In the Yom Kippur War, Strategic Vision Mattered Most

A friend of mine once asked the former secretary of state George Schultz what makes a good secretary of state. “It helps to have a few ideas,” Schultz responded. He wasn’t joking. In the upper ranks of the State Department, one encounters a special type of person, the highly literate non-intellectual. Starting at the assistant-secretary level and moving higher, one encounters well-educated men and women who have often spent long stints at major universities and prestigious research institutes, minds who possess all the necessary machinery to process, shape, and compare ideas with ease. Capable of writing and speaking fluidly, they also present ideas in such a compelling fashion that one is left with the impression that ideas actually matter to them.

But they don’t. The character traits that propel a person up the greasy pole of political power and the traits that foster a commitment to the life of the mind often negate one another. The people who typically attain the title of secretary of state aspire in their heart of hearts to serve their political party or their nation, generally, or simply to exist beautifully at the upper rungs of government. Advancing a specific worldview is the last thing on their minds. Power, not ideas, motivates them.

And then there is that rarest of beings, Henry Kissinger, a secretary of state with deep intellectual commitments who also possessed a remarkable capacity to amass power. In the Nixon administration he enjoyed the strong, almost unconditional support of the president, who, sharing a commitment to the same ideas, hired Kissinger purely based on intellectual affinity. Thanks to their colorful personalities, their personal faults, and the political scandals and controversies that roiled the Nixon administration, the Vulcan mind-meld between president and secretary of state and the importance that both men placed on ideas often do not receive the attention they deserve. Any account of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy that fails to focus on their ideas misses the main storyline.