Reflections on a New Era

...I know how exciting it is for reporters to gain access to arcane classified documents, even though they are usually appallingly written and generally incomprehensible...

...The new Administration may avoid some of the mistakes we made...

...Three and a half years ago, I, an immigrant and a naturalized citizen, was sworn in as Secretary of State of my adopted country, the greatest nation on earth...

...The need for a global structure has long been evident, but the gap between developed and developing countries—a constant challenge to tranquility—has continued to widen...

...But then, shunning the claims of security and alliance, we fell back on our traditional isolationism...

...And I have had no higher aim than to repay in some small measure my debt to this country, which saved me from totalitarianism and the world from slavery...

...an international economic system in which the well-being of all peoples is inextricably intertwined...

...we sought, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to substitute law for politics and to legislate solutions to international conflicts...

...Without our commitment there can be no security...

...They have even made me concede, in sentimental moments, that there may be something in Thomas Jefferson's claim that were it left to him to decide between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would prefer the latter...

...Remember that what appears to an outsider as lack of candor may in reality be the best judgment of serious people grappling with events emerging from a fog of confusing reports and putting forward policies they believe to be right, but cannot know to be right until the time for decision is past...

...That the executive is generally right and the press is generally wrong does not change the basic elements made up on both sides of respeot, fear, deference, and the attempt by each side to get the better of the other...

...After World War II, we finally accepted the responsibilities of world leadership...

...No matter how strong the foundations we have laid, however, the challenges confronting the next Administration will be complex, difficult and painful...

...The relative weight to be given to each can be left to historians...

...We applied abroad policies and programs modeled after our domestic experience of the New Deal and wartime mobilization...

...a nation confident in the progressive fulfillment of the American dream...

...The days when statesmen and journalists coexisted in an atmosphere of trust and shared confidences have given way to a state of almost perpetual inquest which, at its worst, can degenerate into a game of hunter and hunted, dupe and deceiver...

...These, of course, were often slighted (I consider anything except running the full text as being slighted)—I suspect because they were unclassi fied...

...If we falter, no one can step into the breach, and hostile purposes and incompatible values will then shape the future of mankind...

...that our adversaries would change or that their systems would collapse...

...The jokes and the conflicts, the cooperation and the pain of the past eight years reflect the fact that, under our system, the press and the government are natural sparring partners that nevertheless need each other...

...But as the decade drew to a close, we began to learn that we cannot legislate our own moral preferences upon the world at a time when we no longer enjoy physical predominance...

...never before has it been conducted in the knowledge that miscalculation could mean the end of civilized life...

...This article was adapted from his remarks...

...Thinking Aloud REFLECTIONS ON A NEW ERA by HENRY KISSINGER Last January 10, in a broad-ranging address before the National Press Club, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reviewed the changing relations between the nations of the world, his own relations with the press, and the challenges now facing the country...

...I repeat that plea now with equal fervor...

...I believe we have emerged from one of the most trying decades in our history with new maturity, with the foundations of a long-term policy in place, with the world and America more tranquil than we found them, and with considerable opportunities for constructive achievement before us...

...We live today in a world of many centers of power and contending ideologies...

...For all my needling, though, I have admired the objectivity, the honesty and the fundamental fairness of the press corps covering the Department of State and the White House...

...If the press had all the classified documents that were available to me, it would have been as confused as I was...

...Long before I had any expectation that I would be leaving office, I emphasized, perhaps self-servingly, the vital importance of a nonpartisan foreign policy...

...The trauma of Vietnam transformed our international perceptions...

...We shall not settle this debate here—-all the less so since after January 20 I hope to profit from the leaks the press prints...

...a collection of some 150-odd nations sharing few agreed legal or moral assumptions...

...Seldom before has foreign policy had to be conducted against the background of such vast ideological divisions...

...I, naturally, hold the view that the real essence of our foreign policy was to be found in the series of speeches I gave around the country...

...We tended to believe that in foreign affairs our involvement or noninvolvement was a matter of our own choice, and that we needed to act only when our democratic principles bade us to do so...

...Americans must once again conduct their foreign policy debates with a recognition that we are, after all, partners in a vital national endeavor on which depends our future and that of the rest of the world...

...The press and I have had—to put it mildly—an intense experience...

...We came to see that abstract principles are not self-fulfilling...

...What public servant who bears that title with pride and integrity ultimately will not be grateful for a press that relentlessly holds its officials to high standards of truth and integrity...

...But in its best sense these new attitudes have been— and will be—centrally important to the health and vitality of our democracy...

...Our traditional predisposition for moral, legal and clear-cut solutions was not abandoned, but we attempted to reconcile them with a new understanding of the geopolitical realities of our time...

...There will continue to be many complicated choices to make, and there will continue to be intense dispute over the wisdom of the choices made and the courses that have been set...

...We are no longer innocent, but neither have we grown cynical...

...They are the most amusing and perceptive collection of outrageous individualists I have known...

...Both are powerful institutions attempting to serve the public interest by their own lights, and according to their own legitimate purposes...

...Achievement will inevitably fall short of hope and expectation, as it has in every administration...

...As a result of the extraordinary record of discourse between us, we understand each other better...

...And who can avoid the special anguish of knowing that if the reporter succeeds, one has gotten exactlv what one deserves...

...This is the time to build a new foreign policy consensus similar in scope, though different in content, to the one that sustained the post-World War II generation...

...Luckily for us all, Jefferson never had to pronounce himself regarding television...

...The responsibilities once borne by such men as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall, and Acheson were temporarily bequeathed to me...

...Today Amerioa's lead ers must address the familiar goals of peace, prosperity and justice in a global landscape that has been transformed and for which our historical experience offers little guidance...

...As always in such times, that policy emerged from an amalgam of factors: objective circumstances, domestic pressures, the values of our society, and the decisions of individual leaders...

...The '60s were the last full flowering of these impulses—the belief in our omnipotence, in our self-sufficiency, in our ability to remake other societies in our image...

...For my own part, I wish my successors well...

...But they have sharpened my wits as well...

...The profound alterations over the past decade in our perceptions of morality and political propriety have affected every aspect of our public life, and they have had a dramatic impact upon the relationship between the government and the press...

...His strength, and his honesty, calmed our troubled land and restored our pride, our integrity and out sense of decency...

...And if I may be so bold, I believe that our discourse has also served the American people, for they know more, as a result, about the role and responsibilities of this nation in the world—perhaps more than I sometimes wanted them to know...

...We have reconfirmed our historic responsibility to contribute to the eternal quest of all peoples to live in security and peace, free from fear, oppression or foreign domination...

...In the early years of this century we found ourselves alone among the democracies, sufficiently powerful to maintain the precarious world balance...

...Can one ever forget the sinking feeling of being asked a question at a press conference by a reporter who already knows the answer from an earlier background session...

...we acted as if any political problem anywhere could be solved by overwhelming it with our resources...

...The search for peace is, in this age of nuclear weapons, a moral and practical imperative...

...Because of my origin, I have perhaps had a unique perspective of what America means to the cause of freedom and human dignity...

...Through the greater part of the past two centuries, America defined and justified its role in the world in terms of abstract principle...

...Let us, for the first time in over a decade, chart our future as a united people...

...of the press to illuminate, question and analyze...

...They have, at times, left me breathless with exasperation...

...without our contribution there can be no progress...

...The aim of the Executive Branch is to govern, lead and implement public policy...

...But all of us owe those who carry the burden of responsibility the benefit of the doubt, a healthy understanding for the magnitude of their problems and compassion for the narrow range of choices available...

...If I may make a parting request, it is to look upon my successor's challenges with some sympathy...

...in short, a world where challenges of peace, prosperity and justice have no terminal date and are unending...

...But I have one consolation...

...The divisions that have characterized the last decade in this country must finally end...

...Nor can it avoid the difference in perspective inherent in the two points of view...

...Let us behave during these years in a manner that will enable us to remember them as the period when the American people rediscovered their unity...

...Ihave participated in the conduct of American foreign policy during a period of fundamental change...

...that poor nations would embrace democracy and move toward self-sufficiency...

...Even in the difficult times through which we so recently passed, we kept our balance and showed the world the resiliency of our free institutions...

...At the turn of the decade, our cardinal task was to disengage from a war that had placed 550,000 Americans on the mainland of Asia in a way that preserved our ability to design and to influence the development of a new international order...

...It is in the nature of foreign policy that problems of world structure cannot be concluded in one administration...

...Above all, we needed to rally and maintain the support of the American people for the long haul...

...But their mix shaped a profound transition in our nation's foreign policy...

...These upheavals coincided with radical alterations in the international environment...

...Conscious of our limits, we sought to put into place a foreign policy of the kind less favored nations had to conduct throughout history —a foreign policy that depended on the perception of priorities, a feeling for the importance of nuance, and a realization that there could be no terminal date to our efforts...

...The pursuit of well-being, a traditional concern of nations, becomes now, in an era of interdependence, one that can only be realized in cooperation with others...

...To be sure, temptations have remained with us and occasionally surface in our domestic debate or in our legislation...

...Our new President and Secretary of State deserve the understanding and the support of all Americans, for today our relations with other nations affect every citizen...

...I will do my best to contribute to an informed, constructive and supportive public dialogue...

...The problems of justice take on fresh urgency and complexity when the future of democracy rests in the hands of -dwindling number of countries...

...We must never forget that no other free nation is strong enough or cohesive enough to replace us...

...We have had to cope over the past decade with an increasingly complex and turbulent world, in which America has had to seek to achieve its principles and its purposes under circumstances greatly at variance with traditional attitudes...

...In no other country in the world would this have been possible...

...This nation has never lost its spirit, or its faith in its destiny...

...The growing reality of our interdependence is in constant tension with the compelling trends of separatism and intense nationalism...

...The Fourth Estate has a stake in this enterprise...

...The press and I have been reasonably good protagonists...

...its incontestable glory...

...And we should forever thank the fates that watch over us for the steady hand of the President it has been my honor to serve for more than two years...

...The deeds demanded of America in the decade ahead can only be accomplished by a united people and government acting with boldness, perseverance and vision...

...as if the revolutions of our time had primarily economic, rather than political and even spiritual causes...

...the nightmare of Watergate brought into question the validity of our domestic institutions...

...What official has not been aged by the panicky knowledge that some journalist is seducing another source to confirm what he has been told on an off-the-record basis...

...This is America's inescapable burden...

...But the great exertions we undertook were based on the premise that they would be temporary: that at some point our allies would need us no longer...

...they can lead to an overinvolvement as pernicious as our earlier isolation...

...it will surely make some new ones of its own...

...President Ford leaves to Governor Carter a nation recovered...

...Our isolation, vast margins of safety, and a preoccupation with developing our own continent produced a sense of uniqueness, and a conviction that our power and the uses we made of it were but the physical expression of our moral purpose...