Kissinger's Personal Plan

By Hugh Sidey

For a time a couple of years ago, Henry Kissinger pondered quitting. He would leave, marry Nancy and go off to Oxford for a civilized life. It did not all work out that way. There was Watergate. There were a few other things, like his love of power and his Boeing 707. (When asked if he would leave office, he recently jested with airborne reporters, "If any university offers me a plane like this one.")

But last December he came so close to giving up his job that only President Ford's personal urging stopped him. Kissinger polled his closest associates, including Winston Lord and Larry Eagleburger at the State Department, friends like David Bruce, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk. Their counsel was split about fifty-fifty. Some said that he was needed. Others said he would become an issue in the election year, hurting the country and damaging himself.

Even then, Kissinger had some sense of what was to happen to him. The catharsis from Viet Nam would continue, he calculated, coming to rest on him, the one man from those dark days still in high power. And then, Kissinger told his patient listeners, the American people would probably wake up with the spring flowers to see what he and some others had long known: the power of the Soviet Union was drawing abreast of the U.S.'s--a profound shock after a quarter-century of overwhelming superiority.

Kissinger, however, is a very practical man and he has a contingency plan. He has talked it over in bits and pieces for some time with the President. At the start of 1976, he went over it once more with Ford, so that there was no misunderstanding. He understood, he told the President, that events could make it necessary for him to resign to prevent Ford's political defeat. Kissinger was ready and willing on signal. And he would do it so that it would not impair the continuity of America's foreign policy. Just what signal Ford would give Kissinger is a greater secret than what the Secretary talks about in the Kremlin. But the understanding between President and Secretary is complete.

If the attacks on Kissinger had happened three years ago, he has confided to his closest friends, he is not at all sure he could have taken it. He is a tougher man today. He has seen a President leave office, the Viet Nam War fail, the U.S. retreat from foreign obligations. Sometimes late at night when he is mellow he chuckles that he may be the only disciple of John Kennedy ("support any friend, oppose any foe") left in town, a double irony since critics like Senator Henry Jackson accuse him of being too soft on the Soviets.

Howard ("Bo") Callaway, head of Ford's campaign, has urged the President to distance himself from Kissinger, and to tell him to lower his voice for the primary season. Kissinger heard some of the talk played back in gossipy Washington. He asked Callaway over to chat about the problem. Bo explained his "distance" theory. Henry countered that Presidents were not credited with leadership by being distant from their Secretaries; they were either leaders or they were not.

But while the political criticism has been raging in the outside world, there has been a singular consolidation of strength in the foreign-policy establishment. The Kissinger files bulge with letters from men of position, foreign and domestic, who say that Henry must stay even though he may be bruised. His achievements are recognized in their world, if not in the political campaign, they insist. Those few experts who suggest that he resign argue that he should do so to avoid increasingly severe personal attacks.

One who would have him stay is Nelson Rockefeller. He and Kissinger share a view of U.S. pre-eminence that is considered old-fashioned by some of the measures now applied in Washington. They talk about their political fortunes very often, the two getting perhaps their most important personal support from each other.

Kissinger also draws much support from the fraternity of those who know the price that power demands from its practitioners. The other night he had a dinner for a few power wielders, including Hubert Humphrey and Jacob Javits. There was an undercurrent of sympathy for Kissinger's dilemma, if not agreement on all the issues that placed him in it. Several days ago, he breakfasted with Barry Goldwater, another supporter, and in the aerie of the State Department they pondered the strange equation of Richard Nixon off in China, a journey that both felt would do that shattered man far more harm than good. Kissinger talks often and easily with Kay Graham, whose Washington Post prods him every day. She is a source of reassurance. He also keeps up his links with Harvard, drawing advice on disarmament and other policy, although his enthusiasm for the talent he finds there is lukewarm.

Joys, triumphs, mistakes, sorrows--he has known plenty of all of these. His remains a long journey in a dangerous world. But for all the changes that Kissinger has seen and helped bring about, he is in some respects personally unchanged. His compelling mission still is to try to hold off nuclear war and sustain liberty. His life is one of total immersion in the exercise of power, its literature and personalities. Books, music and art are confined to glimpses along the way, although now and then he journeys over to Jack Valenti's Motion Picture Association emporium for a movie. He fell asleep during Fellini's amusing Amarcord, but stayed wide awake throughout Farewell, My Lovely, a Raymond Chandler rouser starring Robert Mitchum--a steely, quiet actor in whose presence Kissinger, the lonesome cowboy, seems comfortable.

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