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 be 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 pro-

fessor'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."

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Prof. Bismarck Goes to Washington

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 antiballistic 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 un-

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der 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,

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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 European-minded 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. ☐

## Afterword

by Fanny Howe

Thrice I croaked
before the sun was up;
the scared bed jumped
to catch my falls; and
the mouth in the shade
exposed a galaxy of snow.

And when the sky was tinsel
on the Christmas trees,
I made an angel of myself
and hung from an icicle
choking. Since you went off
the sun is black sackcloth.

Everything was religious
then. Even our walk
by factories and riverbeds
produced the kingdom of heaven
with you its hot and tender king
with me adoring or loving.

Now black winds blow
and take away my breath.
Again the night is dying on my lips.
If only I told you before:
without you I feel
I'm skating past innumerable monuments:

no words,
no facts, no laws to stop my fall.

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# Thumbing Around:
Letter from a sixteen-year-old

by Bluejay Abigail Stone

dear Jake,

This missive from the other
side of the gap allows one
to ask, Who's calling whom
materialistic?

Your last letter was the best one I've ever re-
cieved in my life. It was like a really peaceful
love affair. Not that I rate your letters 1-10—Just
that it was cheering to know one so beautiful and
intellectual as you gave a shit. So where did I go?

RIGHT DOWN JONES STREET IN NEW YORK!! In fact I tried to call you three times but you weren't in. HMM. I guess you were in cambridge at that fateful time. So heres where I went in order.

1. HARTFORD: got a ride from middlebury Vermont all the way. The guy gave us his adress in Milford for a place to stay. decided to go there that day—thumbed to—

2. MILFORD and stayed with him 3 days. WELL OFF! swimming pool, pool table, stereo, color t.v., snazzy house, and very cute. then his 2 friends drove us to—

3. NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND! Absolutely groovy Jazz fest. Stayed with various people—on the beach—in the woods, on the hill—and once in a very grubby hotel which we split from within the hour. YUCK. stayed for three days—Sly and the family stones, 10 years after, James brown, and the mothers of Invention plus a lot of other super groups. (BLOOD SWEAT AND TEARS!) got a ride in a tiny triumph all the way back to milford where we stayed another 2 days. Then (since the guy in the triumph gave us his adress and a place to stay) we split for

4. GREENWICH, CONN. where we arrived very tired. While thumbing through town to his place we got a ride with this seventy-five year old nut who offered us a place to stay all summer. We decided to start with just one night so we went with him instead. JESUS! (If you can dig that) we drove up to this castle with an actual moat around it! core. the house itself was a million rod serling books high and about two hundred thousand bell bottoms thick. Plush thick fat delicious green carpeting—high ceilings, an actual rembrant,

90

A civilian-industrial complex?

The Roots of American
Foreign Policy

An Analysis of Power and Purpose.

By Gabriel Kolko.

166 pp. Boston: Beacon Press. $5.95.

American
Foreign Policy

Three Essays.

By Henry A. Kissinger.

143 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. $3.95.

By HANS J. MORGENTHAU

These two books, ostensibly dealing with the same subject matter, are utterly different in philosophy and conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, professor of history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is an economic determinist who believes that the class structure of American society, dominated by the business community, determines American foreign policy. The foreign policy of the United States has been consistently at the service of the interests of that community, and since the dominance of these interests over American society has not materially changed — what we call reforms are but adjustments within an unchanging system — American foreign policy has not, and could not have, changed either. There is no room in Mr. Kolko's philosophy for accidents and human shortcomings or even conscious human choices as causative factors. What has happened was bound to happen, given the class structure of America.

This determinist philosophic position leads Mr. Kolko to conclusions that are consistent with his philosophic premise, but unexpected in view of what appears to most of us to be empirical evidence. Thus the author denies the existence of a military-industrial complex because he sees the generals doing the bidding of the ruling business class; civilian control over the military is a means to that end. Our involvement in Vietnam was foreordained long before the first American soldier set foot in

Mr. Morgenthau is Albert A. Michaelson Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Modern History at the University of Chicago and Leonard Davis Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York.

that country, for that war is what the interests of the American ruling class require. These interests require an American victory; for without it the dominoes would indeed fall, and if American business were proved incapable of imposing its will on Vietnam, it would find it very difficult to impose its will on any other country of the third world. Here the critic of the American system sees eye to eye with its stanchest defenders.

This reduction of foreign policy to a mere function of economic power is open to criticism on philosophic and historic grounds. It leaves out of account the whole range of human motivations which, through fear, aggressiveness, pride, moral judgment, missionary zeal and lust for power, have pitted man against man and nation against nation, not only as economic competitors, but also as political rivals.

Economic determinism as a guide to the understanding of American foreign policy was discredited long ago by case studies that showed the extent to which the so-called dollar diplomacy of the turn of the century, seemingly a typical example of a foreign policy doing the bidding of economic interests, was a political policy using economic interests for the political purposes of the state rather than the other way around.

Similarly, the consistency of British balance-of-power policy from Henry VIII to Sir Edward Grey can hardly have been a function of the British class structure, which during that period of four centuries underwent drastic changes. The same consideration applies to the European policies of Russia. The goals and even the methods of those policies have remained constant for at least two centuries. The Commissars have continued the policies of the Czars, while the class struc-

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