Scattershots

A new book attacks Kissinger

Richard Nixon's White House was not a place for men who would shrink from bitter infighting or who lacked driving ambition. Henry Kissinger was certainly in his element there. And seven years after he left the Government, he is still a significant figure on the public stage who draws fierce loyalists and unrelenting foes. A leader among the foes is Seymour Hersh, who won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the story of the My Lai massacre.

In a new book, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit; $19.95), Reporter Hersh sets out, metaphorically, to massacre Kissinger. Hersh quit the New York Times four years ago to devote himself to this project. In 656 pages he blends some new versions of old rumors with some new research (especially about the Paris peace talks that ended the Viet Nam War and about the intricate negotiating leading up to SALT II) that add up to a most unflattering portrait.

Perhaps the nastiest of Hersh's charges is the assertion that during the 1968 presidential campaign, Kissinger secretly supplied the Nixon camp with inside information about the Paris peace talks, then being conducted by the Johnson Administration. At the same time, Hersh claims, Kissinger was also offering to turn over damaging files on Nixon that had been compiled by the Rockefeller campaign staff, for whom Kissinger had worked, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, then Hubert Humphrey's foreign policy coordinator. Kissinger has written in his memoirs that he was approached by both campaigns for advice. But Hersh, quoting some former Nixon campaign officials, paints Kissinger as a double-dealing job seeker. Last week Kissinger angrily denied these specific charges as "a slimy lie." He said what he had read of Hersh's writings about him "is untrue, is distorted, or uses totally interested witnesses, many of whom were dismissed after a year of serving on my staff." But he refused further comment on the work.

In the introduction to his book, Hersh takes dutiful note of Kissinger's and Nixon's "diplomatic triumphs": the opening of China, the SALT treaty, the end of American involvement in Viet Nam, most prominent among them. But Hersh denigrates even those accomplishments, concluding, for example, that Kissinger "cheated" his way to a summit and "lied" about the SALT treaty. Hersh adds scattershot allegations about a number of international events and situations, including charges that Nixon received a large cash contribution to his election campaign in 1968 from the military junta that ran Greece in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But it is the Nixon-Kissinger conduct of the Viet Nam War that receives special attention. At one point, Hersh presents their tactics to end the war as a kind of "madman" theory. He maintains that in 1969 Nixon, trying to frighten North Viet Nam into believing that he was ruthless and unpredictable, ordered a 29-day full nuclear alert, designated "Def Con I." Former Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, who succeeded Kissinger as head of the National Security Council, comments: "I don't think we've ever been to Def Con I, which means imminent attack." Last week a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the U.S. has never gone to that level of readiness. Hersh also attempts to link Kissinger and Nixon to the 1970 coup that ousted Cambodian Neutralist Norodom Sihanouk. But while Hersh quotes some military sources as saying that Washington had such plans under consideration, he offers no evidence of approval by Kissinger or Nixon.

Hersh cites an unnamed American intelligence official as claiming that former Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai had once been on the payroll of the CIA. "A sheer, mad story," retorted Desai last week. Hersh reconstructs what was clearly the low point of Kissinger's service as Nixon's National Security Adviser: the wiretapping of his own aides, other Government officials and some journalists, whom he suspected of leaking and publishing Government secrets. But Hersh's exhaustive account adds little to what many others have written about that event. The book also contains considerable detail on the well-known bureaucratic struggles between Kissinger and Secretary of State William P. Rogers, between Kissinger and his own staff, including Alexander Haig, between Kissinger and Nixon's White House staff, and between him and President Nixon.

Hersh's book is less the work of a historian, or neutral journalist, than of a prosecutor. He appears unwilling to accept even his own evidence of Kissinger's innocence in other seamy activities. The so-called Huston Plan, a scheme to use U.S. intelligence agencies for illegal spying on political activists, was hatched and then shelved because of objections from Attorney General John Mitchell and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, all without Kissinger's involvement. Nonetheless, concludes Hersh, "such high-level indecisiveness would have been unthinkable if Kissinger had been brought in on the deliberations." qed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.