Special Section: CRISIS AND CONFRONTATION

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event, the Chinese message was not what we expected. On the contrary, it accepted the U.N. procedure and the political solution I had outlined to Huang Hua during a secret trip to New York City 48 hours earlier—asking for a ceasefire and withdrawal, but settling for a standstill ceasefire. But Nixon did not know this when he made his lonely and brave decision. Had things developed as we anticipated, we would have had no choice but to assist China in some manner against the probable opposition of much of the Government, the media and the Congress.

Margin of Uncertainty

Our fleet passed into the Bay of Bengal and attracted much media attention. Were we threatening India? Were we seeking to defend East Pakistan? Had we lost our minds? It was in fact sober calculation. We had some 72 hours to bring the war to a conclusion before West Pakistan would be swept into the maelstrom. It would take India that long to shift its forces. We had to give the Soviets a warning. We had to be ready to back up the Chinese if they came in. Moving the task force into the Bay of Bengal created precisely the margin of uncertainty needed to force a decision by New Delhi and Moscow.

On the return flight from the Azores meeting I said to the press pool on Air Force One that Soviet conduct on the subcontinent was not compatible with the mutual restraint required by genuine coexistence. If it continued, we would have to re-evaluate our entire relationship.

The message got through to Moscow. By the morning of Dec. 16, we were receiving reliable reports that the Soviets were pressing New Delhi to accept the territorial status quo in the West, including in Kashmir. Later that day, Mrs. Gandhi offered an unconditional cease-fire in the West. There is no doubt in my mind that it was a reluctant decision resulting from Soviet pressure, which in turn grew out of American insistence. The crisis was over. We had avoided the worst—which is sometimes the maximum statesmen can achieve.

'The India:Pakistan war of 1971 was perhaps the most complex issue of Nixon's first term. What made the crisis so difficult was that the stakes were so much greater than the common perception of them. I remain convinced to this day that Mrs. Gandhi was not motivated primarily by conditions in East Pakistan. India struck in late November; by the timetable that we induced Yahya to accept, martial law would have ended and a civilian government would have taken power at the end of December. This would almost surely have led to the independence of East Pakistan—probably without the excesses of brutality, including public bayoneting, that followed.

Our conduct was attributed to personal pique, anti-Indian bias, callousness toward suffering, or immorality. Had we acted differently, Pakistan, after losing its eastern wing, would have lost Kashmir and possibly Baluchistan and other portions of its western wing—in other words, it would have disintegrated.

The crisis also demonstrated the error of the myth that Nixon, aided by me, exercised an octopus-like grip over a Government that was kept in ignorance of our activities. The reality was the opposite of the folklore: not widening White House dominance but bitter departmental rearguard resistance; not clear-cut directives but elliptical maneuvers to keep open options; not the inability of the agencies to present their