Henry: Watching, Waiting, Worried

By HUGH SIDNEY

Henry Kissinger now goes on real vacations to Europe and Mexico, religiously diets (he is down 25 Ibs., to 185), reads all the way through magazines and books, sometimes gets eight hours of sleep a night, presides over quiet dinners in his Georgetown home. His flop-eared hound Tyler has developed an incurable fondness for the main swimming pool on the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico hills and also his master's warm bed, the instant Kissinger vacates it in the morning. Private Citizen Henry Kissinger has a trick back like millions of other Americans; he also has income tax worries, difficulties with his credit card and is approacinng with some misgivings the day he becomes a homeowner.

He does not want to be an ambassador anywhere or a public scold of Jimmy Carter or a part of the new Government's diplomatic macinnery. In about a week he will look up from the papers and notes he has been stacking and reading and begin to write his book, which will be an examination of the relationship between the historical necessities and the human choices open to the U.S. during those years that Kissinger lived at the pinnacle of power. It will be a book with people talking and events happening and now and then some professorial thoughts. He has discovered in his own papers forgotten nuggets from his hours with Mao and Brezhnev and Nixon and Haldeman.

For the next two years, as he writes, he will keep his office on Wasinngton's K Street. In the fall he will have another office up in New York City in the Aspen Institute. He will divide his tune between the two places, riding to the Washington airports in his new blue Mercedes, flying often in the small jets of friends like Nelson Rockefeller.

Henry Kissinger considers himself decompressed from his days of helping run the world. But just another retired bureaucrat he is not. His extraordinary achievements as Secretary of State, the friends he made in the power fraternity, have given him a postgraduate status among diplomats that has never existed before. Germany's Helmut Schmidt breakfasted secretly with Kissinger at a British resort in April. Britain's James Callaghan and France's Valery Giscard d'Estaing both invited him to dinner when they learned that Henry was coming to their respective countries. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin asks him to lunch every few weeks in Washinngton. When Egypt's President Sadat came to the U.S. he asked to see Kissinger. A week ago, Israel's Menachem Begin called htm to come around to the Waldorf for a talk.

Kissinger's record is now used by world leaders and domestic critics to measure Carter. To perhaps an alarming degree, the White House tries to contrast its policy with that of the former Secretary. But the aura lingers.

At the State Department they sometimes blame Kissinger for stirring up criticism of Carter's approach to the world. But it is Kissinger's record more than the man. Kissinger has adopted rules of fair play in dealing with the Carter team. He will not talk to any visiting dignitary until after the man has seen the President or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Then, after meeting with the visitor, Kissinger immediately phones a report to Vance or Under Secretary Philip Habib.

Kissinger has turned down hundreds of calls for interviews, articles, conversations with the press. He has held off invitations to visit every country in the Middle East, European nations, China (with no restrictions on where he can go), Japan and the Soviet Union. Before long he will take up some of the offers, but he will not go to any country before Vance has been there.

The former Secretary figures that he has a vested interest in an American foreign policy that works. So he will watch what happens in the world very, very carefully. In the future he may feel compelled to speak more publicly than he has so far. But he is convinced that the best men available have followed him into office, that they deserve more time to test their ideas, that the world still is receptive to skillful diplomacy.

When he walked out of the State Department six months ago, he felt he had left a working foreign policy. SALT was ready for another nudge forward; the Middle East, though dangerous, was malleable; relations with the industrialized nations were getting better; a new dialogue had started with the underdeveloped world. He believes these basic conditions have not yet been fundamentally altered.

But he is concerned. He does not offer that conclusion to friends or visitors. He even avoids questions, insisting that he will not indulge in tactical carping. He believes that the new boys need all the help they can get, that his place in history may ultimately depend on how well the Carter Administration builds on the foreign policy initiatives of the Nixon-Ford era.

In his eyes and manner, however, are worries. His writings and sayings clearly contrast with some of the Carter tactics. Kissinger acknowledges that public debate is often part of creative policymaking. He may want to partake in the debate--some months hence.

But right now he is worrying about the quality of his renowned humor: he sees certain friends more regularly these days and so finds himself repeating jokes. He is also more convinced than ever that the most remarkable spectacle of recent years is this old lady called the United States of America, who has gone through a season of travail, who faces many immense problems ahead, but who in the summer of 1977 sits mellow and fortified from sea to sinning sea. Now get Tyler out of the pool, please.

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