Travels with Joe

Kissinger and Kraft in China

When he accompanied President Ford to China in 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was trailed by the customary entourage of diplomatic correspondents, television commentators and syndicated columnists. When Kissinger disclosed that he would be returning to the People's Republic as a private citizen last month, some of his former traveling companions asked to go along. Only one was chosen: Columnist Joseph Kraft.

Kraft was a logical choice. He had known Kissinger for years and had been a student of China since his World War II days as a cryptographer in the Pacific. He had been to the country five times before, and over the years had turned out a stream of China-related columns and one book, The Chinese Difference (1973). "It's still pretty good," says Kraft. "I didn't go ape on the Chinese or the new Maoist man or anything like that."

Nor did Kraft go overboard in praise of China on this latest, ten-day trip to five cities. The five columns he wrote portray China as beset by ideological and economic confusion, and disappointed with what Peking perceives as the U.S.'s unwillingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Kraft did far less independent wandering than on his previous trips, but visited more museums and historic sites. "This was the first time that I bathed in the sea of Chinese history," he says. "I had the almost existential sense of these 6,000 years of rising civilization in China."

The Kissinger party met with top Chinese leaders, including Party Chairman Hua Guofeng, Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping and Foreign Minister Huang Hua. Kraft reports he was surprised to find that Vice Premier Deng, only recently regarded as the undisputed leader of China, "seemed restrained, almost wistful--not the self-confident boss secure at the top of the greasy pole he so often climbed before." By contrast, the columnist found Deng's reputed rival, Party Chairman Hua, to be "well informed and composed He didn't give the impression of someone being threatened from below."

Kraft, who coined the term Middle America in 1968, has in recent years moved more to the middle himself. Once tagged a liberal, he now considers himself an "antipopulist," and believes that egalitarianism can breed mediocrity.

"This country eats up elites for breakfast," he explains. "Yet it's necessary to preserve some kind of quality--quality of education, of birth, of leadership, whatever," An early and tough critic of the Carter Administration, Kraft is not universally popular, but is must reading in Washington. He uses a priceless list of elite sources to compile his thrice-weekly column (syndicated by Field Enterprises to 250 newspapers) and frequent magazine articles (usually for The New Yorker). Kraft writes from a comfortable study in his Georgetown home, but he travels so incessantly that his office is more often some foreign hotel room.

Kraft's detractors complain that he can be exasperatingly self-important, in print and in person. If he lacks the stylistic grace of George Will or the punning ebullience of William Safire, he makes up for it in soundness and breadth of subject matter. Straight-faced, Kraft describes a typical dilemma last week: "This morning when I got up I didn't know if I would write about Rhodesia or about Carter and Brown or about the surge in business investment. I finally decided on Carter and Brown." Says Richard Strout, Christian Science Monitor correspondent: "Washington is getting more difficult and technical all the time, but Kraft manages to be familiar with a wide range of things." That can be a problem, though. Says Kraft: "I get in trouble when I want to do two things at once."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.