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The second principle follows upon the first: that nothing must be done to undermine the credibility and authority of the President. He has applied this code most rigorously to himself. Despite attachments and allies in the press and on the campuses, he has rarely criticized his chief, even in private, even in crisis.

Trusting Mr. Kissinger in a way that he trusts few other men, Mr. Nixon has conferred on him a degree of independence that is not routinely granted to other subordinates. One result is that Mr. Kissinger's briefings are livelier than most, made so by a kind of Teutonic humor that deliberately plays on his heavy German accent and on his position. It is the kind of humor that contrives to be at once self-deprecating and self-important.

"There cannot be a crisis next week," he remarked on one occasion. "My schedule is already full."

Mr. Kissinger's decision to sign on with the President—a decision arrived at after a series of meetings in New York in November 1968—caused mild surprise at the time. He was a Harvard professor, and Harvard, then as now, was not exactly festooned with Nixon loyalists. In retrospect, however, the Nixon-Kissinger match made sense. An immediate point of departure was their joint conviction that the foreign-policy machinery should be recast to coördinate the advice of the bureaucracy and consolidate policy-making in the White House. During the campaign, Mr. Nixon

had promised to revive the old National Security Council machinery; during the interregnum, Mr. Kissinger designed the structure Mr. Nixon wanted.

That structure still defies precise description, but one statement can be made with impunity: Mr. Kissinger runs it all with perfection. On one occasion, a hard-working junior officer submitted for inspection a chapter he had written for one of the President's annual State of the World messages. Mr. Kissinger sent it back with instructions to improve it. A second draft received the same comment, as did a third. The aide then turned in a fourth version. "Is this your best effort?" the boss inquired.

"Yes," the exhausted aide replied.

"Well, then"—with a smile—"this is the one I will read."

As for policy, both the President and his adviser entered the White House convinced that a combination of factors—the increasing costs of the arms race, growing public disenchantment with overseas involvement, the emergence of new centers of power around the world—had made the old rivalry between the United States and China and the Soviet Union at once increasingly damaging and faintly obsolete.

Still another point of departure was the belief shared by the President and his adviser that if the war in Vietnam was to be liquidated, it ought to be done in a way that enhanced rather than threatened the opportunity to build a new struc-

what greater tribute than this fine article!
You are due a knight-errant, Henry K.

1973

HENRY KISSINGER, PEACEMAKER

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ture of peace that both men sensed was at hand. Domestic considerations foreclosed escalation of the war or even maintenance of inherited levels. At the same time, however, "precipitate withdrawal" by the United States would, Kissinger argued, weaken its honor and cripple its power to bargain with its allies or, more important, its cold-war enemies.

"A great deal of the peace and stability [in the world] depends on the confidence other people have in the American promise and in the American performance," he told a group of editors in Chicago in September 1970. "If the United States utterly fails in something that it has undertaken with so much effort, it is bound to affect the judgment of other countries as to the degree to which the United States can be significant in their areas."

Finally, the President and his adviser persuaded themselves that not only American credibility overseas but also the stability of American society depended in no small measure on the manner in which a war that required a staggering investment in men and money was brought to a close. Mr. Kissinger, no less than Mr. Nixon, sought an ending that could be accepted as redeeming the sacrifice.

"The big intangible," he said at a White House briefing in December 1969, "is not only whether there will be public acceptance of the war but also whether there will be public acceptance of the peace. Anybody

can end the war. Our problem is to keep the society together."

What has been Mr. Kissinger's special contribution to Nixon policy? It is not an easy question. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that Mr. Nixon's record in foreign affairs would have been as successful as it has without Mr. Kissinger to carry it through to concrete agreements in private and to define it in public.

Beyond that, the whole effort to achieve a negotiated solution might conceivably have faltered without his patient conviction that, in time, a combination of pressures would create—to borrow his words—the "objective conditions" that would make the notion of settling the war "attractive" to the North Vietnamese. That is not to say that Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger created the conditions by themselves. It is by no means certain that the fierce pressures generated in Washington —the overtures to Moscow and Beijing, the strengthening of Saigon, the costly bombing, the Cambodian campaign, the opportunities for political advantage offered to Hanoi in the agreement itself—were decisive. What can be said is that Mr. Kissinger persisted in his belief that things would fall into place someday.

Moreover, he somehow managed, despite disappointments and miscalculations, to sustain a vision of what the final components of an agreement might be. Even before he joined Mr. Nixon, he wrote in

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Foreign Affairs of the possibility that a mixed commission composed of the warring elements might be established to preside over a final political settlement. In a briefing in San Clemente during the summer of 1969, shortly after Mr. Nixon had announced the first troop withdrawals, Mr. Kissinger sketched a rough solution in which the contending parties would be given political control over areas in which they exercised military authority. He spoke again of such an arrangement in San Clemente in April 1970.

"Any realistic person must recognize," he said then, "that neither side is going to be willing to give up at the conference table what it was not willing to give up on the battlefield. . . . The best agreements are those which everybody has a stake in maintaining. Therefore, no one is going to ask the other side to agree to a political settlement that leads to its complete destruction."

What of Mr. Kissinger's future? He sees at least three major challenges confronting him if he remains through the second term or confronting his successors if, as is widely believed, he decides to leave.

The first challenge would be to seek still better relationships with the Russians and the Chinese, to move beyond the ceremonial triumphs of summit diplomacy to concrete agreements. "We have put up some foundations," he says, "and now a structure has to be built. The task will not be easy."

The second challenge will be to rebuild relationships with America's friends and economic competitors, notably in Europe and Japan. "What's ahead will in many ways be more difficult than breaking new ground with the Soviets and Communist Chinese," Mr. Kissinger says. "The risks of competition are small and the rewards for nationalist intransigence very high. What must be done is to build a political framework with the allies in which economic relationships no longer produce the tensions they have in the past."

The third challenge is to provide for Mr. Kissinger's own succession. As others have noted, his "grand solo performance" on the diplomatic stage has created grave risks, discouraging new talent.

Mr. Kissinger seems to sense the danger. Asked to produce a single convincing reason for staying in his present job after achieving a settlement in Vietnam, he said nothing but marched to his bookcase and handed a visitor his monograph on Bismarck. One paragraph reads:

"A system which requires a great man in each generation sets itself an almost insurmountable challenge if only because a great man tends to stunt the emergence of strong personalities. When the novelty of Bismarck's tactics had worn off and the originality of his conception came to be taken for granted, lesser men strove to operate his system while lacking his sure touch and almost artistic sensitivity."