THE GUILTY ABROAD

EVEN IN FOREIGN POLICY, RICHARD NIXON RELIED ON HIS GIFT FOR SECRECY AND GUILE

Author: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, July 12, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

It was a knowledge not even Nixon's fiercest detractors would gainsay. No 20th-century president has entered the White House with as much experience in foreign affairs -- and none in our history has so single-mindedly focused on it. During his 5 1/2 years in office, Nixon oversaw the opening to China, detente with the Soviet Union and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the war in Indochina, shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, and the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system, to name only the most significant diplomatic events during his presidency.

Even Watergate helped further Nixon's foreign policy renown: Just as he had played the China card in dealing with the Soviet Union, so after 1974 would he play the foreign policy card in his 20-year campaign to be remembered as world statesman rather than unindicted coconspirator.

In ``A Tangled Web,'' his judicious and comprehensive study of ``The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency,'' William Bundy concludes that the two roles were, in fact, inseparable. (Bundy's title, which comes from Sir Walter Scott's observation about what we weave when we begin to deceive, alludes to more than just the complexity of Nixon's statecraft.) Though the author might have chosen less pejorative terms -- ``secrecy'' and ``flexibility,'' say -- Nixon himself would likely not have quarreled with Bundy's assessment that concealment and deceit were as much a part of this president's conduct of foreign policy as vision and boldness were. What he would have disputed, and vehemently, is Bundy's corollary judgment: ``Most fundamentally, [Nixon] lacked the qualities of a statesman and builder'' precisely because of his incapacity for openness and consensus building.

In these contrasting views, one sees the longstanding doctrinal gulf in US foreign policy, one as old -- and still as relevant -- as the divide between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians. On the one hand are the pragmatist advocates of Realpolitik, those who argue that, in Nixon's words, ``Foreign affairs aren't about trust. They're about interests and power.'' On the other are the idealist upholders of what one might call Stimsonian diplomacy, after Henry Stimson, secretary of state under Herbert Hoover and secretary of war under Franklin Roosevelt, who when informed that the United States had cracked the Japanese diplomatic code, declared, ``Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.''

This division is by no means as simple as it looks. Containment, the central tenet of US Cold War foreign policy, was a masterful utilization of Realpolitik -- and largely the handiwork of George Kennan, than whom there is no living figure more revered by the idealist school. Conversely, the anticommunism that did so much to define Nixon's career -- a doctrine Bundy sees him keeping faith with even during the headiest days of detente -- was as much driven by ideology, and even morality, as by national interest.

Even more than Nixon, perhaps, Bundy demonstrates how the camps overlap. He comes by his Stimsonianism naturally: His brother, McGeorge, collaborated with Stimson on his autobiography before serving as national security adviser under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. William Bundy held high-level posts in the defense and state departments in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and from 1972 to 1984 edited Foreign Affairs, the bible of the foreign policy establishment. Yet during the '50s, he served in that least Stimsonian of public-sector enterprises, the Central Intelligence Agency.

Bundy's work takes its place as the most complete and balanced account of Nixon's foreign policy. (Henry Kissinger's memoirs are the most complete; they are not the most balanced.) This is doubly ironic as the author was an associate of Nixon's great bane, John F. Kennedy, and a high priest of the Eastern Establishment that Nixon at once despised and envied. Blood does tell, and, patrician that he is, Bundy displays no end of punctilio toward his subject. Even so, his basic distaste isn't hard to discern. For a Stimsonian, foreign policy is the highest expression of the democratic ethos: open covenants, openly arrived at. For Nixon, its greatest appeal lay in its having so little to do with democracy. Foreign policy allowed for grand and direct action -- go to China, bomb Cambodia, close the gold window -- without having to observe such niceties as informing State or consulting Congress.

The fundamental dynamic of Nixon's diplomacy was individual rather than institutional -- with Nixon and Kissinger as the individuals in question, a pair of solo operators (unquestionably gifted) who relentlessly schemed and meddled at the expense of the professionals. Bundy consistently notes how much Nixon and Kissinger's successes owed to the likes of Paul Volcker at Treasury, U. Alexis Johnson at State, Gerard Smith at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, David Packard at Defense -- and how often ignoring them worsened Nixon and Kissinger's failures. As well as a reassessment of Nixon, ``A Tangled Web'' is a tribute to them and their Foreign Service and sub-Cabinet brethren.

Nixon's greatest sin, in Bundy's view, was defining every foreign policy issue in terms of superpower relations. ``Presiding over a time when the United States should have been moving out of the mold of the Cold War and into the era when local and regional crises were more important than superpower rivalry, and economic factors more influential than geopolitics at any level, he never made the leaps that history called for, on either front.''

That is a strong condemnation, yet on the evidence of Monica Crowley's ``Nixon in Winter,'' nearly half of which concerns its subject's views on Russia and China, the superpowers remained Nixon's near-exclusive focus in his elder-statesman phase, too. Soon after graduating from college in 1990, Crowley joined Nixon's staff as a foreign policy assistant. Two years ago, she published ``Nixon Off the Record,'' which recorded his comments to her on political matters. Her new book follows the same format -- lengthy chunks of Nixon's table talk along with even lengthier chunks of Crowley's exposition -- this time largely on foreign affairs, along with smaller sections on political scandal and more philosophical reflections.

``Nixon's personal and professional disclosures were made in confidence,'' she writes, ``but with the implicit understanding that they would eventually be recounted.'' Implicit on her part, anyway, for as with the previous book, Nixon could have had little desire for the public to see him as he appears in Crowley's pages.

For all that she clearly admires Nixon (and, even more clearly, continues to profit from her association with him), the figure who emerges here is vain, petty, banal, and coarse. When not worrying about his popularity -- ``Do you think the interest in me is down?'' a worried Nixon asks Crowley -- he's sounding less like a statesman than like the Red Queen. ``Remember what they did to Khrushchev? Made him a nonperson? That's what I'll do to CBS and the Post and maybe even the Times,'' he announces, irked at their heavy coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Watergate break-in.

Far worse, Crowley makes Nixon guilty of the one offense he never committed while alive: He's boring. As he drones on through these pages, and then as she expatiates on what he's just droned, it's hard to believe this is the dark star of American politics whose negative ions irradiated public life for nearly half a century. Twice only does she communicate some sense of the man's acrid savor. Delighted to have won a court victory in his endless battle to keep the White House tapes closed, he strikes up an impromptu version of ``Happy Days Are Here Again'' (FDR's theme song!) on the piano. And prompted by his wife, Pat, he shows off an Ultrasuede coat she had given him for Christmas. ``You must see this jacket,'' he proudly tells Crowley. ``Isn't it lustrous?''

It's a strange state of affairs when the most edifying thing a book has to offer is the image of Richard Nixon modeling Ultrasuede. Still, ``Nixon in Winter,'' like Crowley's earlier effort, does offer one valuable lesson for future presidents, even if it arrives too late to benefit the present holder of the office: Beware the ministrations of intimates named Monica.