Powell's Review: The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy by Jussi M. Hanhimaki, reviewed by Times Literary Su

Henry Kissinger has written that on the eve of President Nixon's resignation he tried to console his doomed leader with the thought that history would be kinder to him than his contemporaries had been. Little did the then high-flying Secretary of State anticipate that it would be the other way around in his own case. Closely identified with the only President in American history to be driven from office by political scandal, Kissinger predictably became something of an anti-hero as well in much of what was written about him -- for example, such doorstoppers as those by Walter Isaacson and William Bundy, not to mention Christopher Hitchens's campaign to indict him as a war criminal. It was to be expected: his career has all the ingredients for a crossover book by which academics hope to move from reading lists to bestseller lists, and journalists to get a crack at prestigious book awards. Not one to bear criticism cheerfully, Kissinger has massively retaliated with cubic volumes of closely argued and highly readable apologia which are almost as hard to pick up as they are to put down.

Jussi Hanhimaki's interest in writing this book grew, he tells us, as an increasing volume of Kissinger's official papers were declassified. It was not easy to wrest these cartons of memos, memcons, telcons and the like from the sepulchre of official secrecy, and they still continue to trickle out -- 20,000 pages of telephone transcripts emerged only last year. But fascinating as they are, they hold few surprises. Despite the jealous security prevailing in Nixon's White House, most of its secrets in time became known without benefit of declassification. In researching any period so picked over as the Kissinger years, such records are more likely to provide footnote fodder than new revelations.

Professor Hanhimaki brings a comprehensive knowledge of the period to this project, but offers less of a history of the Nixon-Ford presidency than an explanation of what went wrong with it. Kissinger, he argues, sought to build a structure of international relations -- the "triangular diplomacy" -- based on wary cooperation with Moscow and a readiness to treat with Beijing, but the project eventually revealed its "flaws" in one troubled area of geopolitics or another. These failures resulted from one fundamental mistake: the belief that complex local issues are best settled between the superpowers. SuperK, it would seem, was undone by his own taste for realpolitik.

The trouble with metaphors is that they make one hostage to consistency -- and too much inconsistency is ignored here in order to make the thesis work. The past, indeed, is another country, and we need a reliable map to get around there: it is no help if the historian puts forward an observation on one page and rebuts it on another. Here the author argues frequently (and, it must be said, repetitiously) that Vietnam "could not ultimately be solved through bilateral Soviet-American negotiations...the major flaw in Kissinger's foreign policy architecture (was) the relative lack of interest in the intricacies of the local causes of conflicts and his emphasis on the role of Soviet-American relations...."

The word "ultimately" is simply not enough to soften the contradiction when we are told elsewhere that "triangular diplomacy had been important in bringing about the North Vietnamese acceptance of the Paris agreements of January, 1973". Or take a different crisis, one in which Kissinger departed from "triangular diplomacy", elbowing Moscow aside to take personal charge of the intricacies of the local causes of Middle East conflict. In that case, his humiliation of Moscow "exposed the shaky structure of (his) foreign policy architecture". The way Hanhimaki tells it, he was flawed if he did and flawed if he didn't.

Was it so mistaken, moreover, to believe that one road to compromise in Vietnam might have lain through Moscow or Beijing? Whatever one thinks of American policy in Southeast Asia, it is hard to deny that both were very much a part of the Vietnam tragedy from start to finish. It was not a Viet Cong insurgency which knocked down the gates to the presidential palace in Saigon, but Soviet tanks manned by main force units of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Such Janus judgements are encountered throughout. Thus Kissinger is wrong to defend the Christmas bombing of Cambodia, even though such action had a legitimate military rationale and had been useful before in prompting negotiation; Kissinger "implausibly" blames a hardening of the Chinese negotiation line on the US Congress which banned such bombing, yet a few pages later we are told that this ban had "removed the last remaining stick in Kissinger's negotiating arsenal". Kissinger's charge that Congress bore responsibility for failing to support America's allies was "not without foundation" -- but it was "shameful and self-serving" for him to say so.

Even as our distance from them grows with passing years, the controversies of these times become no easier to put to rest; play-by-play recounting of events based on declassified papers may even weaken our feel for the context in which they took place. Not since the Civil War had national consensus been so torn by dissension and bitterness: never had an administration been led by a president so uneasy in the job and so unsuited to leadership. Kissinger brought a European sensibility and intellectual style to the White House, whose overwrought political atmosphere dramatized both his strengths and weaknesses.

Hanhimaki makes an effort to be fair to his subject -- who may be relieved to learn that the charge of war crimes is dismissed as not proven -- but it cannot be said that he shows him much sympathy. Kissinger's involvement in phone-tapping his staff, for example, was certainly unwise, probably inappropriate and possibly crass -- but is it not overly dramatic to speak of it as an example of his "dark side"? Similarly, there is too much implied disapproval of the "back channel" diplomacy by which Nixon took personal charge of foreign affairs, acting through his National Security Advisor rather than the State Department. Professor Hanhimaki seems to regard this as faintly improper, if not worse. But while such an approach might cause raised eyebrows in a Cabinet-style government, the American chief executive exercises his powers as he sees fit -- and has done so since Jefferson purchased Louisiana. As to using someone as a special, private channel, this has often been the mark of strong presidents -- Wilson had his House, Roosevelt his Hopkins, Jack Kennedy his brother to act on their behalf with foreign officials.

Jussi Hanhimaki, unfortunately, has not been well served by his editors: too many lapses in style or usage have passed uncorrected and, in some cases, the text does not say what it clearly was meant to. Even so, his extensive use of original sources will give this narrative of the Kissinger years a special value for readers. Many of them, however, may question whether his fundamental thesis -- that Kissinger sought to create some new and enduring structure of international polity -- is perhaps itself flawed. Admittedly, Kissinger often talked that way himself -- his doctorate was, after all, from Harvard's Department of Government. But it was History, and its workings, which dominated his thinking from the days of his 400-page senior thesis devoted to the ideas of Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant. His own life was a personal witness to the turmoil of his times: a refugee from the Holocaust in adolescence; a decorated veteran of combat against his former homeland; an academic celebrity and high state officer -- victim, participant, observer and finally moulder of historic events all rolled into one lifetime. It is an irony too far to bracket him in the great American pragmatic tradition of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and Foster Dulles and the men like them who sought international order through global structures. While most American diplomacy was conducted by lawyers or lawmakers who were used to regarding law as the guarantor of stability, Kissinger seemed to see diplomacy more as process than product, and was not so far wrong in seeing himself as a lone cowboy in the lawless badlands of geopolitics. Like everyone else, he expected that the Soviet Union was here to stay and (unlike some) that American policy should start by accepting this reality. He hoped American foreign affairs would find its way between the extreme Right, which regarded all concessions as defeats, and the extreme Left for whom making any demands was presumptuous; and he knew what it was like trying to conduct the business of state while a shouting match was carried on between the sterile and the puerile. Indeed, his had always been the only game in town: "detente" succeeded "massive retaliation" as a catchphrase of punditry, but the prevailing policy had always been some variation of containment -- peaceful where possible, but forceful if necessary. As Dobrynin, his old sparring partner in the back channel, observed, he "found it so difficult to break with the same mistaken traditions of other American Cold Warriors whose policies he often criticized...." In the light of events, historians must decide whose traditions turned out to be mistaken.

James M. Murphy is a retired intelligence officer and a freelance writer on international affairs.

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy by Jussi M. Hanhimaki, reviewed by Times Literary Supplement