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What made the Nixon Administration so "unAmerican" was its attempt to adjust to a world fundamentally different from our historical perception. The impulses to lurch toward either isolationism or global intervention had to be cured by making judgments according to some more permanent conception of national interest. It was no use rushing forth impetuously when excited, or sulking in our tent when disappointed. We would have to learn to reconcile ourselves to imperfect choices, partial fulfillment, the unsatisfying tasks of balance and maneuver.
It was a hard lesson to convey to a people who rarely read about the balance of power without seeing the adjective "outdated" precede it. It was not one of the least ironies of the period that it was a flawed man, so ungenerous in some of his human impulses, who took the initiative to lead America toward a concept of peace compatible with its new realities and the perils of a nuclear age, and that the foreign leaders who best understood this were Mao and Chou, who openly expressed their preference for Richard Nixon over the wayward representatives of American liberalism. It was on the level of shared geopolitical interest transcending philosophies and history that the former Red baiter and the crusaders for world revolution found each other.
At the Threshold
On Jan. 23, 1973, the night Nixon announced the Viet Nam peace agreement, Kissinger pondered what lay ahead.
We stood, I fervently hoped, at the threshold of a period of national reconciliation that would be given impetus by the unique opportunity for creativity I saw ahead. Only rarely in history do statesmen find an environment in which all factors are so malleable; before us, I thought, was the chance to shape events, to build a new world. I was grateful for the opportunity I had enjoyed to help prepare the ground. And I was at peace with myself, neither elated nor sad.
Stretching Man's Horizons
Visiting Cape Kennedy in January 1971 for a moon shot, Kissinger reflected on man's need for challenges—and faith.
We needed the space program; a society that does not stretch its horizons will soon shrink them. The argument that we must solve all our problems on earth before venturing beyond our planet will confine us for eternity. The world will never be without problems; they will become an obsession rather than a challenge unless mankind constantly expands its vision. Columbus would never have discovered America if 15th century Europe had applied the slogan that it needed first to solve its own problems; paradoxically, these problems would have become insoluble and Europe would have suffocated in its own perplexities.
Faith has provided the motive force for mankind's checkered odyssey. But how does one dream in a technocratic age? How do a people regain the faith that caused small peasant societies to build cathedrals with spires reaching toward the heavens, edifices that it would take centuries to complete, enshrining in stone a testimonial to the perseverance and sweep of their aspirations?
It seemed to me as I stood at Cape Kennedy with my daughter Elizabeth, then aged eleven, and my son David, aged nine, that they would live in a world at variance with mine. I had known only national boundaries as a child. Space was beyond my