Apres Henry le Deluge

...Outsiders have rarely held so few key State Department positions, bureaucrats so many, as they do now...

...At any rate, it’s harder and harder to imagine how things could look much worse...

...But even assuming he survives the first Ford Administration, it is clear that the remarkable man who has dominated so much of government since 1969 will soon be gone...

...The Congress seems scared to assert even its limited role in foreign affairs...

...acutely under Lyndon Johnson...

...Conservatives, on the other hand, worry that even the remaining vestiges of realpolitik will be undone by the next regime...

...Gone with “Super K” may be a fondness for B-52s as well as a rare genius and style for wheeling and dealing...

...The problem is not only, as Sam Rayburn once warned Lyndon Johnson, that people like Dean Rusk have never run for sheriff, although the political myopia of the foreign policy establishment in that sense is legendary...

...His patience and rigor nurtured the historic beginnings of serious nuclear arms control...

...No other area of public life has been so little revived with fresh talent and meaningful dissent as foreign affairs...

...but if the Department was to be changed, and its stultification of policy lifted, that would happen only by changing people, bringing in new talent and giving an unmistakable bureaucratic signal that the rules of life had changed...

...In the center of this system, in spirit if not in power, was (and is) the Department of State...

...Its Foreign Service had become a careerist guild, nurturing caution and routine, shunning policy responsibility after its searing brush with McCarthyism in the 1950s, and substituting smugness of style for its all but fatal loss of authority...

...The Impracticality of Dissent Perhaps most telling in bureaucratic terms is the fact that Kissinger’s State Department, at the most important assistant secretary level, is almost entirely in the hands of the career service...

...And everywhere the premium tends to be on acceptance and reputation, not independence and iconoclasm, though those are the very qualities we will need most in the man and the office...

...The recent congressional bath in the Muyuguez crisis showed all too clearly that the anti-Vietnam impulse in the War Powers Act and anti-bombing legislation was just that-a prohibition against land reinvolvement in Southeast Asia-and not an anti-militarist or even anti-imperial surge...

...World War III...

...This is the growing economic involvement of the U.S...

...In a real sense, this is foreign policy without the government, but the very absence of purposeful government control and regulation over multinational firms, the arms merchants, and the food market is a decisive act of policy...

...Virtuoso manipulators like Kissinger might bypass the system altogether and leave i t to its wooden memos and generous pensions...

...More clearly than most other academic observers, he had seen that in the 1960s the American foreign policy apparatus had become a vast feudal kingdom of bureaucratic agencies and interests, in which, as he wrote acidly in 1961, there was a “powerful tendency to think that a compromise among administrative proposals is the same thmg as a policy .” For the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which flung American power into the “long twilight struggle ,” the foreign policy bureaucracy became a Frankenstein monster, turning on its supposed masters to smother any movement away from the preservation of each organization’s perceived mission and thus kill any major initiatives in policy...

...So it was with East-West trade, ideas for a world food reserve, and a range of other economic issues...

...What should be its limits, what should be its broad public purposes for this nation and for others...

...A group of people intent on occupying a small pinnacle of power, it often tends to view public policy as a means, not an end...

...The foreign policy elite, and journalists who get their stories from them, can’t afford to admit that, of course, largely because the phony mystique is job security, if not much else...

...They are watching him...

...No HoDe from the Hill Bureaucracy ascendant, a new computer imperialism rampant-surely there is saving hope in the Congress that ended the war, trimmed arbitrary presidential power, and seems now to assert itself so confidently...

...As long as Kissinger controls the State Department, policymaking will bear the stamp of the obsessive secrecy and reliance on a tiny handful of aides that marked his White House operation...

...It was the Johnson Administration, for example, that organized a Pentagon military sales promotion operation and raised it to a high art in the name of balance of payments...

...Our foreign policy is venal or inept or unimaginative or career-crazed in large part because its practitioners carry those flaws to some degree or another...

...Nor need the trade-off be, as many cynics suggest, the Wall Street mediocrity or Council on Foreign Relations coziness versus the George Wallacevariety amateurism that yearns to lob grenades into the men’s room in the Kremlin...

...Now there has been the final debacle in Indochina...

...The African Bureau is headed by Nathaniel Davis, former U.S...

...The great foreign policy problems of the 1970s and 1980s are largely other nations’ domestic problemland reform, population growth, technological change-and cannot be solved by conventional diploma cy...

...In coming years, we must also determine the impact of the United States’ and Canada’s control of most of the world’s food reserves, which confers on us a greater monopoly over food than the Arabs have in oil...

...To the amusement of his audience, as Time’s Hugh Sidey reported later, the Secretary of State pretends to lunge upward toward the window, shedding his coat in Clark Kent fashion before taking flight...

...State Department super-bureaucrat and Rockefeller Foundation president Dean Rusk...

...One has only to compare the rippleless Foreign Service and the anxious Washington-New York-Boston hangers-on with the genuine, if limited, transformation made in the law by the infusion of young Legal Services lawyers-or to compare the foreign policy “opposition” with the young reformers reaching for power in the labor movement, or the alternative journalism with its influence on the establishment press...

...But left behind, and very much intact, will be an entrenched bureaucracy and foreign policy estab lishment inimical to authentic reform, a vast practice and policy of more subtle intervention undiminished by the lessons of Vietnam, and an alternating incompetence and cooption in the Congress that mock its pretensions to policy responsibility...

...The possible Democratic candidates, men like George Ball or Paul Warnke, both former high officials in the Johnson Administration, have no record of bureaucratic virtuosity or diplomatic audacity rem0 tely approaching Kissinger’s...

...An irreplaceable loss of experience...

...It should have been possible to treat such men fairly in reassignment without the object lessons their appointments now represent...

...More often, however, former FSOs who move to the Hill seem to see themselves as still very much part of the “club...

...Probably the most extraordinary diplomat in American history, Kissinger seemed not so long ago really capable of superhuman feats...

...By the 198Os, according to a recentlyleaked CIA study on world food supplies, this control could give the United States, or at least the tiny part of it that rules the food market, “life and death” power over the growing list of hungry countries...

...Not much...

...Assistant Secretary in the critically important Economic Bureau is Thomas Enders, former Deputy Chief of Mission at the American embassy in Phnom Penh at the time when the embassy was accommodatingly providing the targeting for the secret B-52 bombing of Cambodia...

...Its writings and discussions pose no fundamental questioning of the system, but rather a careful, if largely dull, reiteration of limited policy options, all comfortably within the prevailing orthodoxy...

...Roger Morris, who formerly worked in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff under Henry Kissinger, is now a Washington writer...

...Our international trade and investment abroad can, and often do, have enormous benefits for other countries, from better health to the gradual breaking down of the social and economic barriers that repress millions...

...And, as with most guilds, from the modern American union bureaucracy to Xerox to The New York Times, the continued relative success of the career service, the access of senior officers to top jobs in State, tended to reinforce the compliant, play-it-safe ethic in the ranks...

...For example, the East Asian Bureau has gone to Phillip Habib, whose earlier career was distinguished by his work in charge of public information policies in Saigon...

...Kissinger manipulated, evaded, and generally overcame the bureaucracy as no other figure before him had, and as no other is likely to for a long time to come...

...There has been no basic reform of the Foreign Service...

...The State Department will still not know how to maneuver swiftly through the intricacies of a disengagement on the Golan Heights or a secret flight to Peking, but it will be able to exercise its proven capacity to argue, delay, and reduce policy to its common impos tor, “administrative compromise .” Given this prospect for Kissinger’s successor, what are the odds that he can surmount or reform it himself...

...Worst of all, the likely successors generally inhabit the same insular, establishment world: the corporate clients, the bland board meetings, the “responsible” discussions at foundation-financed conferences and seminars, the careful jockeying with senators or the potential Presidents, the obsessions with “credibility” and “coolness” and covering all bets...

...There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with America’s economic interrelationship with the rest of the world...

...But they are palpable even now in the areas, notably economics, where Kissinger lacks his usual preeminence...

...In a recent issue of this magazine, Frederick Poole described the exodus to Capitol Hill of many former Foreign Service Officers who in their new jobs as legislative assistants and committee investigators have challenged executive policy...

...But unless we move now to take a radical new look at foreign affairs, and plan some sweeping reforms for the next round, ex-Secretary of State Kissinger will probably have to omit that observation from hs memoirs...

...In part, it is the mystique of national security...

...The irrevocable error,” wrote a younger and less co-opted Henry Kissinger in 1956, “is not yet part of the American experience...

...Because of such appointments and persistent neglect of other organizational issues, &ssinger will leave basically unreformed the Foreign Service and foreign affairs bureaucracy that froze policy and extinguished initiative under his predecessors...

...The ponderous consensus memos from the bowels of bureaucracy are simply ignored, their authors momentarily daunted but unreconstituted...

...Ambassador to Chile during the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the first days of the junta...

...This was the famous National Security Council system, with its Interdepartmental Groups, Review Group, Verification Panel for SALT, Vietnam Special Studies Group, Forty Committee, Washington Special Actions Group for Crisis Control, etc...

...Sales projections, like the stock market in the twenties, are up, up, up...

...But he has not changed it for his successor...

...There is also a psychological and personnel problem, which no one quite wants to acknowledge...

...Selection is a variety of Establishment primogeniture...

...Very little in the experience that forms these men,” he wrote in 1961, “produces the combination of political acumen, conceptual slull, persuasive power, and substantive knowledge required for the highest positions of government . ’ ’ Nor is there much evidence that IQssinger’s prospective successors escape this disability...

...nor, at this stage in history, do the far-flung productive and financial networks, commanding economies of specialization and scale, seem avoidable or dispensable...

...with the rest of the world, through the power of global corporations, the booming arms trade, and American business’ near-monopoly control over surplus food grains in an age of imminent famine...

...He promptly moved to establish personal control through a series of bureaucratic committees...

...Not even the charm and persuasion of a Kissinger can get the Indian government to grant land reform in Bihar when that land reform threatens the ruling party, or the intransigent Brazilians to adopt population control, or the Europeans (not to mention the U. S.) to transform their societies and economies to escape permanent bondage to petroleum...

...The bureaucratic model for guaranteed decision-making, Kissinger often remarked, was a paper with three options: present policy bracketed by two unthinkable alternatives...

...It is depressing to contemplate the way in which we customarily pick our Secretaries of State, who they are, and what and whom they tend to represent...

...But their proximity to disastrous and rejected policies, their failure either to sound a public disagreement or to refuse to be a party to what was happening, and now their reward with the most coveted offices, this is less than a powerful testimony to the practicality of dissent...

...Yet the scholar who deplored the State Department system, the National Security Advisor who instantly deprived it of power lest policy atrophy has left it largely alive and well to bedevil the next regime...

...But it is true...

...The issue ends, as it begins, always with people...

...C b Conquering Fudge and Folly There should be a deepening sense in the Capital and the country, unobscured by little gun-boat reversions like Muyuguez, that foreign policy-and with it literally the fate of millions-is less and less within our grasp, whether we are conservative or liberal...

...Almost all the predictable candidates to be the next Secretary of State are in a substantive sense, as in the words of an dld British campaign slogan, “yesterday’s men...

...By the same token, many are unlikely to be alive to the new shape of international problems, the energy or food crises, the new resource assertiveness of the poor countries, the pernicious reach of multinational corporations...

...In a sense, it was easier for Lyndon Johnson to get a paranoid Kremlin to reconsider its strategic force levels than to convince the Pentagon to give our civilian negotiators enough elbowroom to begin genuine negotiations...

...They will have derived much of their formative experience and thinking from the Cold War era in foreign policy, with no guarantee of the historian’s vision and perspective that enriched Kissinger...

...Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller, in their book Global Reach, report that the top 298 U.S.-based firms earn 40 per cent of their net profits abroad...

...Huddled in its foundation, law firm, and academic resting places, the foreign policy establishment has its own “dirty little secret” of banality...

...There are several thousand Americans out there to whom we could entrust foreign policy...

...GM, we now discover, has sales worth more than the Gross National Product of Pakistan or South Africa or Switzerland...

...Two generations and much greater sophistication this side of George Wallace are people who are directing and learning from operations in drug rehabilitation, land reform litigation, insurance fraud investigations, primary election campaigns, welfare rights movements, and a host of similar actions where the politics and diplomacy are as delicate as anything Kissinger and Gromyko ever encountered...

...policy at the time was little more than a vague, sullen squabble between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the rest of the government...

...A reading of the speeches and legislation they have written on foreign policy over the last five years or so will uncover no hidden revolutionary impulse at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue...

...His negotiating gifts, now cynical and oblivious to human costs, now sensitive and brilliant, finally extracted U.S...

...It is Kissinger’s self-deprecating, ingratiating wit which breaks the tension, as 10,000 miles away the Coral Sea steams toward the Ford Administration’s eager little rendezvous with destiny in the Gulf of Siam...

...In any event, to expect the conventional foreign affairs bureaucracy or Secretaries of State, who tend to be Wall Street lawyers, to confront the potential abuses of this system is probably idle fantasy...

...The sheer size of these phenomena is by now familiar and needs little elaboration...

...And if you are one of those who think things in foreign policy can’t possibly get worse, stick around...

...Yesterday’s Men The most compelling argument against any real departures in foreign policy is the inertia and sameness of the men who are in line to inherit Kissinger’s authority...

...Henry Kissinger, standing silhouetted in his West Wing office, glances through the tall windows to notice that some White House reporters have gathered on the driveway outside...

...There could be no agreement in the Administration, however, on the nature of long-run American interest in the region, let alone a mediation strategy...

...troops and POWs from Indochina and, for the first time in a generation, began promising diplomatic efforts in the Middle East...

...The point is not that these men are individually evil or should be denied responsibility in some McCarthyesque purge...

...Though roughly half of this has gone to presumably legitimate NATO defense purposes, American weapons are used for dubious purposes by both sides in the Middle East, ahd by Greece, Spain, Taiwan, and most recently and lavishly, in Iran, to name only the most important countries...

...Similarly, the Middle East crisis and war of 1967 presented opportunities for creative The Washington Monthly/July-August 1975 U. S. mediation not unlike those that followed the 1973 conflict...

...his deputy and New England patrician Christian Herter...

...B-52s Depart, Bureaucracy Remains There is a widely held assumption among liberals that things can only improve under a Democratic Secretary of State or National Security Advisor...

...If anything, despite Kissinger’s example, the traditional Republican disdain for the “cookie-p~shersi~n~ State has lulled them into an underestimation of the power of the bureaucracy...

...In short, if you generally like the way we now do business with the world, rest easy-although you’ll miss the dazzle of the incumbent Secretary of State...

...What is the chance for infusion of new talent into the foreign affairs bureaucracy from the outside...

...We’re going to see a new era of congressional foreign policy,” said one of the many confident House freshmen, a vision relished by Democrats and Republicans alike who seem to share, albeit for different reasons, a distrust of the war mongers and/or detente dupes in the executive branch...

...Foreign affairs in the United States in 1975 is roughly where the domestic private economy was in 1931, dimly understood, widely believed the sacrosanct province of a few calcified experts, beyond the control of the public interest, and about to bring us all to the brink of unprecedented disasters...

...According to reports from the scene by William Shawcross of the London Sunduy Times the targeting was based on a 1:50,000 map several years old that just didn’t show new or relocated villages...

...Inevitably, the talk has begun of Kissinger’s resignation, and even of eligible successors...

...He is still right, even after Vietnam and Watergate...

...As the arms trade is dominated by a few enormous corporations, such as Chrysler, General Electric, or Northrop, food is grown, transported, stored, priced, marketed, and made available for humanitarian purposes (after commercial sales, of course) largely under the control of a few enormous agribusiness firms, such as Ralston-Purina, Continental Grain, and Cargill...

...The dominant ethic for many Hill foreign policy aides is to return to or enter government,” by which they mean the real government of the State Department or the NSC, a goal which enfeebles them with caution much as it does their peers in law firms, foundations, or teaching jobs...

...The practical results of all this-the bureaucratic veto against unconventional leadership, the careerist sterility of the foreign policy elite both in and out of power-were felt...

...His political insight at home and abroad ended the senseless enmity with Moscow and Peking...

...And though Democratic candidates frequently criticize Kissinger’s policies, the criticisms often seem pro forma, and the substantive differences marginal or tactical...

...There have been only five Secretaries of State since 1952: compared to 11 Secretaries of Commerce, ten Attorneys General and Secretaries of Health, Education and Welfare, and nine Secretaries of the Treasury...

...The difficulty of grasping such realities either politically or technically may put the successor all the more at the mercy of the homogenized views of the bweaucracy, slowing his readiness to act in situations he doesn’t understand, and increasing the inertia against administrative reform...

...Examples of such substantive gentility abound, visible in the publications of watering holes like Brookings or the Council on Foreign Relations...

...and William Rogers, New York lawyer and former Attorney General under Eisenhower...

...It promotes, demotes, certifies, ostracizes, shields, brands, and, most of all, decides what it thinks largely from within, little affected by new ideas that are not conventionally “safe” in career terms...

...Like the tsarist or Manchu bureaucracies, the small foreign affairs elite, 3,000-4,000 people from top to bottom, recognizes only one constituencyitself...

...Again, don’t bet on it...

...The bickering between State, Treasury, and Agriculture is not a symptom...

...Then suddenly, like Clark Kent enfeebled by those fragments of kryptonite that used to show up unexpectedly, Kissinger ran into Watergate, new doubts about detente and SALT, dirty tricks in Chile, shabby phone taps on his staff, disaffected clients from Lisbon to Athens to Ankara, impasse in the Middle Eait, and, perhaps the unkindest of all, an unappreciative 94th Congress...

...But if our involvement is inevitable, what kind of involvement do we want it to be...

...Given the stakes, it may not be too early to think about the sort of foreign policy and decision-making we can expect without him...

...Nor does it represent an institutional rejection of the policy habits of the past...

...With few exceptions, like Senators Joseph Biden and Gary Hart or Representative Les Aspin, younger members generally do not seek the Foreign Relations or Armed Services Committees...

...The point, again, is not that we should stop growing grain to eschew this influence, but that our foreign policy has not even begun to touch these vast machines that shape so much of our international relations by decisions made behind the closed doors of corporate boardrooms...

...Or the more likely response of America on the eve of its bicentennial celebration of revolution: “But you just can’t do that...

...Besides Muyuguez, there have recently been other telltale signs-the reversal of the Turkish military aid cut-off, the defection of liberals like Senator Walter Mondale from support of the Mansfield amendment to cut troops in Europe...

...Thus SALT might have actually begun at the Glassboro Summit in the summer of 1967-but did not, because U.S...

...As for the Republican candidates for the succession, the range of names, from Donald Rumsfeld to Elliot Richardson, evokes no better prospect...

...Briefly-the reality, of course, is richer, more banal, more hair-raising than these paragraphs can possibly convey-that is the system Kissinger inherited shortly after noon on January 20, 1969, not, of course, as Secretary of State, but then as National Security Advisor...

...It may be a governmentinwaiting, but it is hardly an authentic alternative...

...The “decent interval” of two years since the Paris Agreements and the Nobel Prize was not long enough to ward off the nagging sense that, in the end, Henry was devoured by the war just like all the rest of them...

...What if the next President barred Treasury, the Pentagon, and Agriculture from making foreign policy, then pensioned half the Foreign Service, assigned the other half to oversee the entire foreign aid budget in the world’s 15 poorest countries, and hired anew 1,000 Americans below the age of 50 to serve a limited tenure of two to three years doing the best job they could to represent, report, and recommend sensible innovations in foreign policy...

...These enduring forces offer little which might improve the darker side of the present record, while they can quite easily stifle the creativity, initiative, and improvisation that have been the best of Kissinger’s diplomacy...

...it is a major cause of the absence of meaningful initiative, and it is indicative of the future in several other issues without Kissinger Private Foreign Policy ~~ If bureaucratic malaise is likely to descend over much of foreign policy, however, there is one central thrust of our Pax Americana that has traditionally been beyond the control of bureaucrats and their Cabinet-level bosses, and thus will probably continue as if Henry Kissinger (and the Vietnam war) had never happened...

...The same men who can thread their way through the complexities and political perils of housing policies or education or economic issues still shrink from foreign policy...

...His popularity, his grip on a still-vulnerable President, the weakness of his rivals, all make Kissinger stronger than his immediate setbacks suggest...

...Controlling the Monster At the heart of Kissinger’s most impressive accomplishments was his personal dominance of the bureaucracy...

...Growing from that authentic success, fed beyond proportion by an accommodating press and the insatiable public yen for a hero amid the Nixon mediocracy, the mythology of “Super K” fastened itself on some surface of the American consciousness...

...The model is now an ITT scheming to protect its profits by overthrowing a freely elected government in Chile, or a Northrop charged with bribing Arab officers to buy weapons, or corporations in Latin America that acquire and variously protect their stakes in a minimally educated, cheap, politically suppressed labor supply, of the kind Gulf+Western enjoys in the Dominican Republic, or United Brands elsewhere in Central America...

...It was Kissinger himself who saw that the usual lawyers and businessmen of the establishment were not up to the job of holding off the Pentagon and the Foreign Service, as well as the Arabs and the Russians...

...What would happen if the next Secretary of State were a Rural Legal Services attorney from California with no foreign affairs experience or ambitions, rather than a Wall Street or Washington mogul whose life’s dream is confined pretty much to having his portrait on the seventh floor of the State Department...

...Below the highest levels, there seem equally slim chances of change from an influx of in-and-outer middlelevel officials, most of whom would hope to join a new Democratic administration...

...There was no more vivid example of this paralysis than the closing years of the Johnson Presidency, when many initiatives, later credited to Kissinger, were raised only to expire in the organizational inertia...

...Not even “Super K’ has tried to play in that league, although the corporations burned him badly on the Soviet wheat deal in 1972...

...The issue is also whether those same corporations will use the power they acquire over our own economy to suck our national policy into a defense of their exploitation...

...Not by background or training, not by the manner of their advance to the unexceptionable eligible’s list, least of all by any vision or passion to change policy, were any of these men disposed to challenge the norms of policy-making...

...All of them seem clearly competent in a technical sense of that word...

...Whether one admires or deplores current policy, however, there are serious reasons to question expectations of significant change, or even the wisdom that Kissinger makes a decisive difference in the basic character of foreign policy...

...The question is not whether America will play a major role in the world, but whether corporate giants, operating beyond public scrutiny or control, will make millions of people believe that America is synonymous with unprincipled pursuit of profit and attendant social-political repression...

...Behind it all there had to be a mastery of the bureaucratic beast-what Kissinger the scholar once called “administrative stagna ti on ” -that had customarily immobilized policy and consumed so many of Kissinger’s predecessors...

...Like the origins of Vietnam, the wellsprings of this vastly wider intervention by corporate greed, arms traffic, and food manipulation are solidly bi-partisan...

...Each of these appointments carries a message to the bureaucracy, and the signals are interesting to contemplate for those who believe the government is learning the hard-won, often bloody, lessons of the last decade...

...Before Kissinger there were John Foster Dulles, the New York lawyer...

...There could be a concerted executive and congressional initiative to regulate the food market and break the power of the agribusiness concerns...

...Out of those carefully structured negotiations in the West Basement of the White House came the solutions to so many deadlocked policies and the creation of so many of the diplomatic glories of the administration, from Moscow to the Sinai...

...In addition to this sort of involvement in the post-Vietnam world, we are also far and away the world’s largest arms merchant, our $86 billion in military sales and aid since 1950 more than twice the Soviet arms trade...

...But the gesture holds a more serious point and, at this moment, an irony...

...The answers to those questions are all too evident in a score of places around the world...

...Until we are willing to try them, we’ll go on suffering the same old fudge and folly...

...For many, it is a life bounded by incestuous maneuver and information among a relatively tiny group of peers and would-be subordinates...

...Kissinger’s successors could pursue effective public control of unpoliced corporate power abroad and call a halt to the bloody, entangling profits of the arms trade...

...No other cabinet office is so ossified...

...Yet if the time of Nobel Prizes is past for a while, there remain awesome opportunities for government...