By Barnard Law Collier | The New York Times
Nov. 14, 1971

WASHINGTON. ROBERT SILVER, a good editor in New York, finds himself one night at a Washington dinner party. He is standing across the room staring almost rudely at what seems to be a very nondescript, middle‐aged Jewish man with eyeglasses and wavy hair, named Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is deep in conversation with this astonishingly beautiful girl, and the girl is looking at him transfixed. “How can this be?” wonders Silver. How does this Kissinger do it?

Completely bewildered and a little bit jealous of whatever it is this Kissinger has, Silver defies all sorts of good breeding and taste to ask the girl, when he corners her alone, what Kissinger said to her to make her eyes so glittery.

“It is very interesting,” the girl reports (at Washington dinner parties there are no private conversations). “Henry really has quite a line. He is very witty and he can talk about any subject brilliantly, but after a while he gets down to the point.

“‘I am just an immigrant Harvard professor,’ he says. ‘Yet here I find myself in this grand home, among these grand people, talking to a very beautiful girl. I know it is not me; it is my job at the White House. If it were not for the fact that I am the President's closest adviser, I would not be in this grand place with these grand people. No . . . [a long, thoughtful, sad pause] . . . I would be just a professor of history, dining by myself, in some lonely hotel room.’”

NOTHING about Henry Kissinger is more engaging than his gift for getting down to the truth of the matter. Not many people have that gift, and certainly nobody else in the Nixon Administration seems to have it. That alone makes Henry Kissinger one of Washington's extraordinary men; his job as Presidential assistant for National Security Affairs also makes him powerful. The combination produces a good deal of admiration for Henry, and without the slightest bashfulness he enjoys it.

The only thing he does all the time, to keep people from bursting his balloon, is to mock the things he doesn't like about himself before the press or the President or his colleagues can do it. He has perhaps two dozen disarming little jokes on himself about his Germanic grammar and the verblessness of his prose.

If history comes out the way Henry Kissinger might like, he will have played a critical role at one of the great turning points in the history of American foreign policy. The implications may be so profound that they will be felt and recognized only by historians not yet born. How good it would be for Henry if these future historians examined the now secret documents of the Kissinger Period and marveled at the man's skill and agility and the unearthly clarity of his thinking at the time. If Henry has it the way he talks about it to interviewers, the historians may be compelled by the facts to write that during the Kissinger Period the old postwar Marshall Plan foreign policy of malignant altruism was replaced with a policy that might be called benign selfishness. Henry has pointed out time and again that the world of the nineteen‐seventies is no place for the rhetoric of a John Kennedy, who pledged in his inaugural that the United States would fight any time, anywhere, any enemy to defend liberty. No longer can the United States buy off most of the world's nations to keep them from “going Communist.” Now the other nations—the ones who matter, anyway—are all strong enough to take care of a Communist threat themselves. And most of them are prosperous enough under a capitalistic system to want to. It is time for the United States to take care of herself and to use her power in new and less draining ways.

WITH his gift for cutting through the fog and the garbage around an issue, Dr. Kissinger has made foreign policy the most noteworthy and successful part of the Nixon Administration. Whether or not he personally agrees with the policy is a debated point. Henry has not let on: that is between him and President Nixon, and perhaps one or two of Kissinger's very closest associates. These men shrug and wince and keep silent.

There is no reliable way of telling how truly powerful Dr. Kissinger is. We are insulated from what goes on in the White House by the strictest kind of security, and the essentials of the relationship between Kissinger and President Nixon may never fully be known. But what information does leak out, from former Kissinger staff people and others who are willing to talk about it, leads you to believe that Nixon and Kissinger spend many hours together discussing things and nobody should make the mistake of thinking that Kissinger concerns himself solely with foreign affairs. President Kennedy and his successors have tended to include foreign policy and most major domestic policies in the realm of “national security? With a trusted Presidential adviser in the national security job, a President may enjoy the convenience and personal security of having near him in the west wing of the White House the man he considers most sensitive to all the political implications of foreign policy. The Secretaries of Defense and State can deal over at the State Department and the Pentagon with the bureaucracy.

Henry Kissinger, Presidential assistant for National Security Affairs, has been called the second most powerful man in the world. Certainly he is playing a crucial role at one of the great turning points in American foreign policy.

“All matters connected with foreign policy go through this office,” is the blunt way Dr. Kissinger puts it. In Washington, it is not exactly polite to say that foreign policy has become too important for the diplomats; so many diplomatic types are of the old, wealthy pillar of Eastern society families, and they don't like to hear it. But Henry Kissinger can be what seems almost brutal in his incisive, uncluttered honesty about how things really are. That is what most of those who know him call his brilliance. It has set him apart since he was a young man.

We are told President Nixon feels he needs a mind of that kind near him. He needs a mind that can present the problems of the day with the penalties of failure and the implications if a certain action is taken or not. He wants these problems put before him in the form of clearly stated choices for decision, with fairness given to differing points of view. Dr. Kissinger has that kind of mind.

“My job in this office,” he says, “is not to be chief formulator of policy. My job is to make sure that the proper range of choices is available to the President. . . .

“Of course he asks my opinion and those of you who know me know that excessive reticence is not one of my difficulties. I can't do anything unless both of the departments” —he means State and Defense—“and the President are confident that I am not loading the presentation in order to produce a particular result. Therefore, I go to considerable lengths to make sure that every point of view that exists within the bureaucracy gets a fair hearing from the President. Then I may add my own point of view.”

Henry likes to tell the story about how one day, not long after President Nixon took office, a group of senior Government officials, all keyed up for the way Lyndon Johnson did business, called from the Defense Department, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency to report that a big North Vietnamese attack had been launched against the South Vietnamese. They told Kissinger that they would be over to the White House Situation Room right away so the President could personally direct the tactics of the engagement.

“I said, Wait a minute, I'll see what the President wants to do,” relates Kissinger.

“I went to see the President and he asked: ‘Is there a decision I can make now that will make any difference to the battle?’

“I said, ‘No.’

“‘Is there any risk if I do not make any decision on this now?’

“I said, ‘No.’

“‘Then tell them not to come over,’ the President said. ‘I will make a decision when there is a clear decision to be made.’”

The admirable terseness of the exchange fails to obscure the immense pressures that Henry Kissinger faces in his position; there are some monstrous frustrations as well. He is a man who either bites or picks his fingernails down deep under his fingertips. He does not have a volcanic temper that erupts and gets it over with; he broods and worries and wrestles with guilts. He will have small nasty tantrums, sometimes so close together that they seem like one big one, as he tries to get exactly what he wants from his staff and from the bureaucracy. Men who can't put up with that kind of character quit him and describe him as a petty tyrant; men who think he is a natural historical phenomenon—and there are a good many of those—learn tab live with his ways. One of his former staff members adds: “Dr. Kissinger drives you to the point where you get things out of yourself that you absolutely knew were impossible.”

All of this, of course, merely gives us a few clues about whether Kissinger is, as he sometimes gets called in the headlines, “the second most powerful man in the world.” Most theories about Dr. Kissinger's great power derive from the widely held conviction that the last man to talk to the boss gets things his way. Whether or not that is really the case with Henry Kissinger and his boss we will not soon know. That is for those unborn historians to ferret out.

If Henry has personally gained anything from his White House position, besides his $42,000 annual salary, is in his confidence. His old friends remark about it.

He is no longer the rather nervous, slightly damp‐handed professor who is made forlorn by being left out of some staff meeting. He does not carry a wounded look when his particular interest is not given top priority. When Dr. Kissinger worked as the foreign‐policy adviser for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor would say to some of his staff before meetings in which Kissinger was not really needed: “Let's ask Henry in on this one so his feelings won't be hurt.” Now Henry has too much to do and more than enough confidence in the seriousness and secureness of his position to worry overly long about being shunned.

George Franklin, the retired editor of Foreign Affairs, the magazine of an enormously influential private group called the Council on Foreign Relations, tells how Henry Kissinger, a young professor at Harvard, was the most independent applicant for a project with the Council he has ever seen, before or since. The project was the basis for Henry's first book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” a serious and scholarly collection of thoughts about what was then the unthinkable: the strategies the United States must adopt to make the best use of the terrifying power of the bomb.

“Henry was extremely interested in the project,” Franklin recalls. “But he put his own conditions on it. He said, ‘I want absolute control of what I write and I want to run it my own way. Will you agree?’ It was very refreshing because so many of them come a bit hat in hand. And we agreed on this, and needless to say we did not regret it.” But for all of Henry's cocksureness in his academic field, Franklin added, “the thing you learned after a while was that Henry was easily bruised.”

Dr. Kissinger, when asked, will agree that his confidence has undergone a massive buildup since he moved into the White House. “Especially my social confidence,” he says. It guarantees the success of a Washington dinner party if the host or hostess can somehow entice Dr. Kissinger to accept an invitation. Where he goes, go photographers, and if they catch Henry in the vicinity of any pretty girl, or with one of his attractive dates, you will see the unlikely and unforgettable Kissinger face displayed the next morning in The Washington Post's gossipy Style section. At one party, Gloria Steinem, the writer‐princess of the Women's Liberation movement, was photographed with Senator George McGovern and Dr. Kissinger. The photograph appeared in the paper with Senator McGovern cropped out. There was the inevitable buzzing about how “Gloria, who does not hate men and would really like to marry, would of course pick a highachieving bachelor like Henry if she picked anybody at all.” But it was the usual nonsense. “The trouble is,” Gloria says, “that when a girl is photographed next to Henry Kissinger it is like a hunter standing with an elephant gun next to an elephant. They assume she is going big ‐ game hunting. I guess they cut poor George McGovern out of the picture in deference to the fact that he is married.”

Bachelor Life

PERHAPS in unconscious envy, perhaps because it is just more fun, the intrigued observers of Washington's most ‐ watched “swinging bachelor” devote much of their attention to the swinging and very little to the rest of his bachelorhood.

Henry Kissinger lives alone in an elegant, rented townhouse in Washington's embassy section, not far from Rock Creek Park. He has a maid who does some housecleaning, but he is not often around to mess up, except to sleep. He rarely entertains there; when he wants guests, he usually asks others to handle his parties for him at their homes. Some things he shares with less prominent bachelors. One morning, while two reporters waited outside to speak to him before he got into his White House limousine, he emerged carrying a huge bundle of dirty laundry and an armful of suits for the dry cleaner.

Kissinger has been a bachelor since a few years before he joined the Nixon Administration, when he and Ann Kissinger were divorced after IS years of marriage and seven years of courtship. As so often happens after divorces, most of their old friends have made a kind of unspoken choice in keeping up with one or the other. Most have chosen to keep up with Henry.

KISSINGER and his former wife rather unselfishly share their two children, Elizabeth, who is 12 years old, and David, who is 10 and looks like his daddy, only with long, blond curly locks. People who see father and children together are driven to comment on the sin. cere warmth and affection of their

They talk freely about Henry's “swinging sex life” in the articles about him, and show‐business girls make themselves available to Henry for publicity's sake. “Which would you prefer, since something should be said about it?” I asked. “Your ‘sex life’ or your ‘social life?’”

Henry Kissinger chuckled an amused chuckle—delighted in the acknowledgment that he, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who every intelligent man knows is a towering mind, may also be a gifted lover.

“I will tell you,” he said, and here it is well to imagine the German accent that sometimes turns w's into soft v's and gargles a few is and softens his u's and o's.

“I work up to 18 hours a day here. When I go out I want to go out to enjoy myself. When I am out on the Coast at the White House in San Clemente, I have more free time. enjoy the company of these girls. They are beautiful and I find some of them interesting. There isn't any more to it than that. It is not an emotional thing. They aren't going to want to marry me.”

Not long ago, in the midst of a discussion of global strategy in his office, Henry rocked back in his chair and in a very serious way blurted out to a friend: “It is astonishing, you know. These starlets, these actresses I go out with. They aren't even sexy.”

THE people who genuinely wish Henry Kissinger well are mostly those who have had something directly to do with furthering his endlessly lucky career. These people look at him with great kindness and affection; they put up with his annoying faults because they are sure they are not dealing with merely a brilliant man. They feel very deep down that they are dealing with the difficulties of genius.

Henry has a very old, dear friend, Dr. Fritz Kraemer, who has known him for almost 30 years. They met in 1943 when Henry was a 19‐year‐old relationship. And they are dazzled by the charm and the intelligence of the children.

David Halperin, who worked in the White House for Dr. Kissinger, remembers an incident about two years ago when David Kissinger was with his father on a White House plane. “David was drawing a picture,” Halperin recalls, “and one of the White House wives looked at the drawing for a minute and said: ‘Why, that looks like a drawing of you, David.’

“‘It is,’ David said.

“‘In fact, it looks like a Michelangelo self‐portrait,’ she said.

“‘No, it's not at all in the style of a self‐portrait by Michelangelo,’ David responded very thoughtfully and seriously. ‘I think it is in the style instead of Raphael portrait of Michelangelo that I once saw.’”

B. L. C. buck private in the U. S. Infantry. Dr. Kraemer, who was then a private too, is now a retired Reserve colonel who works in the Pentagon as a military and political strategist. At work, he wears a monocle. Dr. Kraemer says:

“Henry has great intelligence. But there are many people with great intelligence. This is not what sets Henry apart at all. He has something else, something beyond intelligence, and that makes him a genius. The best way I can describe it is that Henry Kissinger is musically attuned to history. This is not something you can learn, no matter how intelligent you are. It is a gift from God.”

There is a lengendary Harvard government professor named William Yandell Elliott, who is now 75 years old and retired to a farm in Virginia. He has been called Henry Kissinger's mentor, but Elliott denies that in a curmudgeonly bellow.

“Henry Kissinger is responsible for himself!” W. Y. Elliott screamed. “I don't feel responsible for him.” And then more quietly: “He had an unusual and original mind, and he had a feeling of political philosophy. He was not like the stupid behaviorists who turn everything into an either‐or proposition. He was not blind to the epic nature of history. He was not blind to the Bible. He understood the foundations of history.”

Dr. Kraemer is still rooting for Henry to make him extremely proud. He says: “I hope to live to see the day, although this is not likely now that I am tired, ill and finished at age 63, when Henry retires to a Greek island and does some very deep thinking about how the world is run. I want to live to see him write serious books on power and politics in the world, books that people will go back to and read, and say, ‘Hmmm, this Kissinger was absolutely right. That is how it works.’ I want to live to see the day when Henry is remembered like Tocqueville. That will be his real success.”

Dr. Elliott, on the other hand, is hedging his bet. “I'm afraid I didn't give Henry enough of the epic feeling,” he says. “If he has the epic feeling, a man is always confident and guided by it. Henry really should have more of it. After all, he has grown up in the epic of the Jewish tradition.”

HEINZ ALFRED KISSINGER is Henry's real name, the one he grew up with in the German village of Filrth. He was born on May 27, 1923. His father, Louis, was a gentle, soft‐hearted teacher in a girls' high school, and his mother, Paula, was a middle‐class, German‐Jewish housewife.

Every year from the time of Henry's birth, the Nazis gained new ground in Germany. By the time he was in his middle school years, there was already enough wild‐eyed anti‐Semitism around that Henry got into fights because he was a Jew. Henry has never been much of an athlete, and he was much too shy to brazen his way through. So, inevitably, Henry was beaten up by jeering young schoolmates who might soon be enrolling in Hitler's youth movement. Then his father was dismissed from his Job. And Henry was expelled from his regular Gymnasium and made to go to an all‐Jewish school.

Henry's older friends cannot erase from their minds all the disgusting and perverted images that having lived an adult life under Nazism calls up. They therefore insist that the key to Henry's character lies in the cruel and humiliating loss of freedom he suffered while he was growing up.

“That part of my childhood is not a key to anything,” Henry says emphatically. “I was not consciously unhappy. I was not so acutely aware of what was going on. For children, those things are not that serious. It is fashionable now to explain everything psychoanalytically, but let me tell you, the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life.”

Much more crucial, as far as Dr. Kissinger himself is concerned, is some magnificent and consistent good luck. The Kissingers left Germany in 1938, just before it was probably too late. It was Mama Kissinger who at last took the decisive action and got the family out to an aunt of hers in London. Then the Kissingers sailed as immigrants to New York.

Henry was enrolled in high school at night, and to earn extra money for the family he worked in a shaving‐brush factory in Manhattan. His job was squeezing acid out of the brush bristles. He was promoted to delivery boy.

“There are all these people who say that working my way through high school like that was also a traumatic experience and a great hardship,” he says. “But, I tell you, we had a very close family relationship and things did not seem that hard to me. I was not brought up to have a lot of leisure; there was no shame in that.”

It wasn't the work or the hours that bothered Henry, but his accent. “I was terribly self‐conscious about it,” he says. “I finally lost my selfconsciousness over it, I'd say, about 1957 or so”—which is the year his best‐selling “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” was published.

Being drafted was also lucky for Henry. In the regular testing program he was discovered to have an I.Q. high enough (he refuses to say how high) to include him in a special group of draftees whom the Army had decided to cultivate just in case, sometime later in the war, their minds could be made good use of. It was a stroke of astoundingly foresighted planning for the Army. There fore, six months after these 3,000 or so highly intelligent young men were sent to college to hone their minds, the Army washed out the whole program. It sent all of its proven smarter soldiers off to the infantry. The Army had heeded the populist cry that it was unfair and therefore wrong for some soldiers to go to college while others were fighting and dying.

But one day, a few months later, while Buck Private Kissinger was feeling especially sorry for himself, a jeep roared up to the command tent of his infantry company, training in Louisiana. Henry has been heard to tell the story something like this:

“Out of this jeep driven by a lieutenant strides a private. He has an incredible air of authority. He yells in a terrible voice, ‘Who is in cornmand here?’ Out comes a lieutenant colonel and confronts this incredible buck private. ‘I am in charge here, private,’ the lieutenant colonel said. He was shaking a little. The private yelled out, ‘Sir, I am sent by the general and I am going to speak to your company about why we are in this war.’”

The improbable scene, perhaps dramatically sharpened by memory, is accurate enough. It was not uncommon for ordinary soldiers to make such inspirational talks to their fellow troops during World War II. And Dr. Kraemer, who was the private, and who was also a 35‐year‐old lawyer with two Ph.D.'s who had fled his native Prussia, was one of the best.

The only error in the way Henry tells that story is that Dr. Kraemer insists it was not a lieutenant who drove him that day. “It was against the rules for a lieutenant to drive for a private,” he says. “Maybe it was Pfc. who was driving, but no higher.”

Kissinger wrote Kraemer a note, one of many Dr. Kraemer received from fans among the troops who had heard him speak, but he was struck by its discipline and simplicity. “Dear Pvt. Kraemer,” it said. “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you somehow? Pvt. Kissinger.”

WITHIN 20 minutes of his first meeting with what he calls “this little 19‐year‐old Jewish refugee, whose people knew nothing really of the great currents of history that were overcoming them,” Dr. Kraemer was convinced that he was the discoverer of a most important historical mind. “Henry had the urgent desire,” Kraemer says, “not to understand the superficial thing, but the underlying causes. He wanted to grasp things.”

Kraemer took the young man immediately under his wing and he used every trick he knew to get Henry made an interpreter in case the 84th Division should be sent to Germany. And it was. Thanks to Kraemer, Henry became the interpreter for the general.

When the division took the city of Krefeld, it found the city government had vanished along with the fleeing Nazi troops. Something had to be set up urgently to provide for the city's nearly 200,000 people. Kraemer suggested, in his matchlessly persuasive way, that since this young Kissinger spoke German, and had an extraordinary intelligence besides, he should be put in charge of reorganizing Krefeld's government.

“I could only marvel,” Kraemer recalls, “at the way this 19‐ or 20‐year‐old did the job. In just two or three days, the government was again working in a splendid fashion. Henry had planned things wonderfully. This was a prodigy. He had a fabulous innate sense of finding his way out of the most difficult situations. Here this little Kissinger had set up in three days a working municipal government in a large city where everything had been run by the Nazis just two days before.”

The ability of Private Kissinger was so clear that within a year he was administering the district of Bergstrasse. As an administrator, the young soldier was given the power to arrest anyone in the district he chose, at any time, for any reason he saw fit.

“But I was not disappointed in him,” Kraemer says. “He had never, of course, had anything like that kind of power. But never once did he abuse his power. He was permitted to live in a castle, but that didn't turn his head either. He was incredibly objective and without a trace of vengefulness, and when he was transferred the people of Bergstrasse begged to keep him there.”

By then young Kissinger had a sergeant's stripes, and Kraemer (at that point a lieutenant) managed to get him on the faculty of the European Command Intelligence School, where they were teaching officers how to root out Nazis who had gone underground. Sergeant Kissinger was teaching colonels and higher ranks, and he was so good that when the war ended the Army hired him as a civilian teacher at the school at a salary of $10,000 a year. This amounted to a relative fortune in those days, certainly so for a young man with only a high‐school diploma and just a uniform removed from the shaving‐brush factory.

Kraemer was afraid that Kissinger would be seduced by all the money. But one night, during one of the frequent, abstract conversations they carried on until the dawn, Kraemer remembers Kissinger saying:

“Kraemer, I want to go home and get a first‐class education. I know only what I teach in the school. Otherwise, I know nothing.”

Henry came home in May of 1946 and applied for September entrance to most of the good colleges. All of them wrote back that they would be glad to accept him the following year, but the September class was impossible because enrollment had already closed.

“But to its credit,” recalls Dr. Kissinger, “Harvard agreed to take me even though its enrollment was closed, too. That is how I got to Harvard.”

At Harvard young Henry came to the attention of Professor Elliott, who also took him under his wing. “You have the makings of a great philosopher,” the professor once told him. Stern old Elliott was never known to toss words like “great” around lightly.

HENRY flourished in the intellectual soil of Harvard. When one of the most prestige‐soaked jobs in the realm of foreign policy study, the managing editorship of Foreign Affairs, opened up, Dr. Kissinger was recommended wholeheartedly for the job by three men who seldom ever agreed on anything else: McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger and Professor Elliott. “I was tremendously impressed by recommendations from such diverse people,” says George Franklin, who was running Foreign Affairs then. “Often, we get glowing recommendations about some young man because he is some professor's disciple. But in Henry's case it was perfectly clear that this was an extraordinary man.”

Instead of the managing editor's job, however, Kissinger took on the project that produced the nuclear weapons book. He worked with singleminded concentration on it. He lived with his wife in a New York apartment, and when he came home at night he forbade her to talk to him because it would interrupt his train of thought.

It was the right book at the right time. It hit when everybody was just starting to think about a world where others besides the Americans had atomic bombs to threaten people with.

In “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” Henry attempted to prove that there was a genuine possibility of limited, instead of all‐out, nuclear warfare. At that tune, people were not speaking as they do today about tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. The question was only strategic: We destroy Moscow and they destroy Washington. Now, with battlefield nuclear artillery all the way up to the multiwarheaded atomic missiles, the problems are infinitely more complex because the number of variable unknowns is infinitely greater. But the book made very tough reading because it was written in that lumbering,, academic style that so many scholarly books get written in. Henry knew it. “I am sure,” he told Franklin when the book started selling dumfoundingly well, “that it is the most unread best seller Toynbee.”

Not many months after “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” came out, his book called “A World Restored” was published. It had actually been written before the best seller; it was a refined version of his doctoral thesis at Harvard. The analysts of Henry Kissinger now quote rather profusely from this book, which essentially deals with Austria's Prince Metternich and Britain's Lord Castlereagh and their efforts at the Congress of Vienna to rebalance the world after its disruption by the war lord Napoleon. What they tried was to work things out with elegant hardness so that no single power would be overpowering enough to dictate its will to the others. Henry followed up with other books and articles dealing with strategy and foreign policy. These were not the best sellers that “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” was, but it was clear to most of his colleagues that Henry's thinking was getting progressively sharper, even if his writing style was not.

He also went to work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is a kind of petty‐cash Rockefeller Foundation, with only $90‐million or so. It finances projects of special personal interest to the Rockefeller brothers. In an interview with Henry, the Governor was favorably impressed and so was Henry. They agreed that Henry would advise the Governor on foreign‐policy matters on a consulting basis while he remained to teach at Harvard.

“We have become good friends,” Dr. Kissinger says, “I admire Rockefeller very much.”

“What kind of mind does Rockefeller have?” I asked.

“He has a second‐rate mind,” Dr. Kissinger said, “but a first‐rate intuition about people.”

“And what kind of mind do you have?” I asked.

“I have a first‐rate mind,” he said without a trace of modesty, “but a third‐rate intuition about people.”

Then he smiled the melancholy smile of a man who wants to look completely defenseless, and said with a confidential kind of guile: “I seem to trust people I shouldn't trust. . . I hope I can trust you.”

WHEN Rockefeller made his futile attempt to get the Republican nomination for President in 1968, he took a position on Vietnam that perfectly suited his face and his character. It was at the same time both pleasant and deceptive. Defending this position was left mostly to Henry Kissinger.

Robert Shogan, a reporter for Newsweek who covered the Rockefeller campaign, says that every time some really sticky question about Vietnam came up it would be directed to Dr. Kissinger. Shogan recalls: “The Rockefeller staff would always say something like, “So you have a hard one about Vietnam, eh? Well, go see Henry. He's the only one around who can explain what our position is and make it come out sounding right.”

Dr. Kissinger has taken on a somewhat similar role for President Nixon, to whom he was highly recommended by Governor Rockefeller. Kissinger is the Administration spokesman who turns up to meet the press privately and off the record after actions like the Cambodia invasion and other public‐relations disasters lie talks to the newsmen candidly, with humor and with6iit seeming to give them a lot of double‐talk. He is sympathetic and understanding of the business of a newspaper having “to print something.”

What Henry says in these press briefings, and how he says it, seems always to make unvarnished good sense. Journalists like Dan Rather, the White House correspondent for C.D.S., says Kissinger is “the best briefer in Washington.” Kissinger also has the reputation that he never lies. As one newsman said: “Henry will always tell you if something is secret and that he can't talk about it. He'll never just out and out lie like other bureaucrats might.”

“I am always available,” Dr. Kissinger says, “to talk to the press in a critical period. The press appreciates this, and I think this is one of the reasons I have been treated so very well. I must tell you, however, I have no competitors for that job among my colleagues in this Administration.”

Every good newsman knows, of course, that what Henry says he cannot say might radically change the whole picture he is painting for them. But, in the crunch of a deadline, there are a lot of grateful reporters who don't do much hard questioning. Nonetheless, with all that potential for abuse, the reporters I have talked to say that they don't think Henry has ever taken advantage of their vulnerability; or, if he has, they feel it was probably not calculated deception but an honest mistake.

AMONG academics and other partisans there are more severe judgments of Henry Kissinger. In one of the dire predictions he made in an attempt to convince Henry not to take the National Security post, Dr. Kraemer told him: “You are not going to be able to make foreign policy. You will not be the engineer but, at best, the brakeman on the train. The right will call you the Jew who lost us Southeast Asia; the left will call you a traitor to the cause. Don't take the job.”

It is in Henry Kissinger's nature to nod his head thoughtfully at such perceptive and well‐meant pieces of advice, and then mutter: “I know, I know.” And then, for reasons only he may understand, he will go out and do the thing anyway.

So far, the harshest criticism of Kissinger comes from precisely where Kraemer said it would: the left and the right. It was the left that was angry with him first. These people somehow had expected the United States, with a Harvard intellectual like Henry Kissinger at the elbow of the President, to withdraw right away from Vietnam. They were disappointed, and soon began to recall how they had known all along that Kis singer was really just a cryptofascist and a power‐crazed Dr. Strangelove, right down to the evil Prussian accent. (As some of his Prussian friends point out, the accent is really “ridiculously Bavarian.”) A group of profesiora from‐Harvard marched into the Kissinger offices one day and announced that they would not speak to Henry again until the last American soldier had left South Vietnam.

Emmett Hughes, a writer who once wrote speeches for Governor Rockefeller, has many unfriendly things to say about the way Henry was when they both worked for the millionaire. Hughes tells how he tried, during the 1968 campaign, to get a tough statement out of Rockefeller that criticized United States policies in Vietnam.

“Henry was in charge of foreignpolicy matters for the Governor, and he was supposed to be subordinate to me,” Hughes says. “But it was still impossible to get a statement I wanted Rockefeller to make on Vietnam past Henry. We finally got a policy statement out, but it was not nearly as tough as I wanted it. One of the most adroit things Kissinger was able to do was to convince people that he was always against the war. But really his position was that a military victory of some sort was necessary.”

There are also a tot of people who will tell you that Henry Kissinger once said the most personally insulting things about Richard Nixon after Rockefeller was defeated in Miami for the Republican nomination. (When Rockefeller had lost for sure, Henry was seen weeping.) The alleged Kissinger quotation that is most often repeated, is: “That man Nixon is not fit to be President.”

This is followed by one of those questions that contains a built‐in answer: “How can a man who says those terrible things about another man possibly turn around and go to work for him?” The corollary is seldom asked, however: “How can a President, who must surely know alt the bad things Henry Kissinger might have said about him, hire him and keep him for nearly three years as his closest adviser?”

The attacks from the right began only after it was disclosed last summer that Kissinger had made a secret trip to Peking to seal the necessary understanding before President Nixon announced his visit to the Peoples Republic of China. “I have received many amazing letters,” Kissinger says. “It has been my first real exposure to the right‐wing extremists. They sound very much like the leftwing extremists, only their vocabulary is not as good.”

The criticism from the right boils down to the accusation that President Nixon and his conspirator, Kissinger, are weakening the power of the United States by withdrawing almost everywhere in the world so that the Russians can come in. And if that is not bad enough, they are also accused of cosying up to Red China in a cowardly effort to avoid the manly, inevitable confrontation.

As one might suspect from his background, Henry Kissinger says he is most concerned about the danger on the right. He has said privately that, if there is a revolution in this country, “it will not be led by middleclass college students with long hair.” It will be led, he says, by the frustrated and angry hordes of people on the right who will feel that this country has been defeated and humiliated militarily and economically in Vietnam and other places. They are the ones who will make a serious grab for power, and might really get it. By phasing out the Vietnam withdrawal, Kissinger has argued, the right may be placated and this country spared an attempted, fascist‐type revolution.

Dr. Kissinger has also said, in so many words, that the policy of phased withdrawal is designed to protect the threatened freedom of those on the left who are most profoundly opposed to the policy. Altogether, it is as elegant and slippery a bit of political reasoning as you are likely to come across in this day and age.

Some of Dr. Kissinger's old colleagues and acquaintances, free from the passion of topical debate, ask themselves, and each other, “What is it that Henry wants?” Does he want to be known as the most significant German‐Jewish immigrant to America since Einstein? Does he want a share of one of those symbiotic relationships of history—to be remembered as Nixon's Kissinger? Does Henry truly have an epic vision of history?

“I believe,” Henry Kissinger says, “in the tragic element of history. I believe there is the tragedy of a man who works very hard and never gets what he wants. And then I believe there is the even more bitter tragedy of a man who finally gets what he wants and finds out that he doesn't want it.”

You are left by this man, who insists he is talking about success seeking Americans and not necessarily Henry Kissinger, to puzzle out the significance of that thought for yourself.