Arkady told me, and I found myself shaking hands with a bland, spectacled little man. I’ve asked myself many times since if it was really a man at all. I’d heard rumors of the wunderkind of foreign policy, genius of Bavaria and the Upper West Side. Heinz Alfred Kissinger, called Henry, refugee, bright star of Harvard and the RAND Corporation. I’d been curious to meet him, a man in politics who was famous for being smart. In person, he was thickset, alert, but somehow sly. He had something in common with Eisenhower, that sense of a calculating intelligence kept well out of sight.“Pleased to meet you,” I said.“I am very much looking forward to your presidency,” he said in that German accent with a tenor lilt. He looked up at me shyly.“I’m sorry?”“Henry has very interesting ideas about you,” Arkady said. “He’s done a lot of thinking about what’s happening in the world right now.”“Indeed I have, Mr. Nixon. I will come to the point: the current outlook is most unfavorable for the West.
