Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

Mrs. Longworth was one of the few members of the old Eastern Establishment from whom Nixon felt no threat or condescension. She was now beyond ambition and she was wise. She remembered a Washington where the President could go riding every afternoon in Rock Creek Park and spend months at a time in Oyster Bay. She had seen too much of human foibles and of Washington skulduggery to be impressed by the self-important. She had experienced the perishability of fame; she knew the meaning of character. At the height of my power she had told me once that the day would inevitably come when I left office and then my test would be how I reacted to my successors — not publicly but in the recesses of my soul. Would I have compassion for their discomfitures or secretly relish them? She confessed that she and her father had failed that test miserably during the Administration of President Taft.

  I met Alice Longworth regularly at the home of various friends; once or twice she invited me to dinner. She held court now in her musty old house on Massachusetts Avenue. A frail old lady with wispy gray hair, she nevertheless seemed more up-to-date and more relevant than most of the colleagues with whom I had just spent the day. We had all talked glibly of revolutionary change and the need to rise to our challenge. But as I thought of current leaders, I saw none who would age as gracefully as Alice Longworth. Lacking the inward assurance, they would be afraid to risk themselves. How many world leaders would be impressive separate from the power they exercised? How many could stand failure or loss of office without losing confidence in themselves? And if they were afraid to fail, how could they succeed? How would they dare to transcend the conventional — the requirement for truly dealing with revolutionary events — when they were emotionally anchored in it?

  Within minutes of my return to my office, the humdrum reclaimed us. Sir Alec Douglas-Home — the minister who came closest to Alice Longworth’s qualities — called to report the result of the European caucus. All the Europeans, he said, were absolutely firm with the French that there had to be a follow-up to this conference. They simply could not tolerate failure. Jobert was dead set against follow-up machinery of any kind, but his colleagues were willing to proceed in the plenary session to declare that they all agreed to appoint officials to a follow-up meeting; France could either join or reserve its position.

  Home added that Jobert had cabled back to Paris for instructions. He warned that we must not wind up with a “washy formula, a papered over thing.” Aware of my Gaullist leanings, he urged me to hold firm with Jobert. I repeated once more that I would not move beyond agreed positions and that I would consult with him before doing anything.

  The occasion that Home both feared and hoped for never arose. Jobert’s instructions were reaffirmed — or so he told us. Pompidou rejected the compromise discussed between Jobert and me. He would not permit Jobert to go along with the follow-up machinery proposed by the Europeans. There was nothing, now, except to break the deadlock at the plenary session.

  The Consumers Unite

  THE conference reassembled at 9:50 A.M., Wednesday, February 13. A working group had prepared a draft communiqué affirming that the energy crisis was a global problem from which no nation could hope to insulate itself. The draft affirmed “the need for a comprehensive action program to deal with all facets of the world energy situation by cooperative measures.” It then listed for special attention the seven areas I had outlined in my opening speech. To this end, it established a group headed by senior officials with a full-time staff to coordinate implementation.

  I decided to hold two plenary sessions in the morning. The first would deal with principles underlying the communiqué, the second with approval of the actual text. This procedure would avoid the impression of American imposition; it would also prevent delaying tactics in the form of haggling over communiqué phrases. Also, if some new, unforeseen resistance were to develop, there would be an opportunity for adjustment in the second session.

  I had arranged for the conceptual part of the communiqué to be introduced by Foreign Minister Knut Frydenlund of Norway, an old and trusted friend of many years. He had the advantage of representing a country that was not a member of the European Community, thus sidestepping the issue of Community instructions. Ohira of Japan had already agreed to introduce the proposal on follow-on institutions. To buffer the collision further, every foreign minister would be given an opportunity to speak — though all of them knew what the key speeches would say. I went around the table starting on my left, which had the advantage that Jobert would get the floor only after Frydenlund and Ohira had already spoken. A chairman who has all except one minister on his side can afford such “conferencemanship.”

  At the beginning, the affair went as planned. Frydenlund could not have been more effective, obscuring his sharp mind with a facade of ponderous bonhomie. It was not until we reached Ohira that things started getting out of hand. The Japanese Foreign Minister made a lengthy statement. The only trouble was that its meaning was impenetrable. He was too elegantly Japanese to make a clear-cut point in a confrontational situation; instead, he presented his view in the Japanese manner, sketching both points of view with just a slight weight in favor of the direction we favored. It was masterfully subtle but not suitable for a showdown because to the uninitiated it sounded as if there was considerable merit in the French position as well as in ours. It was hard to distill a votable proposition out of so much indirection, a fact reflected in the baffled expressions around the table, especially among those who had been led to expect a breakthrough.

  Alec Home saved the day. With the classy effrontery that can be acquired only from several centuries of aristocratic forebears, he took the floor as soon as Ohira had finished. “If I understand the distinguished foreign minister of Japan correctly,” Home began, and then summed up the previously agreed position in a manner vaguely reminiscent of some things Ohira had implied but of nothing that he had actually said. Beaming at the one civilized colleague among a group of clumsy barbarians, Ohira announced that he had indeed been clearly understood. He could be satisfied because in its skillful Japanese way his speech had broken the deadlock after all.

  The conference had to endure another vitriolic attack by Jobert aimed equally at his European partners, especially Schmidt, and at the United States. By 11:40 A.M., the principles were agreed.

  At 12:36 P.M., the second plenary session assembled to consider the communiqué. It was adopted as drafted; only France dissented from the operational parts outlining specific tasks for consumer cooperation and creating follow-up machinery.

  We had achieved much of what we had set out to accomplish. A consumers’ organization would now emerge. To be sure, it had not been given an heroic mission; it was much easier to achieve cooperation on issues involving no risk of confrontation, such as conservation, emergency sharing, development of new energy sources. But the sum total of these efforts would be to strengthen the bargaining position of the consumers vis-à-vis the producers. Some participants would deny that this was the purpose and even believe it in their fear of the moment. But reality transcends what people say about it, and the reality of what came to be known as the International Energy Agency (formally established later in the year) was to promote the cohesion of the industrial democracies in the field of energy, which in turn made a major contribution to improving the bargaining position of the consumers.

  In buoyant spirits, I called all the members of the American delegation to thank them for their contributions. It had been almost a textbook case of meticulous preparation and disciplined execution. The steering committee of Shultz, Burns, Simon, Bruce, and me had operated free of normal bureaucratic backbiting. This group had established the conceptual framework of the conference, refining tactics almost daily. The working group mentioned earlier had done the actual drafting. These dedicated officials ensured that the American side was by far the best prepared and that the conference — contrary to Jobert’s petulant remarks — was one of the most productive and effective in memory.

  A century earlier, that wo
uld have been the end of it. But in our time there is a referee for international events awarding the palm of victory: The media follow their own necessities and they pronounce on the significance of the outcome. The diplomat is considered biased; the journalists act as judge and jury and they decide what the public will hear or read. By nature they are more finely attuned to the drama of the moment than to the trends of the future, which they discount with a skeptical, even cynical, eye. No international gathering is really over, in other words, until it has been explained in the media. Therefore each of the chief protagonists of the Washington conference was compelled to mount the stage, act out his part in the drama, and promote his own perceptions, seeking to influence future events by shaping the interpretation of current ones. And thus the news conferences by Jobert and me during the course of the afternoon must be seen as the last stage of the Washington conference. (Of course, other delegations also briefed their own press but they neither received the attention nor did they seek it, since it was in their interest to play down controversy and to hedge their bets.)

  I let Jobert go on first, not simply as a matter of courtesy but so that I could adjust my remarks to his. He would, I judged, stress the struggle of the moment; this would only lend emphasis to my proposed theme of the necessity of cooperation. Jobert knew my purpose well enough but he had in fact no choice, because with Europe six hours ahead of Washington he had to make his case quickly or not at all. Jobert was at his most acerbic. He rejected the proposition that the Washington Energy Conference had accomplished anything of consequence. It was all a clever American ruse to dominate Europe:

  I believe that quite wrongly, the headlines used in this affair were too large. After all, from our viewpoint this conference has been a minor one, slightly slap-dash in its preparation and even a little slap-dash in the way it was conceived, because when it was convened all these important lines were not yet apparent. A lot of papers had to be received later. . . . [It seems to have been] a slightly political operation probably for the benefit of the United States — consciously or unconsciously, I do not know — and . . . energy was largely an excuse.

  He repeated his Baghdad wisecrack that the Washington conference was not like the Congress of Vienna; in other words, it was not destined to leave any permanent mark. He reiterated that he had never wanted to come in the first place; he had yielded reluctantly to the entreaties of his European partners and with goodwill toward them (not, by implication, toward the United States); he had come on the basis of a previously agreed position:

  But since they wanted me to go with them aware as they were of the French Government’s objections to this conference, I agreed to accompany them as soon as they were good enough to sign an agreement with me which apparently satisfied everyone.

  This was a not too subtle way of asserting that his European colleagues had betrayed him by violating the Community’s mandate. He did not explain how a vote of eight to one against him could violate the intentions of the European Community. Nor did he consider the vote as final: “Some people spoke from emotion rather than reason. Maybe once they are home they will see the difference between emotion and reason.”

  Jobert held Helmut Schmidt personally responsible, denouncing him for choosing America over Europe — as if these were inherently antagonistic concepts. While he was engaged in personalities, he took a personal swipe at me. He objected to a newspaper article that had drawn parallels between his life and mine because we had both been born abroad — he in Morocco — and had both come to the countries we now represented as adolescents. Jobert would accept no such comparison; he was French, but I not quite American: “You see how Americans see things. I think our listeners know quite simply that I was born in Morocco in fact and that I have always been French.”

  Forbearance is not usually my forte. In this instance, anything less would have defeated our purpose. What we had secured would have to be carried out in a cooperative spirit over many years and would one day, we hoped, include France. It was in Jobert’s interest to downplay the conference, it was in ours to downplay the controversy. His strategy required an emphasis on the present; ours, a steady vision of the future. Therefore I opened my press conference on a conciliatory note:

  [T]his conference . . . was based on the assumption, on our conviction, that the world was facing a problem that had come upon it — at least in the dimensions in which we faced it — somewhat unexpectedly. And in a situation of seeming supply shortages there was a tendency to react with panic, produced in part by lack of information, and with a sense that perhaps the control over our destiny had escaped us.

  To this supply shortage was added at the end of December the serious problem of the rapid escalation of prices.

  The United States holds the view that the problem that has been produced by these two phenomena — the demand, at least for a while, outrunning supply and the rapid increase of prices — can be solved only on a global basis and by multilateral action.

  We hold this view not to vindicate any particular theory of the organization of the world. We have not advocated institutions simply to create institutions. We were convinced, and remain convinced, that it is a problem of global nature incapable of isolated solution and indeed a problem par excellence in which the general interest is identical with the individual interest. . . .

  I refused to take Jobert’s bait. Disagreements with France were temporary; Atlantic unity was not in danger:

  The United States considers the Atlantic relationship the pivot of its foreign policy. Our efforts during the last year have been directed toward strengthening that relationship.

  The fact that there are some differences of view between us and France on how this Atlantic relationship should be strengthened should not obscure the central importance we attach to it nor our recognition that friendship with all European countries, including France, is essential for the security of all of the nations of the Atlantic alliance. . . .

  The industrial democracies, in my view, would not be able to maintain even their domestic cohesion, much less their relationship with one another, unless they acted in a manner perceived by their publics as mastering the new economic challenge. A policy of jockeying for national advantage in the hope of riding out the immediate crisis was bound to fail — weakening confidence in democratic institutions, demoralizing governments, and eroding political ties on which Western security depended. Next to this stake, the quarrels between France and the United States were petty and indeed unworthy. And I thought it our duty to end them at the earliest opportunity.

  The Washington Energy Conference contributed to this ultimate goal. At the beginning of my conversation with Ohira, Japanese Ambassador Takeshi Yasukawa had commented that if the conference turned out not to be a failure it would have to be judged a success. I disagreed: If it was not a success, I said, it should be considered a failure. Like many a play on words, it reflected an attitude. Failure was easy to determine; success was bound to be fragile. On the tactical level we had done well. We saw a conference of thirteen nations through to a conclusion that the other participants had initially hesitated to embrace out of fear of annoying the oil producers. Over the next years the democracies systematically put the key elements of our proposed strategy into place: conservation, financial safety nets, technical cooperation, emergency sharing plans, help for developing countries. Despite many misgivings, the conference had created an organization of consumer unity and given it tasks that over time were bound to strengthen the consumers. The International Energy Agency has thrived, and it remains to this writing the principal vehicle of solidarity among the industrial democracies on energy.

  Over the years ahead the energy situation improved considerably, partly due to growing consumer solidarity. The world oil market stabilized. For five years after the shock of 1973, there were no further dramatic increases in the price of oil. From 1974 through 1978 the price rose less than world inflation; the real price of oil in fact declined by some 25 percent over that
period.3 It took the upheaval in Iran in 1978–1979, with the loss of four million barrels of Iranian oil a day, to trigger another price spiral, which seems to have been arrested at this writing partly by an intensification of the measures of conservation and substitution we put forward in 1974.

  Another Blowup

  THE immediate aftermath of the conference, however, was dominated by the legacies of the controversies just surmounted, not a sense of direction. Before we achieved our goal, we had yet to endure the explosion that we had avoided in Washington. Normally, a diplomat expects an occasional disappointment; he knows that if everything is sacrificed to vindicating the point of view of one party on every issue, all trust is destroyed. Jobert did not accept such restraints. He was determined to thwart the emergence of America as leader of the industrial democracies — the Gaullist nightmare. He could not undo the decisions of the energy conference, but he could press within the European Community for decisions that he knew would generate conflict with the United States. And his colleagues were tempted to conciliate him to compensate for their uncharacteristic resolution at the energy conference.

  In the weeks after the energy conference, therefore, Jobert’s assault was unremitting. In a briefing of the foreign affairs committee of the French National Assembly on February 21 he defended his conduct, claiming that he had never raised his voice though he had been insulted and brutalized. He complained elsewhere that the United States had insisted that France had no right to make any bilateral arrangement with oil-producing Arab countries. (In fact, we had emphasized the self-defeating nature of bilateral deals in general.) That same day a well-placed Quai d’Orsay official told our Embassy that the heart of the current French analysis of European-American relations was that the United States was attempting to “resume the direction of operations in Atlantic affairs.” He mocked my planned stopover in London to brief the British on my Mideast diplomacy, saying it “embarrassed” my hosts (who had specifically requested the visit).