Author: By Alan Berger, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, February 21, 1999

Page: C1

Section: Books

They all do it, but nobody has been quite so assiduous at cultivating the myth of himself as Henry Kissinger. This irresistable impulse to write oneself into history in the most flattering way is tantamount to waving a red cape in front of the scholarly set.

Just as the makers of history cannot resist writing tendentious memoirs, historians and other kibitzers cannot refrain from comparing a statesman's writings to the truth of what happened. From figures such as Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, true leaders with a literary gift, to pretenders as diverse as Kissinger or James Baker, everyone who has had a brush with power seems to fall for the illusion that he can also assign himself the place he deserves in history.

The raison d'etre of ``The Kissinger Transcripts'' is to foil Kissinger's efforts to corner the market in the documents and records needed to write the tale of his diplomacy under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. When he left power, the former Harvard professor saw to it that everything that could be labeled ``personal papers'' was so labeled. But the same spirit of bureaucracy that infuriated Kissinger when he was trying to keep his doings secret from the rest of the US government took poetic revenge on him when he left office. Copies of transcripts of the encounters he most wanted to veil in secrecy -- those with the leaders of Maoist China and the Soviet Union -- were stored in the National Archive among other papers belonging to his aide, Winston Lord of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff. Those files have now been pried loose with Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the National Security Archive, an organization dedicated to declassifying foreign policy and national security documents.

William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive, who edited these transcripts, stitches them together with commentaries that provide useful historical context and a modicum of scholarly background.

The general reader is likely to find that the great value of these transcripts has less to do with the demystifying of Kissinger's memoirs than with the undiluted pleasure of learning exactly what Mao Zedong or Leonid Brezhnev said to Kissinger.

The demystifiers can certainly have their fun with these texts. In them, Kissinger's faults are placed on gaudy display. See Henry fume and rage with his intimidated staff because he has concluded, rashly and falsely, that a note from Beijing implies that the Chinese want to cancel a pending Kissinger trip to the Heavenly Kingdom. The canceling of a Kissinger trip, Henry tells his staff, is a major international event.

In a more serious vein, the transcripts show Kissinger repeatedly misreading regional conflicts such as the one betweween India and Pakistan over Bangladesh, the October war of 1973 in the Middle East, or the looming tragedy of Cambodia, interpreting them merely as scoring opportunities in the great global contest between the superpowers.

One doesn't need these transcripts to recognize Kissinger's habit of reducing complex local conflicts and crises to Manichaean cold-war tests of US credibility. But the unvarnished record leaves little room for doubt about the blunders and crimes that flowed from Kissinger's imposition of a reductionist interpretive system on a complex international reality. Kissinger's statecraft bears a certain resemblance to the textual readings of a dogmatic literary critic who discovers in the most diverse poems and novels recurring proofs for the same critical theory.

In the case of Cambodia, it may be that nothing Kissinger could have done would have saved that blasted land from the Khmer Rouge bloodletting between 1975 and 1979. But in his talks with Chinese leaders we observe him rejecting, over and over again, their offers to godfather negotiations with Prince Sihanouk, who was then under Beijing's protection. Blindly, foolishly, destructively, Kissinger insists on continuing to bomb Cambodia and refuses to explore the opportunities the Chinese propose for a return of Sihanouk and an ousting of the Lon Nol regime that had overthrown Sihanouk with US backing.

It can be unfair to expect, with benefit of hindsight, that a statesman foresee calamities that we know were coming. But Kissinger's stubborn and obtuse conduct of US policy toward Cambodia was no aberration. He cared only for his precious concepts of power-balancing among great powers. He did not want to be bothered with the messy realities of Cambodian politics. Even if nothing could have been done to avoid the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, these preserved diplomatic conversations show that Kissinger never tried to do the things that might have been done. Maybe because there was no place in his rigid concept of power balancing for a concern about the destiny of a few million Cambodians who did not occupy the center stage of history.

In dramatic terms, the character who steals the show in these dialogues is not Kissinger but Mao Zedong. When Mao comes on stage, all the other actors take on the sound of bit players. Indeed, an impatient nonspecialist reader might do well to skip over Kissinger's chats in 1974 and 1976 with Brezhnev -- who drones on and on about warheads and launchers and falls like a sucker for Kissinger's practiced flattery -- and instead search out the intoxicating sessions with Chairman Mao.

The Mao who appears in these pages is not a Marxist, nor a communist, nor even a revolutionary. He is every bit an emperor. If the reader can put out of mind the tens of millions of Chinese who perished because of Mao's imperial reign, and forget for awhile the nasty secrets revealed by Mao's personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui, in his book, ``The Private Life of Chairman Mao,'' it might be possible to relax and enjoy the extraordinary performances of Emperor Mao, even on those occasions when the old lion was weak and sick.

One notices right off that Kissinger's customary flattery goes nowhere in the court of Mao. He tells Mao that he shocked his Harvard colleagues by assigning students Mao's writings, and Mao responds with the weary realism of an old duffer who has long been the object of his own cult of personality. ``I, myself, am not satisfied with myself,'' Mao says. ``The main thing is that I don't understand foreign languages and, therefore, I am unable to read books of Germans or Englishmen or Americans.''

So much for what Western idolators revered as Mao Zedong Thought. The emperor was similarly scornful of the ideology propounded by the cultural revolutionaries he had loosed upon China in those years (1966 to 1976). In a February 1973 rendezvous in Beijing, Kissinger and Mao are discussing their mutual determination to help the conservative Georges Pompidou get elected president of France:

``Chairman Mao: Now Mr. Pompidou is being threatened. It is the Socialist Party and the Communist Party putting their strength against him.

``Dr. Kissinger: Yes, and they have united.

``Chairman Mao (pointing at Dr. Kissinger): They are uniting and the Soviet Union wants the Communist Party to get into office. I don't like their Communist Party, just like I don't like your Communist Party. I like you, but not your Communist Party (laughter).''

One of the subtler pleasures of Kissinger's encounters with Mao is the chance they afford to hear the emperor toy with the professor and his bookish theory of a global power equilibrium. The old fox who led his Reds on their Long March understands in his bones the Soviet peril to China. That is why he accepted Ping-Pong diplomacy and invited Nixon and Kissinger to Beijing. But like a worldly Mafia don, Mao makes it plain that although he needs strategic cooperation with the United States, he does not trust his new partners completely. If the Soviets attack China, he tells his American interlocutors, you may stand back for awhile and do nothing before you come to our aid -- not because you want to harm us, but because you want to weaken the Soviets.

Not only may these transcripts make Kissinger look like a sorcerer's apprentice; they may also disabuse any remaining Maoists in these parts of their last illusions. As when Mao tells Kissinger that ``China is a very poor country. What we have in excess is women (laughter). . . . So if you want them, we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands. . . . Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way you can lessen our burdens. (laughter)'' Mao's mysogyny becomes so offensive that his Chinese translators, two women, scold him for it. Kissinger plays along with the emperor's plaint.

History will likely look kindly on Nixon's and Kissinger's cultivation of detente. But as these documents suggest, Kissinger's 19th-century paradigm of an equilibrium of power was perfectly compatible with the practices and habits of imperial diplomacy.