Swinging Professor

# Kissinger Is 'Faceless Man' of Nixon Administration

WASHINGTON — A development wholly unforeseen by the Founding Fathers is the appearance of a faceless man standing just behind the President and wielding huge power.

Not a Cabinet officer, nor an elected official nor even a representative of some cohesive section of the public, his power is derived entirely from a single source: His personal relationship with the President.

A German-born former Harvard professor is the latest of the men who have cast an anonymous but considerable shadow over the White House. Graying, gentle-spoken Henry Kissinger, 46, has firmly established himself as a predominant force, second only to Richard M. Nixon, in shaping U.S. foreign policy.

Foreign diplomats approach Kissinger just as deferentially as they approach the Secretary of State — and with reason. They have seen him — and heard him speak up — at most of the presidential meetings with world leaders.

They also know that he has freer access to the President than any person outside the Nixon family circle. In effect, his audience is constant. He is in and out of the Oval Office all day — for an average of 90 minutes per day. There are also long, informal chats at Camp David and on the beaches of Key Biscayne and San Clemente.

***

In all this close communication, Kissinger presents not only his own views and suggestions, but also those of others. Still, he insists that his job is not to make policy but

simply to present the President with the various options.

"There is no 'Kissinger policy' on any substantive questions," he maintains. "If there were, the whole new mechanism we have set up in the National Security Council — not to speak of the relations between the governmental agencies — would be in a shambles."

In this century, critics of the "faceless man" phenomenon have held that such a shambles is imminent ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson's ubiquitous Col. Edward M. House. Harry Hopkins was one of the most respected and feared men in Franklin Roosevelt's Washington. McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow were equally controversial figures in the Kennedy and Johnson periods.

What particularly annoys the detractors of the recent crop of faceless ones is that by all known political rules they have come from nowhere. Academics all, they carried no votes in their hip pockets, had no money to speak of, and their prestige was limited to an intellectual elite who mostly disapproved of U.S. foreign policy.

Kissinger, moreover, wasn't even an old friend of Nixon — nor an admirer — before he signed on with the new administration. The two men were barely acquainted on election day. In fact, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man; had been an aloof, shy figure on the New York governor's campaign staff before the Republican convention and had been bitterly disappointed at the outcome.

In the end, it was

Rockefeller himself who brought Nixon and Kissinger together.

"Rocky set up the job for Henry," says a former Rockefeller aide, "because he wanted to reward Kissinger, because he respects Kissinger's intelligence, and because he thought it might give him (Rockefeller) some voice in foreign policy."

***

Surprisingly — or perhaps not so surprisingly — the leader of the Silent Majority has gotten along very well indeed with the naturalized

former professor who arrived in the U.S. at the age of 15 as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany. Both the President and his euphemistically titled Assistant for National Security Affairs are pragmatic, mildly conservative, not given to flights of imagination.

Incongruously enough, Kissinger has fulfilled another and totally unexpected role in the Nixon administration. He has become the resident "social lion" of the White House.

In what may be the least swinging administration since the days of Bess and Harry

Truman, Kissinger is the self-confessed "secret swinger" of Nixon's Washington. As Washington's most eligible higher-echelon single man, the divorced ex-professor somehow has found time for an occasional night out with the capital city's mod latter-day Perle Mesta, willowy, beautiful Barbara Howar; with glamorous magazine writer Gloria Steinem; or with tall, blonde New York socialite Nancy McGinnis.

Though Miss McGinnis seems to have the upper hand these days, the exchanges with Mrs. Howar were more quotable. They met when she spied him talking with a dozen "very important men" at a diplomatic party.

Barbara walked toward the group, crooked her index finger, and Henry came. "Let's sit on the couch so we can touch knees," said Barbara, and the friendship began. Leaving, Kissinger clicked his heels in Prussian fashion and said, "I am going to the Far East. When I return, may I take you out?"

"If you take some troops out of Vietnam, you can take me out any time," said Barbara.

But romance with the man she calls "Super Kraut" is not easy — what with constant phone calls from the White House and a constant bodyguard. "It's all about as sexy as taking a ride in a Brink's armored car," she says.

Chances are, Kissinger will not marry under present circumstances. He's already married — to his job. And he is pleasing the one man in the world he has to please in order to keep that job.

Newsweek Feature Service

HENRY KISSINGER

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wie sehr er selbst in seiner Denkweise wenigstens unbewußt noch den Vorstellungen des kalten Krieges verhaftet ist. Dennoch: wo es um Außenpolitik geht, scheint der Realist Nixon stark genug, um über den Schatten seiner eigenen Vergangenheit zu springen. Zweifellos übt Henry Kissinger, geduldiger Planer einer Realpolitik auf lange Sicht, einen ausgleichenden Einfluß aus. Mehr als bei allen anderen außenpolitischen Fragen gerät Nixon freilich in seiner Vietnampolitik unter den Zwang der gesellschaftlichen Krise und der Rassenspannungen in den USA. Sie bestimmen das Tempo des Truppenabzugs ebensosehr, wie die Rechnung der außenpolitischen Experten. Wahrscheinlich hat Nixon nicht die Zeit zu einem gelassenen Schachspiel um Positionen, wie es den Wunschvorstellungen Kissingers entspräche.

Der Einzelgänger Nixon findet es auch als Präsident schwer, seine Absichten offen und überzeugend darzulegen. Vielleicht ist der Protest der Gegner seiner Vietnam-Politik wirklich nur die Folge eines Mißverständnisses, das sich über Nixons Ziele täuscht. Sicher ist, daß sich hier eine Vertrauens-

lücke zwischen dem Präsidenten und einem wesentlichen Teil der amerikanischen jungen Intelligenz aufbaut, – so wie sie bereits zwischen dem Weißen Haus und der farbigen Bevölkerung existiert. Die Gefährlichkeit einer solchen Vertrauenslücke wird noch steigen, wenn die mobilisierte „schweigende Mehrheit“ bemerkt, daß den konservativen Kampfparolen keine Patent-Lösungen folgen können, die Amerikas Selbstgefühl und Selbstsicherheit innen- und außenpolitisch wiederherstellen. Die Hoffnungen, die geweckt wurden, finden keine Nahrung in der vorsichtigen und zögernden Politik, die der Präsident wirklich führt. Das Ergebnis solcher Taktik kann auch der „schweigenden Mehrheit“ eines Tages als Doppeldeutigkeit erscheinen. Niemand weiß genug von Nixon, um sagen zu können, ob er sich dieser Gefahr bewußt ist. Im letzten Wahlkampf hatte er erklärt, die Tage einer passiven Präsidentschaft seien vorbei, und die Präsidentschaft sei in erster Linie der Ort moralischer Führung. Just diese Rolle scheint Richard Nixon, der in seinem ersten Amtsjahr als Taktiker regierte, nicht übernehmen zu wollen.

## Rassenunruhen in den USA

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„Nicht zu verwalten, sondern zu führen ist die Aufgabe des Präsidenten... Wenn Fragen des menschlichen Überlebens vom Urteil eines Mannes abhängen, muß er die Zeit haben, sich auf die Entscheidungen zu konzentrieren, die kein anderer als er treffen kann.“ (Richard Nixon über „Das Wesen der Präsidentschaft“ am 18. September 1968.)

Sie haften sich in ein unverfängliches Thema geflüchtet – sie sprachen über ihre Hunde. Doch welches Thema ist unverfänglich bei einer Gelegenheit wie dieser? Der hypnotische Blick Polysphems, des einäugigen, nie schlummernden Zyklopen der veröffentlichten Meinung, fixiert sie seit langem. Ihm entging nichts, was sie taten und wenig von dem, was sie in ihren Gedanken bewegten. Alles, was sie unternahmen, hatte seine politische Konsequenz, sogar der Umgang mit ihren Hunden. Lyndon Johnson hatte seine Beagles an den Schlappohren über den Rasen des Weißen Hauses geschwenkt und es durch diesen Satrapen-Spaß mit den Tierschützern, den Damen mit violett getöntem Haar und den Ästheten des Eastern Establishment verdorben, bevor sie sich vom Anblick seiner Operationsnarbe erholen konnten. Richard Nixon hatte durch die Rührgeschichte vom Cocker Spagniel seiner Töchter das Herz der Nation erweicht, seine Karriere aus einer Krise gerettet und sich dafür den Ruf falscher Treuherzigkeit eingehandelt, die vor keiner Attacke auf die Tränendrüsen zureckschreckt.

## Auf dem Weg zum Kapitol

Es gab an diesem grauen Januartag vor einem Jahr nicht viele Berührungspunkte zwischen dem alten und dem neuen Präsidenten, außer der posensaften Rolle, die ihr Verhältnis zu den Hunden in ihrer politischen Vergangenheit gespielt hatte. Vietnam verband sie noch nicht so, wie es sie später verbinden sollte. Noch war aus dem Krieg Johnsons nicht der Krieg Nixons geworden. In der Präsidentschaft steckt eine elementare, gleichmachtende Kraft. Sie bringt es fertig, Männer zu verbinden, die nichts gemeinsam haben als ihre festgerosteten Abneigungen und im Temperament so verschieden sind wie der extrovertierte, rauhbautige Texaner und sein verdeckter, ganz auf Defensive eingestellter und etwas aus der amerikanischen Art geschlagener Nachfolger. Amerika konnte Johnson zürnen, weil es ihn durchschaute. Unter Nixon muß es sich selbst zürnen, weil es ihm nicht

auf den Grund zu schauen vermag. Es empfindet nicht mehr Mißtrauen gegen ihn wie zu Beginn seiner Laufbahn, aber ein vages Unbehagen, ein Gefühl der Fremdheit, das auch zwölf Monate nach seinem Einzug ins Weiße Haus noch nicht weichen will. Der Präsident der „Kiwanis“, der „Elche“, der „Töchter der amerikanischen Revolution“, der keimfreien Patrioten, der positiv gesinnten Vorgarten-Spießer, der Leute, die er die „schweigende Mehrheit“ nennt, der Kleinbürger, die am Veteranentag das Sternenbanner in ihren Rasen pflanzen – dieser Präsident Amerikas, wo es sich am amerikanischsten gibt, ist in seiner psychologischen Konstruktion den akzeptierten Normen des amerikanischen Charakters fern.

## Nixon ist kein Mann der Unbefangenheit

Das ist die Ursache der Spannungen, die Nixon begleitet haben, seit er im öffentlichen Leben steht. Mit den engen Verhältnissen, aus denen er kommt, und mit der überanstrengten Intensität seines Aufstieges lassen sich die Widerstände nicht erklären, die ihm mehr als anderen Politikern zu schaffen machten. Wäre er nur der verschwitzte Streber und unsauber zuschlagende Nahkämpfer gewesen, als den ihn das publizistische Klischee zwanzig Jahre lang ausgab, so hätte ihn die Abneigung der Nation längst ausgebrannt. Es liegt auch nicht an der staren Quäkermoral des Elternhauses, die durch ein harmonisches Familienleben kompensiert war. Es liegt an dem, was man die unamerikanische Komponente seines Charakters nennen muß – und das ist eine Menge, behauptet von einem Mann, der sich den Idealen der amerikanischen Tradition eng verbunden fühlt. Unbefangenheit und Natürlichkeit sind seine Sache nicht.

Obwohl die Nixons irischer Abkunft sind, ist wenig von der aufgelockerten Selbstsicherheit der Kelten an ihm. Eher ließen sich, blickt man schärfer hin, in seinen linkischen Bewegungen, in der Gequältheit seines Humors, in seinem Mangel an Unmittelbarkeit und in einer Verletztlichkeit, die er sich eisern abtrainierte, Spuren einer kontinentaleuropäischen Anlage entdecken. Er ist ein Fremdling in der Welt der WASP, der „White Anglo-Saxon Protestants“, deren Präsident er ist. Sport war schon auf der Schule nicht sein Glanzpunkt. Die Übermenschen-Schultern der Fußball-Stars waren nicht seine Kleidernummer. Dafür war er im Debattierklub der Erste – ein seriöser, etwas gehemmter Primus, den sie den „düsteren Gus“ nannten, gerüstet mit trefflichen Argumenten, aber auch beschwert mit einem Hang zur Selbstanalyse und zu Selbstzweifeln.

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Es fehlt ein Element der Leichtigkeit. Amerika hat noch nie Führer geliebt, die nicht kraftvolle Unbekümmertheit ausstrahlten und schwer an ihrer Verantwortung zu tragen schienen. Es hat in diesem Jahrhundert immer Männer zu Präsidenten gewählt, die Autorität und Selbstsicherheit besaßen oder sie mindestens gut vortäuschten – den imperialistischen Rauhreiter Theodore Roosevelt, den prinzipienstrengen Großbürger Taft, den intellektuellen Moralisten Wilson, den Playboy-Vorläufer Harding, die Konservativen Coolidge und Hoover, den aristokratischen Reformer Roosevelt, den eisenharten Kämpfer Truman, den Volkshelden Eisenhower, den Weltliebling Kennedy, den Viehzüchter Johnson – es war keiner unter ihnen, dem es eingefallen wäre, die Nation zum Senken der Stimme aufzufordern, wie es Nixon bei seiner Vereidigung tat.

Andere Zeiten. Diese Präsidentschaft ist komplizierter als es denen scheint, die sie in schlichter Vereinfachung für einen Rückfall Amerikas in eine Vergangenheit halten, die in den Dschungeln Vietnams und unter dem Trümmerschutt der Rassenkrawalle verscharrt liegt.

## In Krisen geübt

Es besteht ein merkwürdiger Parallelismus zwischen der Verfassung, in der sich das amerikanische Volk auf dem Rückweg von vielen enttäuschten Illusionen befindet, und dem Mann an der Spitze, der durch das Feuer seiner sechs Krisen gegangen ist. Die Ära, in der Amerika, unbegrenzter in seiner Selbstüberschätzung als in seinen Möglichkeiten, der Welt das ideologische Heil zu bringen meinte, ging an dem Tag zu Ende, an dem Nixon und Johnson zum Kapitol fuhren. Die neue Richtung kann ihren Ausdruck nicht finden ohne einen neuen Stil. Der Stil orientiert sich an der Vergangenheit des Mannes. Es kann nach der harten Schule der Politik, durch die er ging, nur ein behüteter Stil sein, mehr umsichtig als risikofreudig, mehr behutsam als aggressiv, mehr darauf bedacht, Fehler zu meiden, als sich durch Originalität zu exponieren.

Die Entwicklung war lange reif für einen Wechsel der Szenerie. Es hat seine innere Rechtfertigung, daß die Vereinigten Staaten in der ersten Krise des nationalen Bewußtseins, die sie als Weltmacht erleben, von einem Präsidenten regiert werden, dessen Wesen ein Spiegel der jähen Zweifel ist. Die Rauhreiter, die Kreuzzügler, die Weltlieblinge und politischen Laienprediger, immer bereit, die Erde „safe for democracy“ zu machen, wären nicht die Leute für diese Stunde. Niemand kann

sagen, ob es ein Rezept für Amerikas Probleme gibt, und noch weniger, ob Nixon es finden wird. Doch ohne Logik ist es nicht, daß die Behandlung der Krise einem Mann anvertraut ist, der weiß, was es heißt, mit seinen eigenen Krisen fertig zu werden.

## Der Zwang zur Mitte

Vietnam ist nur der Code-Name für vieles, was seit hundert Jahren in der Entwicklung der amerikanischen Gesellschaft schief ging. Sieben Jahrzehnte sozialer Anachronismus nach dem Bürgerkrieg, gefolgt von drei Dekaden chaotischen Reformeifers, machten das Land reif für die Couch des Psychiaters. New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Große Gesellschaft – es wurde alles kanoniisiert, was sich mit dem Adjektiv „neu“ anreichern ließ. Der größte Teil des Weges vom Pinonierstaat zum Wohlfahrtsstaat ist zurückgelegt. Das Bedürfnis, nach diesem stürmischen Lauf eine Atempause einzulegen, war seit 1966 überall zu spüren. Konservativen Politikern, die das Erbe einer solchen Entwicklung antreten, ist es nicht aufgegeben, die Uhren zurückzudrehen. Es ist ihre natürliche Funktion, die von der Linken besetzten neuen Positionen zu konsolidieren.

Nixon ist nicht nur im figurativen Sinn ein Politiker der Mitte. Die Mitte zu halten ist für ihn eine Lebensfrage, ein Problem seiner physischen Kondition. Harmonia, die Tochter der Aphrodite und Personifizierung des schönen Gleichgewichtes, hat ihn nie an der Hand geführt. Ein Mann, dem die Asymmetrie das Gesicht prägte, hat etwas zu kompensieren. Er kämpft den Kampf um das rechte Gleichgewicht jede wache Minute, wenn er am Rednerpult steht, wo seine Gesten selten zu seinen Worten passen, wenn er, nie ganz gelöst, seine zeremoniellen Pflichten erfüllt, wenn er mit schief gehaltenem Kopf und erkünstelter Jovialität, gewaltsam Konversation machend, bei Empfängen die Besucherkette an sich vorüberziehen läßt.

Seine großen Gaben sind wie einer jener Willkürakte der Natur, die perfekte Einzelheiten oft so zusammenfügt, daß sie ein unperfektes Ganzes ergeben. Er hat die logische Präzision, die analytische Kraft, die dialektische Schärfe, den politischen Blick und das rasche Reaktionsvermögen, aber es fällt ihm schwerer als ungehemmteren Politikern, diese Elemente in das rechte Verhältnis zu einander zu bringen.

Die Defensive ist permanent. Die kritische Selbstbeobachtung setzt nie aus. Das Bedürfnis, sich mit äußeren Zeichen der Ordnung zu umgeben, ist grenzenlos. Was an echter Beschwingtheit

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fehlt, wird durch Systematik ausgeglichen. Verläß-
lichkeit und intellektuelle Ehrlichkeit gelten ihm
mehr als brillante Originalität und glanzvolle Aus-
strahlung, die einem Präsidenten ohne charismati-
sche Wirkung, schon wegen des Kontrastes, in sei-
ner Umgebung nicht willkommen sein können.

Man versteht, warum er sich damals in Miami
den unwahrscheinlichen Spiro Agnew als Stellver-
treter aussuchte. Sein Veto galt den „Glamour-
Boys“ aus dem republikanischen Jet-Set, den Lind-
says und Percys, die nicht in diese Administration
gepaßt hätten, deren dominierendes Merkmal die
Ausgeglichenheit ist. Es ist eine homogene Equipe,
geformt von dem Verlangen des Chefs, eine glatte
Front zu bieten, an der die Enterhaken des „jour-
nalistisch-akademischen Komplexes“ keinen Halt
finden.

Führer ohne Charisma

Mit mehr als hundert Ratgebern, Assistenten
und Sonderassistenten „to the President“ ist der
Stab des Weißen Hauses der umfänglichste aller
Zeiten. Er funktioniert wie ein wohlgeordneter Ge-
schäftsbetrieb, wie ein überdimensioniertes An-
waltsbüro. Die Zuständigkeiten sind säuberlich ab-
gegrenzt. Es ist eine Maschinerie, die geräuschloser
läuft als unter Johnson. Interne Auseinanderset-
zungen, plötzliche Demissionen und texanische
Vulgär-Prosa, bis voriges Jahr ein unerschöpflicher
Stoff über das hauptstädtische Getuschel, sind
nicht die Merkmale dieser ordentlichen Admini-
stration. Ihr Arbeitsklima ist besser temperiert als
unter dem unberechenbaren und zu verbaler Ag-
gression neigenden Dienstherrn Johnson, dem erst
die Kennedy-Intellektuellen und dann die engeren
Freunde davonliefen.

Das Weiße Haus funktioniert unter Nixon wie
eine schalldichte Kammer, die nur die erwünschten
Geräusche nach außen dringen läßt. Es gibt sich
pressefromm, aber die offene Präsidentschaft, die
Amerika versprochen hatte, ist nicht daraus gewor-
den. Natürlich gibt es so etwas überhaupt nicht; es
gibt nur eine Präsidentschaft, die den Eindruck
vermeidet, daß sie die Öffentlichkeit bewußt irre-
führt, wie es Johnson mit seiner Passion für das
Spiel mit verdeckten Karten tat. Er war fähig,
schon vollzogene Ernennungen zu annullieren, wenn
sie vor der amtlichen Bekanntgabe in der Zeitung
standen. Er liebte das Geheimnis. Er leugnete Tat-
sachen, die ihm unbequem waren, auch dann noch,
wenn schon längst niemand mehr an ihnen zweifel-
te. Mehr als an Vietnam scheiterte er an seiner
Unglaubwürdigkeit, die ihm Amerika weniger ver-
zieh als seine falsche Politik. Gewarnt durch dieses

Henry A. Kissinger
Amerikanische Außenpolitik

(Innere Struktur und Außenpolitik, Haupt-
probleme der amerikanischen Außenpolitik,
Die Vietnam-Verhandlungen)

»Drei Aufsätze, die deutlich machen, warum Kissinger für den amerikanischen Präsidenten so wichtig, ja vielleicht unentbehrlich ist.«
(Christ und Welt)

204 Seiten, Leinen, 18 DM

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Beispiel verspricht Nixon, was die Beendigung des Krieges betrifft, nicht mehr, als er halten kann. Er kann sich noch frei im Land bewegen, was sein Vorgänger im letzten Jahr aus Angst vor Demonstrationen nicht mehr wagen durfte.

Gegenoffensive

Ein Präsident mit konservativem Hintergrund –
da hilft kein Kurs der Mitte – kann bei der heuti-
gen Nervenverfassung Amerikas von der machtvol-
len Koalition zwischen Campus, Kongreß und Ko-
lumnisten bestenfalls nur eine unbehagliche Tole-
rierung erwarten. Die Illusion, er könnte durch
Wohlverhalten und liberale Fügsamkeit das Vorur-
teil der Massenmedien überwinden, hatte Nixon
nie. Er erkaufte sich damit nur eine Schonfrist, die
spätestens im Herbst abgelaufen war.

Seither hat sich die Atmosphäre im Weißen
Haus merklich geändert. Der Präsident ging zur Ge-
genoffensive über. Er ist überzeugt, mit seiner Viet-
nampolitik des methodischen, aber nicht überstürz-
ten Desengagements die Mehrheit Amerikas hinter
sich zu haben. Monate vergingen, bevor das Kon-
zept feste Form annahm. Dafür ist es ein Endpro-
dukt, Resultat eines für den Systematiker Nixon
charakteristischen Prozesses der geduldigen Sich-
tung aller Aspekte eines Problems, des sorgfältigen
Gegeneinanderwägens der Empfehlungen, die dazu
von den Diplomaten, den Militärs, den zivilen Rat-
gebern und den Nachrichtendiensten vorgebracht
werden. Noch unter keiner Administration wurden
so viele Positionspapiere geschrieben und so viele
Analysen von so vielen verschiedenen Stellen beige-
steuert.

Henry Kissinger

Der Filter der Ideen ist der Nationale Sicherheitsrat Henry Kissingers. Er definiert die Optio-

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nen, die dem Präsidenten zur Verfügung stehen, und bereitet sie für die Entscheidung durch ihn vor. Es ist eine ganz auf Rationalisierung bedachte Art des Regierens. Sie orientiert sich nach dem Prinzip, das Nixon vor seiner Wahl aufstellte – die Zeit eines Mannes, von dessen Entschlüssen das Überleben von Millionen abhängt, ist zu kostbar, um mit Verwaltung belastet zu werden. Er muß den rechten Abstand zu den Dingen behalten, um führen zu können. Das gilt bei ihm besonders in der Außenpolitik, die er für sein eigenstes Gebiet hält.

Franklin Roosevelt war der erste Präsident, der sein eigener Außenminister war. Während er den wenig aktiven Cordell Hull, einen reizenden südstaatlichen Gentleman, elf Jahre an der Spitze des State Department beließ, griff er, je tiefer Amerika in den Krieg gezogen wurde, um so direkter in die Leitung der Diplomatie ein. Die Missionen seines Vertrauten Harry Hopkins waren entscheidender als die Verhandlungen des nominellen Außenministers.

Der Kompetenzkonflikt zwischen Weißem Haus und State Department ist in das amerikanische Regierungssystem eingebaut. Er ist Bestandteil der Verfassung. Doch sichtbar wurde er erst in dem Augenblick, in dem die Isolierung Amerikas endete. Entscheidungen von internationaler Tragweite – und fast alles, was die Weltmacht USA heute tut, ist von Tragweite – können nur von dem gewählten Präsidenten verantwortet werden. Das zeigte sich 1919 am Schicksal Woodrow Wilsons. Seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg konnte sich kein Präsident dem Zwang entziehen, persönlich die Außenpolitik zu gestalten. Es ist, solange es das präsidentielle System gibt, durch nichts zu verhindern, daß sie auf zwei Gleisen läuft – sie wird im Weißen Haus konzipiert und im State Department exekutiert.

Es ist müßig, von zuviel Machtkonzentration in einer Hand zu sprechen. Die Gründerväter, die eine Verfassung für 13 dünnbesiedelte Kolonien schrieben, hatten eine gesunde Abneigung gegen Machtkonzentration. Sie konnten die komplexen Anforderungen nicht im entferntesten ahnen, die im letzten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts von der Leitung einer technologischen Massengesellschaft an den Präsidenten gestellt werden würden.

## Die Macht des Sicherheitsvaters

Das System ist anachronistisch. Aber es ist aus vielen Gründen unantastbar – nicht nur, weil es von einem Tabu geschützt ist, das die Intensität eines konfessionellen Bekenntnisses hat, sondern

weil es unmöglich ist, die Regierungsstruktur Amerikas ohne eine Revolution zu ändern, die wahrscheinlich das Ende der Vereinigten Staaten wäre.

Die Zweigleisigkeit der Außenpolitik Washingtons wird noch lange mit uns sein. Wer dabei das letzte Wort behält, hängt natürlich von den handelnden Personen ab. Dean Acheson und John Foster Dulles waren zu starke Außenminister, als daß Truman oder Eisenhower je auf den Einfall gekommen wären, in ihre Zuständigkeit durch ein kleines State Department des Weißen Hauses hineinzuregieren. Von Acheson wissen wir, daß er zurückgetreten wäre, wenn ihm Truman zugemutet hätte, was Dean Rusk später von Kennedy zugemutet wurde. Unter diesem wurde der Sicherheitsrat, brillant geleitet von McGeorge Bundy, zu einer mächtigen Institution, aber auch zum Instrument eines naiven und kreuzzüglerischen Aktivismus. Der junge Präsident wollte „kühne, neue Ideen“ und schnelle Entschlüsse sehen – und er verlangte sie von den Beamten des State Department, die aus langer Erfahrung wußten, daß in der Außenpolitik „neue“ Ideen selten sind, eine kindliche Vorstellung der Amateur-Diplomaten, und daß schnelle Entschlüsse meist aufs internationale Glatteis führen.

Ob Rusk in einer zweiten Präsidentschaft Kennedy's Außenminister geblieben wäre, ist überaus fraglich. Aber der gleiche Mann, über den sich der Kennedy-Clan offen mokiert hatte, endete in der

## Bevölkerungs zuwachs

41

Johnson-Ära als die neben McNamara stärkste Persönlichkeit im Kabinett.

## Systemlosigkeit als System

Der außenpolitische Dualismus zwischen State Department und Weißem Haus ist keine unveränderliche Größe. Wie er funktioniert, hängt davon ab, wie sich die Temperamente der drei Hauptbeteiligten – Präsident, Außenminister und Sicherheitsberater – mischen. Unter Johnson, der wenig internationale Erfahrung besaß, gewann Rusk so deutlich an Einfluß, daß schwer zu unterscheiden war, wer nachhaltiger die Vietnampolitik bestimmte. Das wirkte sich automatisch auf die Position Walt Rostows aus. Der Sicherheitsberater war auf das beschränkt, was sein Titel sagt – er beriet den Präsidenten, aber er zeichnete dem State Department nicht die politischen Richtlinien vor.

Solange ein Außenminister ein gutes persönliches Verhältnis zum Präsidenten hat, kann er den Machtkampf mit dem Stab des Weißen Hauses nie ganz verlieren. Er hat alles auf seiner Seite, was der Sicherheitsberater nicht hat – einen Etat, einen Apparat, Weisungsbefugnis gegenüber den Vertretungen im Ausland, den direkten Kontakt mit den fremden Mächten, das ganze Gewicht eines großen und lang eingespielten diplomatischen Dienstes, das sich auf die Dauer gegen eine kleine Gruppe von Assistenten des Weißen Hauses durchsetzen muß, die nicht den soliden Boden der Bürokratie unter den Füßen haben. Es ist der Gegensatz von Handwerk und Artistik.

Die Position der Präsidentenberater gewinnt und verliert an Bedeutung mit den Problemen, um die es geht. Die Position, die das State Department einnimmt, ändert sich nie. Das erklärt, warum es die erste Sorge Kissingers war, die Funktionen der Sicherheitsrates zu institutionalisieren. Rostow hatte seine Aufgabe anders gesehen. Sein Stil der Beratung entwickelte sich von Fall zu Fall aus der Situation, während Kissinger den Sicherheitsrat nach einem strikten und – wie die bösen Zungen Washingtons sagen – teutonischen Ordnungsprinzip organisiert hat.

## Ein Methodiker an der Arbeit

Es ist eine homogene Mannschaft von 18 außenpolitischen Experten mit genau abgegrenzten Arbeitsgebieten, wie die Abteilungsleiter eines Ministeriums. Sie funktioniert wie ein Sieb der Optionen, das so lange geschüttelt wird, bis die Lösung hängen bleibt, zu der sich der Präsident entschließt. Das System entsprach so exakt Nixons

Vorstellung von einer übersichtlichen Geschäftsführung, daß er jetzt dem Sicherheitsrat ein nach dem gleichen Prinzip konstruiertes Organ zur Sichtung der innen- und sozialpolitischen Probleme gegenüberstellt – mit dem unterbewußten Verlangen eines Asymmetrikers nach Symmetrie im Apparat des Weißen Hauses.

Kein politischer Berater sieht den Präsidenten öfter und eingehender als Kissinger. Mit seinem Einfluß kann sich nur Justizminister Mitchell messen. Daran wird sich so rasch nichts ändern – gewiß nicht, solange die Vietnam-Politik, die Nixon gemeinsam mit Kissinger entwarf, nach den Meinungsumfragen über zwei Drittel der Amerikaner hinter sich hat.

In dem einen Jahr, seit er die Studierstube in Harvard mit dem Büro im Souterrain des Weißen Hauses vertauschte, ist Kissinger in Washington nicht beliebter geworden. Die Stars der amerikanischen Presse grollen ihm, weil er für sie unzugänglicher als Rostow ist. Er hat wenig Geduld mit Leuten, von denen er glaubt, daß sie ihm nicht gewachsen sind. Ein Zug ins Autoritäre, ein rigides Verhältnis nicht nur zur geistigen Disziplin, sondern zur Disziplin schlechthin und eine nicht allzu subtile Neigung, seine Macht zu zeigen, tragen dazu bei, daß die Amerikaner seine Herkunft nicht vergessen. Sie mögen sich sagen – und einige sagen es sogar laut –, daß auch ein Flüchtling vor dem Nazi-Terror nicht alle deutschen Wesenszüge bei der Einwanderungsbehörde abgeben kann. Von enormer Arbeitsenergie, zieht er marginale Probleme der Außenpolitik an sich, von denen es im State Department heißt, daß sie dort besser aufgehoben wären. Geschieden und ohne eigenes Familienleben, pflügt er im Weißen Haus von früh bis spät durch Sitzungsprotokolle, Denkschriften, Positionspapiere, vertrauliche Informationen, Konfidenzen und Konsultationen. Aber selbst seine Kritiker geben zu, daß er Methode in die amerikanische Außenpolitik gebracht hat. Zum ersten Mal seit 1945 zeichnen sich die Umrissé eines rationellen Systems ab, das auf der Erkenntnis beruht, wo die Schwerpunkte der amerikanischen Interessen in der Welt liegen.

Die Außenpolitik in den Griff zu bekommen war für Kissinger leicht. William Rogers und Elliott Richardson, seine Kontrahenten im State Department, waren neu in der Branche. Daß es trotz dieser Konfliktsituation keine ernsten Differenzen gab, erklärt sich durch das umgängliche Temperament des Außenministers. Ein langjähriger und enger Freund Nixons, ist er sich der Intimität seiner Beziehung zu ihm so sicher, daß ihn weder die sachliche Kompetenz noch der Macht-Instinkt

42

Kissingers über Gebühr beunruhigen. Für Rogers ist die Politik ohnehin nicht die Endstation. Er ließ sich vom Präsidenten zur Annahme des State Department nur durch die Zusage bewegen, daß er sich nach vier Jahren wieder seiner privaten Anwaltspraxis widmen könne.

## Das Superministerium

Es ist unvermeidbar, daß sich der Apparat des Weißen Hauses immer mehr zu einem Super-Ministerium ausweitet. Die Tragweite der außenpolitischen Entscheidungen erfordert eine direkte Kontrolle durch den Präsidenten. Die direkte Kontrolle aber erfordert ein eigenes Instrument. In der komplexen internationalen Situation von heute gehen auch Probleme, die nicht die enormen Dimensionen Vietnams haben, weit über die Verantwortung hinaus, die ein Ressort-Minister tragen kann.

Selbst ein Präsident, für den die Außenpolitik nicht den Vorrang wie für Nixon hat, könnte den Sicherheitsrat nicht mehr entbehren. Die Politik der führenden Weltmacht liegt entweder in einer Hand oder sie liegt auf der Straße. Der unausweichliche Zwang, sie zu zentralisieren, gerät dabei in Konflikt mit dem Konzept, das Nixon vom amerikanischen Regierungssystem hat.

„Seit Jahren besteht der Trend,“ sagte er im September 1968 „mehr und mehr Autorität nach Washington zu schwemmen. Zuviele der Entscheidungen, die besser in Seattle oder St. Louis zu treffen gewesen wären, endeten auf dem Schreibtisch des Präsidenten. Ich plane ein gestrafftes föderatives System, das den Staaten, Städten und Gemeinden die Entscheidungsgewalt zurückgibt, die ihnen gebührt. Damit soll der Regierungs-Apparat wirksamer gemacht und die Aufmerksamkeit des Bundes auf die Funktionen konzentriert werden, die nur auf Bundesebene zu erfüllen sind. Die Präsidentschaft ist der Platz, wo Prioritäten gesetzt werden müssen.“

## Glück im ersten Jahr

Nixons erstes Jahr im Weißen Haus war, ges sen an den Vorbelastungen, kein schlechtes Jahr. Das militärische Desengagement in Vietnam kam in Gang, ohne daß Washington das Vertrauen sei ner asiatischen Verbündeten verlor. Ob die Vietna misierung des Krieges ein Erfolg wird, hängt von der Armee Südvietnams ab. Aber zum ersten Mal sieht Amerika einen Weg, den Krieg ohne Verhand lungsfrieden zu beenden und ohne daß Südostasien auf der Stelle in die Hand der Kommunisten fällt. Das ist eine Perspektive, die den Anti-Kriegsde

monstrationen einen Teil ihrer Durchschlagskraft nimmt. Unter 200 Millionen Amerikanern gibt es nicht einen, der von einem schnellen Abschluß des Krieges mehr Vorteil als Nixon hätte. Es stimmt nicht, daß seine Politik zu einer Polarisierung der Gegensätze geführt hat. Sie hat im Gegenteil die Extremisten von den gemäßigten Gruppen der Friedensbewegung isoliert, die mit seinem Kurs nur in der Methode, nicht im Ziel differieren.

Auch sonst hatte er in einigen Situationen Glück. Die Zuspitzung zwischen Moskau und Peking stärkte seine Position gegenüber den Sowjets. Wider Erwarten passierte sein Verteidigungs-Etat den Kongreß fast ungerupft. Seine Partei siegte in wichtigen Gouverneurswahlen. Die Sommer-Affäre Ted Kennedys schaltete seinen gefährlichsten Rivalen für 1972 aus. Er verlor die Nominierung von Bundesrichter Haynsworth, zahlte aber damit politische Schulden beim konservativen Süden ab. Die Regelung des Okinawa-Problems legte den Grundstein zu einer neuen Ordnung im Pazifik.

## Die Unruhe bleibt

Es war, im ganzen, eine aktivere Bilanz als sie dem Debut eines Präsidenten zuzutrauen war, der im Kongreß in der Minderheit ist und gegen den Strom alter Vorurteile schwimmen muß. Die Vorurteile schwinden – nicht bei denen, die Meinung machen, sondern draußen im Land. Aus der Ruhe, deren Amerika nach seinem hastigen Aufbruch zur „New Frontier“ bedurft hätte, wird natürlich nichts. Aber schon die Gewißheit, daß die Unruhe von einem Mann verwaltet wird, der sie nicht erfunden hat, wirkt als Tonikum. Das Amerika der Mitte glaubt sich in dem Mann der Mitte wiederzuerkennen – und eben das ist das größte der Mißverständnisse, denen der Präsident begegnet.

Ein Spiegelbild der amerikanischen Mitte ist die Politik, die Nixon macht, es ist nicht der Mann. Er ist komplizierter als die ideologischen Kontorsionisten auf der anderen Seite des Zaunes. Hinter der kleinbürgerlichen, „normalen“ und allamerikanischen Fassade dieser Präsidentschaft, die schnell zu einem bequemen Klischee geworden ist, entziehen sich die subtileren Eigenschaften des pragmatischen Individualisten, des selbstkritischen Non-Konformisten, des reformerischen Konservativen Richard Nixon, des Mannes mit seinen Widersprüchen, seiner Verletzlichkeit und seinem Einsamkeitsbedürfnis, dem Blick und dem Begriffsvermögen der Nation.

Aber das ahnt das Land nicht. Und das ist besser so – es ist ein Mißverständnis, ein nützliches Mißverständnis.

JANUARY 31, 1970

11

developed breast cancer. They concluded: "If the oral contraceptives are at all carcinogenic for the human breast, they cannot be very potent and the occurrence from this cause must be extremely rare."

The quoted statement came from a report which, Dr. Kistner failed to point out, emphasized the gross underreporting to the FDA of adverse reactions. That the FDA knew officially of but one user with breast cancer showed one thing only - that the reaction-reporting system was even worse than had been assumed. On a purely statistical basis, at least 1200 women of childbearing age among the 3.8 million women on The Pill developed breast cancer in the year at issue. Even if The Pill was in no case responsible, the fact is that Dr. Kistner converted to his own purposes the reporting to FDA of only a single case.

On the night of the first hearing, January 14, the Huntley-Brinkley Report presented on television a critic of The Pill and a defender - without saying that the defender had not been, and is not scheduled to be, a witness. The next night, Huntley-Brinkley ignored the damaging and newsy testimony of Dr. Kassouf on the misleading pamphlets and the role of the AMA - and presented instead an interview with a Searle executive at the company plant in Chicago and a statement by an AMA official, also in Chicago, that women will be all right so long as they stick close to their doctors. The night after that, although there was no hearing that day, Chet Huntley, setting up a straw man, said that doctors were concerned about suggestions that The Pill be taken off the market. No such suggestion had been made at the hearings as of that time. But Huntley-Brinkley proceeded to knock it down with an interview with a Planned Parenthood physician. (No general criticism of NBC News is intended. For example, the *Today Show* presented a balanced panel of physicians on the morning before the hearings opened.) On January 14 Robert H. Finch, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, was reported to have said in Houston, Texas, that by and large The Pill is "the best way" (for "women"? or for "woman"?) to prevent conception. Senator McIntyre pointedly reminded the Secretary, who is building a record of disastrous meddling in FDA regulatory matters, that his words were clearly contradicted by "the scientific evidence well known to the Food and Drug Administration in Finch's own Department." (Indirectly underscoring McIntyre's point, the FDA on Jan. 10 sent a letter to all doctors urging "full disclosure of the potential adverse effects ... thus permitting the participation of the patient in the assessment of the risks ...") All in all, no wonder there's confusion.

Morton Mintz

MORTON MINTZ is a Washington Post reporter and author of *The Pill/An Alarming Report*.

## The Nixon Watch

# Henry's Wonderful Machine

During an inquiry into the evolution and present workings of the policy process devised and operated for President Nixon by his assistant for national security affairs, Henry A. Kissinger, several people who are involved in the process at the White House and in the State Department were asked whether they could think of any major decisions or departures in foreign policy that would not have occurred if the Kissinger system - "Henry's wonderful machine," I had come to call it - did not exist.

One of Kissinger's principal assistants answered: "No. But I do think the decisions have been better defined and conceived, their consequences have been better estimated and projected, than they would have been without it." Another said: "There probably has been no decision made or policy adopted that wouldn't have been if this system did not exist, but there's a much keener awareness of what we are doing, a better understanding of the consequences." A State Department man who works closely with both Kissinger and Secretary William P. Rogers answered: "That's very hard to say. I don't think you can really answer that question." A deputy assistant secretary who is much occupied with meeting the Kissinger staff's demands upon the department said: "No, I shouldn't think so. It may have resulted in a few cases in our being better prepared to deal with problems that may arise - in the sense of identifying the courses that may be taken and of estimating the consequences in advance." Another deputy assistant secretary who is similarly occupied said: "How effective it all has been is a little hard to say. It has got the interested agencies involved, it has influenced the higher levels, but the extent to which it has actually affected policy is a subject that requires further study." Didn't he get some measure of the impact by comparing ultimate decisions with the papers that the interagency group with which he works submitted to the President through the Kissinger machine? "Once in a while you do," he replied. "I've seen a couple of instances of cause-and-effect, but it's been less than one would expect."

As all of the quoted officials pointed out, in one way and another, my question and their answers could produce an unfair and, to policy professionals, an irrelevant judgment of the process and its worth to Mr. Nixon. Its purpose, they argued, is not to determine policy or even necessarily to affect policy decisions. The purpose is to inform the makers of policy - officials would say, the maker of policy, the President - so thoroughly and so well that the final decision is at least based upon the best attainable understanding of all

12

THE NEW REPUBLIC

that is involved and the best attainable estimate of the
probable consequences. That is what the Kissinger sys-
tem is designed to accomplish. A judgment as to wheth-
er it does or not would require a knowledge of the
information, of the nature and range of the choices
provided the President through the process, that is
denied the outside inquirer. One can only examine the
process itself, and marvel that so many people go to so
much trouble for so little demonstrable result.

The preparations for the Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks (SALT) with the Soviet Union, in the preliminary
phase recently concluded at Helsinki and in the sub-
stantive phase soon to begin in Vienna, have by all ac-
counts been the most thorough of their kind, and they
have been and still are being made within the Kissinger
system. But the actual positions to be taken are still
under review; the President has yet to make the deci-
sive choices by which he and the process that informs
his choices will be judged. Three meetings of the Na-
tional Security Council, the Cabinet-level group at the
apex of the system, and countless man-hours of NSC
staff study and calculation went into the Middle East
policy recently outlined by Secretary Rogers. But its
essentials – the Israelis should withdraw from most of
the Arab territory seized by them in 1967, the Arabs
must accept the fact of Israel and come to peaceful
terms with it – were implicit in Nixon statements be-
fore he was elected and were outlined to the Senate For-
eign Relations Committee by Rogers last March 27,
long before the NSC and departmental studies then
under way were completed. A basic “China paper” was
cleared through the Kissinger system last year. But
Nixon had set forth the essentials of his present ap-
proach to China and to American commitments in
Asia – he wants negotiation with Peking, he proposes
to sustain all of the commitments at reduced and mini-
mal cost to the United States – in a *Foreign Affairs* ar-
ticle published in October, 1967. The interdepartmen-
tal group (IG) that deals with Far Eastern policy for
Kissinger at the agency level had nothing to do with
the specific decisions last year to relax restrictions upon
travel and trade with Communist China. The American
invitation, just accepted by Peking, to renew ambassa-
dorial talks in Warsaw after a two-year lapse, was is-
sued by Rogers last February, when the Kissinger sys-
tem barely existed. The Nixon policy of gradual disen-
gagement from Vietnam, meanwhile urging and await-
ing substantive negotiation with Hanoi and the NLF in
Paris, has been and still is the subject of intensive NSC
and departmental labor, but I find it interesting that in

10 days of inquiry not one policy official attributed it
to the Kissinger process as such.

At the peak and center of the Kissinger process is
his own White House staff - formally, The National
Security Council staff. It keeps growing (from 27 func-
tional officers at the start last year to 44 listed on a
roster dated January 8) and most of the growth is in the
two administrative sections that serve Kissinger him-
self. His personal staff, headed by Brigadier General
Alexander Haig, an Army man, has doubled (from three
to six). The staff secretariat under William Watts, a for-
mer Foreign Service officer who got to know Kissinger
when both of them worked for Nelson Rockefeller in
1968, has seven people doing what two tried to do
earlier. There are 19 "operators," five "planners," (two
of whom double as "operators") and eight "program
analysts." Trying to define and differentiate their
functions is a stupefying exercise, partly for the excel-
lent reason that the operators plan, the planners oper-
ate, and the analysts do some of both. All of them con-
tribute to the objective described by Kissinger in the
spring of 1968, when he was advising Governor Rocke-
feller on foreign policy and didn't dream that he would
be Mr. Nixon's chief staff adviser on that subject, in
remarks to a University of California (Los Angeles)
seminar. He said then that a new President who wants
to change the direction and mechanics of policy "must
do so within the first four months. He need not com-
plete it within this time, but he must give enough of a
shake to the bureaucracy to indicate that he wants a
new direction and he must be brutal enough to demon-
strate that he means it."

Kissinger has served Nixon as, among other things,
his surrogate brutalitarian. Whether the President has
really given foreign policy as a whole "a new direction"
is questionable. But there can be no question that the
brutality has had much if not all of the desired effect
upon its principal target, the bureaucracy of the De-
partment of State. A humbler and more quiescent lot of
departmental officials is not to be found in Washington.
This is partly, if paradoxically, because they have ac-
quired a heartening sense of confidence in their Secre-
tary, William Rogers, who after months of seeming
indifference to the woes and problems of the depart-
ment has begun to assert his right of command over it,
along with his prerogatives as the President's senior
constitutional adviser on foreign policy. Given their
recent assurance that somebody really is up there on
the secretarial Seventh Floor, looking after them and
at last countering Henry Kissinger's year-long pre-
eminence in the public mind, they now accept as a fact
of governmental life intrusions and demands from the
Kissinger apparatus that until recently seemed to be
intolerable. Department officers who all but hissed
when they said "Kissinger" now speak of "Henry" in
the tone of intimacy that is heard when members of his
own staff talk about him. The department bureaucracy
has recognized the fact that "Henry" is indeed a surro-

COMING: "Inefficient America,"
or why nothing seems
to work anymore

JANUARY 31, 1970

13

gate, speaking and acting for the President along lines
and through organizational channels that Nixon con-
ceived for himself and authorized Kissinger to imple-
ment in structural detail. "This is the way the President
wants it," State's people tell each other. The nature of
officialdom being what it is, what a President is known
to want is more acceptable than anything a mere staff
subordinate, however eminent, is supposed to want.

Organization and method apart, the atmosphere en-
countered now among Kissinger's assistants in the
White House basement and across the street in the
Executive Office Building encourages a belief that
"Henry's machine" justifies all the pain and effort that
has accompanied its establishment and evolution. The
rather negative appraisals quoted at the beginning of
this report reflect a modesty of claim that is refreshing
in itself. It is good to hear one of Henry's planners say
of a current study project: "Our whole posture in Laos
is subject to critical disagreement. Outsiders ask search-
ing questions about it, so why shouldn't insiders ask
them?" And of the President's vaunted "new direc-
tion" in Europe: "We have a stance, an attitude, in Eu-
rope that is well defined. But it isn't a policy. It doesn't
add up 'by itself' in a coordinated way, to a policy that
takes into account all of the issues and factors that
ought to be considered together." Or to hear a Kissin-
ger operator, one of the geographic officers charged
with oversight of departmental activity in his area, say
of the Middle East (which is not his responsibility but
does concern him): "We have a fairly coherent policy
and strategy for that area. But it's always subject to
reassessment. What do you find if you project the

present policy forward four or five years? Will it make
a difference if you do? We ask the question, and try to
suggest the best answers we can."

Kissinger's continuing dissatisfaction with many of
the answers – the famous options demanded by Nixon
and submitted to him through Henry, principally from
State – is a subject of interesting comment among his
subordinates. Some of them believe that he is unduly
harsh, that the quality of many of the incoming policy
papers has been quite high, and they imply that some
of the NSC staff work devoted to analyzing, criticizing
and supplementing the departmental papers is wasted.
Wasted, that is, unless Henry's needs are considered.
Constantly driven and consulted by Nixon, subject to
a multitude of other demands upon his time, however,
Kissinger is compelled to draw down his own "intellec-
tual capital" and looks to his assistants and to the de-
partmental staffs at their beck, to replenish it. A thinker
by profession, now deprived of adequate time for
thought, he is said to expect "not a substitute for his
own thinking, but a sort of analytical supplement to
his thinking." Nixon considers himself to be a thinker.
The quoted remark about Henry Kissinger may be a
good definition of the principal service that he tries to
render the President.

*Note:* After my report that Mr. Nixon "dyes his hair" appeared, White House assistants who see the President every day convinced me that he has convinced them and his barber that he doesn't. They failed to convince me that he does nothing whatever to conceal the grey in his mop. He does conceal it, or did until it was reported that he does.

John Osborne

A Proposal for Full Employment without Inflation

Stabilizing the Economy

by Melville J. Ulmer

Since the end of World War II, our economy has been
rocking back and forth between excessive unemploy-
ment and excessive inflation, never succeeding in ban-
ishing both at the same time, even temporarily. Our

efforts to alleviate poverty, improve health and edu-
cation, or deal with other basic problems have been
undermined by dangerously rising prices or deepening
recessions in an endless cycle.

Most often the Vietnam War is offered as the reason
why we do not attack poverty, mendacious advertising,
military extravagance, urban blight, a polluted environ-
ment with sufficient vigor. But the Vietnam War did

MR. ULMER'S book, The Welfare State, USA, was
published last year. He is professor of economics at the
University of Maryland.

14

THE NEW REPUBLIC

not begin in earnest until 1966. We have had plenty of time, and ample affluence since World War II, to demonstrate good will and determination.

Our failures no doubt have many sources, but central to them all is our inability to establish a satisfactory state of economic stability. We have been preoccupied at times with fighting inflation, and we typically do this by increasing unemployment—a technique used notably in 1949, 1954, 1958, and today. At other times our concern has been with fighting unemployment, and we typically do this by creating inflation—or we did repeatedly in the 1950s and the early and mid '60s.

The result of these constant fiscal and monetary manipulations has been the creation of the modern "stop-go" economy, a rough duplicate of those in our sister democracies of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. At no time since World War II, except during the peaks of the Korean and Vietnam wars, have we approached full employment. At no time, except for a single recession year (1949), have we stabilized prices. From 1949 to 1969 the price level rose by 54 percent. The average unemployment rate over that period was five percent of the labor force. A true full employment rate would be about two percent. The welfare states of Western Europe have had considerably more inflation and a little less unemployment on the average. But they, too, have rocked from cycle to cycle.

I would attribute our failure to a familiar lag in institutional adaptation. Economic administrators around the world have been committed to the "New Economics" — Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies that are nearly 40 years old. According to the accepted formula, when recession threatens, increase government spending, or reduce taxes, or both; then mix carefully with easy money. When inflation threatens, do just the opposite. It sounds simple, and is — too simple.

In practice, it has appeared, inflation is always with us, and unemployment too. But they do not remain

at the same intensity. That is, during a business expansion, the more we reduce unemployment, the faster prices rise. During a business contraction, the more we dampen inflation, the greater becomes the rate of unemployment. I have diagrammed this relationship as it appears in the United States at the start of the 1970s, in the accompanying chart. All the New Economics does is to move us from one point on the curve to the other. And so we have moved, back and forth, under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, sometimes fleeing "excessive" unemployment, sometimes fleeing "excessive" inflation. We are now at point A on the diagram, with President Nixon trying to thrust us in the northwesterly direction.

**T**he obvious question is, why? Why are we entrapped by an inflation that never ceases — even when unemployment is steep — but simply rises and falls in intensity like a stubborn fever.

Good textbooks describe several causes of inflation, but for brevity at this point I shall call attention to only one — one I consider fundamental and so new on the economic scene that it is all but universally overlooked. This new factor has to do with the wide and growing disparity between the structure of the demand for labor and the structure of its supply. It is hardly news that modern technology has been demanding a high level of skills. But while the *demand* for labor has been altered, in favor of more skill, the corresponding change in the *supply* of labor has lagged. Our average educational level is now much higher than ever before, yet in the nation as a whole the shift in the composition of the supply of labor toward greater skill has not kept up with the shift in demand. In 1961, when the general unemployment rate was seven percent, unemployment rates were 14 percent for unskilled workers and 10 percent for semi-skilled workers. So, for those lacking training, education, or experience, the '61 recession was a depression. The other side of the coin is that in that year the unemployment rate was only two percent for technical workers and professional employees, and less than two percent for business and public administrators. From medical technicians and computer programmers to machinists and draftsmen, skilled personnel were in short supply. And the prices of these scarce services rise under these circumstances, bringing pressure on the price level. The consumer price-index was of course moving up throughout the recession years from the late 50s to the early 60s, though moderately.

The accelerated rise in the price level came soon after, as the contrast just described grew more intense. By 1966, the overall unemployment rate had been pushed down to four percent. For the unskilled, however, jobs remained hard to get; seven percent of them were out of work. For the remainder of the labor force the situation was dramatically different. Bear in mind that Census Bureau surveys are snapshots that are bound to catch some between jobs or in some acci-

THE SOCIAL MENU CURVE

# Prof. Bismarck Goes to Washington:

## Kissinger on the Job
by Nora Beloff

The man who confers with President Nixon more often and more intensively than any other in Washington is a Harvard Professor who is said to admire Metternich but in fact finds in the thinking of Otto von Bismarck the guidelines to America's role in the world today. Installed in the White House in two crucial posts—as the President's resident foreign affairs adviser and as manager of the National Security Council—he is one of the most powerful men in Washington. On the basis of personal acquaintance, private interviews, and many years of experience in writing about international affairs, a distinguished British journalist here profiles the person and thought of Dr. Henry Kissinger.

When Dr. Henry Kissinger was appointed President Nixon's chief aide on world affairs, he liked to amuse his friends by impersonating Peter Sellers impersonating Dr. Strangelove, who might have been an impersonation of Dr. Kissinger himself.

Like Strangelove, Kissinger made his fame as an expert on nuclear war; like him he is a Central European; and like him, his voice is heard in the inner sanctum of government. Unlike Strangelove, Kissinger is a political scientist, and physicists Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun have better claims to being the inspiration for the hero of the famous film. Further, whereas Strangelove was, to say the least, screwed up, Kissinger is cool, humorous, and most of the time, detached.

The impersonation, like most of what Kissinger does, was brilliantly executed and showed two things: first, that he had guessed rightly what a lot of Washington was (and still is) saying of him; second, that having reached the pinnacle of his ambitions, he can now afford self-mockery. An old acquaintance who remembers "the ponderous, uptight, spotty Teutonic professor" of ten years ago says that in those days he never laughed at himself and rarely laughed at all. But over the years, success has changed him: he has lost weight (still plump but no longer fat), improved his appearance, relaxed his manner, and developed a slightly macabre sense of humor about his own role: "Please forgive me, I have to make one more telephone call, to the Secretary of State. We have to tell him when we start a nuclear war . . ."

What is fascinating, and, some would say, alarming, about this soft-spoken academic is that a theoretician of the use of power to achieve national objectives is now in a position to translate theory into practice. In the White House, he sometimes jokes, "You can only make one mistake." Namely, of course, Kissinger is no more than a rather large cog in the vast bureaucratic machine, without any executive authority whatever. He enjoys assuring credulous journalists (Life, Look) that he would never dream of anything as improper as using his special role as compiler of presidential dossiers to get across his private views. Yet as a man of ideas and proud of his conceptual grasp of world affairs, Kissinger is known to have a withering contempt for bureaucrats, with their "quest for calculability" and "yearning for routine," and it is fair to say that he would not be satisfied to be a shuffler of papers for the President. The models he would prefer are those "to whom it is given not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos, there to find material for fresh creation." The attributes he admires are those "which enable the spirit to transcend an impasse in the crisis of history and to contemplate the abyss, not with the detachment of a scientist, but as a challenge to be overcome—or to perish in the process."

His critics like to remember that his main historical work (from which both these quotations are

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drawn) was about Prince Metternich, and some
suspect that his much vaunted "conceptual frame-
work" of world affairs is no more than a hankering
for the good old days of the nineteenth-century
Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe. Those
who have had the stamina to read the book through
to the end will know, however, that he dismisses
Metternich as an obsolete leftover from the En-
lightenment, who wrongly believed in the natural
harmony of international affairs and expected the
world to work like clockwork and that, conse-
quently, "he failed to achieve final greatness."

Kissinger's real hero, the man he judged by far
the greatest genius of his age, perhaps of any age,
was Otto von Bismarck, who, while recognizing
that "equilibrium was needed for stability," saw
the balance of power "in constant flux" and pro-
posed to base his own concert of nations "on precise
calculations of power." Bismarck, we learn in a
glowingly appreciative study Kissinger wrote last
year (and reprints of which he obligingly circulated
to some of his friends at the Paris Peace Talks on
Vietnam), denied that any state has the right to
sacrifice its opportunities to its principles. Bismarck,
he relates, was "unencumbered by moral scruples"
and "knew how to restrain the contending forces,
both domestic and foreign, by manipulating their
antagonisms."

It is obviously to Kissinger's advantage that the
press should see him in a relatively servile role—as
it is to the advantage of the senior members of the
Nixon Cabinet, both for prestige purposes and to
maintain authority over their own departments, to
show that they are the focal points of power. The
counterfeit bureaucrat, doing nothing but staff
work, is also a comforting illusion for Congress,
which is allowed to put Cabinet members on the
carpet but has no right to question White House
personnel. But to at least one of his oldest and
most intimate friends at Harvard, there has never
been a shadow of doubt that Kissinger went to the
White House in the hope of playing a Bismarck
to Kaiser Nixon. He would certainly be a disap-
pointed man if he failed to leave his own imprint
on the nation's history.

The nature of Kissinger's job is twofold: on the
one hand he is the inseparable adviser, confidant,
consoler, apologist, and spokesman for the Presi-
dent. The two men are constantly in each other's
company; Kissinger is at his side for all important
meetings and on all foreign journeys. He rents
(partly at his own cost) the nearest villa to the
Western White House at San Clemente, and at
moments of major decision (how to retaliate when
the North Koreans shot down an American spy
plane, when and whether to announce the next
withdrawals from Vietnam), the two men are often
closedet alone together for hours on end.

Any President needs one man around who knows
the world better than he does and who is utterly

trustworthy and personally congenial: in this sense
Kissinger is to Nixon what McGeorge Bundy was
to Kennedy or Walt Rostow to Lyndon Johnson.
But there is another side, as executive secretary of
the National Security Council, where Kissinger has
greatly enlarged the role played by his prede-
cessors.

Even before coming into office Kissinger had
thought and written a lot about the need to stream-
line the processes of decision-making in Washing-
ton, so that the major issues would come up to the
Chief Executive before actions were agreed upon
and so that decisions, once taken, would be effec-
tively and immediately implemented. Here he
sensed an immediate sympathy with the President,
whose previous experience had convinced him of
the need for firmer central control.

Kissinger's main complaint against the old regime
was that the planning of foreign and defense policy
took place in a vacuum—or became, as he put it,
"an esoteric exercise," while the actual decisions,
vitality affecting long-term national interests, were
taken on an *ad hoc* basis, in the light of some
immediate crisis. He detected "a constantly widen-
ing gap between the technical competence of the
research staff and of the planners and what hard-
pressed political leaders were capable of absorbing."
He noted that "in many fields—strategy being a
prime example—decision-makers may find it difficult
to give as many hours to a problem as the expert
has had years to study it." He deplored the Execu-
tive's habit of taking cognizance of a problem only
when it emerged as an administrative issue, and
when it could no longer be fitted into the wider
foreign policy concept: he saw that "various ele-
ments of the bureaucracy make a series of non-
aggression pacts with each other and thus reduce
the decision-maker to a benevolent constitutional
monarch." And Kissinger is not the man to waste
time as the servant of a constitutional monarch.

It was this explicit need to integrate the day-
to-day decisions into the wider planning and con-
ceptualizing of foreign policy that led Kissinger to
get Nixon to broaden the tasks of the National
Security Council, so that the whole operation came
under the White House apparatus, which meant,
in practice, under Kissinger's own management.

An effort to systematize decisions and get
the departments and agencies to work to-
gether instead of against each other started
under President Johnson, who ordered the installa-
tion of interdepartmental groups to examine issues
and areas of special interest, but under his plan
they were instructed to report back to the Secretary
of State, Dean Rusk. Under the new arrangements,
the interdepartmental groups survive and are
strengthened, but instead of reporting to the Secre-
tary of State, or in the case of military matters, to

78

the Secretary of Defense, as they did before, they
now report their agreements or disagreements di-
rectly to Dr. Kissinger, at the White House.

If the problem under study is a long-term one—
and some of the groups are now handling reap-
praisal of national policy not only over the next
three to five but even over the next ten years—
Kissinger will then ask his own staff to see whether
there has been any interesting research or new
proposal from outside the official hierarchy, in
academic institutions or the serious press. And it is
only when the subject forces itself into the news
or has been thoroughly explored that he will
identify the range of choices and present them to
the President.

He can then advise the President whether the
issue needs to be taken before the National Se-
curity Council (which consists of the President, the
Vice President, Secretaries of State, Treasury, and
Defense, and the Director of Emergency Planning,
and, sitting in, Kissinger, the director of the CIA,
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) or
whether he should handle it personally. Either
way Kissinger will be there, directing the flow.

Kissinger denies that he is cutting Secretary of
State William P. Rogers out of the act: he notes
that the chairmen of all the interdepartmental
groups are the Assistant Secretaries from the rele-
vant sectors of the State Department and says he
assumes they represent their chief, the Secretary of
State. But the fact remains that when the work is
done, the results bypass the departmental hierarchy
and go straight to the White House. Not that the
executive secretary of the NSC would claim that
all his decisions are right; only that there is no
other way except by the centralization around him-
self to prevent the President's wishes from becoming
the casualties of what he sometimes knowingly re-
fers to as "interdepartmental guerrilla war."

Nobody with experience of Washington would
suppose that these transformations have been with-
out tears. Kissinger is doing his best not to overplay
his hand. For example, although his closeness to
the President would make it easy for him to in-
fluence the choice of personnel for the prestigious
overseas posts, he has deliberately refrained from
interfering, even when he knows that an appoint-
ment made for some domestic political reason
would seem internationally silly. He has privately
acknowledged that he cannot "fight on all fronts at
once."

The interdepartmental tension began even be-
fore President Nixon's inauguration, when Dr.
Kissinger, named to succeed Walt Rostow as execu-
tive secretary of the National Security Council,
moved in with deliberate haste and thoroughness
to recruit the best available people to his staff. His
extensive knowledge of the Who's Who of the
Washington hierarchy, and of its academic periph-
ery, enabled him to grab some of the ablest young

experts from the State Department, the Pentagon,
and the universities. Most of them turned out to be
Democrats, excited by the prospect of being so
near the center of power. Many were soon to be dis-
illusioned by President Nixon's White House, but in
the meantime, the NSC shop, with a staff of twenty-
five senior executives, was already in business, ready
and able to handle any world problems involving
the President, while Mr. Rogers and Mr. Laird were
still fumbling about, looking for adequate nomi-
nees to fill the top jobs in their own vast and unfa-
miliar establishments. They have not yet caught up.

Working himself relentlessly, Kissinger
drove his team into a seven-day week,
with the days often lasting well into the
nights. He comforted himself with the thought
that most of his assistants were ten or fifteen years
younger than himself, and none was being asked
to work harder than he did.

The first casualty was his chief staff man,
Lawrence Eagleburger, formerly of the State
Department, who suffered a nervous breakdown and
was relieved to be shifted to a less harassing post
at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Dr. Kissinger
has told him he can come back when he feels up
to it.

There are some indications, however, that it is
not only overwork which has already led to the res-
ignation of no less than eleven members of the NSC
staff. One factor is Dr. Kissinger's own habit of
making exacting demands, and his tendency to bully
and berate those underneath him. Another factor
has been that in trying not to antagonize the other
departments he has ordered his subordinates not to
have contacts with outsiders, particularly to avoid
the press. High-level reporters, who are used to be-
ing ushered into every government office, indignant-
ly resent the ban, finding themselves often cut off
from experts and valued contacts they knew and
freely mixed with before these went into the
White House. The reporters had enough power to
force the White House to relax the rules, but most
of the men on Kissinger's staff still dare not be
seen fraternalizing with journalists.

This means that anyone who wants to make a
real contact with the NSC staff—in other words,
anyone who is seeking information about current
presidential thinking on foreign and defense policy
—needs to see Kissinger himself.

Miss Beloff is chief political correspondent for
London's *Observer*. An Oxford graduate, she worked
in political intelligence for the British Foreign
Office during World War II, started in journalism as
a reporter for Reuters. Her book *The General Says*
*No* describes Britain's failure to get into the
European Common Market.

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As a non-American reporter, I consider it a privilege to see the President's chief adviser, and I certainly do not complain that before one of my meetings there were no less than seven consecutive cancellations; nor that at one of these, on a particularly eventful day, I was kept waiting in the White House lobby for three and a quarter hours, with constant assurances from his staff that he would soon be free, before being told that he was still with the President and I might as well go home. But well-known American columnists have cracked jokes about using the time they are kept waiting for Kissinger as a good opportunity for rereading *War and Peace*. And there are some Cabinet ministers, including the redoubtable John Mitchell, Attorney General, who have been heard complaining that Kissinger never returns their calls.

Paradoxically, the experts Kissinger recruited on his own staff are among those who find it hard to be fitted into his appointments schedule. The fact that they were left to their own devices while their boss went off to San Clemente last summer with the President seems to have exacerbated their feelings of futility—and there were several more resignations when he got back.

Another explanation for the low morale among Kissinger's bright young men is that they rarely see the President himself. Under former Presidents, specialists recruited to work inside the NSC were available when the President needed expert advice: nothing, of course, is more stimulating or encouraging inside the Washington bureaucracy than occasional access to the man who makes the decisions. The Harvard economist Francis Bator, for example, expert on international trade and currency, first under McGeorge Bundy, then under Walt Rostow, used to see President Johnson very frequently indeed. Under the present system, Kissinger absorbs the information from his staff and does all the briefing of the President himself, even on subjects on which he is not an expert. This satisfies Mr. Nixon, who likes to limit the number of people he needs to see; and it satisfies Dr. Kissinger, who enjoys the monopoly.

The resentment and jealousies which the extraordinary accumulation of functions in his office has provoked around Washington are beginning to show in implicitly hostile stories about him appearing in the press. Some of them, clearly, are leaked. He has himself noticed that almost every other week something appears in the newspapers suggesting, in his view quite unfairly, that he is demoting the State Department. He is convinced that these stories come not from the top but from the lesser bureaucrats down the line.

One morning at the San Clemente White House last August, he picked up his Los Angeles *Times* and saw, to his horror, an article by Flora Lewis entitled: "Kissinger Questionnaire Raises Eyebrows

—and Hair." It proceeded to list, accurately, a series of areas and issues on which, as secretary of the National Security Council, he had commissioned special inquiries from the RAND Corporation. The story revealed that the NSC was taking over this type of contract from the Defense Department, from which RAND has always received most of its funds. All this could only have come from an inside source: certainly not from RAND. But what made it so damaging was that, while the overall subjects were correctly listed, the formulation of the precise questions was distorted to make the whole thing sound infinitely more sinister than it really was. The study on the Middle East, for example, was presented as if it had been commissioned to answer the question "circumstances in which American nuclear weapons might be used in the Middle East"; the study on Brazil to analyze "circumstances in which the Government of Brazil might be overthrown, if it decided to expropriate American assets." Kissinger and his staff tried hard but unavailingly to trace the origin of the distorted report, but so far, it seems, without success.

To the inevitable question of how Kissinger reached his present eminence, the stock Washington—or anyhow, Georgetown—reply is that he was the only serious intellectual the Republicans had. It is certainly true that intellectuals are bigger frogs in the Republican than in the Democratic puddle, especially since President Kennedy amassed so many. It is also true that Kissinger is intelligent, erudite, extremely well read, and highly articulate. But it would be wrong to conclude that he got where he is only by the dazzling quality of his mind. Indeed, most of those who have worked with him and also with McGeorge Bundy would agree that on sheer brainpower, Bundy wins. Within his own high-level academic background of Harvard, Kissinger was an obvious *summa cum laude*, but in seminars when he came to debate with dialectical duelists like Tom Schelling, many felt that Kissinger was left trailing far behind.

What has been special about Kissinger has been a certain perseverance and determination not only to acquire knowledge on world affairs but also to put that knowledge to practical use, and this meant, inevitably, getting as near as possible to the Oval Room in the White House.

To push all the way to the adjoining office meant developing a relatively thick skin and a tolerance of rebuffs and setbacks, and for this Kissinger had the hardest training of all, having spent his boyhood in Nazi Germany. Many emerged from that experience permanently bowed down; others, like Kissinger, seem to have acquired a certain protective insensitivity and hardness, which strengthened them in later life.

His father, a high school teacher and a deeply

80

religious Jew, was deprived of his job. He waited hopefully for Germany to come back to its senses, as many other intellectuals did, and gave up and arrived penniless in New York only in 1938, when his son was fourteen. In Manhattan, of course, his erudition was irrelevant, and he had to fall back on drearily unskilled clerical work, while his wife, Paula, an excellent cook, went to serve Jewish families on special occasions. Even now, she occasionally helps out old clients, though she prefers them to call her by her first name only, so that their guests will not know they are being served by the mother of one of the President's chief advisers.

Kissinger's own feelings about his native country have always been ambivalent: he seems more deeply concerned about Germany than about other foreign countries (friends say he was shattered by the news of the first young life lost trying to cross the Berlin wall), yet he is convinced that there is a streak of basic insanity in the German character which might return. He immensely admired, some say worshiped, "der Alte," old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who helped nurse West Germany to recovery, but he has always remained implacably opposed to any idea of giving Germany nuclear weapons or encouraging it to reassert dominance over Europe.

Unlike many Americans, Kissinger actively dislikes reminiscing about his "rags to riches" life story, and he may prefer to suppress any sense of identification with the German or Jewish minorities which might bring into question his authority as an objective international adviser. Inevitably, he had some difficulty adjusting to the boisterous discipline of a Manhattan boys' school, even though academically he was so far ahead of his age group; and it seems that the real transformation from the oppressed and teased foreigner, Heinz, to the successfully and proudly integrated American, Henry, came during his Army service in World War II. His thoroughness, energy, and discipline seem to have commended themselves to the Army, which moved him quickly into intelligence work, and he ended his military career as a captain in the Military Intelligence Reserve. That is perhaps why, whereas many Western intellectuals emerge from hated military service as passionate antimilitarists, Kissinger remained fascinated by the military establishment and directed a great deal of his post-war intellectual energy into military matters.

Following his Army service he earned his A.B. summa cum laude in 1950, and in 1954 a Harvard doctorate. But the upward curve was not continuous. His first major setback was academic: his contemporaries remember that, after his doctorate, he assumed he would automatically be promoted to the Harvard faculty; but although his name was seriously considered and well supported, the decision went against him. Details of the argument are of

course academic secrets, but according to one of the members of the faculty at that time, he was not only judged personally a difficult colleague (he had the reputation of being much nicer to his superiors than to his subordinates), but still more important, the professors suspected that he was less interested in the university or in teaching and research than in making a career in public service.

The major work which earned him his national reputation was *Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy*, and from its publication on he was in and out of the Pentagon as consultant and part-time adviser. The book challenged the Dulles concept of massive retaliation, not on the standard argument that the use of any nuclear weapons is unthinkable, but because, once the Russians had the bomb, the threat was meaningless. Consequently, Kissinger argued, more thought should be given to the use of tactical nuclear weapons which could be related to political realities. Though he has subsequently had second thoughts and no longer advocates limited nuclear war, there is at least one senior (and conservative) staff member of the Brookings Institution who feels that anyone who could even have contemplated initiating the use of nuclear weapons should have disqualified himself from advising an American President.

It was during his work in Washington that he came to know Nelson D. Rockefeller, who hired him to direct the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project, and it was then that he wrote his next major work, *The Necessity for Choice*, cautioning against overconfidence in the East-West détente.

Harvard News Office Photo

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By the time the second book came out, Kissinger had built a big international reputation: through selective invitations to a seminar of foreign students which he directed every summer at Harvard he acquired a network of influential contacts in Western capitals. Among the many international conferences which he attended, he frequently participated in the East-West Pugwash meetings on disarma-ment.

Equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic, Kissinger sought out people with pronounced and preferably unorthodox views, even though they might be politically far apart. One of his closest English friends was Wayland Young, now Lord Kennet and member of the Labor government. Then, Young was an eager campaigner for nuclear disarmament and regular participant in the annual British protest march to Aldermaston; Kissinger accepted the invitation to become godfather to one of Young's daughters. The news that Kissinger was joining Nixon's staff was received with sighs of relief in Europe; the British Prime Minister was among those who was pleased to know there would be someone on the same wavelength at the White House.

After the Harvard rebuff, the University of Chicago offered Kissinger a professorship, which he had led them to expect he would accept. On second thought he decided it was too far from Washington, and he preferred instead to go back to temporary employment at Harvard, in part because it was closer to Washington, and await there a promised permanent professorship in the department of government, which he holds today.

The other trouble in his postwar life was his marriage with Ann Fleischer, a pretty, eager, and docile girl he met soon after he came to the United States, when they were both employed in night work addressing envelopes in a Manhattan office to help their respective parents pay for their education. They were divorced in 1964.

For most of the year, the two bright and unusually attractive children, Elizabeth and David (now nine and seven), are with their mother, who lives in Belmont, Massachusetts. Like many men who leave young families, he compensates when they come to stay during the holidays by being far more attentive and indulgent than when he was a living-in father.

Kissinger served under Eisenhower as an expert and technician, not as a party man. When the Harvard-oriented Kennedy Administration came in, he was stimulated by its intellectual excitement, and he was expected to play an even more prominent role. His friend Arthur Schlesinger, who had previously sponsored him in working for the Council of Foreign Relations, introduced him to President Kennedy. Some of the Kennedy people say the President found the pro-

fessor's harangues a little tiresome; Kissinger confided to his own friends that he disliked the "richboy" values of the Kennedy White House and felt that the sense of nobility and honor was lacking. Those who watched from within say that McGeorge Bundy would not have permitted another pundit too near the throne.

In any case, Kissinger resigned his part-time consultancy and himself ascribes his withdrawal to a fundamental disagreement on European policy. It was a time when the American Administration was backing the Monnet doctrine of European integration, which to Kissinger seemed to mean favoring the Germans and fighting the French.

The Kennedy "Grand Design" involved pressing Britain into an embryonic European federation and basing the Western alliance on "the two pillars" of the United States of America and the United States of Europe. It collided directly with General de Gaulle's resolve to weaken Atlantic ties and to resist any supranational European institutions which would attenuate his own freedom of action.

The Grand Design was never quite as logical as implied by the "two-pillar" concept, first introduced into the political vocabulary by Bundy himself. It was undermined by the insistence of the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, that the United States must retain total control of Western nuclear power. This meant offering the Europeans, at best, only a nuclear contingent, integrated into the American military complex; this came to be known as the Multilateral Force, or the MLF. Under the American scheme even the offer of a joint and integrated nuclear force had to be made not only to the British and French but, on the sacrosanct principle of nondiscrimination, to the Germans too.

Looking back on it today, Kissinger will argue that the Grand Design was back to front: European unity is obviously desirable. But it was all wrong, he says, to push Europe toward economic and commercial integration, which would inevitably be at America's expense, while resisting military integration, which would conveniently reduce the American burden as the Western Europeans increased their capacities to defend themselves.

Kissinger, who felt he knew Germany, never accepted the view that the principle of nondiscrimination should be applied to nuclear affairs; on the contrary, he has always thought that the treaties barring German rights to make or acquire nuclear weapons should be strictly enforced.

There was, perhaps, also a psychological element in the disagreement, which finally led to the breach with the Kennedy team, and brought Kissinger back into politics as a committed Republican. Kissinger was certainly not at ease with the brash optimism and belief in the future which characterized the Kennedy "New Frontiersmen," nor was he comfortable with Lyndon Johnson and the "Great Society."

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But to say that Kissinger is conservative is misleading. Having escaped totalitarian oppression himself, he has a deeply imbued respect for free institutions and individual liberties. His chief (though abortive) contribution to the Republican cause was to volunteer time and energy trying to win the Republican nomination in 1968 for Governor Nelson Rockefeller. This was partly a consequence of having worked closely with Rockefeller, but it was also in the hope that his old patron, to whom he had become ubiquitous brain truster, would be strong enough to keep Richard Nixon out. To Kissinger, as to most of his Harvard colleagues, it seemed essential that everything possible should be done to block a professional politician who had made his reputation in the witch-hunting Joe McCarthy school of public affairs.

Rather, Kissinger's own type of conservatism comes from an innate pessimism about what any government, however big and powerful, can do; he has accepted the struggle between contending nation-states and blocs as inevitable and permanent, and has dismissed as "panaceas" any idea of imposing some international form of authority.

It was because Bismarck accepted and understood the pattern of permanent conflict, and therefore recommended the effective but restrained use of force, that Kissinger has so much admired him. He has also found a similarity between Bismarck and one of his latter-day heroes, General de Gaulle, who believes in the inevitability of international tension and the primacy of nation-states. For Kissinger, when he joined the White House in 1969, it was a most unhappy coincidence of historical circumstances that deprived him of his first practical objective: to restore good relations between the United States and French presidencies.

Being conservative in the minimalist sense—that is, believing basically that nothing much can be done about the pity of the human condition—Kissinger found an unexpected soulmate in President Nixon. For the new President, taking over after the shattering disappointments of the Johnson Administration, felt himself mandated to economize, reduce commitments, fight inflation, and generally educate the American public to expect less from Washington. On the international side, Kissinger provided him with an articulate and effective adviser, who could turn this most negative view of government into a political philosophy and even into a recipe for peace. The Nixon team made several efforts to detach him from Rockefeller before the convention, bidding up three times the money they would offer for his services: friends recall he was outraged and offended by the idea that he could be bought. When he did join Nixon after the election, it was only with Rockefeller's express approval.

Since he joined the White House staff, the two issues which have taken up most of Kissinger's time are arms limitation and Vietnam, on both of which he wrote extensively before taking office. It was easy to foresee that on both he would counsel prudence, and refuse to respond to pressures from the militant and impatient left.

Kissinger has been consistently cautious about Soviet peace feelers. He has admitted that he was shocked by the eagerness with which the Johnson Administration seemed ready to proceed with a summit meeting after the invasion of Czechoslovakia; he has even written of the "heavy costs" to the Americans of their "pallid reaction" to the Czech drama.

It is therefore hardly surprising that when the Russians, on the very day of President Nixon's inauguration, offered to hold bilateral missile talks, the new Administration maintained a seven-month silence. It was not that Kissinger was hostile to opening the dialogue; but he was chary of any deal which might weaken his side's relative position. Accepting as obvious that the struggle would persist, with or without open conflict, and accepting the Bismarck thesis that the balance of power is in constant flux, he could not conceive of an agreement beneficial to both sides. Absolute security for one nation, he has often argued, means absolute insecurity for all the others. "It [absolute security] can be achieved," he wrote in a recently published essay on foreign policy, "only by reducing other states to impotence. Thus an essentially defensive foreign policy can become indistinguishable from the traditional aggression."

To those who argue that he is too negative, Kissinger can point to the little-known fact that he has spent long hours working out specific American responses to the five or six possible Soviet proposals. When the talks begin, he can claim that this Administration, which took over only the most shadowy arms-control program from its predecessor, will be ready for substantive discussions.

The trouble has been, however, that the time factor itself may have jeopardized possibilities of agreement. The head of the Disarmament Agency once lamented that he is expected to operate from a moving stairway.

The President's first major decision was to give the go-ahead for a modified version, which Kissinger helped devise, of the antiballistic missile.

Nixon also authorized the tests of MIRV—a cluster of separately targeted nuclear warheads designed to be launched from a single underground or underwater missile; these had been conceived as a response to the Soviet-planned ABM. The change from the one-missile-one-bang system to the multiple missile has been compared in scale by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with the change from conventional to nuclear explosives. (Kissinger when pressed will retort that it was un-

87

der McNamara's management that research and development on MIRV began.)

According to one expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, George Rathjens, whose pamphlet is compulsory reading in the Disarmament Agency, the deployment of MIRV could destroy any hope of an agreement. He argues that whereas we can count and control missiles and ABM's through long-distance satellite espionage, which both big powers now possess, we would need on-the-spot checks to investigate how many warheads per missile. It was precisely on this issue of direct access to military installations that all previous disarmament negotiations broke down.

In backing the President's reluctance to be hurried into arms talks, Kissinger is not trying to preserve any permanent U.S. superiority in the missile race. On the contrary, it is thought that it was under his influence that Nixon, at his first press conference, abandoned his campaign pledge to uphold the American technical superiority in weapons and to settle for "sufficiency" instead. On the other hand, Kissinger has warned since Czechoslovakia that there is a danger that the Russians might engage in arms talks to lull the Americans into "a false sense of security." He has scorned "the facile belief in certain quarters that the test of dedication to peace should be whether one interprets Soviet intentions in the most favorable light." He has gone so far as to suggest that an agreement restraining missiles might even increase the risks of war by reducing the Soviet dread of an ultimate collision.

There seems little doubt that Kissinger will ultimately be judged by the outcome of the Vietnam conflict: it is only necessary to compare what he said should be done before he came to office with the views Nixon has promulgated and acted on since to see how decisive his influence has been.

Initially, Kissinger saw the war as a justifiable use of limited power to bolster U.S. influence in a sensitive area, and it was only in 1966 that he became convinced that the costs were excessive. It was this calculation rather than any moral repulsion that turned him into a dove. Once he did decide against the war, he did his best to shift American policy. With Washington's approval, he sponsored his own secret mission to Hanoi led by the French scientist Raymond Aubrac, who had known Ho Chi Minh.

Kissinger's personal contacts in the Pentagon and White House enabled him to get an assurance that President Johnson would be interested in exploring Hanoi's intention. But there was no substantive offer for them to transmit, and the go-betweens came back saying that the North Vietnamese were still holding out for an unconditional American withdrawal.

As Kissinger began to see that the Hanoi and Washington views were irreconcilable, and that neither side was going to be able to drive out the other, he began to feel that Americans must come to recognize that the struggle in South Vietnam is primarily a civil war rather than a "war of aggression" by the North against South Vietnam. Arguing from this premise, he came to advocate that the North and the United States should withdraw their forces and leave the rival factions in South Vietnam either to go on fighting or else to reach their own accommodation. He claimed that Hanoi would have no choice but to accept, since the North Vietnamese could not drive out the Americans by their own efforts, "particularly if the U.S. adopts a less impatient strategy, geared to the protection of the population and sustainable with substantially reduced casualties."

If such a formula were to be accepted, the Americans could argue that they had vindicated the rights of the South Vietnamese to choose their own destiny, and so could claim "an honorable peace," which Kissinger has consistently maintained is essential to preserve international confidence.

Many people, at home and abroad, assumed that when Kissinger spoke of "an honorable peace" he was disguising an American decision to give up and give in. It came as a shock to discover that he really did believe that the Saigon regime was an essential partner in any future settlement, and that consequently the war must go on for the time being. One of the young men who resigned from the NSC staff has remarked, "Kissinger is no more than a Walt Rostow with a German accent." This is untrue. Rostow was a passionate advocate of keeping South Vietnam out of Communist control. Kissinger was, and is, seeking a compromise peace, in which both sides forgo the prospects of immediate victory, but without any guarantee that the Communists will not ultimately take over.

The Kissinger formula for a compromise peace is, however, based on three highly uncertain premises, and its feasibility is not yet proved.

The first is the assumption that the pro-American Thieu regime would survive without the presence of the half million American soldiers initially sent in to prop it up.

The effort to "Vietnamize" the war—that is, to shift over responsibility and the direction of their affairs to the South Vietnamese themselves—fit into Kissinger's global thesis: that the trouble with American foreign policy is that it is too paternalist and too inclined to tell others what to do. He seemed, in this context, to forget that the Thieu regime was not just another legitimate and established allied government reflecting popular feeling, like the British or French. This was implied, at least, in the footnote to his December, 1968, essay on Vietnam, in which he said, "There must be some structural cause for the U.S. clashes with our allies,

88

in which both sides claim to have been deceived: see Skybolt, see the Nonproliferation Treaty, and now, the bombing pause." The President's first public claim to success in Vietnam was that he had re-stored "confidence and trust" between Washington and Saigon, which had broken down in the last frantic days of the Johnson Administration.

Kissinger's second questionable hypothesis is the assumption that Hanoi and the Communist Provisional Government of South Vietnam would abandon their immediate war aim of carrying out a revolution in the South as well as the North, provided that the Americans administer the suitable mix of carrot and stick. Kissinger tries to imagine himself in the Politburo in Hanoi, considering how a deal would look from there. He has urged that the American offer should be generous, which he thinks it is. There would be no effort to take from the Communists anything they had gained in battle. Power could be shared through territorial accommodation or through some joint authority at the center. He ruled out a coalition since this was unacceptable to Saigon, but suggested eight months before it became official U.S. policy that the Communists should come into an electoral commission to oversee the South Vietnamese freedom of choice. On the other hand, if Hanoi remained intransigent, the fighting would go on. The question is whether after suffering such appalling losses against such formidable odds the Communists would still think in terms which would seem logical to a European-minded theoretician of power politics.

Kissinger's third hypothesis is that the United States itself could remain unaffected by a plan which might require a sustained, even if reduced, American military presence in Vietnam. He himself has warned that the withdrawals cannot be precipitate. "The frequently heard advice to take risks for peace," he wrote, before Secretary Rogers had publicly advocated this policy, "is valid only if one is aware that the consequence of an imprudent risk is likely to be escalation rather than peace."

He has perhaps given insufficient thought to the risks of the alternative: a "patient" and gradual phasing out of the war on the assumption that, as Hanoi is weaker, time is on the American side. With the rest of the Nixon Administration, Kissinger is certain that the militant antiwar elements are a malevolent minority which cannot impose peace. But unlike most of his colleagues in the White House, who are California lawyers and advertising men, he is less troubled by the turbulence on the left than by the threat of an extremist and anti-intellectual backlash from the right. For this, however, he blames the intemperance and imbecilities of the students and "troublemakers." He shuts out of his mind the idea that the existing strains on American institutions could be aggravated beyond endurance by months, or even years, more of fighting a war

which the most articulate part of the younger generation disavows.

He would argue that his own expertise is in the international field. But it is the domestic situation, and the social and interracial tensions within the United States itself, which make the slow tempo of withdrawal so dangerous—and make it unrealistic to expect President Nixon to play the war, as Bismarck would have done, like a chess game, secretively calculating twelve moves ahead. But then, like his mentor Bismarck, Kissinger prefers to think of countries as powers rather than people. ☐

## Afterword

by Fanny Howe

Thrice I croaked
before the sun was up;
the scared bed jumped
to catch my falls; and
the mouth in the shade
exposed a galaxy of snow.

And when the sky was tinsel
on the Christmas trees,
I made an angel of myself
and hung from an icicle
choking. Since you went off
the sun is black sackcloth.

Everything was religious
then. Even our walk
by factories and riverbeds
produced the kingdom of heaven
with you its hot and tender king
with me adoring or loving.

Now black winds blow
and take away my breath.
Again the night is dying on my lips.
If only I told you before:
without you I feel
I'm skating past innumerable monuments:

no words,
no facts, no laws to stop my fall.

89

# Thumbing Around:
Letter from a sixteen-year-old

by Bluejay Abigail Stone

This missive from the other
side of the gap allows one
to ask, Who's calling whom
materialistic?

Your last letter was the best one I've ever re-
cieved in my life. It was like a really peaceful
love affair. Not that I rate your letters 1-10—Just
that it was cheering to know one so beautiful and
intellectual as you gave a shit. So where did I go?

RIGHT DOWN JONES STREET IN NEW YORK!! In fact I tried to call you three times but you weren't in. HMM. I guess you were in cambridge at that fateful time. So heres where I went in order.

1. HARTFORD: got a ride from middlebury Vermont all the way. The guy gave us his adress in Milford for a place to stay. decided to go there that day—thumbed to—

2. MILFORD and stayed with him 3 days. WELL OFF! swimming pool, pool table, stereo, color t.v., snazzy house, and very cute. then his 2 friends drove us to—

3. NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND! Absolutely groovy Jazz fest. Stayed with various people—on the beach—in the woods, on the hill—and once in a very grubby hotel which we split from within the hour. YUCK. stayed for three days—Sly and the family stones, 10 years after, James brown, and the mothers of Invention plus alum of other super groups. (BLOOD SWEAT AND TEARS!) got a ride in a tiny triumph all the way back to milford where we stayed another 2 days. Then (since the guy in the triumph gave us his adress and a place to stay) we split for

4. GREENWICH, CONN. where we arrived very tired. While thumbing through town to his place we got a ride with this seventy-five year old nut who offered us a place to stay all summer. We decided to start with just one night so we went with him instead. JESUS! (If you can dig that) we drove up to this castle with an actual moat around it! core. the house itself was a million rod serling books high and about two hundred thousand bell bottoms thick. Plush thick fat delicious green carpeting—high ceilings, an actual rembrant,

90

HARPER'S
MAGAZINE

Joseph Kraft

# THE NIXON SUPREMACY

How the President produces his astonishing balancing act and maintains a precarious stability while doing it.

I'm a centrist," Richard Nixon likes to say. And as he says it, the hands take the cat's-cradle position—palms vertical and facing inwards, about six inches apart, with the fingers extended. But not held immobile, as if to figure that unvarying track across a featureless plain, the middle of the road. On the contrary, the hands saw the air; the shoulders swing; and the eyes dart. The impression is of a middle held by force of dynamic tension, of a man struggling Laocoön-like against tremendous gales buffeting from all sides. "I'm a centrist," in other words, denotes a balancing act.

That balancing act expresses the central characteristic that emerges from the first year of the Nixon Administration. The President has not solved many problems. He has not found his way into the heart of America. He has not even established a dominant style. But by playing off forces he has taken a commanding position in the fastnesses of power that matter most. Elected by a narrow minority of the country with only lukewarm support from his own party to face a Democratic Congress and a bureaucracy self-confident as rarely before, Mr. Nixon one year later was on top with his party, the Congress, the bureaucracy, and the country. So far at least, he has been able to do something many despaired of when he came to office. He has been able to rule.

The instinct for balancing forces comes to the President in the most forceful way possible to political men—which is through competition with peers. Lyndon Johnson had a bastion in the Congress, and with the producer interests of the Southwest. John Kennedy had behind him the loyalty of an enormous Catholic bloc. Eisenhower wore a hero's nimbus. For Roosevelt and Truman, there was working the elixir of challenge stirring enough

to mobilize the country. But Mr. Nixon has made his way almost alone, without a base—or rather with an anti-base. He has advanced at moments when better men, fatigued with public causes, sought satisfaction in the private achievement of better living. His natural constituency has been among those left out, or going against the grain of regular patterns. He has flourished among Republican Catholics in the East, hostile to the Protestant Establishment of their party; among executives and country-clubbers in the South, contemptuous of the rednecks; among small-town Republicans in the Midwest, envious of the cities of the Coasts; among the sabras, or native-born, of the West Coast, "fed," as they like to say, with Eastern domination. To hold together a clientele of such sundry resentments requires a constant shifting of stance. Even to his own following, Mr. Nixon has to be all things. And to do that he needs to carry with him, as Elizabeth Drew once put it, a portable Right and Left.

Bob Haldeman, the chief of staff in the Nixon White House and the official closest to the President, in physical proximity at least, can trace the workings of the portable Right and Left principle in the most minute details of almost everything the President does. A striking example was the replacement of Arthur Burns, when he was named to head the Federal Reserve Board, by two White House Counsellors—Pat Moynihan, the flamboyant Irish giant with special sensitivity to the cities and the academic world; and Bryce Harlow, the pint-sized former Eisenhower aide and Procter & Gamble lobbyist known for dry understatement and a sensitivity to business views. Other striking examples abound in the Nixon Cabinet. In the national security field, the Cabinet arrays a downy dove, Secretary of State

Joseph Kraft's syndicated newspaper column appears in the Washington Post and over a hundred other papers. He was Harper's Washington correspondent 1960-65 and is the author of The Struggle for Algeria, The Grand Design, and Profiles in Power.

45

Joseph Kraft

THE NIXON
SUPREMACY

William Rogers, against a beaky hawk, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. In social policy, a with-it friend of the President's-Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch-is stacked against an out-of-touch Presidential friend, Attorney General John Mitchell. In economic policy, a banker and a businessman, Secretary of the Treasury David Kennedy and Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans, are pitted against academic economists, Secretary of Labor George Shultz and the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Paul McCracken. Even among the academic economists, an orthodox Keynesian emphasizing fiscal measures, Dr. McCracken, is balanced by a semi-Friedmanite emphasizing monetary levers, Dr. Burns. It is typical that when it came to making one choice, Mr. Nixon picked the man who divided his followers least-the then almost unknown Spiro Agnew.

To be sure, the Nixon team-without a leading black or a well-known Jew or a Democrat of high standing-is not particularly diverse by national standards. But such differences as exist are well-publicized. Few if any Administrations have spread their discords so boldly on the record. Mr. Nixon was barely in office when Secretary Laird was saying, and Secretary Rogers denying, that the Russians were going for a "first strike" nuclear capacity against this country. As soon as the question of desegregating Southern schools came up, Mr. Finch wanted to go forward while Mr. Mitchell wanted to slow down. Similarly when it came to more tolerant laws for possession of marijuana. In July, the White House itself made it known that only three Cabinet members had backed the President's decision to replace the welfare system with a Family Assistance Plan. A couple of days later, it became plain that the White House was divided on the critical question of whether Family Assistance payments would eliminate or supplement the Food Stamp program. In August, the President announced postponement of a Vietnam troop reduction that had been publicly predicted only a couple of days earlier by both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. When the Vice President went on the warpath a little later he, among other things, attacked Averell Harriman for concessions on Vietnam that had been made by Lyndon Johnson with the full knowledge of Richard Nixon. As the year drew to a close, Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel and Secretary of Labor Schulz were locked in combat as to whether to keep or scrap the oil-import system. Everybody knew that Minority Leader Gerald Ford fought, and nearly beat, the Administration on the extension of the federal Poverty Program in the House of Representatives. Everybody and his uncle saw that on the nomination of Judge Clement Haynsworth to the Supreme Court the Administration was successfully opposed by Minority Leader Hugh Scott and Minority Whip Robert Griffin in the Senate. And on the tax bill, Scott publicly attacked the Treasury, while Senator Charles Percy disdained even to use a screen for his feelings about the Administration. "We blew it," he said.

But did they blow it by chance? Is this spectacular disconcert accidental? Mr. Nixon was, after all, known for years as a tight-lipped, hard-eyed detached professional playing politics by the numbers with ruthless efficiency. In line with that reputation he has established at the White House a strong coordinating mechanism heading up in two figures of far greater importance than generally supposed. Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the Counsel to the President, are quintessential Nixonites. Like the President they come from the West-Haldeman from Los Angeles; Ehrlichman from Seattle. Where Mr. Nixon is a Quaker, they are Christian Scientists. They entered national politics as Nixon advance men in 1960, and they were far closer to Nixon than anybody else-Mitchell and Finch included-at the supreme testing time. When Mr. Nixon lost the race for Governor of California in 1962, Haldeman was campaign manager and Ehrlichman was his deputy. In effect, they walked Lazarus back from the land of the politically dead. "Their loyalty is to God, to country, and to Nixon," a junior White House aide once said. "In reverse order."

At the White House, they run a very tight shop. Haldeman controls all access-on paper as well as in person-to the President; he is the master of the FBI reports on personnel and of the massive White House perks in planes, helicopters, cars, offices, and mess privileges. Ehrlichman is the chief coordinator of the President's domestic program-an internal czar, far more potent than Joe Califano was under Johnson or Ted Sorensen under Kennedy. Their work begins early, with some meetings at seven in the morning, and lasts late. Most communications are in writing-"to cut out the bull," Haldeman once remarked. Gags are about as common as smoking and drinking, which, in turn, is so little a matter of course that Henry Kissinger is considered a swinger, and Moynihan will break out a bottle in his office with a wry remark about being the house Catholic. No sentiment inhibits delivery of the wet mitten-even to friends outworn. When the President came to feel that he didn't want to have his old pal Herb Klein around all the time, Haldeman came up with one of his own protégés-Ron Ziegler-for the job of White House Press Secretary. Nobody is yet sure whether Moynihan's elevation to Counsel-or was a promotion or a kick upstairs. But it strains credulity to suppose that the hard-nosed gang of Nixonites in the White House could not police the Cabinet if they wanted to. In fact, they don't. The disconcert of the Nixon Administration is permitted, if not orchestrated. The President, except for the very biggest and most controlled occasions, keeps himself out of sight. He is exactly the opposite of what Ferlinghetti calls Tyrannus Nix. He lets the flowers bloom. The method of his Administration is to play off various positions and different stands. That is how Mr. Nixon has become the arbiter of the national forums that count most.

Consider, first, his own party. Mr. Nixon has not been obliged, nor chosen, to have the Republicans he beat for the nomination as key figures in his

46

Administration. No Lyndon Johnson sits in the in-
ner circles as Vice President, second-guessing the
boss. Nor is there a Robert Taft, recalling from the
citadel of the Congress past promises forsworn. Mr.
Nixon has taken the beauty parts for himself and
his own men. He has reached around the rivals who
once threatened to take the nominations, and stolen
their stuff.

Nelson Rockefeller was right off edged into
eclipse by a mission to the Latinos that predictably
failed in ways bound to make him a figure of lesser
scope if not ridicule. Former Rockefeller loyalists
were pushed forward as Nixonites—Spiro Agnew as
Vice President; John Volpe as Secretary of Trans-
portation; George Romney as Secretary of Housing
and Urban Development. Some of Rockefeller's
most gifted protégés have been expropriated, nota-
bly Kissinger as the President's Special Assistant
for National Security Affairs and John Price who
works for Ehrlichman in semi-succession to Moy-
nihan as Executive Secretary of the Urban Affairs
Council. Mayor John Lindsay, Rockefeller's chief
opposition in New York, was helped in all kinds
of ways (White House appearances, Model Cities
grant, gift of the Brooklyn Navy Yard) until he
lost the Republican primary for Mayor, and then
campaigned against the President's Vietnam policy.

But most important of all, there is the President's Family Assistance Plan for replacing the welfare system. It probably is, as its chief author Pat Moynihan unblushingly claims, the most important international reform since social security. It takes a critical step—the step past the Protestant Ethic with its phobia about giving something for nothing—toward a guaranteed annual wage. It fits perfectly with decentralization, and the favorite Republican theme of more power to the states: the “New Federalism,” in Rockefeller’s phrase. If only because the labor unions sense that a guaranteed annual wage renders superfluous their summum bonum, the steadily rising minimum wage, the plan could never have been advanced by a Democratic President. It is, as Mr. Nixon was pleased to remind his aides, a classic example of a liberal measure put forward by a Tory leader. Though it may take years to enact, especially given the Administration’s relaxed attitude on Congressional passage, progressive Republicans of all shades can cry up Family Assistance for decades to come. And in doing that, men who once had eyes only for Nelson Rockefeller accept Richard Nixon as their legitimate leader.

The eclipse of Mr. Nixon's other Republican rival
has been even more dramatic. Governor Ronald
Reagan of California, and the rest of the Republican
Right, have been encompassed by the Southern
strategy. To be sure, Administration politicos from
the President on down deny that there is such a
strategy. But they acknowledge that Republicans
have important opportunities in the South and par-
ticularly in what the President calls the "Southern
periphery." And in numberless ways, the Adminis-
tration has gone out of its way to make the most of
these opportunities. There was the emergence of
Attorney General John Mitchell, the chief Southern

strategist, as the President's main adviser on all
political matters from appointments through eco-
nomic policy and on to Vietnam. There was the in-
stallation of Southern strategists in the other key
political posts—Rogers Morton of Maryland as Na-
tional Committee Chairman; Winton Blount of
Alabama as Postmaster General; Harry Dent of
South Carolina as the chief White House politico.
There was the slowing down of school desegrega-
tion procedures in the Southern states. There was
the ostentatiously reluctant bowing to the Supreme
Court when it ordered the desegregation to pro-
ceed "at once." There was the choice of Virginia
for the President's first political foray—on behalf
of Linwood Holton's successful campaign for Gov-
ernor. There were the repeated vacation trips to
Florida, and the appearance at the Texas-Arkansas
football game. There was the hard-line rhetoric dear
to the South on military preparedness, Vietnam, and
dissenters, heading up in Vice President Agnew's
"impudent snobs" speech in—by no mere accident—
New Orleans. No one can estimate exactly the im-
pact of all these moves. But it is not for nothing that
George Wallace has been complaining his script
has been stolen. A Gallup poll shows that 49 per
cent of the enormous Southern vote (one-third of
the total) cast for Wallace in 1968 would vote Re-
publican in the next Congressional election. A
Harris poll shows Wallace "marginally weaker"
than Nixon "in the border states." The fact is that
the South, the most dynamic part of the country
politically, is continuing to tilt Republican. Mr.
Nixon has the process very well in hand, thank you.
And Governor Reagan, who once shaped up as the
darling of Dixie and natural heir to Goldwater, is
nowhere.

Taming the Democratic Congress has proved
scarcely more difficult than mastering the Re-
publican party. The Congress, to begin with, is
not all that important in Republican Administra-
tions. Federal help is sought chiefly by Democratic
clients—the poor and their patrons and the pro-
ducer interests. The Republican clients want less
rather than more government. President Nixon is
not under any serious pressure from his own crowd
to force laws through Congress. Indeed, he can
claim it as an achievement that he has come up with
only one new major program—Family Assistance—
and passed none.

Republican Presidents, furthermore, are less de-
pendent on the far-out backwoodsmen of their own
party to get the essential business of government
done. A Lyndon Johnson or a John Kennedy had
to pay a price to Southern conservatives for ap-
proving such obvious requirements as a rise in the
debt limit. A Republican in the White House can
make a majority simply by adding a few members
of his own party to the large number of Democrats
committed to essential programs. That is how Presi-
dent Nixon pushed the Foreign Aid bill through
last year. More significantly, that is how the Poverty
Program was sustained. On December 12, sixty-

"He has
reached around
the rivals who
once threatened
to take the
nominations,
and stolen their
stuff."

47

Joseph Kraft
THE NIXON
SUPREMACY

three Republicans gently lobbied by the Adminis-
tration joined 168 Democrats to beat the assault on
the program led by the chief Republican back-
woodsman, Minority Leader Gerald Ford.

Lastly, Mr. Nixon has had just plain good luck.
The normal divisions among Democrats along the
North-South line on race and defense have been in-
tensified by two untoward developments. Edward
Kennedy, only months after demonstrating in his
rise to the Whip's job that he could be a rallying
point for Senate Democrats, had the uninhibited
use of his energies cut down at Chappaquiddick. A
few months later, Speaker John McCormack of the
House was linked through an aide, Martin Sweig,
to an influence-peddling affair building up around
the New York promoter, Nathan Voloshen. Early
this year Sweig and Voloshen were indicted, so
there is more to be heard about them and the
Speaker. But so far, Mr. McCormack has used the
affair to build barriers of sentimental sympathy
against the constantly brewing efforts in his own
party to unseat him for reasons of age. The net re-
sult is that the House Democrats are less and
less able to unload a leader who was something less
than a tiger even before he had special reason to
fear an Administration holding the prosecutor's
whip.

In these circumstances, there is only one issue
around which Democrats on the Hill can unite
against the Administration. Be the trouble inflation
or recession, the opposition in the Congress can
always get up a good yell on the economy. But in
managing the economy, Mr. Nixon has been wari-
ness personified. His fight against inflation has been
distinguished by some of the softest punches in
history, and the most widely telegraphed. His chief
anti-inflationary package last April included a cut
from 10 to 5 per cent in the surtax which the Demo-
crats had imposed as a minimal mop on excess pur-
chasing power. Lecturing business and labor on
their responsibilities to hold down prices and wages
-jawboning as it was called in the Johnson Admin-
istration--has been foregone. The one exception-
in the construction industry-was confined to an
institution renowned for inability to take tough
stands, a Cabinet committee. Treasury Secretary
Kennedy, with his instinct for a strong show of
force against inflation, has steadily lost influence
in economic policy-making to the "gradualists" led
by Chairman McCracken of the Council of Eco-
nomic Advisers. When the "gradualists" wanted to
deliver a sharp psychological shock to inflation with
a sudden cut in construction last fall, the Vice Presi-
dent broke the news softly to a Governors' confer-
ence in a way that made it possible for the states to
go right ahead with virtually all their building proj-
ects. The President himself has repeatedly told visi-
tors that his concern for inflation is more than
matched by his fear of recession. At one point,
indeed, he said that if he were to allow a serious
recession it would be the end of the Republican
party.

Not only has Mr. Nixon handled the ball gingerly
in economic affairs, he has been more than ready

to pass it off to the Democrats. The tax-reform bill,
which is probably the most significant government
event of the economic year, is a notable case in
point. At the outset the Administration sought only
an anti-inflationary package including the 5 per
cent surtax, repeal of the 7 per cent investment
credit, and a continuation of certain excise meas-
ures. An Arkansas Democrat, Chairman Wilbur
Mills of the House Ways and Means Committee, put
the word "reform" into the bill, and himself con-
tributed the chief reforms on oil depletion, capital
gains, and abuse of deduction and depreciation pro-
cedures. The reforms, by adding revenue, opened
the door to reduction in general tax levels.

Some reduction was promptly put into the bill
by other House Democrats-notably Richard Boll-
ing of Missouri. Then in the Senate, tax reduction
became the big thing, thanks to still another Demo-
crat. Albert Gore of Tennessee overcame truly feeble
Administration opposition to win an increase in
the basic exemption. Only when the Gore amend-
ment was followed by a series of other amendments
that threatened a massive loss of revenue did Mr.
Nixon step strongly into the picture. At his press
conference of December 8, the President, when
asked if he could accept the tax bill, said, flatly,
"No." There followed a series of letters to the Hill
full of high, serious stuff about the need for respon-
sible behavior in the fiscal crisis. At his White
House meeting with Lyndon Johnson on December
11, Mr. Nixon vainly threw out a hint that the for-
mer President issue a statement condemning the
inflationary danger of too great a tax reduction. But
after, as widely predicted, the tax bill was adjusted
in the House-Senate conference to ease the revenue
loss this year and next, Mr. Nixon, as widely pre-
dicted, let it go through. For the purpose of his
operation had not been a confrontation on the
economy. On the contrary, the purpose had been to
share responsibility. It is now widely believed in
Washington that the economy will go sour in the
next year-through either rampant inflation or a
business downturn. As the man in charge, the Presi-
dent will, of course, have to accept most of the
obloquy. But he is at least in position now to
shoulder off some of the blame on Democratic irre-
sponsibility. And that he is able to put the damper
on the best issue the Democrats have going is a
measure of how much he has smothered their oppo-
sition in the Congress.

What might have been an even better issue the
President denied to the Democrats earlier by
a muffling process inside the bureaucracy. I refer to
the so-called priorities issue, rooted in the wide-
spread feeling that far too much federal money has
been going for defense as against internal needs.
Back in March when Mr. Nixon came down hard-
and almost surely too soon-for building the Safe-
guard ABM system, it looked as though he were
going to be an easy mark for the priorities issue.
But through two little-noted operations centering
around Henry Kissinger and Budget Director

48

Robert Mayo, the Administration has made a mush of the whole question of priorities.

The Kissinger operation has to do with the way matters are put for decision in the National Security Council. Under the loose system set up by McGeorge Bundy for Kennedy, and continued in even looser fashion by Walt Rostow for Johnson, arguments tended to be presented directly to the President by the responsible departmental figures. Repeatedly there were head-to-head clashes between conflicting departments—notably State and Defense. When the President took a position in these circumstances, he was not just charting a course; he was, perforce, accepting the view of one group and rejecting that of another. When it happened that the position of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was rejected—as occasionally it did—then there was let loose against the President and his Secretary of Defense the truly murderous fire that the military bureaucracy and its tribunes in the Congress alone command. That is one reason why Kennedy and Johnson so rarely went against the Chiefs, and why they required elaborate insulation when they did. That is how the strongest Cabinet member in modern times, Robert McNamara, was virtually broken.

Under Kissinger's more formal staff system, there are no direct departmental recommendations to the President. The Joint Chiefs never get to submit a final policy paper. Rather, Dr. Kissinger canvases the various departments and agencies for their views. These views are then worked up by the National Security Council staff into a series of alternate courses. The President chooses one of the alternatives, or a mix of several. He does not have, explicitly, to fight anybody's recommendation. Because Mr. Kissinger formulates the alternatives, he has clearly superseded both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense in importance as a framer of national security policy. He is probably the second most powerful man in the world. But only because his services to the most powerful are so great. For, thanks to the Kissinger operation, Mr. Nixon is spared the agony of direct confrontation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That is why he was able with relative ease to formulate for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks which opened in Helsinki a wide range of American positions that imply some kind of parity with the Soviet Union. That is how he was able to get by with the Guam doctrine, providing for an eventual winding down of the American military presence in the Far East. That is how he was able to return Okinawa to the Japanese with so little fuss, and arrange for the United States to forswear formally the use of biological and chemical warfare weapons. And the same Kissinger tacit has made it possible to reduce military influence on the defense budget once the Mayo operation was in place.

The Mayo operation involved returning to the Bureau of the Budget authority over Pentagon finances which Robert McNamara and his RAND Corporation Whiz Kids had centralized in the office of Secretary of Defense. As a first step, Mayo got hold of a RAND Corporation Whiz Kid of his own

## IN ANTHROPOLOGY
by William Stafford

Backward and upside down, but with an enhanced clarity, our country comes through. Cities gleam as if the sun shines on them in the rain. That golden pool already surrounding us is destiny.

Along the march we made we go back some millions of steps to the one that passed the turn to where we are going. Not to go on but to find that step—that is the point: we find it by thinking, thinking the march by a dance around all our steps.

We are a pulse that everything has; we can feel it; it's our beat too, our time. Our eye is reading itself. Ourselves a greater, subtler, unknown part of the world, we study ourselves, the intricate pulse that built the seismograph.

—James Schlesinger, who became Assistant Director of the Budget Bureau, and, later, Acting Deputy Director. As a next step there came in June a Presidential directive ordering the Bureau to handle the finances of the Defense Department in precisely the fashion it handled the finances of all other departments. Finally, there was established—through National Security Council Memorandum 3031—a Defense Policy Review Committee. That committee is chaired by Kissinger and includes Schlesinger for the Bureau of the Budget, and Under Secretaries Elliot Richardson and David Packard from the Departments of State and Defense. By its mere existence, the committee ends the old military game of brushing aside civilian economizers with the airy assertion that defense is more important than money. The Pentagon now has to justify its money requests before a forum that has Kissinger around to judge the strategic implications of the proposed expenditure. Kissinger, in effect, gives the Bureau of the Budget a license to ask hard questions of the brass. The Budget Bureau's interest in the defense field has, in effect, been legitimized.

Through the joint Kissinger-Mayo operation, the President, with hardly anybody noticing it, has been able to stay ahead of the priorities issue by internal cuts in defense spending. A total of $4 billion was cut last year in the defense budget submitted by President Johnson for fiscal 1970. Among other things, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL, a prime budget-cutting target for years, finally went down. This year, defense spending figures are to come down by another $4 billion—to about $73 billion. Other sacred cows that may eventually be hit are the Army's main battle tank; the Navy's carrier program; and the Air Force's drive for new fighter planes. And the probability is that Mr. Nixon can neutralize the priority issue for a long, long time.

49

For what he has done, thanks to the Kissinger-Mayo
operation, is to contain the armed services—the
yeastiest element of the Washington bureaucracy.

But Washington is not you know what. So master-
tering the bureaucracy, the Democratic Con-
gress and the Republican party does not mean mas-
tering the country. Least of all in Mr. Nixon's case.
He started his term as the most minority of
minority Presidents in more than fifty years. Not
only did he get only slightly more than 43 per cent
of the vote in winning, but Hubert Humphrey, in
losing with just over 42 per cent of the vote, touched
what was probably rock bottom for a Democratic
candidate. Moreover, Mr. Nixon has never been an
actively popular figure—a man to set hearts afire.
Even his best friends have loved him most for the
enemies he has made, or at least the things he was
not. "They like me here," he once observed to me,
"because I have no accent. I don't grate on their
ears." And that ultimate in left-handed self-compli-
ments, with its implicit despair of ever being truly
well-liked, was delivered in Nebraska, a state in
which Mr. Nixon has consistently rolled up some of
his biggest majorities in both primary and Presi-
dential elections.

The Nebraska Formula—the avoidance of grating
—for a while appeared to be the whole Nixon
formula for winning popular support as President.
Mr. Nixon cast himself deliberately as the staid and
sedate leader—exactly the opposite of Lyndon John-
son and the style flamboyant. The chief theme of
the Nixon inaugural was the stress on lowering
voices. His public associations were with the bland-
est of good guys—Billy Graham, Bob Hope, Bud
Wilkinson. When it had to be a black there was
Duke Ellington. Appointments were regularly
leaked in advance so that when finally announced,
they came, not as bolts from the blue so much as
anticlimax. On touchy subjects such as blacks and
kids, the President chiefly asserted how little
government could do—the modest role. Not only
were there no surprises on his first European trip
in February; there were no fireworks even when
Mr. Nixon became, on a visit to Romania in August,
the first President to enter a Communist country.
For sheer flatness, it would be hard to match re-
marks addressed by Mr. Nixon to the astronauts
after the first moon voyage. But what wasn't mag-
nificent was politic. From January through July,
Mr. Nixon's popularity mounted steadily, A Gallup
poll showed that the President's approval rating
moved from 59 per cent of those interviewed in late
January to 65 per cent in July. In August, Mr.
Nixon took off for the Western White House at San
Clemente. No day passed without a shot of him
visibly taking his ease—on the links; in the surf; at
exhibition football games; browsing in a super-
market. It was, as Pat Moynihan remarked, "a sum-
mer of indifference." And then, the cool, calm,
easygoing, relaxed-to-the-point-of-Perry Como Pres-
idency was hit by Vietnam.

Mr. Nixon always knew Vietnam would be the

key issue. He repeatedly told political associates
that unless he was out of the war by 1972, he would
not be reelected. And so he approached the issue
with deliberation—with, as he put it, a plan. The
Nixon Plan for Vietnam, when he took office at
least, was the so-called two-track approach laid out
by Henry Kissinger in the January 1969 issue of
*Foreign Affairs*. There were to be talks between the
United States and North Vietnam on mutual with-
drawal of troops from the fighting area. There were
also to be talks between the Saigon government and
the Vietcong, or National Liberation Front, on a
political settlement for South Vietnam.

Mr. Nixon moved methodically to engage the
other side. Before taking office he sent two private
communications to Ho Chi Minh. To replace Averell
Harriman at the Paris talks, he named a figure of
high prestige who had the hawkish reputation sup-
posedly required for making concessions, Henry
Cabot Lodge. On March 25, President Nguyen Van
Thieu of the Saigon regime, after much prodding
by the United States, declared that he was ready to
meet, publicly or privately, with the Vietcong to
discuss the future status of South Vietnam. Finally,
everything was in place. And at that point—but only
then—Mr. Nixon opened private talks with the other
side in Paris.

The response was negative—almost certainly be-
cause the other side did not want to accept the
Thieu government. But the American mission in
Paris, with a little nudging from the Soviet embassy
there, came to believe that the trouble lay in an
adverse intervention in Hanoi by the Chinese Com-
munists. The notion that something untoward had
occurred in Hanoi seemed to be validated when the
chief Communist negotiator, Le Duc Tho, was re-
called for consultation on April 9. When Mr. Tho
returned early in May, he said something privately
to Mr. Lodge that brought a new wave of hope in
Washington. On May 8, the Liberation Front in-
troduced a new ten-point plan that seemed to stress
the eventual possibility of a neutral South Vietnam.
On May 11, President Nixon made his first impor-
tant policy statement on Vietnam—an eight-point
declaration emphasizing that a new Saigon govern-
ment might be chosen in free elections supervised by
an international commission on which both Saigon
and the Vietcong would be represented.

But once more the reaction of the other side was
negative. On June 6, the Liberation Front trans-
formed itself into a provisional government—a step
that complicated negotiations because the Provi-
sional Government was designed to replace, not
merge with, the Thieu regime. Toward the end of
the month, Mr. Tho gave Murrey Marder of the
*Washington Post* a public interview in which, for
the first time, the other side directly criticized
Mr. Nixon. The stumbling block, once again, was
probably the Thieu government. But when Mr.
Tho left Paris again in July, Washington once
more convinced itself there was a power struggle
going on in Hanoi (connected, it was claimed in
retrospect, with the terminal illness of Ho Chi
Minh). Mr. Nixon, accordingly, laid more and

50

more pressure on the other side to engage along the lines of his May 11 offer. On July 15, he sent still another letter to Ho Chi Minh, asserting it was time to settle. On August 4, Mr. Kissinger passed through Paris and indicated to the Quai d'Orsay that the United States would welcome new, secret approaches. Sometime during this period Mr. Nixon met privately in Washington with Jean Sainteny, former French High Commissioner to Indochina and an old friend of Ho Chi Minh. When Ho died, on September 1, Washington tried to signal interest in a cease-fire by suspending B-52 raids for 36 hours (the suspension was, in fact, supposed to last longer, but a foul-up in communications caused the bombers to go back into action before the White House even realized they were aloft). On September 25, Mr. Nixon dropped into an otherwise innocuous United Nations speech still another invitation to negotiate—an explicit recognition of the principle that the United States would in time withdraw all forces from Vietnam. But the other side, in its response, kept up the insistence that there had first to be some change in the Saigon government. And all this time, while Mr. Nixon was fruitlessly trying to win Hanoi's willingness to bargain with Thieu, internal pressure was mounting in the United States.

The internal pressure took the form of demands for unilateral American troop withdrawals. As early as March, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird returned from Saigon with a plan for Vietnamizing the conflict to be initiated by early withdrawal of 100,000 American troops. Mr. Nixon made a first concession to the pressure by announcing, in his May 11 speech, that 40,000 Americans would be withdrawn in the next three months. But before June was out, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford had published an article in *Foreign Affairs* recommending the withdrawal of 100,000 men by the end of 1969. Mr. Nixon felt obliged to respond that he hoped to beat the Clifford timetable.

By mid-September when the Vietnam Moratorium began gathering force with its demand for immediate withdrawal, Mr. Nixon was in a bad bind. His plan for engaging the other side in negotiations that preserved the existing Saigon regime was not working. His attempted signal through the B-52 raid suspension had been goofed. His own Secretary of Defense was pushing him for faster troop withdrawal, as was the last previous Democratic Secretary of Defense. Coming against this background, the first Moratorium on October 15 looked like the beginnings of an avalanche. At least a million people in all parts of the country participated. They were not only kids, but solid citizens. Leading politicos from both parties were involved. According to a Gallup poll, 57 per cent of the country backed a proposal by a Republican Senator, Charles Goodell of New York, for total withdrawal of all American troops by 1970. The President's approval rating in the poll was at a new low—56 per cent. Plainly, something had to be done.

What Mr. Nixon did, in his November 3 election eve speech, was to make his first active bid for popular support as President. He wrote the speech

almost entirely himself, rejecting two staff drafts because, as he put it, they wouldn't "reach people." His own way of reaching people was to play upon resentment of the peace movement. The speech suppressed the possibility of negotiations which Mr. Nixon had been trying for all along, and presented a bogus choice between precipitate withdrawal and Vietnamization. The President called for a show of support from his old clientele of those left out—this time called "the silent majority." As one White House aide put it, "The President threw the ball to his favorite receiver."

The initial response was very good. And not only in the Niagara of wires, phone calls, and mail that poured into the White House, nor in the gross facts of electoral victories by Republican gubernatorial candidates in two states with Democratic incumbents, New Jersey and Virginia. Far more important signs were flashed by the internal composition of the vote—something to which Mr. Nixon is probably more sensitive than any previous occupant of the White House. For in two suburban counties noted for aversion to state politics—the 10th Congressional district in northern Virginia, which is a bedroom community for Washington, and Bergen County in New Jersey, which is a dormitory for New York City—record numbers of independents turned out to vote Republican. The turnout was pretty clearly stimulated by the President's speech of the night before. So Mr. Nixon said "great," as the election returns were relayed to him at dinner. And he pressed home his advantage with the hard-line stance against the November Mobilization; with the Vice President's attacks on the peace movement and the communications media; and then with his own announcement on December 15 that 50,000 more troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam.

By that time Mr. Nixon had achieved a truly impressive political coup. Using loyalty to the President on Vietnam as a fulcrum, he had turned public opinion around. According to a Harris poll 82 per cent of the country believed Mr. Nixon was on his way out of Vietnam. The same poll showed him well ahead of all possible rivals. A Gallup poll put his approved rating at the all-time high for his Presidency—68 per cent. And another poll at the end of the year showed that Mr. Nixon was the man Americans most admired.

To be sure, Mr. Nixon is still skating on some of the world's thinnest ice. He has got going in Vietnam a cut-and-walk operation, and it is hard to see how he can revive the negotiations which he knows to be the only safe way out. The economy is on a knife-edge between inflation and recession. In throwing the ball to his favorite receiver, he worked up the major source of social tension in the country—the friction between Middle America and highly educated America. For all its high-sounding obscurity, social polarization is not an imaginary danger. The potential for internal turmoil is high. Still, Mr. Nixon's balancing skill looks more than equal to any of these occasions for some time to come. As the first year ends, the wind is favorable and he is letting out sail. ☐

"The Nebraska Formula—the avoidance of grating—for a while appeared to be the whole Nixon formula for winning popular support."

HARPER'S MAGAZINE

MARCH 1970

51

John Corry

# THE MANY-SIDED MR. MEANY

The ex-plumber who rules labor by being “a papa, a rabbi, and a dictator.”

Nearly everyone who knows him says that George Meany is blunt, although bluntness is not something ordinarily attributed to a clever politician, which is what George Meany is, and nearly everyone who knows him insists that George Meany says pretty much what he means, fitting his words and thoughts together as if he were installing something, a piece of plumbing, perhaps, which is something he once installed a lot of at various places in New York, it being his job to do so until 1922. He foreswore it then at an early age to become a labor statesman, first as a business agent for his plumbers' local, and finally as the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, this being a position in which he represents 13.6 million Americans, lunches frequently at the White House, and in general makes of himself a power in the workings of this country and a few others besides. At seventy-five, Meany is the only president the AFL-CIO has had since it came into being in 1955, and even though great labor leaders tend to hang around as great labor leaders until they shuffle off to their just rewards, the business of being a great labor leader can be terribly difficult, demanding that a man mix into all kinds of things and all kinds of company, and all the while being terribly careful that another great labor leader does not cut him down, usually from behind, labor politics being sufficiently complex to insure that Cesare Borgia, unless he were careful, might never have risen above shop steward.

Consequently, at different times George Meany is different things, and sometimes he is a leader of the proletariat, which is what a union leader is supposed to be. Here he is at an auditorium in Manhattan, one of those grim places they hang with the banners of whatever organization is renting it for the evening. He is walking down an aisle, coat on, hat in one hand, dead cigar in the other. Union delegates downstairs are cheering him, and union chiefs on the platform are cheering him, and, most important of all, the troops in the balcony, whom the union chiefs always call their rank and file, know him as one of their own, and they are cheering, too. Moreover, when Meany speaks they know exactly what he is saying. General Electric is against all of them, he says, and so is Madison Avenue, and so is the press, and so is Chet Huntley. ("You know who he is," Meany says, "he is the fellow who scabbed on his own union not long ago.") Then he goes on to damn GE, indicting it for any number of reasons, all of which the troops understand, and when he finishes they applaud, really applaud, and up on the platform the leader of what is called the

New York City Central Labor Council, who is nobody's fool, either, is on his toes, up and down, flinging himself about, and saying, "Let's hear it for President George Meany."

Meany knows his constituents, and seldom moves out too far in front of them, which is one source of his power, and he knows his peers, and tries not to move out too far in front of them, which is another. Here he is at a luncheon in the White House. It is on a Tuesday, and it is the day after Paul Jennings, the president of the International Union of Electrical Workers, has called for the resignation of George Shultz, the Secretary of Labor. The vice presidents of the AFL-CIO are at the luncheon, and so is the President of the United States, and so are Jennings and Shultz, and conceivably it can be a difficult day for everyone. Meany, however, has told Jennings hours before that he damn well better not call for any more resignations, and he has already told the President of the United States that the whole thing was just a misunderstanding, and soon the photographers move in to take pictures of Jennings and Shultz, smiling weakly and shaking hands. Then, Meany takes Nixon's arm, guides him around the luncheon table, and introduces him to the assembled vice presidents, all of them masters of their own labor dukedoms. "Ah," says President Nixon when they reach A. Philip Randolph, who is the president emeritus of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, "the grand old man of American labor." "Ah," says Meany, "that makes two grand old men—him and me." It is not every grand old man who can be sportive with a President he has fought bitterly in an election, win the applause of the boys in the balcony, and eat out the chief of a powerful union when he picks a fight with the White House. Even his admirers are not entirely sure how Meany manages, although his critics suggest that autocracy has something to do with it.

This, however, is probably too simple. The AFL-CIO is made up of 121 national and international unions, many of them run by men who believe they have been divinely inspired to do so. Moreover, there is a long tradition of union autonomy, which means that a great many unions operate like baronies in twelfth-century France, and they do not like to be told what to do. "My number one job," Meany says, like a Capetian king, "is holding the boys together." "Meany," a colleague says, "is sometimes like a papa, sometimes like a rabbi, and sometimes like a dictator." Nonetheless, Meany cannot rewrite a union constitution, or even sus-

John Corry's recent articles in Harper's dealt with the Los Angeles Times and Greece today. He was formerly on the national desk of the New York Times.

52

Andrew Tully
---
Kissinger
is gloomy

Washington — President Nixon has heard some grim news from his State Department and from Dr. Henry A. Kissinger and his intelligence advisers. The subject was the Israeli-Arab crisis and the danger it poses to world peace.

Kissinger, the President's assistant for national security affairs, gloomily predicts a "full-scale war" if Israeli raids on Egyptian territory continue to escalate. Rogers, before departing on his African trip, said he was not quite that pessimistic, but admitted he couldn't refute "Henry's arguments." The intelligence people agreed that preparations on both sides of the Israeli-Arab dispute support Kissinger's cheerless soothsaying.

## Arab weakness

The danger, it was agreed, lay in the weakness of the Arabs' military posture, especially the deterioration of Egypt's defenses. Given the strong emotions involved and the subsequent pressures on Egypt's President Nasser by the more hot-headed leadership of other Arab states, it is feared that Nasser will be persuaded to launch a suicidal offensive on Israel, hoping for intervention from the Soviet Union.

No one knows whether the Russians would send troops should such a blowup occur. But as the principal champion of the Arab cause, Moscow has laid its prestige on the line. The Russian leadership might not want to subject itself to another round of international humiliation such as it suffered in the "war" of 1967.

Kissinger told the President

"all signs" indicate the Soviets are trying to dissuade Nasser from such a course. In this context, it is noted that the Soviet newspaper, Pravda, for several weeks has been viewing the current situation as "a threat to world peace."

Continued Israeli attacks appear to be driving Nasser to the wall. Indeed, U.S. intelligence reports that Nasser and the leadership of Libya, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon have agreed that no negotiations with Israel can be considered until the Arab territory occupied by the Israelis is "liberated."

In another part of the world, this stand might be considered ludicrous, since Israel has air superiority over the whole Arab alliance. Israel also probably has superiority on the ground because of the admitted lack of military skill within the Arab federation. Intelligence reports claim that Cairo already has lost more than 75 of the 300 new Russian planes supplied since 1967 and "probably all" of 309 Soviet ground-to-air missile installations.

## Fanatical Arabs

But all this, according to Kissinger, neglects what he called the fanaticism of the Arab people. They will, he said, "fight with their hands if necessary," until Soviet intervention.

Nasser lately has been boasting of the possibility of launching hordes of Arabs against the Israeli enemy in a last-ditch effort to destroy the Israeli nation. He has told interviewers, "They (the Israelis) have more pilots, but we have more bodies."

Joseph Kraft

State of World Message Marks
A Departure in U.S. Public Life

THE STATE of the World message that President Nixon is delivering to the Congress on Wednesday marks a significant new departure in American public life. And by no mere accident the document was put together while the Secretary of State was off in East Africa and the Secretary of Defense off in East Asia.

For the mere fact of the
basic presidential message
and global posture an-
nounces that foreign policy
is, as never before, in the
hands of the White House.
And the reason is that the
United States is too deeply
engaged around the globe
for any mere Cabinet officer
to be predominant in shap-
ing this country's role in the
world.

To be sure, there was a
time when the Secretary of
State was the President's
principal foreign policy ad-
viser. Through the agency of
the special elite corps of ca-
réer diplomats, he con-
ducted this country's nego-
tiations with foreign coun-
tries. He also harmonized
the foreign policy opera-
tions of other agencies of
American government. As
Dean Acheson once put it:
The President was Allah and
the Secretary of State was
the "prophet who would 'co-
ordinate' the faithful."

But that was back before
World War II. Foreign pol-
icy did not then impinge on
daily life. Precisely because
ordinary Americans were
not touched by what hap-
pened abroad, they con-
ceded primacy to the For-
eign Service and the State
Department. And the other
departments of government,
under no pressure from
their domestic clients to get
in foreign business, were
similarly deferential to the
Secretary of State.

NOW ALL THAT is
changed. Foreign policy
comes home to Americans
every day in the form of
men drafted and killed,
taxes collected, and internal
programs, not to mention

private purchases, foregone.
Many, it not most, of the po-
litical issues that make or
break Presidents are gener-
ated by events abroad. As
constant summit meetings
indicate, international rela-
tions are more and more be-
coming trans-national poli-
tics. And far from foreign
policy being the closed pre-
serve of a profesional elite,
there is no corner of a for-
eign field not touched an-
nually by American business
men or tourists or students.

Moreover, all American in-
stitutions have deep commit-
ments overseas. The most
advance companies — the
firms in electronics, chemi-
cals, autos, planes, petro-
leum, and management serv-
ices—take a growing share
of consolidated profits from
foreign business. A very
large part of this country's
agricultural produce is sold
abroad. Most of the coun-
try's non-profit organizations
—from unions through
foundations to schools—
have important operations in
foreign countries. Cultural
exchange is unceasing. And
every professional group—
lawyers, doctors, economists,
bankers, and social workers
—have connections with op-
posite numbers around the
world.

This national commitment
inevitably finds expression
at the governmental level
Everybody knows that the
Pentagon maintains Ameri-
can troops, advisers, and
programs all over the world.
Ditto for the intelligence
agencies, the AID agency,
and the Information agency.
The Department of Agricul-
ture plays a critical role in
marketing American farm
surplus abroad; the Depart-
ment of Commerce has im-
portant responsibilities in
foreign trade; the Treasury
and Council of Economic
Advisors cannot manage
this country's fiscal arrange-
ments without cooperation
from abroad. And whether
in narcotics or housing or
transportation, agencies
with purely internal respon-
sibilities are more and

more looking to interna-
tional means of solving their
problems.

BUT WITH EVERYBODY
getting into the act, who is
to give directions? Who, to
continue with Mr. Acheson's
simile, is to carry Allah's
sword to the faithful?

Not, more than 25 years of
experience teaches, the Sec-
retary of State. No Secre-
tary can have the prestige
or the staff to make the
other departments of gov-
ernment, let alone the Con-
gress, accept his primacy.

Though John Foster
Dulles looked like a giant
among pygmies, he in fact
yielded the basic shaping of
American foreign policy to
the balanced budget theo-
rems of Secretary of the
Treasury George Humphrey.
And the lesser men who suc-
ceeded Acheson and Dulles
have been so far from as-
serting primacy that the key
role has seemed to devolve
upon Pentagon officials and
White House aides.

In fact, the only official
who can harmonize the vast
range of this country's for-
eign policy interests is the
President himself. Only the
President can weave foreign
policy into the fabric of
American politics. Only the
President can articulate co-
herent foreign policies in a
way that stimulates intelli-
gent national debate. Only
the President can coordinate
the foreign policy actions of
the various departments.

These facts have not been
lost on President Nixon and
his chief White House ad-
viser on foreign policy,
Henry Kissinger. They have
built the White House pri-
macy in foreign affairs upon
an institutional base—a
full-fledged National Secu-
arity Council with a formal
staff and regular procedures
—that is apt to be perma-
nent. And the explicit mark
of the change, the certain
badge of White House pri-
macy in international af-
fairs, is Mr. Nixon's State of
the World message.

© 197 Publishers-Hall Syndicate

Il tire les ficelles
de la politique mondiale

Réalités
mars 1970
Danielle Hunebelle

Kissinger,
l'éminence grise
de Nixon

Il est l'homme le mieux informé des Etats-Unis, et probablement du monde. Il a la confiance du président, sans s'être aliéné celle des membres importants du Cabinet, tels William Rogers, chef du State Department, et Melvin Laird, chef du Pentagone. Dans sa guérite de la Maison Blanche, quinze heures par jour, même le dimanche, ce professeur de Harvard veille, tel une sentinelle, sur la sécurité internationale. Au mieux, il a devant lui sept ans (si Nixon est réélu en 1972) pour jeter les bases d'une nouvelle politique étrangère et d'un nouvel ordre mondial. Au pire, si la liquidation de la guerre au Viêt-nam tourne mal, il sera écarté ignominieusement, au nom de la raison d'Etat.

Il a quarante-six ans, un pouvoir aux contours mal définis, mais immense, une influence dont nous, Français, pouvons un jour ressentir les effets, comme n'importe quel autre pays du monde. En 1938, jeune juif allemand réfugié, Henry Kissinger débarquait à New York, sans protection et sans argent. Trente ans plus tard, il est devenu le numéro deux des Etats-Unis. Comment cela a-t-il été possible ? Quand un Européen rencontre Kissinger, il a l'impression de le connaître depuis toujours. Non pas à cause de l'apparence physique : des vêtements neutres, une taille plutôt petite, le teint jaunâtre des claustrés, un visage buté comme une pierre, abrité derrière des lunettes carrées, et une voix sépulcrale. Non pas non plus à cause de l'accent germanique. Mais l'ensemble, à la fois robuste et frileux, dégage une expression qui tranche carrément sur l'entourage américain :
Dans son bureau du soubassement de la Maison Blanche où il est le numéro deux, Henry Kissinger, quarante-six ans, conseiller du président Nixon, est l'artisan discret du désengagement américain.

mélange de sensibilité et de scepticisme, rapidité d'esprit, chaleur intérieure, détachement allié à une extrême vulnérabilité, hypertrophie du moi, nous voilà loin du Texas, et même de Chicago.
Ce personnage au profil d'oiseau mélangolique, avec son front fuyant, son nez busqué, son menton lourd,

son oreille longue, son air boudeur vaguement libidineux évoque un autre M. K., celui d'un roman de Kafka. Mais ne nous y trompons pas. Henry Kissinger, lui, a trouvé les clefs du château. Il est dans la place. Il y est tellement à sa place, que son cas pose le problème de la prédestination.

En fait il aura fallu la conjugaison de Hitler, de la guerre, et aussi la pension américaine à utiliser les ressources en matière grise et enfin la personnalité très entière de notre héros, pour faire d'un garçon qui à dix-neuf ans voulait être comptable, l'expert actuellement le plus fameux en politique internationale.

Losque la famille Kissinger fuit la Bavière avec à peine quelques meubles, Henry a une vision tronquée de l'existence. Son enfance rêveuse et sentimentale s'est trouvée confinée dans le jardin de son père, professeur

de lycée en chômage forcé, et l'école juive de Fürth, où se rejoignaient les petites victimes de la vindicte nazie. Streicher règne à Nuremberg. Les jeunesse hitlériennes défilent, chantent et marchent au pas de l'oie.

Sur Henry et son frère cadet Walter, l'Amérique fera l'effet d'un électrochoc. Quatre ans après leur arrivée, les frères Kissinger sont versés dans l'infanterie, en pleine guerre, et naturalisés Américains. L'énergie naissante d'Henry, son sens de la discipline, sa connaissance de l'allemand l'orienteront rapidement vers le contreespionnage. Pour la première fois aussi, quelqu'un s'intéresse à lui. Il s'agit d'un jeune universitaire, aujourd'hui personnalité éminente au Pentagone. « Avec une pareille tête politique, vous devez faire des études supérieures » l'encourage-t-il.

A vingt-deux ans, le sergent Kissinger administre un territoire occupé dans l'Allemagne en ruine. Il voit le monde crouler autour de lui. Cet esprit prédisposé au tragique en tire à jamais le dédain des précaires possessions terrestres et le besoin de s'accomplir sans être à la merci des circonstances. Il revoit Fürth, son pays natal, envoie à ses parents une lettre où se reflètent déjà, à son insu, tous les traits du Kissinger de la maturité : indomptable volonté de puissance, curiosité intellectuelle, sens du drame et du détail vécu, émotivité contrôlée, respect de l'autorité. Le capitaine Kissinger finira la guerre avec un traitement de dix mille dollars, en enseignant l'histoire allemande contemporaine aux officiers supérieurs américains.

Quand on compare l'actuel conseiller du président des Etats-Unis à ses prédécesseurs à la Maison Blanche, McGeorge Bundy, assistant de Kennedy, ou Walt Rostow, assistant de Johnson, on ne peut pas ne pas obser-

ce petit
professeur
n'avait qu'une
angoisse :
qu'on ne
découvre pas
son
intelligence
des affaires
internationales

69

ver que plus qu'aucun, Kissinger s'identifie totalement à ses fonctions. Pour lui, il ne peut être question de partage. Il est l'homme d'une idée fixe. Il n'a pas de hobby, pas d'intérêt en dehors de ses responsabilités » historiques ». Son divorce, en 1964, n'a été qu'une péripétie prévisible, la tragédie empiétant sur la vie privée, le dernier sacrifice à un engagement sans réserve. A cet égard, le passé militaire de Kissinger, son expérience au niveau logistique et opérationnel, sont pleins d'enseignement. Il a beau dire : je suis agnostique en ce qui concerne les militaires, ni anti ni militariste. Plus que la majorité des intellectuels, l'ambiguïté de sa nature, faite du besoin d'agir et d'esprit de discipline, le portait à comprendre la vocation militaire, à rechercher le rôle de la défense dans le monde actuel, l'importance des armes modernes, et à étudier, comme il le fit dans son premier livre, *Nuclear weapons and foreign policy*, les incidences de l'arme nucléaire sur la politique étrangère.

Kissinger a l'intelligence logique et analytique de l'universitaire, et l'abnégation quasi religieuse du croisé. Cette ambivalence permet de mieux comprendre les bonnes relations qu'il entretient aujourd'hui, du moins aux échelons supérieurs, avec les grands commis du State Department et du Pentagone.

« Henry est avant tout un ambitieux », affirment certains de ses collègues de Harvard. Pour arriver au pouvoir, il a radicalement modifié ses opinions, et accepté l'allégeance à Nixon, qu'il critiquait ouvertement depuis plusieurs années. « Qui est Kissinger aujourd'hui? », demandent-ils avec un scepticisme nuancé de blâme.

En fait, une étude fouillée de la vie de Kissinger et de ses œuvres révèle que la véritable carrière de l'historien commença à Harvard, lorsqu'il y entre avec une bourse, en 1947. Et dès ce moment, grâce à la sécurité physique et financière enfin assurée, grâce surtout à la conscience nouvelle de sa supériorité, tirée des appréciations exceptionnellement élogieuses de ses maîtres, le jeune Henry se laissa gouverner par son caractère. « J'ai besoin de sentir que ce que je fais *makes a difference* », affirme-t-il orgueilleusement.

Différent, il était par ses origines, al le devint par son ambition. La loi académique de Harvard, qui oblige les futurs professeurs à dépendre pendant huit ans de la bonne volonté des anciens, ne parut pas acceptable à l'étranger naturalisé, impatient d'être

productif, soucieux de compenser les racines qui lui manquaient par l'étendue d'une réputation acquise. Au lieu de se consacrer à l'enseignement et à la recherche, comme la plupart de ses collègues, il se fâche avec Robert Bowie, directeur du centre des études internationales, et également avec McGeorge Bundy, alors doyen de la faculté, ce pur produit wasp de la *upper class* bostonienne (installé de naissance, lui, dans l'Establishment), et rédige son premier ouvrage, pour le compte du Council of Foreign Relations.

Le coup d'essai est un coup de maître. Pendant dix ans, la pensée de Kissinger ne cessera d'influencer celle des stratégies politiques et militaires. Agissant en philosophie de l'histoire, l'aujourd'hui toutes les conséquences de la possession des armes nucléaires, et se déclare partisan de guerres nucléaires limitées. « Parce que vous préférez quelque chose, les gens s'imaginent que vous l'aimez », déplorera-t-il par la suite.

En fait, les idées de Kissinger ont évolué, mais le surnom de « docteur Strangelove » lui est resté. A travers cinq livres et de nombreux articles, l'écrivain consolide sa réputation d'expert non seulement aux yeux des autres, mais aux siens propres. Il est

limogé par Kennedy qui le trouvait beaucoup trop imbu de ses idées, il traverse, désespéré, le désert

maintenant consultant au Pentagone, il conseille et critique trois administrations successives, ses idées seront discutées tour à tour par Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, et aussi par Nelson Rockefeller, dont il devint le collaborateur attitré (Kissinger admire profondément la personnalité intuitive et solitaire de Rockefeller de même qu'il appréciait la compassion et la passion de Robert Kennedy, ce Savonarole de l'ombre. En Europe, il a vénéré Adenauer, et plaidé la cause de Gaulle devant l'Amérique, séduit par la vision tragique de l'histoire et la préoccupation constante du futur, chez l'homme d'Etat français). Cependant dans la coulisse Kissinger

s'impatiente. La politique étrangère est devenue sa chose, son fief. Il a voyagé dans le monde entier (au Japon, en Inde, en U.R.S.S., au Viêt-nam, dans toute l'Europe), rencontrant les principaux leaders et responsables. A ses séminaires de Harvard, participent des personnalités accourues des horizons les plus variés. Il a les contacts, et la connaissance des problèmes. Il se sent préparé. En outre il a une confiance absolue en ses jugements et sa vision du monde. Ses convictions se confondent avec son ambition, car pour faire triompher les unes, il faudra bien assouvir l'au-tre, c'est-à-dire accéder au pouvoir. Matériellement, il est tout à fait désintéressé. « Aucune considération de carrière ou d'argent n'aurait réussi à tirer de moi la moindre originalité, observe-t-il. J'aurais été nul dans le business. Ce qui me fait marcher, c'est la conscience de la valeur de mes idées, et l'espoir d'avoir un impact sur la société. » Cette espèce de mesianisme le convainc qu'il peut être le sauveur non seulement de son pays d'adoption, mais du monde, si seulement on l'écoutait. En 1961, dans la foulée de Kennedy, il fait une incursion à la Maison Blanche. Hélas, l'excès de son zèle, la profondeur de ses convictions, son accent germanique, sans doute aussi son absence totale de frivolité font qu'on ne le prend pas au sérieux. Il démissionne sur la politique européenne (partisan d'une force nucléaire indépendante, il n'accepte pas la position de Kennedy), et relégué à Harvard, loin du pouvoir, il devient très malheureux. Kissinger fait partie de ces êtres secrets et solitaires, capables d'un détachement total, mais possédés par une passion exclusive.

Sans cet arrière-plan chronologique et psychologique, on comprendrait mal la conjonction Nixon-Kissinger. En 1968, le professeur de Harvard, qui croit au destin et aux idées de Nelson Rockefeller, s'engage à fond dans sa campagne électorale. Conseiller de politique étrangère, il parcourt le pays dans les bagages du gouverneur de New York, écrivant les discours, touchant presque à la Maison Blanche. Rockefeller est battu. Retourner à l'Université? L'attitude de fermeté que Kissinger a adoptée est mal interprétablie. Beaucoup de ses collègues le traitent de hawk, de faucon. Dans un article important publié par le magazine *Foreign Affairs*, Kissinger critique les erreurs américaines au Viêt-nam, et suggère un plan de négociations. Nixon lui propose de venir l'appliquer

à la Maison Blanche. Kissinger refuse d'abord. Comme presque tous les intellectuels de la côte est, il redoute les astuces du politicien californien, et ne le croit pas capable d'une vision du monde désintéressée. Après des conversations approfondies, et la recommandation expresse de Rockefeller, il finira par accepter.

Ce que Nixon et Kissinger, arrivés ensemble au pouvoir après leur purgatoire, ont d'abord en commun, c'est qu'ayant réalisé leur ambition, ils ne sont plus les mêmes. La tension s'est relâchée. Les contradictions, les conflits émotifs ont été surmontés. Dans le cas de Kissinger, cela est particulièrement frappant. Sans la guerre du Viêt-nam, qui lui impose un labeur quotidien harassant et fait planer sur lui la menace toujours possible d'un limogeage, il serait le plus heureux des hommes. Son travail, qui consiste non seulement à s'informer et informer le président, mais à lui présenter, pour toute situation donnée, présente ou future, une analyse immédiate, exhaustive et objective de toutes les options politiques possibles, lui convient parfaitement. Il a recruté et dirige une équipe de trente experts. Les câbles les plus secrets, les dépeches les plus confidentielles lui passent entre les mains.

Il est en relations constantes avec le State Department et le Pentagone. Il contrôle l'exécution des décisions. Il inonde les bureaucrates de questions, sollicitant leurs suggestions, essayant de coordonner les travaux de trop nombreuses agences (Kissinger est obsédé par l'inertie, la courte vue et l'égoïsme des fonctionnaires. A son avis, le contrôle des bureaucraires est devenu le problème majeur de notre époque, reléguant au xixᵉ siècle celui de la propriété des moyens de production). En outre il reçoit un flot ininterrompu de visiteurs, d'élègates, sénateurs, savants, journalistes, leaders de la jeunesse et de l'opposition. A travers lui, Nixon a pu établir un dialogue avec tout l'éventail des intellectuels, des libéraux aux consévateurs.

Dans quelle mesure les suggestions du conseiller sont-elles retenues par le président ? Quelle est l'influence réelle de Kissinger ? Il a joué un rôle essentiel dans le premier voyage de Nixon en Europe après son élection; dans l'évolution au jour le jour des affaires vietnamiennes, et le retrait progressif des troupes américaines; dans la décision de fabriquer un système de missiles antimissiles amélioré, et dans l'affaire de l'avion espion abattu par les Nord-Coréens en 1969. Mais

Kissinger n'est pas un ami personnel de Nixon, comme le sont depuis longtemps Rogers, Laird, ou l'avocat général, Mitchell. Les deux hommes se sont rencontrés trois fois en tout, assez brièvement, avant leur association. Cependant Nixon qui, sans être un intellectuel, est très intelligent (et qui avait lu les livres de Kissinger), eut tôt fait de détecter la supériorité de son conseiller sur un gouvernement composé en majorité de provinciaux du Midwest, avocats californiens, agents de relations publiques, tout un personnel de politiciens petits-bourgeois, aux dents longues et idées courtes, strictement limités aux affaires intérieures.

Kissinger voit seul à seul le président chaque jour pendant au moins quatre-vingt-dix minutes. L'esprit de système du chef de l'Etat, son besoin de

Nixon
l'admire
pour son flair
et pour son
cerveau
qui dissèque
les problèmes
avec l'acuité
d'une lame
de rasoir

savoir en toute connaissance de cause où il va, la discipline qu'il impose à ses émotions, sa façon directe, incisive, de poser les questions, en un mot son sérieux ont conquis le respect de l'intellectuel de Harvard. De son côté Nixon apprécie la faculté d'analyse de Kissinger, la consistance de sa pensée, son flair, également sa loyauté, son dévouement, son approche objective.

Egalement secrets et compliqués, avec une passion commune pour l'ordre et la précision, les deux hommes se complètent. Kissinger a trouvé un disciple, Nixon une nouvelle base de réflexion. Tous deux redoutent les changements qui ne peuvent pas être assimilés par la société. Ils se méfient de l'excès d'optimisme ou de bonne volonté, lorsque celui-ci ne s'accompagne pas d'une approche réaliste des problèmes. Ils sont conscients qu'à l'âge nucléaire, la notion d'éternité à disparu, et que si le futur se construit, ce doit être à court ou moyen terme. Tout en laissant la place à des transformations politiques et sociales, ils souhaitent maintenir l'équilibre des forces, et garder dans

l'ordre existant ce qui vaut la peine d'être préservé.

« En Europe, je passerais pour conservateur libéral », dit Kissinger. En Amérique, sa nomination a été généralement applaudie, quoique certains redoutent qu'il finisse par être captif de l'environnement. Ou bien il servira de bouc émissaire, disent-ils, ou bien ses initiatives seront contrées par des préoccupations purement électorales. En attendant de pouvoir changer durablement la substance et les processus de la politique mondiale, Kissinger, dont la résistance physique est à toute épreuve, fait après vingt ans de vie quasi monacale, l'apprentissage de la frivolité. Dans ce Washington provincial et puritan qui tourne autour de l'actuel gouvernement, son sourire décontracté, son pouvoir occulte, son statut de célibataire en font la vedette des diners d'ambassades et réunions mondaines. « Henry est le symbol of sex in the government », disent les mauvaises langues. En fait, Kissinger apprécie les femmes, « plus ardentes et intuitives que les hommes », et on l' imagine assez bien au xixᵉ siècle, ministre de la reine Victoria. Sa nouvelle position lui a fait découvrir le monde du spectacle, les actrices, les personalités en vue. Sa vanité est comblée, mais il n'est pas dupe.

Au bureau dès 7 h 30 chaque matin, les yeux rougis par la lecture intensive, il ne fume pas, ne boit pas, essaye de perdre les kilogrammes pris à la Maison-Blanche par manque d'exercice, voit ses enfants, Elizabeth, dix ans, et David, huit ans, une fois par mois, ses parents une fois chaque deux mois, écoute rarement du Mozsart dans sa petite maison à colonnes du nord-ouest de Washington, et songe avec nostalgie aux nombreux voyages annuels qu'il ne peut plus faire, en particulier à Paris, qu'il adore (il lit et comprend très bien le français). A la fois Européen et Américain, déraciné mais solide, discipliné et indépendant, universitaire et homme d'action, hardi et prudent, égocentrique et dévoué à l'intérêt général, orgueilleux et humble, lourd et humoriste, dur et plein de compassion, calme et intense, obstiné et souple, Kissinger fait un pas en avant, un pas en arrière, ménageant à chaque instant les possibles, soucieux d'être apprécié et compris, mais gardant jalousement ses atouts, et même lorsqu'il paraît céder, sachant d'instinct jusqu'où il peut aller trop loin. Quel que soit le sort de l'administration républicaine, sa personnalité marquera fortement l'expérience politique en cours.

FIN

## Erotik à la russe

wurde vorletzte Woche auf der sowjetischen Wanderausstellung „U. S. S. R. Photo '70" in Washington enthüllt. Vielbeachtete Beiträge des 1200 Lichtbilder umfassenden Rußland-Kaleidoskops, das im Rahmen eines sowjetisch-amerikanischen Kulturaustauschs sieben Monate lang in mehreren US-Städten gezeigt werden soll, waren Photos, die eine Abkehr vom partei-offiziellen Puritanismus ahnen lassen. Zwar überwiegt auch in diesem — aus insgesamt 70 000 Photos ausgelesenen — Porträt des modernen Rußland der „sozialistische Realismus": sibirischer Winter, kaukasischer Sommer, gigantische Kraftwerke, kraftstrotzende Athleten, fruchtbare Felder und fröhliche Kinder. Um so bemerkenswerter erschien Ausstellungsbesuchern der erstmals behördlich genehmigte Sex-Export — die splitternackte, bis knapp unterhalb der Busenspitze in Wasser getauchte Genossin etwa (Titel des Photos: „Geste") oder das als „Sommer" ausgewiesene ländliche Stilleben mit Trockenobst, Spitzenunterrock und Büstenhalter. Recht lange verweilte auch Nixon-Berater Henry Kissinger mit seinem Führer, dem Sowjet-Botschafter Anatoli Dobrynin, vor einem photographischen Kunstwerk, das unbekleidete Sowjetbürgerinnen in der Sauna zeigt. Beunruhigt durch Kissingers Interesse an russischen Rundungen, erläuterte Dobrynin hastig: „Naturlich hat eine Frau dieses Bild aufgenommen."

„Geste"

„Moskaus zwei Zeitalter"

„Sommer"

187

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Waldmann-Film „Eine große Familie“: „Die Arbeit ist keine Gabe Gottes“

trollierten Lastwagenwerk „eine große Familie“.

So jedenfalls sieht es der Patriarch
Overath. So auch hat Fernsehautor
Dieter Waldmann, 43, mit einiger Ironie
sein zweiteiliges Fernsehspiel
überschrieben, das am Dienstag und
Donnerstag um 20.15 Uhr (Waldmann:
„Damit auch Arbeiter, die Frühschicht
haben, den Film sehen können“) vom
Südwestfunk im Ersten Programm gesendet wird (Regie: Peter Beauvais).

Der ehemalige Montage-Arbeiter
Waldmann, nach drei einschlägigen
Fernsehfilmen („Der Unfall“, „Hürdenlauf“, „Schrott“) mit der Arbeitswelt wohlvertraut, hat seine „bisher größte Produktion auf diesem Gebiet“ als Betriebs-„Modell“ entworfen und darin „beispielhafte Vorgänge“ aus dem sozialen Leben konzentriert.

In Waldmanns Muster-Fabrik wird
etwa das Mittagessen in vier nach
Rang und Stand getrennten Kantinen
serviert. Dort pöbelt — auf höherer
Ebene — ein Kleinaktionär beim Ma-

deutschen Wirtschaftswunders in
Fernseh-Spielen, -Features und -Documentationen bereits hinlänglich
analysiert. Doch keiner war bislang so
gründlich am Werk wie Waldmann.

Drei Jahre lang hat er — der „Großen Familie“ zuliebe — die Kniffe der elektronischen Datenverarbeitung studiert, das Akkordsystem erforscht („Akkord, das ist die moderne Sklaverei“) und sich mit dem Aktienrecht beschäftigt. Er hat sieben SPIEGEL-Nummern und 44 Fachbücher exzertiert; dann war das Thema drehbuchreif.

Vor den Aufnahmen ließ Waldmann seinen Schauspielern das Schweißen beibringen, und ehe sie im Schreibpool mitwirken durften, mußten einige Darstellerinnen das Tippen erlernen. Mit derart vorgebildetem Personal und dem Vorsatz, in der „Familie“ Typen-Persiflage und demaskierende Ironie zu meiden, erwirkte Waldmann die Dreherlaubnis unter drei Bedingungen: Er durfte den

188

MOLLENHOFF

# The Demise of an Inquiry

Continued From Page A-1

White House would not go into it without clearing it with the secretary."

The official was reminded that Ziegler had acknowledged the Mollenhoff inquiry on Thursday. "I can tell you that there is no inquiry," he repeated.

In the cold language of the administration spokesman, it would appear that Clark Mollenhoff had been admonished, and that at least part of his charter had been revoked.

When he left his job as investigative reporter for the Des Moines Register to join Nixon, Mollenhoff's role at the White House was described as that of inspector general for the administration. He prefers the title "presidential ombudsman" and says simply that it is his job to protect the President's interest in all matters that come to his attention.

It is not easy to describe Mollenhoff's role in any given case, because, while he sees reporters frequently he seldom speaks for the record.

Behind his desk there is a neatly lettered sign that says "Background Only" in large letters. It adds that reporters who want quotes should see Herbert Klein, the President's communications assistant.

But Mollenhoff has been quoted as saying that he is answerable only to the President himself, and in his first eight months, "there's not an agency or department I haven't looked into."

But Mollenhoff touched one of the administration's most sensitive nerves when he showed sympathy with the young liberal intellectuals of the Ripon Society and their complaints.

And apparently his authority has changed now. The State Department has been put off limits.

Undersecretary of State Eliot L. Richardson had been a long supporter of the Ripon Society when members of that Republican group expressed concern over American policy toward Biafra.

It was Richardson who made it possible for them to interview diplomats in the African section of the State Department and to see the cable traffic to Lagos.

Despite this cooperation, two leading members of the organization, President Josiah Lee Auspitz and member Christopher Beal, remained unconvinced and published a lengthy report criticizing the department—and specifically Richardson—for "insubordination" in neglecting to carry out Nixon's attempt to modify Nigerian policy.

The report received almost no major attention in the press despite its sensitive nature and the aggressive advertising of some Ripon members. When this failed to put the heat on the State Department, Beal and Auspitz went to Mollenhoff.

He reportedly considered their complaints worth checking in the light of past complaints against the department's bureaucracy, usually made by

conservative Republicans, which amounted to the same charge of sabotage of presidential wishes.

State Department officials have maintained that all of this is a tempest in a teapot; that the President has never shown the flaming concern for Biafra that the Ripon Society suggests, and that he has not expressed any dissatisfaction with the State Department.

Whether this is the case or not, Kissinger moved quickly to keep relations with the department from deteriorating, especially his own personal relations with Richardson, which have been close.

Not everybody in the White House agreed with the interpretation that Mollenhoff has been called off, but he was maintaining his posture of official silence.

## VOLPE PREDICTS 10,000 DROP IN ROAD DEATHS IN 2 YEARS

By United Press International

The annual U.S. highway death toll will drop by 10,000 in the next two years because of new auto safety devices, says Transportation Secretary John A. Volpe.

Volpe said yesterday the main factors on which he bases his prediction of the decline in highway deaths will be the growing impact of the government's auto safety standards and, in the future, the use of the inflatable air bag.

The air bag, which Volpe has ordered installed under the dashboard of all cars built after Jan. 1, 1972, inflates upon impact to absorb the crash shock.

## Maddox to Run As a Democrat

ATLANTA (UPI) — Gov. Lester Maddox said today he will remain a Democrat in his bid for lieutenant governor this year.

Maddox said many Republicans had urged him to cross party lines but he had decided against making the switch after a thorough study of both parties.

"I have seen nothing to cause me to think that they (the Republicans) are going to follow any course other than moving on into a socialistic state," he said.

Maddox announced last Monday he would seek the lieutenant governorship, and hinted then he might switch to the GOP.

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Page A-3).

MOLLENHOFF STUDY

Do U.S. Diplomats
Set Own Policy?

By JAMES DOYLE
Star Staff Writer

Special Counsel Clark Mollenhoff of the White House staff is conducting a low-keyed inquiry into the State Department's role — or lack of it — in the execution of foreign policy.

Mollenhoff has zeroed in on U.S. policy toward Nigeria and Biafra as a wedge to explore a larger question: Whether entrenched career diplomats have thwarted Nixon's attempts to change American foreign policy.

There is no reason to believe that Mollenhoff is acting on be-half of President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger. He has been given a good deal of independence to act as an informal inspector general to protect the Pro-

dent's interests throughout the bureaucracy.

But the disenchantment between White House and State Department that has affected every recent administration has taken hold again. Relations between Kissinger's National Security Council staff and the top layer of the State Department have become strained in recent months.

Some but not all of this strain was caused by deep differences between the two in the aftermath of Biafra's surrender, and charges that the State Department's estimate of the situation did not accurately reflect the extent of starvation in the country.

Influential critics of the de-
See MOLLENHOFF, Page A-4

but would pay back their loans over a period when they are making a better income. Nixon proposed extending the repayment period to 20 years from the 10 years in the federal provisions for current subsidies for interest on private loans to students.

The President also proposed creating a career education program that would aid local two-year colleges in training students in critical occupation fields such as police and fire science, environmental technology and health aides of various types.

Federal programs have not paid enough attention to developing two-year community or junior colleges, he said. "Something is wrong with higher education itself" when many courses are "irrelevant, structure is often outmoded" and when colleges pay too much attention to research rather than teaching, he said.

Nixon also proposed establishing a National Foundation for Higher Education that would be funded at $200 million in the first year to make grants supporting innovation and reform in private and public institutions.

He estimated that the new programs he seeks would cost some $400 million more than current federal spending of $5.3 billion a year on higher education.

In his message, the President made some sweeping criticisms of higher education programs developed during the Johnson administration.

"Something is basically wrong with federal policy toward higher education," he said, when government programs that spend $5.3 billion annually "have largely been disjointed, ill-directed and without a coherent long-range plan."

In a gesture toward the rebellious college generation, he added:

"The turmoil on the nation's campuses is a symbol of the urgent need for reform in curriculum, teaching, student participation, discipline and governance in our post-secondary institutions."

### Opposes Fund Ban

The President repeated, however, that "violence or the threat of violence may never be permitted to influence the actions or judgments of the university community." But he also

State Department began considering a compromise settlement rather than surrender.

He is also asking State to explain whether it disregarded the evidence of starvation submitted in a report by a nutritionist hired by the department. It showed the highest rates of edema, a degenerative disease, ever recorded in food-scarce areas.

### 3 Reported Under Fire

The general thrust of Mollenhoff's inquiry is to suggest that the State Department omitted from reports to the White House important information that would have supported the need for immediate U.S. action, and to pose the question of whether the department reacted with a deliberate lack of speed in carrying out presidential directives.

The three persons who reportedly come under fire are Undersecretary of State Elliot L. Richardson, Ambassador Ferguson, and William H. Brubeck, director of the Nigerian section of the department.

A source in the department said today that no inquiries had yet been received from Mollenhoff, and that the undersecretary's office was not aware of Mollenhoff's effort.

Kissinger was reportedly not involved in Mollenhoff's inquiry. He and Richardson maintained a warm relationship during the first year of the Nixon administration, lunching or breakfasting together once a week and talking frequently on the telephone.

But in recent weeks the strain between the National Security Council staff and the top State Department staff reportedly has increased.

Both prepared drafts of Nixon's "State of the World" message delivered to Congress on Feb. 18, but the secretary of state withdrew his version from consideration.

The cover story at the time was that it had been too closely parallel to the White House version to serve as a supplement, and would be reworked as a country-by-country blueprint.

Kissinger and the President are said to have rejected it as unacceptable and poorly drawn.

National Security Council

# New Staff System After One Year

By BROOKE NIHART

WHEN President Nixon in his 18 February "State of the World" message (or National Strategic Objectives Plan-NSOP-as it has been termed by some-JOURNAL 28 February) described his revitalized National Security Council system, he was describing a synthesis of several different concepts which, among other things, permits:

* Discharge of Presidential responsibility, under the Constitution, for making national security decisions.

* Adherence to the National Security Act of 1947, which prescribed establishment of a National Security Council.

* Evolution of the NSC to accord with the Nixon style of operation and what he sees as the decision-making needs of the 1970s.

Throughout history, melding competing viewpoints of advisers and contending positions of governmental agencies charged with domestic, foreign, and military policies has proven one of the thornier problems of government. In less complicated times of snail-paced change, the King and his Privy Council or Prime Minister and his Cabinet could make their decisions in their own good time. But with worldwide interests and deployments, speed-of-light electronic communications, and emissaries and bombs traveling at jet speed, top-level deliberations on multitudinous and momentous matters of state require much more careful-but also much more rapid-consideration. This spells system, coordination, information, and supervision.

## Genesis and Evolution

Establishment of the NSC by the National Security Act of 1947 was inspired by the shortcomings of the WWII State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee and other wartime groups. Architects of the NSC drew on the experiences and early growing pains of Britain's Imperial Defense Council, set up in 1908, and followed it and other similar bodies forward in time through WWI and WWII.

The result was the NSC of 1947, instituted "to advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security so as to enable the military services and the other departments and agencies of the Government to cooperate more effectively in matters involving the national security."

The basic NSC procedures were hammered out under President Truman. Care was taken to prevent it from becoming a decision-making agency-Truman heard the contending viewpoints, the alternatives, and then made the decisions himself. No votes were taken. There was no consensus-only the presentation of views. As Truman so succinctly said: "The buck stops here."

President Eisenhower tended to allow Council members to arrive at a consensus-a sense of the meeting-usually summed up by Robert Cutler, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, which Eisenhower then confirmed. Often, however, when such consensus was not forthcoming, Eisen-

PRESIDENT NIXON signs his 18 February "State of the World" Message while "friends" of the NSC Staff, who prepared the NSOP, look on.

armed forces JOURNAL/4 April 1970

25

NSC Decision-Making Trail

The President, or
Kissinger, or
NSC Staff
raises an issue:

Question is Processed Through
Kissinger
and
NSC Staff

National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM)
Results

NSSM Processed
Through the NSC Staff

Departments and Agencies Involved
and is:

Taken Up by an Appropriate
Interdepartmental Group or
NSC Committee
which produces a:

Basic Paper
which goes to the:

Review Group for further work
then to:

NSC Meeting
Presented by Kissinger

President Makes Decision Later
which goes to:

Interdepartmental Policy Implementation Committee
which supervises actions taken

hower came to his own decision. Other than this rather basic
difference, the NSC was run as it had been under Truman.

Under President Kennedy NSC changes were made in all
areas—there were fewer meetings, fewer members, less
routine NSC action, and more decisions and actions handled
through “other means.” Many major actions were handled ad
hoc by a coterie of trusted Presidential advisers known as the
NSC Executive Committee—or ExCom. This loose, informal
methodology suited the Kennedy “style” and apparently—
but surely for different reasons—President Johnson’s style as
well. (LBJ’s informal band of inside advisers was known as
the “Tuesday Lunch Group”.)

## Suited To The Nixon Style

According to Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Assistant to the
President for National Security Affairs, in a 3 March letter to
Senator Henry M. Jackson (D-Wash) on NSC, "President
Nixon's decisions as to the new role and structure of the NSC
were influenced by his direct experience with NSC ma-
chinery as it was used during the Eisenhower Administration,
and also by the accumulated national experience of a variety
of approaches to the utilization of the NSC machine-
ry... that would be efficient, effective, and suited to his
own style of leadership."

Dr. Kissinger pointed out that the White House set the
theme for the new NSC as early as 7 February 1969 in an
announcement: "The President ... indicated that the Coun-
cil will henceforth be the principal forum for the considera-
tion of policy issues on which he is required to make
decisions.

"It is not, of course, the NSC which makes decisions,"
Kissinger continued. "The President makes decisions in
accordance with his Constitutional responsibility, and the
NSC remains an advisory body as conceived by the 1947
National Security Act."

Kissinger describes the purpose of NSC as providing "a
forum for discussion, in which the interested departments
and agencies of the U.S. Government are asked by the
President to state issues, present alternatives, and discuss
implications, in order that the President may elicit and
receive the advice he requires."

Kissinger concedes that "no institutional arrangement can
guarantee that these objectives will all be realized. Nor can
we claim that the structure and procedures we have devised
are the only way to go about the business of policymaking.
But the orderly and regularized procedures which the NSC
system provides have advantages which President Nixon
prefers to exploit."

## Neither Excessive Informality ...

Stressing further the "orderly and regularized proce-
dures," Kissinger castigated the loosely structured, ultra-
informal methodology of the Kennedy-Johnson era: "The
more ad hoc approach of the 1960s often ran the risk that
relevant points of view were not heard, that systematic
treatment of issues did not take place at the highest level, or
that the bureaucracies were not fully informed as to what
had been decided and why. Flexible procedures used in place
of NSC meetings can enjoy the advantages which come with
informality-speed, frankness, convenience, and so forth-but
they may also suffer from the lack of fixed agenda,
methodical preparation, and systematic promulgation or
explanation of decisions."

Although the systematic Kissinger is himself clearly and
obviously on the side of orderly and regularized procedures,
there is nothing, he said, "to preclude a President from
supplementing formal with informal machinery-as indeed
has frequently been the case in this Administration."
President Nixon, Kissinger said, prefers to make use of the
NSC and the NSC system, with occasional recourse to less
structured groups. "Almost all major issues are now treated
within the framework of the NSC system," Kissinger said.

26

... Nor Excessive Formality

Nixon and Kissinger also perceived problems, on the other hand, in the overly formal approach of the Eisenhower NSC system. Lines of decision-making and procedures for staffing issues and their derivative papers were rigid. The new Nixon system, they believe, provides needed flexibility in the channels through which a paper travels from initiation of a project to its presentation to the Council. A problem requiring a decision can be identified by the President, Kissinger, the NSC Staff, or an interested department or agency. A National Security Study Memorandum then can assign the task to any one of a number of committees or interdepartmental groups, or an ad hoc group can be created to deal with the problem.

Once a Basic Paper has been drafted, the Review Group considers it and may rework it or refer it to other groups for more work before presenting it to the Council. The key to the system, according to Kissinger, is that issues receive a "systematic review and analysis, bringing together all the departments and agencies concerned."

According to William Watts, NSC Staff Secretary, the systematic process of staff work, review, and Council debate represents a "careful turning over of stones," providing a close look across the board at issues under consideration and consequences involved in various courses of action.

Kissinger has been quoted as having said that, "a failure of the system would occur-a real error-should a given course of action be proved wrong for reasons never considered by the Council. The President would be ill served indeed by the NSC system should this happen." Kissinger and the President, it would seem, have consciously designed the system to minimize such possibility.

## Options: Pros and Cons

In Kissinger's words, the Nixon system provides the President "with analytical papers focusing on issues for decision and on clear policy alternatives. The system of supporting subcommittees which the President set up is intended to present distinct options, together with their pros and cons and implications and costs, rather than a single policy recommendation founded on bureaucratic consensus.

"We thus try," says Kissinger, "to identify the real issues for Presidential decision instead of burying them in 'agreed language.' Formal agency positions are taken only at the level of the Council itself, and are argued out in front of the President. In focusing on the issues, we try to ask first the crucial policy question of where we want to go. We formulate the alternative answers to this question, and the President's decision then guides our inquiry into the operational issues."

## Decision after Reflection

Further emphasizing that decision is a personal act of the President, based on the weighing of alternatives, rather than departmental consensus, Kissinger has said: "Nor does the President necessarily make his decisions in the NSC meetings; rather, this is usually done after further private deliberation." The President's decisions, once made, are transmitted in writing.

The committee and staff organization of the National Security Council apparently is the key to implementing the Nixon philosophy of Presidential decision-making.

The committee with the most clout-it oversees implementation of the decisions-is the Interdepartmental Policy Implementation Committee. It is chaired by Under Secretary of State Elliot Richardson and includes members at the assistant secretary/agency head level. These are the people who, while sitting on other NSC committees, have participated in the deliberations leading up to a specific decision, and who have the power within their own agencies to ensure compliance. Henry Kissinger, as the President's assistant, sits in on the IPIC, as he does on most important NSC groups.

# NSC COMMITTEES

## INTERDEPARTMENTAL POLICY

### IMPLEMENTATION COMMITTEE

* Elliot L. Richardson, Under Secretary of State, Chairman

* U. Alexis Johnson, Deputy Under Secretary of State, Alternate

* Henry A. Kissinger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs

* David Packard, Deputy Secretary of Defense

* Richard Helms, Director, Central Intelligence Agency

* General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman, JCS

* Others at the discretion of the Chairman

## REVIEW GROUP

* Henry A. Kissinger, Chairman

* Representatives of: State, Defense, CIA, JCS

* Others at discretion of Chairman

## DEFENSE PROGRAM REVIEW COMMITTEE

* Elliot L. Richardson

* David Packard

* General Earle G. Wheeler

* Richard Helms

* Robert P. Mayo, Director, Bureau of the Budget

* Paul W. McCracken, Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers

* Gerard C. Smith, Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

* Glen T. Seaborg, Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission

* Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, Science Adviser to the President

## WASHINGTON SPECIAL ACTION GROUP

## VIETNAM SPECIAL STUDIES GROUP

## INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE

## VERIFICATION OF ARMS CONTROL MEASURES PANEL

All committees have support from NSC staff.

## INTERDEPARTMENTAL GROUPS (IGs)

### EAST ASIA

* Marshall Green, Assistant Secretary of State, Chairman

### EUROPE

* Martin J. Hillenbrand, Assistant Secretary of State, Chairman

### MIDEAST

* Joseph J. Sisco, Assistant Secretary of State, Chairman

### LATIN AMERICA

* Charles A. Meyer, Assistant Secretary of State, Chairman

### AFRICA

* David D. Newsom, Assistant Secretary of State, Chairman

* Each IG includes representatives of: NSC Staff, DoD, CIA, JCS, and others at discretion of Chairman.

27

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL FAMILY

THE COUNCIL

President Richard M. Nixon

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew

William P. Rogers, Secretary of State

Melvin R. Laird, Secretary of Defense

George A. Lincoln, Director, Office of Emergency Preparedness

OFTEN IN ATTENDANCE

John N. Mitchell, Attorney General

David M. Kennedy, Secretary of the Treasury

General Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff

Richard Helms, Director, Central Intelligence Agency.

"CHIEF OF STAFF"

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Assistant for National Security Affairs

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

David Y. McManis

NSC STAFF

OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT FOR NATIONAL
SECURITY AFFAIRS

BGen Alexander M. Haig, USA

Robert Houdek

W. Anthony Lake

LCdr Jonathan Howe, USN

David Young

NSC STAFF SECRETARIAT

William Watts, Staff Secretary

Jeanne W. Davis, Director

Keith Guthrie

John Murphy

Harry Beach

David White

OPERATIONS STAFF

LATIN AMERICA

Viron P. Vaky

Arnold Nachmanoff

Mary Brownell

EUROPE

Helmut Sonnenfeldt

William G. Hyland

Arthur Downey

EAST ASIA

John Holdridge

Richard Smyser

Lindsey Grant

UN AFFAIRS

Winston Lord

PLANNING GROUP

Robert Osgood, Director

Winston Lord

Col Richard Kennedy, USA

Peter Rodman

Roger Morris

John F. Lehman, Jr

PROGRAM ANALYSIS STAFF

Laurence E. Lynn, Director

John C. Court

Major Stanley M. Kanarowski, Jr., USA

Robert J. Ryan, Jr

Capt Robert L. Sansom, USAF

Walter B. Slocombe

Lt Col Dale A. Vesser, USA

Delmar Karlen

NEAR EAST AND
SOUTH ASIA

Harold S. Saunders

Samuel Hoskinson

AFRICA

Roger P. Morris

INTERNATIONAL
ECONOMIC AFFAIRS

C. Fred Bergsten

Ernest B. Johnson

Robert Hormats

SCIENTIFIC AFFAIRS

Col Robert M. Behr, USAF

Michael A. Guhin

Watchdogs

An interagency Review Group, chaired by Kissinger, includes representatives of the principal agencies involved in national security affairs and—at the discretion of the chairman—can bring in specialists and representatives from other interested agencies.

Basic Papers come to the Review Group from the originating group or committee. The reviewers critique the papers, enter further considerations, raise new related issues, devise new options. The reviewers may send the papers back for rework or to another group for work or comment. The finalized papers are presented to the Council by Kissinger.

The Defense Program Review Committee also is chaired by Kissinger and includes such members as the Under Secretary of State, Deputy SecDef, JCS Chairman, and CIA Director. It also includes several other important agency heads, however, who contribute their own expertise to the deliberations: the Budget Bureau Director, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman, and the President's Science Adviser.

The DPRC reviews major defense policy and program issues which have strategic, political, diplomatic, and economic implications in relation to overall priorities for goals and use of national resources. The DPRC's role is that of national arbiter for resource allocation.

Fact-Finding and Evaluation

Although the President said, in his 18 February message, "We do not want to exhaust ourselves managing crises; our basic goal is to shape the future," crises do occur and must be dealt with.

In the same message, the President observed: "Intelligent discussions and decisions at the highest level demand the fullest possible information. Too often in the past, the process of policymaking has been impaired or distorted by incomplete information, and by disputes in the government which resulted from the lack of a common appreciation of the facts."

The rest of the NSC machinery is designed for these fact-finding and future-shaping roles.

* The Washington Special Actions Group is organized to anticipate and prepare for possible crises—civilian as well as military—and to manage them should they happen.

* The Intelligence Activities Committee—backed up by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, an outside, independent advisory group—sits in constant judgment on the nation's intelligence activities and interpretations.

* The Vietnam Special Studies Group collects and analyzes the latest information on Vietnam.

* The Verification of Arms Control Measures Panel develops the data on which to base policy discussions for SALT.

* Finally, there are five Interdepartmental Groups (IGs) for the five areas of the world of greatest concern. Each is chaired by the assistant secretary of state for that area and includes specialists on the area from other agencies.

The NSC committees are composed of high-level officials or other departmental representatives. These "chiefs" can bring the weight and power of whole departments to bear in compiling data and arguments.

The NSC Staff System

To generate its own data and arguments and provide an independent analysis of departmental views—as well as to furnish routine staff work for the NSC system—the President's White House roster includes 46 NSC staffers—six working directly for his National Security Affairs Assistant, Kissinger, and 40 on the NSC staff itself (see box: "NSC Family").

28

Dr. Kissinger and his immediate staff are located in the White House, where the President has easy access to them. The NSC Staff is next door in the Executive Office Building (the old State-War-Navy Building) at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue—near enough for convenience yet far enough away for quiet, productive work.

To anyone looking closely at the new NSC system one fact comes through clearly. That is the all-pervading presence—and influence—of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. This German-born Harvard professor, long-time defense adviser to Presidents and Presidential aspirants, and national security academician, can be found as chairman or member of every NSC committee. He chairs two key committees—the Review Group and the Defense Program Review Committee. With his chairmanships and memberships, plus his control of the paperwork in the NSC Staff, he occupies a central and powerful position.

## Alarm at State, Pentagon

Some observers have viewed Kissinger's apparent great power with alarm, seeing it as a shift in the policy-making center of gravity.

According to insiders, offers of upper-level Pentagon jobs are being turned down on the ground that the "action" is no longer in the Pentagon, and instances are cited of "low-level NSC staffers" scuttling valid Pentagon programs.

There also have been rumors of early attempts to provoke a showdown between Secretary Rogers and the Presidential Assistant. If Rogers, relatively unaccustomed to top-level Washington infighting, was taken in by this game he was clever enough not to carry his counter-action too far. For one thing, he would have run head-on against certain firmly held Presidential views; for another, Kissinger was firmly entrenched and clearly understood the distinction between his role and that of the Secretary of State.

The President takes his Constitutional prerogative and responsibility for the conduct of foreign and defense policies very seriously indeed. He is reported to have told author Theodore H. White during the election campaign that "No Secretary of State is really important—the President makes foreign policy."

Kissinger himself is said to have dismissed the reported rivalry between him and Rogers as "sort of a melodramatic account that doesn't make any sense." The Secretary of State, according to Kissinger, "is operationally oriented" and "responsible for conducting foreign policy. I am more conceptually oriented. I help the President to set goals." He further expressed the conviction that his and Rogers' roles "mesh together well."

## Proof of the Pudding

How can the results of a goal-setting, policy-advising system such as the National Security Council be evaluated? Nixon's NSC hasn't lost a war for the United States—but neither has it won a war. Rash and irrational action could easily get the country into a fight at any time, but whether it has been NSC advice that has kept the U.S. out of any new war during the past year is problematical at best.

Critics are ready to point out that, Vietnam aside, the Administration has been unusually free of international crises during its first year. In contrast, they say, the first year of the Kennedy Administration saw the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a Berlin crisis, and the Congo and Laos flare-ups. Johnson, in his first year, had the crises in the Gulf of Tonkin, Cyprus, and Panama.

The nearest thing to a crisis during the Nixon Administration's first year was the Navy EC-121 electronic reconnaissance plane shot down last April by the North Koreans. NSC staffers feel that the incident was handled very smoothly, and that useful lessons were learned. The staffers point with pride to several other areas of success where the

major brunt of staff action was borne by the NSC. Some actions taken by Mr. Nixon, with the NSC's advice, staffers say, represent real landmark decisions—marked departures from previously unassailable positions. Among the better-publicized actions in this category are the renunciation of chemical/biological warfare, the development of a new approach to Latin America, the return of Okinawa to the Japanese, institution of the Vietnamization policy and the withdrawal plans, flexible and phased ABM deployment, the 1½-war force level, a new negotiating backup for SALT, and the reduction of the American presence abroad.

As President Nixon said of the NSC system in his 18 February message, "There is no textbook prescription for organizing the machinery of policymaking, and no procedural formula for making wise decisions. The policies of this Administration will be judged on their results, not on how methodically they were made."

And indeed, "the buck" does stop with the President. He must make the decisions, and the proof of the pudding will be in those decisions—and the advice behind them—over the next three years. The new NSC system is the culmination of 23 years of experience adapted to the needs of a new President. Viewed in isolation the Nixon NSC system makes a lot of sense. In conjunction with the executive agencies of government the flow of information, deliberation, decision, and implementation seems to work smoothly.

The first year's record looks good. Only time and the trials of crises managed—or avoided—will tell in the long run however.

THE CONCEPTUAL THINKER—Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, insists that he is the conceptual thinker, not operationally oriented action man, of the Administration.

29

hard-working, going all the time. But there is a certain wariness about him and the whole empire he is building." The President has been forced to issue repeated assurances that Secretary of State William Rogers is indeed the principal adviser on foreign policy, and the State Department the principal executor of that policy.

Theoretically, Kissinger's main job is not to advise the President on a particular course of action in a given situation. Rather it is to draw on the resources of the operating agencies—primarily State, Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency—and develop all the information and options available so that the President can reach decisions with the fullest possible understanding of their ultimate implications.

the National Security Council has been elaborately revised.

"Foreign policy," says Kissinger, "isn't made by answering cables," Nixon remembered only too well the efforts during the Eisenhower Administration to establish a workable structure through the National Security Council. The forms were created, but there was not much in the way of ideas. In reaction, John Kennedy swept away the NSC substructure and relied on more spontaneous methods. Lyndon Johnson virtually abandoned the NSC and used the "Tuesday luncheon" with top advisers as the principal form of deliberation. The meetings were so informal that there is no known official record of the discussions or the decisions made over the table. There was no machinery for the systematic follow-up of policy.

Nixon came into office determined to restore some of the formalities of the Eisenhower years and at the same time make them more creative. As in the past, there are five planning subcommittees with responsibility for as many areas of the world. Now, however, they will come under the NSC instead of the State Department, although an Assistant Secretary of State will act as chairman of each. To these are being added five groups set up by function (see chart).

## No Basement Policy

After the subgroups complete work on a given issue, the conclusions are sent to a new NSC review board, chaired by Kissinger. Here competing views are refined and new material can be added. It is Kissinger's review board that prepares the final working document for NSC consideration. Finally, after an NSC decision has been made, overseeing its implementation among the departments becomes the responsibility of a committee headed by Under Secretary of State Elliot Richardson. Kissinger is a member of that body as well.

How well this machinery will work remains to be seen. Kissinger insists that the organizational changes that give the National Security staff formal responsibility for coordination of planning will create neither a bottleneck nor a trespass on the rights of Cabinet officers such as Rogers and Laird. "I'm not making policy in

tends. "When policy comes to be seen as my policy, then I've failed." He adds: "If Cabinet officers sense that I use this position to regulate the flow of information so that the outcome is in the direction of my preferred point of view, then I've lost my effectiveness." Since taking office, Kissinger has said nothing publicly on substantive issues.

## Caustically Critical

Kissinger's somewhat anguished protestations that he knows his place may not avail him much. The middle edges of the State Department, for instance, are always fearful of being trampled upon by the White House staff; it was no different when McGeorge Bunch held Kissinger's post. Critics have sometimes accused Kissinger of having an ego as big as his intellect. They have raised eyebrows at the fact that he worked for different Administrations (nothing very unusual as such), and noted that, while serving as Candidate Nelson Rockefeller's foreign-policy adviser, he was often caustically critical of Richard Nixon. The inevitable crack that traveled from Harvard to the corridors of the State Department: "I wonder who's Kissinger now."

Humility is not his hallmark. When he served as a consultant to the Kennedy Administration, he disagreed with his European policy. He pressed his views insistently and was indignant when they were ignored. He resigned because of that. "I think I was right on the substance," he says now, "but I was insensitive in my reaction." While he was working for Rockefeller, he was told once that a speech he had written was being redone. "When Nelson buys a Piano," he snapped, "he does not hire four house painters to improve it."

He is of average height, compact build, sandy-haired, composed and insidious. He is 45, but he easily could pass for several years less—or more. Horn-rimmed glasses obscure his grey eyes. On first meeting, he can smile shyly and even indulge in promotional persifrage, as if to belittle his reputation for being brusque with colleagues, students and office help. "There cannot be a crisis next week," he jokes, in a softly Germanic accent. "My schedule is already full."

Indeed it is. In setting up the new machinery and addressing the problems that confront the Nixon Administration, Kissinger has been working six days a week from 7:30 a.m. to near midnight. His new bachelor quarters overlooking Rock Creek Park are a shambles; he got home to dress for an intimate White House dinner one night unsure whether he would find a dinner jacket and black tie. He arrived back at the White House 20 minutes late. The critic who has always demanded "creativity" of government smiles wanly and says he dreads the moment when someone will approach him with a new idea; he fears

18

TIME, FEBRUARY 14, 1969

# 'NSC System' Feeds On Crisis

## Panels Of Experts Sift Options For President As Problems Sprout

By JOHN S. CARROLL

(Washington Bureau of The Sun)

Washington, June 14—In his 1968 campaign, Richard M. Nixon told the voters why the Eisenhower years had been peaceful, while the Kennedy-Johnson years were strewn with disasters.

The main difference, he said, was the National Security Council. The weekly meetings of the five-member council, he claimed, had been the key to the Eisenhower success. By the same token, Mr. Nixon continued, the eclipse of the council under the Democrats had led to "most of our serious reverses abroad since 1960."

Yet last Wednesday, when the National Security Council gathered for a session in the Cabinet Room, it had not met formally for exactly seven weeks.

What seems to have happened is that the tail has greatly outgrown the dog. Over Mr. Nixon's 17 White House months, the council itself has tended to do less and less, while the "NSC System," as it is known, is flourishing.

Under Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, the Harvard professor who directs the "System," the staff has expanded and various new panels—at least one

of them more important than the council it supposedly reports to—have sprouted in response to crises or other demands.

(Continued, Page A4, Col. 1)

AP
ADVICE—Dr. Henry Kissinger, head of the "NSC System," confers with the President.

“Clotheslines”

Business is booming for women bank executives, who now number about 16,000.

“Working Woman”

Fish fillets in a gelatin mixture of white table wine and cranberry juice cocktail look and taste deliciously different.

“Food”

“Charley’s Aunt,” starring Louis Nye, is that rare thing—a farce that isn’t really about sex.

“Theater”

# Hollywood Today

BY NORMA LEE BROWNING

## Juliet as ‘Mame’

◎ FLASH: Juliet Prowse and her new steady beau Bob Jarden are just back from Dallas where they really dug her in “Mame”... Standing ovation at dress rehearsal yet! ... Juliet now goes into rehearsal for her TV special, “The Clowns” with Sammy Davis Jr., and Jerry Lewis, to air early fall

◎ MORE MAME: Ann Miller, whose “Mame” wowed Florida and Broadway [and she’s about to take off for Atlanta, so watch out!], had a dinner gate with Henry Kissinger the other night and told him off [she’s the one who can do it].... “With everyone worried about Viet Nam, it’s unbecoming for you to be known as the world’s biggest playboy,” she told him, referring, of course, to Kissinger’s celebrated night-outings with Zsa Zsa Gabor and—more recently—Jill St. John, once best known as Frank Sinatra’s girlfriend.

Juliet Prowse

◎ SUPER STAR IN RESIDENCE: Barbra Streisand is back in town for a while with son Jason. To while away the time, Barbra is taking tennis and French lessons. When she finished “The Owl and the Pussycat,” Streisand vowed to take off a full year [after four pictures in a row] and it looks as though she’s doing just that.... Incidentally, she still owes two weeks to the Riviera in Las Vegas but it looks as though she’ll not be keeping this date ’til 1971.

◎ BUST-UP DEPT.: Steve McQueen’s closest pals are saying the cause of his break-up with Neile is not, as rumored, another lady—but his addiction for racing cars. It’s well known Neile doesn’t approve of his hazardous hobby—nor his newest racing picture, “Le Mans,” which he’s now shooting in France.

◎ HIATUS: We ran into Lana Turner between husbands at the opening of Kings Castle in Lake Tahoe. She was with her tall, dark, and handsome secretary, Taylor Pero. Lana looked incredibly scrumptious. When we asked if she had any plans to get married again right away, she laughed, “I can’t. I’m not divorced yet, you know.”

◎ FALL FLURRY: That very busy Pepsi lady, Joan Crawford, has quite a fall acting schedule lined up. She will guest-star in a segment of Vince Edwards' new ABC-TV series, Matt Lincoln.

and have learned something.

About 350 parents and young people had turned out that evening to hear and ask questions of Dr. Daniel X. Freedman, chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago, president of the American College of Neuro-Psycho Pharmacologists, and director of the American Psychiatry Association's Task Force on Drug Abuse and Use.

“If you discover your child is using drugs, don’t panic,” Dr. Freedman advised the adults at the program sponsored by the Grassroots committee of Project: STRAIGHT DOPE.

“Each parent and child have to work together. Parents must be well-informed, and really know about drugs. They should sit down and talk it over with their children in order to find out what it’s all about. They should determine whether or not the child has tried a drug as an experiment or because he feels some need for escape or relaxation.

“When you stop to think about it, everyone has some way of relaxing. Some people golf, others collect stamps. Everyone has something different to do that is separate from what he does all day long.

“You may use a chemical substance like coffee or gum to make you feel a little different. Look at religion. There is wine at communion to remind you this is a different order of being than you are accustomed to. It puts you in a different frame of mind.”

The problem where drugs are concerned comes in the purpose.

“For what purpose are you taking a drug?” he asked. “The purpose generally is defined by your culture. If a doctor gives you a barbiturate, he does it because you need to go to sleep. The same drug can make you feel high or loose. If your intention is to take the barbiturate to go to sleep, you will. If your purpose is to get high, you’ll feel hilarious. The same drug taken under different circumstances can have different results.

“It’s hard to single out a specific drug and say it’s bad. It’s

whole family might say the culture, drug adolescents is

DR. FREEDOM that drugs are enormous drugs, sprung up there is more any time in said, adding mass media to this situation.

“Many of the using LSD in the 60s, he became bored mid-’60s,” he what could have and what had of their friends became bored up. But the pr

Ronald Smith win Van Gog

WHAT'S HAPPENING NOW?

I CAN'T TELL... THERE'S SO MUCH SMOKE YOU CAN'T SEE ANYTHING!

MY POOR DOG RIOT AT THE C FARM! MY