Kissinger's Complaint

As Secretary of State in a generally pro-business Republican Administration, Henry Kissinger had an unusual opportunity to observe how American corporations operate abroad. Last week Kissinger, now a professor at Georgetown University, had some unflattering comments on the subject. Speaking before a blue-ribbon panel of businessmen at a seminar staged by Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies, Kissinger dismissed as an "absurdity" the Marxist contention that American executives use the U.S. Government to help them impose economic imperialism on foreign countries. His reason: businessmen are too shortsighted to be so Machiavellian--indeed, too myopic to call on the American Government for legitimate help.

In what seemed like a sweeping generalization, Kissinger said, "Business has no perception of its long-range interests." Most corporations, he insisted, "never have a strategy to affect the overall political environment abroad"; instead, their executives think "it is smart politics to placate at almost any cost" the governments of foreign countries. Moreover, he said, when multinationals do get into trouble overseas--for example, when they are threatened with expropriation by other countries--they wait until the eleventh hour before seeking State Department help. "They come to us in their extremity, usually when they have been taken over. If we [the State Department] did do something and the host government started negotiations, business usually took the first windfall that came along and ran. And if you said anything to them, they would give you a great lecture about free enterprise."

In general, said Kissinger, in a comment that seemed to apply to U.S. corporate dealings at home as well as abroad, "businessmen's conception of how to influence Government is that when they are in deep trouble they send some lobbyist around to promote some limited specific objective that pays off very rapidly. Labor is far more intelligent. I know of no business that has a long-term research organization and a long-term ability to work with Congress and the Executive Branch when there is no pressure."

Long-Range Strategy. Businessmen attending the seminar were quick to issue rebuttals. PepsiCo Chairman Donald Kendall noted that Kissinger has confessed that economics is not exactly his forte and suggested that commenting on how U.S. corporations conduct themselves abroad is not either. On the point of long-range strategy, Kendall pointed out that he began negotiating with the Soviet government in 1969, about when Kissinger himself did, and is still at it (PepsiCo has developed a lucrative business bottling soft drinks in Russia). Nathaniel Samuels, a director of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., asserted that one reason businessmen do not call on the U.S. Government for help abroad is that such a request often is "an invitation to trouble."

Arthur Stupay, a Cleveland broker and former multinational executive who was not at the seminar, offers a fuller defense. Says he: "American businessmen in some ways are more sophisticated in managing foreign operations than the State Department. U.S. businessmen live longer in a country and know the customs and culture more intimately than State Department people." If businessmen do not ask the Government for help when they get into trouble abroad, Stupay adds, it is because "they have contacts that they think are better informed."

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