Prof. Bismarck Goes to Washington: Kissinger on the Job

When Dr. Henry Kissinger was appointed President Nixon’s chief aide on world affairs, he liked to amuse his friends by impersonating Peter Sellers impersonating Dr. Strangelove, who might have been an impersonation of Dr. Kissinger himself.

Like Strangelove, Kissinger made his fame as an expert on nuclear war; like him he is a Central European; and like him, his voice is heard in the inner sanctum of government. Unlike Strangelove, Kissinger is a political scientist, and physicists Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun have better claims to being the inspiration for the hero of the famous film. Further, whereas Strangelove was, to say the least, screwed up, Kissinger is cool, humorous, and most of the time, detached.

The impersonation, like most of what Kissinger does, was brilliantly executed and showed two things: first, that he had guessed rightly what a lot of Washington was (and still is) saying of him; second, that having reached the pinnacle of his ambitions, he can now afford self-mockery. An old acquaintance who remembers “the ponderous, uptight, spotty Teutonic professor” of ten years ago says that in those days he never laughed at himself and rarely laughed at all. But over the years, success has changed him: he has lost weight (still plump but no longer fat), improved his appearance, relaxed his manner, and developed a slightly macabre sense of humor about his own role: “Please forgive me, 1 have to make one more telephone call, to the Secretary of State. We have to tell him when we start a nuclear war . .

What is fascinating, and, some would say, alarming, about this soft-spoken academic is that a theoretician of the use of power to achieve national objectives is now in a position to translate theory into practice. In the White House, he sometimes jokes, “You can only make one mistake.” Nominally, of course, Kissinger is no more than a rather large cog in the vast bureaucratic machine, without any executive authority whatever. He enjoys assuring credulous journalists (Life, Look) that he would never dream of anything as improper as using his special role as compiler of presidential dossiers to get across his private views. Yet as a man of ideas and proud of his conceptual grasp of world affairs, Kissinger is known to have a withering contempt for bureaucrats, with their “quest for calculability" and “yearning for routine,” and it is fair to say that he would not be satisfied to he a shuffler of papers for the President. The models he would prefer are those “to whom it is given not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos, there to find material for fresh creation.” The attributes he admires are those “which enable the spirit to transcend an impasse in the crisis of history and to contemplate the abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, lint as a challenge to be overcome—or to perish in the process.”

His critics like to remember that his main historical work (from which both these quotations are drawn) was about Prince Metternich, and some suspect that his much vaunted “conceptual framework” of world affairs is no more than a hankering for the good old days of the nineteenth-century Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe. Those who have had the stamina to read the book through to the end will know, however, that he dismisses Metternich as an obsolete leftover from the Enlightenment, who wrongly believed in the natural harmony of international affairs and expected the world to work like clockwork and that, consequently, “he failed to achieve final greatness.”

Kissinger’s real hero, the man he judged by far the greatest genius of his age, perhaps of any age, was Otto von Bismarck, who, while recognizing that “equilibrium was needed for stability,” saw the balance of power “in constant flux” and proposed to base his own concert of nations “on precise calculations of power.” Bismarck, we learn in a glowingly appreciative study Kissinger wrote last year (and reprints of which he obligingly circulated to some of his friends at the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam), denied that any state has the right to sacrifice its opportunities to its principles. Bismarck, he relates, was “unencumbered by moral scruples” and “knew how to restrain the contending forces, both domestic and foreign, by manipulating their antagonisms.”

It is obviously to Kissinger’s advantage that the press should see him in a relatively servile role—as it is to the advantage of the senior members of the Nixon Cabinet, both for prestige purposes and to maintain authority over their own departments, to show that they are the focal points of power. The counterfeit bureaucrat, doing nothing but staff work, is also a comforting illusion for Congress, which is allowed to put Cabinet members on the carpet but has no right to question White House personnel. But to at least one of his oldest and most intimate friends at Harvard, there has never been a shadow of doubt that Kissinger went to the White House in the hope of playing a Bismarck to Kaiser Nixon. He would certainly be a disappointed man if he failed to leave his own imprint on the nation’s history.

The nature of Kissinger’s job is twofold: on the one hand he is the inseparable adviser, confidant, consoler, apologist, and spokesman for the President. The two men are constantly in each other’s company; Kissinger is at his side for all important meetings and on all foreign journeys. He rents (partly at his own cost) the nearest villa to the Western White House at San Clemente, and at moments of major decision (how to retaliate when the North Koreans shot down an American spy plane, when and whether to announce the next withdrawals from Vietnam) , the two men are often closeted alone together for hours on end.

Any President needs one man around who knows the world better than he does and who is utterly trustworthy and personally congenial: in this sense Kissinger is to Nixon what McGeorge Bundy was to Kennedy or Walt Rostow to Lyndon Johnson. But there is another side, as executive secretary of the National Security Council, where Kissinger has greatly enlarged the role played by his predecessors.

Even before coming into office Kissinger had thought and written a lot about the need to streamline the processes of decision-making in Washington, so that the major issues would come up to the Chief Executive before actions were agreed upon and so that decisions, once taken, would be effectively and immediately implemented. Here he sensed an immediate sympathy with the President, whose previous experience had convinced him of the need for firmer central control.

Kissinger’s main complaint against the old regime was that the planning of foreign and defense policy took place in a vacuum—or became, as he put it, “an esoteric exercise,” while the actual decisions, vitally affecting long-term national interests, were taken on an ad hoc basis, in the light of some immediate crisis. He detected “a constantly widening gap between the technical competence of the research staff and of the planners and what hardpressed political leaders were capable of absorbing.” He noted that “in many fields—strategy being a prime example—decision-makers may find it difficult to give as many hours to a problem as the expert has had years to study it.” He deplored the Executive’s habit of taking cognizance of a problem only when it emerged as an administrative issue, and when it could no longer be fitted into the wider foreign policy concept: he saw that “various elements of the bureaucracy make a series of nonaggression pacts with each other and thus reduce the decision-maker to a benevolent constitutional monarch.” And Kissinger is not the man to waste time as the servant of a constitutional monarch.

It was this explicit need to integrate the day-to-day decisions into the wider planning and conceptualizing of foreign policy that led Kissinger to get Nixon to broaden the tasks of the National Security Council, so that the whole operation came under the White House apparatus, which meant, in practice, under Kissinger’s own management.

An effort to systematize decisions and get the departments and agencies to work together instead of against each other started under President Johnson, who ordered the installation of interdepartmental groups to examine issues and areas of special interest, but under his plan they were instructed to report back to the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. Under the new arrangements, the interdepartmental groups survive and are strengthened, but instead of reporting to the Secretary of State, or in the case of military matters, to the Secretary of Defense, as they did before, they now report their agreements or disagreements directly to Dr. Kissinger, at the White House.

If the problem under study is a long-term one— and some of the groups are now handling reappraisal of national policy not only over the next three to five but even ever the next ten years— Kissinger will then ask his own staff to see whether there has been any interesting research or new proposal from outside the official hierarchy, in academic institutions or the serious press. And it is only when the subject forces itself into the news or has been thoroughly explored that he will identify the range of choices and present them to the President.

He can then advise the President whether the issue needs to be taken before the National Security Council (which consists of the President, the Vice President, Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense, and the Director of Emergency Planning, and, sitting in, Kissinger, the director of the CIA, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) or whether he should handle it personally. Either way Kissinger will be there, directing the flow.

Kissinger denies that he is cutting Secretary of State William P. Rogers out of the act: he notes that the chairmen of all the interdepartmental groups are the Assistant Secretaries from the relevant sectors of the State Department and says he assumes they represent their chief, the Secretary of State. But the fact remains that when the work is done, the results bypass the departmental hierarchy and go straight to the White House. Not that the executive secretary of the NSC would claim that all his decisions are right; only that there is no other way except by the centralization around himself to prevent the President’s wishes from becoming the casualties of what he sometimes knowingly refers to as “interdepartmental guerrilla war.”

Nobody with experience of Washington would suppose that these transformations have been without tears. Kissinger is doing his best not to overplay his hand. For example, although his closeness to the President would make it easy for him to influence the choice of personnel for the prestigious overseas posts, he has deliberately refrained from interfering, even when he knows that an appointment made for some domestic political reason would seem internationally silly. He has privately acknowledged that he cannot “fight on all fronts at once.”

The interdepartmental tension began even before President Nixon’s inauguration, when Dr. Kissinger, named to succeed Walt Rostow as executive secretary of the National Security Council, moved in with deliberate haste and thoroughness to recruit the best available people to his staff. His extensive knowledge of the Who’s Who of the Washington hierarchy, and of its academic periphery, enabled him to grab some of the ablest young experts from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the universities. Most of them turned out to be Democrats, excited by the prospect of being so near the center of power. Many were soon to be disillusioned by President Nixon’s White House, but in the meantime, the NSC shop, with a staff of twentyfive senior executives, was already in business, ready and able to handle any world problems involving the President, while Mr. Rogers and Mr. Laird were still fumbling about, looking for adequate nominees to fill the top jobs in their own vast and unfamiliar establishments. They have not yet caught up.

Working himself relentlessly, Kissinger drove his team into a seven-day week, with the days often lasting well into the nights. He comforted himself with the thought that most of his assistants were ten or fifteen years younger than himself, and none was being asked to work harder than he did.

The first casualty was his chief staff man, Lawrence Eagleburger, formerly of the State Department, who suffered a nervous breakdown and was relieved to be shifted to a less harassing post at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Dr. Kissinger has told him he can come back when he feels up to it.

There are some indications, however, that it is not only overwork which has already led to the resignation of no less than eleven members of the NSC staff. One factor is Dr. Kissinger’s own habit of making exacting demands, and his tendency to bully and berate those underneath him. Another factor has been that in trying not to antagonize the other departments he has ordered his subordinates not to have contacts with outsiders, particularly to avoid the press. High-level reporters, who are used to being ushered into every government office, indignantly resent tlie ban, finding themselves often cut oft from experts and valued contacts they knew and freely mixed with before these went into the White House. The reporters had enough power to force the White House to relax the rules, but most of the men on Kissinger’s staff still dare not be seen fraternizing with journalists.

This means that anyone who wants to make a real contact with the NSC staff—in other words, anyone who is seeking information about current presidential thinking on foreign and defense policy —needs to see Kissinger himself.

Paradoxically, the experts Kissinger recruited on his own staff are among those who find it hard to be fitted into his appointments schedule. The fact that they were left to their own devices while their boss went off to San Clemente last summer with the President seems to have exacerbated their feelings of futility—and there were several more resignations when he got back.

Another explanation for the low morale among Kissinger’s bright young men is that they rarely see the President himself. Under former Presidents, specialists recruited to work inside the NSC rvere available when the President needed expert advice: nothing, of course, is more stimulating or encouraging inside the Washington bureaucracy than occasional access to the man who makes the decisions. The Harvard economist Francis Bator, for example, expert on international trade and currency, first under McGeorge Bundy, then under Walt Rostow, used to see President Johnson very frequently indeed. Under the present system, Kissinger absorbs the information from his staff and does all the briefing of the President himself, even on subjects on which he is not an expert. This satisfies Mr. Nixon, who likes to limit the number of people he needs to see; and it satisfies Dr. Kissinger, who enjoys the monopoly.

The resentment and jealousies which the extraordinary accumulation of functions in his office has provoked around Washington are beginning to show in implicitly hostile stories about him appearing in the press. Some of them, clearly, are leaked. He has himself noticed that almost every other week something appears in the newspapers suggesting, in his view quite unfairly, that he is demoting the State Department. He is convinced that these stories come not from the top but from the lesser bureaucrats down the line.

One morning at the San Clemente White House last August, lie picked up his Los Angeles Times and saw, to his horror, an article by Flora Lewis entitled: “Kissinger Questionnaire Raises Eyebrows —and Hair.” It proceeded to list, accurately, a series of areas and issues on which, as secretary of the National Security Council, he had commissioned special inquiries from the RAND Corporation. The story revealed that the NSC was taking over this type of contract from the Defense Department, from which RAND has always received most of its funds. All this could only have come from an inside source; certainly not from RAND. But what made it so damaging was that, while the overall subjects were correctly listed, the formulation of the precise questions was distorted to make the whole thing sound infinitely more sinister than it really was. The study on the Middle East, for example, was presented as if it had been commissioned to answer the question “circumstances in which American nuclear weapons might be used in the Middle East”; the study on Brazil to analyze “circumstances in which the Government of Brazil might be overthrown, if it decided to expropriate American assets.” Kissinger and his staff tried hard but unavailingly to trace tire origin of the distorted report, but so far, it seems, without success.

To the inevitable question of how Kissinger reached his present eminence, the stock Washington—or anyhow, Georgetown—reply is that he was the only serious intellectual the Republicans had. It is certainly true that intellectuals are bigger frogs in the Republican than in the Democratic puddle, especially since President Kennedy amassed so many. It is also true that Kissinger is intelligent, erudite, extremely well read, and highly articulate. But it would be wrong to conclude that he got where he is only by the dazzling quality of his mind. Indeed, most of those who have worked with him and also with McGeorge Bundy would agree that, on sheer brainpower, Bundy wins. Within his own high-level academic background of Harvard, Kissinger was an obvious summa cum laude, but in seminars when he came to debate with dialectical duelists like Tom Schelling, many felt that Kissinger was left trailing far behind.

What has been special about Kissinger has been a certain perseverance and determination not only to acquire knowledge on world affairs but also to put that knowledge to practical use, and this meant, inevitably, getting as near as possible to the Oval Room in the White House.

To push all the way to the adjoining office meant developing a relatively thick skin and a tolerance of rebuffs and setbacks, and for this Kissinger had the hardest training of all, having spent His boyhood in Nazi Germany. Many emerged from that experience permanently bowed down; others, like Kissinger, seem to have acquired a certain protective insensitivity and hardness, which strengthened them in later life.

His father, a high school teacher and a deeply religious Jew, was deprived of his job. He waited hopefully for Germany to come back to its senses, as many other intellectuals did, and gave up and arrived penniless in New York only in 1938, when his son teas fourteen. In Manhattan, of course, his erudition was irrelevant, and he had to fall back on drearily unskilled clerical work, while his wife, Paula, an excellent cook, went to serve Jewish families on special occasions. Even now, she occasionally helps out old clients, though she prefers them to call her by her first name only, so that their guests will not know they are being served by the mother of one of the President’s chief advisers.

Kissinger’s own feelings about his native country have always been ambivalent: he seems more deeply concerned about Germany than about other foreign countries (friends say he was shattered by the news of the first young life lost trying to cross the Berlin wall) , yet he is convinced that there is a streak of basic insanity in the German character which might return. He immensely admired, some say worshiped, “der Alte,” old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who helped nurse West Germany to recovery, but he has always remained implacably opposed to any idea of giving Germany nuclear weapons or encouraging it to reassert dominance over Europe.

Unlike many Americans, Kissinger actively dislikes reminiscing about his “rags to riches” life story, and he may prefer to suppress any sense of identification with the German or Jewish minorities which might bring into question his authority as an objective international adviser. Inevitably, he had some difficulty adjusting to the boisterous indiscipline of a Manhattan boys’ school, even though academically he was so far ahead of his age group; and it seems that the real transformation from the oppressed and teased foreigner, Heinz, to the successfully and proudly integrated American, Henry, came during his Army service in World War II. His thoroughness, energy, and discipline seem to have commended themselves to the Army, which moved him quickly into intelligence work, and he ended his military career as a captain in the Military Intelligence Reserve. That is perhaps why, whereas many Western intellectuals emerge from hated military service as passionate antimilitarists, Kissinger remained fascinated by the military establishment and directed a great deal of his postwar intellectual energy into military matters.

Following his Army service he earned his A.B. summa cum laude in 1950, and in 1954 a Harvard doctorate. But the upward curve was not continuous. His first major setback was academic: his contemporaries remember that, after his doctorate, he assumed he would automatically be promoted to the Harvard faculty; but although his name was seriously considered and well supported, the decision went against him. Details of the argument are of course academic secrets, but according to one of the members of the faculty at that time, he was not only judged personally a difficult colleague (he had the reputation of being much nicer to his superiors than to his subordinates), but still more important, the professors suspected that he was less interested in the university or in teaching and research than in making a career in public service.

The major work which earned him his national reputation was Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, and from its publication on he was in and out of the Pentagon as consultant and part-time adviser. The book challenged the Dulles concept of massive retaliation, not on the standard argument that the use of any nuclear weapons is unthinkable, but because, once the Russians had the bomb, the threat was meaningless. Consequently, Kissinger argued, more thought should be given to the use of tactical nuclear weapons which could be related to political realities. Though he has subsequently had second thoughts and no longer advocates limited nuclear war, there is at least one senior (and conservative) staff member of the Brookings Institution who feels that anyone who could even have contemplated initiating the use of nuclear weapons should have disqualified himself from advising an American President.

It was during his work in Washington that he came to know Nelson D. Rockefeller, who hired him to direct the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project, and it was then that he wrote his next major work, The Necessity for Choice, cautioning against overconfidence in the East-West detente.

By the time the second book came out, Kissinger had built a big international reputation: through selective invitations to a seminar of foreign students which he directed every summer at Harvard he acquired a network of influential contacts in Western capitals. Among the many international conferences which he attended, he frequently participated in the East-West Pugwash meetings on disarmament.

Equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic, Kissinger sought out people with pronounced and preferably unorthodox views, even though they might he politically far apart. One of his closest English friends was Wayland Young, now Lord Kennet and member of the Labor government. Then, Young was an eager campaigner for nuclear disarmament and regular participant in the annual British protest march to Aldermaston; Kissinger accepted the invitation to become godfather to one of Young’s daughters. The news that Kissinger was joining Nixon’s staff was received with sighs of relief in Europe; the British Prime Minister was among those who was pleased to know there would be someone on the same wavelength at the White House.

After the Harvard rebuff, the University of Chicago offered Kissinger a professorship, which he had led them to expect he would accept. On second thought he decided it was too far from Washington, and he preferred instead to go back to temporary employment at Harvard, in part because it was closer to Washington, and await there a promised permanent professorship in the department of government, which he holds today.

The other trouble in his postwar life was his marriage with Ann Fleischer, a pretty, eager, and docile girl he met soon after he came to the United States, when they were both employed in night work addressing envelopes in a Manhattan office to help their respective parents pay for their education. They were divorced in 1964.

For most of the year, the two bright and unusually attractive children, Elizabeth and David (now nine and seven), are with their mother, who lives in Belmont, Massachusetts. Like many men who leave young families, he compensates when they come to stay during the holidays by being far more attentive and indulgent than when he was a living-in father.

Kissinger served under Eisenhower as an expert and technician, not as a party man. When the Harvard-oriented Kennedy Administration came in, he was stimulated by its intellectual excitement, and he was expected to play an even more prominent role. His friend Arthur Schlesinger, who had previously sponsored him in working for the Council of Foreign Relations, introduced him to President Kennedy. Some of the Kennedy people say the President found the professor’s harangues a little tiresome; Kissinger confided to his own friends that he disliked the “richboy” values of the Kennedy White House and felt that the sense of nobility and honor was lacking. Those who watched from within say that McGeorge Bundy would not have permitted another pundit too near the throne.

In any case, Kissinger resigned his part-time consultancy and himself ascribes his withdrawal to a fundamental disagreement on European policy. It was a time when the American Administration was backing the Monnet doctrine of European integration, which to Kissinger seemed to mean favoring the Germans and fighting the French.

The Kennedy “Grand Design” involved pressing Britain into an embryonic European federation and basing the Western alliance on “the two pillars” of the United States of America and the United States of Europe. It collided directly with General de Gaulle’s resolve to weaken Atlantic ties and to resist any supranational European institutions which would attenuate his own freedom of action.

The Grand Design was never quite as logical as implied by the “two-pillar” concept, first introduced into the political vocabulary by Bundy himself. It was undermined by the insistence of the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that the United States must retain total control of Western nuclear power. This meant offering the Europeans, at best, only a nuclear contingent, integrated into the American military complex; this came to be known as the Multilateral Force, or the MLF. Under the American scheme even the offer of a joint and integrated nuclear force had to be made not only to the British and French but, on the sacrosanct principle of nondiscrimination, to the Germans too.

Looking back on it today, Kissinger will argue that the Grand Design was back to front: European unity is obviously desirable. But it was all wrong, he says, to push Europe toward economic and commercial integration, which would inevitably be at America’s expense, while resisting military integration, which would conveniently reduce the American burden as the Western Europeans increased their capacities to defend themselves.

Kissinger, who felt he knew Germany, never accepted the view that the principle of nondiscrimination should be applied to nuclear affairs; on the contrary, he has always thought that the treaties barring German rights to make or acquire nuclear weapons should be strictly enforced.

There was, perhaps, also a psychological element in the disagreement, which finally led to the breach with the Kennedy team, and brought Kissinger back into politics as a committed Republican. Kissinger was certainly not at ease with the brash optimism and belief in the future which characterized the Kennedy “New Frontiersmen,” nor was he comfortable with Lyndon Johnson and the “Great Society.”

But to say that Kissinger is conservative is misleading. Having escaped totalitarian oppression himself, he has a deeply imbued respect for free institutions and individual liberties. His chief (though abortive) contribution to the Republican cause was to volunteer time and energy trying to win the Republican nomination in 1968 for Governor Nelson Rockefeller. This was partly a consequence of having worked closely with Rockefeller, but it was also in the hope that his old patron, to whom he had become ubiquitous brain truster, would be strong enough to keep Richard Nixon out. To Kissinger, as to most of his Harvard colleagues, it seemed essential that everything possible should be done to block a professional politician who had made his reputation in the witch-hunting Joe McCarthy school of public affairs.

Rather, Kissinger’s own type of conservatism comes from an innate pessimism about what any government, however big and powerful, can do; he has accepted the struggle between contending nation-states and blocs as inevitable and permanent, and has dismissed as “panaceas” any idea of imposing some international form of authority.

It was because Bismarck accepted and understood the pattern of permanent conflict, and therefore recommended the effective but restrained use of force, that Kissinger has so much admired him. He has also found a similarity between Bismarck and one of his latter-day heroes, General de Gaulle, who believes in the inevitability of international tension and the primacy of nation-states. For Kissinger, when he joined the White House in 1969. it was a most unhappy coincidence of historical circumstances that deprived him of his first practical objective: to restore good relations between the United States and French presidencies.

Being conservative in the minimalist sense— that is, believing basically that nothing much can be done about the pity of the human condition—Kissinger found an unexpected soulmate in President Nixon. For the new President, taking over after the shattering disappointments of the Johnson Administration, felt himself mandated to economize, reduce commitments, fight inflation, and generally educate the American public to expect less from Washington. On the international side, Kissinger provided him with an articulate and effective adviser, who could turn this most negative view of government into a political philosophy and even into a recipe for peace. The Nixon team made several efforts to detach him from Rockefeller before the convention, bidding up three times the money they would offer for his services: friends recall he was outraged and offended by the idea that he could be bought. When he did join Nixon after the election, it was only with Rockefeller’s express approval.

Since he joined the White House staff, the two issues which have taken up most of Kissinger’s time are arms limitation and Vietnam, on both of which he wrote extensively before taking office. It was easy to foresee that on both he would counsel prudence, and refuse to respond to pressures from the militant and impatient left.

Kissinger has been consistently cautious about Soviet peace feelers. He has admitted that he was shocked by the eagerness with which the Johnson Administration seemed ready to proceed with a summit meeting after the invasion of Czechoslovakia; he has even written of the “heavy costs” to the Americans of their “pallid reaction” to the Czech drama.

It is therefore hardly surprising that when the Russians, on the very day of President Nixon’s inauguration, offered to hold bilateral missile talks, the new Administration maintained a seven-month silence. It was not that Kissinger was hostile to opening the dialogue; but he was chary of any deal which might weaken his side’s relative position. Accepting as obvious that the struggle would persist, with or without open conflict, and accepting the Bismarck thesis that the balance of power is in constant flux, he could not conceive of an agreement beneficial to both sides. Absolute security for one nation, he has often argued, means absolute insecurity for all the others. “It [absolute security] can be achieved,” he wrote in a recently published essay on foreign policy, “only by reducing other states to impotence. Thus an essentially defensive foreign policy can become indistinguishable from the traditional aggression.”

To those who argue that he is too negative, Kissinger can point to the little-known fact that he has spent long hours working out specific American responses to the five or six possible Soviet proposals. When the talks begin, he can claim that this Administration, which took over only the most shadowy arms-control program from its predecessor, will be ready for substantive discussions.

The trouble has been, however, that the time factor itself may have jeopardized possibilities of agreement. The head of the Disarmament Agency once lamented that he is expected to operate from a moving stairway.

The President’s first major decision was to give the go-ahead for a modified version, which Kissinger helped devise, of the anti ballistic missile.

Nixon also authorized the tests of MIRV—a cluster of separately targeted nuclear warheads designed to be launched from a single underground or underwater missile; these had been conceived as a response to the Soviet-planned ABM. The change from the one-missile-one-bang system to the multiple missile has been compared in scale by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with the change from conventional to nuclear explosives. (Kissinger when pressed will retort that it was under McNamara’s management that research and development on MIRV began.)

According to one expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, George Rathjens, whose pamphlet is compulsory reading in the Disarmament Agency, the deployment of MIRV could destroy any hope of an agreement. He argues that whereas we can count and control missiles and ABM’s through long-distance satellite espionage, which both big powers now possess, we would need on-the-spot checks to investigate how many warheads per missile. It was precisely on this issue of direct access to military installations that all previous disarmament negotiations broke down.

In backing the President’s reluctance to be hurried into arms talks, Kissinger is not trying to preserve any permanent U.S. superiority in the missile race. On the contrary, it is thought that it was under his influence that Nixon, at his first press conference, abandoned his campaign pledge to uphold the American technical superiority in weapons and to settle for “sufficiency” instead. On the other hand, Kissinger has warned since Czechoslovakia that there is a danger that the Russians might engage in arms talks to lull the Americans into “a false sense of security.” He has scorned “the facile belief in certain quarters that the test of dedication to peace should be whether one interprets Soviet intentions in the most favorable light.” He has gone so far as to suggest that an agreement restraining missiles might even increase the risks of war by reducing the Soviet dread of an ultimate collision.

There seems little doubt that Kissinger will ultimately be judged by the outcome of the Vietnam conflict: it is only necessary to compare what he said should be done before he came to office with the views Nixon has promulgated and acted on since to see how decisive his influence has been.

Initially, Kissinger saw the war as a justifiable use of limited power to bolster U.S. influence in a sensitive area, and it was only in 1966 that he became convinced that the costs were excessive. It was this calculation rather than any moral repulsion that turned him into a dove. Once he did decide against the war, he did his best to shift American policy. With Washington’s approval, he sponsored his own secret mission to Hanoi led by the French scientist Raymond Aubrac, who had known Ho Chi Minh.

Kissinger’s personal contacts in the Pentagon and White House enabled him to get an assurance that President Johnson would be interested in exploring Hanoi’s intention. But there was no substantive offer for them to transmit, and the go-betweens came back saying that the North Vietnamese were still holding out for an unconditional American withdrawal.

As Kissinger began to see that the Hanoi and Washington views were irreconcilable, and that neither side was going to be able to drive out the other, he began to feel that Americans must come to recognize that the struggle in South Vietnam is primarily a civil war rather than a “war of aggression” by the North against South Vietnam. Arguing from this premise, he came to advocate that the North and the United States should withdraw their forces and leave the rival factions in South Vietnam either to go on fighting or else to reach their own accommodation. He claimed that Hanoi would have no choice but to accept, since the North Vietnamese could not drive out the Americans by their own efforts, “particularly if the U.S. adopts a less impatient strategy, geared to the protection of the population and sustainable with substantially reduced casualties.”

If such a formula were to be accepted, the Americans could argue that they had vindicated the rights of the South Vietnamese to choose their own destiny, and so could claim “an honorable peace,” which Kissinger has consistently maintained is essential to preserve international confidence.

Many people, at home and abroad, assumed that when Kissinger spoke of “an honorable peace” he was disguising an American decision to give up and give in. It came as a shock to discover that he really did believe that the Saigon regime was an essential partner in any future settlement, and that consequently the war must go on for the time being. One of the young men who resigned from the NSC staff has remarked, “Kissinger is no more than a Walt Rostow with a German accent.” This is untrue. Rostow was a passionate advocate of keeping South Vietnam out of Communist control. Kissinger was, and is, seeking a compromise peace, in which both sides forgo the prospects of immediate victory, but without any guarantee that the Communists will not ultimately take over.

The Kissinger formula for a compromise peace is, however, based on three highly uncertain premises, and its feasibility is not yet proved.

The first is the assumption that the pro-American Thieu regime would survive without the presence of the half million American soldiers initially sent in to prop it up.

The effort to “Vietnamize” the war—that is, to shift over responsibility and the direction of their affairs to the South Vietnamese themselves—fit into Kissinger’s global thesis: that the trouble with American foreign policy is that it is too paternalist and too inclined to tell others what to do. He seemed, in this context, to forget that the Thieu regime was not just another legitimate and established allied government reflecting popular feeling, like the British or French. This was implied, at least, in the footnote to his December, 1968, essay on Vietnam, in which he said, “There must be some structural cause for the U.S. clashes with our allies, in which both sides claim to have been deceived: see Skybolt, see the Nonproliferation Treaty, and now, the bombing pause.” The President’s first public claim to success in Vietnam was that he had restored “confidence and trust” between Washington and Saigon, which had broken down in the last frantic days of the Johnson Administration.

Kissinger’s second questionable hypothesis is the assumption that Hanoi and the Communist Provisional Government of South Vietnam would abandon their immediate war aim of carrying out a revolution in the South as well as the North, provided that the Americans administer the suitable mix of carrot and stick. Kissinger tries to imagine himself in the Politburo in Hanoi, considering how a deal would look from there. He has urged that the American offer should be generous, which he thinks it is. There would be no effort to take from the Communists anything they had gained in battle. Power could be shared through territorial accommodation or through some joint authority at the center. He ruled out a coalition since this was unacceptable to Saigon, but suggested eight months before it became official U.S. policy that the Communists should come into an electoral commission to oversee the South Vietnamese freedom of choice. On the other hand, if Hanoi remained intransigent, the fighting would go on. The question is whether after suffering such appalling losses against such formidable odds the Communists would still think in terms which would seem logical to a Europeanminded theoretician of power politics.

Kissinger’s third hypothesis is that the United States itself could remain unaffected by a plan which might require a sustained, even if reduced, American military presence in Vietnam. He himself has warned that the withdrawals cannot be precipitate. “The frequently heard advice to take risks for peace,” he wrote, before Secretary Rogers had publicly advocated this policy, “is valid only if one is aware that the consequence of an imprudent risk is likely to be escalation rather than peace.”

He has perhaps given insufficient thought to the risks of the alternative: a “patient” and gradual phasing out of the war on the assumption that, as Hanoi is weaker, time is on the American side. With the rest of the Nixon Administration, Kissinger is certain that the militant antiwar elements are a malevolent minority which cannot impose peace. But unlike most of his colleagues in the White House, who are California lawyers and advertising men, he is less troubled by the turbulence on the left than by the threat of an extremist and anti-intellectual backlash from the right. For this, however, he blames the intemperance and imbecilities of the students and “troublemakers.” He shuts out of his mind the idea that the existing strains on American institutions could be aggravated beyond endurance by months, or even years, more of fighting a war which the most articulate part of the younger generation disavows.

He would argue that his own expertise is in the international field. But it is the domestic situation, and the social and interracial tensions within the United States itself, which make the slow tempo of withdrawal so dangerous—and make it unrealistic to expect President Nixon to play the war, as Bismarck would have done, like a chess game, secretively calculating twelve moves ahead. But then, like his mentor Bismarck, Kissinger prefers to think of countries as powers rather than people.