APR 25 1986

FROM UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

FOR RELEASE: THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 1986

ON THE RIGHT by William F. Buckley Jr.

UNDERSTANDING REAGAN

When Henry Kissinger went down to Washington last week to address a meeting of academicians at what he thought was a closed meeting, he spoke of Ronald Reagan and his administration in terms he would not have used addressing a Republican rally. But if you listened carefully to everything Kissinger said, and weighed it comprehensively, you would find him much more shocking to academicians than to Reaganite loyalists.

Of Ronald Reagan Kissinger said that, just to clear the air, he was in no way ''indebted'' to Reagan -- in the sense, let us say, that Henry Kissinger would be bound to acknowledge being indebted to Richard Nixon. He went on: Moreover, if you meet Reagan and talk with him briefly, you wonder how he managed to be elected governor of California, let alone president of the United States.

One can hear the academic audience purring at this point; but it did not anticipate what was to come.

Kissinger went on to say that in fact Reagan had

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BUCKLEY

4/24/86

dominated the politics of California for eight years, had
dominated the political life of the United States for six
years, and not inconceivably could go down as one of the most
significant presidents of the century.

How can this be?

Because, Kissinger explained, the apparent
limitations of Reagan totally disguise an intuitive grasp he
has not only for priorities, but also for technique. Here,
Kissinger later explained, is a man who managed to change his
entire staff without a ripple of change in policy, so clearly
did he himself dominate policy. A president who clearly
outwitted the Soviet Union through 1983 and 1984 on the
matter of deploying theater weapons in Europe. When Gorbachev
arrived in Geneva it was widely conjectured that he would
''eat'' Reagan alive. But Reagan's intuitive wit, his sense
of what to get into, what not to get into -- what
academicians might call his reticulative sense of order --
ended him up dominating the summit. And just as Gorbachev now
believes that by threatening a summit cancellation because of
Libya he will embarrass Reagan, quite the contrary is likely:
Gorbachev will lose, and Reagan gain.

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Now what got reported from all the above over ABC
was mostly the business about how Kissinger wondered that
Reagan ever got elected governor of California, let alone
president of the United States. Nothing was said about the
subtleties of Mr. Kissinger's extemporized remarks, let alone
his statement to the academicians that they tend to suffer as
a class because academicians tend nowadays to be either
job-seekers or revolutionaries. They are, accordingly, not
attempting to carry the load, to help public figures to
conceptualize problems with clarity. As an example, take
Nicaragua. Mr. Reagan is here genuinely handicapped by his
rendering of the problem. Either the problem is grave enough
to bring U.S. action, or it is not. If it is, $100 million is
a meaningless antitoxin; if it is not, then we have no
business helping the contras at all. The academic class tends
to ignore refinements in stating the question.

One notes from Ronald Reagan Jr.'s amusing and deft
piece in Playboy magazine that alongside the son-reporter,
hiding outside the summit room in Geneva was presidential
historian Edmund Morris, with the same numinous notepad on
which he has written the first part of the best biography

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ever done on Theodore Roosevelt. It is Kissinger's implicit
point that Reagan deserves a biographer of the subtlety of
Morris. But between now and the consolidation of Reagan's
reputation in America's history, commentators need to be
cautious. Last year, Jack Kemp press aide John Buckley (a
nephew) bunted a question about Kemp (Wasn't he too stupid to
be president?) by citing Reagan (They said Reagan was too
stupid to be president). What emerged in many news stories
was merely: Kemp Aide Says Reagan Too Stupid to Be President.

Ronald Reagan is a very unusual man, with unusual
habits of mind and manner. Three months ago, a retiring and
shy editor was asked by a friend after the affair whether she
had been apprehensive at the prospect of sitting for two and
one-half hours next to the president of the United States at
the testimonial dinner. ''Well,'' she said, ''as a matter of
fact I was. But as soon as he sat down, he turned to me and
said, ''Priscilla, do you want to hear what I said to
Gorbachev?''''

You wonder how such people as that can get elected
governor of California. But then you think about it for a
while, and you find yourself wondering how come, the last

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time the voters were consulted on the matter, that man won
only 49 states.

COPYRIGHT 1986 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

4400 Johnson Drive, Fairway, Kan. 66205 -- Phone 913-362-1523

A18 SUNDAY, APRIL 20, 1986

THE WASHINGTON POST

GAO Told
Deaver Had
Key Role

DEAVER, From A1

pert. Some officials involved in the acid rain issue said they were surprised when Deaver expressed an interest in it.

Deaver said in a recent television interview that he is not knowledgeable about the complexities of the acid rain issue.

Deaver has denied any wrongdoing in the matter, which is being investigated by the General Accounting Office at the request of Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Office of Government Ethics also is reviewing it.

The White House discussions on acid rain led to the

port his contention that his role in the acid rain issue was strictly part of his White House duties.

Since leaving the White House, Deaver has become a highly visible lobbyist for several countries and corporations seeking to influence administration policy, including Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Some White House officials said they were concerned when Deaver met recently with Office of Management and Budget Director James C. Miller III to discuss efforts by his client, Rockwell International, to persuade the administration to purchase more B1 bombers. Deaver said the meeting was proper because the budget office was not part of his former White House office.

Deaver has been negotiating to sell his firm to the British advertising and communications giant Saatchi and Saatchi for $18 million, although the London firm has expressed misgivings about the negative publicity surrounding Deaver's activities.

Kissinger on Contra Issue: Two-Sided Nonsense

Foes, Advocates of Aid Accused of Spouting Platitudes

By Christopher Connell
Associated Press

Henry A. Kissinger, speaking at what he thought was a private symposium, said both sides are spouting nonsense in the debate over aid to the rebels in Nicaragua.

The former secretary of state also said President Reagan is not the "trivial" figure most scholars think, although "when you meet the president ... you ask yourself, 'How did it ever occur to anybody that he should be governor, much less president?' "

Kissinger made the remarks Friday to a small group of scholars at the Library of Congress. Afterward he expressed surprise that a reporter had been invited to cover the

session, saying, "Did I kill myself in there?"

Kissinger, secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations, said the Reagan administration "in many ways has been personally more offensive to me ... than any others."

Kissinger, who headed Reagan's commission on Latin America, said that either the administration's analysis of the situation in Nicaragua "is wrong or the solution is wrong. It cannot be that it is such a vital interest and it can be solved with $100 million."

The argument of Democratic opponents that "you ought to use diplomacy and not power is also total nonsense. What does it mean, diplomacy and not power? If they said, 'It's not a vital interest' or 'In

using force you do so much other damage to other interests that are

> "When you meet [Reagan] you ask yourself, 'How did it occur to anybody that he should be governor, much less president?'"

—Henry A. Kissinger

even more important,' then we could join a sensible debate.

"As it is now, both sides are stating platitudes," he said.

He expressed amazement that Reagan didn't miss a beat after virtually his entire White House staff left following his first term.

"People said [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev would eat him alive. [Former president Jimmy] Carter you can eat alive because he wants to show off. But since Reagan doesn't go in beyond his depth, Gorbachev may think the guy is naive, tricky, he can think any number of things, but he cannot get beyond a certain point," Kissinger said.

"He [Reagan] has a kind of instinct that I cannot explain," he said, adding that it is "perfectly possible" history will judge Reagan as "a most significant president."

It is "also possible that he will be seen as somebody who spent a lot of capital maintaining popularity for eight years," Kissinger said.

Kissinger also said it is impossible to run for president "unless you are a rich, unemployed egomaniac."

THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20540

April 21, 1986

Dear Mr. Regan:

Henry Kissinger has asked that I write to you concerning the Council of Scholars symposium at the Library of Congress April 17-19, at which he spoke on the topic "Does Scholarship Matter?" Some of his remarks on that occasion were reported in the press, to his surprise because he had assumed that no representatives of the press were present. (I enclose the printed program of the symposium.)

Secretary Kissinger spoke from notes but no prepared text. Many of his quoted remarks were made in response to specific questions during a discussion period that followed the presentations. Although it is not my place to pass judgment on Mr. Kissinger's remarks, I can tell you that I considered them at the time entirely even-handed, recognizing the remarkable political achievements in the President's career while confessing that the source of these achievements frequently defied analysis, particularly of the kind most familiar to his scholarly audience. This was in keeping with his general theme: the interaction of scholarship and public policy to the betterment of each.

I would also suggest that a group of thirty leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences does not constitute an audience ordinarily predisposed to judge a President favorably. By his candor and moderation, Secretary Kissinger secured assent from that audience to the President's stature as a political leader, despite the difficulty of explaining that stature in conventional terms. That was the message I got from his remarks, despite any contrary impression that may have been derived from press reports.

Enclosure

Honorable Donald T. Regan
Chief of Staff
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N. W.
Washington, D. C. 20500

M. H. ABRAMS: John, I think you've succeeded. Next time I put pen to paper--and I still use a pen; I'm so far from using a computer that I don't even type--my hand will tremble, I will think of your smiling face, and will that stop me from writing another bad book? Not for a moment. What worried me when I incurred my now-notorious bicycle accident, my athletic injury, was the fear that I wouldn't be able to come here and chair this symposium, and I worried that if I weren't here to introduce our next speaker, nobody would know who Henry Kissinger was. Well, he is a scholar; that's why he's here. And an eminent one who published major works in European diplomatic history, in American foreign policy, and so on.

He was then called to Washington to put his knowledge to public service in the great tradition as assistant to the President for national security, of course, and as Secretary of State. He has, as we know, continued to write, and has earned various high rewards, all the way from the Woodrow Wilson Prize in 1958, for the best book in government and international affairs in that year, to the Nobel Prize in 1973. It's a privilege, then, to present Henry Kissinger, who will answer the question, Despite how much it costs, does scholarship matter? Mr. Kissinger.

HENRY A. KISSINGER: Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen. This is one of those occasions which one accepts nine months earlier because one thinks he will ~~it was~~ because of one's enormous admiration for Dan Boorstin and one's sense of gratitude to the Library of Congress, and as the date approaches and one realizes one will not get close to finishing the research one set out to do, wonders whether one should invent some illness. You will as suave and not hear from me, an elegant presentation as you have just heard. I

[c]

called Dan earlier this week to tell him that I had stacks of notes, long quotations, lots of problems, but that I had not been able to write them into a paper worthy of this group, and that I am therefore going to speak somewhat extemporaneously, and probably will revise much of what I say in the light of our subsequent discussion.

I am here in a strange position. I was a scholar, then I was a government official, during which period I was almost totally illiterate, in the sense that I don't recall reading any serious non-classified document other than detective stories. And then I went back to sort of a half-world between scholarship and public life, and probably concentrated my scholarship in a somewhat egocentric way, on redoing the experiences I had just participated in, in writing memoirs. So I don't know, really, in what capacity I address you.

To answer the question, does scholarship matter?, I think it's matters enormously. It matters on various levels. First, I apply it to the question of public policy, which has been my preoccupation for the last 15 or so years. Scholarship matters because you must not believe for one moment the saying that a national leader grew in office. I have never known a national leader to grow in office. What they do in office is to deplete the intellectual capital with which they arrive in office. They learn how to manipulate the bureaucracy. They learn how to deal with tactical problems. They do not acquire the perspective or the sense of the future which is essential to master critical events. The difference, in my view, and there may be more learned people here who will contradict me, between great statesmen and ordinary statesmen, or disastrous statesmen, is really a question of intelligence. It is much more frequently, almost

inevitably, a sense of history and a sense of philosophy. All major decisions in which I was involved, or that I have studied as a scholar, were major because the pros and cons were fairly evenly divided. And to find one's way through the confusion of events is impossible unless there is previously established some conceptual framework which provides guideposts. The real task of political leaders is to take a society from that with which is familiar to a future where it has never been, and to traverse that route takes a degree of moral certainty that is not achievable simply by a tactical analysis of the situation as it presents itself, since there the background clutter and the significant are very difficult to distinguish.

Now, in this task, I believe that our society right now suffers from very severe handicaps on two levels, first, on the level of who becomes an eminent policymaker. I take it increasingly axiomatic that to run for the President in the United States is impossible unless you are a rich, unemployed egomaniac. You must, therefore, devote four years of your life in competition with six or seven others who are motivated to enter that race primarily because they think, quite correctly, that they are as good as you are, but not measure themselves against any other historical standard. So the odds, in any one case, of succeeding are very finite. You have to spend your time raising fifteen million dollars for the nominating process, which puts a high premium on appealing, a nominating process that goes state-by-state. So all your incentives are to concentrate on a study of pressure groups and xzziki sectional interests, and all your rewards are in getting on the evening news. I cut my political teeth on the staff of Nelson Rockefeller, who was a hopeless naif and idealist. He suffered from the illusion that you become President, or

at least candidate, by having the best program. And he kept asking,
"What is the right thing to do?" and spent much more time on research
than on collecting delegates, and therefore managed to miss the Republican
nomination three times in a row, despite having every other advantage,
including the one that he didn't have to raise fifteen million dollars
from pressure groups.

These are the men, of either party, who then become Presidents.
And then they are immediately thrown into issues about which they have
either never thought or haven't thought for four years. And the fewest
of them reflect on how they may ever appear in history books. The problem
with their staffs is even more severe, because all the qualities that I
have described that it takes to be a Presidential candidate are even more
true of people willing to join so forlorn an effort as a Presidential
race as a staff member. What person who has anything significant to do
could spend four years of his life on such an enterprise? And yet, they
wind up in the White House, and you then find the phenomenon, in both
parties, that you could identify people who have never done anything in
their lives, intellectual or practical, except run the United States.

So this is the problem on the political level. On the scholar's
level--and, I repeat, my contribution to scholarship has been marginal
in recent years, so many of the criticisms I make can be applied to me.
I'm much better at identifying the issue, the problem, than in defining
its solution. But on the scholarly level, I believe, perhaps more wrongly,
that the best preparation for policy-making is a combination of history
and philosophy, and in some technical issues like arms control, science;
but even there, more from the philosophical than from the technical level.

That combination is very difficult to achieve for reasons on which I will
give you my impressions. But let me talk about them on various levels:

First, knowledge of the past; second, perception of the nature of the issue
as a philosophical problem;--in other words, the first, the historical
problem, the second, the conceptual issue; and in my field of international
affairs, the particular difficulty that the United States has in dealing
with either of those.

One of the nearly insuperable problems in writing history in the
contemporary period is the fact that the historian is not in the embarrassment
of finding a significant document. He is in this embarrassment, but he is
in this embarrassment primarily because he is overwhelmed with documentation,
not because it is hard to find. When I wrote about nineteenth-century
diplomacy, diplomats were far from home. Communications were slow. They
therefore had to explain to their governments what it was they were trying
to achieve, and to analyze the situation in order for their governments to
form an opinion. The governments knew that they could not give tactical
instructions because they would arrive too late, and therefore, the govern-
ments had to explain what they were about and what, in general terms,
they wanted their representatives to achieve. There were no typewriters
or Xerox machines, so to produce a document was a significant effort.
None of these conditions exist today. There are tens of thousands of
documents floating all over the place. Communication is instantaneous.
It is very rare that you put on long paper, as an instruction, what you
are trying to achieve. The typical instruction is to tell the ambassador
or negotiator what he is supposed to say, without a great deal of
explanation. And since the Freedom of Information Act, preferably without

[L]

any explanation. The bureaucracies are so consumed with their internal
struggles that many documents are written that can be understood only
in terms of the relative positioning of various parties within a governmental
apparatus. And some are written in order to shift the responsibility
and cannot be taken seriously at all. In addition, 98 percent of the
documents are never seen by the people who make the decisions.

Now, I must say, I am of course especially sensitive to books
about the period with which I am familiar. And if the definition of a
bad book is incorrect quotations, quotations out of context, quotations
that are run together where the omission is not indicated, or where part
of a quotation is suppressed, I could give you books in which over 50
percent of the quotations have this character, including one which
failed to receive the Pulitzer Prize for history only because the
author was foreign and therefore not eligible for it. And this
never challenged. Nobody ever bothered to check the quotation, because
it was assumed that anything that makes a government look iniquitous is
likely to be true.

But leaving aside the fact that history tends to shape into
political advocacy now, the most honest historian in the world, with
the best intentions in the world, would have a nearly insuperable task
if he were--not nearly--an insuperable task if he were let loose on all
the documentation. Now, I try to get around this problem in my own
work by having segregated every document that came across my desk, and the
collection that's in the Library of Congress here, and which has been
administered, really, with such ability, has at least the advantage
that people will know what was seen by me and the Presidents I served.

It
But of course that does not answer the question, what should
have been seen by me and the Presidents I served? But at least it will
permit people to reconstruct the decisions on the basis of the evidence
that existed. But for a historian to go at a problem called today is, I
repeat, almost impossible. And to understand these documents without
a psychiatric explanation of what the bureaucratic context was even
more difficult. And one's predisposition is exactly the one that Mr. Broderick
mentioned. Even I, who, when I read something about the period with which
I am familiar, and it says it's a Joint Chiefs of Staff document, I
have a tendency to believe, okay, the idiots put this down, but it's in
the document. But, for example, there is one document which is always
quoted. It says, "President Nixon bombed Cambodia against the advice of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff." I never bothered to check that until I finally
looked for it. Well, it was a document that was never sent to the White
House. It wasn't advising against the bombing of Cambodia, it was recommending
the bombing of Cambodia. It had six pages explaining why Cambodia should
be bombed, explaining why no civilian was closer than X miles to the place
to be bombed. And on the last page, it had a typical "cover yourself"
loss
sentence, saying, "The ~~of~~ some civilian lives can nevertheless not be
excluded. Still, we recommend proceeding." That "still" sentence has always
been omitted. The six pages ~~preceding~~ is always omitted. That one
sentence is always quoted, and has, to my knowledge, never been challenged.
And I could go on and on about how history is being presented in this
manner, because it is now being written precisely because it is so
difficult to write a complete history, which tends to be written by
advocates. If I can just give one other example, again, about the bombing

of Cambodia. Senator Symington asked General Westmoreland during a
budget hearing five years after the event, "Is it possible that, if you
had bombed these Vietnamese concentrations and pushed them deeper into
Cambodia, that this might start a series of events in which an unknown
with
but a very complicated question. First of all, General Westmoreland was
not the quickest mind that existed. Secondly, he wanted to get his budget
for this year, and if you read Congressional hearings, you rarely find
a senator saying, "You're full of baloney, Senator." What he said was,
"It is
possible to say that," or something like that, which was, "Get off my
back and give me my budget." That doesn't mean it wasn't possible; I'm
not proving the opposite by this, I'm just saying to take a sentence like
this and make General Westmoreland the witness of it means we are not
capable of learning from that historical period. But, I repeat, it would
be very difficult to do even on an objective, for an objective
historian, it would be very difficult to know which documents were self-serving,
which documents were serious. I can give you, from my personal experience,
I put into the appendix of my book in very small print, a number of
documents in which I warned President Nixon against the consequences of
certain action, which have never been found by reviewers, and that's quite
proper, too. I put them in there because they were serious documents.
They were intellectually valid. I sent them in to President Nixon. I
never followed them into the Oval Office, so unless he read it and said,
"Okay, you're right," overruling everybody else, it was quite clear nothing
was going to happen. I deserve no particular credit for these memos,
but maybe someday they'll surface in your collection and confuse people.

But I think I've said enough about the difficulty of writing

LQ

history. Let me turn to a much more serious problem, which is, how does
a nation perceive itself in foreign policy? Now, I did and had done an
enormous amount of research, which I may incorporate when I print this,
if this ever gets printed, about historic Russian perceptions of foreign
policy and historic American perceptions of foreign policy. And the
reason I do that is because there is a folklore in America about the
nature of international affairs which seems to be totally unaffected
by practical experience, or informed by scholarly knowledge that is widely
available. For example, I think one can argue--now I will start getting
into trouble finding my notes--that there are a number of principles which
more or less constantly animate American foreign policy. I will have
to improvise even those [inaud]. One is that the normal state of relations
among nations is that of peace, and that conflict is an aberration. There
is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever, except in the American
domestic experience, the idea that the motivation of leaders is the
economic betterment of their society, it is possible that this is
the dominant factor motivating statesmen. It is possible, in every
decade since World War II, to find quotations from both Democrats and
Republicans asserting that this is the predominant goal of the Soviet
Union and that the Soviet Union is eager to abandon the arms race. It
started during World War II and, I repeat, it has existed in every
decade since then. Fortune magazine, during World War II, wrote, "Russia
will prefer the peace of Europe to its communization." The arguments
in favor of this assumption are that Trotsky is dead, and that it is
the essence of Stalinism to use communism as an instrument of Russian
nationalist policy, not of expansion. Russia is not so much land-hungry

as hungry for security and economic progress. More or less the same thing was said about Khruschev. In 1956, Secretary Dulles said, "If these liberalizing forces go on, they will gather momentum. Then we can reasonably hope, in a decade, perhaps, that what we ask is the great goal of our policy; that is, a Russia which is governed by people who are responsive to the wishes of the Russian people, who have given up world-wide ambitions, and who conform to the principles of civilized nations as they are embodied in the United Nations Charter." The fact that such a Russian government has never existed, under either Czars or communists, for maybe very good historical reasons, does not seem to affect this persistent analysis. And therefore the secret American dream with respect to foreign policy is to turn it into a subdivision of psychiatry or into an act of theological conversion. If you read the literature of containment, for example, you will find two extraordinary phenomena.

The first: during our period of atomic monopoly, the United States asserted that it was weak, and that it had to build a situation of strength before it could negotiate, which in retrospect is a quite extraordinary conclusion. The second is that when that situation of strength is realized, negotiations would follow automatically. And I defy anybody to find in the literature of containment, either by Kennan or Acheson or Dulles or any of their disciples, any discussion of what would happen on the gray day that the Soviets, recognizing the situation of strength, show up at the conference table. So, in 1954, President Eisenhower announced that he is going to the summit, because there has been too much attention to detail, and he will concentrate on the atmosphere. And President Reagan, thirty years later, announces that his achievement at the summit was not

to do anything concrete, but to remove distrust.

In other words, in the American view, nations are either peaceful or warlike, and a policy of equilibrium or balance of power is inherently wrong, and indeed, a contributing factor to international tension. So in 1949, the Department of State presented the Atlantic Alliance to the Congress by saying, "NATO is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence the balance of power, but the balance of principle." And of course Woodrow Wilson, the father--no, one of the most eloquent representatives of this view--stated repeatedly that he wanted to substitute the (concert) of powers for the balance of power, ? "when all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose, all act in the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection." I was a consultant to the Kennedy administration during the Berlin Crisis, and one of their nearly obsessive preoccupations was to define a position on Berlin that might achieve the support of Prime Minister Nehru. Skeptics like myself, who said that such a position could not exist in the world, that India would be mad to commit itself to an issue so far away and antagonsize a nearby neighbor capable of affecting the internal balances was treated with, if not contempt, with a certain amount of superciliousness. And so it happens that when one reads our literature, one finds that often the impression is left that in an hour of crisis, the first thing the President does is to call in the legal advisor to see whether there is some document that obliges us to respond.
In other words, it is not the fact of a change, but the method that is at issue. In 1936, when the Germans reoccupied the Rhine, President Roosevelt asked the State Department what the implications were, and clearly

it changed the strategic map of Europe. Max From then on, it was
foreordained that eastern Europe would be doomed, since an offensive
strategy was technically either no longer possible or too costly. Here
is the answer: "Dear Mr. President: I am transmitting herewith a memorandum
giving a brief analysis of the action taken by the German government in
sending troops into that part of the Rhine zone which was demilitarized
under the Treaty of Versailles, and which demilitarizations likewise provided
for in the Treaty of Lucerno. It would appear from this brief analysis
that the action of the German government has constituted both a violation
of the Versailles and Lucerno pacts, but as far as the United States is
concerned, in fact it does not constitute a violation of our treaty of August 25,
1921, with Germany." Period. No other analysis of the implications of
that move.

So we find a huge intellectual problem in my view, many of the
basic assumptions which I have mentioned and brutally summarized are not
only wrong, but belied by experience.

But that isn't even the main point that I want to leave with this
group. My main point is something else. There does not exist a coherent
theory of international relations which debates opposing schools of thought
with which I am familiar. And in some areas there has been a stagnation
when there has been a certain advance in theory for a reason which I will
try to state, but which, of course, is surely debatable. When I became
Security Advisor, I was emotionally quite attached to the people who had
contributed to my intellectual formation. They misunderstood this as
necessarily agreeing with their point of view, but that's a different
issue. But I thought it would be easy to assemble groups of experts who

could enlighten what I soon found, that you can assemble, especially in
technical fields, whatever group you want to give you your preferred
answer, that it is very difficult to find people who will take a position,
who will look at a problem separate from positions you can already read
they have taken previously. in the field of arms, for example, most scientists
are divided into more or less two schools--there are, of course, notable
exceptions-- One that believes that their moral contribution to peace is
to stop the arms race, and the best way to stop the arms race is to prevent
any new weapon from being built, and therefore it is quite predictable
that they will oppose any new weapon on the ground either that existing
weapons are good enough or that some super-duper weapon is going to come
along. And so you find an eminent group that has managed to oppose every
weapon for thirty years, or come up with something that's not doable at
the particular moment. Now, I will admit that the Pentagon is short-
sighted, but statistically it is improbable that over 30 years, it is
always wrong. Every once in a while, they are apt to come up with something
that has some merit. On the other side, you have a rather passionate
group that thinks anything that's technically possible is also desirable.
In the process, the question of what we are trying to achieve, either in
weapons or arms control, becomes very difficult. I think in the contemporary
world, at this moment, we would have, in fact, a good opportunity to
negotiate if we had an idea what we want to negotiate about. The arms
controllers seem to me to be stuck in the categories of the late '50s, and
the opponents are stuck in the categories of the early '70s, and they
paralyze each other. Now, why does this happen? In the late '50s, I
participated in a number of [portion missing]

that they could exercise power directly, and that the Vietnam War then
split the academic community, in the fields with which I am familiar, into
two groups: job applicants and revolutionaries. The job applicants are
essentially undistinguishable from other bureaucrats, and they write
position papers of greater or lesser significance. And the people who
believe that every governmental servant must have a warped mentality and
can hardly wait to implement, to act out, the fantasies or frustrations
of his youth necessarily pick on every ambiguity to prove their fundamental
point, that the system is not to be trusted. In the process, there aren't
any seminars anymore; at least, no seminars that make the country a
contribution that I believe that group did, for better or worse. And we are
still stuck in a period when I do believe that the pressures on the
Soviet system are great, without a long-term intellectual framework.

So all of this is a long way, a much too long way, of saying,
yes, scholarship would matter if we could find our way through
some of these problems, some of which are extrinsic to the academic community, some of
which are intrinsic to it. God knows, the policy-making process desperately
needs it, and I hope only that in the question period, you don't ask me
for an explanation for a solution to what I have outlined to you. I know don't
know the solution, but I have given some thought to the issue and when
into a I turn this paper, I'll even document it.

M. H. ABRAMS: Well, in assuring us that scholarship matters,

Dr. Kissinger was obviously preaching to the converted--I presume we're all converted, that's why we're here. But I think one thing he persuaded us is that he has told us things that very much matter. We all look forward

THE COUNCIL OF SCHOLARS of the Library of Congress was established in 1980 to accomplish the following tasks: to serve as a link between the Library of Congress and the world of scholarship and to advise the Librarian of Congress on ways to sustain and strengthen this connection; to survey the Library's collections to ensure that they can support the most ambitious scholarly activity in all fields; and to deliberate periodically on large issues in the world of ideas and to prepare an inventory of knowledge of these issues. The inventory of knowledge is intended to inform the widest possible audience about what is known on a topic and about what aspects of the topic require further research and exploration.

The first installment in the inventory of knowledge, *Creativity: A Continuing Inventory of Knowledge* (Washington, Library of Congress, 1981), was a distillation of the results of the Council's Symposium on Creativity, November 19-20, 1980. Work, the second topic in the inventory of knowledge, was the subject of a symposium at the Library of Congress, April 26-27, 1984. Scholarship Today is the third topic in the inventory of knowledge.

The Council of Scholars is supported entirely by private donations. Among its benefactors have been: the Standard Oil Company of California, the Exxon Education Foundation, the Xerox Corporation, the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, the New York Times Company Foundation, the De Witt Wallace Fund, Inc., the Charles B. and Flora Thornton Fund, the Flora L. Thornton Foundation, the Foundation of the Litton Industries, and Honorable Clare Boothe Luce.

## Symposium Program

April 17-19, 1986

Pickford Theater, Madison Building
Chair: M. H. Abrams, Cornell University

Thursday, April 17, 1:00 p.m.

What's Going on in Modern Scholarship

The Defining Characteristics of Modern Scholarship

Jacques Barzun, Columbia University

The Epidemic of Theory

Ricardo Quinones, Claremont College

Computers and Modern Scholarship

Robert Oakman, University of South Carolina

Friday, April 18, 9:30 a.m.

The Midwives (or Mediators) of Modern Scholarship

The Facilitators

The Academic Mentor

Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale University

The Foundations

John Hope Franklin, Duke University

The Disseminators

The Publishers

Samuel Vaughan, Random House

The Evaluators

The Reviewers

John Gross, The New York Times

Friday, April 18, 2:00 p.m.

The Impact of Modern Scholarship

The Cost of a Bad Book

John C. Broderick, Library of Congress

Does Scholarship Matter?

Henry A. Kissinger, Secretary of State, 1973-77

Scholarship and Public Policy

John Brademas, New York University

Saturday, April 19, 9:30 a.m.

What Can We Do About It?

Comments

Gertrude Himmelfarb, City University of New York

Simon Michael Bessie, Harper & Row, Publishers

Carol Orr, University of Tennessee Press

Observations

The Council

[LC]

THE COUNCIL OF SCHOLARS
OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 1985-86

Daniel J. Boorstin, *The Librarian of Congress*

M. H. Abrams, Chair

M. H. Abrams

Class of 1916 Professor of
English

Cornell University

Robert Alter

Professor of Comparative
Literature

University of California,
Berkeley

Cleanth Brooks

Professor of Rhetoric,
Emeritus

Yale University

Gwendolyn Brooks

Consultant in Poetry

Library of Congress, 1985-86

Daniel J. Boorstin

The Librarian of Congress

Elizabeth Eisenstein

Alice Freeman Palmer

Professor of History

University of Michigan

John Hope Franklin

James B. Duke Professor of
History

Duke University

Sydney Freedberg

Chief Curator

National Gallery of Art

A. Lee Fritschler

Director

Advanced Study Programs

The Brookings Institution

Clifford Geertz

Professor of Social Science

Institute for Advanced Study

Owen Gingerich

Professor of Astronomy and
History of Science

Harvard University

Nathan Glazer

Professor of Education and
Social Structure

Harvard University

Robert Heilbronner

Norman Thomas Professor
of Economics

New School for Social
Research

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Distinguished Professor of
History

City University of New York

Albert O. Hirschmann

Professor of Social Science

Institute for Advanced Study

Joseph Kerman

Professor of Music

Joseph Kitagawa

Professor of Religion

University of Chicago

Koentjaraningrat

Professor of Anthropology

University of Indonesia

Joshua Lederberg

President

Rockefeller University

Michael Novak

Director

Religion, Philosophy, and
Public Policy Study

American Enterprise Institute

Robert Nozick

Professor of Philosophy

Harvard University

J. G. A. Pocock

Professor of History

Johns Hopkins University

Simon Ramo

President

TRW, Inc.

Carl Schorske

Professor of History

Princeton University

Paul Sigmund

Professor of Politics

Princeton University

Emily Vermeule

Professor of Classics

Harvard University

Aileen Ward

Albert Schweitzer Professor
of the Humanities

New York University

Scholarship Today

THE HUMANITIES

SOCIAL SCIENCES

A SYMPOSIUM

The Council of Scholars
of

The Library of Congress