KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

by Henry A. Kissinger

May 31, 1987

Edited version
mailed 8/5/87

Father Schell, members of the class of '87, friends, I must tell you I have never spoken to a group like this before, so I tried to get some advice -- particularly considering the fact that I am supposed to confine my remarks to about fifteen minutes. I should add that if I do keep my remarks that short, it will enable all of you to say you were present at an historic occasion.

I asked one friend what I should say, and he said, "Be short and be funny". That wrecked one theme I had in mind, which was to stand tall and be serious. Then I asked somebody else what I should talk about, and he said there is only one theme for commencement and that is say "Go forth". And now I've said it.

From now on, I'm on my own.

I thought I would talk to you for a bit about some of my experiences and observations about international affairs. I do so because I was once a professor, and then a policy-maker. When I became a policy-maker I thought I would have a marvelous relationship with professors, having worked with them for my then adult life. That judgment turned out to be wrong; there is inevitably a difference in perspective between those who observe

1

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

inevitably a difference in perspective between those who observe
events and those who have to make decisions. That is one thought
I would particularly like to leave with you.

When you observe events you can pick your topic; you can work on
it for as long as you want; you are responsible only for the most
plausible theory that you can develop; and you have the privilege
of changing your mind. When you are a policy-maker you cannot
select your problems; they present themselves. In fact, the most
overwhelming impression you have as a policy-maker is that every
day there are more subjects that you can possibly deal with and
more meetings than you can possibly absorb. I frankly feel sorry
for those who are called before the investigations we seem to
have every ten years and are asked to explain in excruciating
detail what they said at a particular meeting. Frankly, top
policy-makers, half the time, can barely remember what specific
subject the meeting was about. At any rate, the problems present
themselves and the most difficult task is to make sure that the
urgent does not drive out the important. Secondly, you have only
a very limited time to work on any problem. Third, you have only
one guess. When you're an observer, you can write an article and
a few weeks later you can say, "I've made a terrible mistake.
I'll go back to the library and do another one". As a policy-
maker your mistakes are irrevocable.

And this means that certain experiments cannot be tried, no

2

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

matter how brilliant they may sound. I mention all of this to
you because, no doubt, at the universities to which you go, you
will find many professors to whom everything appears extremely
simple. I remember during the Vietnam War a group of professors
came to see me once and said, "You and President Nixon obviously
did not notice that Cambodia is a different country". Now we may
not have been quite as bright as these professors, but that was a
fact that had not completely escaped us. We also knew that there
were five Vietnamese divisions there that were killing five
hundred Americans a week, and we had to balance that knowledge
against the other considerations. While I don't want to recite
the controversies of a decade and a half ago, I would like you to
remember that most policy-makers are almost as intelligent as
most observers, and that the simple problems get taken care of at
lower levels. At the higher levels the difficulty is that the
pro's and con's are fairly evenly divided.

In fact, the most difficult task of any policy-maker in any
country is that when his scope of action is greatest, his know-
ledge is at a minimum: When his knowledge is greatest, his scope
for action has usually disappeared. In 1936, when the Germans
reoccupied the Rhineland, they changed the strategic map of
Europe. One French division could have stopped them. Had that
been done, Ph.D. theses would still be written on the subject of
whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or a maniac bent
on world domination. Five years later, everybody knew that he

3

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

was a maniac bent on world domination: They purchased certainty
at the cost of twenty million lives.

The dilemma anybody has in these positions is: If he acts in
time, he cannot prove it was necessary; when he can prove it was
necessary, he has to pay an exorbitant price for dealing with the
problem. This is the reason simplistic explanations of why some-
thing is obviously true, and why these idiots are not doing it, is
something one should look at with enormous suspicion. In fact,
if you study the lives of great statesmen, you will find that
they were not necessarily more intelligent than their compa-
triots. What you usually find is that they had more courage and
more character. The toughest job for any political leader is to
take the society which he represents from where it is to where it
has never been, but ought to go.

At this moment, for example, we are in the midst of a debate
about the meaning of Mr. Gorbachev's intentions. In some respects
it is a classically American debate. If you read American poli-
tical literature from the post-war period, in both political
parties, you will see that we have never known irremediable
disaster or powerful foreign neighbors. Peace is considered the
normal condition and tensions are thought to be an aberration.
Thus, we believe in foreign policy by conversion. We expect that
one morning some Soviet leader will appear who will be like any
ordinary American. I have a mid-western friend who is of the

4

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

view that there is no such thing as a British accent -- that this
is put on in order to intimidate Americans. And, thinks my mid-
western friend, if you can only catch a Britisher unaware, like
waking him up at four in the morning, he will talk like any other
human being. We have something of this attitude towards the
Soviets.

A few years ago three Soviet leaders died in rapid succession.
Delegations went to the funerals and reported back that the new
Soviet leader was a man genuinely dedicated to peace. I found
that fascinating, having attended many state funerals myself,
because what usually happens at a state funeral is that after the
interment, there is a reception and then you get to see the
grieving head of state for about twenty-five minutes maximum.
Deduct half that time for translation and three minutes for the
common decency of saying something about the departed, and you
are left with about nine minutes to figure out the intentions of
somebody who has spent his whole life fighting his way to the top
in a competition from which nobody has ever retired with honor.

Recently, one of the leaders of our country came back from the
Soviet Union and announced that he had come to the conclusion
that the Soviets were heading towards capitalism. Forty years
ago, Senator Connolly from Texas, not known for his radical
sympathies, announced, "The Soviets have been approaching for
years the end of Communism and the whole world will be gratified

5

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

by this culmination of their efforts". Now, about Gorbachev --
my view is first that to become head of the Communist Party is
not for the gentle at heart. Secondly, he was the protege of
Suslov, who was the chief party idealogue, and of Andropov, who
was the head of the secret police. From this I draw the perhaps
unworthy conclusion that they were not likely to have been closet
doves. But perhaps Gorbachev fooled them both, in which case we
have a historically unprecedented situation in which the leaders
of the two super powers are both former actors.

Don't misunderstand -- I do not say that we cannot come to an
agreement with the Soviets. I am saying that a Soviet leader who
comes home from a meeting with an American leader and says, "I've
just met the most charming man you can imagine, and we've got to
do something for him" would be in deep trouble. And it is no
accident that the President, who up to now has been the most
successful in dealing with the Soviets, was Richard Nixon, who
never claimed that personal charm was what got him where he was.

I believe we have, in fact, an enormous opportunity with the
Soviets. The governmental system is in deep trouble; in the
seventy years of their history they have never had a legitimate
succession. Every leader has died in office except one, who went
on vacation without his colleagues and was removed by a coup.
Nobody has ever retired from their board of directors, the Polit-
buro, except through execution or disgrace. Further, the Soviet

6

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

economy is in major difficulty; you cannot run an economy in
which every article in commerce has to be moved by governmental
allocation.

But we must not confuse foreign policy with psychiatry. To get a
sensible agreement we have to understand _our_ values and _our_
security requirements and _our_ purposes. We cannot turn the
process into a technical exercise of trying to pick among Soviet
proposals those which do us least damage. There is, as I said,
a considerable opportunity, but a great deal depends on how we
handle our own affairs and how much we stay with the values for
which we stand. Our western values are unique in history and --
despite all the cynicism that you will hear -- they are something
of which we should be proud.

There are at least four principles unique to western values:
One, the state is not the personal possession of the ruler, but
reflects a community of citizens, all of whom possess equal
rights and are involved in shaping the destiny of their
community. Not everybody was considered a citizen at all periods, but
the struggle has always been to extend the concept of citizenship
to the widest circle. Second, even the most powerful rulers are
subject to law. This was true in the Roman period, and it was
true when the church insisted that there is an area of divine law
outside any temporal power. No other society has insisted on
such absolute concepts of justice and on such limits of temporal

7

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

power. Third, officials must justify themselves by service. And fourth, to be a citizen means to be free.

So that Western history, with all its shortcomings, has been an unending struggle for the idea of freedom. It is important to keep this in mind because too much of contemporary politics is based on the endless fiction that the west is just as bad as its adversaries and that we have nothing of which we should be especially proud.

Then there is the problem of how to make policy. And I would point out here a number of issues. One, as indicated, the most difficult problem is to go from where you are to where you have never been. But nobody has any experience with the future and therefore, how to create a consensus with respect to that is not easy. When I was a young professor, intellectuals were not yet eligible for government positions; their duty was, if they wanted to have any effect, to look ahead five to ten years and make their contribution in this manner. Some of us tried to do that. Since then, most intellectuals have split into two groups: one, potential revolutionaries who emphasize that we are run byIDIots, criminals, and worse, and who know the absolute truth, usually delivered with a beatific smile of certainty. The others are applicants for government jobs who write position papers for candidates and, in the process, become no different from the

8

KENI PRIZE DAY SPEECH

candidates. So if one wants to do something useful in the intel-
lectual world, one should look some years ahead.

Another issue is the loss of relationship between men and events.
All the great statesmen that I have ever studied have had a
vision of the future. When I started working with politicians I
was very close to Nelson Rockefeller, who would today be consi-
dered hopelessly naive because he suffered from the illusion that
to become President one should have the best program, so he spent
months and years and resources studying what that program should
be. He never got to be President, of course, so he never got to
do what he had planned. The modern politician, by contrast,
doesn't worry much about what he should do: he worries about what
he should say.

It is not true that you learn in office. What you don't know
before you get there, you will never learn later. What you
learn in office is how to make decisions, not what decisions to
make. And one deals with an enormously cumbersome executive
branch. Father Schell mentioned that I was both Secretary of
State and National Security Advisor; for a glorious period I was
both, and I can tell you that relations between the White House
and the State Department have never been as good as they were in
that period. But normally the competition between bureaucratic
entities is one of the overwhelming facts of modern government.

9

KENT PRIZE DAY SPEECH

If a man from Mars came and looked at the relative positions of
the various countries, it would never occur to him that it is the
United States that should be in great difficulty. And we aren't.
And we shouldn't be. We do have a great opportunity to make
progress and to advance towards a more peaceful world. But we
cannot do it if we rely on Soviet transformation and the psycho-
logical assessment of others to make our critical decisions for
us.

In the 19th century a statesman said: "World history with its
great transformations does not come upon us with the even speed
of a railway train. No, it moves forward in spurts, but then
with irresistible force. One must take care, whether one can
discern the Lord's march through history, seek to grasp the hem
of his cloak and let oneself be swept along the greatest distance
possible." Politics too often produces an orgy of self-righteous-
ness amidst a cacophony of sounds. Under such circumstances,
little production is possible. The best any generation can do is
to permit enough time for reflection, so that one can listen for
the Lord's footsteps and grasp the hem of his cloak. No genera-
tion can do more, but it also should not do less.

10

KENT SCHOOL
KENT, CONNECTICUT 06757

JUL 30 1987

July 22, 1987

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
350 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Dear Henry,

Accompanying this letter is a rough transcription of your Kent speech. It has been our custom to publish Prize Day addresses in the Fall issue of *The Kent Quarterly*, and we hope that you will grant us permission to follow this tradition in your case. If so, we would appreciate your editing the text and returning it to us as soon as possible.

I am returning herewith the photograph you so kindly made available for our use. *Photo, Filed*

My best personal wishes to you and to Nancy, and many thanks again.

RWS:eg

1

Prize Day Speech--May 31, 1987

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

Fr. Schell, members of the class of '87, friends, I must tell you I have never spoken to a group like this before, and I tried to get some advice particularly considering the handicap that I am supposed to confine my remarks to about fifteen to twenty minutes, which, if I do, will enable all of you to say you were present at an historic occasion.

I asked one friend what I should say, and he said, "Be short and be funny." Sort of knocked over one theme I had which was to stand tall and be serious. Then I asked somebody else what I should talk about, and he said there is only one theme for commencement, and that is say "Go forth." And now I've said it. From now on I'm on my own.

I thought I would talk to you for a bit about some of my experiences and observations about international affairs. I do it because I was once a professor and later on I was a policy-maker. When I became a policy-maker I thought I would have a marvelous relationship with professors having worked with them for my then adult life. That turned out to be a great mistake. And one reason is that there is inevitably a difference in perspective between those who observe events and those who have to make decisions. And it is one thought I would particularly like to leave with you.

2

develop; and you have the privilege of changing your mind. When you are a policy-
maker you cannot select your problems; the problems present themselves. In fact
the most overwhelming experience you have as a policy-maker is that everyday
there are more subjects than you can possibly deal with, that you go to more
meetings than you can possibly absorb, and I frankly feel sorry for some of these
characters who appear at these investigations we seem to have every ten years who
are being asked to explain in excruciating detail what they have said at what
meeting because, especially the top policy-makers, half the time, can barely
remember what specific meeting the subject is all about. At any rate, the problems
present themselves, and the most difficult task is to make sure that the urgent does
not drive out the important. Secondly, you have only a very limited time to work
on your problem. Third, you have only one guess. When you're an observer you can
write an article and a few weeks later you can say, "I've made a terrible mistake.
I'll go back to the library and do another one." As a policy-maker your mistakes
are irrevocable.

And this means that certain experiments cannot be tried no matter how brilliant
they may sound. Now I mention all of this to you because no doubt at the
universities to which you go you will find many professors to whom everything
appears extremely simple. I remember during the Vietnam War a group of
professors came to see me once and said, "You and President Nixon obviously did
not notice that Cambodia is a different country." Now we may not have been
quite as bright as these professors, but that was a fact that had not, completely
escaped us. We also knew that there were five Vietnamese divisions there that
were killing five hundred Americans a week, and we had to balance that knowledge
against the other knowledge. And while I don't want to recite the controversies of

3

a decade and a half ago, I'd like you to remember that most policy-makers are almost as intelligent as most observers and that the simple problems get taken care of at lower levels. And at the higher levels the difficulty is that the pros and cons are fairly evenly divided.

In fact the most difficult task of any policy-maker in any country is that when his scope of action is greatest, his knowledge is at a minimum. When his knowledge is greatest, his scope for action has usually disappeared. In 1936 when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland they changed the strategic map of Europe. One French division could have stopped them. Had that been done, Ph.D. theses would still be written on the subject whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or a maniac bent on world domination. Five years later everybody knew that he was a maniac bent on world domination; they purchased certainty at the cost of twenty million lives.

The dilemma anybody has in these positions is: If he acts in time, he cannot prove it was necessary; when he can prove it was necessary, he has to pay an exorbitant price for dealing with the problem. And this is why all these simplistic explanations of why something is obviously true and why these idiots are not doing it is something one should look at with enormous suspicion. In fact if you study the lives of great statesmen, you will find that they were not necessarily more intelligent than their surroundings. What you usually find is that they had more courage and more character. The toughest job of any political leader is to take the society which he represents from where it is to where it has never been.

At this moment, for example, we have a big debate about the meaning of Mr.

4

Gorbachev's intentions. Now in some respects it is a classically American debate. If you read the literature of Americans about the entire post-war period in both political parties you will see that in this country that has never known irremedial disaster, that has never had powerful foreign neighbors, peace is considered the normal condition. Tensions are considered an aberration, and therefore we believe in foreign policy by conversion. We expect that one morning some Soviet leader will appear who will be like any ordinary American. I have a mid-western friend who is of the view that there is no such thing as a British accent--that this is put on in order to intimidate Americans. And, thinks my mid-western friend, if you can only catch a Britisher unaware, like waking him up at four in the morning, he will talk like any other human being. We have a little bit that attitude towards the Soviets.

A few years ago three Soviet leaders died in rapid succession. Delegations went to the funerals and reported back that the new Soviet leader was a man genuinely dedicated to peace. I found that fascinating having attended many state funerals myself because what usually happens at a state funeral--giving you information which you will never forget--is that after the interment there is a reception and then you get to see the grieving head of state for about twenty-five minutes maximum. You take away half for translation and three minutes for the common decency of saying something about the departed, that leaves you about nine minutes to figure out the intentions of somebody who has spent his whole life fighting his way to the top in a competition in which nobody has ever retired with honor. So you can assume that it is not a profession for choirboys, although that may be unfair.

5

Recently one of the leaders of our country came back from the Soviet Union and announced that he had come to the conclusion that the Soviets were heading towards capitalism. Forty years ago Senator Connolly from Texas, not known for his radical sympathies, announced, "The Soviets have been approaching for years the end of Communism and the whole world will be gratified by this culmination of their efforts." Now, about Gorbachev--my view is first that the career of becoming head of the Communist Party is not for the gentle at heart. Secondly, he was the protege of Suslov who was the chief party ideologue and of Andropov who was the head of the secret police--from which I draw the perhaps unworthy conclusion that they were not likely to have been closet doves. Maybe he fooled them both. In that case we have a historically unprecedented event in which the leaders of the two super powers are both former actors.

Now, don't misunderstand--I do not say that we cannot come to an agreement with the Soviets. I'm saying that a Soviet leader who comes home from a meeting with an American leader and says, "I've just met the most charming man you can imagine, and we've got to do something for him" would be in deep trouble. And it is no accident that the President who up to now has been most successful in dealing with the Soviets was Richard Nixon who never claimed that personal charm was what got him where he did. But he was matter-of-fact insisting on strict reciprocity.

I believe we have, in fact, an enormous opportunity. The Soviet governmental system is in deep trouble in the sense that in the seventy years of their history they have never had a legitimate succession. Every leader has died in office except one who went on vacation without his collegues and was removed by a coup.

6

Nobody has ever retired from their board of directors, the Politburo, except by
being executed or disgraced. So they have to set up a more regular system of
government. Their economy is in major difficulty. You cannot run an economy in
which every article in commerce has to be moved by governmental allocation.

But we must not confuse foreign policy with psychiatry. To get a sensible
agreement we have to understand *our* values and *our* requirements of security and
*our* purposes. We cannot turn it into a technical exercise of trying to pick among
Soviet proposals those which do us least damage. There is, as I said, a
considerable opportunity but a great deal depends on how we handle our own affairs
and how much we realize the values for which we stand. The western values are
unique in history and with all the cynicism that you will hear, they are something
we should be proud of.

There are at least four principles unique to western values: One, that the state is
not the personal possession of the ruler but reflects a community of citizens and
that all citizens possess equal rights and were involved in shaping the destiny of
their community. Not everybody was considered a citizen at all periods, but the
struggle has always been to extend the conception of citizenship to the widest
circle. Second, that even the most powerful rulers are subject to law. This was
true in the Roman period and it was true when the church insisted that there is an
area of divine law outside of any temporal power. No other society has insisted on
such absolute concepts of justice and on such limits of temporal power. Third, that
officials must justify themselves by service. And fourth, that to be a citizen means
to be free.

8

and used resources studying what he should do. Of course he never got to be president so he never got to do it. The modern politician too much of the time doesn't worry about what he should do, he worries about what he should say. And there is a huge gap between those two things.

It isn't true that you learn in office. What you don't know before you get into office, you will never learn in substance. What you learn in office is how to make decisions, not what decisions to make. And one deals with an enormously cumbersome executive branch. Fr. Schell mentioned that I was both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor; for a glorious period I was both and I can tell you that relations between the White House and the State Department have never been as good as they were in that period. But normally the competition between bureaucratic entities is one of the overwhelming facts of modern government.

So I would like to tell you--one, that if a man from Mars came and looked at the relative positions of the various countries, it would never occur to him that it is the United States that should be in great difficulty. And we aren't. And we shouldn't be. We do have a great opportunity to make progress and to advance towards a more peaceful world, but we cannot do it if we rely on Soviet transformation and the psychological assessment of others to make our critical decisions for us.

In the 19th century a statesman said the following: world history with its great transformations does not come upon us with the even speed of a railway train. No, it moves forward in spurts, but then with irresistible force. One must take care. Whether one can hear the Lord's march through history, seek to grasp the hem of