While candidates for President, Vice President, and the Senate grab most of the political time and space in the media during this election year, some people are also “running” in 1980 for appointive positions. One of these eager candidates for a high job in a Ronald Reagan Administration is Henry Kissinger, who would like to be Secretary of State again or any reasonable facsimile thereof.
Kissinger was brought into the Nixon Administration in 1969 even though Henry was not a Nixon supporter and had spoken disparagingly about Nixon. However, Kissinger had something better than certified campaign loyalty to the newly-elected President: a powerful patron named Nelson Rockefeller.
This time around, Kissinger’s patron is dead and Henry can’t count on being appointed by a President he did not support. Kissinger swallowed hard, faced up to the inevitable, and announced his endorsement of Ronald Reagan.
Like Howard Baker, Kissinger had already sized up the SALT II debate as the vehicle to drive himself back into the good graces of Republican voters. Baker’s strategy of running for President (and now for Reagan’s Vice President) was to take the leadership against the SALT II Treaty and thereby expect to earn forgiveness from Republicans for his mortal sin in voting to give away the Panama Canal.
Kissinger’s credibility with Republicans is more difficult to restore. He not only worked to give away our Canal, but he was the architect of SALT I. Opposition to SALT II makes no sense unless one admits the folly of SALT I which Kissinger, in his intellectual vanity, could not do.
In late 1979, Kissinger gave lengthy testimony to the Senate on SALT II, parts of which could be quoted by both sides in the debate. His testimony was designed primarily to confuse the record in regard to his own views and to duck responsibility for his own mistakes.
For example, Kissinger told the Senate that our present military inferiority “is the consequence of unilateral decisions extending over a decade and a half.” Precisely. But Kissinger personally made many of those unilateral decisions.
Undaunted by the total collapse of his policies of political detente, military disarmament, and trade “linkage” with the Soviets on which his SALT I was built, Kissinger has plowed ahead with his campaign to return to power in the Reagan Administration. He unfolded a new policy speech at a recent convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors where he displayed his talent for conning reporters by a combination of flattery, wit, and an esoteric jargon that makes them feel important but intimidates them from asking tough questions like they hurl at other politicians.
James Reston called the speech “truly presidential.” William Buckley called it “rich in thought, nuance, balance.” It was, in fact, a self-serving mishmash of complaints against the Carter Administration for problems Kissinger had caused.
He blamed the Carter Administration because it “repudiated the SALT position of the previous administration.” Yet the SALT position of the previous administration, which was designed by Henry himself, surrendered the U.S. right to build an anti- missile defense to protect our population, to build more than 1,054 ICBMs (although the Soviets have 1,614), to build any heavy ICBMs (although the Soviets have 308), or to build more than 41 nuclear-firing submarines (although the Soviets built 62).
Kissinger told reporters that the question today isn’t defense dollars but whether the weapons gap between Soviet military power and ours is narrowing. But the gap is actually widening, and the missile gap in favor of Russia was created by the deliberate Kissinger decision to destroy 550 Minuteman I and II missiles when the Minuteman III missiles were built, instead of keeping them as part of our arsenal.
Kissinger is to blame for the fact that America has 550 fewer ICBMs than we could have had. That wasn’t a financial decision because the missiles were already in existence. It was a decision to allow the Soviets to attain missile superiority over us for the sale of detente.
A few weeks ago, this columnist asked Ronald Reagan, “You did promise, didn’t you, that you would not reappoint Henry Kissinger?” To which Reagan replied, “That’s right; I did.” Reagan should never be allowed to forget that promise.
