'We Are Going to Win-But How?'

By Hugh Sidey

James Schlesinger was back in a little office last week, stuffing his pipe full of Sir Walter Raleigh, quoting Heraclitus ("Character is destiny"), pondering his singular journey through the high corridors of power and his sudden descent. He had for the moment somewhat the look of a trapped creature, with the low ceiling of the office at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies pressing down on him.

The huge office of the Secretary of Defense fit his large frame better. His reach then went to Sitka, Bonn and Tokyo, instead of across a single desk piled with mail. He used to command 3.1 million people. He now has one secretary.

But though his surroundings were changed, his power base taken away, he was remarkably the same man who had inhabited the dim offices of the Budget Bureau some seven years ago when his Government career started.

With his close friends, he brooded about what had happened to him and why. But this weekend, when he decided to go public, he locked all those personal matters away and vowed he would not raise them as he crusades for a strong defense, for a clearer national vision of where we are going. One could almost hear the relief over at the State Department because the chastened Henry Kissinger, blamed by some (and maybe even by Schlesinger) for the firing, worried to his aides that Schlesinger might be more of a problem outside the Government than in it.

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Gerald Ford has not communicated with Schlesinger since the Sunday morning when he dismissed him. That silence is significant, more for Ford than Schlesinger, because the world has spoken. Hundreds of letters and telegrams and countless telephone calls have rolled over him. Job offers have piled up -invitations to lecture, to teach, to write. Then last week came a moment of special satisfaction for Schlesinger, who at times had walked a lonely path. The Senate voted to commend him "for his excellence in office, his intellectual honesty and personal integrity, and for his Senate, such language is quite courage and independence." Even in the unusual.

Through his years at the AEC, the CIA and the Pentagon, he grasped his subjects well, but there was something more about him -an extra dimension.

His mind never stopped at his department's doorstep and never got bogged down in palace intrigue.

So last week he ticked off his reasons for pride in his years at the Pentagon -keeping the defense strong, making nuclear strategy more flexible, holding the military together after Viet Nam. Then, as usual, there was more. Skepticism has gone too far, he believes. It has forced concentration on things that don't matter, like perceiving conspiracies and finding villains for the sheer sport of it. He worried about family structures weakening, and whether the schools are good enough to produce the people we need now. So much of the national disillusion, he felt, had been planted in the classrooms in past years.

Schlesinger showed no bitterness as he sounded his call. "The United States retains the moral responsibility to serve as the guardian of freedom around the world," he said quietly. "No other nation can do it." Then he smiled and said, "I feel like that intelligence officer who was at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and, looking around at the disaster, said, 'We are going to win this war. But God bless my soul if I know how.' " He is going out now to look for that answer to the new American challenge, which is to live securely in a world where for the first time our resources are limited and our adversaries are as strong as we are.

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