DIPLOMACY: Thoughts from the Lone Cowboy

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His own success, Kissinger said, has probably accentuated a problem that troubles America's intellectual community. While one group of intellectuals is totally alienated from Government and will not serve, a second group has become so power-oriented that its members do what the politicians want them to do rather than decide what is right and should be done. "Giving power to intellectuals was debilitating to their effort in some respects," he said. Today fewer foreign affairs experts on quiet campuses are willing to sit back to develop new thought about international affairs.

Long Ride. As Kissinger pondered himself and the world, he would occasionally chuckle, seemingly still unable to believe who he was and where he had been, but still relishing his long ride at the top. "How in the world would a middle-aged Jewish professor find this rapport with the American people?" he asked, and then answered his own question. "There is a basic goodness in the American people... In all my time there was never one letter asking, 'Why should an s.o.b. with a German accent tell us what to do?' In no question period did anybody get up and ask, 'What the hell do you know about America?' "

Maybe he did know some things about America that others had overlooked, Kissinger went on, as old memories crowded back. He talked about growing up under the Nazis, of coming to America scared, of living in a seamy crevice on Manhattan's West Side, but then of writing an essay in high school on what it meant to be able to walk down a street with his head up. "There is this magnificent pluralism in America," he said. "You are never in a position where there is not some group that will listen to you. It is one of the ironies that what finally sustained me was the support of the common people, not the elite."

The basic precepts formed during the contemplative years at Harvard were never altered as he went about the job of conducting foreign policy, Kissinger said. Once on the job, a man does not learn much other than technique—he does not get new wisdom. "You are an athlete. Even if decisions call for reflection, you must depend on your instincts ... Sometimes it feels as if you were in one of those movies, sitting on the track in front of an express train. The train is bearing down on you. You know what to do if you did not have ten other things that needed doing first. You are praying that the train somehow will miss and you will not get hit. Such a situation occurred in Cyprus. If I had ever had twelve hours and been able to pick out an intelligence report, I would have seen that the situation needed attention."

What had saved him from disaster so many times, what had rescued him from public wrath, what had prevented his self-destructive urges from consuming him, was his humor. Humor had meant so much, he said. "You need detachment from yourself. You are only a small pebble on a sand of infinite expanse. You need to understand the sense of fragility of human aspirations."