The cartoonist Herblock recently published a cartoon which showed Dr. Henry Kissinger applying for a marriage license with his bride-to-be, “Miss Secretary of State.” She was wheeling a baby carriage with a four-year-old child who was a miniature Henry. This cartoon told more eloquently than words the fact that the appointment of Dr. Kissinger as Secretary of State is the mere solemnizing of a 4 1/2-year-old living arrangement.
Dr. Kissinger is not an unknown quantity, as many Cabinet officers have been prior to their appointments. He has a clear and definable record of public service which ought to be evaluated at the time of a new appointment. He has not only been running our foreign policy, but he has also been in control of our defense policy and our intelligence.
The principal alleged achievement of Dr. Kissinger’s public service is the SALT Treaty, which was drafted under his close supervision down to the last fateful minutes before President Nixon signed it in Moscow with full television coverage at midnight on May 26 last year.
Every individual and every nation should have the inalienable right of self-defense; to take this away violates the first law of nature. Yet, the SALT Treaty prohibits our national right of self-defense by forbidding anti-ballistic missiles to protect our people.
Although the U.S. Constitution states that to”provide for the common defense” is one of the first duties of our Government, Dr. Kissinger has given us, in SALT, a Treaty which leaves us defenseless against incoming enemy missiles, whether they be Soviet or Red Chinese, accidentally launched or deliberately launched. Like the emperor in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale called “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” we are naked and nobody talks about it. We are naked because we have no defenses against enemy missiles, and nobody talks about it because Henry Kissinger says we are clothed with a piece of paper signed by the Russians and with invitations to visit Red China.
Dr. Kissinger simply gave in to Soviet demands that we not protect our cities or the cities of our allies. In so doing, he adopted the discredited M.A.D. theory of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. M.A.D. stands for Mutual Assured Destruction, and is the crackpot theory that we are safer if our cities are sitting ducks for enemy attack than we would be if defended by ABMs.
In arranging that all our intelligence gathering facilities feed into his hands. Dr. Kissinger has placed himself in a position where he must accept responsibility for our intelligence failures. He must realize this because he recently publicly accepted responsibility for the failure of U.S. intelligence to discover the Soviet Union’s disastrous grain harvest last year, despite our superb satellite surveillance expert that it can read print in a book from miles in the sky.
Dr. Kissinger personally announced the Soviet grain deal at a press conference at San Clemente on July 8,1972, and it is a key part of his new rapprochement with the Soviet Union. If our intelligence had reported the true facts about the harvest disaster in time, we could have charged the Soviets the full price for the grain, instead of making the American taxpayers pay $800 million so the Russians can enjoy cheap bread at only 23 ¢ per loaf.
The Senate has a solemn obligation to make a thorough study of Dr. Kissinger’s 4 1/2-year record.
