'Secretaries of State and the Practice of International Affairs'

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 19, 2006

Elliott School of

International Affairs

George Washington

University

Spring 2006,

Thursdays, 5:10-7 p.m.

Henry A. Kissinger, evil incarnate to many in an earlier generation of college students, provokes little outrage in the current crop of future leaders. When a group of graduate students recently considered his record as secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations, they used words such as: "Gravel-voiced . . . intellectual . . . stylish . . . bureaucratic master . . . lone cowboy . . . sneaky . . . ruthless . . . pompous."

Pioneer of detente with the Soviet Union and China, advocate of withdrawal from Vietnam after a "decent interval," winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Middle East negotiator and alleged war criminal as the architect of President Richard M. Nixon's controversial policy in Chile, Kissinger was also a cultural icon. Back then, he was known for squiring photogenic young women around Washington and for providing material for late-night comics as well as antiwar demonstrators. John Belushi regularly impersonated Kissinger on "Saturday Night Live" (with Dan Aykroyd as Nixon); Monty Python wrote a song about him:

Henry Kissinger

How I'm missing yer

You're the doctor of my dreams

With your crinkly hair and your glassy stare

And your Machiavellian schemes . . .

Yet the 16 master's degree candidates gathered late last month for the final session of a course called "Secretaries of State and the Practice of International Affairs" found Kissinger lacking. Their choice as the most effective secretary in recent years was James A. Baker III. As chief diplomat in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, they noted, he shepherded the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany and the international coalition that fought the Persian Gulf War without a hitch.

Karl F. Inderfurth, a GWU professor of international affairs whose several diplomatic posts in the Clinton administration included assistant secretary for South Asia, began holding the class in mid-January with reading assignments that included memoirs by Kissinger and most of the eight men and two women who followed him as secretary of state, along with material about the office and the practice of diplomacy. The goal was to define the job, measure the performance of recent occupants and determine the ingredients of success.

To set the scene, Inderfurth sent the students back to John Quincy Adams, the nation's ninth secretary of state and one of only a handful who stayed the course with a two-term president (Cordell Hull topped them all with a whopping 11 1/2 years under President Franklin D. Roosevelt). "Grant active powers, grant fervid zeal, and guide by thy control," Adams wrote in a prayer penned as he assumed his duties on Sept. 21, 1817.

Inderfurth also provided students with excerpts from James Chace's biography of Dean Acheson, who served under President Harry S. Truman. "So great is the scope, so vast the tasks, so limitless the horizons," Acheson once wrote of being secretary of state, "that vital powers are exercised far beyond what one had thought of as his strength." He compared the sense of power to a drug addiction and said that once it ended, the "outstanding sensation is of the flatness of life."

An overview of Kissinger's tenure was the last of a series of student research presentations that had covered George P. Shultz in the Reagan administration; Baker; Madeleine K. Albright in the Clinton administration; President George W. Bush's first secretary of state, Colin L. Powell; and Powell's successor, Condoleezza Rice.

Donning black glasses with fuzzy eyebrows attached, the Kissinger group pledged to "dissemble the myth" of the 57th secretary of state. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, began Adam Harrison, and his childhood experiences had left him wary of "chaos and disorder" and with a deep-seated dislike of "moral crusades." Maggie Tien described Kissinger's self-image as a "lonely, heroic leader" who found the State Department bureaucracy an encumbrance.

After detente, Vietnam and Chile, Kissinger's star fell along with Nixon's during Watergate, they said. Although he continued as secretary of state under President Gerald R. Ford, he feuded with Donald H. Rumsfeld, Ford's defense secretary.

Summing up, Inderfurth asked the class which secretary had brought the most useful background to the job. Ann Kabagambe wondered whether Kissinger and Albright, both born outside the United States, "looked at the world differently" from the rest. Perhaps Kissinger had purposely kept his German accent as a diplomatic "selling point," she observed.

Inderfurth asked about Rice, the current secretary. Had her upbringing as an African American child of the segregated South made her a more compelling promoter of Bush's "democracy agenda?" Kabagambe was dismissive, saying, "I think that out there in the world nobody really buys that concept of a poor black girl in foreign policy."

Tien thought that Baker's background in politics had made him more pragmatic. "He sees that diplomacy is rooted in politics," she said, and he had a political relationship with his president.

Retired Army Gen. Powell had been loath to interfere with the Pentagon, said Shirin Zamani, and had played "good soldier" in the current Bush administration. "I think that maybe led to him not being as effective as he could have been."

They agreed that Kissinger, with his immigrant background and professorship at Harvard, had brought the most to the job. But having the best preparation did not necessarily make him the best steward of foreign policy. "Kissinger did a great job pushing his foreign policy goals, but whether they were the right ones is a very different question," one student said.

Although Baker easily was voted the most effective statesman, no one in the class would have wanted to work for him. When asked who they would have worked for, several students called out Powell's name but pulled back, wondering how satisfying it would be to work for a secretary whose power was curtailed by the White House.

"Can you say Powell if it was under a different administration?" asked Jason Spellberg.

"You can't change administrations," Inderfurth ruled. In that case, the students decided, they would go with Shultz.

Class Notes is an occasional peek into the classrooms of current and former government officials teaching the next generation expected to join their ranks.