Thoughts from the Lone Cowboy

By the time he returns from Acapulco's sun next week, Henry Kissinger should have a fully operational office awaiting him. Surrounded by crates loaded with personal papers, the former Secretary of State's six aides are setting up shop in a corner suite atop a downtown Washington office building. The space was made available by Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies. Kissinger will lecture at Georgetown for six months at a salary of about $15,000.

That is only pin money for Henry these days. Last week it was disclosed that he had made a five-year deal with NBC to serve as a special consultant and commentator on world affairs for a sum that--according to some reports--might top $3 million. A week earlier Kissinger signed a contract with Little, Brown for his memoirs--the first of several U.S. and foreign deals that are likely to bring him several million dollars more.

In his new office, Kissinger will be working principally on his memoirs. But the suite is also emerging as a kind of shadow State Department, as Kissinger's staffers stuff manila folders with articles on the new Administration's foreign policy (one is labeled "Vance Middle East Trip"). Plainly, Kissinger will keep close tabs on his successor. But he has also vowed to keep closemouthed about how the new team is doing--at least for six months or so.

Brass Plaque. Kissinger's own office is roomy but still bare. The only decoration--a farewell gift from the State Department's Policy Planning Staff--is a poster of a glowering orangutan, captioned: IF I WANT YOUR OPINION, I'LL BEAT IT OUT OF YOU. At the end of a small conference table is Kissinger's brown leather Cabinet chair with a brass plaque affixed to the back that reads:

SECRETARY OF STATE, 1973-. Out of neglect or nostalgia, the date he relinquished the post has yet to be inscribed.

Clearly, Kissinger's impact will be felt for a long time to come. During his final days in office, he shared some thoughts about his stewardship of U.S. foreign policy with TIME Washington Bureau Chief Hugh Sidey. They are worth considering as the nation sets off in new diplomatic directions.

No apologies for his flair, he insisted. It had all been intentional. "I rarely did anything impetuously. The steps were prepared over a long period of time," he said. "But then things were done dramatically. We had to have drama to focus the attention of the American people ... I think that most Americans liked shuttle diplomacy."

His luck all through his life had been phenomenal, Kissinger admitted. "My career was an accident. You cannot aim for it. It cannot be duplicated by design. Most people who come to power in Washington have aggressively sought it. I thought that I would be a staff aide to the President and nothing more."

There were currents of change in American foreign policy during Kissinger's days in Washington, and Nixon could not make the American people feel entirely comfortable about them. "It was a time to generate and focus people's hopes." Then came Watergate and the isolation of Nixon, and the Secretary of State was forced into a near-presidential role that would have been "unthinkable under any other circumstances."

His own success, Kissinger said, has probably accentuated a problem that troubles America's intellectual community. While one group of intellectuals is totally alienated from Government and will not serve, a second group has become so power-oriented that its members do what the politicians want them to do rather than decide what is right and should be done. "Giving power to intellectuals was debilitating to their effort in some respects," he said. Today fewer foreign affairs experts on quiet campuses are willing to sit back to develop new thought about international affairs.

Long Ride. As Kissinger pondered himself and the world, he would occasionally chuckle, seemingly still unable to believe who he was and where he had been, but still relishing his long ride at the top. "How in the world would a middle-aged Jewish professor find this rapport with the American people?" he asked, and then answered his own question. "There is a basic goodness in the American people... In all my time there was never one letter asking, 'Why should an s.o.b. with a German accent tell us what to do?' In no question period did anybody get up and ask, 'What the hell do you know about America?' "

Maybe he did know some things about America that others had overlooked, Kissinger went on, as old memories crowded back. He talked about growing up under the Nazis, of coming to America scared, of living in a seamy crevice on Manhattan's West Side, but then of writing an essay in high school on what it meant to be able to walk down a street with his head up. "There is this magnificent pluralism in America," he said. "You are never in a position where there is not some group that will listen to you. It is one of the ironies that what finally sustained me was the support of the common people, not the elite."

The basic precepts formed during the contemplative years at Harvard were never altered as he went about the job of conducting foreign policy, Kissinger said. Once on the job, a man does not learn much other than technique--he does not get new wisdom. "You are an athlete. Even if decisions call for reflection, you must depend on your instincts ... Sometimes it feels as if you were in one of those movies, sitting on the track in front of an express train. The train is bearing down on you. You know what to do if you did not have ten other things that needed doing first. You are praying that the train somehow will miss and you will not get hit. Such a situation occurred in Cyprus. If I had ever had twelve hours and been able to pick out an intelligence report, I would have seen that the situation needed attention."

What had saved him from disaster so many times, what had rescued him from public wrath, what had prevented his self-destructive urges from consuming him, was his humor. Humor had meant so much, he said. "You need detachment from yourself. You are only a small pebble on a sand of infinite expanse. You need to understand the sense of fragility of human aspirations."

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