Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1972moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 1, 1973

Men of the Year

Nixon and Kissinger: Triumph and Trial



    It was a year of visitations and bold ventures with Russia
and China, of a uniquely personal triumph at the polls for the
President, of hopes raised and lately dashed for peace in Viet
Nam. Foreign policy reigned pre-eminent, and was in good part
the base for the landslide election victory at home. And U.S.
foreign policy, for good or ill, was undeniably the handiwork
of two people: Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Alfred Kissinger,
the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs. For
what they accomplished in the world, what was well begun -- and
inescapably, too, their prolonged and so far indecisive struggle
with the Viet Nam tragedy -- the two are Men of the Year.

    They constitute in many ways an odd couple, an improbable
partnership. There is Nixon, 60, champion of Middle American
virtues, a secretive, aloof yet old-fashioned politician given
to oversimplified rhetoric, who founded his career on gut-
fighting anti-Communism but has become in his maturity a
surprisingly flexible, even unpredictable statesman. At his side
is Kissinger, 49, a Bavarian-born Harvard professor of urbane
and subtle intelligence, a creature of Cambridge and Georgetown
who cherishes a never entirely convincing reputation as an
international bon vivant and superstar. Yet together in their
unique symbiosis -- Nixon supplying power and will, Kissinger
an intellectual framework and negotiating skills -- they have
been changing the shape of the world, accomplishing the most
profound rearrangement of the earth's political powers since the
beginning of the cold war.

    The year contained vast praise, tidal changes, a movement
from a quarter-century of great power confrontation toward an
era of negotiations. But if Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in
opening the gates to China, in urging a new detente with Russia,
in pressing forward the SALT talks and a dozen other avenues of
communication between East and West, it was also in its final
days, a year of devastating disappointment. In October Kissinger
euphorically reported to the world that "peace is at hand" in
Viet Nam. Then, as it has so many times before in America's
longest and strangest war, the peace proved once again elusive.
As the Paris negotiations dissolved in a fog of linguistic
ambiguities and recriminations, Richard Nixon suddenly sent the
bombers north again. All through the year, Nixon and Kissinger
labored at a new global design, a multipolar world in which an
equilibrium of power would ensure what Nixon called "a full
generation of peace." But at year's end, the design remained
dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there
seemed no early exit.

    Other themes and other figures, of course, also preoccupied
the world in 1972. While Nixon and Kissinger projected their
visions of order, political terrorists kept up a counterpoint.
In May, three Japanese gunmen hired by Palestinian guerrillas
opened fire at Tel Aviv's crowded Lod airport, killing 26
travelers and wounding 72 others. Then in September, eight
Palestinians invaded the Israeli Olympic team's dormitory in
Munich. Twenty hours later, 17 men, including eleven Israeli
athletes and coaches, were dead.

    The shadow of the gunman still hung over Northern Ireland.
This year alone, more than 450 people died in the terror. A bomb
blast in downtown Dublin killed two people and accelerated a
government crackdown on the Irish Republican Army in the South.
The dangerous freelance adventurism of skyjacking persisted. As
of last week there have been 393 such episodes round the world
in 1972, including one marathon in November that lasted 29 hours
before the three hijackers left the Southern Airways jet in
Havana. China's Premier Chou En-lai was crucial to the
beginnings of detente that is leading more than one-fifth of
the earth's population out of its dangerous isolation. So was
Russia's Leonid Brezhnev; with the Soviets, the Americans signed
15 far-reaching bilateral agreements for trade and cooperation
in space, technology and other fields The Man of the Year in
1970, West Germany's Willy Brandt, continued pursuing his
Ostpolitik with the signing of a treaty normalizing relations
between the two Germanys and won a surprisingly generous mandate
at the polls from his people for it. But the primary will and
intellect behind the emerging alignments resided in the White
House.

From Ideology to Realpolitik
    It was a full year for Nixon, who had to combine the roles
of statesman abroad and politician seeking re-election at home.
In a pre-election address on foreign policy, Nixon declared with
some satisfaction that "1972 has been a year of more achievement
for peace than any year since the end of World War II." Such
optimism reckoned without the breakdown of the Viet Nam
negotiations, yet in many ways the assessment was accurate.
Nixon and Kissinger adroitly played Russian and Chinese desires
and fears off against one another to establish a nonideological
basis for relations among the three great powers.

    Peking's perception of an American determination to get out
of Viet Nam, its worry about Russian influence spreading deeper
into Asia, and to a lesser degree in concern about the
burgeoning power of Japan -- all these factors led to the
Chinese summit last February, with its astonishing tableaux of
Nixon walking the Great Wall, of Nixon toasting Chou. The genius
of the Nixon-Kissinger policy was its sensitivity to thinking
in Moscow and Peking. That startling thaw between the U.S. and
China deeply disconcerted the Soviets.

     Anxious to quiet its Western Europe borders, Russia had
been diligently courting Willy Brandt and other leaders in the
hope of solidifying the status quo in Europe. But the
Washington-Peking tie also made a U.S.-Soviet thaw imperative
from Moscow's standpoint, which is precisely what Nixon and
Kissinger had planned. In a sense, Nixon vaulted over the
Western Europeans to establish his goal: improved ties with
Russia. From this triangular power play emerged continued
improvements in relations and slowly expanding trade with China,
and the series of agreements, including a massive trade pact,
with Russia. It opened the path toward other negotiations,
notably on "Mutual Balanced Force Reductions" in Europe,
scheduled to begin Jan. 31.

    The theoretical basis of the Nixon Doctrine is stated in
Kissinger's 1969 American Foreign Policy: "Regional groupings
supported by the United States will have to take over major
responsibility for their immediate areas, with the United States
being more concerned with the overall framework of order than
with the management of every regional enterprise." Kissinger
recognized that the legacy of Viet Nam would be a reluctance to
risk further involvement overseas; he and Nixon also understood
the inherent instability of a bipolar world.

    The Nixon-Kissinger objective has therefore been to shift
the focus of revolutionary regimes round the world from ideology
to issues of national interest. Both men are turning the
criteria of decision making from what some Europeans cynically
call "the savior attitude" to the equations of Realpolitik,
implicitly abandoning the moralistic considerations that have
dominated American foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson. "The
world is becoming less ideological," says British Political
Scientist Frederick Northedge, "and more concerned with
survival."

    The classical policy that Kissinger and Nixon are
practicing derives from perceptions of national interest that
have dictated successful foreign policy in Europe for 500
years. Political thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes
contributed to a body of experience and theory that culminated
in the 19th and 20th centuries in the effective policies in
Metternich, Bismarck, Adenauer and DeGaulle, four statesmen whom
Kissinger admires. Metternich claimed that "it is freedom of
action, not formal relations" that leads to successful
diplomacy. Following that dictum, Kissinger and Nixon have
reassessed U.S. relationships, abandoning some ties as out-of-
date (Taiwan), remaking others that might inhibit freedom of
action (Japan, Western Europe) and forging new ties with old
enemies (Russia and China) to expand the field of play. Another
dictum of Realpolitik holds that "interests are constant,
alliances are not,"

    For all the successes of the Nixon-Kissinger policies,
there have been some missteps even apart from Viet Nam. One
evident weakness is that the balance-of-power design has not
allowed much of a role for lesser nations. The White House has
tried to compensate by declaring that in reality Japan and
Western Europe are the two additional poles in a pentagonal
relationship. Argues Harvard Government Professor Stanley
Hoffman: "We have, especially in Asia, moved as if the era of
horizontal great-power diplomacy had arrived, and our weaker
allies are disconcerted. We have, both in Europe and Asia,
behaved as if our principal allies were already part friends,
part rivals."

    Most of the shocks to American allies were registered in
1971 after the first overtures to Peking. Japan was hardest hit
but other Asian allies were similarly disconcerted -- South
Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and most traumatically,
Taiwan. There was also some unease across the Atlantic. In 1972
there was increasing accommodation to the new realities, but
inevitably uneasiness remained. Partly to relieve Western
Europe's apprehensions about the new American Realpolitik, the
White House has declared 1973 to be "the year of Europe," with
the intention of mending long-neglected relations there once
the U.S. disentangles itself from Viet Nam. The Administration
still must formulate a coherent European policy, especially in
the areas of economics.

    The ambiguities and shock of the Viet Nam impasse have led
some in Washington to speculate that the extraordinary
Kissinger-Nixon relationship was in some trouble. The question
was beguiling but difficult to answer, for the two constructed
a working arrangement that is unique in U.S. history. Among
other things, it has been the odd arrangement of Secretary of
State William Rogers, whose department Nixon has largely
bypassed in the making of foreign policy. For the President,
Kissinger has been a combination of professor-in-residence,
secret agent, ultimate advance man and philosopher-prince. In
an important sense, he is Nixon's creation, using the power base
of the presidency to roam the world and speak for Nixon, to
set the stage for summits, to negotiate war and peace. There
have been simpler relationships before, but none exactly the
same: Richelieu and Louis XIII, Metternich and Hapsburg Emperor
Francis I, Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson, Harry Hopkins and
F.D.R.

The Loyalist Who Never Joined the Team
    In their personal dealings, Kissinger and Nixon tend toward
formality, with a certain restraint and distance that are
natural to both men. Each, in his own way, is a somewhat
enigmatic character. Despite moments of humor, Nixon remains his
intense, somewhat rigid self, even with Kissinger. Both men have
their private lives, and Kissinger is not on the list (a short
one) of the President's intimate friends. For all his outer ego,
his fierce driving of subordinates and his international
celebrity, Kissinger has a servant's heart for Nixon when it
comes to  power and ideas. He has been willing to subject himself
to the scorn of his academic peers (after the Cambodian
invasion) and serve the President with a total loyalty that is
matched inside the White House only by H.R. Haldeman, John
Ehrlichman, Press Secretary Ronald Zeigler and Kissinger's own
deputy on the National Security Council, General Alexander Haig.
Once, after listening to department spokesmen advocating their
parochial concerns before the National Security Council,
Kissinger stalked out of the room, grumbling that "not a
goddamned one of them except the President cared about the
national interest."

    Kissinger is not a team player in the almost obsessive
sense that the other Nixon loyalists are. He will, for example,
lunch on occasion with a reporter and provide background on the
peace negotiations. He has no close friends inside the White
House -- and not a few enemies who resent his power and personal
style, his dates with beautiful women and access to a larger,
more glamorous world. Kissinger's strength in the
administration, so far, has been that he has won the President's
confidence and trust, that they enjoy a remarkable professional
rapport. Says on high-ranking U.S. diplomat: "The halls of the
State Department are littered with the bones of those who
thought they could split the President and Henry." The President
even wrote Kissinger once: "Frankly, I cannot imagine what the
Government would be without you."

    Despite their dissimilarities, they share some traits. One
is a contempt for bureaucracy. "In the bureaucratic societies,"
Kissinger once wrote, "policy emerges from a compromise which
often produces the least common denominator, and is implemented
by individuals whose reputation is made by administering the
status quo." Both tend toward perfectionism. Kissinger drives
his National Security Council staff to strive for that state of
refinement in their position papers and memos that he likes to
define as "meticulous" -- a favorite adjective of approval.

The Advisor as Lone Cowboy.
    Nixon takes a particular delight in Kissinger's secret
operations and ruses. Sometimes Nixon has even helped to throw
observers off the track -- spending an apparently nonchalant
weekend at Camp David when a secret meeting was on in Paris. So
secretly have the Paris talks been held that only a handful of
Administration officials saw the draft agreement that Kissinger
hammered out with Le Duc Tho in their five-day session last
October. CIA Director Richard Helms obtained his copy through
his sources in Viet Nam and asked if the text was accurate. Said
Kissinger suavely: "It has the odious smell of the truth." On
another level, late one night before the election, Nixon came
back to Washington. The President told Kissinger that the two
of them had been on different journeys that day, but he believed
the roads led to the same goal.

    The relationships between the two has occasionally been
strained, however, most notably by a recent two-hour interview
that Kissinger foolishly granted to Italian Journalist Oriana
Fallaci. The quotes in that performance were so startling and
hubristic that some readers familiar with Kissinger's
intellectual style suspected Fallaci of embroidery. "President
Nixon showed great vigor, a great ability, even in picking me,"
Kissinger is quoted as saying, apparently in all seriousness;
of course he was quite right, but perhaps he should not have
been the one to say it. In an interview that fairly bristles
with the first person singular pronoun, Kissinger revealed that
he loved "acting alone" in his diplomacy: "The Americans love
the cowboy who comes into town all alone on his horse, and
nothing else. He acts and that is enough, being in the right
place at the right time, in sum a western. This romantic and
surprising character suits me because being alone has always
been part of my style."

    The idea of Kissinger as Jimmy Stewart has a certain
ridiculous charm, although the notion is probably closer to
Nixon's image of himself as expressed in Six Crises a decade
ago. In any case, the President's men were not amused. "About
this point," says one White House source, "it was high noon in
the old West Wing. At least a half dozen people who matter here
in the White House hit the ceiling when they read that story.
They called it the biggest ego trip anyone had ever taken." Soon
afterward, at press briefings, Zeigler pointedly and repeatedly
emphasized that the President was "giving instructions" to
Kissinger about the Paris negotiations, deflating any suggestion
that Kissinger was a diplomatic Destry. Since then, Kissinger
seems deliberately to have kept a very low profile -- although
that might have reflected discouragement with the progress of
the peace talks.

    The new spirit of national interest and Realpolitik
naturally dictated disengagement from Viet Nam. Yet Saigon's
hold on the U.S. was once again disastrously tenacious. Elected
in 1968 on a pledge to end the war, Nixon chose an
excruciatingly slow four-year policy of Vietnamization --
turning the war over to Thieu's forces -- as a means so he
thought, to salvage some "honor" from the commitment. His forays
to Moscow and Peking this year were decisive in turning Hanoi
toward serious secret negotiations; the critical moment came
last spring when, even after Nixon had gambled by mining the
harbors of the North, the Russians decided not to call off the
summit meeting.

The Reasons Why Peace Was Not at Hand
    At last, on Oct. 26, Kissinger made his now famous
misstatement: "Peace is at hand" in Viet Nam. The world's hopes
soared, the stock market leaped upward with Kissinger's
declaration: "What remains to be done can be settled in one more
negotiating session with the North Vietnamese negotiators,
lasting, I would think, no more than three or four days." But
between Oct. 26 and Dec. 16, the settlement that both sides
supposedly agreed upon disastrously unraveled. Kissinger blamed
the North Vietnamese for the impasse, and in calculated anger,
the President unleashed the most massive bombing of North Viet
Nam of the whole long war. One top Administration official said
last week that Nixon's behavior was influenced by the way in
which Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War. "You remember,"
the official said, "that the talks with North Korea were bogged
down. Ike took over and immediately ordered massive bombing of
North Korea, including the dikes. Nixon was Vice President then,
and he says that, however much of a peaceful image Ike struck,
his show of strength worked."

    In assigning blame, others looked to South Vietnamese
President Nguyen Van Thieu, who certainly was doing everything
in his power to torpedo the proposed agreement. Inevitably, too,
the Nixon-Kissinger relationship was scrutinized more earnestly
than ever for frictions. It became a journalistic fashion to
look for "light between" the President and his advisor. There
was some encouragement for this activity from within the White
House, notably from Haldeman, who considers himself an extension
of Nixon and deeply resents Kissinger's high profile and the
fact that Kissinger is not subordinate to him as is everyone
else on the President's staff. And it did not escape notice that
in his Dec. 16 briefing, Kissinger repeatedly emphasized that
it was the President who had to be satisfied with the
settlement.

    These scraps aside, there is no real evidence of strain
between the President and his advisor, perhaps because a careful
reconstruction of the chronology of events in Paris and Saigon
indicates both must share some responsibility for the breakdown
in reaching an agreement. Kissinger seems to have underestimated
the difficulty of the remaining "details" to be worked out. It
was odd for a man of Kissinger's caution to have been so euphoric
and expansive as he was on Oct. 26. His anticipation was too
great, relying too much on what he called the continued "good
will" of Hanoi and Le Duc Tho, with whom he evidently got on
well. He also underestimated the opposition of Thieu.

    For his part, Nixon, who fully understood what Kissinger
had brought back from Paris, backed off when Thieu balked. In
sending Kissinger back to the North Vietnamese to extract more
specific language in the draft on the sovereignty of South Viet
Nam, so as to meet some of Thieu's objections, Nixon alarmed
Hanoi, which believed it had a deal. In predictable riposte,
Hanoi then began asking for revisions of its own. As Kissinger
explained in his Oct. 26 briefing, an agreement had
finally seemed possible because the military and political
issues of the war were to be separated; a cease-fire now, then
politics and maneuvering among the Vietnamese for the ultimate
control of Saigon. By raising the sovereignty issue, among
others, Nixon sharpened a deliberately fuzzed point, bringing
the detailed politics of the settlement back into the present
negotiations. In other words, he insisted on nailing down
specifics where Kissinger and Tho had purposefully left them
vague, subject to future negotiations, as the only means of
reaching agreement.

    When Hanoi refused to buy, Nixon ordered the bombers aloft
to try to pressure the North Vietnamese. The heavy military
gamble, in his view, had paid off before, when he invaded
Cambodia in 1970, Laos in 1971, and mined Haiphong last May in
the face of criticism and protest in the U.S. The atmosphere
around the White House was even similar to last spring's, a mood
of coolness and toughness only occasionally soured by the
fulminations of the "doom and gloom brigade," as the Washington
press corps is called. Gambling had, in fact, become part of
Nixon's international style -- to seem deliberately
unpredictable, to let Hanoi, Moscow and Peking know that he was
capable of almost anything, to keep them off their guard. It
may be that he felt doubly confident this time in re-escalating
the war, for the U.S. election six weeks before may have
persuaded him, rightly or wrongly, that public opinion would be
solidly behind him.

The Election and Nixon's America
    The President, in fact, was spending much of the time last
week on his Inaugural Address, taking as his thematic starting
point Teddy Roosevelt's two Inaugurals emphasizing the
responsibilities of the U.S. as a world power and of individuals
as citizens. Its tone and confidence would surely reflect the
scale of his victory last November. With 49 states and 60.7% of
the ballots cast, Nixon's landslide ranked with Lyndon Johnson's
in 1964 and Franklin Roosevelt's in 1936. The appearance of a
mandate was there, but it was in some sense deceptive. Nixon's
men claimed the endorsement of a "new Republican majority," but
they were ignoring the widespread ticket-splitting that occurred
at the polls. In the House, the G.O.P. picked up only 13 seats,
and in the Senate, where Republicans needed five to claim
control, they lost two seats. That left the Democrats ahead 57
to 43 in the Senate and 243 to 192 in the House, where three
seats will be declared vacant. The Democrats also made a net
gain of one governorship.

    It was, as everyone said, a peculiar election. Aided by the
Democratic reforms that he himself had helped to institute,
George McGovern seized control of the nation's majority party
and then so mishandled it that the election became a referendum
less on issues and ideologies than on the personal competence
of the two men. Issues of economic and social justice became
lost in a tangle of doubts about McGovern himself. First he
proposed a $1,000-a-year guarantee for every American, only to
revise the suggestion later. Then came the Eagleton affair,
McGovern never could shake the charge, however unfair, that he
was the candidate of "amnesty, acid and abortion." He was, too
many voters believed, and indecisive radical -- the worst kind.

    Somehow, McGovern deeply misjudged the American psyche. In
part, he was defeated by a mood of reaction against the '60s,
against the counterculture, against permissiveness, against
social programs for blacks, against excessive welfare spending.
Yet the nation was not engaged in a precipitate swing to the
right, rather is was apprehensive about too rapid change and
about George McGovern as a leader.

    When Arthur Bremer gunned down George Wallace in a Maryland
shopping center last May, Richard Nixon's re-election was all
but assured. He picked up the vast majority of Wallace votes in
November.

    Given the McGovern nomination, Nixon waged a comfortable
non-campaign from the incumbent's traditional stance of
statesmanship-above-the-battle. The economy, one issue that
might have sunk the Republicans, was humming along toward
recovery. Scandals, or near scandals, erupted, infecting the
political air with a sour smell. First there was ITT, with the
suggestion that the Justice Department dropped antitrust suits
against the corporation in return for at least a $200,000
subsidy of the G.O.P convention. Agents with ties to the
Committee for the Re-Election of the President and to the White
House were arrested after breaking into the Democratic National
Committee's Watergate headquarters to remove electronic bugs
planted there earlier. Nixon's campaign was heavily financed by
anonymous donors. Yet none of those issues took hold in a
serious way, none of them seemed to make much difference. Says
Paul Asciolla, a liberal priest and editor in Chicago: "Nixon
was smart. He talked about the football blackout when McGovern
was going on and on about the bombing. He talked about safety
in the streets when McGovern concentrated on Watergate."

    Americans were not all that callous or indifferent. Yet
they seemed, in a sense, disengaged from the large political and
social and military issues that had demanded so much of them in
the decade past. There was some sense of endorsing the status
quo, or of improving it gradually; a nation bombarded by
rhetoric through the 60's did not take to McGovern's apocalyptic
language. This disengagement undoubtedly worked to Nixon's
political advantage in the election, just as it gave him,
paradoxically, the freedom with which to pursue his boldest
international ventures.

    But generalized portraits of a national mind have a
tendency toward caricature. America is -- has always been -- a
mosaic of inconsistencies, of deeply contradictory and often
unexpected impulses. The language of "liberal" and
"conservative," of "Middle American" and "radical," usually lags
behind the real changes. Thus, for example, William F. Buckley
now favors decriminalization of marijuana. Black Panther Bobby
Seale is running for mayor of Oakland, Calif., and between those
conservative and radical poles, the mass of Americans exhibit
a complexity that defies tidy compartmentalization.

    Nixon has taken more and more of articulating his own
vision of America. At its core is his profound conviction that
the real America, the heartland America, the land of the
Founders' virtues, has somehow been betrayed by the liberal
Eastern media and by Government and academic intellectuals who
grew up in the legacy of the New Deal. Without those enemies,
the President seems to believe, the nation would belong to
itself again.

Something Less than the New Revolution
    But when he articulates this vision, Nixon on occasion
deals in simplicities of virtue, spiritual nostalgia, even
paternalistic atavism that are as unrealistic as the excesses
of radical rhetoric. In an extraordinary interview he granted
to the Washington Star-News before the election NIxon said "The
average American is just like the child in the family. You give
him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something.
If on the other hand you make him completely dependent and
pamper him and cater to him too much, you are going to make him
soft, spoiled and eventually a very weak individual."

    For all the dazzle -- and trials -- of his foreign
relations, Nixon's domestic record in the first four years has
represented something less than his "New American Revolution."
When the President heralded that objective two years ago, he
listed six major goals: revenue sharing, government
reorganization, health insurance reform, welfare reform, full
employment and new environmental initiatives. Of those efforts,
only general revenue sharing has been approved by a hostile
Congress; the other goals have proceeded fitfully or not at all.
Most of Nixon's domestic efforts in Congress have involved
beating back passage of bills the Administration regarded as too
expensive. When that failed, he resorted to the veto or, as in
the case of the very expensive water-pollution bill, he simply
refused to spend all the funds authorized.

    In the Nixon years, federal spending has mounted massively,
but in his second term the President will try to curb the rate
of increase. It is also going through a period of rough riding
for the President on Capital Hill. Majority Leader Mike
Mansfield has announced that he will pursue ways to develop
Democratic alternatives to White House proposals. In fact,
chances are that Nixon will simply not propose a great deal, but
will concentrate on trying to run more efficiently the vast
number of federal programs already in being. The middle and
blue-collar classes certainly do not want to pay more taxes for
programs which, they feel, benefit mostly the blacks or other
members of what socialists call the "under class." But there may
be some areas -- for instance, medical care or the environment
-- where even Nixon's own constituency may eventually become
dissatisfied in the absence of greater federal effort.

    Nixon's victory hardly caused a mood of merriment to
descend on Republican Washington. "We are sore winners," said
one Cabinet member. The morning after the election the President
demanded resignations from 2,000 politically appointed members
of his Administration, including his entire Cabinet, so that he
could clean house as he chose. Only four of his eleven Cabinet
members will still be at their desks after Jan. 20, plus Elliot
Richardson, who moves from HEW to the Department of Defense.
The only obvious pattern in the changes is an emphasis on
managers, budget trimmers -- and loyalists. But the large
turnover, which is being reflected in lesser posts down the
line, serves a larger management purpose in Nixon's mind. Nixon
told reporters in a post-election Camp David meeting: "The
tendency is for an Administration to run out of steam after the
first four years, and then to coast, and usually coast
downhill." Too often, he observed, anyone in government "after
a certain length of time becomes an advocate of the status quo,
rather than running the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy runs him."

From Privacy to People, Power and Peace
    What Nixon seems not inclined to tamper with is the staff
of his palace guard, whose pettiness and unswerving zealotry,
many would argue, do not serve the President well. More than
ever, Nixon lives in isolation, avoiding the press as much as
possible as he moves from Camp David to Key Biscayne to San
Clemente, reveling in the privacy that those retreats provide
him. He treats Congress as an entity to be ignored or an
obstacle to be surmounted, often to the distress of its members
even in his own party. Although the Administration during the
campaign observed a moratorium in its vendetta with the press,
it has now begun a calculated drive to frighten the TV networks
into more "balanced" coverage.

    His critics call him remote and heartless, but Nixon
believes that he is linked in a mysterious way to the great
American majority -- the silent American, the middle American,
the middle class, the middle-aged. He believes a majority of
Americans share his vision of a traditionalist revival, of
trying to make less government work better, of encouraging local
remedies and local responsibilities for local problems. It is
his version of power to the people, and it is a power he thinks
can be harnessed to change the direction and spirit of the
country for good. Observes TIME's High Sidey: "He is out to lay
claim to a whole counter-counterculture, this one the culture
of Middle America."

    Abroad, Nixon will now concentrate on making his
Realpolitik an ongoing reality through SALT II, world trade and
money agreements, the slow, patient task of redefining ties with
old allies. By visiting China and Russia, Nixon and Kissinger
have constructed a triangular world order with Japan and the
major European powers also invited to play new roles in his
"generation of peace." All this could, of course, be undone if
President and Advisor cannot end the war in Southeast Asia. It
remains, as it was, incredibly, four long years ago, Nixon's
and Kissinger's first and most vital priority, a possible
destroyer of the best of presidencies and policies. Together the
Men of the Year accomplished much in 1972, but the essential
achievement continued to elude them.