Kissinger’s Shadow (20 page)

Having teed off on Kissinger, Reagan landed squarely on Ford: “I believe in the peace of which Mr. Ford speaks—as much as any man. But, in places such as Angola, Cambodia and Vietnam, the peace they have come to know is the peace of the grave.”
4

Reagan in 1976 was using Kissinger to boost himself into the final phase of a remarkable transformation of the Republican Party. Not the party's takeover by the forces of the New Right but rather its conversion into the primary political vessel of a weaponized version of American exceptionalism. Previously, at least since World War I, it had been mostly Democrats who started and ran the nation's wars, doing so (whatever their actual causes) in the name of spreading democracy. Republicans had long been the party of the hard line, but their hard line tended to be chauvinist, isolationist, and know-nothing, devoid of the democratic evangelicalism associated with the Wilsonian tradition of the Democratic Party. That would change with Reagan.

Earlier, during his 1968 feint for the Republican nomination, Reagan focused on national security, arguing that the Soviet Union was overtaking the United States in the arms race. With all the other candidates focused on getting the country out of Vietnam, Reagan had trouble gaining traction. He pledged that he wouldn't “be ashamed to talk out in the open about morality.”
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Other than standing up to the Soviets—for instance, later in the year calling on Washington to place what we today call “sanctions” on the USSR for having invaded Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring—it was unclear what he meant by that pledge.

Eight years of Henry Kissinger allowed Reagan to focus his criticisms.
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When Reagan talked about “moralism” in 1976, everyone knew what he meant: the opposite of what was presented as Kissinger's amoral realpolitik, of Kissinger's willingness to treat Leonid Brezhnev, Mao, and Mao's successors as ethical equals. The standard bearer of the rising American Right had a rolling list of complaints: Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, the Panama Canal, Israel. But behind all these issues lay the main target: détente.

Kissinger didn't introduce that word into America's political lexicon; it had long been part of the diplomatic vernacular. Nor was Kissinger primarily responsible for easing tensions between Moscow and Washington. The dynamics of normalization were under way for over a decade, traced back to, among other events, Stalin's death in 1953, JFK's willingness to negotiate with Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis, and Willy Brandt's “Ostpolitik,” which improved relations between West and East Germany. But by the mid-1970s, détente had become associated with Kissinger, particularly with the ratification of a series of treaties between the United States and the USSR meant to slow the arms race, including SALT in 1972 and the Helsinki Accords in 1975.
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Reagan in 1976 pronounced the word “détente” as if it were M. Kissinger's middle name. He'd include in his speeches a litany of crises in which Washington apparently lost the upper hand to Moscow—Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, the Middle East—repeating, after the mention of each, the same refrain: “Doctor Kissinger said ‘we must not allow this to interfere with détente.'” For the rising Right, the word became synonymous with decline, defeat, appeasement, and surrender. Détente, Reagan and his supporters charged, was Kissinger's way of managing decline.

Kissinger didn't respond to these attacks during the 1976 primaries; to do so would have hurt Ford, since Kissinger was so unpopular with rank-and-file Republicans. But later, out of office, he would defend détente, saying it was a framework not for managing decline but for ensuring that Washington didn't waste its resources in pointless crises as it steadily worked to “wear down the Soviet system.” Ford judged the “challenge to be in the nature of a marathon race,” Kissinger said, and he was concerned to not dissipate the nation's “strength in a series of sprints designed for the gallery.” The goal of détente was “to prove to the American people that crisis and confrontation were a last resort, not an everyday means of conducting foreign policy.”
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In reality, détente was much more than suggested either by Reagan's criticism or by Kissinger's defense.
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Nixon entered the White House in 1969, as the golden years of America's postwar economic boom were coming to an end. Public debt was increasing, trade balances were tightening, energy costs were mounting, the dollar was devaluing, Third World markets were closing (thanks to nationalization and high tariffs and subsidies), and economic rivals in Europe and Asia were expanding. In this context, détente became as much an economic strategy as a political one, a lifeline for the corporate base of the fraying New Deal coalition (which included Kissinger's first patron with real power, Nelson Rockefeller). Military deescalation would free up public revenue for productive investment and tamp down the inflationary pressures that scared the big banking houses, while the normalization of international relations would open the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China for trade and investment.

If détente had restored the American economy to global primacy, criticisms of the policy by Reagan and the other tribunes of the New Right might have missed their mark. But normalization failed to solve the economic crisis, which by 1975 seemed intractable: China, coming out of the Cultural Revolution, was a basket case, while the economies of Eastern Europe and the USSR were too anemic to absorb sufficient amounts of US capital and too poor to serve as profitable trading partners. So when Reagan, in his TV spots, looked at the camera and said (a tad angrily, not with the “happy warrior” demeanor he would perfect in his 1980 run) that “we've given the Soviets our trade and technology” and have gotten nothing in return, the complaint registered. “Well, the time has come,” Reagan said, “to tell us, the American people, what we are getting out of détente.” He continued: “What has the United States gotten in return, other than Soviet belligerence in the Middle East, Soviet duplicity in Southeast Asia, and Soviet imperialism in south-central Africa?”

Kissinger, muzzled for the duration of the election season, couldn't respond (he had become such a target for the Right that Ford asked him to cancel a series of planned addresses in California; Kissinger spent much of 1976's spring and early summer primary season traveling abroad, including to Latin America, Europe, and Africa). But given the poor state of the US economy, the ongoing effects of both inflation and stagnation, what could he have said?

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Kissinger in 1976 must have felt a little bit like the sorcerer's apprentice. In the 1950s and 1960s, he used fear of the “missile gap,” which he knew to be nonexistent, to establish his credentials as a serious defense intellectual raising hard questions and suggesting hard alternatives. Now he had to listen in silence as Reagan used a similar set of lies, accusing him of letting the United States fall behind Moscow: “The Soviet army is twice the size of ours.… We are outgunned three to one in artillery pieces, four to one in tanks. Soviet strategic missiles are larger, more numerous and powerful than those of the United States.”
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During the primaries, a story circulated about Kissinger, told by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, that electrified Reagan's base. The admiral, in his memoirs published in early 1976, said that Kissinger had confessed to him that he thought America's best years were behind him. The two men were traveling in a train from Washington to Philadelphia, and Kissinger, according to notes Zumwalt claimed he wrote down immediately following their conversation, said that he:

feels that U.S. has passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations. He believes U.S. is on downhill and cannot be roused by political challenge. He states that his job is to persuade the Russians to give us the best deal we can get, recognizing that the historical forces favor them. He says that he realizes that in light of history he will be recognized as one of those who negotiated terms favorable to the Soviets, but that the American people have only themselves to blame because they lack stamina to stay the course against the Russians who are “Sparta to our Athens.”
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Zumwalt's memoir was published in May but Reagan was already quoting from it in April. In a half-hour television ad, he said that according to an “unpublished book”—Zumwalt's—Kissinger thought his job was “to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position available” behind the Soviet Union. Reagan here was sounding a lot like Kissinger in the 1950s, drawing on Oswald Spengler's diagnosis of the threat of decline but insisting that decline wasn't inevitable: “I don't believe the people I've met in almost every State of the Union are ready to consign this, the last island of freedom, to the dustbin of history, along with the bones of dead civilizations of the past.”
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From Spengler, Kissinger also developed, as we have seen, his critique of sterile rationalism and his appreciation of the importance of “spontaneity,” “instinct,” and “intuition” in conducting statecraft, of knowing one's “purpose.” Where Spengler and Kissinger believed there existed a realm of experience not subject to the laws of reason but rather governed by these intangible values. Now listen to Reagan, continuing his brief against Kissinger. “Call it mysticism, if you will, but I believe God had a divine purpose” for the United States. And while Kissinger in the past had drawn from Spengler to warn of the bureaucrats who insist that things are so complicated that nothing can be done about anything, in 1976 it was Kissinger who was tagged by Reagan as the bureaucrat.
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Clearly referring to Kissinger, Reagan lambasted the “self-anointed elite in our nation's capital” who spend their time “telling us” that governance is “too complex for our understanding.”
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Kissinger, the Spenglerian, had been out-Spenglered.

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Reagan lost his 1976 bid against Ford, and Ford went on to lose to Jimmy Carter. Yet before he exited Foggy Bottom, Kissinger, who had outlasted all his original rivals from the first Nixon administration, had to suffer the ignominy of watching Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz—the men who would later lead the United States into Iraq and Afghanistan—outmaneuver and undercut him.

Wolfowitz, who would serve George W. Bush as assistant secretary of defense, was part of the CIA's infamous “Team B,” an ad hoc intelligence review that Ford set up to appease conservatives who insisted that the CIA was underplaying its estimates of Soviet power. In the White House, Cheney and Rumsfeld pushed the idea. “They wanted to toughen up the agency's estimates,” Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst, said. “Cheney wanted to drive [the CIA] so far to the right it would never say no to the generals.”
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Weak on facts, hard evidence, and verifiable numbers, Team B was strong on rhetoric, depicting the Soviets as an expansionist threat gathering its forces and preparing to strike. Its fifty-five-page report, finished in December 1976, was the Right's answer to the Pentagon Papers, a nearly perfect negation of the document Daniel Ellsberg had leaked three years earlier. The scholars and policy makers who composed the Pentagon Papers represented the kind of men Kissinger disdained: experts enthralled to facts. In contrast, the members of Team B were admitted ideologues. “Its members,” as J. Peter Scoblic notes, “saw the Soviet threat not as an empirical problem but as a matter of faith.”
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Where the Pentagon Paper authors pored over raw data and produced a dense, empirical exposition of the cause and effect leading to deeper, disastrous involvement in Vietnam, Team B-ers barely considered any actual intelligence. They knew the CIA had underestimated Soviet strength even before they saw the CIA's estimates. Previewing what would become known as Dick Cheney's “one percent doctrine,” Team B interpreted threats with the smallest probability of occurring as likely to occur. Absence of proof of Russian superiority was taken as proof of superiority: “Team B's failure to find a Soviet non-acoustic anti-submarine system was evidence that there could well be one,” noted one summary of the findings.
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Like the Pentagon Papers, Team B's findings were secretly passed on to the press to influence public debate. Ellsberg leaked to try to end a war. Team B-ers leaked to restart one: the Cold War. In December 1977, the
New York Times
published a front-page story legitimizing the “intelligence” findings of Team B, shaping subsequent public discussion of the defense budget. It would take some time to have its effect, but Team B's assessment would provide the justification for Reagan's massive arms buildup.

And just as the Pentagon Papers continued to be a point of reference for opponents of intervention, the success of Team B continued to inspire the neoconservative Right, especially the policy makers and intellectuals who drove the United States to war in 2003 by politicizing official intelligence or manufacturing false intel on Iraqi efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
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At the Pentagon, for instance, Donald Rumsfeld after 9/11 “was reprising Team B by creating his own intelligence shop,” based on false reports on Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons. “That's why they set up an intelligence unit in [Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith's office,” said James Bamford, who writes on matters related to national security. “The whole purpose was to get that kind of information and send it to Cheney.”
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The philosophy of history that motivated most members of Team B (as it did most of those involved in pushing for war in 2003) was Kissinger's philosophy of history. They swore on the validity of intuition in assessing threats and on the importance of will in rendering material power effective. They assailed the “objectivity” of previous CIA estimates, the misguided insistence of intelligence experts on focusing only on what the Soviets were actually doing and not on what, based on their material power, they were capable of doing. Team B-ers maintained that one had to look at the material power (which, in any case, they greatly exaggerated) of the Soviet arsenal and assume the worst—that is, take as a baseline that Moscow
would
do what it
could
do. Sounding a little bit like the young metaphysician Henry Kissinger, who insisted that truth was a matter of interpretation, Leo Cherne, a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board who helped set up Team B, said, “We are in the midst of a crisis of belief, and a crisis of belief can only be resolved by belief.”
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The irony, of course, is that members of Team B used the intuitive philosophy of history to derail Kissinger the philosopher of intuitive history.
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Their objective was, as historian Anne Hessing Cahn writes, to “belittle, besmirch, and tarnish Henry Kissinger.”
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Rumsfeld, as Ford's secretary of defense, and Dick Cheney, the White House chief of staff, for instance, used Team B to isolate Kissinger in his last months in office and sabotage the possibility of a new SALT treaty with Russia.
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