Kissinger in Action
By G. JOHN IKENBERRY
nytimes.com
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Saw a TV program last night on a book about Kissinger. Wow what a job it did on him. I was a kid when the vietnam war was on. I found it remarkable that nothing good ever seemed to happen. The book described on TV blames Kissinger for it all I suppose. Did he really call off NV peace agreements just for elections and personal power?? I am reading the attached link just to try and get some balance on what happened.
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In a surprisingly gripping account of two foreign policy crises, this book brings together the recently declassified telephone transcripts of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, as he orchestrated American policy during the 1973 war in the Middle East and the 1975 evacuation of Saigon. It is history seen as the tickertape flow of urgent conversation.
Most of "Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises" follows Mr. Kissinger through the tense nonstop telephone diplomacy of the war in the Middle East. What emerges is a vivid portrait of one of the 20th century's most influential statesmen operating at full tilt and in the full glow of his power — in rapid kaleidoscopic sequence and in various mixtures cajoling, reassuring, flattering, delaying, smoking out and threatening Soviet, Israeli, Egyptian, British and United Nations diplomats, soothing the concerns of senators, parrying bureaucratic intruders, and periodically updating a distracted and detached President Richard M. Nixon embroiled in the constitutional crisis of Watergate.
The transcripts capture better than Mr. Kissinger's memoir the difficulty, yet utter necessity, of synchronizing his diplomatic strategy aimed at obtaining a cease-fire with the shifting tide of Arab-Israeli military operations. Mr. Kissinger's great accomplishment was in getting the war to end in a way that reduced Soviet influence in the region, maintained Israeli solidarity and strengthened Arab confidence in American-led peace negotiations.
The transcripts that trace America's evacuation of Vietnam show a beleaguered Mr. Kissinger not shaping the flow of events but simply hanging on — trying unsuccessfully to end America's disastrous Indochina experience with a measure of dignity. Mr. Kissinger finds himself caught between the looming collapse of Saigon under siege by advancing North Vietnamese troops, a Congress unresponsive to requests for emergency military assistance, and his own vision of a graceful exit.
Here Mr. Kissinger's problems are in Washington, and he talks mostly to journalists and congressmen. This crisis is of America's own making. As the situation in Vietnam deteriorated, Congress bares the brunt of Mr. Kissinger's growing bitterness. In a conversation with John B. Connally, the former secretary of the Treasury, the secretary of state remarks: "We started the panic, that's the hell of it. There would have been no" North Vietnamese "offensive if it wasn't for congressional debates on help for our allies." Later, speaking to Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Mr. Kissinger reports on his appearance before Congress: "Well, Indochina is gone but we will make them pay for it. In my whole testimony today, I said twenty-five times that it was Congress's fault."
The immediate crisis that Mr. Kissinger faced was to get the remaining Americans and as many political refugees as possible out of Saigon before it was too late. But the real drama was the national agony of the war itself. Even at the bitter end — after the billions of dollars and thousands of lives were lost and the only issue was short-term emergency aid — the anger and divisions over Vietnam continued to grip Washington and paralyze policy.
The book can also be read as a unique glimpse at the complexities and ambiguities of crisis diplomacy, what the British historian and diplomat Harold Nicholson called, in reference to the chaotic diplomatic aftermath of World War I, a "study in fog."
The Mideast war and the end of America's tragic involvement in Vietnam were great geopolitical dramas. But at the time, as these transcripts make clear, Mr. Kissinger and his colleagues spent most of their time not pondering its grand significance but simply trying to figure out what precisely was going on along the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights, at the Kremlin, in the Pentagon and at the Saigon airport. Incomplete information, mixed signals, garbled communication, all contributed to a confusing and ambiguous flow of events. |
