(5 of 23)
The war in Indochina was the culmination of the disappointments of a decade that had opened with the clarion call of a resurgent idealism and ended with assassinations, racial and social discord and radicalized politics. Our dilemmas were very much a product of liberal doctrines of reformist intervention and academic theories of graduated escalation. The collapse of these high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which Establishments flounder. The leaders who had inspired our foreign policy were particularly upset by the rage of the students. The assault of these upper-middle-class young men and women—who were, after all, their own children—was not simply on policies, but on life-styles and values heretofore considered sacrosanct. Stimulated by a sense of guilt encouraged by modern psychiatry and the radical chic rhetoric of affluent suburbia, the young protesters symbolized the end of an era of simple faith in material progress. Ironically, the insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma.
My attitude toward the protesters diverged from Nixon's. He saw in them an enemy that had to be vanquished; I considered them students and colleagues with whom I differed but whose idealism was indispensable for our future. In November 1969 Nixon asked me to comment on a memorandum sent to him by Pat Moynihan, then Counsellor to the President. It described a scene at a Harvard-Princeton football game in which the assembled graduates—worth, according to Pat, at least $10 billion—roared support when the Harvard University band was introduced, in a takeoff on Vice President Spiro Agnew's denigrating phrase, as the "effete Harvard Corps of Intellectual Snobs." A warning in Moynihan's memorandum about the "incredible powers of derision" of the young was significantly underlined by the President. A part of my response follows:
"Most are casualties of our affluence. They have had the leisure for self-pity, and the education enabling them to focus it in a fashionable critique of the 'system.' Many are substantially anti-Establishment not only because that is the natural bent of youthful alienation, but also because it is a major thrust of contemporary academic literature. Modern American sociology, psychology, political science, literature, etc., have turned a glaring light (as they should have) on the faults in our society. All this is bound to fall on fertile ground—and cover more of it than ever before—in a country that sends 8 million kids to college.
"There just might be a chance, over time, to win some of these young people to your side. You have something basic in common with many of them—a conviction that the machinery of New Deal liberalism has to be fundamentally overhauled. You also share a concern that America play a more balanced and restrained role. You are, in fact, turning over most of the rocks at home and abroad that these kids want to see turned over."
"General Kirschman" Goes to Paris
Most of Kissinger's diplomatic breakthroughs were achieved via unofficial "back channels"