Kissinger

...Safely over that hurdle Kissinger went ahead to the Ph.D...

...Kissinger has been the epitome of a certain type of academic operator (one uses that last work without coloration) of the 1960s...

...the defense department is going to mothball the single installation at Grand Forks, now almost completed, which willhave cost five and a half billion dollars...

...The Kalbs have organized their chapters sensibly, and missed very little or maybe even nothing as they turn from SALT to Vietnam ("Riding the Vietnam Roller Coaster") to Jordan to Cuba to China to the summits of 1972 to pulling out, down to the last section of the book, which is entitled "From Scandal to War" (Watergate, the Fourth Arab-Israeli War, the Aswan-Jerusalem shuttle...

...Some advantages, personal and public, can come from the secrecy practiced by Kissinger, but it does seem that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages...

...On the surface of things in 1968, Kissinger was about to fail, which meant going back to Cambridge on a permanent, non-shuttle basis...

...When he thought that his subordinates or newspapermen had been leaking information he unhesitatingly had their phones tapped, and he read the resultant transcripts when they came across his desk...

...Kissinger graduated from Harvard with the top accolade, summa cum laude...

...Kissinger came to Washington with an acute sensitivity to the dangers that can come from the hundreds of newspapermen who spend their time in the capital pursuing bits and pieces of information around the cabinet departments and other offices...

...After he went down to the Council on Foreign Relations, headed up a prestigious study group, and in 1957 published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a hook that came out just at the time of the national concern about Sputnik, he obtained so much public notice that Harvard rethought the tenure problem and invited him back...

...There can be no doubt that the present secretary of state likes to hold his cards close to his vest...

...Kissinger's other writings have this same quality, which sometimes has been described as Germanic, though there have been many writers of German origin who have written memorable English...

...Surely it is foolish, because it is dangerous, for Kissinger to feel that he can ignore the experts in his own cabinet department, that he can keep them busy with useless work while he deals with a few trusted advisers such as Helmut Sonnenfeldt or Joseph Sisco...

...The present secretary of state is often thought of as a sort of academic genius, a Wunderkind, and it is true that the signs are impressive...

...The book offers a detailed account of Kissinger's years as presidential assistant for national security affairs and, now, secretary of state...

...For three or four days the President's number-one adviser then lived in a dacha in the Lenin hills and talked nonstop with Brezhnev and Gromyko...

...The Kalbs relate (and this information must have been obtained from the secretary, since no one else could have given it) how Henry spenta long day at the office, and then attended a cocktail party and enjoyed himself thoroughly and ostentatiously, after which he was whisked off to Andrews Air Force Base where he met the Soviet ambassador and immediately the big presidential jet took off for Moscow, secretly of course...

...In the 1960s came increased "visibility" as Kissinger shuttled between Cambridge and New York to advise Governor Nelson Rockefeller...

...The Kissinger foreign policies, so much advertised in the public press, have often been failures or, at best, draws...

...It was a Monday, and Kissinger had to get back to Cambridge to teach his seminar at four...

...But it seems clear that his denial about the wiretapping has been diplomatic, that is, a lie...

...Suppose that the secretary of state's jocular remarks about retiring—coming back from the Middle East in November 1974 he joked with reporters on the plane about how much he might expect to make for speeches after his retirement—were to be followed by an exit from office in the near future...

...Meanwhile the American ABM is dead...

...When an issue of policy comes up and the President asks someone about the issue, the answer must be that only Henry knows and perhaps the President would consider having Henry come over and brief him...

...Only a large organization such as the six thousand people domiciled mostly at Twenty-First Street and Virginia Avenue can hope to examine the ideas and policies of the dozens and dozens of important nations, not to mention the countries that would like to be important...

...but the Kalbs have brought order out of the details and the reader can easily find his way...

...And here their evaluation would have to be adverse...

...Only on the last day did Henry deign to inform the local American ambassador that he was in residence at the dacha...

...Nor could he remember anything, really, about either Metternich or Castlereagh who were the principal figures in the post-Napoleonic drama...

...A few months ago A.J.P...

...To bring peace to the Middle East it later seemed to be necessary for United States military forces to go to DefCon 3 (Defense Condition 3, halfway on a scale from 5 down to 1, with 1 meaning war...

...The reviewer can testify on that point...

...For CBS News perhaps this is what viewers want to see and hear...

...While aboard the big jet during the ten-hour flight Henry slept and the ambassador read...

...They would have to turn to some of his ways of behavior in office, his techniques in the White House or on the seventh floor...

...Kissinger did not show considerable accomplishments before holding office, nor has he demonstrated very special qualities while in office...

...Let there be no mistake about it: this was not scholarship but "development- or something or other, perhaps of an academic program, maybe a government program, possibly just a career...

...The Kalbs, then, have failed to make their point—the point of greatness...

...The Soviets knew two weeks in advance that war was coming, and did not bother to warn the patron of Israel...

...Chairman Mao is in his last years and what will happen when his successors review his foreign policies...

...Henry then can release the secret...

...The exit from Vietnam required four years, and everyone knows that South Vietnam is in parlous shape today...

...It begins with some pages on how the job came to the man (no holder of public office in America will admit that he ever sought it...

...Can Kissinger qualify...

...Some of the seventeen taps were kept on phones for months after the individuals concerned had left government employ, and civil suits are pending in the courts...

...And of course they have chosen their man's last name as the title, which must be an evidence of greatness...

...The Kalbs have been completely taken in by the glamor, one might say, of a big operator like Kissinger flying in some big jet to somewhere or other, or coming back from somewhere or other...

...The Chinese who smile and bow to Americans on the streets of Peking may suddenly be chasing the foreign devils into the trees...

...The authors spend a considerable time showing Kissinger's upward movement after he received his B.A., summa cum laude, in 1950...

...There then is a flashback to the early years in Germany, emigration to the United States in 1938, high school in New York City, a stint in the United States army, and the years at Harvard...

...Sometimes one thinks the purpose of the secrecy is to corner the negotiation for Kissinger rather than use the regular ambassador on the spot...

...During the 1960s he seemed too ambitious, and maybe slightly conservative, to get a really good appointment in Washington, and he cycled on the fringes of affairs, though his closeness to Rockefeller meant that he had to be taken into consideration now and then...

...What would historians say about his legacy...

...The authors do not come right out and say that Kissinger is a great man, but they imply that conclusion, all the way through the 549 pages of text and 12 pages of bibliography and notes...

...After four chapters there were no numbers...

...He wanted to control the release of information for the greater good of the government, surely...

...But no one, looking back on the preceding fifteen or so years beyond Kissinger's baccalaureate, could say seriously that he had become a great scholar...

...And the Kissinger policies toward Europe are well-known to have verged on fiasco...

...Detente, a witty French writer has said, is cold war pursued by other means...

...The business of playing "I've got a secret" seems better for television than for diplomacy, and it is not very exciting on television...

...Yet there is enough indication, enough evidence at the moment, to say that those policies have not come off very well...

...As for the two agreements in Moscow in 1972, concerning nuclear weapons and the ABM, they now look almost ephemeral...

...For people who can read—well, they deserve something better...

...Why all the secrecy in handling the President's trip to mainland China, preceded as it was by the secret trips of Kissinger, since the Chinese knew and the Japanese did not need to be shocked...

...Every once in a while the sun would come out...

...His work has been unread by more people who bought it than the work of any other writer except Toynbee...

...There now are more than one hundred and fifty countries in the world, and more than one hundred and thirty belong to the United Nations...

...Kissinger thought about it for a day or so and accepted...

...And in accord with the dictates of history and historians since the time of Thucydides he should be able to point to a legacy of his greatness...

...A second part of the legacy of Kissinger foreign policy, less disturbing than the problem mentioned above but still foolish to an outside observer, is the secretary's penchant for secrecy...

...For the Vietnamese it could have been the ambassador in Paris...

...As for detente with Russia, it did not mean enough to the Soviet Union to prevent a nasty situation developing in the Middle East during the autumn of 1973...

...Such an individual should have considerable accomplishments before holding office—before, thatis, reaching the height of his greatness...

...Taylor reviewed a reprint of A World Restored and brought together a grand assemblage of aphorisms, which one might describe as Kissingerisms...

...Elliott's colleagues in the political science department thereupon passed a rule that no senior essay could exceed 150 pages...

...President-elect Nixon learnedthat there was a Republican who was also a Harvard professor, and seems to have been so surprised as to ask to see Kissinger...

...Speaking of secrecy one should not fail to mention Kissinger's part in the electronic enterprises of the Nixon Administration...

...In the case of the Chinese this could have been the American ambassador in Poland...

...Kissinger's work in public office, whether in the White House or on the seventh floor of the department of state, has been hectic and peripatetic, one problem after another, enough to drive most biographers to distraction...

...Beam did resign shortly thereafter...

...They would note, for one thing, his willingness, perhaps even eagerness, to ignore the bureaucracy of his department, and probably add that such a tactic made little sense...

...The problems of American foreign relations in the 1970s are so complex that no man can keep them, in all their complication, in his own mind...

...The book was so opaquely written that one sailed along in the haze...

...He recently undertook to read A World Restored, which concerns the making of peace after the Napoleonic Wars...

...After its announcement for the year 1973, American relations with Europe reached their lowest point since 1932 when President Herbert Hoover was dunning Europeans to pay the war debts of 1917-1918...

...Then there is the legacy of the Kissinger policies...

...But there was time for several hours of talk over the lunch hour, and the result was an invitation to become adviser for national security affairs...

...The result was not spectacular, even though the thesis eventually was published...

...He demanded an investigation, and said that if found guilty he would resign...

...During the years as Kissinger's assistant at the White House, Haig said, he "never viewed myself as anything but an extension of Dr...

...Kissinger in an emotional scene in Salzburg last June denied absolutely that he had done any phone tapping, and he had sufficient chutzpah tosay that he could not continue to be tormented and at the same time carry on the duties of his high office...

...The Year of Europe remained a phrase instead of a phase...

...Kissinger," and he added that in passing names of officials and reporters to the FBI he had been told to ask "generally that they be surveilled...

...At the moment his legacy would seem to amount to a good deal less than greatness and could easily be interpreted as deplorable...

...The Soviets are mirv-ing, and both Soviet and American missiles are heading out to sea...

...They relate his work at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York during the mid-1950s, and the return to Harvard and a tenured professorship...

...The problems are too complicated, and require what General George C. Marshall used to describe as staff work which is, to put it bluntly, careful study and analysis...

...Kissinger, has had its ups and .downs, and everything considered it does not represent American scholarship so much as American scholarly entrepreneurship—the sort of frantic movement from campus to metropolis to Washington to capitals abroad, seminars mostly met but sometimes missed, a constant advising and assisting that, everything considered, surely did not allow much time for reading and thinking...

...That way it is possible to use the release of information as diplomacy, for sometimes a mere public statement suffices to get a point across to an adversary or even a friend...

...The academic career, which has led the public as well as government officials to refer to the secretary of state as Dr...

...During this celebration of the Year of Europe the Arabs quadrupled the price of oil, a calamity for which Europeans are still cursing the United States...

...Observers of the Kissinger stewardship in high office would not be able to say much about the policies he carried forward, the successes he achieved...

...Testimony before the committee by General Alexander Haig, censored at the time and belatedly released, leaves little to the imagination...

...At last came the meeting with Nixon and the appointment to head the National Security Council...

...His senior essay was 350 pages long, and Professor William Y. Elliott refused to read more than a hundred pages but still gave the bright undergraduate the summa...

...He scoffed at the intellectual result, however, which (though he did not say it) resembled the sayings of Chairman Mao because of their vacuity or double meaning or plain incomprehensibility...

...Well, now, have they proved that Kissinger is a great man...

...Because it is an old academic custom to take notes from books about history, he stuck a file card in the book on which he planned to jot down the numbers of pages from which later he would type off the notes...

...The Harvard political science faculty felt uncertain about Kissinger in 1954 and denied him tenure...

...The thought never occurred to the Kalbs that the local American ambassador, Jacob D. Beam, an expert on the Soviet Union, might well have resigned immediately...

...Nowhere was there any lasting success...

...Why the secrecy over the negotiations with the Vietnamese in Paris—what was there to lose by bringing out details of the discussions...

...In 1973 the European nations were told of American moves in support of Israel, not consulted about them...

...His luck then changed...

...The notion of secrecy also fits Kissinger's belief that the press and public should have information from official sources, not from leaks...

...As for the policies in office, whether they show greatness might be a task of analysis more properly left to the future...

...Therecord is not impressive...

...It appeared as if Kissinger would never achieve high appointive office in Washington, for he had made some indiscreet political comments...

...The Kalbs admit that Kissinger's opaque prose makes tough going and is sometimes impossible to read...

...And however heartening it is to realize that the long era of isolation has now come to an end, with Americans again speaking to Chinese, it must remain a large question as to what the friendliness will mean for the future...

...The two men met on the thirty-ninth floor of the Pierre in New York, at ten o'clock on the morning of November 25, 1968...

...the smaller nations supplying raw materials are standing up to the large nations...

...But one must wonder whether there has been less here than meets the eye...

...The members of the Senate foreign relations committee absolved him almost before they could have investigated...

...And much more can be done through the ambassador in Moscow...

...Then ill luck intervened, when Rocky in 1964 and 1968 failed to receive the Republican nomination...

...The work of subsequent years is fairly well known in outline, for Kissinger has touched virtually every international crisis or development of importance since January 1969...

...He should be able to demonstrate very special, one might say outstanding, qualities while in office...

...One of the lessons of recent world politics is that no longer can diplomacy be conducted from the major capitals...

...Nixon gave Kissinger a week to think it over...

...Richard Nixon," he had said in his convoluted way, "is the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President...

...The advantages of knowing more than anyone around him are fairly obvious...

...Kissinger's prose has been assembled into books, and the books make an impressive stack, and they are well-published, by the best New York and Boston firms, but they are hard to read...

...The diplomacy with China, so much remarked, was a relatively simple business...

...That would be the end of the chapter...

...Then Kissinger lost his temper when the Europeans would not follow his Israeli policy and was heard to say, "I don't • care what happens to NATO...

...Consider, first of all, the pre-1969 record...