Reappraisals (56 page)

A Tangled Web
cuts a broad, clear swath through such claims. In the first place, Bundy shows how the way in which foreign policy was made under Nixon—the effective exclusion of professional expertise, especially that of the State Department, and Kissinger’s clever reorganization of committees and hierarchies at the NSC and in the White House so as to centralize virtually all knowledge and authority in his own office—meant that foreign policy was no longer subjected to careful or contradictory debate and discussion. Hardly anyone interrogated Kissinger on the possible side effects or unintended consequences of his words and actions. Decision making was certainly rendered more “efficient,” in the sense that major decisions were unlikely to be questioned or diluted before implementation, but the results, Bundy writes, were often disastrous. One clear implication of his book is that U.S. foreign policy in these years, far from growing out of brilliantly reasoned and long-mulled strategic rethinking, was a “seat-of-the-pants” operation, with much consequent effort devoted to various forms of damage control.

This, it has to be noted, is a partisan position. Kissinger and Nixon most certainly did ignore and snub qualified experts, especially those in the professional diplomatic and intelligence communities with whom William Bundy was closely identified. But the track record of such “experts” through the sixties had its own blemishes. The Communist regimes of Southeast Asia, including the one in Hanoi, were authoritarian and repressive and posed a threat to their non-Communist neighbors; and Hanoi was implacably determined to expand its power. But no one in the West had found any very convincing way to oppose those governments without propping up unsavory (and often unpopular) local non-Communist regimes, and in most cases not very successfully at that. Many American soldiers had died in Vietnam before Richard Nixon came to office, for reasons that seemed increasingly obscure to many people. The “experts” could try to explain why and how the U.S. was in Southeast Asia, but they had little to offer on what should now be done, either to save South Vietnam or to extricate American forces. And that, above all, was the problem facing the incoming Republican administration.

Bundy’s second theme follows from the first. The “streamlined” decision-making process, with all power and initiative centralized under two men and their staffs, was from the outset intended to exclude not just unimaginative bureaucrats but also, and especially, those offices and agencies constitutionally empowered under U.S. law to oversee and share in the making of foreign policy, notably Congress. This would in due course be the source of Nixon’s undoing, when congressional committees and even erstwhile senatorial supporters of the Vietnam War, for example, grew not just frustrated but genuinely alarmed at covert operations, unauthorized bombings, and the like and began to rein in the executive power. But it is also related to the inability of Nixon, in particular, to grasp that in a democracy the government is not only obliged but is also well advised to give a running account of what it is doing and why if it wishes to retain public confidence and support.

On the contrary, Bundy writes, foreign policy under Nixon and Kissinger was not only not adequately discussed with Congress or the electorate, it was on vital occasions deliberately hidden by what can politely be called dissimulation. The administration did not just indulge in covert acts or illegal military operations and wiretapping or otherwise persecute those whom Nixon or Kissinger suspected of leaking details of their undertakings (which in Kissinger’s case included members of his own staff). When they did describe what they planned to do, and why it ought to be done—whether to a congressional committee, to a roomful of journalists, or in a televised speech—they not infrequently, Bundy writes, said one thing and then in practice did the opposite.

In the short run, Bundy observes, this gained support for their policies— as when Nixon impressed upon his domestic constituency the virtues of “Vietnamization,” or Kissinger promised great things for the Paris Peace Agreements of January 1973. But the point is that, while the Paris accords were probably the best outcome that the U.S. could get by that date, they represented an unhappy compromise and at best a holding operation, as Kissinger well understood. To claim more for them—to hold out the prospect of a free and autonomous South Vietnamese state for the foreseeable future—was disingenuous. And such deception just stored up greater frustration, disillusion, and ultimately cynicism when it turned out that the results were quite other than promised.

This chronic preference for offering self-serving, optimistic tales and then hoping no one would notice the unappetizing outcomes is one of Bundy’s major themes, and he sees it as having had a corrosive effect on U.S. public life: “In the end, Richard Nixon’s use of covert operations was less important than his persistent record of misrepresenting his policies and pursuing strategies and actions at odds with what he told Congress and the American people.”
²
And, finally, these domestic shortcomings cannot simply be excused with the claim that at least the policies themselves were strikingly effective. Some were, but others were not. The opening to China and the arms agreements with the USSR were good in themselves, and in the Chinese case helped unfreeze U.S. domestic discussion of foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger can rightly take credit for these accomplishments. But they never merged into some overarching grand strategy, the very idea of which turns out to have been, for the most part, an Oz-like illusion.

It is one of the strengths of Bundy’s book that he manages to demonstrate how integrally related were all the separate characteristics and defects just noted. He provides many examples. We have long known about Kissinger’s scorn for foreign policy professionals, his confidence in his own knowledge and understanding—in the words of one earlier commentator, he “enjoyed putting the boot in State whenever possible.” When one of his staffers objected to the plan to invade Cambodia in April 1970, Kissinger responded revealingly, “Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern Establishment.”
³

Bundy, however, is concerned not so much to offer further illustrations of such attitudes as to show their detrimental impact on policymaking itself. Better staff work and a more sensitive ear to local knowledge, he argues, might have mitigated the long-term impact on U.S.-Japanese relations of the unwelcome surprise (
shokku
) of the opening of links with China in 1971—something that Nixon and Kissinger kept very much to themselves, while leaving it to the then Secretary of State Rogers and his hapless staff to explain this turn of events to the perplexed and worried Japanese, who had been given no advance warning.

In a similar way, Bundy writes, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee only learned the full extent of Nixon’s “initiatives” in Cambodia thanks to the revelations of a disgruntled army officer. Although, according to Bundy, “a very few selected members of Congress” were told about the secret bombing, none of the congressional committees constitutionally established to authorize and fund military actions had ever been informed of the military violation of a neutral state. Nor, Bundy writes, had Nixon or Kissinger thought to consult other influential congressmen about these undertakings—with the result that when they were finally and inevitably leaked, they led not just to the congressional decision in June 1973 to cut funding for future U.S. military action in Southeast Asia, but to the broader mood of frustration and resentment that contributed to Nixon’s fall. Bundy is quite insistent upon this sequence of events. It was not just Watergate that brought the president down, he writes; rather, it was the accumulation of broken promises, exaggerated claims, and straightforward lying—in foreign as in domestic matters—that finally drove the other branches of government into revolt—“failures of trust brought on by years of neglect and deception,” in Bundy’s words.

Bundy, as befits a former official of the CIA, has nothing against “secrecy,” an inevitable component of policymaking in any sensitive area, and one for which there are appropriate and legitimate institutional structures. His criticism concerns deception, and the peculiar combination of duplicity and vagueness that marked foreign policy in the Nixon era. “The essential to good diplomacy,” Harold Nicolson once suggested, “is precision. The main enemy of good diplomacy is imprecision.” And, paradoxical as it may seem, the main source of imprecision in this era was the obsession with personal diplomacy. Diplomacy (Harold Nicolson again) “should be a disagreeable business . . . recorded in hard print.”
⁴

For Kissinger, in Bundy’s account, the reverse was true—he preferred to treat diplomacy as a series of confidential contacts with men with whom he could “do business,” while avoiding a clear and official record wherever possible. Moreover, in Bundy’s words: “Contrary to the repeated claims of Kissinger in particular, neither he nor Nixon operated solely, or even habitually, on the basis of dispassionate analysis of the U.S. national interest.” Both men thought rather of people in terms of “heroes and villains,” and both “were strongly influenced by personal impressions of individuals.”
⁵

As a result, Kissinger sidetracked professional diplomats, established back channels with all manner of persons, and took over crucial negotiations himself, often without consulting the existing negotiating team and leaving them completely in the dark. On this Bundy is quite unforgiving. The “parallel track” in Paris, where Kissinger met secretly with Le Duc Tho while the official U.S. negotiators twiddled their thumbs, or a series of interventions in arms negotiations that resulted in the frustrated resignations of senior U.S. officials—these are the occasion for some of his more forthright strictures. Of the SALT 1 talks in 1970 he writes, “It was hardly the way to conduct a major negotiation: a President not really interested, his principal assistant intervening without the knowledge or concurrence of the negotiating team, and the team left to fend for itself.” Of those same SALT talks a year later: “Kissinger had left many loose ends, in another sloppy negotiating performance.” And of the Vietnam peace talks and Kissinger’s “personal diplomacy” in general: “Negotiations bored Nixon and fascinated Kissinger, whose enthusiasm was not always matched by his skill.”

How telling are these criticisms? That Kissinger was sometimes high-handed in dealing with his staff, or that on occasion he humiliated professional negotiators in order to preserve secrecy or highlight his own role, would be neither here nor there if he had secured the desired outcomes. Bundy’s emphasis on such matters may strike some readers as excessive. But on many issues his criticisms are justified by the evidence he provides of poorly executed negotiations and oversold agreements.

In order to keep direct control over everything in this way, Nixon and Kissinger did not just deceive others as to their actions; they were also, Bundy suggests, less effective than they might have been even in matters that interested them. As for places and problems in which they had no sustained interest, or about which they knew very little, the outcomes were disastrous. They were blindsided, for example, by the oil crisis of 1973-74 because, Bundy writes, neither man grasped the connection between domestic demand, U.S. domestic oil production, and the changing terms of trade in international energy (the U.S. share of world oil production fell from 64 percent in 1948 to 22 percent by 1972, even as U.S. domestic usage steadily rose). Oil—like trade, or small, peripheral countries—did not figure in their view of what counted or how the world worked, and they were consistently ineffectual or wrong, through either inaction or a badly conceived policy, when faced with such matters.

Three instances will serve to illustrate these claims. Cambodia— ”Mr. Nixon’s war”—is normally thought of as the major flaw in the Nixon record, and so it is. It is the occasion for Bundy’s strongest condemnation—“a black page in the history of American foreign policy.” In Cambodia the Nixon administration repeated all the mistakes of Vietnam on an accelerated and concentrated scale without the excuse of inexperience. It secretly authorized over 3,600 B-52 air raids against suspected (but undiscovered) Vietcong bases and against North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia in 1969-70 alone. By 1974, as Bundy shows, this policy had contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge—a Communist guerrilla organization whose crimes certainly cannot be laid at Nixon’s door, but whose political prospects were enhanced by the devastation brought about by the war. Bundy’s summary of the final stage of the Cambodian disaster is characteristic in its careful review of the record and worth quoting at length: