At the last stretch of his teaching career. Kissinger became Nelson Rockefeller's chief foreign policy advisor during the 1968 Republican Presidential campaign. During the campaign. Kissinger had made a number of highly caustic remarks about Richard Nixon; in Miami, he went so far as to declare that he doubted Nixon's fitness to be President. It must have later been a shock to many people that Nixon would have appointed this man to a top foreign policy post; Kissinger had been a Rockefeller man from way back, and he had publicly scorned the President-elect. And veteran as he continued to question Nixon's ability, he let it be known privately that he was willing to consider an offer from the winning camp.

BUT WHY had Kissinger placed such high hopes in Governor Rockefeller? Not because he was necessarily more "liberal," but because he was more intimately familiar with the nature of American interests-and more willing to overlook popular opinion in order to pursue them. For Rockefeller was one of that elitist milieu which was steadfast in its convictions and highly contemptuous of public will whenever it intruded on those convictions.

Kissinger's fear of Nixon stemmed from the belief that he was so deeply involved in the popular political process that he might give in to the transitory whims of public opinion rather than follow a course of action which was manifestly correct. Rockofeller was an interventionist in principle, a far more dedicated cold warrior and alliance-builder than Nixon, with his earthbound, contingent claims to popularity, could ever have been. And it as only after receiving assurances from Nixon that he would occupy a pivotal post in the new administration-that he would have a truly significant measure of control over policy decisions-that he consented to move from one salon to another, from the Rockefeller-funded drawing rooms in Cambridge to Nixon's Washington.

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 that respect 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 linchpin 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 trouble-spots 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 policymaking 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 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.

BUT Kissinger's coup of the Cabipet 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 Indochina 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 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.