Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

Charter Day
College of William and Mary

February 10, 2001

Thank you, President Sullivan, members of the Board of Visitors, ladies and
gentlemen. Thank you very much for this very warm, very friendly welcome. I was told
that you do that for all your Chancellors.

It is impossible to follow so distinguished a Chancellor as my friend, Lady
Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher had an unbelievable ability to get to the heart of a problem.
I once called on her at 10 Downing Street, and she said, "I understand you want to talk to
me about Latin America. What is it you want to talk about?" I said, "I'd like to talk about
the Latin American debt problem." Lady Thatcher said, "When you borrow money, you
pay it back. That is the only debt problem I know anything about."

So it is a great privilege for me to be here at the second oldest university in this
country on an occasion when such distinguished people as Larry Eagleburger and
Adolphus Hailstork are granted honorary degrees. And I look forward to my service here
as Chancellor.

I would like to talk to you a little bit about the perspective for the conduct of
foreign policy. I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker. And therefore I
have seen something of the perspectives of each of these groups. And there is a huge
difference between these perspectives. As a professor, you can pick your subject; you
can work on it for as long as you wish; you are responsible only to your best judgment
and the judgment of your friends. And you have the possibility of changing your mind
and saying, "I'll go to the library and write another book."

As a policymaker, the problems are imposed on you. You cannot choose your subject, and the most overwhelming experience for all of us who have been in policy-making jobs is that there is almost always more to do on any given day than you can possibly accomplish. And so one of the necessities of a policymaker is to choose from among the plethora of events that bear in on him those which most urgently need attention. He has to make sure in that process that he does not neglect what is important for what is urgent.

As a policymaker, you are responsible not only for the best, but also for the worst outcomes. There are some experiments you cannot try. Not that you would not like the outcome, but because you cannot except the consequences if you turn out to be wrong. So you cannot take risks beyond a certain point. You do not have the option of doing it all over again. You cannot say, I'll go to the library and write another book.

A policymaker has to strike a balance between his values and necessities. Any American president in any administration and any prime minister in any country has to start with the fundamental requirements of the security of his country. That is the irreducible condition he has to keep in mind, the impact of his actions and the perception of others.

As a professor, as a philosopher, one has a duty to think of absolute values, and those values are, of course, not dependent upon circumstances. But, as a policymaker, one always has to understand that one is living in a world of many societies with different approaches. A policymaker on the whole must approach his goals in stages, and each stage may be imperfect; he is, in some sense, a prisoner of circumstances.

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The great presidents and the great leaders in the world have been men with strong moral convictions. They might not have been able to translate their convictions into outcomes in one term in office or maybe even in one lifetime, but the decisions that policymakers at high levels have to make are always very closely balanced and therefore cannot be solved consistently without strong moral convictions. The easy decisions get made at lower levels. At high levels, the pros and cons are often 51 to 49, and usually even narrower. And that is a passage one can navigate only by strong moral convictions, even when they don't translate immediately into the ultimate goals. In our national debate, there is a need for a greater understanding of both sides. One reason why I am happy to be here is to do what I can in a limited way to contribute to this discussion.

We in America are in a very special circumstance. We represent a country that has never had a powerful neighbor that was populated in its vast majority by immigrants. Being an immigrant myself, I know that the meaning of America for people like this is different from that of what most other nations have of themselves.

For the greatest part of our history, we have had two major attributes. One, we could afford to separate ourselves from the rest of the world and engage ourselves only in the case of overwhelming danger and then retreat back into our country. And secondly, we believed, and correctly, that our values were important and relevant to all the rest of the world. But for the greater part of our history, we also thought that the implementation of these values was not something we should fight for by military means unless American national security was involved.

In 1823, John Quincy Adams said the following: "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America's heart,

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her benedictions, and her prayers. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend a general cause by the countenance of her voice, and by the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors of usurp the standards of freedom....She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

This is one of the challenges of our time. The United States will always stand for freedom and democracy, and the United States must support it with economic and other measures. But the United States has to be careful about engaging itself in military operations in countries in which we cannot define what the outcome is and in which we then become involved in passions that are not relevant to our national security. This was one of the debates in recent years over various trouble spots around the world. And it is especially important because as we look around the world today, we see a great many problems of different varieties. We have been brought up to believe that every problem in every part of the world responds to similar motivations, but the fact is that, when we look around the world today, we see at least four different kinds of world:

> The world of the North Atlantic and the Western Hemisphere, where there are democracies based on market economics and where the principles of American democracy can be applied quite literally.

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The world of Asia, in which the nations deal with each other very similarly to the nations of Europe in the nineteenth century, with some emphasis on the balance of power, with some concerns for each other's strategic actions. It is the area where there is, in fact, an increase in armament. And it requires a different kind of understanding by the United States more similar to what Britain had to do in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The world of the Middle East, which is more similar to the Europe of the seventeenth century, characterized by religious wars and ideological conflicts.

The world of Africa, which is really an appeal to the human conscience. In Africa, there are no conflicts that affect the security of major powers, only the well-being of the local population. It is an area where a globalized approach by all the nations of the world to improve conditions is extraordinarily important.

So America today faces these different worlds, and we are the one country that has an impact in all these regions simultaneously. In our history, every problem we have recognized has had a solution. In this world that I have described, we are engaged in a permanent process. Those of you who study international affairs and those of you who are concerned with foreign policy should understand that we have a national obligation to have a perspective of the future, but you cannot have a perspective of the future if you do not respect your past.

Therefore we have to transcend these bitter disputes of recent decades in which vested interests become involved in undermining the confidence of America in itself. I have a Chinese acquaintance, who claims that there is the following proverb. I say he claims this because I am not sure there are actually as many proverbs as the Chinese tell us there are. The proverb goes like this: "When there is turmoil under the heavens, little

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problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to little problems, and little problems should not obsess us."

Our national task is to make sure that we deal with the big and not the little problems, that we reduce the big problems to little problems. That is our task, it is our opportunity, and to be able to make whatever small contribution we can make, to do it together.

It is an honor to be here as your Chancellor. Thank you very much.

## Luncheon Remarks

I would like to thank all of you for the marvelous reception and also for the opportunity to serve here as Chancellor. As I said already in my remarks this morning, Margaret Thatcher--who wrote me an enthusiastic letter about William and Mary, urging me to accept this--has been a very good friend of Nancy's and mine since the 70's. In fact, Nancy discovered her first. She was education minister, and I had never heard of her. Nancy said, "You have to meet Margaret Thatcher." But every time I requested a meeting with her, the British government thought, "What could he possibly be up to talking to the education minister?" So it never happened. I finally had to ask a mutual friend to invite us both to dinner, and that is how I met her. And we have been good friends since.

I am very happy to be here on the day that Larry Eagleburger is being honored. He and I worked together. He was assigned to me by the Johnson administration when I was appointed as a liaison, and I was absolutely determined I was going to have my own

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people. I had decided that just as soon as I was sworn in, I was going to fire him. And that is not what happened. He became my indispensable and close associate, and an even closer friend over the years. He has been enormously devoted to this university, and he was one of the principle factors that led me to accept this. Then you all know President Sullivan. You let him enter the door, and you're gone. And I let him enter the door.

I would like to thank all of you for what you do for the university. I would like to thank the members of the Green and Gold Society who help provide the private funding and the members of the Board of Visitors who have guided this college.

I would like to say a word to the professors because this morning I did make some remarks about the differences between professors and policymakers. But I think that it is not to denigrate the role of professors. I think it is important to have a group in our country that maintains a sense of perspective and contributes to a historical sense.

Frankly, starting with the Vietnam War, maybe even a little earlier, we have had this problem in the academic community, that I know. When I was a graduate student and a young professor, none of us ever thought we would be in government. So if you wanted to contribute to the national thinking, you had to develop, to write something with a five-to- ten-year perspective, and you realized that this was your function.

Then, starting with the Kennedy administration, so many academics got into government. Then, starting with the Vietnam War, such a division occurred between them that it tilted the values, in my view, of a lot of the academic discussion. In this sense, I used to think they were divided between revolutionaries and job applicants.

The job applicants wrote more or less the same papers you already saw in the government, and the revolutionaries were doing the sort of thing we saw this morning

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and elsewhere. So, in the process, it was becoming fairly difficult to get a non-partisan,
long-range view that recognized the importance of where we came from and that
remembered that the hardest path for any society and any leadership group is to help the
country to go from where it is to where it has never been. That takes a certain act of faith
in your country, and it is an act of confidence. And the policymakers run the risk of
being submerged by the urgent. And so I believe that the academic community can make
a great contribution by offering perspectives, provided they do not oversimplify it too
much. So each side has its important role to play.

At any rate, I want to say to the professors who are the architects of the education:
We--if I may say this since I also have been a professor--contribute. When I come back,
I hope to meet with the students during programs that the faculty arranged and to be in
contact with the great teaching which I know is going on.

So let me thank you for giving me this opportunity. Let me thank all of you for
what you do for William and Mary. And for having made this such a great occasion for
my wife, my son who came all the way from Los Angeles to participate in this, and to tell
you how proud I am to be a member of this family.

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Dr. Henry A. Kissinger

February 10, 2001

Thank you President Sullivan, members of the Board of Visitors, ladies and
gentlemen. Thank you very much for this very warm, very friendly welcome. I was told
that you do that for all your Chancellors.

It is impossible to follow so distinguished a Chancellor as my friend, Lady
Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher had an unbelievable ability to get to the heart of a problem.
I once called on her at 10 Downing Street and she said, "I understand you want to talk to
me about Latin America. What is it you want to talk about?" I said, "I'd like to talk about
the Latin American debt problem." Lady Thatcher said, "When you borrow money you
pay it back. That is the only debt problem I know anything about."

I would like to talk to you a little bit about the perspective which foreign
policy is conducted. I have been a professor and I've been a policy maker. And
therefore I have seen something of the perspectives of each of these groups. And there is
a huge difference between these perspectives from some points of view. As a professor,

[Y]

you can pick your subject; you can work on it for as long as you wish; you are
responsible only to your best judgement and the judgment of your friends. And you have
the possibility of changing your mind and saying, "I'll go to the library and write another
book."

As a policy-maker, the problems are imposed on you. You can not choose your
subject and the most overwhelming experience for all of us who have been in policy-
making jobs is that there is almost always more to do on any given day then you can
possibly accomplish. And so one of the necessities of a policy-maker is to choose from
among the plethora of events that bear in on him those which most urgently need
attention. He has to make sure in that process that he does not neglect what is important
for what is urgent.

As a policy-maker you are responsible not only for the best that can happen, but
also for the worst that can happen. There are some experiments you cannot try. Not that
you would not like the outcome, but because you cannot except the consequences if you
turn out to be wrong. **So you cannot take risks beyond a certain point.**

You cannot say, I'll go to the library and write another book. **And those are
elements to keep in mind when you judge the actions of any policy-maker in any
administration.**

A policy-maker has to strike a balance between his values and necessities. Any
American president in any administration and any prime minister in any country has to
start with the fundamental requirements of the security of his country. That is the
irreducible condition he has to keep in mind, the impact of his actions and the perception
of others.