Kissinger in the White House: A Man of Many Options

"As Metternich would say, that policy is worse than a crime. It is a mistake."

-Henry Kissinger, circa 1960's

Shortly after President-elect Nixon chose Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor late in 1968, Kissinger phoned a number of prominent journalists and declared, "Everything I said is off the record."

Kissinger was referring to the remarks he had made about Nixon while serving as foreign policy advisor to Nixon's chief rival, Nelson Rockefeller, in the earlier Republican presidential campaign.

At one point in the campaign, Kissinger was asked why he had decided to become Rockefeller's foreign policy advisor. He replied that serving Rockefeller was the best way to keep Nixon out of office. And after Nixon had won the nomination in Miami, an indignant Kissinger is said to have remarked, "He is not fit to be President."

Be that as it may, Kissinger's request of November would have been an outright insult to any reporter. Such requests are always mandatory before-not after-the fact, and are appropriate only in the case of private conversations, not general pronouncements. In effect, Kissinger was trying to suppress what legitimately belonged in the public domain.

And it might have seemed surprising that, only a month after the election, Nixon would have chosen one of his most vocal antagonists as a leading policy aide. But the two men had much more in common than anyone would previously have supposed.

To begin with, Nixon turned out not to be the partisan, suspect observer of the international scene whom Kissinger had so feared. Quite the contrary-Nixon was determined to take hold of the foreign policy machine and fashion his own commitment to world order, regardless of public and Congressional opinion. In the past, policymaking powers had typically drifted around Washington between one administration and the next, from the strong State Department of Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles to the loosely organized Kitchen Cabinets of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. As a result, decisions had been made in a chaotic, ad hoc atmosphere which lacked consistency and framework; the new President decided that such practice should cease. And besides, Nixon had long fancied himself a statesman; most of his government experience had been in the foreign policy field, and before expressing interest in the Presidency this time around, he had appeared to be grooming himself as the next Republican Secretary of State.

For somewhat different reasons, Kissinger agreed that policy planning should be centered in the White House. For Kissinger, the balance-of-power diplomat, had long believed that world equilibrium was based on the constant threat of force, and thatrespect for the United States rested on the fear of its enormous military machine. At times, secret talks and well-placed overtures could avert military engagements that were not in the interest of the United States; at others, where an escalation to armed conflict seemed necessary, the decisions must be made and the orders carried out by a few top men who acted with the greatest of speed. Such a policy of threat demanded a high degree of centralization-and the resulting Nixon-Kissinger policy structure was designed to circumvent those forces in government, such as Congress and the Cabinet bureaucracies, which were considered extraneous to that approach.

IN ADDITION, Kissinger realized that the policy of threat would be a failure if Nixon could not appear unfettered by others-inside Washington and out-who had claims on the President's conduct of foreign affairs. In as early a tract as A World Restored, Kissinger had written that "the impetus of domestic policy is a direct social experience; but that of foreign policy is not actual, but potential experience-the threat of war-which statesmanship attempts to avoid being made explicit." In other words, popular opinion was little more than an encumbrance on those few who were capable of making decisions. For if the foreign diplomat were allowed to feel that the President's policy could be swayed by domestic upheavals, then the credibility of threat-the lynchpin of the policy-would ultimately collapse.

Corollary to the policy of threat was the notion that the United States would keep its promises and fulfill its commitments no matter what the price. For the ultimate failure of diplomacy was to lose credibility, and there was a feeling for the honor of a great power that went very deep in Kissinger. There was the idea that a faulted credibility in one area of the world would surely lead to disaster in another, because for Kissinger all the great troublespots of the world were lined up on a single continuum that connected the two superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. Should the Russians violate the cease-fire lines in the Mideast, then the President must be free to respond in Cambodia. And if the policy made no sense in cost-benefit analysis, at least it would proceed from strategic thinking which transcended the day-to-day pressures of political life.

NEEDLESS to say, Kissinger felt that the Presidency was the only office of government which could determine and execute foreign policy in the way it should properly be conducted. Congress was an impediment; its members, by and large, were not properly schooled in the hard-fought, intricate practice of diplomatic affairs, and were more likely to respond to the uninformed concerns of their voters, to the shoddy tug-and-pull of the popular political process, than to the arduous twists and turns of great power relationships. The bureaucracy, too, was an enemy: no imagination, no flair, no speed or adaptability, little grasp of the sacrifices and risks one must incur if one were to maintain a flexible policy. And as for popular opinion, Kissinger's interest lay not in how the votes would be cast today, but in how the Executive structure would be affected by domestic reactions to the policy when that policy had finally run its course five or ten years later. His overwhelming concern was how well the White House could continue to function as the major force in foreign policy, whether popular opinion would one day rise up and destroy the Presidency as an instrument of diplomatic relations. And when Kissinger finally agreed to go to work for the man whom he had so viciously scorned as a Presidential candidate, it was only on the condition that the policy-making structure be geared to White House predominance.

In a series of meetings held at the end of November 1968, Nixon invited Kissinger to accept the post of foreign policy assistant and proposed a revival of the National Security Council. Set up under Truman after World War II to coordinate policy planning, the NSC system had long since fallen into obscurity, but Nixon viewed it as an instrument of restoring to the White House a critical measure of flexibility and control over policy decisions. More than anything else, Nixon dreaded being handed a single policy recommendation which, more often than not, might be a compromise policy, an effort on the part of several differing agencies which had subdued their disagreements and presented the White House with a position it could then only accept or reject. Underlying the revived NSC structure was the so-called "options" system; the recommendations of each agency would be solicited by the White House and then screened for the NSC and Nixon by Kissinger and his staff.

It was clear that, in such a scheme, the White House would hold predominance in the policy field. How much influence Kissinger would have-as opposed to Nixon's other advisors-was not yet evident. As the "options" man, Kissinger would be expected to give a fair, objective account of each alternative; as confidential advisor to the President, his strength would rest more on his personal relationship with Nixon than on his policymaking abilities-a relationship that would have been very difficult to predict. "I suppose what really was clear was that Henry Kissinger did not intend to become a man of particular influence," Thomas Schelling, Kissinger's closest colleague on the Harvard Faculty, said recently. "I think he honestly thought that there was a more detached role for himself." So Kissinger had gone to Washington to whittle down the options and strengthen Nixon's hand; his own influence could be determined only by the chemistry of his relationship with the President.

BUT FOR astute Presidential observers, the news of Kissinger's supremacy in foreign policy was not long in coming. In December 1968, he flew to Key Biscayne to present Nixon with a set of blueprints for the revived NSC system-and William P. Rogers, the new Secretary of State, was already out in the cold. No longer would it be as necessary for the Secretary to meet with the President on an informal basis, as Acheson and Dulles and Rusk before him had done; like all other Cabinet members who dealt in foreign policy, his ideas would no longer be brought directly to Nixon, but would have to pass first through a system which Kissinger administered. And when Rogers met with the President and his national security advisor, he was completely overshadowed, so outclassed by Kissinger that he would rarely see Nixon in Kissinger's presence anymore. "He avoids his confrontations with Henry because he knows he'll make a fool out of him," one State Department official said recently.

Kissinger was a towering figure amid the rest of the Nixon appointees. None could compare to him in terms of sheer mental preparation for the job. One Harvard colleague said of Kissinger that his present position is "the culmination of his career as a student of international affairs." And it is probable that Kissinger came into his job better prepared than either of his predecessors under Kennedy and Johnson, not to mention those whom Nixon had just appointed to other, less rigorous posts, the men who had won their jobs as political favors, not by sheer intellectual breadth.

More important, though, Nixon and Kissinger shared a vital number of deeply-held concerns. They were very much preoccupied with the strength and power of the Presidency, with the need to maintain one's independence and maneuverability in a politically fluid world. Most of the others in Nixon's retinue were men of politics, men who could be restrained by adverse domestic feeling or be deterred from a policy that seemed to make no material sense. But Nixon-a President determined to behave in a Presidential way-and Kissinger the great power diplomat would brook no compromise. And Nixon's personal relationship with Kissinger, unfettered as it was by ulterior political motives, became deep and profound. Kissinger is the President's only post-1960 acquaintance to have become a member of his personal inner circle. He sees Nixon more frequently than do any of his other appointees. And as Nixon's confidante, Kissinger passes the crucial judgments on the very options that he and his staff have laid out.

BUT Kissinger's coup of the Cabinet departments was not as simple as that. It involved a devious circumvention of the bureaucracy through the skillful use of study memoranda and detailed, lengthy questionnaires. According to several men who were close associates of Kissinger at the time, Kissinger came to power determined not to rely on normal channels for information concerning each of the policy undertakings. His attitude was that one couldn't expect anything imaginative or innovative from the bureaucracy, that one would instead have to develop pipelines of one's own. And so he proceeded to ensnare the Cabinet departments in a series of useless policy studies which left them very much on the short end of decision-making.

Kissinger's first act as Nixon's advisor was to commission an options memorandum on the progress of the war in Vietnam; he began work on the study as early as December 1968. In the months preceding the study, the military state of affairs in Indo-china had been the subject of a raging controversy inside the various departments. The outgoing Presidential advisors and the upper crust of Washington's foreign service were claiming that the NLF had grown significantly weaker since the Tet offensive the previous February, that the Communist military campaign would fold in a matter of months. But the lower echelon-often closer to the truth than were their superiors-said rightly that the guerrillas were merely regrouping forces and growing stronger all the time-that, in effect, the entire American military effort had been a failure. Since the higher-ranking officials had regularly suppressed the opposing view in their conversations with the White House, the consultants whom Kissinger had commissioned to write the study now felt it especially necessary to get word to Nixon of what the second group was saying-which was now possible for the first time, because Kissinger and the NSC were already committed to forego the compromise policy formula and unfold the disagreements for the President.

KISSINGER'S solution was to split the Vietnam memorandum in two; the first part would contain a list of options on what to do about Vietnam, and the second would be a list of specific questions on the progress of the war. It was the questions part of the study-the first in what became known as National Security Study Memoranda-which Kissinger said had been designed to reveal the differing points of view. This he proposed to accomplish in an unprecedented way-by putting identical sets of questions to different departments, questions which, in the cases of most agencies, fell clearly outside their range of primary responsibility. The CIA, for example, was asked to file a report on the proficiency of ARVN-a task which had always belonged to the military command in Vietnam. One result of the questionnaire, undoubtedly, was that many estimates suddenly became more honest; for example, the military command decided for the first time to abandon the "attrition" rationale for sustained U.S. ground action in Vietnam. In similar manner, the State and Defense Departments showed up each other's positions on the war.

But the major result of the questionnaire seems to have been that it tied up and discredited the bureaucracy as a whole. The higher-level officials were now as shamed as their underlings, and entire agencies were seen in outright conflict. Further-more, the questions themselves were long and bulky-merely sorting out the answers required a major effort on the part of Kissinger's own staff. And by the time the series of National Security Study Memoranda-on Vietnam and on each of the remaining issues of foreign policy-had been completed, Nixon and Kissinger had already taken the crucial steps in shaping the new Administration's approach to policy. "They had us tied up here for months and months," one State Department official ruminated recently on the NSSM series. "One wonders whether they've been used in the formulation of foreign policy."

IN FACT, Kissinger's use of the NSSM series to tie up Washington's civil service was a blunt, cynical attempt to alter the effectiveness of the National Security Council set-up. The options system had been designed to curtail the influence of the bureaucracy, not to remove it; but when the dust had cleared, the Cabinet departments had been rendered virtually ineffective in the choosing of policy. By foreclosing one source of ideas, Kissinger had eliminated the options that would derive from it. The result was that his own office had been measurably strengthened.

As if this were not enough, Kissinger also proceeded to strike the "immediate withdrawal" alternative from the options half of the Vietnam memorandum, leaving his current Vietnamization plan as the most moderate of all the options listed. Thus, even before the paper had gone to the National Security Council, Kissinger had made the crux of the Administration's final choice inevitable: the United States was not going to leave Vietnam without exacting a price from the NLF and Hanoi. By thus manipulating the options system, Kissinger had unilaterally made a crucial policy choice.

Kissinger's ascendance took an additional toll on the functioning of the Cabinet departments and stifled any useful ideas which might otherwise have originated in them. Neither Rogers nor Secretary Laird has been as forceful and persuasive an advocate as Kissinger, and, as a result, their immediate assistants-the men who feed position papers to Kissinger and his staff-have been less likely to take risks and back their department heads up. The result has been a near monotony of viewpoint; the crucial policy recommendations have come almost uniformly from Kissinger's office.

More important, however, is the fact that, with the concentration of power in Kissinger's office, Congressional investigation of policymaking-which was never very comprehensive-has reached a new low in effectiveness. As confidential advisor to the President, Kissinger has successfully claimed "executive privilege" when asked to testify on the record in Congressional hearings. As a result, the only contact that Kissinger has with Congress is through informal, intermittent briefing sessions with House and Senate leaders. And even those briefings appear to be empty exercises, for Kissinger is subjected to them only when the President decides they are necessary. For example, a one-time leading member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee-former Sen. Albert Gore-said recently that he did not know of any White House briefing sessions with Congress preceding the decision to invade Cambodia last Spring.

KISSINGER'S refusal to testify on the record would not be a particular departure from past practice if the power concentrated in his office were not so weighty. Traditionally, most Presidential advisors were also heads of departments; they were responsible to Congress, both through the appropriations process and as Administration representatives. But not Kissinger; his stranglehold on policy, combined with his Congressional immunity, has cut off vast amounts of information on White House policymaking from Capitol Hill's purview. Congressional resentment on this subject reached a high pitch last March, when Stuart Symington, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged on the Senate floor that Kissinger was "Secretary of State in everything but title," and that the appearance before Congressional committees by William Rogers had become "a rather empty exercise."

Congress is not the only group of men with whom Kissinger has been secretive. In his spiraling staff of more than 100 people, there is no one with whom Kissinger discusses his conversations with the President. Besides his deputy, Gen. Alexander Haig, there is not one Kissinger staff member who has had any direct access to Nixon-a sharp departure from past practice, when numerous White House consultants, including Kissinger himself, were able to meet with the President. And until recently, Kissinger was the only. Administration official besides Nixon to convey Presidential policy to the media; under the guise of "a high White House official," he regularly briefed the Washington press corps on major developments in foreign policy.

AND FINALLY, of course, he is the second most important policymaker besides Nixon himself. There is not a single important international issue on which he does not have a major say; even on the subject of the Middle East-which Kissinger generally leaves to the State Department, partly because of his Jewish background-he has emerged at crucial points to warn against a growing Soviet presence. One of Kissinger's ex-staff assistants recently went so far as to suggest that the Middle East has been tossed to Rogers as a political bone because it is not a major issue-"which it may well be if you leave it to Rogers long enough."

But if Henry Kissinger's experience as White House administrator has demonstrated anything, it is that obedience to the orderly process of government is basically incompatible with the role of the cunning diplomat. For if he were obligated to predicate his actions upon such obstacles as popular will and honest information, then his actions could be predicted and the diplomat's flexibility-his capacity to pursue a policy of threat-would rapidly diminish. And if Kissinger was determined to accomplish anything, it was to remove every conceivable constraint from policymaking so that the President's calculated guile could run its course. If the bureaucracy could be curbed, and Congress circumvented, then the policy of threat would become a reality. And that is precisely what Kissinger engineered.