Kissinger: History and Apologia

...The most famous of our six living former Secretaries of State deserves to have his account of the eighteen tempestuous months of the aborted Nixon second term considered in its own terms...

...Responding to the Soviet threat with an alert of American forces (about which Kissinger did not consult Nixon, though he thinks that maybe Haig did), Kissinger was appalled to find the alert "immediately engulfed in the cynicism spawned by Watergate," many Americans believing that Nixon had generated the crisis to deflect pressure on him...

...Kissinger's reluctance to cast the first stone is matched by his effort to place himself beyond stone-throwing range...

...but we had a different perspective...

...He protests a mite too much in asking us not to judge him too harshly from the way he talked to Nixon...

...For four years," he mourns, "I had sustained myself through the anguishing turmoil of Vietnam with the vision of a united America turning at last to tasks of construction...

...Anwar Sadat, with the "patience and serenity of the Egyptian masses from which he came," a leader who understood "the virtue of solitude and used it so rigorously...

...Kissinger cannot quite extricate himself from the den of thieves whose criminality he will not acknowledge...

...story made the rounds that I responded to someone at a dinner party who thanked me for saving the world with the smug reply, 'You are welcome.' " This single sentence points up the complexity of the many-layered Henry Kissinger—at once self-adulatory, self-mocking, and, by leaving doubt about the authenticity of the story, self-shielding...

...It is A-plus for history, C-minus for apologia...

...That suggests how Kissinger would like us to see him—as the super-diplomat who carried the burden of a wounded President and bore unjust slings and arrows aimed against himself while he strove to save world peace...

...than to stand the test of deferred scrutiny...

...It doesn't wash...

...Some of Kissinger's observations have an enduring quality that invite compilation into "Sayings of H. A.K...

...The anecdote dates from May 31,1974, the end of the spectacular Middle East diplomatic shuttle that "may have been the high point of public acclaim ever accorded a Secretary of State," but was soon overtaken by the disintegration of the Nixon Administration as "Watergate turned into an obsession that threatened to consume our substance...

...One ends up wishing to give Kissinger separate grades for the two sides of this book, to the extent that one can separate them...

...The detractors' view that Nixon was the incarnation of evil is as wrong as the adulation of his more fervent admirers...

...Thus, as Kissinger sees himself, he was first an accidental beneficiary of Watergate, but ultimately the victim of Watergate, which he found producing so much instability at home that it stifled his creative initiatives abroad...

...I have yet to see one iota of give on their part...

...He explains that it was "especially tempting to fall in with Nixon's musings," and "we sometimes made a contribution more to meet the needs of the moment...

...There are sensitive impressions of world leaders Kissinger has known: Leonid Brezhnev, "touched by insecurity" that caused him endlessly to seek reassurance he would be courteously received in America, and, once in this country, trying to "hide his vulnerability behind heavy-handed clowning...

...Kissinger still managed to avoid sharing that view with the President until August 6, five days after Haig had told him that "matters were heading towards resignation," and only two days before Nixon announced he would step down...

...In July 1974, at long last, Kissinger was forced to the conclusion that "no Secretary of State can by himself manage the foreign policy of our nation...

...We knew better than most that Nixon not so much lied as convinced himself of an expedient account...

...It will acquire no kudos for translating its inner doubts into hesitation...

...Once plundered, it must grow again organically...

...Because this was a time of personal diplomacy, he inevitably stands at the center of momentous events—the Vietnam peace negotiations, the breakthrough to China, Middle East war and peace-making, East-West summitry and arms control...

...Once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail...

...He won three Emmy awards for his Watergate coverage for CBS News...

...Had America not "consumed its authority in this melancholy period," Kissinger muses, it might today have a stable relationship with the Soviet Union...

...The taps on Kissinger aides, other officials, and journalists, of which Kissinger, preoccupied with "the pressures of decision-making," says he was "only dimly aware...

...it cannot be restored simply by an act of will...

...Acts of historic magnitude must not be mortgaged by petty maneuvers that risk their ultimate purpose for marginal and temporary benefits...

...Secretary of State had completed his business...

...There is much that has relevance for today...

...Ah, yes, the wiretaps...

...Not, mind you, because of any fault in Nixon, but because the irresponsible people in Congress and the media were making it impossible to govern...

...He even suspects that, on some occasions, "I was set up to prevent me from disassociating myself from some course or to get me on record in supporting some complicated design...

...Where his own motivations are not under attack he writes with wit, grace, and wisdom...

...Does he really not see the connection between Watergate and the "anguishing turmoil of Vietnam...

...Confidence is a precious commodity...

...One example may suffice: "We did not condone the shabby practices revealed by Watergate...

...From some passages in Years of Upheaval one gets a sense that Kissinger is preparing us for embarrassments to him yet to come in unreleased documents, White House tapes, and Kissinger's own telephone transcripts...

...And Moshe Dayan, "self-centered, poetic, aloof, a brilliant manipulator of people and yet emotionally dependent on them...

...And he concluded that it would be best for Nixon to resign because "the ebbing of Presidential authority encouraged a creeping irresponsibility within the Government, in the Congress, and in the media...

...Yielding to that temptation might be the popular thing to do, but it would be wrong...

...Thus, his Watergate-tarnished colleagues, H.R...

...He describes himself as "stunned" when Presidential assistant Leonard Garment visited his office on April 14,1973, to warn him that Watergate, whose ramifications went far beyond the break-in on Democratic headquarters, was about to blow open...

...As Kissinger grappled with a Soviet threat of intervention in the Middle East in October, he also had to cope with an "agitated and emotional" Nixon, talking of his own possible death...

...His sense of proportion appears to fail him as he constructs for himself the picture of "Presidential surrogate" in a time of trouble, acceding to the State Department portfolio along with his White House position as international stand-in for a crippled Nixon...

...Painfully, reluctantly, he finally says that the wiretaps were something "I was never at ease about," the single "part of my public service about which I am most ambivalent...

...What he does not spare us is considerable obfuscation about his own contribution to the "ebbing of authority," building for himself a house of words that Kissinger, the analyst, would be the first to penetrate if he did not inhabit it...

...Threaded through the 1,200-odd pages of this volume are a monumental series of straddles on Nixon...

...Kissinger spares us his version of the kneeling-with-the-President scene elsewhere described...

...Has the good professor's perceptive sense failed him...

...The temptation, in this Watergate anniversary year, is to measure the Kissinger self-image in Years of Upheaval against conflicting views, from the sneering portrait by John Ehrlichman (Witness to Power) of a White House sycophant and busybody now preoccupied with "shielding the flame" of his reputation, to Seymour Hersh's massive attack on Kissinger as the evil genius of domestic and global conspiracy...

...First, he must look at his part in the decisions escalating war that brought on the wave of protest to which the Nixon Administration reacted with tactics of espionage and surveillance that planted the seeds of the Watergate siege mentality...

...And can he really not find himself in the picture...

...The wiretaps may have been "unpalatable," but, after all, were "as ubiquitous as the telephone and almost as old...

...One should say at the outset that this memoir represents a prodigious feat of historical narrative, at its best where Kissinger does not feel on the defensive...

...It is interesting to be reminded that "throw-weight," a Reagan Administration approach to arms reduction, was dismissed as impractical by the Nixon Administration...

...For Kissinger, who had come a long way with Nixon, it must have been hard to have to break the news that he needed a new President in order to continue managing American foreign policy...

...Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Mitchell, worked "sometimes competitively, more often cooperatively for the success of an Administration in which they believed," though "I had no doubt that there were sordid elements in the White House that ultimately engulfed them...

...He squirms to rid himself of the wiretaps, describing them as something whose reverberations pursued him on his global peace-making missions, persisting even after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize...

...President Reagan could easily recycle the Nixon memo of 1973 saying, "We are now Israel's only major friend in the world...

...Kissinger can stand outside himself to enjoy light moments, such as his awkward first formal review of an honor guard, or the plight of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko when his plane kept circling over Damascus until the U.S...

...More specifically still, there were the wiretaps...

...Second, and more specifically, Kissinger's rages about leaks of information connected with the war, from the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 to Daniel Ellsberg's disclosure of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, spawned the "White House plumbers" who officiated at the break-ins associated with Watergate...

...Thus, Alexander Haig, as his assistant, caused Kissinger "moments of extreme exasperation," but these were "superseded by admiration for Haig's integrity, courage, intelligence, and patriotism...

...Willy Brandt, ideal for the "symbolic role" of reversing Germany's postwar policy, but possessing "neither the stamina nor the intellectual apparatus to manage the forces he had unleashed...

...For example: "In crises the most daring course is often the safest...

...And now, through acts that made no sense, discord would descend again...

...If we didn't have this damn domestic situation," Kissinger told Nixon as they discussed North Vietnamese recalcitrance in April 1973, "a week of bombing would put this agreement in force...

...But when Kissinger discusses his associates in the Nixon Administration, seeking dissociation short of repudiation, his cool detachment seems to desert him and be replaced by a self-conscious effort at mechanical balance...

...Daniel Schorr (Daniel Schorr is senior correspondent of Ted Turner's Cable News Network...