ELLIOTT "discovered" Kissinger. He spent long hours with his young prodigy-the two would often read and grade master's theses written by Elliott's graduate students-and provided Kissinger with impetus for his career. With Elliott, Kissinger founded and directed Harvard International Seminar, through which about 40 mid-career people from foreign countries-writers and artists as well as scholars and politicians-visited Harvard for two months of the summer every year. (It was later discovered that several of the foundations financing the Seminar were secret conduits for CIA funds. Kissinger claimed not to have known of CIA support.) Many of these people became high-ranking government officials in their countries in the years after their attendance at the seminar, and several-with whom Kissinger developed strong personal ties-became valued contacts for a man who was continually in the process of building his career.

It was at Elliott's recommendation that Kissinger went to work for the Council on Foreign Relations as an editor of Foreign Affairs and director of the Council's study on nuclear weapons. And it was through Elliott that he joined the Rockefeller Brothers Fund when that group became interested in sponsoring a series of reports on American foreign policy. Kissinger's interest then underwent a major shift from scholarship to policy. And it was his incorporation of 19th-century balance-of-power theory into the leading policy issue of the 1950's-thermonuclear relationships-where Kissinger made his mark.

The basis for Kissinger's political thinking was contained in his Ph.D. thesis, written in 1954 and later published under the title, A World Restored: The Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age. In it, he discussed the diplomatic deals and maneuvers by which a handful of foreign ministers-particularly Metternich and Viscount Castlereagh-restructured post-Napoleonic Europe and set the course of history for more than a century. In A World Restored, Kissinger argued that "stability based on an equilibrium of forces" was ultimately responsible for the relative calm of Europe in the decades preceding World War I. His fascination, however, lay clearly not with physical force as such, but rather with the clever ploys and double entendres of great power diplomacy.

The image of Europe's fate being played out in negotiations by foreign ministers who were free of popular constraints and who maintained almost unlimited autonomy with respect to their own heads of state is one that held unlimited appeal for him. And his sympathies lay not so much with the Castlereaghs who sallied forth from their island paradises when they found their interests threatened as with the statesmen who were naturally inclined to activist, interventionist roles-men like Metternich, who defended impotent Austria and finally commanded European peacemaking through the devious use of offers, deals, and threats:

"When the unity of Europe came to pass, it was not because of the self, evidence of its necessity, as Castlereagh had imagined, but through a cynical use of the conference machinery to define a legitimizing principle of social repression; not through Castlereagh's good faith, but through Metternich's manipulation."

IT WAS with this perspective that Kissinger wrote Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which grew out of the Council on Foreign Relations studies. In it, Kissinger argued for the doctrine of "flexible response" and wound up advocating a policy of limited nuclear warfare. Not that he favored the most forceful possible use of drms; the central dilemma facing American policymakers in their dealings with the Soviet Union at that time was a choice between "massive retaliation" and no response at all. From a strategic point of view. Kissinger stated that the capability of response was vital to American security interests; from a technical viewpoint, he argued that it would be possible to choose a limit on the nuclear scale up to which it would be possible to threaten an escalation-and, if necessary, to carry out the threat.

The doctrine was rejected by most knowledgeable specialists in the arms field. The book was viciously reviewed by several influential arms specialists, a factor which re-inforced Kissinger's native insecurity and compelled him to backtrack and reverse many of the central policy recommendations. Nor were many aspects of the policy startling or innovative in themselves; the considerations surrounding the bomb and limited war had already been outlined in part by the work of Bernard Brodie, James Gavin, and Edward Teller, and the sections on diplomatic flexibility borrowed heavily from Metternich and the conferees at Vienna. The book's real departure was its fusing of diplomatic concerns with the theory of nuclear war: the result was a potent, hard-line combina-tion of cajolery, threat, and physical force.

The book was given a gala launching by the Council on Foreign Relations, and despite the criticism it received from experts, it was an instant public hit. On bestseller lists for 14 weeks, it made Kissinger an internationally known figure, won him a Pentagon consultantship, and attracted the attention of several influential policymakers and officials-such as Vice President Richard M. Nixon-who later played a role in enhancing his power and prestige.

In 1957, the creation of the Harvard Center for International Affairs gave Kissinger a chance to return to teaching and scholarship with his power base intact. The CFIA was being set up by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as well as by McGeorge Bundy and Harvard's leading foreign policy specialists. In a struggle for the position of associate director, Kissinger-reportedly with the prodding of the Rockefeller group-edged out Edward Katzenbach, director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Defense Studies Program out of which the new Harvard Center grew.

KISSINGER'S return to Harvard was at once triumphal and antagonizing. He now had an immense coterie of associates, contacts, and patron saints in the outside world. His calendar was always full, and he continually angered students and colleagues by postponing their appointments as many as four or five times in a row. The unattractive twin pillars of his personality-insecurity coupled with unlimited intellectual arrogance-had been reinforced by the competitions and successes in the outside world.

But there was an ingrained fatalism in Kissinger-a feeling "that ultimately failure is one of the likely outcomes of any form of action," as his close colleague Stanley Hoffmann put it-which lent Kissinger's personality a soft spot not ordinarily found in such stern, arrogant men. "He has a human quality I value very much," a colleague at the Center for International Affaris said recently. "There's a deep melancholy about him, and a sense that you're dealing with a guy who has known unlimited tragedy and seen some of the bleakest parts of the human landscape."

And there is a deep sardonicism in his personality, a self-deprecating sense of humor which he would sometimes use to disarm his colleagues and at other times to make straightforward remarks which he would never have dared utter in a serious vein. "My problem," he once said to a Faculty coleague with a trace of a grin, "is that I was born arrogant"; the remark of a man who either thought himself above reproach or was perhaps entirely too blind about the roots of his own scornfulness.

Soon after he returned to Harvard, he began a practice which was to recur at other times in his academic career: playing both sides of the White House political fence. Ostensibly a Rockefeller man. Kissinger readily agreed to compose position papers for a Democratic Presidential candidate: Senator John F. Kennedy. He was the leading specialist on European security matters, true, but there was no reticence about consulting for a potential winner.

AND it was as a consultant for President Kennedy that Kissinger got his first real taste of what infighting and influence games in the White House were really like. Not that he had ever been naive and amiss; it was simply that the struggle for power was more subtle and refined that even he had imagined. After advising Kennedy on the Berlin crisis-and asking the President to enter negotiations with the Russians and flex the possibilities of response, which Kennedy never did-Kissinger boorishly chose to criticize the President's policy in the pages of Foreign Affairs. Even as Kennedy failed to be swayed by his advice, he travelled about the world like a man of consequence, advertising himself as the White House consultant on European security. Able to meet with Kennedy only from time to time, he insisted on getting regular access to him-a principle which he would deny today, because virtually no one on Kissinger's present staff sees Nixon but Kissinger himself.

And finally there was the competition from the fast-talking, native American intellectuals of Camelot, the hard-nosed, problem-solving, pragmatically arrogant men who rejected the notion of failure and believed they could master the world with the American military machine. In this milieu. Kissinger-the advocate of negotiations and graduated threats-was very much an outcast.