“Henry Kissinger is without question the most brilliant American polemicist in the general area of foreign and national policy. He possesses an unusual ability to seize particular positions and publicize them in a compelling manner… .” So wrote Professor Morton Kaplan, a leading champion of a “scientific” approach to the study of international politics, in a review of the “traditionalist” Kissinger's The Necessity. for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy (1960). President Nixon's choice of Kissinger as his advisor on National Security Affairs marks the perpetuation of academies in that role, McGeorge Bundy of Harvard and Walt W. Rostow of M.I.T. having served as predecessors under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

The British Minister of Defense, Denis Healy, has informed us that within minutes of the outbreak of hostilities every Soviet fleet unit in the Mediterranean would be sunk. Let us hope that he has supplied us with a long-overdue corrective to the near-hysteria evident in the press about the Soviet naval presence in the area.

Presumably by citing the destruction of the Soviet fleet “within minutes” Mr. Healy is making reference to nuclear weapons—a most implausible scenario. But even in a limited encounter, held short of a nuclear exchange, it is hard to believe that the Soviet fleet would fare well in combat.

With the publication of Hans J. Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs. Power Politics more than two decades ago, one might have thought that the dragon of creeping scientism would have been laid to rest by now. But Scientific Man, self-confident and potentialiy omnipotent, dies hard.

Last December, for example, Donald F. Horning, President Johnson's science advisor, urged the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Science with a starting budget of at least $2 billion. He was referring, of course, to the physical or “hard” sciences. On the “soft” side, President Johnson reportedly had privately criticized the “kooks and sociologists” who'used the War on Poverty as a living laboratory for their research experiments. I don't know if Mr. Johnson said this, but as a “soft” scientist, I kind of wish he had.