Under Fire and on the Attack

When Ronald Reagan promises that if elected, he would fire Henry Kissinger, he draws cheers from many audiences. (Shades of Richard Nixon in 1968 promising to fire Attorney General Ramsey Clark.) The attacks on Kissinger are not doing much good for Reagan, or Scoop Jackson either. Still, after suffering through one of his rougher weeks, the Secretary of State took the offensive against those presidential candidates who condemn U.S. foreign policy. Speaking to the Boston World Affairs Council,* he accused them of being vague and inconsistent.

Kissinger posed a series of pointed questions: "What do those who speak so glibly about one-way streets or preemptive concessions propose concretely that this country do? What risks would they run? What precise changes in our defense posture, what level of expenditure over what period of time do they advocate? How concretely do they suggest managing the U.S.-Soviet relationship in an era of strategic equality?"

Twin Temptations. More broadly, Kissinger protested that his policies were under fire from both the political left and right, and claimed that this double attack could result in a U.S. foreign policy "paralysis, no matter who wins in November." He explained: "If one group of critics undermines arms-control negotiations and cuts off the prospect of more constructive ties with the Soviet Union, while another group cuts away at our defense budgets and intelligence services and thwarts American resistance to Soviet adventurism, both combined will, whether they have intended it or not, end by wrecking the nation's ability to conduct a strong, creative, moderate and prudent foreign policy." He pleaded: "We must avoid the twin temptations of provocation and escapism."

If Kissinger sounded a bit oversensitive to criticism and unrealistic in expecting a consensus on world affairs in an election year, he nevertheless was focusing the debate on the more practical problems of global diplomacy. Though he mentioned no names, two of the hawkish critics he clearly had in mind reacted quickly. Said Republican Reagan: "I thought that in this country no public official was above and beyond public questioning." Democrat Jackson protested that Kissinger was the first Secretary of State in modern history to go "wandering around the country in the middle of the presidential primaries indulging in partisan politics." President Ford defended the Secretary: "I would not, under any circumstances, want

Henry Kissinger to quit--period."

Kissinger's defense of his policies partly diverted attention from some bruising lumps he took earlier. Two sworn statements by former President Nixon released last week seemed to contradict sworn statements by Kissinger. The first Nixon contradiction came in a rambling, seven-hour deposition given at San Clemente last January in response to a $3 million suit filed by Morton H. Halperin, a former National Security Council staff member whose telephone was tapped for 21 months by the FBI beginning in May 1969. Nixon and Kissinger are among eight officials of the Nixon Administration being sued by Halperin. Nixon readily conceded that he had ordered the wiretapping program, which involved taps on Halperin and 16 other Government officials and newsmen. He did so, he said, because Kissinger had told him of no fewer than 21 leaks of national security information in his Administration by April 1969.

The main conflict centered on just who had first selected Halperin to be wiretapped. Nixon said he asked Kissinger to tell J. Edgar Hoover, the late FBI director, who on the NSC staff had access to the leaked information. But Nixon contended that he had "no recollection" of specifically approving the wiretapping of Halperin himself. By contrast, in his own affidavit for this suit, filed last January, Kissinger claimed that it was Hoover who had first mentioned Halperin, identifying him and other unspecified persons "as security risks." And it was Nixon who then had "directed surveillance of Morton Halperin and certain others."

The disagreement raised a question of which man is telling the truth. So, too, did a Nixon reply to inquiries from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which had asked him about the CIA's role in trying to keep Salvador Allende Gossens from becoming President of Chile in 1970--and in ousting Allende three years after he won office. Kissinger had told the committee in a secret session last August that in 1970 "President Nixon was encouraging a more direct role for the CIA in actually organizing such a coup" to topple Allende. But Nixon claimed in his testimony that "I do not recall being aware that ... the CIA was promoting a military coup in Chile." Allende in 1973 was the victim of a coup, but the CIA has insisted that the agency had nothing to do with it.

Serious Error. Still more embarrassing to Kissinger was the growing controversy over the revelation that Edward R.F. Sheehan, a Harvard International Affairs research fellow, had access to secret State Department documents last fall while working on a book on Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. In an article for the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Sheehan praises Kissinger as having been "at the apogee of his skill" during those negotiations (TIME, March 15). The article quotes directly from the dialogue of Kissinger's conversations with such leaders as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli former Premier Golda Meir and Syrian President Hafez Assad.

When protests arose over this use of supposedly secret information, a State Department spokesman last week promised an investigation and declared: "Insofar as any State Department official provided Mr. Sheehan with information based directly on memoranda of conversations, this was unauthorized, a serious error of judgment, and disciplinary action will be taken."

The internal department probe was a charade. Sheehan had, in fact, played to Kissinger's ample ego by writing a letter to Assistant Secretary Alfred L. Atherton Jr., who heads the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. It was full of encomiums about the Secretary and asked for Kissinger's cooperation in the author's research. Sheehan thought he was "laying it on a little thick," but sent the letter anyway. Atherton showed it to Kissinger, who told him to help Sheehan. Atherton preserved the fiction of not disseminating classified documents by reading aloud to Sheehan from secret memos of Kissinger's conversations. Sheehan was allowed to take notes. He later talked to many of the same Middle East leaders to confirm and flesh out the secret reports that he had heard from Atherton.

Of course, Kissinger argued that Atherton had gone further than the Secretary had wanted him to. At week's end, Atherton was given a letter of severe reprimand. In any case, Kissinger was reminded by his critics--with some relish--of his double standard on leaks. New York Times Columnist William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter whose phone had been tapped in the 1969 leak investigation, charged that to Kissinger, "the criterion of classification has become intensely personal"--anything embarrassing to him is "top secret" but anything helpful to him "can be leaked with impunity." As Kissinger had discovered, the news leak is like a slippery hose, capable of spraying both those who use it and those who try to shut it off--and the Secretary had been drenched both ways.

* Kissinger received the Council's award for improving international relations. It was presented by Henry Cabot Lodge, former diplomat and Republican Senator.

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