Breakfast at Kissinger's

Henry Fairlie

Washington Let us begin with a dull remak, because dull remarks are most likely to be true. No one in Washington, no one in New York, where I went last week, perhaps no one in the country, has the slightest notion of what President Carter is doing in foreign policy.

His speech to the United Nations, full of characteristic optimism and panache, told us exactly nothing, yet it told us again what everyone feels rather than knows: that a very individual foreign policy is in the making.

'Who is he in bed with?', a puzzled Con gressman said to me the other day. 'Surely we have a right to know that. Is he in bed with the Russians, with the Chinese, with the Panamanians, with the Cubans, with the Japanese? What's the point of all this "right to know" agitation if we don't know who our President is in bed with?' He leaned back and flashed a smile he meant me to remember. 'I admire him for that, at least I think I admire him for that. He is the first sailor, we have had in the White House since FDR, so he has a girl in every port.' His smile stayed. 'I wonder what he's up to?' he mused, and he still smiled.

No one knows what Carter is doing in foreign policy, but everyone knows that the • foreign policy is all ready and going to be his. Cyrus Vance at the•State Department and Zbigniew Brzezinski at the White House are not policy-makers like their predecessors. They formulate the chess problem, he moves the pieces — and he moves them with a perturbing, and to many a disconcerting, and even naive, impulse. Show him seven clear spaces in front of his rook and he will move his rook to the other end of the board. The experts cover their eyes with their hands. He has exposed his king. They hear a scuffle on the board, peek through their fingers, and lo and behold his rook is back in front of his king, rampant and on guard.

From human rights to Russia, to the Mid dle East, to China, to Japan, to Africa, to Cuba, to Panama, wherever one looks this man has moved with what can at least be called a dazzling precociousness. One sometimes thinks that God must really take to him, because there is no other rational explanation of derring-do. I don't think we have had a President so emotionally — and yes, intellectually — involved in foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson. An old New Dealer said to me not long ago: 'This man acts across the board as if America had never been defeated. Does it terrify me?' He threw his arms over the back of his chair: 'It makes me toss and turn during the day; it doesn't yet make me toss and turn at night.' There is of course a far more severe judgment of Carter's conduct offoreignpol icy, and it is voiced by Henry Kissinger in public and in private with his usual heaviness of speech, as if he is an Atlas who cannot shift the burden of the world from his shoulders even when he is out of office.

Kissinger says that he does not wish to seem to criticise Carter's foreign policy. That said, he criticises. It has become almost a Washington scandal that he regularly invites Washington journalists, domestic and foreign, to breakfast with him at the Metropolitan Club. Have you ever had breakfast with Henry Kissinger at 8am? There are only two things to do in preparation: either drink nothing the night before or get plastered and sit through breakfast with him in the haze of one's own hangover.

The man is magnetic. There is no doubt about it. He fills in the order: two eggs scrambled, two eggs fried up, two English muffins, two orange juices; and as he does so he looks up. 'This is of course off the record'. Off the record my foot. The man is plain politician, plain cunning, plain deviousness. He pants to be leaked. He reminds me of a R A Butler, who once said when I asked to see him: 'The difficulty is, Fairlie, that one never knows whether you regard the interview as off or on the record. How can I tell?' I assured him that I wanted only what is now called 'Deep background'. His hurt voice came over the phone: 'Oh, but I have something to tell you'. That is Kissinger, too. He has something to say which he wants heard.

Kissinger has let it be known, not on one occasion only, that he thinks that he managed to push the Soviet Union out of the Middle East and that President Carter has unnecessarily and even wantonly invited it back. I have heard it reported from a seurce that I regard as wholly trustworthy that he has spoken even more strongly since the joint American-Soviet statement on the Middle East in which it was conceded that the Palestinians have rights, and I have been told that he has used words like 'betrayal and 'obscene' of Carter's attitude to Israel. One can indeed imagine him saying so. Henry Kissinger is a deceptive man. He is a romantic. He is especially a romantic about foreign policy, and even more especially about his role in its conduct. His words sound unromantic, especially over break.z fast at the Metropolitan Club.

'There is no conceptual thinking about foreign policy in this administration. Americans in general do little conceptual thinking about foreign policy. There is nothing like the consensus about the broad aims of foreign policy which Britain had in the nineteenth century.' And this is breakfast, his bodyguard sitting in the hall outside and just in time the English muffins come. But all of this is his own romanticism .There was no such consensus in Britain in the nineteenth century, though it is true that the Germans have always thought so, attributing to us more acuteness than we had or have; and he himself never pursued any broad conceptual goal while he was in ctrarge-of . American foreign policy. This prince of improvisers, this impressionist, this player with light over the surface of events, this producer of hats out of rabbits, this Machiavellian un-Machiavellian, this poet of relativity, he talks at breakfast of conceptual thinking in foreign policy. More coffee, yes?

But all of this contrast between Kissinger and Carter seems to me important if one takes Kissinger's words at their face value — and all his words have value at several levels. One thinks of him as this cool, rational, conceptual strategic thinker about America's long-term interests in the world, and Carter seems in contrast to be a naïve, born again, preaching farm boy from below the Mason-Dixon line, but when one remembers that Kissinger is a romantic, one of those heavy German romantics who march with clodhopping boots over even a twinkling star, President Carter begins to look different and even rather sophisticated.

If one listens to Kissinger very closely one hears amongst everything else a man who does not like the President being in charge. This is understandable, given the President he served. He is fascinated by politics, perhaps too fascinated by it, like someone downstairs who is too interested in what goes on upstairs, and yet he does not really believe in politicians being in charge. What was Nixon's contribution to foreign policy? Well, Nixon knew the politics of foreign policy. He could get things across, and although Kissinger says this with genuine admiration, some real acknowledgement of the politician's prowess, there is also a measure of disdain for the politician's role. It must be very peculiar to Henry Kissinger that America now has a President who conducts foreign policy as his own policy without either Cyrus Vance or Zbigniew Brzezinski being much more than retained officials. And I suspect that this is puzzling not only to Kissinger but to The Times of both London and New York, especially puzzling to the Economist, and puzzling above all to the Foreign Policy Council in America and to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. We have a politician in charge once again. The thing is preposterous.

But I suggest that we should look with some interest at this man Carter as he begins to feel his way in foreign policy. He gets away with murder. No one that I know denies this. His early emphasis on human rights has, whatever anyone says, altered the concept of democratic foreign policy in the last quarter of this century. Andrew Young was at first put down as a mere bungler and fool. He is now deeply respected by the most judging of professional diplomats. Carter will carry the Panama Canal Treaty, and however unimportant that may seem in Britain it is vitally important here. America will solve without humiliation what cost us and France the pain of Suez, and Carter will have done it.

He moves his rook as I have described, and one would not disagree that he is capable sometimes of moving his bishop horizontally and vertically across the board instead of diagonally; but always he manages to get the bishop back in place just in time for the end game. We need to learn that we are living with a full President once more, and that part of his weaponry is to unnerve people. They don't know what is going on in his unconceptual mind.

The bother about concepts like inviting the Soviet Union back into the Middle East is that they are just concepts. They are as much concepts as Jane's Fighting Ships saying that Russian naval power is overtaking that of the United States, or Henry Jackson saying that Russia always makes ninnies of the Western democracies. The fact of the matter is that the Western democracies have done rather well since 1945, that they are all on their feet in their rather absurd ways, and that America has done one helluva job with its several mistakes and its heartbreaking follies in holding the West together. The Communist countries including Russia have gained hardly a morsel of the land, minds, hearts or souls of other Peoples in thirty years of attempted expansion. In fact Cuba could well be the fiftyfirst state in reality if not in name in a few years. President Carter knows something of this which many of us are unwilling to know. He is very unfrightened of Communists at home or abroad. Communists? What are they when set against Christianity? He more than anyone would have smiled his own smile if he had been there when Stalin asked how many divisions the Pope had. How many Baptists does Stalin have? he would have thought.

There is one deeply serious acknowledged fact that must be taken into account. There is not one foreign leader, friend or rival, who has not said in words that are not merely ceremonial that President Carter is one of the most intelligent, formidable, strong, able political leaders they have ever met — and they are themselves politicians who have met many Others. I have my own serious criticisms of Carter, but those are for a different piece, What I believe is more widely acknowledged here than is usually said is that his foreign policy is a thing of unusual farsightedness, that he is breaking up the Whole Cold War attitudes with an insight Which few of us really have, while keeping America very strong — very strong indeed. 1 think we are today unused to politicians in charge of foreign policy. We have allowed managers to persuade us that it is something for experts. Carter is a pure politician, dislodging rivals abroad from established positions just as he dislodges those at home. The world is still to him a thing of possibilities. He will not be cornered by the world. In this he is American. He moves about with something of the old confidence of America in him, and it seems a very long time ago since we accused him of having come from the Trilateral Commission and to be nothing but their appointee. He is himself, and perhaps that is the most and the best that a democracy can throw in the face of the world: a politician who trusts himself as he trusts his countrymen while he still insists that America should be strongly armed for its own defence and that of its allies.

There is no chance in the world that he will let down Israel, but as he tries to find the grounds on which it may now be defended he manoeuvres with a confidence and skill to which we are unused and therefore do not recognise. He has given nothing away to the Russians: rather he has drawn them in again into another area of the world which they have always found a morass. The Russians know nothing of the Middle East. They are not a threat there. But what Carter says beyoad that is that Communism is not a threat if the democracies love their own processes. It is the lesson that Franklin Roosevelt taught with his sheer gusto of spirit, and Carter is as near to it as any president since him.