Gentle Knife

By WALTER ISAACSON

Everyone in the state department is trying to knife me in the back, except for Bill Bundy," Henry Kissinger grumbled after becoming Nixon's National Security Adviser. "He is still enough of a gentleman to knife me in the chest." So true, even now. In his new book, A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency (Hill and Wang; 647 pages; $35), the patrician Bundy is still inserting the knife in a gentle, gentlemanly way. His title comes from Sir Walter Scott's lines about the "tangled web we weave/ When first we practice to deceive." In assessing Nixon and Kissinger, Bundy comes to the unsurprising conclusion that "the taste for acting secretly was obsessive" and that an "unshakable bent to deceive" undermined their accomplishments.

The prime example in Bundy's march through the Nixon years is Indochina. From the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 to the secret assurances made to South Vietnam in 1973 that the U.S. would militarily enforce the Paris peace accords, Nixon and Kissinger showed that "deception goes hand in hand with bad policy," Bundy charges.

Perhaps. But Bundy, who oversaw Asia policy at State during the Vietnam buildup, fails to wrestle with the sad irony that has dogged his career. It was forthright, honorable, well-bred folks--the best and the brightest, such as William Bundy and his brother McGeorge--who unintentionally got us into Vietnam. It was secretive, manipulative folks--such as Nixon and Kissinger--who got us out.

Bundy's book is a valuable one, a solid chronicle from the vantage of the old foreign policy establishment. But it could have been so much more powerful and poignant if he'd delved deeper into the murky questions about Vietnam that continue to gnaw at many of us, presumably including Bundy.

--By Walter Isaacson