Bill Moyers Journal; 702; A Conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski

You Funding for this program is provided by this station and other public television stations and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I think we did very well, and I'm trying to be objective about it, not so serving, and shaping the beginnings of truly significant structural responses. I think the electoral outcome clearly shows that we did not do as well in communicating

to the public why we need to head the way we were headed, why we need to stick to that course, why nostalgia and escapism no longer will suffice. Now, obviously, that's a judgment, and I don't want it to be interpreted as a political slam at the other party. Maybe their prescriptions would be better than ours. I hope their prescriptions are premised on a recognition of the extent to which the world really has changed. I hope they're not derived from the hope that somehow the conditions of the fifties can be recreated, because they want to be. Tonight a conversation with President Carter's National Security Advisor is being the F. Dickensky. I'm Bill Moyers. What were your thoughts on election night seeing it all come down to defeat?

Well I must confess that by election night I knew what would happen. I had a sense of what would happen by Tuesday morning, perhaps even by Monday night. So in that sense I already digested some of the elements of defeat. But of course there was a sense of disappointment. There was a sense that something very important, not only in my life, but in the life of the country, was coming to an end. And the feeling, which I, of course, is highly subjective, that the president deserved better, that the president who initiated some major changes, basic changes in our domestic affairs, in our foreign policy, deserved better, which I think he will get from history, a recognition of the fact that he undertook some very major assignments, which it might have been wiser politically to shrink. And that sense

I felt sorry. I do have fundamental faith not only in the democratic process, but particularly in the vitality of this country. Many pollsters saw a great river of votes streaming away from the president in the last 48 hours before the election. And they saw that as the result of the damn finally breaking again on frustration over the hostages. What credence do you give to that opinion? I'm not the best person to make a judgment on this. I'm not an expert on voting behavior, so all I can give you is my generalized impression of what happened in the elections. The analogy that I use to explain it to myself or to my children is that of the boxing fight. The president first went into the ring to spar with a partner, Senator Kennedy. And Senator Kennedy wore fighting gloves. The president didn't, and he

pummeled away at the mid-riff, which is a national economy and inflation. And he softened the president up. And then the president went into the ring with his opponent for the championship fight. And he again punched away at the mid-riff, the economy, inflation, where the president was already softened up by Kennedy. And he lost some of his basic support there. And then Iran came up to weekend. It revived every bitter memory of the last year. And that permitted the knockout blow, the blow which really made for the margin in the elections. We were going into the elections that weekend, either even or slightly ahead. Something happened during that weekend that made for a change. And I suspect it's a revival of the public's memories, of the difficulties, the humiliations, the frustrations of the preceding year, and so far as the hostages are concerned. I don't think there's any question

about that to a reporter being out in the country over the course of the last three months trying to cover the campaign. And I was wondering if you and the president did fully realize to what extent the hostages had become the symbol of America's impotence in general and Jimmy Carter's impotence in particular. I think the president did. I certainly did. We also realized that we had an obligation to be responsible, to be responsible, to the genuine national interests of this country, responsible to the well-being of the hostages, and that we couldn't demagogue it. Some of your colleagues have told me that Mr. Carter would like nothing more than to have the hostages back before he leaves office in January. What are the odds that that will happen? I think Bill, I still cannot give you any odds for two reasons. One, they really would be a wild guess. Two, I'm still senior official in the government. We are negotiating this. We are in touch as we all know with the Algerians and others. I think any guess that I would make could be counterproductive, could be

hurtful. Of course, the one event that fundamentally dealt a blow to the president, to the country, and changed the balance of power in the Middle East was the overthrow of the Shah by the fundamentalist Muslims. And several questions still today cry out for illumination. First, there was that famous or infamous toast, depending on how you look at it, that the president gave in New Year's 1978, domestic unrest was already taking place in Iran, and the president trumpeted Iran as quote, the island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. Was the decision to play down our intelligence reports and hope that such a public endorsement, which steady the Shah's regime realistic, was our intelligence out of touch, or was the president like other presidents we both know, in which I've served, if the president's tendency to hyperbole to get out of hand? Well, first of all, you have to make allowance for Southern politeness, the tradition of being very generous, hospitable, welcoming

guests, gracious when being a guest. And I think this is just part of a cultural tradition that has its charms, but also occasionally some liabilities if you want to be analytically precise. I don't think a toast should be parsed for analytical precision. I'm sure we all say things in toasts or in readings, which perhaps we wouldn't say we were trying to render a very precise historical judgment, but most of us not presidents and the recipient of the toast is not the Shah of Iran. But in this particular case, the president was the deliver of the toast and the recipient was the Shah. So that has to be registered. Now, insofar as intelligence is concerned, I believe that the time we visited Iran, the overwhelming consensus of the diplomatic community, of the intelligence community, was the Daeshaw stable, the regime was stable, and it would continue as such. Such analyses continued to be the predominant ones until early fall of the year when things surfaced and became

more critical. But even then, there was some division of opinion. The fact of the matter is that when you deal with complicated political social change, which is generated by modernization, it's not easy to predict how to express itself politically, critical events such as the theorifier, I believe in August, which killed hundreds of people, then the demonstrations, then how you handle them become decisive to the outcome. I don't believe that revolutions are inevitable until after they have happened. But it was true before you came to office and after you came to office that our intelligence people were under instructions not to have any dealings with the revolutionaries, or at least to have only minimum dealings with the revolutionaries, even then former ambassador William Sullivan, whom I know has some differences with you. Quotes the Shah as asking how the US could expect influence events there if we didn't deal with, quote, these people. But during this period you're talking about,

our intelligence agencies were not trying to establish contact with the revolutionaries. No, that's not precisely correct. It's a different way of putting it. Obviously, we avoided developing extensive political contacts with the opposition of a type that could be construed as encouraging that opposition, because it clearly wasn't in our interest to magnify political difficulties for a government that was friendly to us. This doesn't mean that political officers and particular intelligence officers were prevented from maintaining the kind of contacts they need to make reasonable judgments. I think there is a very subtle but important difference between the two. The notion that we totally isolated ourselves from the different currents in the country is wrong. I know a number of officials, both there and who managed Iranian affairs at state, who are frequently in touch with the opposition in order to know what is going on. Are you saying that events just simply

overran our capacity to interpret them quickly or to make those contacts between the toast and the fall? Yes, I think the intensity of the change and also the way that change was managed, particularly by the Shah, was such that it transformed social unrest produced by modernization without any political framework for it into a much more difficult to control revolutionary process that eventually prevailed. Now, we never know at a given moment in a revolutionary situation whether a revolution will succeed or not. We know this much better in retrospect. Some people back in 78 were of the view that the fall of the Shah was inevitable. Some people were of the view that can be avoided, either by repression or by reforms or by combination of the two. At the time, you are never in a position of knowing with certainty what will happen. You make best possible contingent judgments. And last but not least, the people in power there, presumably, should be in a position to know what is in their best interest

because, after all, their own heads are at stake. I think we make a mistake in looking at history, respectively, and always seeing it as some sort of a clear, straight-line projection. History is a very contingent and uncertain process. And acts of will, psychological well-being, specific incidents, influence the outcome of events. Acts of will, interesting, interesting term. Do you think that had we had the will then to prop the Shah up, to keep the Shah in power, we could have done so? We will never know. We do know that the Shah had a large bureaucracy, a large, well-trained army, which, until some point, at least in time, and precisely when, was both disciplined and loyal. And we do know that he himself, and his memoirs confirm this, hesitated in so far as how he should best respond. And in a situation like this, I think it's not

unfair to say that he who hesitates loses. We were not in a position to dictate in a very precise manner how he ought to behave. After all, he was the ruler of some 40 million people. He was not some appointed governor of ours. So we were not in a position to tell him specifically what he should do. Ultimately, the responsibility for saving his throne was his. Clearly, from our strategic standpoint, Iran was very important. Iran was a close ally. It stood by us and by Israel in the 73 war. It was the pivot of a security zone which sealed off the Persian Gulf from a possible adversary. And therefore, an outcome which guaranteed stability and friendship was obviously in our interest. Was it in our interest to try to keep him in power? I don't want at this stage with the hostage issue being so sensitive to speculate too far, but quite clearly, a friendly Iran allied to us

is in our strategic interest. I would say also that it is in Iran's national interest. There's one other, and this will strike you probably as irrelevant. But if you were on the campaign trail as I was this fall, and you were asking questions about the President's perception as a leader, I kept being hit. You would have been hit as I was with this incident, the decision to allow the Shah, the former Shah, into the country for medical treatment. Now, I happen to know that the President went against his instincts in making that decision. The Foreign Service officers in Tehran were warning of dire consequences if the Shah were allowed in. I know that the President was opposed initially to that decision, and I also know that he yielded only under enormous pressure from Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and John McCloy. Do you think the President, what the public wants to know is, even this much later, is why the President listened to them instead of following his own instincts?

Let me merely say this, there are certain principles involved also. We have always been a country that's open, that's open to refugees, that's open to friends. There are certain principles which guide our conduct to deny someone who had been a friend of ours, whatever his faults or limitations may have been, who stood by us for some 25 years, to deny him, not on an asylum, but the opportunity to get medical treatment when he was genuinely gravely ill, would have meant compromising a very fundamental principle, and would have meant compromising it under duress. That's not an easy thing for any President, for any honorable person to acquiesce to. As a whole friend of David Rockefeller and as a colleague in a sense of Henry Kissinger, sometimes a competitor, did you resent the pressure that

was being brought in the Shah's behalf by his powerful friend? No, I did not. I felt that they were motivated by genuinely patriotic considerations, when they expressed their views. One does need to agree with them. One could feel that there are problems or dimensions of the issue, that they were not taking into account, that we had additional responsibilities, that they didn't, but throughout I felt that their motives were correct, and I did not feel that they were subjecting us to unfair pressures in registering their views. The general feeling in the political community, where I spend much of my time, is that one reason the President lost is that he could not convince the country that he had mastered this job. In foreign policy, for example, the criticism is he could never seem to chart a consistent course of dealing with the Soviets on the one hand and holding the allegiance of our

allies on the other. Why do you think that the President never could assimilate, convincingly manage, resolve the contradictions enough to hold a constituency in the country? There are many reasons for the difficulty. I'm not sure I would entirely accept your conclusions, but you certainly put your finger on the difficulty. I think, first of all, the President had the very difficult task of convincing the public that America today lives in a world of very complex change in which our foreign policy has to operate on several planes at the same time. I agree with you that it's very difficult to do, and I agree with you that it didn't happen. Because I think it had happened, Mr. Reagan would not have won by as convincing a margin as it did. In fact, when I did an interview with Governor Reagan last year, he said, I know I'm going to win for one simple reason. And I said, why? And he said, because Jimmy Carter is not in command, and the American people won't somebody in command, he was very

much in command. I often marveled in the course of the last four years how much in command he was. Why didn't the people see this? But the problem was one of perception. And here, what I have to say is that it seems to me all of us did not adequately emphasize the importance of formal speeches, broadly conceptual type statements, which would convey to the American public on a continuing basis, the sense of direction, the meaning of the policies that were pursued. Are you saying it was a public relations failure? Yes, and I have to fault the public media as well, the mass media. There is a problem today, it seems to mean American mass media, with the way they approach the news. They're not interested in trends, in deeper relationships. They're interested in the latest event, in the latest news. I would often try to get the president to give a broadly conceptual speech, outgifts on myself. I'll talk to the newspaper men about them. They would

immediately say, what is new in it? And if you told them, well, this is an attempt to explain what is the meaning of America's position in the world. This is an attempt to emphasize certain continuities. They would ignore it. The president gave a very important speech this year, in Philadelphia, in May, which was a doctrinal speech designed to outline his broad priorities, put in a wider context what he was doing in foreign affairs, indicate how there would be consistency and continuity in the months ahead, or perhaps in the years of head, if he was reelected. It was a very important speech. The European press wrote it up enormously. Do you know what was reported in the American press? What was reported were some offhand remarks he made the same day, two hours later, about Mr. Vance and Mr. Muskie. This was right after the switcher rule, where he made some comments about the two of them and how he compared them. And that was all the press reported, because that was fascinating. That was gossipy. Would it have been easier for the American people to understand

if the management of foreign policy were not divided between a national security advisor and the Secretary of State? I've worked in the White House for years back in the 60s. It seems to me that the problem with strong White House national security advisors is that they get a vested interest in their own advice, and because they have a proximity to the President, they almost always get the last word. Well, it would be also a good idea to go back to the days of a simple world, to the days of the President who is not deeply involved in foreign affairs, to put it differently. Every system of decision making ultimately reflects the personality and the style of the President himself. There is no such thing as an ideal arrangement in so far as foreign policy is concerned in regards to state and as sea or defense, and ultimately the President himself. It flows from the top down.

But this position you hold has grown deadly on before. Five separate President? Yes, and one has to ask oneself, why did it grow that way? Is it because it was occupied by extraordinarily talented, energetic, assertive, powerful, brilliant, Machiavellian individuals? Wow, of course. That's perhaps one of the answer. And of course, a lot of people like to put it that way, including perhaps even some incumbents. Or did it develop that way? Because the thrust of world events increasingly did two things. One made the President an evitable center of decision making. He could no longer delegate that responsibility to remote secretary of state, but had to be deeply involved, especially because of the connection between foreign policy and domestic affairs. And that connection immediately limits the ability of a single individual in the department to provide leadership. And secondly, did the connection between foreign policy and defense issues in effect create a cluster

of security problems, dilemmas, which need to be coordinated? Try to deal with a lot of the problems we face today, for example, in the Persian Gulf area, where I have been deeply involved in trying to shape a regional security framework, on the basis of a single department making the key decisions. If it's defense, it'll be skewed one way. If it's state, it'll be skewed another way. And neither will abide by coordination by the other. There has to be someone next to a strong president who provides that coordination. And last by not least, strong presidents, in addition to making decisions themselves, don't want to be prisoners of particular departmental perspectives. They want someone against whom to test ideas and recommendations. All right, but look at the practical implications of that. This past April, when U.S. News and World Report made its annual survey of who runs America, you came in ahead of the Secretary of State. Indeed, you were third only behind the president and the chairman of the Federal

Reserve. Now, having worked in the White House, I know what kind of message that sends to the government. It has to bill jury go. It has to embarrass, or at least weaken, the Secretary of State. And it brings up the very practical consideration. How can anyone argue that a strong staff assistant, no matter how necessary he is given the complication of this world, be perceived as more influential than the Secretary of State without affecting the way business gets done? It's probably affects how business is done. In this particular case, I suspect it had something to do with my academic background. And therefore, my inclination to try to put things together and to explain them and to use the mass media in order to provide such explanations. In contrast to a certain disinclination, by otherwise, extraordinarily able and successful secretaries of state, as both Vans and Maski have been, to engage

in a great deal of public education. I think a great deal of the public perception of my role, and I suspect some exaggeration of my influence. I say some because I don't want to denigrate entirely, is due to the fact that I was in a position to perform this function at a time when it wasn't being very actively performed by others. And after all, a great deal of foreign policy making and democracy is also the generation of support and understanding of foreign policy objectives. And if I was helpful in that regard, well, that's all to the good. Well, there's another practical example. I remember in the spring of 1977 when Secretary Vance surprisingly took to Moscow new proposals for assault accord. The intriguing thing to me was an article that appeared in the New York Times saying, at the White House, officials indicated that they did not expect the mission to accomplish much, and some question whether

Mr. Vance and his advisors would take a firm enough line in discussions with the Kremlin. Now, the practical question is that it was obvious to anybody around town that that came from your office, and didn't that undercut the State Department in such a way that from the very beginning, Secretary Vance's turf had been claimed or at least part of it had been claimed by an alternative center of power, namely your office. The fact of the matter is that he went to Moscow with two proposals, one of which set to the Soviets and new administrations in town, deeply committed to arms control. Let's seize this opportunity and not only have an agreement based on Vladivostok, but let's go beyond it. Let's have deep cuts. At the same time, he had another proposal within which he also laid on the table before the Soviets, and it said essential to the following. If you cannot buy that, then let's sign immediately an agreement on the basis of Vladivostok setting aside the issues on which there was no resolution, and that particularly involved

the coups missiles. And let's quickly conclude that an agreement and go on to solve three aiming for deeper cuts. The Soviets rejected both. As far as the gossip that came from the White House regarding the Secretary's mission is concerned, all I can say, and I said in all honesty, is that I regret it. If it had come from my shop and if I knew who said it, I would have fired them. I think that throughout my tenure, throughout Sivance's tenure, we both made efforts to stop such gossip. I think if you were to look through newspaper clippings, you would find much more directed at me from state than directed at Secretary Vance from NSC. I think if you put them in piles, one would be very high, one would be very small. But then my staff is much smaller. But aren't you confirming the concern that I expressed, which is that when there are these two rival power centers in the foreign policy establishment, you're going to have the very kind of confusion and inconsistency that became an issue in this campaign.

I don't agree with you, because I don't conceive of them as rival power centers. One is an integrative role, and other president has private advisors, other president. You know, you talk as if the NSC developed ever since Bundy occupying that job. No, no, it goes back. I know that the car clippered, in fact. Well, not on the car clippered. Don't forget Colonel Hounds. Don't forget Harry Hopkins. But they really were private advisors. And by your own admission a minute ago, you filled a public... Well, you became a public communicator. Yes, in part, because there was the need to articulate and to explain. And I was filling a role. I was not thrusting myself into it. Every time I spoke, I spoke with approval of the president and the White House, very frequently coordinating it in advance with Si, as to what I would say, and so forth. But the point I want to make, which I think is true, and it's not just a self-serving point, and I think you would confirm it, because you've lived in Washington, is that there is an absolutely more bit preoccupation in the Washington press score with personal relationships

or can't deny that. And a desire to stimulate conflict because the press score feeds upon it. When I came to Washington, the prediction was that Vance and I would have a knockout and a dragout. For about a year and a half, not only was there no conflict, but there was a love fest. It is true that over the nearly four years in which we both served the president, we had some disagreements and no to blown two issues. One, how to handle Iran, and how to handle this complex relationship between Soviet expansionism and arms control. In both cases, we had the same objective in mind, we agreed objectives, we disagreed and means. I believe, for example, that Vance, Brown and I, and then Musqueh collaborated really very well. Never once did Vance do anything with the president behind my back. He was meticulous in informing me. Never once was the piece of paper of any importance that went to the president, that I did not make certain

to the Secretary of State saw. A couple of times the president went to meet the Secretary of State, that the airport, the demonstrators' friendship for him, it just so happens that I was the one who went to the president and said, it would be a nice gesture if you went and agreed at the side of the airport. At then, on a personal level, the relationship was good. There were times when we had some serious policy disagreements, which the president resolved. But in that context, the institutional pressure to make it into a larger conflict, to talk to newspaper men, to snipe at each other is very strong from both sides. How could such a nice man be booed at the Democratic National Convention? Well, you'll remember that even a nicer man, a much more decent man, was also booed at one point. When the president spoke of registration, he was booed. I stand for certain things, which are certain segment of the Democratic Party, particularly that segment, which is rooted in the 72 political experience, the McGuvern people, yes, and which is still strongly reacting to the Vietnamese war, simplifies a poor. My view is that in addition to being responsive to the new political

realities of the world, in addition to being guided by moral concerns, we have to recognize the continuing relevance of power, be strong, be strategically innovative, take tough decisions involving expansionism and respond to them. And that is not popular in certain segments of the party. And when I was booed, predominantly by two delegations, one from Massachusetts and one from Pennsylvania, I was booed because I stand for things, which are certain segment of the party, finds difficult to digest, and which I believe the party has to face up to if it is to be a relevant political force in the conditions of the 80s. What do you mean? If the Democratic Party is to be a vital force, it has to combine not only economic realism with social compassion at home, but commitment to principle and morality with a recognition of the continued relevance of power abroad. There is no dichotomy between these two.

You mean we should be willing to use our power? Yes. We have to, because power is still a relevant facet of world affairs, and American self-abstention is a contribution to greater instability, growing conflict, and thus in my judgment ultimately is even immoral. And yet this administration has been relatively criticized by its rivals and in the press as well for not using power, for being vacillating, for being unable or unwilling to insert itself militarily. Yes, we have been criticized that way by our critics, and as you said earlier in certain segments of the party, booed me for instead insisting on alternative policies. The fact of the matter is that we started doing a great deal. It is this president who in peacetime for the first time increased the defense budget. It is this president who has modernized NATO. It is this president who accepted the recommendation to develop a rapid deployment force. It is this president who decided on the deployment of the MX. It

is this president who has engaged himself in shaping a regional security framework for the Persian Gulf. These were all important undertakings which reflect the recognition of the importance of American power and of its essential contribution to global stability. Then why did it lose the election? Domestic problems, first of all, were overriding. I think the combination of inflation with a general sense of social needs about our social economic condition was very damaging. I think the impact on traditional democratic constituencies of the very sustained and even aggressive Kennedy campaign should not be underestimated. And then of course, the bitter frustration of the one year long hostage tragedy. All of that contributed to defeat. In addition to whatever shortcomings we as individuals may be guilty of, perhaps we didn't articulate our approach well enough.

Perhaps we didn't make it clear enough to the public how many fundamentally important things were done by the administration for policy. Let me just take them off in a few seconds. Panama Canal treaties and the new relationship with that in America. Majority rule in Africa and therefore a new relationship with Africans who four years ago were hostile to us. The camp David process and the first peace treaty ever between Israel and the Arab country. A new relationship with the Arabs, moderate Arabs and the effort to build a regional security framework for the Persian Gulf. Recognition of China and the normalization of relations with the most powerful, potential powerful and certainly most populated country in the world. A new relationship which was the first time in 80 years gives us good relations with China and Japan simultaneously. An opening to the third world. NATO restoration. A policy of differentiation towards Eastern Europe. Finally, a negotiated but non ratified salt agreement. This is a series of very impressive accomplishments for an administration

of only four years. And yet there is so much uneasiness in the country. And when I come to Washington today, I hear people for the first time in a long time talking about the possibility of war with the Soviet Union, the possibility of confrontation in the Middle East, the failure to get the salt accord, now meaning that it's not only badly wounded but perhaps probably terminally wounded. There is a sense of apprehension and concern in the world that belies the record that you quite rightly point to as what President Carter has tried to accomplish. How do you account for this, this ease and fear that I sense? We now live in a world from which we cannot disengage but which we can no longer dominate. A world whose problems are becoming our problems. We have been a nation for 200 years. It's only in the last 30 or 40 years that the problems of the external world became truly vital

to our own security. More recently, the problems of the outside world have become central to our own internal socio-economic well-being. We have never had that condition before. Therefore, we are now compelled, indeed with our own domestic problems, to try to influence world events over which we have less and less control. That's a new circumstance for Americans. How do you react to it? I think it's on the natural, the basic instinct. The instant instinct is nostalgia, escapism. Let's find a formula which restores the more comfortable past. It's much more difficult intellectually to assimilate, understand, the narrative change, and then to respond to it. Perhaps this is where the President erred because he, in a responsible and rational fashion, tried to guide the nation towards a recognition

of what's new and what's terribly difficult. When he said the energy problems and moral equivalent of war, he said something very true. But the public found it very difficult to understand. There is this yearning out there, Dr. Pogensky, by millions of people who feel that we've been sandbagged by the Russians, humiliated by the Iranians, and outtraded by the Dotsons, a yearning to see the United States restored to its former status, as you call it, of a great and rich and respected world power. Do I hear you saying that yearning is unrealistic that no one can be number one in England? I think in many respects, we are still number one, and for a long time, we remain number one. But being number one means something different today than it did 30 years ago. Because then everybody else was weak or passive. Europe was still recovering. Japan was barely beginning to. The Soviet Union was still suffering from the wounds inflicted upon it in World

War II, and the rest of the world was just beginning to be decolonized. Today, the world is very different. There are new centers of power. The Soviet Union militarily score equal with us. Europe is economically equal, stronger than we. Japan is outdoing us in trade. And the third world is becoming organized, as for example, the OPEC experience shows. We may be still number one, but it's a number one in a league of many more powerful teams, some of which can gang up against us. It's this reality, which is so difficult for the public to comprehend. And the task of leadership in this context is to shape policies that are responsive to it and to educate the public to understand the necessity for these politics, for these decisions, for these new policies. I think we did very well, and I'm trying to be objective about it, not so serving, in shaping the beginnings of truly significant structural responses. I think the electoral outcome clearly shows that we did not do

as well in communicating to the public why we need to head the way we were headed, why we need to stick to that course, why nostalgia and escapism no longer will suffice. Now, obviously, that's a judgment, and I don't want it to be interpreted as a political slam and the other party. Maybe their prescriptions will be better than ours. I hope their prescriptions are premised on a recognition of the extent to which the world really has changed. I hope they're not derived from the hope that somehow the conditions of the fifties can be recreated because they want to be. If you could leave a small wager of advice to them as they walk into your office and you leave, what would you say to them? Oh, I could say a great deal. If you only let me say one sentence or two, I would say that no one-dimensional policy, no one-dimensional solution is the way to deal with the problems of the world, which

is now politically awakened across the board and in which there are profound and enduring demands for a redistribution of global political and economic power. I believe we're moving into historical era in which the idea of freedom is becoming the genuine historical inevitability of our times because as people become more educated, more self-assertive, more or less and less inclined to accept the bondage of tradition or of governance that's authoritarian and arbitrary. We are identified with that idea and I think we have a great deal to contribute as a society, but we mustn't do it in the sense of dictating specific arrangements, imposing specific prescriptions, demanding that specific rules ordained by us be mindlessly affluent. It's in this area that I find American

role to be continually very important even though we mustn't have the simplistic notion that we can shape the world in our image or that our power can solve every problem. Let's try to make that doctrine or that philosophy applicable to a very specific case. Stay with the millies for just a minute. When the President committed us to defend the Persian Gulf from Soviet aggression, his message was widely perceived to carry the threat of nuclear force. There were, from the administration, a number of signals in the days after that that in fact we had shifted our thinking to include the possibility that if we intervene in the Middle East, nuclear tactical nuclear weapons were implicitly a consideration. Let's take this fact. If the President were to inject the Marines into the Middle East against Soviet troops and they were to do badly, wouldn't we have to consider using tactical nuclear weapons? No, we would not have to consider using them

necessarily, although our opponents would have to consider the possibility of us using them. In other words, that is a deterrent. Take another example. For many years we have felt strongly that a free Berlin is important to the freedom of Western Europe and notably to West Germany's commitment to the Atlantic Alliance. We have 4,500 American soldiers in Berlin. Do you for a minute consider that that is enough to defend West Berlin if the Soviets decided to take it? Clearly not. But the presence there means that the Soviet Union would know, indeed, knows that an effort to take West Berlin would engage it with the United States and that a variety of consequences might follow, not necessarily in nuclear war but not certainly total excluding the possibility either. If our vital interests in the Persian Gulf region were threatened, the President said in last January that the United States would be engaged and if necessary arms would be used, but where they would be used, how would they be used,

whether they would be vertical escalation in the sense of the kinds of weapons that are used or horizontal escalation in the sense that we may choose to respond elsewhere in a manner that is equally punitive to Soviet interests. Is a decision with the President would then reach in the light of the nature of the challenge? And is the purpose to keep the Soviets guessing? The purpose is to make certain that the Soviets know that we would do what is necessary in a manner that is most effective to protect our interests in that part of the world. Whether it is because of that commitment in the Middle East or whatever, you can't come to town today without hearing this talk of war. Fortune magazine this month quotes one military expert in your administration almost casually estimating a 50-50 chance of a shootout between Soviet and American troops somewhere in the world in this decade. Do you think we're close to the war? No, I don't. I believe that if we pursue the mix of policies that we have tried to undertake, namely on the one hand, develop

a more meaningful relationship between the United States and the newly awakened political forces, the new nations in the world. And if on the other hand we maintain the efforts to sustain a strategic balance with the Soviet Union, to contain Soviet expansionism, then I think we stand as good a chance to create a system of deterrence as our predecessors did in the 40s and in the 50s when they undertook a similar task in regards to Western Europe and the Far East. This in my mind is the new compelling challenge of the 80s. Not risky. I think it would be risky not to respond to it. Expensive yes. Expensive yes. I agree with that. It's going to be expensive and the country will have to face up to it. And that's another problem that anyone who's president will have to face. That picture looking over the cover pass with the Soviet, with the Chinese weapon that got such prominent attention not only here but in Moscow and peaking as well. Sure.

What was the message? Well actually there was no message. It's again one of those incidents which assumes a life and an importance of its own far beyond what transpired and sometimes even distorting what transpired. What happened there was very simple. I was visiting a parking standing out post and the Pakistani officer in charge of it held out this machine gun, showed it to me, handed it to me and said look this is a Chinese copy of a Soviet machine gun. And I held it looked at it looking down at the ground with it. And that was photographed. And then it was portrayed in accounts as not on the holding it but as pointing it towards Afghanistan in some accounts as even firing it towards Afghanistan and so forth. Now it's one of those things which happens which is then used in political dialogue or conflict against you and just have to live with it. There was no special message intended in the action. It was totally fortuitous. It wasn't planned. And I suppose how I simply

shied back held my hands back and said no I'll never touch it. That would have been a message of sorts too. What does it say both the picture of the cover pass, the booing at the Democratic Convention, these contradictions you've been telling about? What does all of this say about being in public life today about governing, about communicating, about trying to make a democratic society understand the nature of the world? What does all this say about governing? I think it says that it's an extremely difficult process. That it is a process which you should engage yourself in knowing that it has enormous personal satisfaction as well as personal costs. That it is a process in which you're likely to be given at times excessive credit, an excessive acclaim, and at times excessive abuse and unwarranted criticism that you have to be prepared for both, that you have to be prepared to discount both. You have to be very careful first of all to discount

excessive acclaim because you can easily go to your head, make you lose your sense of proportion, make you very unprepared for a return to private life and for defeat. That's right. Perhaps a temperate defeat but a defeat nonetheless. At the same time you have to be prepared to discount criticism, not to be hurt by it and not to be influenced by it because after all some of it is motivated by the desire to have alternative policies. Some of it is part of what might be called legitimate political contest. A lot of it is an expression of the most fundamental human emotions of which envy is the strongest one. It's not an accident, I think, that the strongest and most malicious critics of Henry Kissinger and of myself have been our fellow academics. Why? I strongly suspect because underneath a lot of that criticism is the strongest emotion of all, the overriding, the irresistible desire to have been in our shoes. If there is one thing you could redo of the last four

years, what would it be? Well, that's a very hard question to answer. I think perhaps, and I'm not sure this is a mistake and I'm not even sure I could have done it differently. I think it probably was politically counterproductive and so far as I'm concerned for me to have become so much identified and in some respects inaccurately as the frontman on the Middle Eastern issue. It's an issue of enormous complexity and one charged with a great deal of emotion, an issue over which people feel very deeply and rightly so. I came to be viewed very quickly as some sort of a spearhead, whereas in fact the question was far more complicated than that. I remember reading all sorts of articles violently attacking me for engineering the American Soviet Declaration in the Middle East, whereas in fact I was far from its author. I was

just conveyor and that was all, and so far as my role is concerned. But for a variety of reasons, perhaps in part connected with what we discussed earlier, namely my role in explaining policies, I came to be viewed as the frontman, the spark plug, and thus became the lightning rod. And this I think had a lot to do with some of the coatings I encountered and some of the hostility that developed. Had it taken a sense I heard? No, well you're wrong if you're detecting that because it isn't. I happen to feel that maybe it's my historical background that it is important for what really transpired to be known by others, that it is wrong for people to live in myths and illusions. And I accept that in the political process you have to shoulder some of that because somebody has to.

And to one of the prices for proximity to the president, for the role that you play inevitably, and seeing him many times a day, and being able to give an idea and comment on the view of others, is that you become a... That's a trade-off. It's a trade-off which I'm very gladly. When I came to Washington, there was widespread speculation, and I can speak about this now without any ulterior motive and therefore I hope I'll be believed because I wasn't believed during the last four years. There was widespread speculation that I wanted to be Secretary of State, and that my goal was to be Secretary of State. I can tell you now what I've said to many people before, and it's as true now as it was then. I never wanted to be Secretary of State. I did want, I'm not shy in admitting it, to be what I was because I... I'm not shy in admitting it, but I'm not shy in admitting it, to be what I was.