"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.