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How well this machinery will work remains to be seen. Kissinger insists that the organizational changes that give the National Security staff formal responsibility for coordination of planning will create neither a bottleneck nor a trespass on the rights of Cabinet officers such as Rogers and Laird. "I'm not making policy in the White House basement," he contends. "When policy comes to be seen as my policy, then I've failed." He adds: "If Cabinet officers sense that I use this position to regulate the flow of information so that the outcome is in the direction of my preferred point of view, then I've lost my effectiveness." Since taking office, Kissinger has said nothing publicly on substantive issues.
Caustically Critical
Kissinger's somewhat anguished protestations that he knows his place may not avail him much. The middle echelons of the State Department, for instance, are always fearful of being trampled upon by the White House staff; it was no different when McGeorge Bundy held Kissinger's post. Critics have sometimes accused Kissinger of having an ego as big as his intellect. They have raised eyebrows at the fact that he worked for different Administrations (nothing very unusual as such), and noted that, while serving as Candidate Nelson Rockefeller's foreign-policy adviser, he was often caustically critical of Richard Nixon. The inevitable crack that traveled from Harvard to the corridors of the State Department: "I wonder who's Kissinger now."
Humility is not his hallmark. When he served as a consultant to the Kennedy Administration, he disagreed with its European policy. He pressed his views insistently and was indignant when they were ignored. He resigned because of that. "I think I was right on the substance," he says now, "but I was insensitive in my reaction." While he was working for Rockefeller, he was told once that a speech he had written was being redone. "When Nelson buys a Picasso," he snapped, "he does not hire four house painters to improve it."
He is of average height, compact build, sandy-haired, composed and inconspicuous. He is 45, but he easily could pass for several years less—or more. Horn-rimmed glasses obscure his grey eyes. On first meeting, he can smile shyly and even indulge in professorial persiflage, as if to belie his reputation for being brusque with colleagues, students and office help. "There cannot be a crisis next week," he jokes, in a softly Germanic accent. "My schedule is already full."
Indeed it is. In setting up the new machinery and addressing the problems that confront the Nixon Administration, Kissinger has been working six days a week from 7:30 a.m. to near midnight. His new bachelor quarters overlooking Rock Creek Park are a shambles; he got home to dress for an intimate White House dinner one night unsure whether he would find a dinner jacket and black tie. He arrived back at the White House 20 minutes late. The critic who has always demanded "creativity" of government smiles wanly and says he dreads the moment when someone will approach him with a new idea; he fears he might not have time to consider it. For the time being, he says, he is living off "intellectual capital."