05/27/2004 14:09 FAX 2127349598

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Remarks by Dr. Henry Kissinger

April 15, 2004

We're all here because Paul Nitze left his mark on his time, and I'm here to bear witness to the fact that he left a few marks on me in the process.

I met Paul 50 years ago, when he had already created NSC-68, had been head of the policy planning staff, and was a mythic figure to me.

In these 50 years since then, which have been years of struggle and achievement for our country, Paul has made, as we all know, a seminal contribution. He belonged to the generation to whom service in the country, for the country, was the noblest calling, and to whom the party that was in office was irrelevant to his notion of service.

He started his public career at a time when America had emerged into a world in which all the existing parameters had been shaken.

The system of states centered around Europe had committed suicide. A huge ideological challenge arose and America had to face this world in the aftermath of a war where President Roosevelt had said to Churchill, that any idea that American troops could stay in Europe, or anywhere outside the United States for more than two years after the end of the war, was an idle fantasy.

The generation of Paul Nitze, with the huge contribution of Paul, answered the questions that have to be dealt with whenever a new international system is created.

What is the challenge? What is the strategy? What are the means to implement the

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strategy? And how do we justify it to our people and
to the rest of the world?

And since we emerged as the strongest
nation, we had a special obligation to translate our
power into legitimacy, and to translate our strength
into acceptance.

The great achievement of the generation that
wrote NSC-68 and then implemented it was not only to
think about their problems but then to see it through
for the next decades, in every one of which Paul made
a crucial contribution to our thinking and to our
policy.

The strategy of containment was a curiously
American phenomenon. The idea that a nation that had
an atomic monopoly and had the power to impose its
will, would adopt a strategy that would wait for the
gradual transformation of its adversary, was not one
that you can find in textbooks of international
diplomacy.

And it challenged the problem, or the way in
which Americans approach policy. Not having been
involved in international affairs for the greatest
part of our history, Americans had a tendency, and
still have a tendency to believe that every problem
has a solution, and has a solution in a finite period
of time, and there's a rebellion against the notion
that in foreign policy issues have to be approached in
stages. And that every stage is imperfect in relation
to the ultimate ideal around which you might orbit.

So it took people of the perseverance and
character and knowledge and wisdom of Paul Nitze to

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see it through. In the process, he often encountered
incomprehension and misunderstanding.

I remember when Paul Nitze was appointed by
President Nixon, there was great resistance to him on
the part of Senator Stennis, especially, because he
thought Paul Nitze was too soft and too liberal, and I
can tell you now I called on Senator Stennis and took
the personal responsibility to guarantee that Paul
Nitze was not too soft, speaking of the law of
unintended consequences.

I then of course had the opportunity to work
with Paul in the years to come, and to observe his
views and his conduct.

In the space between relying on history and
abdicating, and trying to impose a solution in a
period of nuclear weapons, Paul always stood at the
edge of what was feasible, what was necessary and what
was crucial.

I mention these qualities because we're
again in a period in which the international system as
we have known it is in collapse.

The principles by which we fought the Cold
War do not apply to many of the circumstances we now
face. Deterrence cannot work with societies, or with
nongovernmental groups that have nothing to defend,
and diplomacy has a different meaning with groups that
reject the concept of compromise.

And all of this occurs in the period when
the characteristic and the power of the various states
is in the process of changing, which alone used to be
enough to bring about commotion in the international
system. This is compounded by the emergence of

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nongovernmental groups that can themselves represent security threats, and finally, by the emergence of what seems to me to be the new black holes of international affairs, regions which governments lose control over the regions, that then suck in all the nihilistic and anarchistic and destructive elements, and spew them out again.

These are the challenges of our time, and what we need is people who, like Paul Nitze, devote themselves to exploring the necessities and opportunities of such a period.

And so it is a great privilege for me to have been asked to say a few words about a man whom I always admired, sometimes disagreed with, but whose enormous contribution to our society and to the peace of the world should serve as an inspiration to us to perpetuate the way he approached his problems and the sense of service that he imparted. It was an honor to be his contemporary.