Rockefeller Service Award

Nelson Rockefeller Institute of Government

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger: Mr. President, Governor Cuomo, Mayor Dinkins, Happy and other members of the Rockefeller family who have been such an integral part of my life, distinguished guests. It is a great honor for me to receive an award named after the man who was the single greatest influence on my life. I certainly appreciate the many kind things that have been said about me tonight. I noticed that President Ford omitted to point out that I was, during his presidency, not only Secretary of State but also National Security Advisor. I mention this only because never before and never since have relations between the White House and the State Department been as harmonious as they were in that period.

And, Governor Cuomo, one reason I have never seriously considered the Republican Party's offers to run for Governor - which are usually delivered to me two weeks before filing time - is that I always have the less than worthy thought that perhaps I am not necessarily the first choice. Another reason is that I am terrified your researchers might run across a remark once made by my former Cabinet colleague, the then Secretary of the Treasury, Bill Simon, who in the days when we were both serving in perfect harmony in the Ford Cabinet, said "Henry Kissinger's knowledge of economics

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is the best argument against universal suffrage."

After leaving government, I was propelled into the private sector which necessitated that I learn economics. I must also say that Dick Nathan's reference to the breakfast at which I advised him on how to write succinctly dates my incipient megalomania to a fairly early period. It was only afterwards that a British reviewer wrote about one of my books, "I cannot tell whether Mr. Kissinger is a great writer, but anyone finishing his book is a great reader."

Mr. President, Governor Cuomo, Mr. Mayor, this is a really moving occasion. I had the great honor of serving with President Ford at a dramatic point in American history. I believe it is one of President Ford's greatest achievements that most Americans today cannot even remember how dangerous the collapse of our executive authority was to the peace of the world. The matter-of-fact way in which President Ford restored confidence and conducted the affairs of this nation in a period of inflation, which he got under control, of division, and of foreign pressures will be recorded in history as one of our proudest national achievements.

Every leader has to decide how to balance the experiences of his people with a vision of their future. If he confines himself to only the experiences that are

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commonly shared, he may doom his society to stagnation;
if he stands out too far in leading the way, he may be-
come isolated.

In the three years that I had the privilege of
serving under President Ford in the area I know best,
he always led the way with a serenity and an inner
assurance that sprang from a deep personal faith in
America.

In April 1976, when we were heading into the Texas
primary, I left for Southern Africa. We had agreed that
the United States would come out on the side of self-
determination for the people of what was then Rhodesia.
President Ford made the decision to do so even when I
pointed out to him that the Texas primary was only two
weeks away. The proposal itself did not have to be made
in any particular month. But he insisted that our domestic
election schedule not be allowed to dictate the necessities
of either history or human decency in another area of the
world. One of the results of this approach was that we
achieved the unprecedented feat of losing every county in
Texas in the primary. I mention this only because he
knew perfectly well what he was ordering.

When we went to Helsinki, where President Ford
signed the Helsinki agreement, he was accused of betray-
ing Eastern Europe and of acquiescing in the permanent

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division of the European continent. It was our view,
and his decision, that, on the contrary, by interjecting
the subject of human freedom into the international arena
on an obligatory basis we were contributing to the weaken-
ing of communist rule all over Eastern Europe. I must say
that we could not have foreseen the revolutionary impact
that document was to have on the brave peoples of Eastern
Europe who read into it a more immediate charter than we
had anticipated.

I mention these events only to indicate how an
unelected President coming in at a time of extraordinary
difficulty - who was confronted within a few months by
a very hostile Congress and in the course of a year by an
assault within his own party - was able to walk a steady
path and with undying faith in goals of which all America
can be proud.

Of course, this is an evening to honor the memory
of my good friend and teacher, Nelson Rockefeller. I met
him when I was a graduate student and he, then in govern-
ment, invited me for reasons that remain to me forever
obscure to be rapporteur of a group he had assembled,
in characteristic fashion, to assess the opportunities
represented by a summit between President Eisenhower
and the new Soviet post-Stalin leadership.

I have often told this story about our first
meeting but it is worth retelling. All the professors

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present were competing with each other's tactical advice when Nelson Rockefeller said, "Tactical advice I can get in Washington. What you are here for is to tell me what is right. And if you can convince me, I will do it one way or another."

Well the one way it didn't work was to do it within the government. So Nelson Rockefeller resigned and started a studies program that looked ten years into the future of America, in the fashion described by all the previous speakers tonight. He assembled the very best people he could find regardless of party affiliation and put out a series of reports that later became the policy documents of, I would say, all the subsequent administrations of the decade for which they were designed.

But it was not in the cards that he should implement them himself. I am sure textbooks will be written some day about the methods devised by Rockefeller's group to lose national elections. It was not easy but we overcame all the obstacles, finding an altogether new approach each time.

Now the reason for this was fundamental to what Nelson Rockefeller stood for. By the standards of current politics, he was truly naive, for he genuinely believed that one would get elected President if one simply had the best program. He never asked his advisors what he

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should say; rather, he wanted to know what he should do.

So, while other candidates were collecting delegates, he was collecting advisors. He met with them two or three evenings each week for hours on end to educate himself on the substance of the problems with which government ought to deal.

I did not then, and maybe not now, know a great deal about the mechanics of presidential elections, so whenever I showed up at a Republican convention I was stunned that his massive efforts, often extending over a period of two or three years, had produced maybe twenty additional delegates. And I remember the puzzlement of some of these delegations, to which I was sent to explain our views on foreign policy, about being asked to make what must have sounded on my lips like abstruse their vote depend on translations from German, as I diligently presented our policy views.

I mention this because, in the failed effort, there was also a certain heroic vision of what have turned out to be our present-day necessities. In the field which I know best, America is now in the position which George Bernard Shaw summed up by saying: "There are two great tragedies in life: One is not to attain your heart's desire; the second is to attain it."

No nation has ever so completely fulfilled what it set out to do in so brief a period of time as the United States has since the end of World War II. If you

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compare the policy statements of both major parties
from 1949 to 1954 with what actually transpired between
1989 and 1991, you will find that we have more than fulfilled
what we hoped to achieve.

But, now, what is our duty? It is a question which
Nelson Rockefeller would have loved, and which can only
be answered, if not by his own precise methods, then
certainly by the attitudes which he represented. For
Nelson Rockefeller believed that all problems could be,
if not altogether solved, then at least improved upon.
I once mentioned to him how I had told a President that
a certain problem was not being handled well - a Democratic
President and not anyone he was necessarily supporting. He
said: "Never tell a President about a problem without at
least indicating some approach for its solution. He has
enough problems he cannot solve without you adding to them."
This was his attitude toward our national problems and it
is still the correct attitude toward our national problems
today.

We no longer live in a two-power world. Foreign
policy is no longer a zero sum game. Multiple power
centers are quickly evolving though there is as yet no clear
idea of the order by which the new world is to be organized.
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe has many causes.
For a historian the most moving is the fact that, essentially,

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it disintegrated from an absence of legitimacy, without
which it simply could not generate a proper idea of a
just domestic or a voluntary international order.

Throughout our national history, we have always
been able to solve most of our problems. But from now
on we are living in a world in which there will be few
if any final solutions. Instead, situations will arise
that require on-going gradual improvements and in which
the relationship of power to values will have to be rein-
terpreted along the way. Policy making as an art in which
leaders are more concerned with what they should say than
with what they should do, will now almost certainly en-
courage stagnation and demagoguery.

So, it is especially at times like this, when I
think back with affection and nostalgia on my dear
friend, that I like to consider all the changes as a trem-
endously exciting opportunity. How proud he would be of
what is being done in Latin America, which was always close
to his heart and which is today a pocket of perhaps the
most creative American policy-making initiatives. Democracy
and economic well-being are being fostered by nearly every
Latin American government in the footsteps of our own great
tradition. Nelson Rockefeller would be especially proud
that his brother has played such a seminal role in helping
to shape public consensus on these issues.

I do want to thank you all for honoring me tonight.

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In closing I would like to recall a sentence which Nelson used frequently in his conversations with me. When all the analyses were done and all the practical groundwork had been laid, Nelson would take me aside and, because in the end his real passion was always for other human beings, he would say to me, "Never forget that the most fundamental force in the world is love."

Thank you very much.