a few...
...Failure...
...This strikes me as reductive, much as the idea of d~tente or almost any other strategic orientation becomes reductive when removed from context and looked at abstractly, as a proposition...
...Volume II, which is no less inordinate in size and ambition than White House Years, begins on a note of triumph in August 1973, with the author sitting on the steps of the President's pool at the western White House ("The President o f the United States floated on his back in the water") and hearing that he is about to be appointed to the highest post this country can offer a foreign-born citizen.~ But in this volume the mood has changed...
...Meanwhile, relations with the Russians, now solemnly baptized (and ballyhooed for internal political reasons) as detente, proceeded in their normal adversarial fashion, only occasionally lightened by Kissinger's sardonic chumminess with Anatol and Andrei and Leonid...
...and that if you reject his policy you do not console him by admiring his prose...
...Apparently the allure of America's trashy pop culture is too much for them...
...in a manner' entirely his own...
...Only, the world in question is the one we share, the world of current events...
...Certainly not all Third Worlders are mediocrities...
...and finally--the purpose of it all--to end the Vietnam war and undertake a series of spectacular initiatives: d&ente, the opening to China, the approach to Sadat, the Nixon Doctrine, which were to constitute the Nixon legacy, a " s t r u c t u r e of peace...
...Watching them brood pays a double dividend, instructing us deeply in The Confusion and also giving us a familiarity with many of the future eminentoes of these far-off lands...
...These are serious, thoughtful, and (each in its way) successful attempts to get " a t " the second panel of Kissinger's huge triptych, 1,283 pages of narrative, documents, and reflection on his service as secretary of state during the truncated second administration of Richard Nixon...
...But a major culprit is surely Norman Podhoretz, whom Kissinger takes the trouble to chide in a footnote as a critic who moved from one (anti-Viemam) extreme to another, and whose current aberration is to insist that d~tente is impossible in the nature of things, that economic exchanges and arms control negotiations can only redound to 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 the advantage of the Soviets, that American policy must maintai,~ an a t t i t u d e of unremitting hostility and confrontation in o r d e r to mobilize an American people historically " r e l u c t a n t to support large standing armies, let alone to use them in combat" and " i n the absence of some higher m e a n i n g . . , to be overwhelmed by the ever-present isolationist temptat i o n . " This is the view that Podhoretz expounded brilliantly in The Future Danger, and now repeats in his "reconsideration" of Kissinger: [B]y representing the Soviet Union as a competing superpower with whom we could negotiate peaceful and stable accommodations --instead of a Communist state hostile in its very nature to us and trying to extend its rule and its political culture over a wider and wider area of the world--the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations robbed the Soviet-American conflict of the moral and political dimensions for the sake of which sacrifices could be intelligibly demanded by the government and willingly made by the people...
...that he would rather be Bismarck than Goethe...
...So, for one last moment, it is Nixon who has become the hero again...
...All irony aside, this is artfully done, composed and written with a sensibility and skill that set it apart from even the more distinguished memoirs of our time and make us reach far back for parallels-to Theophrastus, for example, or La Bruyere, although Kissinger's portraits are not of "types" but of flesh-and-blood leaders...
...They immure themselves in their dormitory rooms...
...because the Europeans and the Japanese were excessively inclined toward accommodation...
...Somehow we had preserved a vital foreign policy in the debacle," our author says, and he prays that "fate would be kind to this good man [i.e., Ford] and that his heart would be stout and that America under his leadership would find again its faith...
...one could make a little anthology of his aphorisms and bravura pieces...
...I do believe them...
...It must have weighed on his mind because he keeps complaining of being caught in the middle between the Left, who insisted on viewing foreign policy a s " a branch of psychiatry," and the theological Right...
...They suffer all the brummagem sentiments emanating therefrom, and return to jerl~water conftrmed in the belief that they have tasted the culture of Einstein and Beethoven...
...K i s s i n g e r uses the term d~tente quite loosely in Years of Upheaval, so that it becomes synonymous with practically all Soviet-American relations...
...It may be that the very concept of detente misled the American people...
...Let me hasten to repeat (on pain of being guilty of doing unto Kissinger's critics what they would do unto him...
...In the current atmosphere, this should not surprise us...
...and nothing notable was lost except-and here is the crux of my difference with Podhoretz and Hoffmann--that which in the nature of things could not be saved...
...Myrdal but from Shiva Naipaul, reviewing the Third World politics of the Cooperative Socialist Republic of Guyana twenty years later...
...that he was guilty of displaying "far greater compassion for the petty misch?ef-makers of Watergate than for the victims of Pinoc h e t " ; and finally that " i t would be a service to posterity--one that would not have to be paid by anyone's blood or tears' ' - - i f he took up another line of work...
...Or to Saint-Simon, for the narrative verve and color, except that Kissinger was no envious onlooker, curdled with scorn and spite, writing his memoirs because he had been denied the employment he deserved...
...that his performance was conceptually flawed...
...t i t should be recalled that upon being named secretary of state, Kissinger continued to serve as national security adviser until November 1975...
...In this volume, however, Watergate is constantly looming, at first in the background and then front and center, so that everything is chastened and darkened by the gathering catastrophe that hangs over Nixon and ends by striking him down...
...Conflict keeps creating new facts, but even after apparently decisive military action, these are variously per' L i t t l e , Brown and Co., $24.95...
...If this gets us into a bit of a muddle, it preserves our options and is intellectually painless...
...He seems to be asking Horatio to absent himself from felicity and write his story...
...The exhilaration of,he mover and shaker is still there, the frank appetite for power and the apparentlyself-mocking humor with which he doubles as poet and philosopher...
...But how much does it really weigh in the balance against the fact that every major crisis we have lived through since World War I I - - B e r l i n , Korea, the Cuban missiles, Vietnam, the "red alert" during the October War--involved the Russians on the adversary side...
...In other words, d~tente breeds illusion and illusion disarms us, witness the current o u t b u r s t of u n i l a t e r a l i s t sentiment in Europe and the growth of antinuclear h y s t e r i a in the United States...
...But what about the statesman...
...A friend of mine who is well acquainted with Kissinger insists that he is not primarily a writer...
...Whether one agrees or not--and I do not--with Podhoretz's (and Hoffmann's) dismissive view of Kissinger's talent for "conceptualizing," the essential political question remains: What did he do...
...In the Third World, too, there is the proverbial rat race--sometimes dominated by real rats...
...The war in Vietnam was terminated at last and if the aftermath was cruel (as indeed it was and is) it is at least arguable that Congress, by refusing to allow the President to enforce the terms of the agreement negotiated between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, was responsible for turning the possibility of an honorable exit into a disgraceful rout...
...Although Kissinger only occasionally pauses for polemics with bureaucratic adversaries like James Schlesinger or with senators like Jackson, he is visibly sensitive to the criticism of his peers, and not merely because it complicated his task with Congress and the press...
...Besides, by excluding the Russians from the Middle East, Kissinger "contributed to the decline of detente," and this helps to explain why the Russians "tried a few years later to turn the tables on their rivals in Africa and on the periphery of the Middle E a s t . " This sounds like Le Monde, and the ineffable balancing act of French neutralism: If the Soviets engage in imperialist adventures in Angola and Afghanistan, American policy is not precisely to blame but not without responsibility either...
...These two gentlemen, who rarely agree on public issues, nonetheless agree that whatever one may think of Kissinger's record he has written an extraordinary book...
...The real world is not a series of statements, however cogent, but (as the philosopher said) everything that is the ease...
...that he was mistaken in fancying himself a "strategist and conceptual thinker...
...Whatever elections and opinion polls may say to the contrary, legitimacy in this view derives from "being on the side of history," which means in the hills or jungles or wherever the language of the Left is spoken...
...Add what Hoffmann calls Kissinger's ruthlessness, his personal ambition, and his resort to fantasy (a polite word for prevaricationmspecifically with respect to the alleged plan to enlist Chou and Sihanouk to save Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge) and what it all comes down to is that Kissinger failed because he was not a nice guy...
...More could have been done, I suppose, to induce the American people to match it...
...E a r l y this summer when the battle for Stanley was drawing to a close and the Israelis were tightening their noose around Beirut and the Russians belatedly beginning to growl, I had visions of Henry Kissinger rocketing around the globe again, from Moscow to Peking to Cairo...
...For another, today's world is (like yesterday's) too much with us, the background noise is hardly conducive to reflection, and Kissinger's account of his experience raises so many complex issues that people tend to be overwhelmed by it...
...to handle the press, which he did with consummate skill to the greater glory of the White House and, of course, himself...
...His memoirs read sometimes like a work of literature, bathed in an atmosphere of historical fiction, with occasional longueurs but carefully plotted and filled with suspense...
...This, not Watergate, is why Kissinger overestimated his ability to manage an orderly retreat from Vietnam-a not implausible hypothesis, to revert to the style of Le Monde again, although Kissinger's frequent references to Watergate would suggest that he was not unaware of it...
...The laugh is that our State Department still dreams of participating in the dance of statecraft with these goons...
...For once these dolts have spent a quarter of a century or so gaining their M.A.'s in telecommunications and other such pud courses, once they have tired of clipping magazine lingerie ads for their salacious scrapbooks, of plying blonde coeds with coffee in student unions and learning how to masticate chewing gum without swallowing it, all will return home to take up lofty positions in the" local establishment or to be beaten to death in Utopia's dungeons...
...There is little evidence, aside from the two instances I have mentioned, that the appearance of Years of Upheaval has changed the terms or raised the level of the ongoing foreign policy debate among us...
...But both point to the felicity of his portraits, the aptness of his language, his ingenuity as a negotiator--all of which, as pure story, informs, fascinates, and delights the reader...
...Everything depends on whether and how they can be put together, the kind of task that our once and future Metternich, if his memoirs are to be believed, had a genius for solving...
...So much for what one might call Kissinger's Hoffmann problem...
...I do not want to be misperceived...
...But the guidance they offer is necessarily limited...
...They meditate solitarily on TV's pish-posh and radio's simian sound...
...We are deliberately led to juxtapose two images--the President floating on his back in the water and the President returning in defeat to the western White House, to float, as it were, face down...
...Podhoretz has a problem with the word " g r e a t , " being repelled (he tells us) by the fashionable inflation of language...
...He is Henry Kissinger, a man from nowhere, who appears at a time of great national travail, almost by accident, without authority other than that conferred by his competence and wit, to wield enormous power and conduct our foreign affairs...
...No author could wish for a more perceptive reaction to his work...
...The President is thinking about his place in history...
...scribed himself as a loner in terms that people thought rather ridiculous at the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982"" 11 time, but the fact is that Kissinger was and remains sui generis...
...This is the man who once, in an interview with an Italian journalist, de...
...Engulfed in anguish" but "feeling an immense relief," Kissinger--who has also acquired a wife in volume II--prepares to stride firmly into volume III...
...The last pages, including that eerie evening with Nixon in the White House on the night before his resignation, have a Hamlet-like quality...
...Which of the parties in the Middle East wants peace and which wants only victory...
...When the alarm was finally sounded there was no unwillingness to accept the necessary s a c r i f i c e s , only a g r e a t confusion about what precisely needed to be done...
...He is telling us, directly or by implication, what he thinks we should do...
...Yes, it is true...
...ceived, ambiguous, impermanent...
...For a moment we are almost persuaded that reality is the propositions we devise to represent it...
...Too crude--or too complex...
...They "skim" the book or put it aside for a more propitious time, and meanwhile the events so carefully recorded and interpreted recede at a rate approaching the speed of light and Kissinger's monument takes its place--already!--with the memoirs of Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle in that undifferentiated limbo we call the Past...
...Add to these seminal experiences their attendance at a few afternoon classes where their siestas are disturbed by the occasional rough shouts of an anti-American prof and their minds will forever be abuzz with The Confusion and The Resentment...
...In power, he behaved and thought like a man of power, not like a progressive professor of political science...
...I find it impossible to quarrel with the Podhoretz catechism...
...Without abandoning or betraying his convictions or forgetting what we have lr from the past he must remain aware that the f u t u r e is open and t h a t - - i f he is a Kissinger--his book remains to be written...
...But only for a moment...
...This was just as true in Vietnam and in the Middle East, wherever, in fact, our policy ignored " t h e t e r r i b l e dangers of contriving a n e g o t i a t e d s e t t l e m e n t between a party that wants peace and a party that, although it may at certain moments p r e t e n d otherwise, wants only v i c t o r y . " So the famous structure of peace was nothing but a mirage...
...Throughout the Third World almost everyone takes pride in his ancient ghosts and goblins...
...All extol the timeless rhythms of their antique cultures...
...In his beginning is my end...
...One might have wished in t h e s e memoirs for more attention to the ideological b a t t l e ; welcomed, for example, a proposal for promoting democratic ideas and p r a c t i c e s , such as the one Ronald Reagan p r e s e n t e d before the British Parliament early this summer...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 15...
...because OPEC had bared its teeth and the Iranian debacle was app r o a c h i n g - i t is also arguable that the world was a more dangerous place for our country when Kissinger left office than whon he was sworn in, and that the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy can and should be faulted on a number of counts, e.g., the neglect or mishandling of international economic arrangements, our European relations, Iran...
...But that is another story...
...Podhoretz, with his customary brilliance and passion, "reconsiders" Kissinger in the June 1982 issue of Commentary...
...It is not my p r e s e n t purpose to engage in long post-mortems to determine whether K i s s i n g e r ' s tactics were right or wrong, successful or not, in Cambodia, in the Middle East, in the opening to China, on arms control, but simply to point out that in not one of these most visible events was our action misdirected or vitiated by illusions about our adversaries or, for that matter, about any of the other "concepts" that Podhoretz (or Hoffmann) would offer to guide our foreign policy...
...The word seems a bit flat...
...How would Podhoretz have proposed to stop it...
...They visit Disneyland and Miami Beach...
...Hoffmann cites with apparent approval Kissinger's "spirited defense of d~tente" (mainly against criticism from the Righ 0 but ends by complaining that a strategy of confrontation and negotiation was too complex for the American public to follow, and that such an interpretation and practice of detente "was bound to force the Russians to ask themselves whether there was enough in it to make it worth their while...
...The tactics may not always have been effective but the principle remained precisely what it had been during t h e coldest days of the Cold War: containment - - w i t h the hope (and what American secretary of state has not expressed it...
...After the wireless has been installed and the TVs are in place, news from godless and gorgeous America will wobble every swarthy mullah, every fuliginous patriot, and all the caudillos of Patagonia...
...The words are not from the 1960s encomiums of Dr...
...Coming as it does after a graceful and sensitive appreciation of K i s s i n g e r ' s achievement as a writer, Podhoretz's sudden plunge into what he calls the "real world" (which is in fact the world of language and logic) astounds us by its rigor...
...Hoffmann seems to want to have it both ways...
...They were the sophisticated hardliners, from Paul Nitze to Lane Kirkland, for whom detente was a vast mistake...
...H . J . Kaplan KISSINGER II: HENRY KISSINGER AND YEARS OF UPHEAVAL Only the f a n a t i c s will deny it: K i s s i n g e r ' s account o f diplomatic life d u r i n g Watergate is a masterwork...
...Some obviously are men of sound character and high intelligence, but all the second-raters suffer from The Confusion whether they study at Harvard or Slippery Rock...
...People on every.rung of the Third World ladder want to know more, and this creates problems...
...Kaplan has been a foreign service officer, a corporate executive, a writer, and an editor...
...Months have passed sifice publication (on March 25), and though the event was attended by the usual hoopla, I suspect that the book has been more widely touted and bought than read, and that its significance will take many more months, indeed years, to sink in...
...The policymaker, in any case, must " s t a y l o o s e , " as our popular language puts i t - - b u t this is e a s i e r said than done...
...The Confusion can be observed right here in America where it addles the brains of all the mediocre graduate students sent by Third World governments to make off with the American magic...
...What he might wish for, in any case, if he is as insatiable as one surmises from the boundless energy and the lust for power displayed in these pages--and what we all might wish for him and for our country--is not merely agreement and praise but a closer attention to what he is saying...
...in any case, the law of the excluded middle need not apply...
...Yet word of Uncle Sam's Gomorrah remains diverting...
...It has yet to occur to the diplomats that Third Worldism seems "to hint at a kind of universal mental retardation...
...But it doesn't matter...
...But for Hoffmann it also explains why Kissinger "reduces liberals to caricature" and "favors rightwing regimes...
...But now, as his helicopter disappears over the horizon, Fortinbras, alias Gerald Ford, observed by the same implacably indispensable eye, "strides firmly toward the White House, his arm around his wife's shoulder...
...Hoffmann's perfidious advice to Kissinger--to become a writer of biographies and so to "indulge his taste for great men"puts me in mind of a dimly remembered passage in Saint-Simon that recounts the long and laborious journey of a provincial nobleman to Versailles, where he hoped to dazzle the court with his brilliance and play a great role...
...communique with Mao and Chou Enlai...
...Although many of Kissinger's personae have disappeared from the scene, if not from this life--Nixon, Mao, Chou, Sadat, Heath, Golda Meir, and a host of others--the issues raised in Years of Upheaval are very much with us...
...that someday this too shall pass...
...The corruptions of the foul West are known to every informed rickshaw puller, every bazaar entrepreneur...
...and a little help from his friends--Nixon, Ford, et al.--but the fact remains that he made history almost singlehandedly...
...Then they were on the run...
...Hoffmann also reproaches Kissinger for failing to understand" the extent to which a state's external performance and strength depend on domestic cohesion and consensus...
...Kissinger is not the sort of memorialist who merely tells us what happened...
...It was, Podhoretz maintains, "based on a misconception of what was possible in the real world...
...The answer may actually be both, or now one and now the other...
...One of Kissinger's critics, unconsciously mimicking the tone and style of his text, remarks that no statesman ever writes memoirs to denigrate his own role...
...What, then, was this "vital foreign p o l i c y , " - a n d why do Podhoretz and Hoffmann pronounce it a failure...
...In White House Years we learned how Kissinger was not only allowed but encouraged to set up his famous "back channels" to undercut the Department of State and reduce the titular secretary, Rogers, to a figurehead...
...The establishment, whose thunder was thus to be stolen, suspected Nixon of betrayal from the moment he entered the White House...
...Incredibly, Nixon seems to have clung to the idea that the ceaseless activity of his secretary of state would help to save him...
...In the view o f a neo-Kantian liberal, domestic consensus always depends on the prevalence of "progressive" policies and ideas...
...and both are generous in their praise of the negotiator who put the pieces together with Sadat, Assad, Brezhnev, and the Israelis after the October War, and worked out the Shangha...
...Occasionally, as in volume I, he steps back from his story to declare a principle or sketch a portrait...
...This strikes me as improbable, but if one takes the trouble to be Kissinger why should one excellence exclude the other...
...Years of Upheaval," the second volume of his memoirs, reminds us.that diplomacy in the old-fashioned sense can still play a significant role, even in an age of implacable ideologies...
...I am suggesting not that the record is unflawed, but that in retrospect it stands up quite well...
...The f i r s t volume, White House Years, was published in 1979...
...Negatives proliferate in this view of the world, and so do dichotomies: Kissinger is too confrontational and too devious to conceive of a genuine accommodation...
...But their judgment is univocal and clear and appropriately touched with awe: A masterwork has entered the American canon...
...none could be, by any imaginable policy under the circumstances...
...Could any set of general concepts, even if spelled out in greater detail than Podhoretz does, give access to a world more " r e a l " than the one so vividly pictured in these memoirs ? In such a world, profound insight, e.g., into the nature of the enemy, may or may not be as relevant in the short run as some passing circumstance, e.g., the enemy's food supply, or an election at home...
...The hero is neither an artistic sensibility like Jean Christophe nor a "delicate child of life" like Hans Castorp nor even 'Lanny Budd...
...A marvelous bit, written long after the event about someone who (if memory serves) makes no further claim on our remembrance...
...We now have twothirds of the Gospel according to Henry, and while there is still no sign that anyone has organized a church it is obvious that the News he brings is from On High, the reasoning is compelling, and the style does honor to our culture...
...Exactly who should be included in this category is not clear...
...The final scenes will send him back to California, presumably to float in that pool again, but this time as a political corpse...
...He scales mountains, fords rivers, endures interminable roads and horrid discomforts, then prepares himself with elaborate care for his presentation at court--to which Saint-Simon (who has described all this in detail and with delectation) devotes exactly two words: I1 ddplut...
...As I clear my throat and prepare to make solemn noises about this extraordinary performance, I find that the noises I had in mind have been largely preempted by Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, and Stanley Hoffmann, a distinguished professor at Harvard...
...The latter were not, as one might suppose, premature moral majoritarians or any other element of the non-establishment Right...
...to staff the national security office with the people he needed even if they were exotics (Democrats, left-wingers, and god-only-knewwhat) who would never have been tolerated in the proximity of the Chief had Kissinger's large shadow not screened them from view...
...For the reader who emerges blinking from this prodigiously detailed account of a performance without precedent in diplomatic history, the judgment has a summary--almost comical--ring to it...
...It may also be true that Kissinger and Nixon aroused exaggerated hopes in the ability of regional surrogates such as Iran to help defend our interests in the Near East and elsewhere, instead of relying exclusively on American military power, assuming Congress would ever have allowed them to do so...
...The events narrated in Years o f Upheaval actually begin in January 1973, with Nixon's second inauguration, not in August of that year...
...Because the Soviets were willing and able to increase their military spending by some 40 percent throughout the decade, and we were not...
...Most, if not all, of these theses could be aptly i l l u s t r a t e d by aphorisms or vignettes from Years of Uptaeaval...
...The foreign policy elite of which Stanley Hoffmann is at once a spokesman and a critic is the milieu from which Kissinger sprangwan academic arm of the awesome Eastern establishment that Richard Nixon presumably was attempting to disarm and co-opt when he appointed him in the first place...
...and that they understand...
...But surely it is unfair to blame them and the so-called doctrine of d~tente for the unprecedented military buildup the Russians undertook during the 1970s...
...In the interim a few little things have happened: visits to Hanoi and Peking, the fall of Allende, meetings with Brezhnev, war in the Middle East, the famous shuttles, the energy crisis, rapprochement with Sadat, trouble with the Europeans--and our hero has been at the center of them all...
...So Hoffmann can say--of a man who was demonstrably the most popular secretary of state in living memory, and surely the most prestigious on Capitol Hill since George C. Marshall-that "his concept of power was often too crude to be accepted at home...
...H.J...
...This is a truism, with a sniff of Harvard about it, but the self-serving purpose is hardly achieved if the events are twisted, the reasoning specious, the style (the man himself, as Buffon observed) inauthentic...
...The Yom Kippur war was concluded without damage to the essential interests of Israel, while preparing the ground for Camp David and helping Sadat free his country from dependence on the Soviets...
...no great breakthrough, no "structure of peace" was achieved by agreement...
...To paraphrase the master himself: What, in the name of God, is strategic failure...
...To call it an utter failure begs the obvious rejoinder: compared to what...
...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 It is worth noting that Kissinger has gone out of his way to create this symmetry...
...For one thing, the inside story of Watergate, to which Kissinger adds a bit of pathos, has lost its morbid fascination...
...people move in and out of it on different issues...
...that both Hoffmann and Podhoretz render full and fair homage to the literary qualities of this book: the psychological penetration of the portraits, the brief essays on national problems, the obiter dicta on tactics and the sustained vivacity of the style...
...But there is something preposterous about applying a similar treatment to the events related in Kissinger's memoirs, as if so many and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 13 many-sided actions, so diversely inspired, undertaken under such ambiguous circumstances, could all be summed up in one cruel thrust: Heflopped...
...But none of these operational achievements can alter the judgment of these two intellectuals that the ideas which Kissinger brought to the conduct of foreign policy were mistaken...
...Forty-year-old graduate students from American universities were suddenly the most powerful Metternichs in post-Pahlavi Iran...
...Of course he had a brilliant staff and the paraphernalia of a superpower (armies, fleets, alliances) behind him...
...The opening to China, long a gleam in the eye of American Presidents (and an idea that had even occurred, believe it or not, to John Foster Dulles) was finally accomplished, while preserving the freedom and integrity of Taiwan...
...Furthermore, Podhoretz argues, K i s s i n g e r not only c r e a t e d illusions but fell victim to them himself...
Vol. 15 • September 1982 • No. 9
