The State Department: New U in the Fudge Factory

THE STATE DEPARTMENT

The U.S. ambassador to Guinea was under house arrest, and hostile mobs screamed the standard litany of anti-American slogans outside the embassy.

Last week’s outburst in Conakry (see THE WORLD) was admittedly only a mini-crisis by postwar standards. Nonetheless, it provided a lively climax to Under Secretary of State Nicholas deB.

Katzenbach’s first month in the State Department — which included four days in Viet Nam and two weeks as Acting Secretary of State while Dean Rusk was attending the Manila Conference.

Though hardly a stranger to domestic crisis, Katzenbach, 44, had had no direct experience with foreign policy be fore his appointment in September.

Since then the former Attorney General has spent nearly every waking hour learning the red-taped ropes of diplomacy. Days, including Saturday and most of Sunday, have begun shortly after 8 a.m., ended 13 hours later. After 21 straight days without going home for dinner, Katzenbach finally had his family to supper with him at Foggy Bottom, then plowed through the torrent of dispatches at his desk while his children watched Tarzan on the undersecretarial color TV set.

The Right Questions. More instructive than the files, which he devours at a 1,000-words-a-minute clip, have been his skull sessions within the department. Applying the Socratic approach, which he learned as a law professor at Yale and the University of Chicago,’ Katzenbach stirs up debate and, in the words of one participant, “asks the right questions and plenty of them.”

Big (6 ft. 2 in.), bearish Nick Katzenbach—one of the few men in Washington who call Rusk by his first name—could not present a greater physical contrast to George Ball, who ably occupied State’s No. 2 post for more than five years. The elegantly attired Ball was never seen in shirtsleeves or without a vest; Katzenbach makes the most expensively tailored suit look as if it came from the thrift shop. (Yet, as he explained to amused associates, he will always be U—the traditional designation of the Under Secretary in the department’s phone book.) The Under Secretary’s door was usually closed during Ball’s tenure; it is now usually open. Ball was almost exclusively preoccupied with European unity and had a theologian’s hostility toward Charles de Gaulle. Katzenbach is constitutionally open minded and has a rare gusto for new facts, theories, arguments.

Indeed, Katzenbach’s restless, probing nature should more than outweigh his present lack of experience in foreign relations. Lyndon Johnson, like John

Kennedy before him, has complained about the lack of new ideas from the State Department. Rusk, because of temperament and pressure of time, has been unable to build a strong, creative secretariat that can anticipate problems before they reach the fire-bell stage or recognize when a policy has outlived its usefulness. Building a flexible, imaginative second-level team that will not shy from new approaches will now be Katzenbach’s most pressing task.

Home Thoughts. After weeks of listening, learning and prodding, the new Under Secretary last week catalogued his initial impressions before the Foreign Service officers who run what Ball fondly called “the fudge factory.” After a quote-heavy speech, with references ranging all the way from Lyndon Johnson and Oliver Cromwell to Heraclitus and Anatole France (commenting on Kant), Katzenbach concluded: “Can I urge each and every one of you that you have got political problems at home and that you should be as shrewd observers and as concerned about politics here in the United States—about what public opinion is and about what the Congress is doing—as you are about the politics of foreign countries?”

His point was well taken. In the always-sensitive realm of congressional relations, the department has not been notably successful of late. Rusk has not won acceptance on Capitol Hill of the Administration’s policies on foreign aid or increased trade with Russia and Eastern Europe. The Administration plans to push hard next year not only for a trade bill but also for a consular treaty with the Soviet Union. The Government will also face renewed heckling from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over Viet Nam. In this kind of encounter, Katzenbach has already won his spurs as a diplomat.