Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  According to the organization chart, the Under Secretaries on the Seventh Floor are supposed to help the Secretary coordinate the Sixth Floor, where the Assistant Secretaries are located. But the real world is not so tidy. The organization chart that reflects real lines of authority has not yet been devised. For one thing, the Deputy Secretary’s role depends importantly on the personalities involved and the Secretary’s own style. In Dean Rusk’s tenure, he and George Ball tended to divide the world between them. Others acted as chiefs of staff across the board, as Walter Bedell Smith did for Dulles. I assigned to my Deputy Secretaries general supervision over foreign economic policy as well as over the functional bureaus. I personally worked with the regional bureaus.

  As for the Under Secretaries, their impact varies. The Under Secretary for Economic Affairs has a staff too small for his assignment; the Under Secretary for Security Assistance has a title larger than his responsibilities. The economic Under Secretary must deal with the entire gamut of foreign economic policy aided by only a handful of staff assistants and backed up by a bureau (headed by an Assistant Secretary) that is far too small — and also too low in rank — to deal with all the powerful Cabinet departments and agencies whose duties impinge on our foreign economic policy. The job of Under Secretary for Security Assistance was created when military assistance played a larger role than proved to be the case later. He thus has responsibilities smaller than those of some Assistant Secretaries; I used the position to handle newly developing crises, like the early phases of the energy emergency in 1973.

  The key Under Secretary is that for Political Affairs, which is traditionally the highest policymaking position occupied by a career Foreign Service Officer. It is responsible for interdepartmental coordination in the political field and above all for imposing some coherence on the regional bureaus. In practice, two factors vitiate the assignment. First, an officer with the grasp and toughness to make these individualistic bureaus follow a common concept is not easy to find. The temptation is great for the Under Secretary for Political Affairs to take over some area of operational responsibility that has been his specialty, thus adding an additional official to the multitude already reporting directly to the Secretary. Second, the Assistant Secretaries will generally resist having intermediaries between themselves and the Secretary; they tend to insist on their day in court. And they have the technical ability to do so because the officers of the Seventh Floor have tiny staffs. With only one or two special assistants, these run the risk of becoming prisoners of the bureaus below them unless there is a clear allocation of responsibilities that makes it impossible to bypass them.

  These tendencies account for the mushiness and slow pace by which the State Department has driven so many outsiders to distraction. Since the Department at any moment threatens to disintegrate into practically autonomous fiefdoms — and surely does so under a weak Secretary — a great deal of time is spent on “clearances,” meaning that each bureau has to be consulted on any problem remotely involving its formal responsibilities. No bureau likes to be overruled — nor does it really want to win, because this implies that it might lose next time. All the incentives are thus skewed toward compromises reflecting the lowest common denominator and paralyzing the imagination.

  Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine. Too often policy filters up from the bottom in response to events, complaints, or pleas that originate abroad. Each significant country is assigned to an officer with the revealing title of “country director”; indeed, some of these officials seem more interested in directing “their” country than in shaping the foreign policy of the United States. Or rather they tend to identify the two, becoming spokesmen for the country assigned to them. The country director drafts a cable to respond to a specific situation. He clears it with interested bureaus and sends it up through the hierarchy, sometimes with an explanatory memorandum, frequently not. The memorandum in any event is typically focused on the immediate problem, is heavily influenced by the local context, and, if it deigns to present options, does so in a manner that all but imposes the bureau’s preference. If it survives all obstacles, and if it is one of the minority that are of special policy importance, the cable winds up on the desk of the Secretary of State. He does not know which ideas were eliminated by the clearance process, what modifications occurred on the cable’s journey to him, or — unless he has studied the subject himself — what long-range purpose is to be served, if any. He can rewrite the cable, though he will rarely have time or the detailed knowledge to do so. He can reject it, though if he is not extremely vigilant the cable is likely to come back to him in only slightly modified form. (In the summer of 1976 I received so many essentially identical cables on one particular subject I did not wish to act upon that only the threat of transferring the entire bureau stopped the pressure.)

  The most difficult task for any Secretary of State is to impose a sense of direction on the flood of papers that at any moment threatens to engulf him. Even someone who, like me, had spent his lifetime on the study of foreign policy — and whose hobby it was, to boot — was sometimes overwhelmed. The system lends itself to manipulation. A bureau chief who disagrees with the Secretary can exploit it for procrastination. For example, in 1975 the Assistant Secretary in charge of Africa managed to delay my dealing with Angola by nearly ten weeks because he opposed the decision he feared I would make. He simply used the splendid machinery so methodically to “clear” a memorandum I had requested that it took weeks to reach me; when it arrived it was diluted of all sharpness and my own staff bounced it back again and again for greater precision — thereby serving the bureau chief’s purposes better than my own. Alternatively, the machinery may permit a strategically placed official’s hobbyhorse to gallop through, eliciting an innocent nod from a Secretary unfamiliar with all the codewords and implications.

  I came to the office too late in Nixon’s term to attempt a fundamental reorganization — a task that should be undertaken in the early phase of the first term of an administration. Such a reorganization would see to it that each bureau reports to some Under Secretary; that the Deputy Secretary is freed to act as an alter ego; and that some formal apparatus is created on the Seventh Floor to insist on the development of a long-range policy.

  In an Administration racked by Watergate and buffeted by a war in the Middle East that broke out within two weeks of my confirmation, reorganization requiring legislation was out of the question. I tried to impose coherence by three steps. First, I sought to carry out what I consider one of the key responsibilities of the head of any department: to elicit from his subordinates a standard of performance of which they do not know they are capable. I insisted on thoughtful memoranda; I drove my staff mercilessly. Many could not stand the pace or my temperament and resigned. They are the sources of much unfriendly publicity regarding my administrative methods. Those who stayed — and they were the majority — responded nobly to the challenge; many became close personal friends. The analytical work of the Department improved remarkably.

  Secondly, I moved into positions charged with long-range planning key associates whom I had recruited for the National Security Council staff. They were familiar with my methods. They understood my insistence on a strategy. I put Helmut Sonnenfeldt, in the essentially free-floating office of Counselor, in charge of East-West relations. He was later to be traduced for alleged “softness,” an absurd accusation reflecting a woeful ignorance of the convictions and contributions of an outstanding public servant. Many times in these volumes I have quoted from his superb analyses, which the passage of time has confirmed to be penetrating, shrewd, and wise.

  I placed William G. Hyland in charge of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. A brilliant analyst trained in the Central Intelligence Agency, he subjected all information and preconceptions to skeptical and informed scrutiny; he saw to it that intelligence guide
d rather than followed policy prescriptions.

  Two other key transfers from the White House were Lawrence Eagleburger and Winston Lord, who combined high ability with a deep personal friendship. Eagleburger’s skill was the management of men and organizations. An experienced Foreign Service Officer, he understood the foibles of his colleagues without succumbing to their parochialism. He had the virtue of being deeply attached to the Foreign Service; he used this dedication as a challenge to seek to turn his service into a great institution. First as my executive assistant, later as Deputy Under Secretary for Management, he saw to the translation of concept into policy. He stood up to me when necessary. He was incorruptible in his judgment; he was one of the outstanding public servants of my experience.

  Winston Lord was largely responsible for giving an impetus to conceptual thinking as the new director of the Policy Planning Staff. He had been a close collaborator during my White House years on key enterprises, including the opening to China and the Vietnam negotiations. In 1970 he was close to resigning over the incursion into Cambodia. I appealed to him with the argument that if the young men of his generation channeled their idealism into protest, there would be none left to build a better world. He would serve his principles better by working for an end to the war within the government than by striking a pose outside. Fortunately for me, he stayed on — no little influenced by his marvelously strong wife, Bette. He became one of my best collaborators, a resident conscience, and a close friend. More than almost anyone, he was familiar with my views; he had a global, not simply a regional, perspective. I gave him priority in choosing the best men and women for his staff. He and his associates screened most key cables coming to me for consistency with policy and provided me with additional papers on fundamental or long-range issues that the operational bureaus often missed. Together with Peter W. Rodman, they helped me write the speeches by which I sought to articulate the premises and goals of our foreign policy.

  Peter Rodman had written one of the most outstanding undergraduate theses of my tenure as professor at Harvard. After Oxford and law school he joined my NSC staff in the summer of 1969. He remained in the White House after I became Secretary of State as an informal liaison to my office. Self-effacing, brilliant, indefatigable, he came as close to being indispensable as it is possible to be in a large government. His role was hard to define. In addition to speech writer, he functioned as my institutional memory. He did research projects; he made sure that what was being said in negotiations or publicly was consistent with previous statements on the subject and with our internal planning. He attended nearly every sensitive conversation, technically as a note-taker, in reality as confidant and adviser. He was a constant if unsung hero of my tenure as Secretary of State.

  Thirdly, I formed out of this group, plus the Deputy Secretary, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, and the regional Assistant Secretaries, a kind of political staff group to help me plan strategy. I met with them as a body practically every day on key issues. Still, the Department’s central structural problem remained throughout my period in office.

  The Foreign Service

  THAT foreign policy nevertheless succeeded as well as it did I owe in large measure to a group of men and women who have sustained Secretaries of State through the modern period: the Foreign Service of the United States.

  On one level, gaining control of the machinery of the Department of State is relatively easy. The Secretary’s unambiguous orders are scrupulously carried out, at least at the outset, because the Foreign Service begins with the presumption that the Secretary deserves its support — until it has tested the limits of his tolerance. The difficulty is that it is not always easy to formulate orders unambiguously. The competent, proud, clannish, and dedicated Foreign Service Officers soon spot the lacunae in the knowledge or endurance of their chief, and fill them with recommendations derived from a philosophy honed through the common trials of a close-knit fraternity. They justly take pride in their professionalism; they abhor “lateral entry” — the jargon for political appointees who have not risen through the ranks. The difficulty is that they sometimes treat the Secretary as a lateral entrant — an appointee who could never have made it on his merit through the competitive rigors of the Foreign Service.

  In the hands of a determined Secretary, the Foreign Service can be a splendid instrument, staffed by knowledgeable, discreet, and energetic individuals. They do require constant vigilance lest the convictions that led them into a penurious career tempt them to preempt decision-making. In American folklore, our professional diplomats tend to be maligned as a collection of striped-pants fuddy-duddies, excessively internationalist in outlook, soft in defense of the national interest, as often a contributory cause of our difficulties abroad as agents of their resolution. The need to “clean out” the State Department has become a staple of our political oratory. Several Secretaries have begun their tours of duty with that expressed determination. I know of none that has left office without having come to admire the dedicated men and women who supply the continuity and expertise of our foreign policy. I entered the State Department a skeptic, I left a convert — with the perhaps unbalanced conviction of one who has overcome earlier prejudice on the road to Truth.

  Until the so-called Wriston reforms of 1954, the Foreign Service was a small, elite organization that supplied our diplomatic personnel overseas and staffed some of the key positions in the Department of State. Its formal title, Foreign Service of the United States, implied that it was a Presidential instrument; in reality its chain of command has always run to the Secretary of State. Before the reforms the Department of State was staffed by two types of officers: those who stayed permanently in Washington and were part of the civil service, and those who divided their service between the United States and overseas but generally preferred to serve in embassies — the traditional Foreign Service. During this period the Foreign Service Officers were drawn largely from the upper-class, predominantly Protestant, private-school background of the Eastern Establishment — from the social groups, in short, most likely to be interested in America’s international role. Many had the financial means to support a style of life not possible on government salaries.

  The Wriston reforms created a unified Foreign Service. It was no longer possible to serve only in Washington or exclusively abroad. Each officer had either to join the Foreign Service or leave the departmental career ladder. Most chose to stay. The rationale for Wristonization was sound. In the old system, the civil servants in Washington issuing orders to embassies did not always understand what it was like to be on the firing line. And Foreign Service Officers always abroad gradually lost the perspective of Washington; they rarely had the experience of dealing with Congress or pursuing interagency battles. They lost touch with America and therefore represented it less effectively abroad. (Imagine, for example, someone leaving the United States in 1970, being abroad almost continuously for ten years, and trying to reflect the American scene to foreigners.)

  Wristonization was designed to make Foreign Service Officers whole, to give them both experience with America and broad overseas knowledge. The official writing cables of instructions in State could imagine what it would be like to carry them out. The diplomat overseas would have some understanding for the context of American society and the clash of priorities and agencies that are at the heart of government.

  After Wristonization, the key positions in the Department were manned by career personnel. Except at the highest political level, advancement was through stages of increasing responsibility in the Foreign Service. At the same time strenuous efforts were made by successive Secretaries of State to broaden the base of the Foreign Service to make it more representative of the American people as a whole, opening it to women, members of ethnic and racial minorities, and people with a wider variety of geographical and academic backgrounds.

  Amazingly, the value structure of the earlier period persisted through all these changes. The Foreign Service remained s
elf-consciously elitist. Serving abroad, especially as an Ambassador, rated higher on the scale of values than almost any assignment in Washington, partly because successive pay adjustments had made overseas service financially more rewarding, but above all because the men and women who chose the career were genuinely dedicated to fostering America’s relationship with the world around us. The conventional criticism, that they were a group of “cookie pushers,” contributed to a sense of beleaguered solidarity. And the cohesiveness was reinforced by many shared experiences in far-flung posts forever inaccessible to the regular civil servants with whom the Foreign Service came into contact or, for that matter, to their superiors. All these tendencies, it cannot be emphasized often enough, developed among a group of men and women of truly exceptional ability and dedication who came to their elitist convictions naturally by passing one of the most difficult and comprehensive written and oral examinations required for any career.