NEW MAN FOR THE SITUATION ROOM

HIS title is a jawbreaker, his functions well masked from the general public. Yet when Harvard Political Scientist Henry Alfred Kissinger assumes the role of Assistant to the Presi dent for National Security Affairs, operating out of the Situation Room in the White House basement, he will automatically become one of the most important men in the U.S.

Kissinger's appointment, the first one Nixon has made to a major policymaking position, won wide praise from academe. Harvard Law Professor Adam Yarmolinsky, who spent six years at the Pentagon under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, declared: "We'll all sleep a little better each night knowing that

Henry is down there." One who viewed Nixon's choice with outright misgiving, however, was Nuclear Physicist Ralph Lapp, who has often been at odds with the nation's scientific Establishment for its overinvolvement with the military. He argued that Kissinger is an unreconstructed hardliner.

Hard or Soft? Lapp is not the only American with that view of Kissinger. Herman Kahn, head of the Hudson Institute "think tank" and long an influential consultant to the Pentagon, once noted that the creator of the film character Dr. Strangelove used "part Henry Kissinger, part myself, with a touch of Wernher von Braun" for a model. In fact, claims Yarmolinsky, "the resemblance is entirely superficial. He is no war lover, period." Rather, Kissinger is acknowledged by most of his colleagues as a thoroughgoing "realist" among the often dogmatic band of thinkers known as "defense intellectuals."

When a reporter asked Kissinger last week if he would characterize himself as a hard-or soft-liner, he replied: "I have tried to avoid labels like 'hard' or 'soft.' " Moreover, he has vigorously criticized those who wear such labels. "Soft-liners [and] left-wing critics of American foreign policy seem incapable of attacking U.S. actions without elevating our opponent to a pedestal," he wrote in the Brookings Institution's recently published Agenda for the Nation. "If they discern some stupidity or self-interest on our side, they assume that the other side must be virtuous." As for hardliners, he continued, they "follow the same logic in reverse."

Riposte Removed. In his first published book, the widely hailed Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), Kissinger emphasized the dangers of overreliance on the concept of massive retaliation and called for the adoption of a more flexible response--three years before General Maxwell Taylor made headlines with the same argument. There are those, however, who insist that the flexible-response approach has, in fact, made the U.S. more vulnerable to limited, "brushfire" actions since the threat of a nuclear riposte has been all but removed. Kissinger has also deplored the notion that the U.S. should seek to establish overwhelming military superiority over the Soviet Union on the grounds that this would destroy the balance of power that is needed in a nuclear world. In A World Restored (also 1957), on Metternich and post-Napoleonic Europe, Kissinger wrote, "The desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others."

That position places him squarely at odds with Nixon's campaign argument that the U.S. should abandon the concept of nuclear parity. He has disagreed with Nixon on other issues. Through the campaign, Kissinger served as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's principal foreign policy adviser, and on more than one occasion implied that he regarded Nixon as the least qualified of all the presidential candidates, and even as a dangerous man. But Kissinger, who first met Nixon last year at a Christmas party in Clare Boothe Luce's Manhattan apartment, discovered during his recent talks with the President-elect that they shared a number of views--most notably on the need to shore up NATO, establish closer relations with France and West Germany and keep the U.S. militarily strong.

Born in Fuerth, Germany, in 1923, Kissinger came to the U.S. in 1938, when his family fled from Hitler, still speaks with a noticeable accent. After four years as a World War II enlisted man, including a year and a half in Army counter-intelligence in Europe, he received his bachelor's (summa cum laude), master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard. He served as a White House consultant during the first 18 months of the Kennedy Administration, but his influence waned after he argued that it was anomalous to send 16,000 "advisers" to Viet Nam just when the decision was being made to neutralize Laos. Since 1965, he has made three trips to Viet Nam for the Johnson Administration.

First Priority. In the Brookings Institution study, Kissinger maintained that a "comprehensive, bipartisan, high-level re-evaluation of all aspects of national security" should be one of the first orders of business for the new Administration. The primary requirement is for "a definition of the national interest and national security over the next decade," since in his view the ultra-empirical U.S. too often handles developments on an ad hoc basis, without any clearly defined purpose or overall view. In his five books and a raft of magazine articles, Kissinger has set forth his viewpoints on how the U.S. should handle some of the major geopolitical issues of the day:

sbFLEXIBLE RESPONSE: "The Romans stampeded the first time they confronted Hannibal's elephants, not because the elephants were particularly effective but because the Romans had never considered a mode for dealing with such a contingency," Kissinger wrote in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Consequently, the U.S. needs "a doctrine [whose] task will be to prevent us from being continually surprised." Kissinger argued that weaponry and personnel should be set up to cope with any contingency, so that force could be resisted without inevitable resort to nu clear weapons (though he envisioned the use of tactical nuclear weapons without incinerating the world).

sbTHE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE: "The most constructive American foreign policy since the end of World War II has been the development of Atlantic relationships," he wrote in The Troubled Partnership (1965). Arguing that the Allies want leadership--not hegemony--from the U.S., he strongly defended De Gaulle for his efforts "to teach his people and perhaps his Continent attitudes of independence and self-reliance." He also paid tribute to the French President as a man who, like himself, recognizes that peace is not a natural condition but the result of a carefully maintained balance of power.

sbVIET NAM: Kissinger dates the beginning of U.S. error to 1961, when the number of American advisers was expanded twentyfold. He argues that a U.S.-style political structure cannot be superimposed on Viet- Nam. He also maintains that doing battle with the North has only complicated matters. Thus, he privately called for a bombing halt over the North in early 1967. In mid-1968, he was instrumental in preparing a peace proposal offered by Nelson Rockefeller. It called for a phased troop pullback, the end of guerrilla warfare by the Viet Cong, internationally supervised elections, and finally Saigon-Hanoi negotiations on reunification.

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