The Presidency: Finding Peace in Strength

There is a melancholy echo these days for Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, as he trudges to the Pentagon and pulls up a chair in the somber interior of Room 3E333. He and ten other members of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces have been asked to design the free world's nuclear deterrent for the rest of this century. Helms' entire adult life has been given to studying and acting against forces that would quell freedom. The problem probably cannot be solved for more than a few years at a time, a fact that Helms accepts but many Americans find hard to digest.

As Helms nears 70, his belief that strength brings peace, that vigilance thwarts aggression, is undimmed. And so he is back in public service, alarmed at the rising number of people in the free world who accept without question Soviet declarations of peace, who grow flaccid out of fear of Soviet strength. The cycle repeats itself.

Fifty years ago this Sunday, Jan. 30, 1933, when Helms was a Williams College sophomore getting ready for exams he heard that Adolf Hitler had become dictator of Germany. Two years later, in the fall of 1935, Helms was a United Press reporter in Berlin, hunched forward in his seat in the Kroll Opera House watching Hitler rant against the Versailles Treaty. "I noticed that Hitler had become rather pale," Helms recalls. "He was passing a handkerchief back and forth between his hands underneath the lectern." Suddenly Helms understood. "At this moment," Hitler shouted, "German troops are crossing the Rhine bridges and occupying the Rhineland!" His mesmerized audience cheered wildly. Helms, then 23, was stunned. The world shrugged.

In the summer of 1936, Helms covered America's greatest hero, Charles Lindbergh, who became frightened by German air might after Hermann Göring showed him the huge air force he was building. That September, Helms was in Nuremberg at the Nazi Party Congress, where uniformed ranks roared their devotion to Hitler and flights of new bombers thundered endlessly overhead. In all his subsequent years in and around power, Helms has never seen anything quite like it.