Kissinger's Old-Boy Network

While on a visit to Washington, D.C., a few years ago, Israeli Knesset Member Gad Yaacobi picked up his hotel telephone early one morning and dialed the White House. Asking for Henry Kissinger's office, Yaacobi identified himself and explained that he would like to drop by to talk to the President's foreign policy adviser. Normally, such a request from a relatively unimportant visitor would be brushed aside as an intrusion on Kissinger's carefully rationed tune. Yaacobi's appointment, however, was promptly arranged for 4 p.m. that same day. Recalling the incident last week with a grin, Yaacobi explained: "I guess that's what you call having an in."

Like Yaacobi, several dozen other non-Americans have a similar in with the U.S. Secretary of State. They are alumni of Harvard University's six-week summer International Seminar, run by Kissinger for 18 consecutive summers, until he joined the White House staff. Each year he selected about 40 men and women from abroad who had already started their careers and who, he figured, might eventually become leaders in their own countries.

Kissinger chose well: among the graduates of his seminars are Belgium's prospective Prime Minister Leo Tinde-mans, West German Minister for Economic Cooperation Erhard Eppler, Israeli Deputy Premier Yigal Allon, South Korean former Prime Minister Chung II Kwon, Japanese Minister of Trade and Industry Yasuhiro Nakasone, Norwegian Foreign Minister Knut Frydenlund, and such prominent nongovernment figures as West German Editor Theo Sommer and British Historian Michael Foot.

In conversations with TIME correspondents last week, many of Kissinger's "old boys" remembered him as a reserved, hard-working scholar without flamboyance. Belgium's former Finance Minister Andre Vlerick (seminar of '53) recalled: "Henry Kissinger was very shy and timid. He was self-conscious about being considered a foreigner by the Americans."

While some alumni recall that Kissinger at times was overbearing and a stickler for rules, none deny his unmistakable intellectual brilliance. A European student of Kissinger's in 1962 who is now a senior official in his own country remembers that "one had to be alert in Kissinger's class or else one would be pushed quickly against the wall. The seminars were fencing matches, one hit after the other. His strong weapon in arguing was irony. We all loved it. He was never boring, always relating to what was actually happening."

Some former students occasionally dig out their old seminar notebooks for insight into Kissinger's current policies.

Yaacobi says that his 1967 notes contain "a very precise plan of what subsequently happened in America's relations with China, Viet Nam, Russia and the Middle East." Tindemans feels that Washington's present difficulties with Europe were anticipated by Kissinger in 1962: "He realized that Europe would want to take an independent stand, but warned that Europe must accept the consequences of its policy."

Many former students claim that their exposure to Kissinger in the seminars has helped them to understand certain key elements in his approach to foreign policy: an undisguised disdain for bureaucracy, an impatience with Utopian ideas, and an ability to view power relationships unencumbered by ideology. Several former students remarked that Kissinger had no apparent heroes, and that his supposed admiration for Metternich has been considerably exaggerated. Some Asian and Middle Eastern students criticize him on the grounds that he viewed the world in European terms and understood little about the Third World.

Like most teachers, Kissinger is pleased to see his former students succeed. At diplomatic receptions, he enjoys greeting foreign officials as "my old student." He must have been especially delighted at the opening of last year's Middle East peace conference in Geneva, where Tahseen Basheer was the Egyptian spokesman and his Israeli counterpart was Meron Medzini. Both are Kissinger alumni.

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