A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency

Bundy, a former adviser at the State and Defense Departments as well as the CIA under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and editor of Foreign Affairs from 1972 to 1984, here recaps U.S. foreign policy during the Nixon era. He has a lot to say, some of it negative, about the role of Henry Kissinger as Nixon's special assistant for national security affairs, then as secretary of state. Bundy credits Nixon as a brilliant strategist who was undone by his tendency to exclude the public and Congress from his deliberations. He is less charitable to Kissinger, whom he describes as obsessed with control and often making errors of judgment when refusing to consult professionals at the State Department and failing to bring Congress into his confidence. Bundy takes a jaundiced view of the memoirs of both men in their respective depictions of what transpired in Vietnam and Cambodia, as well as what he describes as their self-serving accounts of the opening to China and relations with the Soviet Union. He does credit the Nixon Administration with successful policies in the Middle East, many negotiated by Kissinger, to defuse Arab-Israeli conflicts, and concedes that Nixon was a skillful maneuverer and an experienced analyst. He maintains that Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments were undone less by Watergate than by the president's obsession with secrecy and his practice of deception. Photos not seen by PW. (May)