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. Furthermore, 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.

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.

Congress is not the only group of men with whom Kissinger has been secretive. In his spiralling 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.

"However we got into Vietnam, whatever the judgment of our actions, ending the war honorably is essential for the peace of the world. Any other solution may unloose forces that would complicate prospects of international order."

-Henry Kissinger in Foreign Aflairs, January 1969.

If there were a single a?? image for Henry Kissinger's role in Vietnam, it would be one of the global diplomat clinging to stability, maintaining order, concerned with honor and prestige. And it is in Vietnam that the Nixon-Kissinger policy has reached the limit of its logic and faced the acid test.

There was once a time when the war was not a Nixon-Kissinger enterprise, when it was something the new Administration had inherited and-so it seemed-was publicly committed to dissolve. But with the extension of the ground fighting into Cambodia. Laos, and briefly. North Vietnam-as well as the drastic escalation of air attacks all over Southeast Asia-the war has become very much an ingredient of Nixon-Kissinger policy. And it is a policy that originated not in the bowels of the Pentagon, not in an overweening bureaucracy's forward thrust, but in the clearly visible diplomatic ambitions of the President and his aides.

To begin with, there was the survival of the regime in Saigon. It was a regime that past American policy-makers had installed and then sworn to uphold, and though the new American leaders probably had little real use for General Thieu-and were suffering the domestic consequences of what little use they had-they also felt it essential that no American policy precipitate the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime. For that would impugn their honor and damage their credibility, and those were concepts that did not come cheap to them. And in the absence of the regime's guaranteed survival-a guarantee which Hanoi and the NLF adamantly refused to extend-the only American recourse would be the use of sheer physical might, coupled with the threat of additional force if their opponents did not give in.

Kissinger is fond of calling himself the "Walt Rostow of peace by negotiations"; but in his diplomat's creed, negotiation is merely another tool to enforce one's will, a tool to which overtures, threats, and finally the use of force itself are all fixed as perpetual adjuncts. Kissinger's early advocacy of negotiations, his expressed belief that a compromise could be reached with Hanoi and the NLF, were rooted in the assumption that the overpowering weight of the U.S. military stood behind America's negotiators at every step of the way. And in a situation of fixed objectives-that of the NLF and Hanoi, to bring about a revolution in their country, and that of Washington, to uphold the Saigon regime-the use of force would be bound to increase.

And so when an American administration dealt with a revolutionary power, Kissinger believed it should attempt to eliminate the ideological element of the struggle by forcing its opponent to behave in more traditional terms. For it was a cardinal rule of balance-of-power diplomacy that when countries entered the international arena, they acted like nation-states. They were compromising, malleable, and-for purposes of conflict-ideologically "clean." They became supple and entered negotiations when threatened with-or confronted by-the use of force.

But with a truly revolutionary liberation force, the United States-in spite of all the military machinery at its disposal-could reach no understanding or mutual trust; her outlook, her diplomacy, her negotiating language were all alien to such a force. And in the absence of common ground, the only way to draw an ideological renegade down to one's level was with the ever-increasing threat and use of force.