Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  The Foreign Service’s approach to foreign policy nevertheless reflected much of American attitudes and historical experience. The Foreign Service had developed in the earlier years of our history when no direct physical threat to America’s security was apparent. America’s foreign involvement was considered to flow less from a concept of national interest — which was thought morally myopic — than from enlightened notions of freedom of trade and the implementation of moral, or at least legal, principles. We believed that the decision to be involved with matters beyond our shores was entirely ours to make. We would engage ourselves against overwhelming dangers, but we would take no responsibility for the day-to-day management of the balance of power; indeed, we tended to deny its importance and even demonstrated our moral superiority by denouncing it as a contributory cause of international tensions. American diplomats proclaimed their faith in international law. They were more likely to concern themselves with the illegality of another state’s conduct than with whether the latter’s actions represented an assault on the international equilibrium and hence to our long-term security. They were not called upon to develop a geopolitical design. They tended to resist the concept as reflecting values that America had transcended.

  Until the end of the Second World War, the Foreign Service saw its role as a negotiating instrument, not as the designer of a foreign policy; more as solving concrete issues as they arose than as conceiving a strategy and shaping events. Long service abroad created greater sensitivity to the intangibles of foreign societies than to those of our own. Conscious of the isolationist tradition in America, Foreign Service Officers had a tendency to seek to balance it by becoming spokesmen for the countries in which they were stationed or for which they were given responsibility in the Department of State. This is referred to in the Department as the disease of “localitis,” or “clientism.” A Foreign Service Officer’s job is always easier, or more pleasant, if he is able to produce good news for his client country — more aid or backing in a dispute, or an invitation to meet the President, for example. A diplomat abroad faces the same dilemma that a Congressman does. How much should he represent his constituents’ view, even be an advocate — at the risk of parochialism, not to mention loss of credibility in Washington? How much should he try to take the overall view that reality imposes on the President and Secretary of State — at the risk of not giving them the full flavor of local views they need to make a decision, and knowing that fellow ambássadors or country directors will be pushing hard for their clients while he is trying to be “fair”?

  The Foreign Service emphasizes negotiability — which is another way of saying consciousness of what the other side will accept. There is less sensitivity to the pressures and incentives that, if boldly applied, can alter the perceptions that in turn define negotiability. Institutionally, the Foreign Service generates caution rather than risk-taking; it is more comfortable with the mechanics of diplomacy than with its design, the tactics of a particular negotiation rather than an overall direction, the near-term problem rather than the longer-run consequences.

  Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts. It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it. What the Department of State needs is strong and consistent leadership grounded in a philosophy of the world and guided by a sense of purpose. Frequent gyrations in our national direction demoralize the Foreign Service, as they do foreign nations. Leadership clearly incapable of grasping the complexity of the office or in constant need of briefing on the most elementary issues elicits the most self-willed assertions of Foreign Service parochialism. The wholesale purge so often advocated would accomplish no good. Any alternative group is likely to have the same biases, which are after all rooted in our society and our history. A climate of fear would arrest a healthy maturation. But under strong Secretaries of State — like Dean Acheson — the Foreign Service is a marvelous tool, and under all of them a loyal one.

  The Foreign Service, in fact mirroring the same biases as the society it represents, has had to undergo the same painful adjustment to a new postwar world unprecedented in our experience. Once the last resort in defense of freedom, the United States has since 1945 become the principal protector of the global equilibrium. Our diplomacy must be prepared to act on assessments of whose truth it cannot at the time be sure. We must resist seemingly marginal changes because to wait until the challenge is unambiguous may also make it unmanageable. All this requires much greater self-assurance and intuition and daring and above all conceptual skill than have been traditionally fostered.

  Early on, I abandoned my own preconceptions and decided that it was impossible to conduct a creative foreign policy of the United States without the Foreign Service, even less against it. We had a joint task of mutual education while helping to move our society to an understanding of its new circumstances. In the process it became soon clear to me that no foreign minister in the world is served by a more creative, skilled, professional, and loyal group of men and women.

  I used the four-week interval between my nomination and confirmation to conduct a systematic talent search in the Foreign Service. Despite all the clichés about my alleged hostility to the bureaucracy, the truth is that during my tenure as Secretary of State, the highest percentage of all my appointments at the policymaking level were Foreign Service Officers. I elevated those who enjoyed the respect of their peers and represented the ablest younger men and women. And I took care to give serious assignments to those I replaced, including some who out of loyalty to Rogers had publicly criticized my appointment.

  There is no doubt the Foreign Service served me with distinction. It stuck by me when I came under attack. It made possible my successes. It is not to blame for those areas of policy in which I fell short.

  Taking Over

  MY biggest immediate challenge in taking over the State Department was to fulfill the purpose for which, in effect, I had been appointed: to conduct a strong foreign policy despite the growing weakness of our executive authority; to use the premier Cabinet office to inspire hope in a future worthy of our nation’s ideals amidst a political crisis unprecedented in our modern history. My acceptance remarks in the East Room were intended to establish the main themes of my tenure at the State Department. In the face of the disintegrating authority, we had to project serenity and strength and purpose to discourage pressures by adversaries and to give hope to those who depended on us.

  If history was any guide, crises were now unavoidable. And we would be able to weather them only if the American people saw our foreign policy as a design for peace and international order, not simply as tactical responses to upheavals tempted by executive weakness. We had to put forward a vision that would put into perspective the squalid spectacle of the destruction of a Presidency unfolding daily in the headlines and newscasts. It was imperative, at that moment most of all, to remind Americans and our friends around the world that our government was functioning and purposeful and the master of events.

  This is why I scheduled three speeches during my first two weeks as Secretary. Within forty-eight hours of my taking the oath of office, I addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. Since I had not felt free to call on State Department personnel until I had been sworn in, the speech was prepared in a round-the-clock frenzy of some thirty-six hours. It went through many versions during the final night while the State Department support and secretarial staffs received their first exposure to my compulsive methods. When all was done, technology threatened vengeance for our presumption. I was standing in the doorway of my office at the Waldorf Towers, impatient to depart for the UN across town, waiting for the final text of my speech to be photocopied for a file copy. My new secretary, Jane Rothe, courageously informed me that the overheated machine had just eaten a page of our only complete typed draft. The original page had gone into the machine; nothing had come
out. Fortunately, the handwritten pages remained. Jane sat down calmly and typed the missing page over again. There was no way the actual delivery of my maiden speech could match the drama of its preparation.

  In my address to the General Assembly I asked the nations of the world “to move with us from détente to cooperation, from coexistence to community.” I then stated the main goals of our diplomacy, which in that forum obligates one to list every key region and trouble spot in some more or less meaningful sentence. The omission of a part of the world is likely to cause a diplomatic incident; frequently banality is the better part of valor. (In my inexperience I forgot that lesson and omitted Europe. I paid the price; the gap was added to a catalogue of my neglects.) Less conventionally, I called for international cooperation on an agenda reflecting the interdependence of the modern world:

  We are, in fact, members of a community drawn by modern science, technology, and new forms of communication into a proximity for which we are still politically unprepared. Technology daily outstrips the ability of our institutions to cope with its fruits. Our political imagination must catch up with our scientific vision.

  Keeping my promise to Senator Humphrey, I called for a World Food Conference for 1974. I promised that the United States stood ready to define its responsibilities in the dialogue between rich and poor nations in a humane and cooperative spirit.

  On October 8, I delivered a long-prepared speech in Washington at the Pacem in Terris Conference. In Chapter VII, I quoted from the portion on US–Soviet relations, but its central theme was an appeal for a new national consensus on America’s role in the world. There had been controversy over the Administration’s emphasis on the balance of power, the alleged amorality of my approach to world affairs. I tried to set forth a philosophical view of the relationship between morality and pragmatism:

  This country has always had a sense of mission. Americans have always held the view that America stood for something above and beyond its material achievements. A purely pragmatic policy provides no criteria for other nations to assess our performance and no standards to which the American people can rally.

  But when policy becomes excessively moralistic it may turn quixotic or dangerous. A presumed monopoly on truth obstructs negotiation and accommodation. Good results may be given up in the quest for ever-elusive ideal solutions. Policy may fall prey to ineffectual posturing or adventuristic crusades.

  The prerequisite for a fruitful national debate is that the policymakers and critics appreciate each other’s perspectives and respect each other’s purposes. The policymaker must understand that the critic is obliged to stress imperfections in order to challenge assumptions and to goad actions. But equally the critic should acknowledge the complexity and inherent ambiguity of the policymaker’s choices. The policymaker must be concerned with the best that can be achieved, not just the best that can be imagined. He has to act in a fog of incomplete knowledge without the information that will be available later to the analyst. He knows — or should know — that he is responsible for the consequences of disaster as well as for the benefits of success. He may have to qualify some goals, not because they would be undesirable if reached but because the risks of failure outweigh potential gains. He must often settle for the gradual, much as he might prefer the immediate. He must compromise with others, and this means to some extent compromising with himself.

  It was still a hopeful period. I was convinced that a thoughtful debate could even help the nation regain its bearings. Our historic idealism was the best compass course through the new perils that were now inevitably ahead of us. On October 4, I spoke in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at a dinner for the delegations attending the UN General Assembly:

  Of the species on this planet, man alone has inflicted upon himself most of his own suffering.

  In an age of potential nuclear cataclysm, in an age of instant communication amidst ideological conflict, our most urgent task is to overcome these apparently iron laws of history. The vision of a world community based on justice, not power, is the necessity of our age. . . .

  I pledge you that the United States is ready to begin the journey toward a world community. Our sights will be raised even when our tread must be measured. We will make no excessive promises, but we will keep every promise we shall make. We look upon stability as a bridge to the realization of human dreams, not as an end in itself. We know that peace will come when all — the small as well as the large — have a share in its shaping, and that it will endure when all — the weak as well as the strong — have a stake in its lasting.

  Two days later the Middle East war broke out.

  * * *

  I. The transcript of my testimony in executive session was later published, with relatively minor deletions for security and to spare embarrassment to those individuals tapped.8

  II. See Chapters V and XXII.

  XI

  The Middle East War

  An Awakening for Us All

  AT 6:15 A.M. on Saturday, October 6, 1973, I was sound asleep in my suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York City, my head quarters for the annual session of the UN General Assembly. Suddenly Joseph J. Sisco, the energetic Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, barged into my bedroom. As I forced myself awake, I heard Sisco’s gravelly voice all but shouting that Israel and two Arab countries, Egypt and Syria, were about to go to war. He was confident, however, that it was all a mistake; each side was really misreading the intentions of the other. If I set them right immediately and decisively, I could get matters under control before the shooting began. It was a flattering estimate of my capacities. Unfortunately, it turned out to be exaggerated.

  What had triggered Sisco was an urgent message from our Ambassador in Israel, former Senator Kenneth Keating. Two hours earlier, Prime Minister Golda Meir had summoned Keating to her office in Jerusalem. It was extraordinary for an Israeli leader to be at work that day — for it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year for Jews. It is a day spent in fasting, prayer, and reflection; it reminds man of his insignificance in relation to God and climaxes a High Holy Day season in which, according to tradition, God decides the destiny of all mortals for the coming year.

  Golda’s startling message was in effect that Israel’s encounter with destiny had already begun: “We may be in trouble,” she told Keating. Egyptian and Syrian troop movements, which both Israel and the United States had assumed to be simply military exercises, had suddenly taken a threatening turn. Keating reminded her that not twelve hours previously he had been assured by Israeli defense officials that the situation was not dangerous. This was no longer accurate, Mrs. Meir replied; the Israelis were now persuaded that a coordinated Egyptian and Syrian attack would be launched late that afternoon. Since the Arabs were certain to be defeated, she suggested, the crisis must result from their misunderstanding of Israeli intentions. Would the United States convey urgently to the Soviet Union as well as to Israel’s Arab neighbors that Israel had no intention of attacking either Egypt or Syria? Israel was calling up “some” reserves, but as a proof of its peaceful intentions was stopping short of general mobilization. Keating asked whether Israel was planning a preemptive strike. Golda emphatically reiterated that Israel wished to avoid bloodshed; it would under no circumstances initiate hostilities.

  When Sisco awakened me there were only ninety minutes of peace left for the Middle East. So skillfully had Egypt and Syria masked their war preparations that even at this stage the Israelis expected the attack to come four hours later than the time actually set. I knew that no diplomacy would work if an Arab attack was premeditated. But my view was still colored by the consistent Israeli reports, confirmed by our own dispatches, that such an attack was nearly impossible. I therefore plunged into a frenetic period of intense diplomacy to head off a clash, more than half convinced that Egyptian and Syrian actions grew out of a misunderstanding of Israeli intentions.

  A crisis does not alway
s appear to a policymaker as a series of dramatic events. Usually it imposes itself as an exhausting agenda of petty chores demanding both concentration and endurance. One is forced to react to scraps of information in very limited spans of time; longing for full knowledge, one must chart a route through the murk of unknowing. Operationally, a crisis resolves itself into minutiae that must be attended to with painstaking care, which includes the need to ensure that all parties work from the same body of information. So it was that morning of the Day of Atonement when war stalked the Middle East.

  At 6:40 A.M. I called the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, at his Embassy in Washington. Roused from bed, he was sleepy and confused (or pretended to be). I asked him to assure Moscow urgently, as well as Cairo and Damascus, that Israel had informed us it was not planning any offensive action.

  Dobrynin at first claimed that the whole episode must be an Israeli maneuver to justify a preemptive attack. I told him that my point in calling him was precisely to guarantee the opposite. Next, pedantically diplomatic, he wanted to know who was sending messages to whom — was it an assurance from Israel to the Arab countries or from the United States to the Soviet Union? I cut him off impatiently: “If this keeps up there is going to be a war before you understand my message.” Dobrynin found another excuse for procrastination: He doubted that his communications were fast enough for Moscow to act in time. I offered our end of the Hot Line; he implied the Soviet end was too far from the Foreign Office. (I found myself wondering what use it would be in a major-power crisis.) So I put the White House switchboard at Dobrynin’s disposal. He accepted with a show of gratitude.