Absent from center stage was Henry A. Kissinger, 80, who served Richard Nixon and Ford as national-security adviser and secretary of State. The onetime Harvard government professor has paid careful attention to his place in history, producing thousands of pages of elegantly written and best-selling memoirs about his Nixon-Ford years (most recently “Ending the Vietnam War,” published earlier this year). The latest is his new book, “Crisis,” a fascinating window on two pivotal episodes–the 1973 Yom Kippur War (excerpted on the following pages) and the fall of Saigon in 1975. Unlike Kissinger’s earlier books, “Crisis” consists mainly of never-before-released transcripts of his private conversations, with his own additional interpretation.
As one of the most controversial public officials in recent history, Kissinger has followed Winston Churchill’s fabled dictum that to secure your historical standing, be sure you are the first to write about it. And Kissinger knew that sooner or later, by congressional demand, Nixon’s secret tapes of his private conversations would become public, a long process that has begun but is far from complete. Whether these tapes showed him, for example, trying to prod a deeply troubled president to do the right thing (Kissinger’s version) or as an aide willing to say anything to curry Nixon’s favor (the critics’ version), Kissinger has been inclined to fix his historical image in the public mind on his own terms.
As a memoirist, Kissinger has enjoyed a formidable advantage. His books have been based on his papers and other materials. By his orders, these were secreted in the Library of Congress and were to be closed to outsiders until five years after his death. Although they were produced on government time and by government employees, Kissinger successfully argued that they were “private” and twice prevented the government’s National Archives from examining them to decide whether they were or not.
Kissinger’s monopoly on this historical record has driven many scholars to distraction. Groups of lawyers, scholars, journalists and archivists have used pronunciamento, lawsuit and other crowbars in a usually vain effort to open Kissinger’s Library of Congress cache.
In 2001, a quarter century after his departure from government, Kissinger volunteered to let the National Archives begin processing 10,000 pages of documents from his State Department years for ultimate release. This collection includes the telephone transcripts that form the basis for “Crisis”–once dubbed the “Dead Key Scrolls” by columnist William Safire because Kissinger’s aides made them using a “dead key” extension on his phone system.
His Scrolls do not quite have the tantalizing aura of the Nixon tapes. Typed up by Kissinger’s staff for use in daily business, they lack the unpredictability and pungent language (“I don’t give a s–t about the lira!”) that bring Nixon–and the Kissinger of those years, when he appears–back to life. Still, since the revelation of Nixon’s secret taping system outraged the public, high U.S. officials have not systematically preserved their private conversations by taping them. Thus for the tumultuous years from the Watergate summer of 1973 through Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in 1977, we will probably get no more intimate source than Kissinger’s Scrolls.
It is not hard to imagine why Kissinger chose the Yom Kippur War and the Vietnam collapse as the subjects for this book. Both are dramatic turning points and show Kissinger to excellent advantage. Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson said that no man comes out of his own memorandum of conversation looking second best. The same may be said of “Crisis.” The leading man looms as a tower of sanity, cool and broad-minded, negotiating with wit, stamina and skill. He is surrounded by a cast of lesser characters ranging from the beleaguered Nixon, distracted by Watergate, to the last U.S. ambassador to Saigon, the emotional Graham Martin, who shows himself inclined to make himself into a human sacrifice as other Americans flee the North Vietnamese victors.
Kissinger has defended his and Nixon’s decisions on Vietnam in earlier volumes. In this new one, he manages to convey the difficulty with which, as the Viet Cong pushed for final victory, he had to balance conflicting demands from other U.S. officials, angry conservatives, angrier South Vietnamese allies and an impatient Congress.
Kissinger’s fellow Republicans have far more use today for Reagan’s “Why Not Victory?” strategy than for the Nixon-Kissinger detente with the Soviet Union. He may hope that they might reconsider after reading his you-are-there rendition of the Yom Kippur War, showing how his private collaborations with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin helped to prevent a superpower smash-up. Readers of this book should certainly recognize that Kissinger’s effective 1973 Mideast diplomacy was the forerunner of President Bush’s current efforts to broker an Arab-Israeli peace.
More than anything else, “Crisis” recaptures the quality, now forgotten by many Americans, that made “Super K” in 1973 the most admired man in the country (according to the Gallup poll). Americans who worried about Nixon’s psychiatric balance during Watergate or Ford’s schooling to be president believed, through crisis after crisis, that they need not worry as long as Kissinger’s steady hand was on the tiller. As Kissinger faces the bar of history, he shows himself with this book shrewd enough to understand that whatever future critics may think about Cambodia, Christmas bombings or the ouster of the Chilean government, this quality will be one of the strongest arguments in his favor.
