HENRY KISSINGER once credited his success partly to the fact that he works alone in the fashion of the clas sic Western gunslinger. But even the Lone Ranger needed his Tonto, so on his voyage to North Viet Nam, Kissinger is taking along his trusty sidekick, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William H. Sullivan.
The silver-haired Sullivan has been Kissinger's chief political adviser throughout the long cease-fire negotiations. While Kissinger was talking to North Viet Nam's top emissary, Le Due Tho, Sullivan was working 18-hour days at the "tandem negotiations" that tack led the technical details of the cease fire, such as the logistical arrangements for the release of war prisoners and the machinery for supervising the truce.
The filigree on those final supervisory arrangements is so intricate, Kissinger recently quipped, that, "as far as I can tell, only my colleague Ambassador Sul livan understands completely."
More recently Sullivan has been dividing his time between the White House and the State Department, poring over background material and briefing Kissinger for the newest talks in Hanoi. From Hanoi, Sullivan will fly to Saigon, Vientiane, Phnom-Penh and Bangkok to brief allied officials on the import of the negotiations. Then back to Washington and off again to Paris, where Sullivan will act as deputy to Secretary of State William Rogers for the U.S. delegation at the international guarantee conference on Viet Nam, beginning Feb. 26.
To stay in shape for such arduous assignments, Sullivan carves time out of his schedule to swim and ice-skate near his home in Bethesda, Md. A trim 5 ft. 11 in., he watches his weight (Metrecal at his desk for lunch) and his appearance. Even in the thick of a crisis, his gray suits hold their shape and his loafers keep their high buff. Complains one subordinate with a tinge of envy, "This guy never even looks creased."
Kissinger, of course, was attracted to Sullivan for more cerebral reasons. "Henry likes clever diplomats but can't abide stuffy bureaucrats," explains a mutual friend. "Bill Sullivan is a very clever diplomat." After serving in half a dozen embassies from India to Italy, Sullivan was plucked from departmental obscurity in 1962 by another enemy of bureaucrats, W. Averell Harriman, then head of the U.S. delegation to the Laos conference in Geneva. "It took me just a couple of discussions with Sullivan to realize he was not an ordinary man," Harriman recalls. He made Sullivan his deputy, but several senior State Department officers protested that Sullivan could not be promoted over them. Harriman simply told them that if they did not approve of his decision, they could "ship out."
Sullivan gradually became known to his colleagues as "Mr. Indochina," and he has fought to retain his pre-eminence in that field. "There are some bloodied noses around the department among those who tried to muscle in," notes one Asian specialist. Sullivan's knowledge of Indochina's politics is encyclopedic. One colleague recalls that, about two years ago, Sullivan "simply sat down and dictated to his secretary the basic paper that became the foundation for the 'leopard-spot' standstill cease-fire concept now agreed to."