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His home is the White House. There he gets his hair cut, there he takes his laundry (giving rise to a Democratic gag: "Pat Nixon takes it down to the Potomac and beats it with a stick"). When he is not dining out, he eats in the White House mess. Nominally, he lives in a town house overlooking Rock Creek Park. As one of his occasional dates, Barbara Howar, put it: "The place looks like a Holiday Inn. The furniture is sort of Grand Rapids Motel. The one room that shows that somebody lives there is his library. The walls and bookshelves are lined with pictures of Henry with every world leader you've ever heard of, and some you haven't."
Kissinger's one serious temptation is food—the gooier the better. A slight bulge beneath his satin cummerbund testifies to his indulgence. If he accepts many invitations, he also returns them. Though he loves to make stellar appearances at Washington's celebrity-packed Sans Souci restaurant, he often takes friends to dine at a modest Chinese restaurant, where his patronage is proudly noted on the menu. When he goes to Paris, he likes to bring back silk scarves to give to friends. The less visible Kissinger takes delight in his two children (he was divorced from his wife in 1964) and in other people's children.
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Underneath the ebullient Kissinger exterior, friends have detected a touch of melancholia. His ego and his humor are a cover for his closely held deeper feelings, which he is reluctant to talk about or share in public. But at the moment he has cause to be contented. At the Washington Press Club last week, he joked about how he would like to "come to meetings of the National Security Council in dark glasses and tennis shoes. And I would like to hold all my briefings over the longdistance telephone. If I didn't like the way it turned out, then it wasn't me on the other end of the line. But it's only a dream." Not for a moment did anyone in that cavernous ballroom believe that Henry Kissinger envied Howard Hughes or wanted to be any place but where he was: front stage center in the world's most important capital.