(10 of 10)
Last December, Walter Stoessel, 54, formerly Ambassador to Warsaw, was named Ambassador to Moscow. Secretary Kissinger is not permitted to do to Stoessel what Presidential Adviser Kissinger did to Stoessel's predecessor, Jacob Beam: in 1972, while he was negotiating detente with the Kremlin, Kissinger sneaked into Moscow without even telling Beam that he was coming, or why.
Open Target. Kissinger's passionate concern for secrecy, indeed, is one of the things for which he is most often faulted by his critics. Kissinger's treatment of Beam in Moscow may have been humiliating, but at least it had no adverse effect on U.S.-Soviet relations. On the other hand, relations between Washington and Tokyo have gone awry ever since Kissinger went to Peking in 1971 without telling former Japanese Premier TASS Eisaku Sato what was afoot with HI Sato's Chinese neighbors. Even if rumors of Nixon's proposed visit had leaked, some critics say, it would have been less damaging in the long run than Japan's subsequent loss of face. One specific complaint of U.S. intelligence experts who resent Kissinger's excessive sense of secrecy: the fact that information about his talks in Peking with Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung have never been allowed to circulate beyond the White House.
Kissinger's eminence and visibility as a ranking world statesman make him a fairly open and obvious target for criticism, some of it valid, some not. One complaint is that he gets along better with dictators than democrats.
Kissinger replies, "Our initial negotiations were directed to authoritarian governments because that was where we faced the danger of war. Negotiations with allies are more complex in this phase of the development of Western democracies but in the long run more important."
The most trenchant criticism, however, comes from old academic colleagues who question his intensive use of personal diplomacy. The University of Chicago's Hans Morgenthau worries that Kissinger will be constricted in whatever else he does by an obsession with preserving detente. Harvard Professor of Government Nadav Safran, who otherwise gives Kissinger's performance high marks, suggests that "perhaps a less interesting Secretary of State might delegate authority so that various people would be running various problem areas simultaneously."
More than one critic recalls that it was Kissinger himself, in the spring 1966 issue of the quarterly magazine Daedalus, who wrote: "The statesman is suspicious of those who personalize foreign policy, for history teaches him the fragility of structures dependent upon individuals."