The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

I have read Tony Judt’s review, “Counsels on Foreign Relations” [NYR, August 13], with some sadness.

It is over twenty years since I left government. One would have thought that to be enough time to permit a calm discussion of the challenge America has faced since the Vietnam War destroyed the national consensus on foreign policy. The deeper meaning of the period is that it crystallized the inherent tension between America’s idealism—the perception we have of ourselves as a nation with a special mission—and our growing involvement in a world of power, hence of relative judgments.

How to strike the balance between these competing realities is not a simple matter, and practitioners of foreign policy have struggled with that problem for most of our history. The reconciliation of ambivalent pulls is a task never likely to be completed, but we will not manage any progress unless we grant the good faith of the principal participants in the debate and have sufficient confidence in ourselves to risk a truthful definition of the issues.

Both Bundy’s book and Judt’s review fail to meet this test:

—Judt, based on Bundy, asserts that I have reclassified public papers as “personal” in order to close them to “prying eyes.” This is flatly untrue. No public document has ever been reclassified by me. Well over 90 percent of the papers in my collection at the Library of Congress are copies of originals in the files of either the State Department or the Nixon and Ford libraries. They are available to researchers on the terms established by the originating departments.

The only unique papers in the collection are records of telephone conversations that a court of law—not I—held to be personal papers and that never were treated as public papers before that.

—Judt claims that I avoided “a clear and official record wherever possible.” This is the opposite of the truth. No administration recorded its deliberations, decisions, and negotiations more carefully or more fully than the ones in which I served. There is in the official files a nearly complete verbatim record of all my negotiations, backchannel or otherwise. (I insert the qualifier “nearly” only to protect against an inadvertent bureaucratic slip-up.) There is also a complete record of all my memoranda to the President prior to any negotiation (front- or backchannel) outlining the proposed talking points and afterward reporting the results. There are certainly no unrecorded agreements.

—To demonstrate the anachronism of my world view, Judt quotes me as writing: “One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves.” He does not reveal that he is fiddling with the quote which is from a paragraph comparing Metternich’s greater emphasis on moral consensus with Bismarck’s balance-of-power politics. Specifically, Judt is cutting the sentence in half and omitting the next sentence: “…something akin to the Metternich system evolves in which a balance of power is reinforced by a shared sense of values. And in the modern age, these values would have to be democratic.”

Distortions of specific fact are exceeded by distortions of the underlying reality. Despite strained bows to fairness, Bundy cannot overcome his distaste for his successors. Even when he praises me for some action, as on Middle East diplomacy, he ascribes the success to some unappetizing character trait, as even Judt has pointed out.

Even when discussing bibliography, Bundy cannot keep himself from making snide comments. Thus, he describes Nixon’s and my memoirs as “perhaps the most determined effort ever to fix the image of their period.” And when describing the transition process by which the Nixon NSC process came about, Bundy writes, “Nixon approved Kissinger’s secretly produced blueprint.” The facts fully described in my memoirs and easily checkable were these: I was appointed Security Advisor on December 2. Nixon had designated General Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s former Chief of Staff, as principal consultant regarding NSC procedures. My original recommendation was to retain the existing machinery with slight modifications. This was rejected by Nixon and even more vehemently by President Eisenhower, whom we consulted. Goodpaster therefore produced a plan very close to the system later adopted by Nixon. This was discussed by Nixon at a meeting in Key Biscayne on December 28 with the new Cabinet appointees, Laird for Defense and Rogers for State. During January there were further discussions with Rogers and Elliot Richardson, Undersecretary of State-designate. On January 19, Nixon formally established the existing system. The trouble with my alleged secret blueprint is that it was not “secret” nor did it in the main come from me.

As Judt renders Bundy, the Vietnam peace accords of 1973 were a disingenuous deception because we held out the prospect of a free and autonomous South Vietnamese state. No allowance is made for the possibility that any senior member of the Nixon administration may have held sincere views. We knew the task of preserving the only ally ever asked to defend itself entirely with its own forces would be extremely difficult and said so on many occasions. But we did believe—as Bundy would have found out by interviewing those involved in the negotiations—that with adequate economic and military assistance, South Vietnam had a chance to preserve its independence. We did not consider it conceivable that the Congress would within two years at first drastically reduce and finally cut off aid to the country for whose freedom over 50,000 Americans had given their lives. Bundy obviously believes that South Vietnam was doomed no matter what we did. But it is possible that Bundy was as wrong about how to end the war as he was about whether to enter it. In any event, a difference of assessment does not warrant the charge of deliberate deception or disingenuousness.

Because Bundy has chosen the posture of prosecuting attorney, he is unable to do justice to the constraints reality imposes on policymakers’ preferences—a challenge for which he should have some compassion from his own experience. Judt notes approvingly Bundy’s criticism of Nixon and me for failing to brief Japan in advance about the opening to China in 1971, and the European allies about the military alert in 1973 in the Middle East crisis. As a former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Bundy knows only too well that there was no way of briefing the Japanese government without a leak; it was a painful decision not to give advance warning, though all friends and allies—and especially Japan—were consulted to the utmost once the US-China dialogue began in earnest.

As for the alert, we faced what we considered a Soviet ultimatum; we thought that a Soviet move into the Middle East was imminent—perhaps a matter of hours away. To demonstrate our resolve to resist, we increased the readiness of our military forces and simultaneously called a meeting of the NATO Council in Brussels. In addition, we briefed our principal allies in detail in their capitals.

Bundy’s attitude of condescending righteousness leads to extraordinary hypocrisy. Throughout his review, Judt follows Bundy in treating the alleged penchant of Nixon and me for covert operations as the ultimate cause of Nixon’s downfall. Phrases like “morally repugnant” for a covert operation in Chile that was never carried out—and was in many ways an extrapolation of the activities of the administration in which Bundy served—drop lightly from Bundy’s pen and are duly repeated by Judt. One would have thought that having served in one of the key positions in two administrations truly profligate in the use of covert operations, Bundy would not open up the subject. Bundy served in high office in the administration which instigated a coup against the South Vietnamese leader with whom we were allied, one of the unintended consequences of which was the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother; the administration that invented the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, conducted the Bay of Pigs and the war in Laos as CIA programs, started covert programs in Chile, and planned the only assassination plots of any American administration.

The Cold War was not a tea party, and I do not pass judgment on complex decisions from the vantage point of thirty years. But I do say that Bundy is in no position to give moral lectures on covert operations to his successors whose use of that instrument was much more limited both in scope and frequency.

Judt (and Bundy) decry covert operations of the administration in which I served, but they suppress the context. They claim “misleading promises to the Kurds,” as if that suffering people had been triggered into fighting Iraq by our representations to them. The fact is that when the US decision to support the Kurds was made in July 1972, the Kurds had already been fighting Saddam’s oppression for several years. They were supported by Britain, Iran, Israel, and neighboring countries. Nixon was asked to support them in 1972 when the Soviet Union, disappointed in Egypt, began to pour arms into Iraq beyond the capacity of the Kurds’ existing sponsors to match. Without our help, the Kurds would have been destroyed earlier—that was our real choice.

Judt next asserts that we “abandoned” the Kurds. The fact is that in 1975 when the issue of expanded support came up, it was for $300 million and two Iranian divisions at the precise moment that Congress was cutting off all aid to Vietnam and Cambodia. Does Judt believe such a request would have succeeded? The Shah did not and threw in his hand. It is possible to argue the practical issue; to elevate it to a moral assault is at a minimum inappropriate.

Cambodia by now evokes a reflexive response, and assertions about Cambodian bombings have achieved a near liturgical quality. If so, their advocates should be able to risk stating the facts bearing on the decision without invoking totally misleading forms of words. Instead, Judt cites Bundy approvingly when he describes the secret bombing of Cambodia “as the military violation of a neutral state.”

Given his previous position, Bundy knows the facts well enough. Four North Vietnamese divisions were based permanently in Cambodia, killing scores of Americans each month in South Vietnam and then withdrawing into the safety of a specious neutrality they were violating daily. The real question is why the Johnson administration, of which Bundy was then the principal staff member on East Asia, accepted this charade which cost so many American lives, not why the Nixon administration “violated” it. It is also relevant that the Cambodian chief of state, Prince Sihanouk, had all but invited US attacks on the sanctuaries, both publicly and in remarks to Chester Bowles (then an emissary of the Johnson administration). He implied that he would ignore such attacks because the Cambodian population had been expelled by the Communists.

The secret bombing started after the North Vietnamese launched an offensive (the mini-Tet) two weeks after Nixon assumed office, killing an average of four hundred Americans a week. After four weeks of this and suffering over 1,000 dead, Nixon retaliated by bombing a ten-kilometer-wide zone along the South Vietnamese border where the sanctuaries were located. We had originally planned to react to a Sihanouk protest by asking for a UN investigation of the sanctuaries, thereby admitting the bombings. But Sihanouk did not protest and even invited Nixon to Phnom Penh while the bombing was going on. Key members of Congress had been briefed, including the Chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees, the Speaker, all of them Democrats, and other congressional leaders. I recall no objections nor any urging to widen the circle of those privy to the information.