By Jerome A. Cohen
Here is Joe Bosco’s brilliant analysis in today’s The Hill.
I wish the author had not inserted the supposition that Henry Kissinger might have told his PRC friends that flattery of presidents was necessary in order to be persuasive. Although Henry might well have, it would be better to have evidence to support the thought, a quite plausible one in light of Henry’s public flattery of Nixon.
I have not reviewed the Nixon tapes but know, from my own experience in occasional discussions with Henry in the period 1969-71, of his ability, on the one hand, to make fun of the president in private and, on the other, to behave in the most obsequious manner when the boss summons by phone. As many may know, Henry has often been an outrageous flatterer to others, not only presidents. He has long been a sometime practitioner of the maxim that “flattery will get you everywhere”.
More substantively, unlike Joe Bosco and, today, many others, I do not agree that the 1971-72 Nixon-Kissinger momentous breakthrough with the PRC was mistaken, and not only because it was desirable at the time to seek to balance Soviet power. Many of the other reasons that made it desirable for the US and the PRC to begin to cooperate remain valid today. Indeed, in view of China’s progress, those reasons are more important than ever and should not be obscured by the many challenges that China’s increasing prominence inevitably presents.
I share the author’s great concern for what to do about the PRC’s many outrageous human rights abuses and agree that Henry’s prescriptions utterly fail to respond to those challenges. I wish that Joe had mentioned Henry’s enormous success in maintaining a business consulting enterprise that has rested in important part on his access to PRC leaders.
I was amused by the reference to Henry’s alleged maneuvering to make sure that Nixon would designate him as the presidential agent for the July 1971 secret trip to Beijing. The first draft of the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics private memorandum on the need for a new China policy, prepared for whoever might be elected president in 1968, suggested, in its first recommendation, that the new president select the secretary of state to carry out secret, if need be deniable, conversations with the Beijing leadership. Our Harvard-MIT group of Asia specialists, convened by Kennedy Institute leader Dick Neustadt, intended to submit that memorandum right after the election.
After Nixon won, it became clear that William Rogers would become secretary of state and that our colleague Kissinger would become national security advisor. Because Henry, although not a member of our committee since he had not been associated with Asia, was known to some of our group, we decided to submit our memorandum via Henry. It was suggested by some who knew Henry that we change the first recommendation in the final draft to eliminate the specific reference to the secretary of state and instead to suggest that the president select someone in whom he had the greatest confidence for the stealthy China mission. Those who knew Henry, as I then did not, felt confident that he might maneuver to qualify for the extraordinary opportunity.
The rest, as they say, is history!