The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House
Hersh, Seymour M.
THE PRICE OF POWER: KISSINGER IN THE NIXON WHITE HOUSE by Seymour M. Hersh Summit Books. 698 pp. $19.95. by Bernard D. Nossiter Seymour Hersh is a superb reporter, digging out buried documents,...
...He suggests that Watergate prevented him from working his will...
...He drinks his own urine and boasts of the decades he has spent without sleeping with his wife...
...A quick settlement would be a public relations coup for the White House," Hersh writes...
...If material anonymously supplied was verified, then the nature of the verification should be cited...
...There is something irresistibly comic in Hersh's reliance on Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist boss of Albania, to provide the last word on the China opening...
...Every journalist, of course, relies on anonymous informants, but anyone with a claim on history must acknowledge this fact in each instance...
...In his memoirs, even Kissinger admits some of his attempts to muscle Rogers out of the way...
...But for anyone who knows India, Desai is the very soul of rectitude...
...Is there an Israeli plot to kill Arab scientists...
...It is an indictment, and almost every Kissinger maneuver is a separate count...
...The sorry fact is that at independence in 1947, Moslems, Hindus, Bengalis of either persuasion, and Sikhs slaughtered each other with a ferocity unmatched in the subcontinent's continuing bloody history...
...Hersh pays only a one-sentence tribute, and then tries to deprecate it...
...Quite properly, Hersh devotes more space to Vietnam, Nixon's first-term preoccupation, than to any other subject...
...The same cannot be said for all members of his family, and there may be a simple misunderstanding here...
...Hoxha said that Peking should never have allowed Nixon to come and, as Hersh writes, "the Albanian leader also correctly summed up the importance of rapprochement to Nixon," who would benefit at the polls from his Peking visit...
...Hersh often retails a story or gives us a blind quotation without telling us whether he is relying on a source who sought anonymity, a document, or what...
...Anyway, Kissinger and Nixon clearly missed the significance of an offer from President Anwar Sadat of Egypt to expel his Russian advisers in return for some disengagement by Israel in the Sinai...
...If Sadat took the initiative, the Kissinger-Nixon axis had the belated sense to seize it...
...Henry Kissinger is the Augie March of international politics, a glib, quick-witted opportunist, obsequious to his boss—on election eve in 1972, he left a handwritten note on Richard Nixon's pillow thanking him for his "unfading human kindness and consideration"—and brutal to subordinates...
...Hersh is equally ungiving over Salt I, the first nuclear disarmament agreement between the superpowers...
...Their tormentors, the Moslems of West Pakistan, at independence drove out Hindus with "racially inspired assaults and murders...
...Once again we are back in the dismal swamp of the secret bombing and failed invasion of Cambodia, a world of false reports and doctored documents...
...can knowledge of Israeli efforts to deny nuclear capability to other countries in the Middle East by assassinating their most sophisticated nuclear scientists...
...Hersh will argue it out in a libel suit...
...Who wrote the paper...
...This is plausible but incomplete...
...Even Hersh calls it a "remarkable accomplishment" but neglects to say why...
...He baldly identifies Morarji De-sai, the conservative Indian politician, as a $20,000-a-year agent for the CIA...
...His refusal to recognize the limits of power is almost meg-alomaniacal...
...He pandered to a master who is supposed to have said frequently, "Bomb the bastards...
...He wrote "Soft State: A Newspaperman's Chronicle of India" and "Britain: A Future That Works...
...The new accord, whatever its legalistic shortcomings, ended the crises by assuring West Germany an unblocked route to Berlin...
...Kissinger says he is not proud of these episodes, useful as they were...
...But Hersh hurries on to other matters...
...This won't do...
...India did not invade West Pakistan," Hersh writes, forgetting that three pages earlier he said that "Indian troops seized thousands of square miles" in a "limited retaliation in the West...
...No doubt that motive played a part...
...He cites approvingly a State Department official who complained that the deal was done at Taiwan's expense...
...by Bernard D. Nossiter Seymour Hersh is a superb reporter, digging out buried documents, running down elusive officials to make his case...
...Inside that House, he took the hard line...
...Again, this was done behind the back of the State Department...
...By January, Nixon orders Kissinger to buy the deal he could have had in October...
...If they were applauded for end runs around the diplomats, why should Kissinger be damned...
...Most diplomats would be quite content with a failure that brought Egypt, the most powerful nation in the Middle East, to the American camp and sealed off Israel's southern border, thereby making a major conflict in the region all but impossible...
...It closes with the delayed and belated accord Kissinger negotiated in January 1973, which took the United States out of its hopeless adventure in Vietnam...
...Since the end of World War II, Berlin had been a recurrent source of crisis, of tension between Moscow and Washington...
...He applauds the plan for a massive Christmas bombing of Hanoi...
...Hersh also quotes an Asian expert who told him: "If he'd tried to do it [open the China door] on the usual interagency basis, the trip would never have taken place...
...It is all of a piece with Kissinger's hints to columnists that he was a dove in a White House of hawks...
...Has it succeeded...
...i name ; ADDRESS city state zip Please cup and mail to: THE PROGRESSIVE attn: Ellen Seefelt 409 East Main Street Madison, Wisconsin 53703 BOOKS r no doubt of American will and power...
...Since Secretary Rogers complained because the deal gave Moscow a consulate in West Berlin, the Kissinger-Nixon team was well advised to ignore Foggy Bottom...
...But for all its 700 pages, The Price of Power is not the definitive study of foreign policy in the first Nixon term...
...The deceit no doubt cost tens of thousands of lives, including an uncounted number of Americans...
...Hersh insists that all future arms bargaining will be haunted by such dishonesty...
...We see Kissinger pushing to win Nixon's approval of a deal with Hanoi in October 1972...
...Even so, it is less than just to blame Kissinger and Nixon, as Hersh does, for the "dead and maimed" in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra, and the Middle East...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy frequently complained of obstruction at State...
...In his end notes, Hersh says that some of those he interviewed requested anonymity and "the information itself, once cross-checked and verified, was more significant than the names of all those involved in providing it...
...He tells some choice tales of Kissinger's negotiating mistakes and his attempts to extract faked estimates from the CIA to support his deal...
...No doubt, but other motives might also be ascribed to the search for peace...
...Hersh offers no sources, no documents to sustain his remarkable charge...
...Raw materials, moreover, must be sifted with care...
...Any man capable of wiretapping his Jewish aides to placate the coarse anti-Semitism in Nixon's White House is clearly destined for great things in an amoral world...
...Hersh's achievement is the provision of a rich store of raw materials of papers and conversations that no serious study of Kissinger, Nixon, and their time can ignore...
...As a parting shot, Hersh tells us that Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy after the war was a failure because it did not solve the critical problem of the Palestinians...
...isolation from the world's most populous nation...
...Hersh's harpoon has an extraordinary reach...
...The President, cocksure of victory in the election a month later, fears any change in the status quo might threaten his electoral landslide...
...Hersh's passion to put Nixon and Kissinger in the wrong over every quarrel is understandable, but he is not entitled to assume that morality must reside in those they oppose...
...Almost every page offers some nugget for dedicated Nixonphobes...
...It opens with Kissinger's double-agent role in the 1968 campaign, in which he supplied Nixon with Democratic secrets and offered a similar service to Hubert Humphrey...
...The real point, I think, is what was achieved: a U.S.-Soviet accord to curb some nuclear weapons, another breakthrough of no small importance...
...Desai is cranky...
...In the end, his enormous labor is marred because Kissinger-Nixon is not the white whale...
...When rebellion flared in East Pakistan, she saw her opportunity and took it...
...want to join The Progressive Sustainers...
...Hersh is Ahab in single-minded pursuit of the white whale, the quintessence of evil: Kissinger and Nixon...
...Indeed, Hersh's account of State's bureaucrats provides one very good reason for the "back channels" Kissinger and Nixon used to escape the diplomats and the Defense Department...
...Does Hersh really prefer the more even-handed approach of a Ronald Reagan, who has frozen the Peking thaw by selling arms to Taiwan...
...In his memoirs, Kissinger claims he was trying to assure an exit that would leave I An Invitation to Join The Progressive Sustainers The Progressive Sustainers are a group of loyal and committed readers who provide essential support by monthly contributions...
...To color the picture better, the Bengalis of East Pakistan are "a tolerant, gentle, and cultivated race...
...Apart from its victims, the bombing changes nothing...
...They must be downed in order to place the Nixon-Kissinger tilt toward Pakistan in its harshest light...
...What other journalist would lightly toss off in a footnote a tale like this: "According to a CIA report in my possession [there is] AmeriBernard D. Nossiter is the United Nations bureau chief for The New York Times...
...Above all, he is God's angry man, consumed with righteous indignation over those in power who are indifferent to human suffering and disdainful of the truth...
...In The Price of Power, Hersh skips lightly past the Secretary of State's larger achievements and finds them soiled, in any case, by Kissinger and his chief...
...I will send a monthly contribution of C $ 16 ? S15 C$20 $25 Cothcr__I C for the next six months...
...The Progressive Sustainers assure us of the regular assistance that is vital to the magazine's operation and survival...
...Conversely, Gandhi must be portrayed as a compassionate, selfless woman "drawn into the tragedy" of East Pakistan's effort to gain independence from West Pakistan...
...As for Indira Gandhi, she and her fellow Hindu nationalists always resented the partition that divided the subcontinent into India and Pakistan...
...Of course East Pakistan's Moslem Bengalis were exploited by the Punjabi Moslems of the West...
...Desai, a vocal critic of Indira Gandhi's authoritarian "emergency" rule, succeeded her as Prime Minister when she unwisely called an election...
...When Hersh errs, it is to make a point, in this case to belittle Indira Gandhi's critics during the last war with Pakistan in 1971...
...A sheer lack of imagination over the radical turn offered by Sadat is an equally good explanation...
...He delays...
...for the next twelve months...
...Theirs is a much richer story than a Manichean view allows...
...Kissinger, eager to supplant Rogers, changes horses swiftly...
...She marched her armies into both wings of Pakistan to seal the divide and weaken her Moslem neighbor...
...In Hersh's view, the chance was lost because Kissinger wanted "to undermine the State Department...
...His approach skews his treatment of the epochal breakthrough to China, a Nixon-Kissinger initiative that ended the U.S...
...i ? until further notice...
...It was, and probably a good thing too...
...The Hersh collection is flawed by the frequent use of blind or unsourced quotation...
...Hersh does not carry his picaresque tale as far as the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, but he still manages to get in a few shots over Kissinger's performance with Israelis and Arabs before the war...
...The book is neither biography nor political analysis...
...Well, yes...
...In Hersh's view, Kissinger's "need to dominate Rogers and his willful misunderstanding of the limits of Soviet influence inside Egypt helped to make inevitable" the October war...
...This, to put it gently, is a strained view of events...
...Sometimes his swiftness gets the better of things...
...For Hersh, "back channels" or private transmission lines to a foreign power are simply further examples of Kissinger the malign, eager for power and eager to undercut Secretary of State William Rogers...
...If Hersh lacks Melville's style, he has the same fixation on detail, often at the expense of narrative...
...That is all...
...In much the same way, Hersh dismisses the Kissinger-Nixon deal with the Russians over Berlin...
Vol. 47 • September 1983 • No. 9
