HENRY KISSINGER: THE MAN WHO CONTROLS THE DESTINY OF AMERICA

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80-01601R000300360037-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 17, 2000
• Sequence Number: 37
• Publication Date: January 26, 1972
• Content Type: OPEN

STATINTL STATINTL
JanuA p1Wv4c or F F 'bR 3#0 D~~ '-~ b1`I
STATI N $6RY KISSINGER: THE MAN WHO
CONTROLS THE DESTINY OP
AMERICA
HON. JOHN R. RARICK
OF LOUISIANA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Wednesday, January 26, 1972
Mr. RARICK. Mr. Speaker, events of
the past day indicate even more clearly
than before that Henry Kissinger is privy
to state secrets denied the Members of
the Congress and the American people. It
seems as if the President believes that
he and Dr. Kissinger can, acting in se-
cret, determine the future course of
America. .
I, for one, am convinced that this
country Is too great and its liberties too
precious to be entrusted to the minds of
two men-President Nixon and his alter
ego, Henry Kissinger. This Congress and
the 'American people have the right to
know.
Had President Nixon told the Ameri-
can people the truth some 30 months ago,
this country would not be so polarized,
so divided. The truth is that much of the
confusion in America results from de-
liberate, political maneuvering on the
part of the President.
The American people have the right to
know the truth about Henry Kissinger,
this man who is above congressional in-
vestigation, who is not answerable to the
people or to their elected representa-
tives.
The American people have the right to
know who this Henry Kissinger is and
what entitles him to be set above other
men. I include two interesting articles
delineating the true nature of this man
and his relationship to the President in
the RECORD at this point:
[From the Washington Post, July 11, 19711
HENRY KISSINGER: NIxoN's METTERNICH
(By David Landau)
(The writer Is managing editor of the Har-
vard Crimson, in which the following ap-
peared as part of a series of three articles
on the career of Henry A. Kissinger.)
"He was a rococo figure, complete finely
carved, all surface, like an intricately cut
prism. His face was delicate but without
depth, his conversation brilliant but with-
out ultimate seriousness. Equally at home
In the salon and in the Cabinet, he was the
beau-ideal of [an] aristocracy which justifies
itself not by its truth but by its existence.
And if he never came to terms with the new
age it was not because he failed to under-
stand its seriousness but because he dis-
dained it."
With these words, a Harvard thesis-writer
named Henry Kissinger introduced Clemens
Metternich, Austria's greatest foreign min-
ister. Metternich was a man whom Kissinger
emulated, whose diplomatic life he has
sought to relieve. And the comparison of the
two is far. from inapt:
. As Richard Nixon's most influential ad-
viser on foreign policy, Kissinger has em-
bodied the role of the 19th-century balance-
of-power diplomat. He is cunning, elusive
and all-powerful in the sprawling sector of
government which seeks to advise the Presi-
dent on national security matters. As Mr.
Nixon's personal emissary to foreign digni-
taries, to academia and-as "a high White
House official"-to the press, he is?vague and
unpredictable. Yet he is the single authori-
tative carrier of national policy besides the
President himself.
Like the Austrian minister who became
his greatest political hero, Kissinger has used
his position in government as a protective
cloak to conceal his larger ambitions and
purposes. Far from being the detached, ob-
jective arbiter of presidential decision-mak-
ing, he has become a crucial molder and
supporter of Mr. Nixon's foreign policy. In-
stead of merely holding the bureaucracy at
comfortable arm's length, he has entangled
it in a web of useless projects and studies;
cleverly shifting an important locus of ad-
visory power from the Cabinet departments
to his own office. And as confidential adviser
to the President, he never speaks for the
record, cannot be made to testify before
Congress, and is identified with presidential
policy only on a semi-public level.
Like the ministers who ruled post-Napo-
Iconic Europe from the conference table at
Vienna-and the Eastern Establishment fig-
ures who preceded him as policy-maker of a
later age-Kissinger believes that legislative
bodies, bureaucracies . and run-of-the-mill
citizenries all lack the training and tem-
peranhent that are needed in the diplomatic
field, He is only slightly less moved by the
academics who parade down to Washington
to peddle their ideas. And, when one sets
aside popular opinion, Congress, the bureauc-
racy and the academic community, there re-
mains the resident alone. The inescapable
conclusion is that Henry Kissinger's only
meaningful constituency is a constituency
of one.
It might have seemed surprising that, only
a month after his election, Mr: Nixon would
have chosen one of his most vocal antag-
onists-the foreign policy adviser of his chief
rival, Nelson Rockefeller-as a leading policy
aide. But the two men had much more In
common than anyone would have supposed.
To begin with, Mr. Nixon turned out not
to be the partisan, suspect observer of the
international scene whom Kissinger had so
feared. Quite the contrary-Mr. Nixon was
determined to take hold of the foreign policy
machine and fashion his own commitment to
world order, regardless of public and con-
gressional opinion. In the past, decisions had
been made in a chaotic, ad hoc atmosphere
which lacked consistency and framework; the
new President decided that such practice
should cease.
For somewhat different reasons, Kissinger
agreed that policy planning should be cen-
tered in the White House. For Kissinger, the
balance-of-power diplomat, had long be-
lieved that world equilibrium was based on
the constant threat of force, and that respect
for the United States rested on the fear of
its enormous military machine. At times,
secret talks and well-placed overtures could
avert military engagements that were not in
the Interest of the United States; at others,
where an escalation to armed conflict seemed
necessary, the decisions must be made and
the orders carried out by a few top men who
acted with the greatest of speed.
Such a policy of threat demanded a high
degree of centralization-and' the resulting
Nixon-Kissinger policy structure was de-
signed to circumvent those forces in govern-
ment, such as Congress and the Cabinet
bureaucrats, which were considered extra-
neous to that approach.
GUARDING CREDIBILITY
In addition, Kissinger realized that the
policy of threat would be a failure if Mr.
Nixon could not appear unfettered by
others-inside Washington and out-who
had claims on the President's conduct of for-
eign affairs. In as early a tract as "A World
Restored," his 1954 Ph.D. thesis on Metter-
nich and the restructuring of post-
Napoleonic Europe, Kissinger had written
that "the Impetus of domestic policy is a
direct social experience; but that of foreign
policy is not actual, but potential experi-
ence-ttie" threat of war-which statesman-
ship attempts to avoid being made explicit.'
In other words, popular opinion was littl
more than an encumbrance on those few wh
were capable of making decisions. For if th
foreign diplomat were allowed to feel tha
the President's policy could be swayed by
domestic upheavals, then the credibility of
threat-the linchpin of the policy-would
ultimately collapse.
Corollary to the policy of threat was the
notion that the United States would keep
its promises and fulfill its commitments no
matter what the price. For the ultimate fail-
ure of diplomacy was to lose credibility, and
there was a feeling for the honor of a great
power that went very deep in Kissinger.
There was the idea that a faulted credibility
in one area of the world would surely lead
to disaster in another, because for Kissinger
all the great troublespots of the world were
lined up on a single continuum that con-
nected the two superpowers: the Soviet
Union and the United States. Should the
Russians violate the ceasefire lines in the
'Mideast, then the President must be free to
respond in Cambodia. And if the policy made
no sense in cost-benefit analysis, at least it
would proceed from strategic thinking which
transcended the day-to-day pressures of po-
litical life.
WHITE HOUSE PREDOMINANCE
Kissinger felt that the presidency was the
only office of government which could deter-
mine and executive foreign policy in the way
it should properly be conducted. Congress
.was an impediment; its members, by and
large, were not properly schooled in the hard-
fought, intricate practice of diplomatic af-
fairs and were mofe likely to respond to the
uninformed concerns of their voters, to the
shoddy tug-and-pull of the popular political
process, than to the arduous twists and turns
of great-power relationships. The bureauc.
racy, too, was all enemy; no imagination, no
flair, no speed or adaptability, little grasp
of the sacrifices and risks one must incur if
the one were to maintain a flexible policy.
Kissinger, the balance-of-power diplomat,
had long believed that world equilibrium was
based on the constant threat of force, and
that respect for the United States rested on
the fear of its enormous military mach ' Inc.
And as for popular opinion, Kissinger's in-
terest lay not in how the votes would be cast
today, but in how the executive structure
would be affected by domestic reactions to
the policy when that policy had finally run
its course five or ton years later. His over-
whelming concern was how well the White
House could continue to functioh as the ma-
jor force in foreign policy, whether popular
opinion would one day rise up and destroy
the presidency as an instrument of diplo-
matic relations. And when Kissinger finally
agreed to go to work for the man he had
scorned as a presidential candidate, it was
only on the condition that the policymaking
structure be geared to White House predomi-
nance.
In a series of meetings at the end of No-
veniber, 1968, Mr. Nixon invited Kissinger
to accept the post of foreign policy assistant
and proposed a revival of the National Se-
curity Council. Set up under Truman after
World War II to coordinate policy planning,
the NSC system had long since fallen Into
obscurity, but Mr. Nixon viewed it as an in-
strument of restoring to the White House a
critical measure of flexibility and control over
policy decisions. More than anything else, he
dreaded being handed a single policy recom-
mendation which, more often than not.
might be a compromise policy, an et7t~rt on
the part of several differing agencies which
had subdued their disagreements and pre-
sented the White House with a position it
could then only accept or reject.
Underlying the revived NSC structure was
the so-called "options" system; the recohn-
mendations of each agency would be solicited
Approved For Release 2001/03/04: CIA-RDP80-01.601 R000300360037-3