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Kissinger returns Vance's praise, but not unreservedly. "I have extremely high regard for Vance," he says. "I like him enormously as a human being. He's done a very good job in conducting foreign policy. His strengths are his fairness, his sound judgment and his patience. If he has any weakness it's that he doesn't assert himself enough. There can be free debate within the Government, but there has to be one recognizable voice that speaks for American foreign policy."
That voice was supposed to be the voice of Jimmy Carter. But Carter, inexperienced and impetuous in foreign affairs, subject to conflicting advice and distracted by domestic problems, has often vacillated and improvised. The consequence has been a series of foreign policy reverses. The problems of U.S. relations with the world have proved much more stubborn than Carter expected, and the need for a steady, if unspectacular negotiator with solid experience and sound judgment has, as a result, grown increasingly important.
This does not mean that Vance, an affluent Wall Street lawyer with long service in Democratic Administrations and close ties to the once dominant Eastern foreign policy establishment, disagrees in any basic way with Carter's goals in world affairs. Indeed, he takes considerable pride in helping to shape them. Nor does it mean that he is without blame for some of the setbacks those policies have suffered.
What it does mean is that the selflessly professional Vance, after some hesitation, has gradually pushed the State Department back into its once prominent pre-Kissinger role in both planning and executing foreign policy.* This has occurred in part because while Carter is indeed more intensely interested in world affairs than his predecessor, Gerald Ford, he is certainly no more so than John Kennedy or Richard Nixon. And as Carter has rushed to confront many problems both at home and abroad, he has sometimes stumbled by not availing himself of State Department expertise. The lesson has been a painful one for both Carter and Vance, but the President seems to have learned that while he must make the final decisions, he cannot be his own Secretary of State.
To be sure, there is still a strong competitive foreign policy voice seeking the President's ear in the more aggressive and imaginative Zbigniew Brzezinski, who operates just down the hall from Carter's office as head of the National Security Council. Yet the former Columbia professor, for all his purposefulness, respects Vance's role, and while the two certainly differ on just how tough the U.S. should be toward Russia (Vance advises the milder approach), Brzezinski has made no attempt to dominate Vance the way Kissinger humbled Secretary of State William Rogers.