FRANCE

Henry Kissinger looked forward to his first official
visit to France with special anticipation. It was the
summer of 1969, and he was accompanying President Nixon
to Paris on a state visit.

The President of France then was Charles de Gaulle, and
both Nixon and Kissinger shared a respect bordering on
reverence for one of the great political figures of the post-
war era.

But their private meeting with Charles Le Grand proved to
be disillusioning. Great Britain had not yet been admitted to
the European Community, and Kissinger suggested to the French
President that British membership in Europe might make it
easier to control West Germany. We don't need Britain to
do that, said de Gaulle haughtily. In the past, we have
controlled Germany by war.

Kissinger felt de Gaulle's answer showed how much the
great man's judgment, even his common sense, had been perverted by
his opposition to Britain's entry into Europe.

That meeting led Kissinger to conclude that de Gaulle's perceptive ability to find the critical soft spot in everybody else's position was not matched by an ability to provide constructive alternatives.

The criticism of American policy without offering constructive alternatives was a hallmark of French policy during Kissinger's early period as Secretary of State.

Michel Jobert, the feisty little French intellectual who served as Pompidou's Foreign Minister, became Kissinger's bete noir in the Councils of Europe.

They clashed at NATO over U. S. intentions in Europe, and they clashed again at the Energy Conference in Washington, which Kissinger had organized in the hope of unifying the oil-consuming nations into a cohesive group that could deal on a bloc-to-bloc basis with OPEC.

Kissinger claimed to like Jobert personally and to appreciate his intellect, but one of the Secretary's closest aides said that while Kissinger had "great respect for Jobert's mind, there wasn't anybody who got more under his skin. Jobert drove him bonkers by constantly seeking ways to stick it to the United States. That led to a very awkward relationship...Their personal relations got very tough and awkward...Jobert came as close to driving Kissinger to incoherence as anybody I've seen."

I once asked Pierre Salinger, the White House Press Secretary under President Kennedy and later a correspondent for the French magazine L'Express, why Jobert was so anti-American.

"It's simple," Salinger replied, "He has an American wife."

Jobert's well-publicized clashes with Kissinger did him no harm back home. His popularity doubled. But neither Jobert nor any other French official of the moment could match Kissinger's celebrity in their own country. A poll in a French magazine at the end of 1976 listed Kissinger as the second most outstanding personality of the last 10 years. Only Charles de Gaulle ranked ahead of him.

When President Pompidou died, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing became President, Jobert was replaced by Jean Sauvagnargues.

One immediate tip-off that the French attitude toward America was changing: Sauvagnargues abandoned the linguistic chauvinism of his predecessors and dared to speak English in private meetings with Kissinger and in public as well.

When Sauvagnargues visited Washington in September of 1974, Kissinger reciprocated some of the elegant treatment he had received in France and staged a splendiforous candlelight dinner at the National Gallery of Art. In the shadow of American and French masterpieces, both men artfully portrayed a new relationship between their two countries.

As usual, Kissinger prefaced his serious remarks with a witty warm-up: "My staff had prepared some remarks for me of really devastating profundity--but impossible to read by candlelight." So, he said, "I will have to improvise a few remarks."

"As I was sitting at the table, I thought of a reception I attended this afternoon... I was invited to a retirement party, and having read _The New York Times_ for the last few weeks, I thought perhaps something had happened that I hadn't been officially informed of yet. So on the one hand, I was reassured when I went to the reception and found it was

the retirement of Senator Fulbright.

"But on the other hand, I was extremely sad. And I reflected about the special role that Senator Fulbright has played in our national life. It occurred to me that the relationship that France has had with the United States has some similarity to the relationship that Senator Fulbright has had with the State Department...

"There have been occasional criticisms, all the more irritating because they usually turned out to be right. But there also has been at the basis of the relationship an understanding that real friends are meaningful only if they have opinions of their own.

"The great problem of our contemporary world is to know how much unity we need and how much diversity we can stand...

"Foreign Minister Sauvagnargues and I have known each other only for a few months. In that period, I believe I can say that many of the misunderstandings have been worked out..."

Sauvagnargues responded with a toast in the same vein:

"I am, of course, rather overwhelmed by this grand reception, by this gathering of what's best in Washington in politics, science, arts, press and even outer space. I can hardly find words, so I choose English because I've found in my experience that when you are at a loss to say anything, you must choose English...

"That doesn't mean that I won't say anything now--I'll try, although I just read in the (Paris) *Herald Tribune* a nice anecdote about the head of government who suddenly found he had nothing to say to the United Nations and so said he would renounce his address. And, of course, the Foreign Minister had to speak for him...

"This doesn't mean that Foreign Ministers don't have anything to say, because the Secretary of State just told us fundamental things about the relations between the United States and France...

"In our relations, we had and we may still have--although if it's up to Secretary of State Kissinger and myself it won't happen--artificial quarrels. Thank God, they have been disposed of, and now we are faced with the real problems, and these real problems are bad enough...

"But let's not attack the press, because the press is a very important power in this country and also in mine. Let's only wish that the press could now make news of the very important news, which is that the Secretary of State of the United States and the Foreign Minister of France are not fighting with each other..."

That news was duly reported, but it certainly wasn't as much fun to report as it used to be when the Secretary of State of the United States and the Foreign Minister of France got together.

While Sauvangnargues was a newcomer to Kissinger's international sphere, Giscard d'Estaing was an old friend and one of the few world leaders with whom Kissinger liked to philosophize.

He was also one of the first foreign leaders to meet with President Ford following Nixon's resignation.

[L.C]

The meeting took place in a Caribbean province of France-- Martinique--on a plantation.

Giscard arrived aboard a Concorde, the fastest commercial jet in the air. It flew so fast across the Atlantic time zones that the French President's arrival time in Martinique was earlier on the clock than his departure time from Paris. He showed a bent for intellectual humor by quipping to Ford and Kissinger, "I got a head start on eternity."

During one of the more relaxed moments of a relaxed weekend, Kissinger and Gcard took a dip in the plantation pool.

The chief of the White House Secret Service detail, Dick Keiser, and his State Department counterpart, Jim Cantrell, were interested bystanders. They were also having a good time.

"A Secretary of State dog-paddling," said Cantrell. "It's undignified."

"Well," remarked Keiser, "The Secretary dog-paddles with a great deal of determination. He seems to get where he wants to go."

"Yecch," said Cantrell.

"Look," said Keiser, "Now he's dog-paddling underwater."

"No," replied Cantrell, "he's drowning."

The meetings in Paris were generally held in somewhat more formal settings.

Kissinger used to go to the Elysee Palace on one of the most elegant streets in the world--the Rue St. Honore--to meet with Giscard. Usually, he walked on foot from the Ambassador's residence, where he stayed in Paris, a quarter of a mile or so from the Palace.

Kissinger was a fan of the chef at the Embassy residence and vice versa. Kissinger got good food and the chef got the Secretary's autograph.

32

On one of those mornings when Kissinger walked from the residence to the Elysee Palace for a breakfast meeting with Giscard, the President let him eat cake. It was the Secretary's 52nd birthday and Giscard had ordered up a surprise birthday cake with 52 candles.

Eyewitnesses said the Secretary, who was never known as short-winded, blew them out. But usually well-informed sources could not say whether he made a wish.

When Kissinger emerged from the Palace after his meeting with Giscard, waiting newsmen, most of them French, serenaded him in English, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. It came out "'Appy Birsday to Youuuu."

Kissinger thanked them in English. He understood French fairly well, but I never heard him speak it in public.

In one of his arrival statements at Orly airport, he told the assembled press multitudes, "I don't want to strain Franco-American relations by speaking in French, so I'll make some remarks in English and Mr. (Alec) Toumayan will interpret."

Kissinger got a second cake on his 52nd birthday from Treasury Secretary William Simon, who was in Paris for economic talks and who was disputing Kissinger for bureaucratic control over international economic policy.

In joshing acknowledgement of their bureaucratic feuding, Kissinger looked at the cake with suspicion and cracked, "I want a taster."

Simon joshingly obliged and asked Assistant Treasury Secretary Gerald Parsky to take the first bite.

The scene was reminiscent of a joint Kissinger-Simon news conference held at the time of the first Energy Conference in Washington.

33

to the consumer nations and also to the OPEC members, and Mr. Simon
will discuss the relationship of this initiative to the domestic
energy concerns, and we will both take questions on that subject.

"Then, at an appropriate point, we will switch to other foreign policy subjects which I alone will answer, Mr. Simon."

Simon then got some laughs of his own: "I can understand that,
because at the appropriate time, Mr. Secretary, you will press a
button and I will disappear into the ground..."

Simon did not disappear, but he went on to become Secretary of
the Treasury. And Kissinger not only survived his cake, he also
prevailed in the bureaucratic struggle for policy control.

to control his
His battle ^ waistline did not survive the birthday cake, however,
and there was even a third one on his 52nd birthday.

When he returned to the Embassy residence, his secretary,
Chris Vick, told him he had to go to the library there. Kissinger
duly went to the library and feigned surprise when his traveling staff
presented him with a Christian Dior tie and a cake shaped like a
book (his biography had recently been published).

The staff members, who were paying for the refreshments themselves,
pulled a Nixon. They bought a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne--the
best in the world--for the Secretary and the members of the inner circle,
but they had a less expensive brand for the others.

Kissinger not only drank the Dom Perignon, he actually wore the
tie the next day.

The Secretary was back in Paris later that year for another inter-
national economic conference. Since the meeting was closed to the press,
the television correspondents questioned him outside about his speech to the
group inside.

One of the questions was, "How do you think the oil producers will respond to your request that they make a greater contribution to the world economy?"

A puckish look spread across his face. "How can they resist me?"

Paris was one of the favorite stops on the Kissinger circuit for most of the rest of the entourage for all of the obvious reasons. But it did have a drawback. We were put up in the Hôtel Crillon, which is directly across the street from the U.S. Embassy.

What the Crillon had in convenience and $75 rooms, it lacked in almost everything else, especially room size, service, air-conditioning and civility of personnel.

Paris was not one of the favorite stops for the State Department security agents who traveled with Nancy Kissinger. It meant they had to spend the day in the beauty parlor.

[LJ]

In his last summer as Secretary of State, Kissinger made another visit to France which did not involve a stop in Paris. It did not involve any business at all.

For only the second time during all of his travels, he took a day off on the road.

Earlier in the year, he had made a rest stop at Cancun, a new Mexican resort in the Caribbean, but he cut it short and returned to Washington. His aides said he felt guilty.

The French rest stop was Deauville, the Dufy-esque resort on the Normandy coast, which features the sun and the sand and the sea and a racetrack which is the French equivalent of Saratoga.

Kissinger, Nancy, and David were the guests of international banker Loel Guinness, whom Kissinger described on the plane as an "old friend," only he got his first name wrong and called him "Noel."

It turned out Kissinger had met Guinness, who, yes, was related to the famous brewing family, in Acapulco, and Guinness had urged him for a long time to visit his farm in Normandy.

Kissinger decided to accept the invitation when a hole developed in the itinerary for his trip to Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan--a trip which some of the more cynical members of the press thought he was taking primarily so as not to have to appear before the Platform Committee at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

The Secretary also wanted to go to The Hague, since it was the only NATO capital (outside of hostile Athens) which he had not yet visited, and the Dutch had been imploring him to go.

But when Kissinger suggested certain dates for his visit, the Dutch replied that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister were going to be away. Too bad, said Kissinger, so the Prime Minister agreed to return to the Hague. Each side gave a little, and the negotiated date for the

37

visit left a gap between Pakistan and Holland. Deauville filled the gap. His arrival was not a run-of-the-mill affair. As he got off the plane at night at Deauville Airport, he was greeted with boos, catcalls and shouted obscenities, mostly in French. But the uproar was not the result of the controversy he had stirred up in France by opposing the French sale of a nuclear reprocessing plant to Pakistan. The uproar came from a group of angry French newsmen who for security reasons were not allowed on the airport ramp and couldn't get pictures of his nighttime arrival.

He acknowledged their welcome by walking over to the airport building, where the photographers stopped shouting long enough to shoot some pictures. But as soon as Kissinger walked away, the photographers, their lungs fully warmed up, resumed their tirade, turning their wrath on the French officials who had kept them back.

The reception he got was probably even noisier than the first time he landed in Normandy--as a soldier at Omaha Beach. But he made clear to French newsmen that he was not saying he had taken part in the D-Day landing in June, 1944. "Usually I just say I landed at Omaha," he explained, "but I don't say it was six weeks after the invasion."

The fact that he talked to any newsmen at all caused a big flap within the traveling press corps.

The traveling newsmen were put up at The Golf Hotel several miles away from Guinness' secluded farm and Kissinger had said on the plane he would not meet with newsmen while he was there.

But French photographers went out and waited for pictures. French newsmen went out and waited for whatever. And some of the traveling American newsmen went out to ease suspicions about any secret meetings that might be taking place at the farm.

[10]

When Kissinger saw the American newsmen, he couldn't resist going out to the gate to talk to them.

He teased them about their suspicions. Turning to the French photographers, he said, "I hope you'll go. I'm waiting for Ian Smith to arrive." (Kissinger eventually did meet with Rhodesian Prime Minister Smith, but it was in South Africa and it was not a secret).

Since Kissinger was not conducting any business in Deauville, he thought ("in his naive way," one staffer put it) that he could have a nice quick visit. So, when he saw (before leaving Teheran) the memo explaining that upwards of 100 support people were involved in the visit to Deauville, he uncorked the fabled Kissinger temper and ordered the staff cut in half. That meant the Secretariat staffers all put in double shifts in France.

The Guinness spread was a stud farm, and the State Department was set up in the stalls and the foaling pen.

It made for a nice touch, since near the makeshift Secretariat was a yearling by Secretariat, the Triple Crown winner. That yearling had been bought for more money than anybody in the other Secretariat was ever likely to see in his or her lifetime--more than a million dollars.

39

Kissinger gave strict orders to the staff not to impose on his host in any way, but Guinness was fascinated by all the communications gear and the whole State Department operation, and he kept visiting and asking questions. He soon knew more about the set-up than Kissinger himself did. Kissinger never bothered about the technical details anyway; but Guinness kept dragging him out there. The Secretary went around asking people, "What do you do?" One person had been on eight trips, but this was the first time Kissinger had talked to him face-to-face.

Guinness was so fascinated by the communications array that he even ordered his own (Associated Press) wire service ticker installed after the Secretary left.

Before he became Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger spent a great
deal of time in France, but it wasn't known at the time. He was nego-
tiating secretly with the North Vietnamese to end the War in Indo-China.

Brake trouble on the Presidential jet taking him secretly to an
obscure air field outside of Paris almost blew his cover in April, 1970.

The plane had to be diverted to Frankfort's Rhein-Main airport,
which was better prepared to handle a crippled jet.

The Germans did not know about the secret negotiations, and if they--
or anybody else--had found out Kissinger was aboard the plane and in Europe,
the secrecy would have been compromised and the peace talks possibly
broken off.

Major General Vernon (Dick) Walters, the senior defense attaché in Paris, was alerted about the problem with the plane. He went immediately to President Georges Pompidou, who _did_ know about the secret talks, and arranged to have a French plane flown secretly to Germany to pick up Kissinger.

Kissinger, disguised in a big fedora and dark glasses, transferred
from the big jet to the smaller plane and took off for Paris.

The Germans, who naturally had to give their permission for the French
plane to land at Frankfort, were intrigued by the mysterious flight. Walters
put them off by telling them a high-ranking French official was returning
home secretly after a rendezvous with his girl friend.

The Germans wanted to know whether the girl friend was German. Walters
told them she was. That pleased them and they didn't push their inquiry.

One of Kissinger's frequent companions on those secret missions was
William Sullivan, later Ambassador to Laos. Many of his memories are a
blur of secret motorcades and clandestine meetings and fatigue. (Sullivan
once fell asleep while briefing the South Vietnamese). At the U.S.
Embassy in Paris, he recalls, there was seldom time for a meal, so they

[n]

often ate ham sandwiches. But the Embassy wine cellar still contained some superb wines left over from the days when former Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon was Ambassador, and, thanks to a sympathetic Embassy chef, Kissinger's negotiating aides frequently washed down their ham sandwiches with vintage Haut-Brion.

In private conversation, Kissinger used to refer to the North Vietnamese as "shits" and "bastards,"--appellations which he felt helped to explain why they behaved the way they did. "Maybe they don't know how to do anything else except make war," he used to complain.

Soon after becoming Secretary of State, Kissinger went to Paris to meet an old protagonist--Le Duc Tho, Hanoi's chief negotiator.

En route to Paris, Kissinger reminiscent about some of his sessions with Tho, whom he referred to as "Ducky," in private.

He recalled the North Vietnamese were obsessed with written schedules; they insisted that every last detail be written down.

To satisfy that obsession, the American negotiators simply invented scenarios, whether they bore any resemblance to reality or not.

During one of the extended public negotiating sessions in Paris, the Americans gave "Ducky" a scenario every day, knowing it wouldn't be followed and he dutifully wrote it down. After 10 straight days of observing this ritual, however, he pointed his finger at Kissinger and said, "I wrote it down... but I don't believe it."

Kissinger also described Tho as a "specialist in enigmatic statements." But now that "Vietnam is no longer our central foreign policy problem," he said, "I can wait him out to see what he means," rather than frantically trying to analyze those statements.

En route to Paris, Kissinger remarked, "Seeing Le Duc Tho is like a reunion of old war veterans." Not quite.

42

The Paris meeting turned out to be a winter re-run of a once
familiar scene at the Majestic Hotel on Avenue Kleber. Le Duc Tho
arrived, smiled, said nothing. Kissinger arrived, waved, said nothing.

They came and went separately, those two negotiators who shared
a Nobel Prize for a peace that did not turn out to be all that peaceful.

They met in the hotel's conference center, but they were never
photographed together.

It was the last time they would talk together, face-to-face.
Two years later, Tho's side had won it all.

Ironically, just before going to Paris, Kissinger had collected his
Nobel Prize. The U. S. Ambassador in Norway had accepted it in Oslo in
the Secretary's behalf. Kissinger had decided against going to Norway
himself to pick it up--for obvious reasons.

43

GREAT BRITAIN

London was one of Kissinger's favorite stops on his global circuit,
and he made it a point to get there as often as possible.

He liked James Callaghan, the British Foreign Minister who became the
Prime Minister.

He loved Claridge's, the luxury hotel not far from the American
Embassy.

And he had no trouble with the language, although he used to tweak
the British enviously about their eloquence and their accent, noting
once at a dinner party in Brussels that "the British really adopt their
accent just to impress Americans. If you wake them up at four o'clock
in the morning, they speak English just like everyone else."

London was usually a stopping off place on the way to or from some-
where, but on his second trip there as Secretary of State, in December of
1973, he delivered one of his more significant speeches.

In an address before the Pilgrims Society, he proposed that the United
States, Europe, Canada and Japan join forces to solve the energy crisis,
which he termed the "economic equivalent of the Sputnik challenge of 1957."
One result was the creation of the International Energy Agency, the first
cooperative venture by the world's industrialized nations in the field
of energy.

The Pilgrims Society was a rather stuffy organization. It was founded
in 1902 to foster American-British friendship, but it had never accommo-
dated to male-female friendship. The members of the traveling press
were not invited to the black-tie dinner because the Society is an all-
male bastion and the traveling press corps included three women.

So the press was allowed in only for the after-dinner speeches,

Despite the stuffiness, Kissinger did essay a touch of humor. His prepared remarks began, "I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to you this evening, but like most Americans, I am seized by a mixture of pride and terror when asked to appear before a British audience. In my particular case, and without any reflection on this distinguished assemblage, it is probably more terror than pride, since there is no blinking the fact--it is there for all to hear--that my forebears missed the Mayflower by some 300 years."

At the suggestion of the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, he did amend the opening paragraph. He said "missed the boat" instead of mentioning the Mayflower, since, Sir Alec told him, everyone there would get the point. The polite titters bore Sir Alec out.

After Kissinger had been in office only six months, an election upset changed the leadership in Great Britain, and Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Laborites, became his British interlocutors.

Although he was somewhat more comfortable with the Conservatives that with the Laborites, he immediately struck up a good working relationship with Callaghan.

At a stopover on his way back from Moscow, Kissinger was asked at a news conference, "Would you say, Mr. Secretary, that your relations with the new British government will be better than your relations with the former British government?

17

He replied, "My megalomania has reached a point where I was not
aware of the fact that my relations with the old British government
were bad, but I had a very good talk with the Foreign Secretary and with
the Prime Minister and I expect that the relations with the new British
government will be excellent."

And they were, especially with Callaghan, although the combination
of the big, bluff English politician and the short Harvard intellectual
seemed an odd diplomatic coupling. Callaghan is not known as one of
the great thinkers of his time, and Kissinger had been highly critical of
the British Foreign Secretary's negotiating talents in the Cyprus affair.
Kissinger felt Callaghan had virtually pushed the Turks into a second
phase of military action. (Nor did he have much confidence later that the
Callaghan government could follow through on a Rhodesian settlement).

But despite his private denigration of Callaghan's abilities in some
areas, he found him personally attractive. As he once said on the plane,
"Callaghan has been extremely helpful in European matters--very decent.
I like him very much."

One of the Secretary's aides explained that Kissinger was so fond of
Callaghan because the British Prime Minister was "open and honest, without
guile and left the limelight to Kissinger", meaning he did not try to compete
publicly with his American guest.

However, when Callaghan took the Secretary of State on an expedition
to Cardiff, in Wales, a crowd of demonstrators turned out to heckle.
Most of the placards they carried were aimed at Callaghan, not Kissinger,
and the Secretary noted, "This is one time when I'm glad to yield the
limelight to you."

18

After Harold Wilson unexpectedly stepped down as Prime Minister, and Callaghan moved up, Anthony Crosland became Foreign Secretary, and he and Kissinger quickly established a close, personal, friendly relationship that was unique in the Secretary's relations with his counterparts around the world.

telegraphic

In their trans-Atlantic exchanges, Kissinger and Crosland used to award each other points for their attitudes or comments on handling certain situations.

For example, Kissinger once sent a cable expressing interest in seeing a soccer match involving Chelsea, which was a second division team rather than a first division team, Crosland sent him back a message awarding him two points for proletarianism.

Or Kissinger would send Crosland a long cable on what the United States was doing in Southern Africa, then conclude with a paragraph awarding the Foreign Secretary points for his handling of the latest debate in Commons. The points were not given lightly.

The mutual affection was apparent when Crosland and Kissinger held a joint news conference--another in a series of "final" news conferences by the Secretary--on Kissinger's last visit to London in December, 1976.

Crosland pointed out that "Dr. Kissinger is paying a valedictory visit to London, which has long been planned, following the NATO Conference in Brussels. He will be doing a number of important things--going to a football match tomorrow, going to the theater tomorrow night; more important, he is being given a farewell dinner, farewell only in his role as Secretary of State, by the Prime Minister this evening at No. 10 (Downing Street)..and we are glad to welcome him here...."

Kissinger was consulting very closely with the British on Rhodesia at the end of 1976, and so almost every overseas trip included a visit to London.

The British press was somewhat suspicious of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith's promise to transfer power to the black majority, and somewhat resentful of Kissinger's apparent success in getting Smith's commitment to black majority rule, after it had been holding off the British for more than 11 years.

Kissinger was careful not to take too much credit for it. He cut the British in for their share of the credit in his public pronouncements and made clear there had not been just a "Kissinger proposal," but that the basis of the proposal was the plan put forward by Prime Minister Callaghan in Parliament the previous March.

So, when Kissinger held a news conference at the U. S. Embassy to talk about Rhodesia, he made sure to invite Crosland to participate.

The British suspicions were reflected in the question of a local reporter, who said to the Secretary: "You started to say what happens if the operation goes well in the hand-over to the British. What happens if it gets sticky?"

Kissinger shot a whimsical glance at Crosland and answered: "We'll get the blame."

Before the laughter subsided, Crosland added resoundingly: "That's right!"

At his London news conferences--or others for that matter,-- the traveling press would usually tend to dominate the questioning.

During one of these sessions, an exasperated British reporter finally broke in to say, "If the British press can put in a word edgeways... Can you explain.... "

Kissinger couldn't resist. "I knew there was a strange accent in this room," he cracked.

During one of his overnight stops, en route to the Middle East, Kissinger held a brief news conference at the Queen's Lounge at the VIP quarters at Heathrow Airport, mostly for the benefit of the local reporters.

Whether out of boredom or reverence, the British newsmen hesitated to ask questions, and during one long pause, one of the traveling reporters--from *The Washington Post*--asked Kissinger to elaborate on a statement made by President Nixon at a news conference the night before. Nixon had said the United States might slow down its Middle East diplomacy if the oil embargo were not lifted. Kissinger, who was just about to enter into another round of Middle East diplomacy, ducked the question, but once aboard the plane, he shouted at the reporter in mock anger: "You won't rest until I hang myself." Then he added, "Your problem is, it kills you to see an American official treated with respect."

Occasionally, the visits to Great Britain were merely refueling stops, usually at Mildenhall, in the north of the country, and sometimes the American Ambassador and/or British officials would fly up to meet him.

When President Ford stopped at Mildenhall for a refueling stop on the way back from an economic summit in France, the U. S. Ambassador

to the Court of St. James at the time was that jack-of-all-government-
trades, Elliott Richardson, one of the most-appointed (or disappointed) public
figures of our time.

After his appointment as Ambassador, Richardson had mused aloud that
if Kissinger were to step down one day as Secretary of State, Richardson
wouldn't mind having that appointment as well.

During the Ford stop, the President was having coffee with Richardson
inside the VIP terminal. Kissinger asked Ford, "Mr. President, Ron Nessen
noted there's a Bible on the coffee table. Is there going to be a
swearing-in?"

When there was a swearing-in involving Richardson at the State
Department--when he took the oath as Ambassador--Kissinger made it a
point to be there. And he alluded to those reports that Richardson
might one day be his successor.

The audience for the swearing-in ceremony in the Thomas Jefferson
Room on the eighth floor of the State Department was made up largely of
people who had worked with Richardson in most of the other agencies of
government, and so it was a much larger crowd than usual.

Kissinger began, "Mr. Ambassador, I can hardly describe the sense
of panic with which I saw on my schedule this morning a notice that
said, 'Swearing-In of Elliott Richardson.'"

The Secretary waited for the line to sink in before continuing:
"You notice the alacrity with which I address him by his title."

Kissinger also noted that "no appointment has given me greater
pleasure..." And although the phrase is obviously a rhetorical cliche,
he probably meant it.

During 1976, London received Kissinger seven times, and not even the fleshpots of the Middle East could match that single-year record.

On every visit, he stayed at Claridge's, a hotel of old-fashioned luxury, where room service operates around the clock, where the grillwork elevator is still run by a human being, where staff members outnumber the guests by two to one, where there is no stand-up bar, where the bathtubs are so big it's impossible to take a bath without floating. Claridge's is so secure in its reputation that it never even advertises.

But not all of the old fashion is luxurious. During the heat wave which baked Europe during the summer of 1976, we all got to spend a sweltering sleepless night at Claridge's, since it has no air conditioning.

While the Secretary of State was certainly welcome at a hotel which catered to royalty, the members of the traveling press must have seemed to be a cut below the average Claridge's guest as they trooped in and out from and to the buses which the Embassy hired for the long rides to Heathrow Airport. In good times, the buses had tables and lamps and even television sets. In times of austerity, we rode in mini-buses--overcrowded and cramped.

One departure scene was memorable. Members of the press sprawled throughout the small lobby, where real wood burns in a real fireplace during the winter. As we were waiting for our bus, I took out my portable typewriter, put it on a coffee table, and began writing a couple of radio spots.

A liveried porter approached quietly and politely informed
me that "typing was not permitted in the lobby." Not even for
35 pounds a night.

It was not only Claridge's where the Kissinger magic did not
rub off.

On one of the first visits to London, I decided to have
dinner at Tiberio, a good Italian restaurant not far from the
hotel.

I called to make a reservation. Sorry, said the maitre d',
Nothing available until 11 o'clock.

On the next trip, I stepped up the pressure. I called again,
identified myself as Richard Valeriani of NBC News, and got the
same answer.

The next time, I pulled out all the stops. I called the
restaurant, identified myself again and explained that I had
just arrived with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and would
like to make a reservation for dinner around 8:30.

Sorry, said the unimpressed maitre d', Nothing available
until 11 o'clock. He sounded like a recording.

I later recounted this sequence to a friend while having dinner
at the Washington version of Tiberio, a trans-Atlantic offshoot
of the original. His reaction was direct: "The next time, dummy,"
he said, "Call the concierge at Claridge's and have him make the
reservation."

I followed that advice, and on the next visit to London I
at dinner at Tiberio at 8:30.

[11]

Many of the stops in London were literally overnights. We arrived at Heathrow at night, made the long drive to Claridge's, filed, went to bed, and left early the next morning, with a baggage call of 4 or 6 a.m.

Many of us put our bags out for pickup the night before, so we wouldn't have to do it at 4 a.m. This was standard practice, and we left out the clothes we would need for the next day.

On one London stop, Bob Funseth, the State Department's spokesman, opened his room door to put out his bag just after midnight. Funseth, a prim, proper Foreign Service Officer, was wearing only a raincoat over his shorts.

One of the unusual features of Claridge's is that the room doors close by themselves, and Funseth stepped just a little too far out into the hall. The door locked behind him.

But he was in luck. A secretary from the traveling party appeared down the hall. Funseth called out to her to ask a porter to bring a key. As he did, the raincoat fell open. Funseth the Midnight Flasher! The secretary fled. Funseth himself had to get a hall porter to open the room.

This story has never before been revealed in print.

During his three years in office, Kissinger spent all of his birthdays--May 27--on the road. In 1976, the road was London. He was there for a routine meeting of CENTO--the Central Treaty Organization--news of which usually appeared among the classified ads, if at all.

But Kissinger's boiler-plate speech with a routine reference to the Middle East got worldwide attention because the UPI's Dick Growald wrote a lead about a new American "initiative."

Not only did correspondents get callbacks from their home offices, Kissinger got calls and cables from all over the Arab world, asking

25

him, What's up Henry?

Before leaving London, the traveling correspondents decided to give Kissinger a birthday lunch--and Claridge's was the most convenient place. He delayed his return to Washington for the lunch, which featured wienerschnitzel, his favorite dish.

After lunch, Kissinger told a story about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt: As he reached the banks of the Red Sea, and Israelite named Manny, the first known PR man in history, approached Moses and said, "What are you going to do now?"

Moses replied, Why I'm going to part the waters of the Red Sea.

If you do that, Manny said, I can get you two pages in the Old Testament.

Then turning to the UPI reporter, Kissinger jibed, "good-naturedly "If Moses had had you around, Growald, he wouldn't have had to do anything."

GERMANY

When Henry Kissinger was still a Professor at Harvard, he occasion-
ally ran diplomatic errands for the Kennedy White House.

One of his assignments for President Kennedy involved a trip to
Bonn to see Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, one of the grand old men of post-
war Europe.

Kissinger used to delight in telling about his meeting with Der Alte.
According to his version, he had just launched into his presentation in
the Chancellor's office when Adenauer interrupted him: "I've already
heard most of this--and from the President himself," Adenauer complained,
"So I don't see why I should sit here and hear it repeated by one of his
flunkies."

Kissinger replied respectfully but firmly, he says, to this effect:
"Mr. Chancellor, the President has considered it important enough to
send me here to tell you this, and therefore, I think you should give me
the courtesy of hearing me out. Besides, I don't have to be here. I'm
a university professor, and I could be at Harvard devoting my time to my
profession instead of taking the time to be here."

Adenauer responded with a question: "How much of your time do you
spend working for the government?"

"About 25% of the time," replied Kissinger.

"Then," said Adenauer, "I think I'm entitled to hear 75% of the
druth."

Kissinger's subsequent rise to international preeminence made him
something of a folk hero in his native land.

However, the fact that Henry Kissinger, a German-born Jew, had
such a prominent position in the making of foreign policy for West
Germany's most important ally caused some nervousness in Bonn.

Within the government, a group of Kissinger-watchers was put together

[c]

informally to keep tabs on him.

Germany was the country from which his family had been forced to
flee while he was a 15-year old school boy. It was the country where a
dozen members of his family died in concentration camps. And the
Germans weren't sure how he felt about them.

They needn't have worried. If Kissinger felt any of the inner
conflict experienced by many Jews who ran for their lives from the
Holocaust, he didn't show it.

There were few traces of it when, on one of his most memorable
trips for those who traveled with him, he returned to his birthplace,
Fuerth, a small town near Nuremberg, in December of 1975, to receive
the city's Golden Citizen Medal.

Kissinger seemed to intellectualize the occasion. Any emotional
capital may have been spent on a previous visit, since this wasn't
the first time since his family had fled Fuerth in 1938 that Kissinger
had returned. Officials were quick to point out that they had invited
him in 1959--"before he was famous"--to read a lengthy monologue based
on his book, "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy."

Workmen literally rolled out a red carpet as Kissinger, wearing
a black overcoat in the 33-degree weather, arrived at Nuremberg Airport,
five miles from Fuerth. Nancy, wearing a long gray coat and high
black boots, was with him, and after a greeting from Foreign Minister
Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Fuerth's Lord Mayor Scherzer, Kissinger
climbed into a huge black Mercedes 600 limousine for the trip along
the heavily paved road to his birthplace. Police helicopters
hovered overhead.

The site of the ceremony was the Municipal Theater, built in 1902
in a German Art Nouveau style, with elaborately ornate decorations
and full of red upholstered chairs.

45

[L]

Engraved on the exterior are four names--Schiller, Beethoven, Mozart and Lessing.

Not more than half a mile away was the three-story, stone apart-
ment house at Mathildestrausse 31, where Heinz Alfred Kissinger was
born a half century earlier, in a second-floor apartment later occupied by
a retired railroad employe.

In typical fashion for affairs of that kind, the ceremonies opened
with music--by the 52-voice Fuerth youth choir of the Helene-Lange-
Gymnasium, where Kissinger's father had taught until 1933, when he was
forced to leave his job.

Kissinger sat in the front row with his hands folded, next to
Genscher. Nearby sat his parents, Louis and Paula, and his brother,
Walter.

The Lord Mayor, the gold chain of his office hanging around his
neck, said in his speech, "The very concept of detente is inextricably
linked to your name."

Kissinger's speech was markedly restrained and delivered first in
English, then in accented German, in a voice so low-key that many
listeners cupped their hands to their ears.

The past hung over the ceremony like a storm cloud, but Kissinger looked backward only briefly. "I am proud to be here as the Secretary of State of perhaps the only country in the world where it is possible for an adopted son to have the opportunity for responsibility and service that I have enjoyed," he said. "I am happy to share this occasion with my family, my parents, who have never lost their attachment to this city in which they spent the greater part of their lives. I believe that my visit here exemplifies the extraordinary rebirth of friendship between the American people and the German people.....

46

"Our generation has witnessed -- and has no excuse over to forget --
the dark force of brutality and raw power at large in the modern world.
As I stand here today, suffering is still dominant in many parts of the
globe. Of all the species on this planet, man alone has inflicted on
himself the great part of his own anguish...

"...We must persevere until what is now unfamiliar becomes natural... what is now a vision of peace becomes a reality and our legacy to our children.

"Thus, in the deepest sense, this simple ceremony, which shows to what extent we have overcome an unhappy past, symbolizes as well the future for which we must strive--a world of nations which find pride in their reconciliations, not their power; an era in which convictions are a source of moral strength, rather than of intolerance or hatred...

"In this spirit--and on behalf of my family as well--I accept your distinction and shall treasure it. I am honored and moved and grateful."

[c]

Henry was not the only Kissinger who spoke that day. His father, Louis, was invited to talk at a private luncheon in the cafeteria of a local bank. In a brief speech which included references to Aristophanes and Euripides and their critiques of war, the elder Kissinger said, "As a parent, it is a joyful feeling to know that the name 'Kissinger' today means the same as peace in the world..."

Later, the Kissingers visited the Jewish section of the Municipal Cemetery where Henry's maternal grandfather, Falk Stern, is buried. The site is marked by a two-foot stone engraved with the name and the dates, "1.7.1870--10.5.1939." 1939 was a bad year for German Jews.

Fuerth, traditionally a haven for Jews, turned on them in the 1930's. Seven of the city's eight synagogues were destroyed.

Kissinger had waited more than two years before accepting the invitation to Fuerth and he squeezed it in at the last minute when a projected visit to Madrid fell through.

Even then, he declined to tour the neighborhood where he was born--on the grounds he didn't want to cause too much commotion.

48

[c]

"This is his secret revenge," said one observer. "For him, this is more important than winning the Nobel Peace Prize."

But Kissinger himself blocked all efforts to analyze his psyche. When reporters tried to probe his feelings more deeply during the flight out of Germany, he put them off. A reporter wanted to know about the references to Euripides and Aristophanes in his father's speech. "That was to put me down," Kissinger joked. "He's now working on giving a little lift to the speech I'm writing for Paris. He's going to send me a few pages tonight."

The chapter on Fuerth was closed.

Peter Rodman, the Secretary's traveling note-taker who followed Kissinger from Harvard to the White House and then to Georgetown University as a principal aide and writer, was also the resident black humorist on the plane.

When Kissinger went back to Germany to watch a soccer game for the first time as Secretary of State, Rodman joked to newsmen, "They planned an interesting show for halftime. They invited all of Henry's classmates to come back and beat him up."

Kissinger never did talk freely about his childhood, but he did tell an ABC interviewer: "Well, of course, I was nine when the Nazis came to power. I think the deepest impact it made on me was that twice, once in 1933, when the Nazis came to power, then in 1938, when I came to the United States, all the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed and many of the people that one had considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into enormous turmoil and into fantastic insecurities."

49

[c]

"So, in this sense, it was a rather unsettling experience."

And he talked about what it was like to be in America: "It was extremely exhilarating to be able to walk along the street without having to worry whether some kids would beat you up and without any sense of discrimination."

He amplified on that slightly in a later speech.

"When I came here in 1938, I was asked to write an essay at George Washington High School here in New York City about what it meant to be an American. I wrote that, of course, I missed being separated from the people with whom I had grown up and from the places that were familiar to me.

"But I thought that this was a country where one could walk across the street with one's head erect, and therefore, it was all worthwhile."

"What America means to the rest of the world is the hope for people everywhere that they shall be able to walk with their heads erect, and our responsibility as Americans is always to make sure that our purposes transcend our differences."

Since Kissinger had left Germany at the age of 15, he claimed that his German vocabulary was more suited to soccer than to international politics or diplomacy.

But as a GI in post-war Germany, he expanded his German vocabulary and eventually overcame his reluctance to speak his native tongue in public during his frequent visits to the Old Country.

It was not as though he had turned his back on the language. His most secure phone at his White House office in his pre-Department of State days had a label in German reading, Super-Secret.

He frequently joked about his alleged difficulty with his native language.

50

[L]

On his Secretarial trips to Germany, when he met with then Foreign Minister Walter Scheel, who later became the Federal Republic's President, they had no need of interpreters. Kissinger spoke in English, which Scheel understood, and Scheel spoke in German, which Kissinger understood.

At one of their early meetings, in March, 1974, when U. S.-European relations were still somewhat out of joint, Kissinger began a joint news conference with Scheel by saying: "If you permit me, I will speak in English so that you don't think my German has an anti-European intention..."

But the Germans faced a problem when Scheel became the President Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who did not speak or understand English.

Officials at the German Foreign Office had to decide whether they should let Genscher talk to Kissinger without an interpreter and assume that the Secretary of State would respond in his Bavarian German, or pretend they didn't know whether he spoke German or not and provide an interpreter.

The Foreign Office eventually decided on putting diplomacy ahead of sensibilities, and it provided an interpreter, who was, indeed, required for the more substantive conversations.

51

[Lc]

Kissinger, During a later visit to Bonn, a German reporter asked, "What happen the last time, when after your talks, misunderstandings emerged?"

He replied nonchalantly, "I must have spoken German."

Kissinger, who liked ethnic jokes, joked ethnically about the Germans themselves as well as their language.

En route to Bonn in the summer of '74, one of his aides reminded the newsmen traveling with the Secretary of State they were all invited to attend the Sommerfest, or summer festival, at the Bonn Municipal Theater.

"And I tell you," Kissinger put in, "Have Fun!"

A reporter added, "Or else."

"Everyone is determined to have fun," Kissinger explained happily. "And, you know, when there are 2,000 Germans determined to have fun, something happens. It won't be fun, but something happens. So then we go to the Sommerfest."

He added quickly: "That's off the record about the Sommerfest."

But it was fun, as Kissinger stole the spotlight from Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and assorted other German dignitaries.

About 2,000 people attended out for the combination dress ball and "happening" in the Municipal Theater overlooking the Rhine, and it seemed that all of them shook hands with him or got his autograph during the evening.

It was a weird setting for the Secretary of State, as he made his way, surrounded by bodyguards, through the throng of people and the various "happenings," which included Donald Duck cartoons, men in drag gliding around on roller skates, a huge string orchestra, a talk show, and a record player blasting out the lyrics of a briefly-popular song entitled, "Henry."

The lyrics went something like this:

"Henry: La la la la, la la.

"Kings beggars, gypsies wait for Henry's kiss.

"A baby wails. My little one, don't cry, you can tell your
troubles when Uncle Heinz comes by."

"What are Tarzan and Superman against his tricks.

"Hercules, the Commissar, are all out--

"A new star--Henry!--has all the clout."

It was sung by somebody called merely Wolfgang, not to be confused
with Amadeus Mozart.

The flip side was "Oobe-Doobe-Sha-Sha-La-La-Chou-Chou-Girl."

The records sold like Beatles' albums so Kissinger could autograph
them, but neither song ever hit the top 40 Chart in the United States

The Sommerfest had little, if anything, to do with diplomacy, but
it was typical of the hospitality the Germans provided for Kissinger.

They went out of their way to vary the settings for his visits--
Bonn, of course, but also Berlin, Hamburg--Schmidt's hometown--the elegant
castle at Schloss Gymnich, and Munich.

The Secretary of State was not especially chummy with the Germans
when he first took office, since Willy Brandt was then Chancellor, and
those two men did not operate on the same diplomatic wave length.

The relationship

A became much cozier when Helmut Schmidt, one of his oldest politi-
cal friends in Germany, became Chancellor, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher,
who became one of his newest good friends, took over the Foreign Minister's
job.

Genscher went to Salzburg in June of 1974 to meet Kissinger, who
was en route to the Middle East with President Nixon.

As the two men emerged from their first meeting at the Hotel
Alexmannstein in Bad Reichenhall, Kissinger took note of the large
number of Germans and Austrians among the flock of reporters. "I would
like to speak in English in order not to violate my native language too

53

violently," he said.

A German reporter wanted to know if Kissinger and Genscher had discussed a stop in West Germany on the Secretary's way to the Nixon-Brezhnev Summit in Moscow the following month.

"No," Kissinger replied, but I discussed a stop in Germany on the way back from the Summit for some football games and, of course, very important conversations."

The European reporters laughed understandingly, knowing the World Cup soccer finals would be played in Germany in July, and that Kissinger was a soccer freak.

Some of them even knew that every Monday morning, the German Embassy in Washington delivered a plain brown envelope marked "Eyes Only" (top secret) to Kissinger's office. It contained the scores of the weekend soccer games in Germany.

Kissinger was once asked by reporters on his plane about his soccer-playing ability. With his usual analytical skill, he explained that "I wasn't fast, but I was tricky." Some thought the trickiness endured and was translated into other fields, like diplomacy.

When Kissinger showed up in Munich for the World Cup games, he refined his comments to the press: "The intensity with which consultations have been pursued with the Federal Republic of Germany in the last few days is obviously the result of long-term planning," he dead-panned. And since he was a "polite guest," he said, he had informed his German hosts that he would leave it entirely to them to decide where they should meet. He added, superfluously, "And I wouldn't ask any questions about the place or the additional activities."

[c]

A German TV commentator who interviewed the Secretary of State turned out to be even more inane than most American sports commentators. He pushed that once Kissinger left the old home town of Fuerth, the brand of soccer played there was never quite the same again.

With unaccustomed modesty, Kissinger acknowledged he never did make the town team, but he talked about playing for his school team. He was the goalie, he said, and with puckish humor, went on to point out that when he was in the nets, there were a lot of high-scoring games.

Kissinger's memory about his own soccer-playing days did not reflect his considerable talents as a historian. The recollections varied according to time, place and circumstance.

He once told some reporters that he played goalie until he broke his hand and then shifted to a forward position. Not surprisingly, he was an offensive forward--on the right side of the line. In one account his position on the school team escalated into the captain's job.

Predictably, he was an advocate of exciting offense. He lamented the decline of good offensive soccer--something he articulated when he watched a Brazilian national team play during a visit to Brazil in 1976.

His enthusiasm for fussball spilled over into football, American-style, and he was--one of the most prominent fans of the Washington Redskins. And even though he might return to Washington at 3 A.M. of a Sunday morning, he would be in the stands--well, not quite the stands,

55

[c]

the owner's glass-enclosed box-- that Sunday afternoon.

His support for the Redskins in the George Allen era may have been
as much diplomatic as anything else. If Kissinger appreciated good
offense in soccer, there was no way he could like the Redskins other than
geographically, emotionally, politically or diplomatically.

His true feelings emerged during a visit to Afghanistan, where he
was taken by his local hosts to see a Buzkashi match. There aren't too
many foreign ministers in the world who have seen a Buzkashi match, in which
two teams of horsemen of indeterminate numbers---the number depends on the
size of the field of encounter--try to score points by depositing the
corpse of a headless calf in a circle at each end of the alleged playing area.
The circle is the equivalent of the goal in soccer and the corpse is the
equivalent of the ball. The horsemen thunder up and down the field, trying
to outmaneuver the other side while holding on to the heavy corpse.

from the equivalent of the owner's box

After watching the game for a while in the stands in Kabul, Kissinger commented, "It's a little bit like watching the Washington Redskins...The offense consists of one basic play."

When possible, Kissinger didn't mind using soccer to make a political
point. For example, at a time when the East Germans were still contend-
ing for a spot in the World Cup playoffs, the Secretary of State sidled
up to a ranking Soviet official. "I'll bet you don't want East Germany
to win," he said, and when the phlegmatic Soviet official did not respond,
Kissinger went on, "If the East Germans win, they'll cause more trouble for
you than ever before."

The Soviet official laughed a big Russian laugh and slapped
Kissinger on the back—acknowledging his geo-soccer acumen.

56

[Lc]

When he arrived at Olympic Stadium, the ardent American advocate of a global balance of power diplomatically declined to predict the outcome of the battle between two of America's staunchest allies--West Germany and Holland.

For most of the world outside of the United States, the World Cup is the equivalent of the Super Bowl and the World Series rolled into one. West Germany won, 2-1, and Kissinger watched his old friend, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, present the World Cup with great satisfaction to the German team. The Secretary of State then returned to the world of diplomacy, where the results generally take somewhat longer to achieve-- and are seldom so clear cut.

Kissinger's frequent visits to Germany included one stopover in Berlin. Why? "Because no senior American official has been in Berlin since Nixon in the early days of the Administration, and the Germans thought it would be good for morale."

Speaking of games, as Kissinger arrived at his hotel in Munich for the final World Cup match, he found a message--a telephone call from Elizabeth Taylor. Kissinger, the putative public swinger, told newsmen, "She wanted to get a briefing on the European Security Conference." And he chuckled the special Kissinger chuckle.

For dinner, the Germans took Kissinger to a Bavarian restaurant outside of Munich, to a hearty Guest House where the expanse of food was matched only by the expanse of bosom of the waitresses, all good solid Bavarian stock with Wagnerian chests, causing Kissinger to observe that if the dinner had not been served by those particular waitresses, the guest list would have had to be increased by about a third in order to fill the room. Bavarian hyperbole.

Three newsmen served as poolers, but only New York Magazine's Gael Greene could have done justice to the pool report, which was, in truth, a food report. The bounty boggled the mind---roast goose, roast pork, roast venison, roast veal, roast beef---and on and on.

Without indulging in an Epicurean flight of food fancy, it should be sufficient to point out that the banquet included three desserts--crepes, Black Forest cake, and ice cream with nine--count 'em--nine--kinds of fresh berries.

At the World Cup final itself, more than 3,000 extra security men patrolled the stadium. As a security precaution, Kissinger had flown into the Luftwaffe's Furstenfeldbruck air base instead of landing at the Munich commercial field, but all the extra security did not relate solely to his presence at the game. The Germans wanted to make sure the bloody events of the 1972 Olympic games--when Palestinians killed Israeli athletes--were not repeated.

57

[c]

But they were also worried about security and the threat posed by fanatical nihilist terrorists. The Secretary did not make the ritual pilgrimage to the Berlin Wall. American officials claimed there just wasn't enough time during his four-hour visit to include a trip to the Wall, but German sources acknowledged that since the trial of several terrorists was beginning the day of his visit, they didn't want to take any chances on provoking violence.

there would be

In fact, an anonymous caller had warned a rocket attack on Kissinger's plane as it landed at an airport in the French sector of the city. There wasn't. Instead there were signs of affection reading, "Welcome Kissy."

Kissinger always seemed to appreciate the Germans for their gemutlichkeit as well as their steady support of his European policies, but for all of his respect for German dynamism and skill, as a German, he perceived the soft spots in the country's geopolitical psyche. As a Kissinger friend once told a Life Magazine interviewer, "Henry will understand....that West Germany is not a great power. Others will look at its extraordinary industrialization, its gross national product, its export ratio, and will say this is an important state. Henry will say that in the last half century, it has lost two wars, that its regime has been broken five times in a man's lifetime, that it is a weak country."

Kissinger himself told Theo Sommer of *Die Zeit*, "Throughout my public life, I have been a strong advocate of the closest ties between Bonn and Washington. German leaders, in and out of office, are personal friends of mine. Nevertheless, I think it would be unfortunate for the Federal Republic, unfortunate for NATO, and not in anybody's interest to turn NATO into a special Bonn-Washington relationship. It would be too heavy a burden on the Federal Republic. It would raise all the suspicions in the rest of Europe that a generation of responsible

59

German foreign policy has been erased. And it would encourage the splitting up of the West rather than be an element of stability. I don't believe it is necessary. I don't favor it. I know no German leader who favors it."

By the spring of 1976, there were some in the United States who thought Kissinger was a political liability to his party and his President. But that feeling was not shared in Germany.

And so, although Oslo is about one hour from Stockholm as the crow flies, it turned out to be about eleven hours as Henry Kissinger flew. Kissinger went to Norway for the spring meeting of NATO, then flew to Sweden by way of Bonn.

He made the 1,400-mile detour largely because Schmidt and Genscher were engaged in difficult election campaigns, and they felt a Kissinger visit would boost their electoral chances.

In Germany, the heimatstadt boy who made good was still clearly considered a political asset.

Not long before arriving, Kissinger had issued a warning against Communist participation in the Government of Italy, and Schmidt had criticized the Secretary of State for his remarks.

Ironically, Schmidt was as concerned as Kissinger, but he believed the less said about it publicly, the better. Schmidt was concerned not only from a NATO point of view, but also from a personal point of view. He was concerned that a strong Communist showing at the polls in Italy in June would produce a strong conservative reaction in Germany, thus helping the Christian Democratic opposition.

So, when Kissinger and Schmidt appeared in public in Bonn, a reporter wanted to know if they had talked about the subject in their private conversation.

Kissinger was ready with an answer. "We have already discussed the Italian situation publicly between us, so there was no need to discuss it privately," Schmidt laughed. He was also re-elected.

GREECE-TURKEY-CYPRUS

The Greek-Turkish feud over Cyprus (and everything else) and the Arab-Israeli conflict have kept the Middle East seething for longer than problem-solving Americans like to think about.

One problem-solver came up with a solution: Send all the Turkish Cypriots to Turkey, send all the Greek Cypriots to Greece, and then re-settle the Israelis on Cyprus.

Henry Kissinger might have had as much success with that scheme as he did with anything else on Cyprus.

In July of 1974, Nikos Sampson, a Greek Cypriot extremist with the reputation of a thug, staged a coup d'état with Greek backing against the President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios.

A week later, Turkey, despite warnings from the United States, invaded Cyprus, where the Turkish Cypriots represented about 18% of the population. The Greeks had long oppressed the Turks on the island and the Turks were out to get even.

Not long afterward, they extended their occupation to a large chunk of the island.

Meanwhile, back in Athens, the dictatorship of the Greek colonels, humiliated by the Turkish military victory, was forced out of office, and constitutional democracy returned.

The rumors about a possible coup against Makarios had been circulating since March. The Cypriot Ambassador in Washington, Nikos Dimitriou, had informed the State Department that the assassination of Makarios was being plotted by extremists who wanted "Enosis," union with Greece.

LQ

Such information was not a novelty. As officials in the
European Bureau used to joke, the Cyprus experts had predicted 300
of the last two attempted coups against Makarios.

But Kissinger was defensive about it. As he explained at a
news conference: "I have read many learned articles during the week
of why we were taken by surprise by the coup in Cyprus, and I simply
would like to point out to you ladies and gentlemen that obviously
the man most concerned in Cyprus, namely Archbishop Makarios, also
was taken by surprise, so that the information was not exactly lying
on the street."

He was not reluctant to joke about his defensiveness. At the
same news conference, he pointed out there were reports of a coup
in Greece "at this moment."

A reporter then suggested that "whatever may or may not be
happening in Greece did not take you by complete surprise."

Kissinger replied, "If I answer this question, I get into
major difficulties, because if I say it took us by complete surprise,
you will say 'intelligence failure.' And if I say it didn't take
us by complete surprise, you will say other things."

Kissinger himself later said other things about his performance
on Cyprus. He said them in an interview with *Time Magazine* while
reflecting about the move from academic center to Operation Center:
"Once on the job, a man does not learn much other than technique--
he does not get new wisdom.

"You are an athlete," he said. "Even if decisions call for
reflection, you must depend on your instincts... Sometimes it feels as if

you were in one of those movies, sitting on the track in front of an
express train. The train is bearing down on you. You would know what to do
if you did not have ten other things that needed doing first. You are
praying that the train somehow will miss and you will not get hit.
Such a situation occurred in Cyprus. If I had ever had twelve hours
and been able to pick out an intelligence report, I would have seen
that the situation needed attention."

Other things had been said about the Nixon-Kissinger policy toward
the Greek junta for a long time. The United States was highly uncritical
of the only non-Democratic government in NATO, despite recommendations
from lower-level officials to keep pressure on Greece to restore
constitutional rule. One explanation was that the Administration did not
want to revive the political fortunes of the extreme left wing in Greece.
But another explanation came from a State Department official who was
deeply involved in the Cyprus crisis. He was absolutely convinced the "hands-
off-the-colonels" policy came directly from President Nixon as a reward to
Tom Pappas, a big Nixon financial backer from Boston who had the
Exxon Franchise in Greece and who was very close to the junta.

But once the Makarios coup rumors started circulating, Washington
sent messages to Athens to lay off Cyprus.

The Greek government, however, didn't take the warnings all that
seriously. One reason may have been that the American Ambassador, Henry
Tasca, refused to deal directly with the junta's strongman, Dimitrios Ioannides,
head of the secret police, despite his official instructions from Washington.

The chief channel of communications to Ioannides was the CIA.
And the CIA reported on the day before the coup that the Greek strongman
was leaning away from a coup on Cyprus.

[c]

But that was a smokescreen--a neat job of acting by Ioannides for the benefit of an American CIA operative. The coup went off the next morning. Cyprus radio announced that Makarios was dead.

The report proved premature.

Makarios had never been a hero in Washington. He was regarded as something of a "Castro of the Mediterranean," who was the principal obstacle to a resolution of the dispute between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, and who was also a little too chummy with the Russians. The U.S. attitude was captured in a story related by Laurence Stern, a Washington Post reporter. Stern reported that one State Department official reacted to the news that Makarios had survived by saying, "How inconvenient."

Kissinger was not a fan of Makarios, whom he viewed as an impediment to a reasonable settlement on the island. Some State Department officials speculated, not unreasonably, that his satisfaction at seeing the Archbishop retired from the Presidency was one of the reasons he was so reticent about denouncing a coup d'état led by a man known as a psychopathic killer.

Right after the coup in Nicosia, Kissinger asked Cypriot Ambassador Dimitriou who this Nikos Sampson was. Dimitriou said he as a madman and an egomaniac. The Secretary of State pointed out that some people called him an egomaniac, too. Dimitriou explained there was a difference.

American efforts, whatever they had been, to dissuade Athens from going ahead with the coup on Cyprus had failed. The next step was to persuade the Turks not to invade a Cyprus now led by a man who favored Enosis.

Following the coup, Joseph Sisco, the Undersecretary for Political Affairs, was sent to talk the Turks out of invading. Sisco flew to London, then spent his time shuttling between Athens and Ankara. It was not an easy assignment, as Kissinger pointed out with amusement following