A World Getting Closer Together

By Hugh Sidey

BEYOND the dollar storms and the sump that is Watergate, there is a bigger world, and it is coming together in a manner that brings some hope this springtime. In that world, the Richard Nixon of the long head and the calm eye resides. There, too, walks Henry Kissinger, the most remarkable presidential creation of this century. The two are trying to cement global tranquillity into permanent peace.

That goal is still Nixon's special preoccupation. He eagerly asks Kissinger about North Viet Nam's Le Due Tho: "What kind of man is he?" Then he listens to the traveling professor spin out his stories, which by now are better than those of Marco Polo.

Something new is taking focus, something that neither Nixon nor Kissinger fully comprehends as the two men spend their lonely evenings in the Lincoln Sitting Room. There is a fraternity of nations and men who are linked to each other by personal encounter and by friendship of sorts, by poetry and philosophy and economics, and finally by the feel of power.

There were in Hanoi the first hints for Kissinger from his overly polite hosts that they were considering what it might be like to spend their time and energy building a society rather than warring. It was hardly spoken, a fragile wisp of human yearning that hung on the idea that America might help them. Kissinger clutched it and brought it home, and Nixon is now nurturing it.

"They all have a stake in it," Kissinger says. They have been dealt in by Nixon. They can have a summit or some help, and there is a brighter future in trade than in bombs.

When the stories increase about the trouble between Russia and China, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin comes around to the White House more often for lunch, and Kissinger goes up 16th Street to the Russian embassy frequently. The coziness grows in direct proportion to the increasing tension between Russia and China. Each meeting with China's Premier Chou En-lai is better than the last, the talk easier, and the banquets more bountiful. Kissinger is up a few pounds.

Richard Nixon is banking that a future coalition of previously contending nations will act like a magnet, and that soon even irascible India will be drawn in for her own good. Nixon understands the world. "It's a street scene to him," Kissinger once said in admiration. "You talk of Saigon or Karachi or almost any place, and he has been there. He can see it and hear it and smell it."

When the oceans separate the two men, they talk by cable, and that special familiarity with the world is invaluable. Nixon sets the goals and leaves the details to Kissinger. Once, when the professor burdened the President with too many odds and ends from Paris, Nixon told him not to do it again.

Kissinger has devised a totally new diplomatic approach. He brought a special compassion for human misery and an understanding of the political problems of other men that in the end transcended even the awesome Kissinger ego. That compassion is rooted in his past, and there is no better explanation than his simple statement: "My father was a very loving man."

Kissinger set the pace slow. He listened and listened--hours of searching out the minds of these former adversaries to imagine what they thought, what they faced and what they wanted. "Dean Rusk had it right," says Kissinger. "What is important is to know what the man thinks about in the morning when he is shaving."

Now, in the National Security Council, they are asking not just how many missiles Russia has (they know), but how come Marshal Grechko, the Soviet Defense Minister, wants those missiles? What's he afraid of? And how come Poet-Philosopher Marshal Yeh Chien-ying thinks he needs those millions of men ready to march? You would think we would have asked these questions a long time ago, but no, not until Nixon have we really wondered.

One gets the feeling these days that maybe Nixon-Kissinger will be a longer-lasting twosome than many think. The relationship works too well; it is too important to be broken up. Change would be too risky. History strongly suggests that what Richard Nixon s and Henry Kissinger are doing now can never be done again. They seem gloriously caught up in it, like all the other men of power in this unusual time.

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