On Sunday last, after reading the charges against him in The New York Times, he considered skipping the Middle Eastern trip with the President. He consulted with his aides in the Government and with members of the Congress and the press, who told him he was turning an old controversy into an unnecessary crisis.

Accordingly, he decided to make the trip, but somewhere along the way apparently he concluded, as he had said last Sunday, that this was a question of personal honor that had to be resolved. His news conference in Austria before a traveling White House press corps that had nothing else to report dramatized his threat to resign.

This was obviously the wrong issue at the wrong time and in the wrong place, but it illustrates the paradox in Mr. Kissinger. He is a highly intelligent and rational man, but he is also deeply sensitive, and he has probably been traveling too far under too much tension.

Also, going back to the original controversy on the wiretaps, he was, like so many others in the White House, under great pressure from "the other side" of the Executive Mansion.

When there were leaks to the press and Messrs. Ehrlichman and Haldeman were demanding that the leaks be stopped, Mr. Kissinger himself knew he was suspected as being the source of the leaks. He was not even sure that his own telephones were not being tapped.

Somewhere in this atmosphere of suspicion somebody "initiated" the wiretapping proposal, and Mr. Kissinger, rightly or wrongly, went along, believing that if he didn't he himself would be accused of the leaks.

The Kissinger threat to resign is only the latest evidence that everybody in the Nixon White House seems to be deranged or corrupted by the lack of trust there.

Even the most intelligent of men do strange things and the Kissinger press conference is stranger than most. There was no great issue about him in the public mind. He was the one practical man, dealing successfully with intractable questions, but now he has made a big issue out of it and the Congress will have to try to sort it out.

Meanwhile, he has placed himself along with the President as a victim of an irresponsible press, and this is precisely what he has always tried to avoid. He has wanted to be separate, to keep Watergate and foreign policy apart, but now he has linked them with himself, or at least made a big issue out of them, and this makes things even worse than they have to be.

GIVE FRESH AIR FUND.

press conference to a friend a half-hour later, he said that more than half the questions dealt with wiretapping. "If this keeps up," he reportedly said, "I'm going to resign."

On Saturday, Kissinger saw Mike Mansfield, the majority leader of the Senate. It was at a breakfast to which Kissinger had invited the Montana Democrat the week before. "He was in some distress," Mansfield recalled yesterday. "We discussed other matters, but then we got to the question of wiretapping."

Said Mansfield: "He felt it made it much more difficult for him to conduct the foreign policy of the United States as the agent of the President. He indicated ... that it would be an impossible job to carry out that responsibility and have this other thing hanging over him ... and that he might have to consider resigning."

"I told him not to even think of it," Mansfield recalled.

Nevertheless, Mansfield said that on Sunday Kissinger was so disturbed that he called the senator at home. "He expressed concern about the continuing attacks on his credibility and honesty and said he was considering not going with the President to the Middle East because he would be under some sort of a cloud," said Mansfield. "I told him 'Don't you dare think that way. You go; you're needed; you can be extremely helpful; the country depends on you...'"

Mansfield said: "I told him to roll with the punches and do what the rest of us do with criticism: to try to add another layer of skin on."

By Sunday night Kissinger was still seething. Friends who saw him at a dinner party said he was cooler, colder than usual. "I thought he was less warm and funny than usual," said

Kissinger "seems to be vulnerable to the charge of dissembling," and which added that "sooner or later this whole dismal episode must have its full airing."

Even before these articles appeared, Kissinger was described by one confidant as feeling that he was being subjected to criticism he is in no position to answer. "He's very sensitive," this friend said, "and this was hitting below the belt." He added: "He was really upset by these innuendos and charges resulting from leaked information ... and his hands are tied behind his back. He can't talk back about secret information... He's willing to take on anyone but he thinks this is unfair criticism ..."

His friends agree that the criticism, in the words of one, "has hurt very deeply." There is the sense that Kissinger feels—although he has never expressed it—that he has done so much for the nation and is now being treated so shabbily, that he is becoming the victim of a kind of witch hunt.

Nick Thimmesch

Rule of Law is Same for Kissinger as for Others in Watergate

Washington.

Henry Alfred Kissinger, the international celebrity who wins huzzahs as secretary of state, will get righteous support from some after his Salzburgian outburst. But in the long run, Dr. Kissinger hurt himself, his nation and the cause of world stability.

Dr. Kissinger should learn who he is. It is the President of the United States who makes foreign policy. The secretary of state advises on it, helps shape it, enunciates and administers it.

For Dr. Kissinger to stamp his foot and threaten to quit if the House Judiciary Committee and the press does not lay off him on the matters of his involvement in wiretapping and the "plumbers," well, it is so highhanded it begs precedent.

What was he doing, going on strike for better working conditions on the eve of a very important presidential mission to the Middle East? Presidents Kennedy or Johnson probably would have fired him on the spot. But Dr. Kissinger evidently thinks that he is so important that he can upstage the President.

Besides being an extraordi-

nary bad show of manners, and a jarring action on the Middle East trip, Dr. Kissinger's tantrum must have profound effect on the minds of the leaders in the Kremlin, Peking, the Middle East and Europe. Is this Dr. Kissinger so self-important, they might well ask, that he is an entity to himself and not to the U.S. government?

I know of no public figure in Washington who has had a more favorable press in recent years than Dr. Kissinger. Newsweek foolishly depicted him as superman, and Time, which must be edited by ninnies these days, had him as Merlin the Magician. If anything, Dr. Kissinger has had all the best of it from the press.

He is neither superman nor Merlin. He is a gifted strategist, a stolid negotiator, and a man who has benefited greatly from the extraordinary opportunities and latitude given him by President Nixon. Were it not for Mr. Nixon, Dr. Kissinger would still be shuffling around as Harvard professor, appreciated in his national security world but not by the big world.

In cry-babying about his

honor being impugned, and innuendoes, and all the rest, Dr. Kissinger is only emphasizing that he asked for it. Sure newsmen roughed him up at his first press conference after his triumphant return from the Middle East, but that is the ball game in Washington these days. As Senator George D. Aiken (R., Vt.) put it, "The damn fool. Can't he take it? That's part of the business, being criticized."

There is gathering evidence that Dr. Kissinger did not tell the whole truth when he testified under oath last September about his role in the wiretapping of 17 staffers and newsmen. Nor was he as forthcoming as possible on how the special investigative unit, the "plumbers," were formed, or what his knowledge was of their activities.

Had Dr. Kissinger, in his testimony last September, defended the right of a government to protect the confidentiality of its national security information and admitted that he was a principal in the efforts to provide that protection, he would not be in the mess he is in now.

Instead, he depicted himself as a passive participant in these legitimate—at the time—activities. That's the sum and substance of it.

Now it is up to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was haphazard in its interrogation of Dr. Kissinger on these matters, to conduct a full scale, open investigation. It is also up to Dr. Kissinger to really stand up like a man and clear the record.

Around Washington there is a curious alliance now of Dr. Kissinger fans (many of whom detest Mr. Nixon and Republicans) and loyal Republicans who are damning

the press and the Judiciary Committee for leaks and such that caused Dr. Kissinger to erupt. Strange, but the Nixon-haters now defending Dr. Kissinger never complained about leaks that hurt Mr. Nixon and his other top lieutenants in recent months.

If some of Mr. Nixon's men are charged with or convicted of perjury, and if Dr. Kissinger's unsatisfactory answers before Senator J.W. Fulbright's committee could wind up as perjury, the rule of law should be the same. Isn't that what the righteous in this town have been arguing ever since Watergate broke out all over?

THE WASHINGTON POST, SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 1974

Rowland Evans and Robert Novak

Kissinger's Resignation Threat

Henry Kissinger's first serious thought of resigning came not last week but in April 1973, as the Watergate crisis exploded—and it was directly linked to his precarious position as an outsider in the Nixon White House.

For four years, Kissinger had been the target of Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, who used to refer to him in the inner sanctums as "Superkraut." Despite rising popularity and diplomatic triumphs, Kissinger always felt imperiled. Partly from that sense of siege came his ready consent to wiretap his own aides in the name of security. From it, too, came his brooding 14 months ago that the wiretaps would someday be used to entangle him in Watergate.

He was prophetic. Intimates are convinced that Haldeman's chief associate, John D. Ehrlichman, has leaked information against him. But the irony of his resignation threat is this: It fortifies both Mr. Nixon and indicted Watergate conspirators, including Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

All now seem under the same tent. Mr. Nixon and his disgraced aides benefit from association with Nobel Prize winner Kissinger. But both his brilliant career and American foreign policy are threatened.

Suspicion of Kissinger by the Haldeman gang came from his associations: Harvard professors, Georgetown dinner parties, Vietnam sessions with Nixon-haters. He had also hired scorned "Eastern elitists."

In the paranoiac White House, where everyone beyond Haldeman's inner circle was an enemy, Kissinger's political antecedents as intimate adviser of Mr. Nixon's political foe, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, were suspect.

Kissinger had his own ample share of paranoia, and the Nixon White House polished it. Thus, two years ago Kissinger ended an early-morning Oval Office session with the President and Haldeman to keep a breakfast appointment. When Haldeman asked who with, he named the author of a new Nixon book.

"He's no friend of ours," Haldeman exploded in anger. Kissinger turned to the President and said the book had praised the Nixon foreign policy, but in fact he had skipped the rest of it. Mr. Nixon was amused, but Haldeman was outraged.

When the decision was made in May 1969 to start tapping telephones of reporters and national security aides, Kissinger offered not the slightest resistance. He himself was enraged at the leaks. They threatened his network of secret diplomatic activity. He felt that a government unable to keep its secrets could not operate.

But beyond that was his own endangered flank. Surrounded by aides whom Haldeman regarded as Nixon enemies, Kissinger was "holler than the Pope," listing his closest associates on the National Security staff among those having access to secret information.

When Watergate broke, Kissinger quietly suggested that both Haldeman and Ehrlichman resign in Mr. Nixon's interest. They did not react favorably,

and Ehrlichman later became a source of newspaper stories seeming to link Kissinger into the enveloping scandal. Kissinger kept silent but even in April 1973 he was privately talking resignation if a spurious tie-in connected him with Watergate. Thus, when he went public in Salzburg, the words that flowed had been practiced in his mind for many months.

In going public, Kissinger is seeking a total exoneration that may be beyond anyone's power. Ambiguities over his exact words about the wiretapping issue can't be resolved.

Kissinger has now given Mr. Nixon his best anti-impeachment ammunition: Imposing his celebrated name to the President's, in the sense that, for totally

different reasons, both are now under attack from press and politicians. As one member of the House Judiciary Committee told us: "This affair has robbed the impeachment proceedings of its viability."

Kissinger's enemies are now cheering: Liberals who will never forgive his toughness—and success—on the Vietnam war; Zionists who feel he has betrayed Israel; anti-Soviet hardliners who hate his policy of detente.

Kissinger's public outrage over the issue of the security taps has now crystallized an international dilemma. But the real problem stemmed from a White House that fed and fostered paranoia in everyone who touched it.

© 1974, Field Enterprises, Inc.

SPECTRUM
Varying shades of personal opinion on current issues

NICK THIMMESCH
CBS RADIO NETWORK

JUNE 15, 1974

I'm Nick Thimmesch.

That was a bad show Dr. Henry Kissinger put on in Austria. Has his head swelled so big that he feels he can't breathe at any given moment? Sure, he's unhappy with one rough session with newsmen in Washington. And sure, he's probably weary from his hard work in the Middle East. But did he have to erupt on the eye of a historic visit of an American President to the Middle East?

Dr. Kissinger should know that he is not President in charge of foreign policy. The man who makes foreign policy in this Administration, and in all others, is the elected President of the United States. The Secretary of State helps shape that policy, advises on it and administers it. But Dr. Kissinger is not in charge of U.S. foreign policy.

Besides being an extraordinary bad show of manners and a jarring action on the Middle East trip, Kissinger's tantrum must have a profound effect on the minds of the leaders in the Kremlin, Peking, the Middle East and Europe. "Is this Kissinger so self-important," they might well ask, "that he is an entity to himself and not to the U.S. government?" He was like the little boy who didn't like the way the game was going so he stamped his foot and threatened to quit.

He blames his troubles now on the House Judiciary Committee and the press because of their intense interest in his role in wiretapping and in the White House Plumbers' operation. Actually, no one in Washington has had more favorable or kinder treatment in the press than Kissinger. Indeed, he was created by a press starving for a hero. And the press foolishly came up with Kissinger as Superman and Merlin the Magician. Kissinger is a mortal like all of us.

Dr. Kissinger brought his troubles on himself. Had he been more truthful -- more forthcoming -- when he was under oath before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last September, he wouldn't be in this mess.

Now there will have to be full-scale hearings in order for Kissinger to clear himself. And from the gathering evidence, there is good reason to believe that Dr. Kissinger wasn't telling the whole truth. This, in itself, is bad enough. But for Dr. Kissinger, in effect, to threaten to go on strike -- as the President of the U.S. goes into an important tour of the Middle East -- well, it's bush league. He hardly showed class.

Kissinger will be defended here by sycophants and others who don't know his great skills in ambiguity. But Dr. Kissinger should not be a sacred cow or a superman. He's supposed to tell the truth like everyone else when under oath.

This is Nick Thimmesch for Spectrum.

The diverse opinions expressed on SPECTRUM are those of the commentators themselves and should not be attributed to CBS or any of its affiliates
Produced under the supervision of CBS News, 524 West 57 Street, New York, New York 10019 (212) 765-4321

STAR-NEWS 6-14-74

MARY McGRORY

# Henry's Getting His Way

By Mary McGrory
Star-News Staff Writer

Henry Kissinger's tantrum is proving one of the most successful in the history of the art.

The entire globe is wringing its hands and offering him ice-cream, lollipops, a trip to the zoo, and even a pony if he will just get up off the floor and promise not to run away.

Kissinger's dreadful scene in Salzburg had the desired effect on the U.S. Senate, which went into a paradox of remorse and contrition for its part in the affair. It bears an especially heavy burden because it provided the forum at which he may have committed perjury — his confirmation hearings last September.

It is the purpose of a tantrum to make onlookers feel guilty and the Senate could hardly be more stricken. Fifty-two members have signed a resolution affirming their belief in the secretary's "integrity and veracity." The two leaders have spoken out in favor of national security wiretapping. It remains only for the group to endorse "failure to testify accurately and fully before a Senate committee," which is the new euphemism for lying, in case it turns out that Kissinger indeed was the instigator of the 17 wiretaps.

THE HOUSE Judiciary Committee, which inadvertently turned up the most damaging contradiction of Kissinger's sworn denials that he instigated the taps, is under a storm of abuse. The committee was stalking the President through agency abuse allegations when it stumbled over the secretary of State. Several of the members babbled to the press and Chairman Rodino's telephone has been ringing off the wall. Callers who face with equanimity the impeachment of Nixon rage at Rodino for "persecuting" Kissinger.

It was all Rodino could do to keep the committee from stopping in its tracks to vote praise of the secretary.

The climate is not one in which a Senate Foreign Relations Committee can proceed to the inquiry which Kissinger has demanded. If the senators really want to get to the bottom of it, they might prove it by requesting from Rodino the new documents, the most complete in the uproar, which cast a blight on the Queen's garden party at the British Embassy.

The secretary's wrath may have been programmed. He began his threats to resign privately almost immediately after his disastrous homecoming press conference. It may have been fed on the long plane ride to Europe by his chief, the President, the only person in sight who stands to gain from the explosion.

HIS IDOLIZED secretary is now caught up in the Watergate drama. And he is making effectively, although much more narrowly, the same lament which the President has been peddling for two years. How can you talk of bugs when I have brought you a generation of peace? The double standard has been introduced. If Kissinger is to be forgiven because he stilled the guns on the Golan Heights, should not the man who sent him there be excused, too?

Kissinger may be angry with himself for not "toughing it out" last September. Had he known then what he knows now of the fervor of his fans, he might have

said, "I did it and I'm glad," or "I did it and I'm sorry." Either way, he could have weathered the consequences.

His genius is to be thought a secret sympathizer by both sides, and it accounts for his triumphs in the desert. The Syrians and the Israelis were persuaded that he was working for them, just as hawks and doves, right and left, Goldwater and Fulbright, the White House and Georgetown all thought he was one of them.

## Point of View

His only failure was to convince three or four members of the press that he should not be questioned about taps from his office. He lapsed into incoherence over it. He tried to present himself in Salzburg as the victim of unknown accusers.

ALTHOUGH Richard Nixon cannot be called an "unimpeachable" source at this moment, he is surely one of the sources of the secretary's discomfiture. In the transcript of Feb. 28, in the familiar garbled form, a sentence that would trigger suspicion, occurs. "Henry ... I know that he asked that it be done."

Kissinger, threatened with the loss of his superman cape, a rift in the universal acclaim, stamped his foot. It was heard round the world. He may be mollified. And he must realize from the reaction that no matter what the Senate Foreign Relations Committee turns up, they would hate to add to his embarrassment, which he has elevated to being "incompatible with the dignity of the United States." What he means, of course is his own dignity, and he has long since convinced most of them, along with himself, that the two are indivisible.

Eagleton

Gravel

Talmadge

Hinick

Cook

who has consistently supported the President, conceded he would just as soon not have to vote on impeachment prior to the November elections. "politically, there's less strain if you've al-ready been beaten or re-elected," he said.

His close identification with the Presidents is causing some problems back

would be a problem for incumbent Democrats, too.

But Eagleton, for one, is not so sure his re-election prospects will suffer if he is forced to remain in Washington during an impeachment trial.

"It sure gives your opponent an advantage in terms of access to the voters, but on the other hand I guess you might get some indirect benefit from sitting here doing your duty," he said. "It might be a washout."

Eagleton can probably afford to view the situation calmly: he is expected to survive, with relative ease, a rematch of his 1968 race against former GOP Rep. Thomas Curtis.

Bayh and Gravel how

THINK THINS

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*According to the latest U.S. Government figures. Filter: 17 mg. "tar", 1.2 mg. nicotine; Menthol: 16 mg. "tar", 1.2 mg. nicotine av. per cigarette, FTC Report March 74.

washington metropolitan area transit authority

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CITY COUNCIL

Notice of Public Hearing

R1

THE WASHINGTON POST, FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 1974

Joseph Alsop

# 'The Political Role of the Media'

> "It is hypocrisy to pretend the press was not responsible for Dr. Kissinger's decision to resign unless cleared."

It is a time to stop being mealy-mouthed. If the U.S. government loses the invaluable services of Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, the enormous, Watergate-induced self importance of the American press will be to blame.

If the U.S. dollar—your dollar and my dollar—loses a lot of its value on the world markets; and if American foreign policy also joins American economic policy on the dung-heap of disorder, you can thank your friendly media.

The plain fact of the matter is that we now have in Washington, not just a double standard, but a triple standard. You have to begin right there to understand the resulting orgies of hypocrisy. And the first part of this triple standard for public judgment of public men concerns the political role of the press, or media.

It is the smarmiest kind of hypocrisy to pretend that the press was not directly responsible for Dr. Kissinger's decision to resign his office unless his name could be promptly and decisively cleared.

On last Thursday, he had just returned from one of the greatest and most totally exhausting diplomatic feats in rather more than a century. The secretary was being very modest if he merely thought he had "deserved well of the Republic"—in the phrase of old Rome.

His reception was a savage and disgusting press conference, during which he was treated like a common criminal. At one point, one of his interrogators even suggested that he might well be indicted for perjury, and bellowingly inquired whether he had already retained counsel to represent him in case of a perjury indictment. To be sure, only a minority thus disgraced the formerly honorable reporter's trade.

Yet in the subsequent commentaries, the members of this minority were never rebuked by their colleagues. Instead, Dr. Kissinger was rebuked. The climax came on the evening of Monday, when The New York Times hit the streets with an editorial accusing Dr. Kissinger of "dissembling" in tones majestically combining self-righteousness and pecksniffery. Telegraphed to Salzburg, the editorial promptly triggered Dr. Kissinger's press conference and resignation statement on Tuesday.

Those are the plain facts. What has happened cannot be comprehended without those facts. Yet this reporter has seen no account of Dr. Kissinger's

threat to resign that has set forth the facts either fully or forthrightly. Overall, it seems a mite odd for the major political role of the press to be left out of the accounting, when we have taken to holding our public men so strictly accountable.

This is the first part of the prevailing triple standard in Washington. As to the other part that justifies the word, "triple," it is simple enough. Dr. Kissinger has in fact been accused of "dissembling," and has even heard the word "perjury" hurled at him, because of a crucial national security matter involving less than a score of wiretaps. Under the law, such wiretaps are entirely permissible for national security purposes.

One wonders, then, why it was so shocking for a servant of the Nixon administration to worry about national security to the extent of knowingly approving under a score of wiretaps. After all, national security wiretaps were very much more numerous in the Truman administration, and they were vastly more numerous in the administration of President Kennedy.

This reporter, with a known three

wiretaps to his credit, all pre-Nixon, has long held the doctrine that if you have not been tapped, you have been slacking on your job. As to the Johnson administration, President Johnson sensibly did not trust the late J. Edgar Hoover—so he had the Secret Service do the tapping for him, again on a major scale. In short, the servants of the Nixon administration are plainly being judged by different tests than those that prevailed in happier times.

So we come back to the Watergate-induced self-importance of the American press that was noted at the outset, noting this is not meant to detract for one moment from the great achievement of exposing the crimes and squalls that now go by the name of Watergate.

Yet it seems this success has now led to a new and dangerous situation. Some people have now openly begun to follow the rule: ""I'll be judge, I'll be jury," said Cunning Old Fury; "I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."

Meanwhile Sen. J. William Fulbright, who has seen more than mere leaked bits of the total data, is reportedly confident that Dr. Kissinger did not dissemble when he appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee. Furthermore, even with Cunning Old Fury, one supposes that some vague notions of national interest usually prevailed.

© 1974, Los Angeles Times

["Nixon's Favorite Mayor Seeks New Tag", "A LOCAL-AID BILL\nENCOUNTERS SNAG", "W. W. APPLE, JR.", "In the part of some states where the Republican Party is not a strong party, Mr. Apple, in his righting hand, has been a strong推進力. The again, Mr. Apple, who has long been a member of the Republican Party, has been a strong推進力. He has been a strong推進力 for some years, and they know that, if they can defeat the Democrats in a state when the Democrats are winning, they will have to fight a battle when the Democrats are not strong. He will be noticed also. Mr. Apple will be noticed also. Mr. Apple will be noticed also. Mr. Apple will be noticed also. He will be noticed also. He