The New York Times
June 2, 1983, Thursday, Late City Final Edition
BOOK PORTRAYS KISSINGER AS A DOUBLE-DEALER IN ’68
BYLINE: By BERNARD GWERTZMAN, Special to the New York Times
SECTION: Section A; Page 14, Column 3; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 1553 words
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, June 1
Henry A. Kissinger is described in a new book as so eager to have a high office in Government in the late 1960’s that he offered confidential advice to both the Democrats and the Republicans in the 1968 Presidential campaign.
After the candidate for whom he worked, Nelson A. Rockefeller, lost in the Republican convention that July to Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Kissinger offered to share the Rockefeller campaign’s derogatory files on Mr. Nixon with Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, then the front-running Democratic candidate, Seymour M. Hersh writes in his book, ”The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House.”
Mr. Hersh says the offer was made to Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Humphrey adviser who was to become President Carter’s national security adviser in 1977. Mr. Kissinger was to become Mr. Nixon’s national security adviser and, later, his Sec-retary of State.
But in September, the book continues, after the Democratic convention had nominated Mr. Humphrey and Mr. Nixon was the clear favorite in the polls, Mr. Kissinger telephoned Richard V. Allen, Mr. Nixon’s foreign policy adviser, and offered to provide inside information through friends and associates in the Johnson Administration on what was hap-pening in the secret negotiations in Paris on ending the Vietnam War.
Contacts Not Widely Known
Mr. Nixon has written in his memoirs that Mr. Kissinger provided him with ”information about the bombing halt” or-dered by President Johnson just before the 1968 election and that this was a factor in his deciding to offer Mr. Kissinger the job of national security adviser after the successful election. But Mr. Kissinger’s contacts with the Humphrey camp were not widely known.
Mr. Hersh quotes Ted Van Dyk, an aide to the late Mr. Humphrey, as saying that in late October, at a time when Mr. Humphrey had started to rise in the polls and Mr. Kissinger was aiding the Nixon camp, Mr. Kissinger wrote a letter to Mr. Humphrey criticizing Mr. Nixon and offering his services.
The book quotes Mr. Van Dyk as saying that ”I remember Henry as being a both-sides-of-the-street kind of guy.” But when reached today at a conference in Bonn, Mr. Van Dyk said that while he could confirm talking about the Kissinger letter, he does not remember saying that about Mr. Kissinger.
When asked for his reaction to the book, Mr. Kissinger replied through his office that he would have no comment be-cause he had not seen it.
Names a C.I.A. Informer
The book as a whole provides an unflattering protrayal of Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon in action in the first four years of the Nixon Administration. It draws on previously published memoirs by both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger, as well as other books, and from 1,000 interviews that Mr. Hersh said he conducted over four years.
Among other things, Mr. Hersh says in his book that Morarji R. Desai, a prominent political figure in India who be-came Prime Minister in 1977, was a paid informer for the Central Intelligence Agency after his falling out with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1967. Mr. Hersh attributes this to ”former American intelligence officials” and quotes them as having ”recalled” that Mr. Desai was paid $20,000 yearly during the Johnson Administration and possibly into the Nix-on Administration.
Mr. Desai is described as the source for the Nixon Administration’s assertion that Mrs. Gandhi was planning to conquer West Pakistan in 1971 after successfully defeating Pakistani troops in East Pakistan and creating the state of Bangla-desh, a war in which Washington sternly criticized the Indians.
On another topic, Mr. Hersh says that, in 1969, as part of an effort to force an end to the Vietnam War, Mr. Nixon planned to threaten Hanoi with serious military consequences unless it negotiated seriously by Nov. 1, the anniversary of the Johnson decision to stop bombing North Vietnam.
This was previously divulged by Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger, but Mr. Hersh adds the disclosure that among the con-tingencies discussed by Mr. Kissinger’s staff was the detonation of a nuclear device to block roads from China to North Vietnam. He also says the Strategic Air Command was put on a 29-day combat alert in October 1969, but that in the end nothing came of the planning. In his memoirs, Mr. Kissinger said Mr. Nixon ”never pursued the threat seriously.”
The book also refers to long-standing rumors that Mr. Nixon received millions of dollars of support from the military junta that ran Greece in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Mr. Hersh writes that the House Intelligence Committee re-ceived sworn but unpublished evidence in 1976 from Henry A. Tasca, who had been Ambassador to Greece, that Thomas A. Pappas, a Republican fund-raiser, had ”served as a conduit” to the Nixon campaign from the Greek Gov-ernment in 1968.
Although Mr. Hersh says there is no firsthand proof that the United States was responsible for the coup that unseated Prince Norodom Sihanouk as Cambodia’s leader in 1970, he writes that Samuel R. Thornton, a Navy intelligence specialist in Saigon, said Americans had made contact earlier with Lon Nol, who eventually led the coup, under the code name ”Sunshine Park.” Mr. Hersh said this is ”hard-to-ignore evidence that at least some officials in the American Government were actively encouraging the overthrow of Sihanouk before 1970.”
Efforts to reach Mr. Thorton and Mr. Pappas by telephone were unavailing. On yet another topic, Mr. Hersh says the White House and labor unions agreed in late 1971 to allow American grain to be shipped on foreign vessels after the union leaders were told that such a deal was crucial to the success of the negotiations on strategic arms limitation that culminated in 1972.
Discussion of Personal Strains
Mr. Hersh, a former reporter for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for reports on the massacre of Vi-etnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968.
Much of his new book is taken up with discussion of the personal strains, tensions and animosities within the Nixon Administration, including the well-known efforts of Mr. Kissinger to undercut the effectiveness of both Secretary of State William P. Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird. Mr. Hersh says, for example, that Mr. Rogers’s Mid-dle East peace-making efforts in 1969-71 failed because of Mr. Kissinger’s ”spite” in refusing to cooperate.
The book gives only passing credit to the Nixon Administration for its opening to China, the conclusion of strategic arms accords and the ending of the American involvement in Vietnam.
Mr. Hersh said neither Mr. Nixon nor Mr. Kissinger would consent to his repeated requests for interviews in preparing the book. He says Mr. Kissinger, in sharing confidential information with the Nixon camp, ”would have astonished his friends in the Paris delegation who continued to trust him in the weeks before the elections as part of the team seeking a settlement of the Vietnam War.”
‘Basic’ Information
Mr. Hersh quotes John N. Mitchell, Mr. Nixon’s campaign manager, as saying: ”Henry’s information was basic. We were getting all our information from him.”
In his memoirs from that period, Mr. Kissinger said several Nixon emissaries called him after he returned to Harvard, where he was a professor, after the Republican convention of 1968. ”I took the position,” Mr. Kissinger wrote, ”that I would answer specific questions on foreign policy, but that I would not offer general advice or volunteer suggestions. This was the same response I made to the Humphrey staff.”
He said the only question he was asked came from Mr. Mitchell, who wanted to know if he thought the Johnson Ad-ministration would agree to a bombing halt before the election. Mr. Kissinger said he replied that he thought one would be worked out and therefore ”I advised against making an issue of it.”
He said Mr. Mitchell checked that opinion with him once or twice during the campaign and gave him the telephone number of H.R. Haldeman to call if he got ”hard”information. But, he said, ”I never used it.”
Mr. Hersh says that Mr. Allen received a phone call from Mr. Kissinger 12 hours before Mr. Johnson announced the bombing halt. Mr. Kissinger ”excitedly announced,” Mr. Hersh says, that ”I’ve got important information,” then went on to decribe that an accord had been reached in Paris allowing the halt in the bombing.
”My attitude was that it was inevitable that Kissinger would have to be part of our administration,” Mr. Allen told Mr. Hersh. ”Kissinger had proven his mettle by tipping us.”
Mr. Allen served as national security adviser to President Reagan for a year. In a telephone interview today, he con-firmed the accuracy of his quotations in the Hersh book.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Illustrations: photo of Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger
Copyright 1983 The New York Times Company