Your Best Friends Won't Tell You

By Hugh Sidey

ONE of the oddities of these times is that the U.S. seems able to get along better with Communist dictators than with the governments of free nations. The meetings with the high men of Peking, Moscow and Hanoi are more frequent and appear to be more candid and intimate than some with the leaders of Canada, France or Germany. In some instances over the past months there has appeared to be more camaraderie and humor between Communists and the U.S. representatives than has existed lately between the diplomats of this nation and the democratic societies of Europe and Asia.

So it was last week that the undercover mutterings of Japan came out into the open. The Japanese feel left out and uninformed. While Henry Kissinger has paid three visits to Japan, Richard Nixon has yet to go. Kissinger's latest Asian swing included three days (19 hours of meetings) in Hanoi and four days (21 1/2 hours of meetings) in Peking, but he stopped in Japan for only a day (2 1/2 hours of meetings), and it seemed almost like an afterthought.

In most of the capitals of Europe as well there are continuing complaints about never being sure just what President Nixon is planning to do next with Russia or China, although certainly Russia and China know. And small countries like Israel and South Korea, whose very lives depend on this nation, have set up spy networks in Washington to try to learn what is on the minds of Nixon and Kissinger.

There are some good reasons, of course, for the U.S. Government's behavior. First, the diplomatic action right now is with the Communist nations. Hence the meetings and all those handshakes and smiles. Also, the character of Japan has for the moment stymied this country's top statesmen. Japan has not yet conceived a complete global policy. Thus those marvelous philosophical evenings mulling over the condition and future of civilization, which Kissinger found so warming in Peking, cannot be had in Tokyo. When Washington's international planners have turned to Europe, they have found up until fairly recently a collection of individual states mostly preoccupied with their internal problems and their relations with immediate neighbors--and not all that interested in global strategies.

For all of that, the White House seems in the grip of a secrecy syndrome that was thought to be found only in the Kremlin. In this respect, we seem to have become more like the Communists than they have become like us, which is not the way that some people thought it should work.

A few days ago Kissinger guardedly reported on his Asian conferences, and his concern about letting the news out was apparent. When asked what he had told the Japanese, he chuckled, "Three days after leaving Tokyo there can be almost nothing left to reveal that is not already in the Japanese press." Well, maybe that is bad, but maybe not. There are some people left who believe that this is the way a free society should work.

At that same briefing, Kissinger was asked if he could say something about what he and Mao Tse-tung had talked over. He paused. "I am debating whether to spend ten minutes saying 'No,' or just say 'No.' " Then he spent 45 seconds saying "No." While most people can understand the need for confidentiality in such discussions, is there not room in this age for a little public glimpse at conversations by either Nixon or Kissinger with a man whom just a few years ago we were calling an international murderer?

The Soviets did not cancel the Moscow summit when we bombed Hanoi and mined the Haiphong harbor in May. Are we to believe that the generation of peace would collapse if we learned a little of what Nixon and Brezhnev talked about when they took a hydrofoil ride on the Moscow River last spring?

John Kennedy had a good thought back in 1961 when things were a little tougher with the Communists. He came back from his meeting in Vienna with Nikita Khrushchev, and he talked at length with his diplomatic officers, even with the press. At one of these meetings, after telling about the bitter confrontation between himself and Khrushchev, he paused and asked his audience, "If we put this out, will it jeopardize future relations with the Soviet Union? Does Khrushchev understand how democracies work?" Kennedy then answered his own question. "If he doesn't, maybe it is time he learned."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.