Helter Skelter

William Bundy’s long and sober account of American foreign policy under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger is, in cumulative effect, devastating for the reputations of both.

The former president’s claim to the favorable opinion of history, which he doggedly maintained with considerable success during the years that followed his departure from the White House, was that liberal opinion and Congress, by refusing to back his policies, had robbed him of success in Vietnam and Cambodia. He claimed that he had nonetheless reshaped the geopolitics of his day by recognizing China, thereby redressing the international balance to Soviet Russia’s disadvantage and American advantage, while at the same time developing Soviet-American detente.

Kissinger, the former secretary of state, implied in his memoirs that he had been the principal intelligence behind the president’s successes, handicapped at the same time by Nixon’s miscalculations and wrongdoings, which eventually brought the edifice down.

William Bundy’s conclusion is that President Nixon made the policy decisions in his administration, and the brilliant professor whom he had lifted from Harvard obscurity was his counselor and negotiator, not his mentor. The two together, Bundy says in “A Tangled Web,” were “in many respects a strong foreign policy team,” but their judgment was “erratic and often subjective, and their vision too narrow.” They were both effective in presenting their policies, the otherwise maladroit president in painstakingly prepared speeches and Kissinger with his astute manipulation of a willing press, but both in the end undermined their position through lies to Congress and to the public, eventually forfeiting the trust of both.

Bundy does not write as a political enemy of President Nixon, although he describes himself as a Democrat. He served in the CIA and on the National Security Council in the Eisenhower administration, in the Department of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and, subsequently, for five years in the State Department. Certainly he is no liberal polemicist. He is a surviving member of the real Eastern establishment, which was social rather than political and never liberal in the usual meaning given that term today but eminently conservative in its disposition to maintain institutions and respect the received wisdom.

He and his brother McGeorge, national security advisor to both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, were among the well-meaning officials who gave America the war in Vietnam. He diffidently suggests in this book that while the Vietnam failure was the product of disastrous errors by three administrations, it did in the end have some positive influence on subsequent Asian political stability.

Thus, hard as the author’s final judgments are of his two subjects, his book is not a polemic or settling of accounts. It is restrained and courteous in its (nearly always) dispassionate examination of the diplomatic and political record of the Nixon presidency and the brief term of Gerald Ford as Nixon’s successor when Kissinger remained secretary of state.

The author’s dispassion fails only once,when writing about the release of the White House tapes with their repetitive notation “expletive deleted.” Bundy says, “[T]he mind-set of the White House was revealed as that of the gutter, with President Nixon himself setting the tone.” Bundy was not the only one shocked on that occasion, for exactly that reason. We have since become unshockable.

Nixon himself considered Charles De Gaulle an important influence. He believed that in Vietnam he faced the same problem de Gaulle had confronted and mastered in Algeria. De Gaulle’s advice to him, at a dinner in Paris three months after Nixon’s inauguration in 1969, was twofold: “Get out of Vietnam and cultivate China.” The American was already determined to do both but misunderstood what de Gaulle was actually saying to him.

He took from de Gaulle technique without substance. He adopted the Frenchman’s methods of silence and reflection, followed by dramatic interventions, as when de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO or vetoed British membership in the European Community. But as Bundy says, Nixon’s dramatic interventions rarely had a prepared follow-up or a coherent goal. They were related to his use of the bargaining tactic of implied irrationality, as H.R. Haldeman described it, of trying to convince his opponents “that he might be pushed to a point where he might do something totally irrational. This was a strategic concept.” It was also a tactic of intimidation, which has had a bad influence on subsequent administrations, encouraging a tendency to make military intervention a substitute for thought.

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger seemed to understand that de Gaulle in Algeria made a cold and magisterial judgment that the war was lost, or at least could not be won on morally and politically acceptable terms, and concluded that he had therefore to manage a defeat. He had to make a withdrawal on the best terms possible, despite bitterly divided public opinion at home, civil uprising by the French population in Algiers, an army mutiny and a terrorist campaign in metropolitan France by the military mutineers. He accomplished what he set out to do with great moral and physical courage. His success reestablished the French Republic and gave France in the 1960s a major role in world affairs.

Nixon and Kissinger recognized that for reasons of domestic opinion they needed to get out of Vietnam, but they lacked de Gaulle’s ability to face the real choices. They told themselves that they could gain at the conference table what was lost in the field, pretending that a “Vietnamized” South Vietnamese army could win a war it previously had been unable to win when backed by half a million American soldiers.

They indulged the illusion that, even after the American troop withdrawal in 1973, bombing could arrest North Vietnam’s determination to conquer the South. This simply was not serious, neither intellectually nor politically--as the humiliating outcome demonstrated.

If Nixon and Kissinger, like de Gaulle in Algeria, had immediately negotiated for the best they could get and turned to reconciling a divided United States, the result could not possibly have been worse than what actually happened to Vietnam, and to America, after six more years of war. Cambodia, whose invasion in 1970 Bundy rightly calls “a black page in the history of American foreign policy,” would gave been spared and several million Cambodians, Vietnamese and Americans saved from atrocious death or mutilation.

Behind our policy in Southeast Asia was an assumption that, as Bundy says, was the central analytical weakness in Nixon administration policy. Both Nixon and Kissinger believed that the world Communist movement was hierarchical and disciplined, that the influence of nationalism or even national interest on Asian Communism or in politics elsewhere in the non-Western world was unimportant and that regional conflicts involving Communists could be regulated only in Beijing or Moscow.

This motivated the opening to China, which Nixon had contemplated even before his election, and was also the reason why the president devoted considerable attention, a month after his inauguration, to opening a confidential back channel of communications to the Soviet Union, by way of Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

Neither relationship had any serious effect on the war in Indochina. Nixon and Kissinger went to China with the mistaken belief that China could and would make the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese yield. They also had a larger geopolitical ambition, that by opening up to China they could put Russia in difficulty and establish a new international balance of power.

The balance was changed, but to China’s advantage. China, not the United States, was the country under serious Soviet threat. (Russia seems at the time to have contemplated a strike against Chinese nuclear forces.) By recognizing the United States, China counterbalanced the Russian danger, and during Nixon’s first visit to China in early 1972, in an emotional banquet speech by the president, the Chinese even obtained what Kissinger later said was a commitment from Nixon that “edged up to an American military guarantee of China.” The United States got nothing of consequence in return.

The back-channel relationship with the Soviet Union also ended in paradox. By 1970, Dobrynin was reporting to Moscow that the Nixon administration accepted “a divided Germany and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” again with nothing in return. A Kissinger aide told a gathering of American diplomats in London that the United States was working to make Soviet control of Central and Eastern Europe “organic,” in order to regularize the unstable domination that then existed. Henry Kissinger said that “the problem of our age is how to manage the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower.”

The problem of our age in fact proved to be quite the opposite: how to manage the collapse of the Soviet Union as a superpower and oversee the peaceful liberation of Central and Eastern Europe.

Nixon once said that he and Leonid Brezhnev “were the only two members of the most exclusive club in the world.” When Nixon was brought down by Watergate, Dobrynin said that Brezhnev was Nixon’s “last friend.” Kissinger was, from the beginning of his relationship with Chou En-lai, the Chinese premier, struck with admiration for him and, as the political hysteria of “the Gang of Four” overtook China during the 1970s, was perhaps Chou’s last friend--or last and most important foreign friend. This fellowship of the powerful was accompanied by American policies by which the supposed lackeys of these Communist leaders were being pounded by B-52s.

Both Nixon and Kissinger were lone operators, hostile to the bureaucracies of American government, unwilling to accept the constraints Congress tried to impose on them. Policy was made on impulse and private judgment, in paranoid isolation. The two considered themselves smarter than the bureaucracies, and on many issues they probably were. But impulse combined with ignorance to produce the nomination of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as America’s gendarme in the Persian Gulf and Middle East and which provoked the Iranian revolution of 1979, still an object of U.S. policy obsession. Cambodia’s invasion was decided while everyone who actually knew anything about Cambodia was cut out of the policy loop.

Policy was equally arbitrary and personalized in Europe. Both Nixon and Kissinger despised and distrusted Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany. They scorned the Helsinki negotiations on European cooperation and security, with their West European-inspired human rights guarantees. But Brandt and Helsinki together established detente in Europe and legitimized the East European dissidence that helped undermine the Soviet position in the region.

The whole story of this country’s foreign policy in the Nixon-Kissinger years is a very strange one, stranger than most of us who lived through it could have imagined at the time. Our foreign policy was being run by two secretive and manipulative individuals who did their best to avoid congressional and public accountability. They believed that history would justify their actions, but history has done no such thing. The history is here, in Bundy’s detached and scholarly account of the whole extraordinary affair, and it concludes that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “pattern of deception, of Congress and of the American people, [was] in the end doomed to failure.” In Indochina, Iran, Chile, the Middle East, China--taken over by the Gang of Four--and even in Europe, it failed. It is an exemplary and fascinating story, and rather frightening.