FOREIGN RELATIONS: A Super Secretary to Shake Up State

The momentous decision was an nounced in, of all places, a swimming pool. Julie Nixon Eisenhower telephoned Henry Kissinger and asked whether his two young children would like to come over for a dip at the Nixons' San Clemente estate. Indeed they would. A little later, Julie called back and asked Kissinger to come along too.

So Kissinger and his children were contentedly paddling around in the pool, behind the expensive bulletproof wind screen, when Nixon himself appeared in his trunks and strolled out into the afternoon sunshine. He got into the pool and then said to Kissinger, "Why don't you and I go down to the other end?"

Stunning News. The two men splashed to the shallow end of the pool. Kissinger took a seat on the steps, half in and half out of the water, while the President stretched out and floated on his back in front of Kissinger. Then Nixon gave him the news. "If you will let me," said the President, "I would like to nominate you for Secretary of State tomorrow."

No matter how prepared Henry Kissinger may have been for that moment, it still stunned him. He had heard the rumors ever since last year's election: that Secretary of State William P. Rogers was ready to resign and that the President was thinking of making Kissinger his top foreign policy adviser in name as well as in fact. A few weeks ago the President had told Kissinger that Rogers wanted to resign, and he had asked Kissinger's opinion about several possible successors. Later, when Kissinger mentioned that he had been planning a trip to Europe, Nixon cautioned him: "You'd better not make any travel plans for the next month or so. I'll need you close by." But none of this had altogether prepared Henry Kissinger for the news that he, an immigrant, a Jew, a professor who still spoke English with a marked German accent, was about to become the nation's 56th Secretary of State. He told the President —what else could he say?—that he certainly had no objection to his name being submitted to the Senate for confirmation. Then, still in the pool, the two men talked about problems ahead.

In one sense, of course, Kissinger's nomination was simply a confirmation of the true state of American diplomacy. It was Kissinger, the theorist of a Bismarckian balance of power, who had created the intellectual framework for Nixon's greatest achievements in foreign policy, the new detente with China, the progressive improvement of relations with the Soviet Union and, finally, the truce in Viet Nam. It was Kissinger, too, who personally brought those theories into reality in an endless series of secret flights and exhaustive negotiations in Peking, Moscow, Paris. Secretary of State Rogers traveled to official conferences and presided over the traditional routines of foreign affairs.