Gromyko on Kissinger
Andrei Gromyko. Memoirs (1989)
Published at the close of the Cold War, Andrei Gromyko’s memoirs presented Soviet diplomacy from the inside, pairing legalistic precision with a famously unyielding style that earned him the Western nickname Mr. Nyet. His portraits of Henry Kissinger traced strategic rivalry, ritualized negotiation, and détente as managed coexistence not reconciliation.
Original Source: Андрей Громыко. Памятное. Книга вторая. Москва, Политиздат, 1990
A special place in the formation of US foreign policy under Nixon and Ford belongs to Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State whom I met more often than any other holder of that post after the war. I have known generations of American state officials, each man with his own personality and way of thinking. and each With a supply of negotiating ammunition already well tested in his political career. Kissinger, however, had spent the war in US intelligence somewhere in Europe, and had not climbed the ladder of state service. Even so, he seemed perfectly at home in his jobs.
It took quite a few meetings at various levels to prepare SALT-1, and Kissinger and I drank many a cup of tea together at them. Our meetings in Moscow, Washington, Vienna, New York and Geneva were businesslike and dealt with the nuts and bolts of the issues. The summit meetings took place in order to draw all the ends together, to set the seal on the understandings we had reached and to maintain impetus for the future.
Whenever we two ministers took our seats at the table, each could be sure that his opposite number, first of al4 wanted an agreement - otherwise he wouldn't be there - and, secondly, was properly prepared for the discussion. This ruled out any notion of outsmarting each other or of pulling the wool over anyone's eyes, and indeed the prestige of any man who attempted such tactics would have been damaged. It is surprising, therefore, to read in Kissinger's memoirs suggestions that in certain cases, referring even to summit talks, he was supposedly able to 'out-smart' the Russians'. He does not, of course, produce any facts to support his claim, since there aren't any. In practice, the Secretary of State behaved with dignity at the talks, and did not resort to any of the methods he hints at in his memoirs.
Kissinger is without doubt a capable, even a highly capable, man, who has acquired considerable experience in foreign affairs. Within the limits allowed him, he was able to put forward genuinely constructive proposals, and I always found it extremely interesting to conduct talks with him. He never stated the obvious or took refuge in the platitudes of less experienced diplomats. The arguments he brought into play always contained elements so powerful that it was not enough merely to say they were unconvincing - one had to show why they were unconvincing.
Kissinger was also given to widening the terms of his analysis, especially when the subject was world tension, the mistrust be tween states and between the USA and USSR. He liked to intro duce theoretical reasons for Washington's policy on a given question. When we debated arms reduction and disarmament, he would return repeatedly to his belief that all the problems which divided East and West, including the USSR and USA, were interconnected: 'These problems cannot be solved separately, in isolation. They are all connected. Therefore they have to be solved interrelatedly.'
His judgements, however, were often dubious, offending both logic and history. For instance, he frequently cited Metternich as his idol in nineteenth-century European political history. He believed that Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austro Hungarian empire and later its Chancellor. had been right when he claimed that the problems dividing the European states should not be treated in isolation from each other, bur that their solution should somehow be embodied in a single process. Kissinger had nothing convincing to offer, however, when it was pointed out to him that Metternich and his successors were in large measure responsible for the eventual collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire; and that even before its collapse it had been endlessly engaged in largely unsuccessful wars. Fortunately for the world, Kissinger did not practise what he preached with total consistency. Thus most of the successes he eventually achieved in combination with the Soviet side - particularly in the field of nuclear arms limitations - occurred because Washington did not make agreement in one area conditional upon agreement in another.
Even so, for almost the entire period of his tenure as Secretary of State, Kissinger practised the technique of applying pressure on the Soviet Union wherever possible, whether in Asia, Africa, the Middle East or anywhere else, as a way of forcing us to make concessions. Clearly this was a straight transfer to international affairs of the sort of wheeling and dealing that goes on throughout American domestic politics, and for as long as Washington employed this approach nothing useful could be achieved in talks with us. It was only when realism triumphed and the USA learned to take account of the interests of both sides that things improved. The former Secretary of State has one particular quality of which he says nothing in his memoirs -- his extraordinary ability to switch positions. For example, in our talks on strategic arms, he had accepted the principle that they were based on Soviet-US parity. He liked to repeat: 'The principle of parity is of fundamental importance.' Now, however, when he is out of office, the same Kissinger who contributed so much to our agreements regards this principle as a virtual anathema. Moreover, he tries to assert that the agreements made by the two powers no longer fully meet the needs of this principle. He brings no evidence for this; it is pure opportunism.
To ignore principles, as Kissinger had frequently done, is a game that takes its toll. Having immersed himself in the world of his memoirs after leaving office, Kissinger tried to join public life again by offering his services to the Reagan administration. This was the administration which denigrated everything of value that had previously been achieved in Soviet-US relations, yet Kissinger approached it without batting an eyelid, in the hope that the new President would want him in his cabinet. However, his attempt was unsuccessful; apparently he was not quite what Ronald Reagan was looking for.
Seneca, the Roman philosopher and Nero's tutor, once uttered this wise saying: 'When a man does not know which harbour to head for, no wind is fair.'
Source: Andrei Gromyko. Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1989)