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.