February 22, 1969

Dear Milton:

Many thanks for your thoughtful letter of February 5
and profound regrets for the extended delay in
relying.

You have indeed understood correctly the system
that the President is trying to create here. Your
comments on how the system can, in fact, help
the Secretary of State exert the leadership he should
are also on the mark. Unfortunately, he apparently
does not happen to see it that way.

I am off to Europe for a week with the President,
but hope to see you soon after I return.

With warm regards,

Henry A. Kissinger

Mr. Milton Katz
Director, International Legal Studies
Law School of Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

LSE:jm

Cambridge, Mass. 02138

DIRECTOR
INTERNATIONAL LEGAL STUDIES

February 5, 1969

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
Special Assistant to the President
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Henry:

I read Peter Grose's story on the first page of this
morning's N.Y. Times (Wednesday, February 5) with bored
disgust. Despite the provocative slant through which
Grose filtered the underlying facts, enough of them came
through to give me an impression of their real meaning.
May I check it with you?

As I understand it, the President starts from the
plain fact that a number of significant departments and
agencies in addition to the State Department are pre-
dominantly or substantially engaged in foreign affairs.
The President must effectively use each of them singly
and all of them together to serve national purposes in
accordance with national plans. How to do this? Politi-
cally and operationally, the various departments and
agencies can't be absorbed within the Department of State;
nor can their activities be channeled through the Depart-
ment of State as a clearing house. The President doesn't
want to overlay the departments and agencies with a parallel
stratum of officialdom in the White House. Nor does he
want to undertake a personalized one-man government. He
has decided to organize the several departments and agencies
into carefully interrelated working groups, and to support
each group with selected staff officers. Each such staff
officer is to be part of a comprehensive staff or secre-
tariat. The staff is to be harmonized and controlled by
the President through you as his Special Assistant. The
staff function is to serve the departmental groups, not to
duplicate them, still less to overlay them. The President

-2-

has underscored this last point by insisting that differ-
ences of opinion among the several departments and agencies
be brought to his attention for resolution, rather than to
be swept under the rug of a spurious consensus.

The plan is not inconsistent with leadership by the
Secretary of State. On the contrary, it could facilitate
his exercise of leadership, if he (i) retains the President's
confidence, (ii) uses the arrangement instead of fighting
it, (iii) exhibits the necessary imagination and judgment,
and (iv) has qualified men to represent his department in
the several groups.

Have I understood it correctly? I believe the concept
to be constructive, with greater promise of healthy evolu-
tion than the Johnson or Kennedy arrangement. In some re-
spects, it may be seen as taking off from Eisenhower's mode
of using the National Security Council. But it can avoid
the three main flaws of the Eisenhower arrangement: in-
sufficiently energetic participation by the President him-
self, the suppression of differences of opinion under an
appearance of consensus, and some unnecessarily cumbersome
organizational features.

Here's a piece of incidental intelligence, not important
in itself, but perhaps not without interest. From direct
personal knowledge, I believe I can report that the original
conception of the National Security Council (which came into
the 1947 statute, as you may recall, from the Eberstadt
Report on the Unification of the Services) contemplated a
development along such lines as the President now envisages.
The pristine germ was a desire to create an American peace-
time functional equivalent of the British War Cabinet and
War Cabinet Secretariat.

All my best.

Yours,

Milton Katz

MK:ms

Dec 4
lunch

Law School of Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass. 02138

October 31, 1969

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
Assistant to the President
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Henry:

I'm very sorry that I couldn't make it for lunch on Wednesday, November 5. The first three days of the week are my heavy teaching days; in addition, Ernst and Miekje van der Beugel will be meeting some people at our house on Wednesday afternoon and dining with us that evening.

I'm scheduled to testify before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics on Thursday, December 4, at 11:00 a.m. I take it that December 4 is beyond the range of reasonable predictability in your schedule, but if you should be in Washington on that day with an open hour for lunch, might we perhaps have lunch after I finish on the hill?

All my best.

MK:ms