Peter Rodman

A man of towering character and intelligence, Peter Rodman, who died of leukemia on Aug. 2 at age 64, served as foreign policy adviser for five Republican Presidents, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. Rodman epitomized the essential continuity of American foreign policy.

He understood that service to the country requires confronting certain realities and that you cannot use one truth as an alibi to neglect another. He was never partisan. He had a certain innocence about national service: he believed that if he stood for the right thing, people would give it consideration. When he didn't get that consideration, he didn't sulk but moved on.

I first knew him when he was my tutee at Harvard, and after he finished law school, I took him into the White House, where he soon made himself indispensable. Within a year or so, he was responsible for preparing materials for every negotiation and was always at my right hand.

Of course, we didn't agree on everything, but Peter's views were thought out with precision and presented with great decency. The only subject on which we truly disagreed was baseball: despite my best efforts, he remained a devout Red Sox fan, while I'm an avid Yankees fan.

Peter--who was like a son to me--was a good friend and a man who adored his family. He was extremely devoted to his wife and two children--and rabid about his dog. He was a man who possessed the rare combination of capability, moral strength and unselfishness. Much of the debate about foreign policy tends to group people into realists or idealists, but this is not a meaningful distinction. To conduct foreign policy, you have to understand the world as it is, but to avoid stagnation, the country also needs a vision of the future. The essence of Peter Rodman was a combination of both.

Kissinger is a former U.S. Secretary of State and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize