In the early 1970s the international relationships that had been frozen since soon after World War II showed signs of decongealing. Sensing the historical moment, the Nixon administration aspired to be both the catalyst and the beneficiary of this time of rare opportunity. As national security assistant and then secretary of stale, Henry Kissinger was uniquely situated to participate in, shape, and observe these efforts. The first volume of his memoirs, White House Years, detailed his part in the early Nixon period, January. 1969, to January, 1973. Now he continues the story in a weighty second volume. Years of Upheaval (Little. Brown; 1,283 pp.; $24.95) takes us from 1973 to the Nixon resignation in August, 1974.

Never since ancient times,” wrote Frank Dilnot for the New York Times, “has a Continent received an individual with the expectation and interest that Europe will receive President Wilson….” The assessment was accurate. When Woodrow Wilson arrived in France on December 13, 1918, a month before the opening of the peace conference at Versailles, he came as the savior of Europe and was welcomed as such.

The trip to Europe was a gamble, one he himself had said would be the “greatest success or the supreme tragedy” of history. He realized that the statesmen of Europe did not want him at the peace conference, and for that reason alone he felt he must go. For him the conference would be a struggle between the forces of good, of the New Diplomacy, and the forces of the Old Diplomacy, which had brought about the Great War and were still being pursued by the statesmen of Europe. “Europe is still governed by the same reactionary forces which controlled this country until a few years ago. But I am satisfied that if necessary I can reach the peoples of Europe over the heads ortheir Rulers.” During the war itself Wilson's methods and goals had been resented by Allied leaders, but he had gone ahead in spite of them and had succeeded in obtaining an armistice based on the Fourteen Points. In securing the peace, he would use the same methods.

When NATO came into being in 1949, not a few believed that before long it would succumb to threats from without. They thought the fledgling organization would prove unequal to the task of keeping Soviet power from spilling over the boundaries of the Alliance. But they were wrong.

Still others believed that NATO would succumb to problems from within. They doubted that Alliance members would be willing to subordinate their own narrowed interests to the interests of the community as a whole. But they too were wrong.

Only a handful of the collective security organizations in history have matched NATO's record of longevity. At the age of thirty-four the Alliance is not just alive—it is flourishing.

Brazil has always been an inward-looking country. The national consciousness is transfixed on the mystery of Amazonia, the nation's own dark heart. And it has been the abiding dream of generations to conquer the country, to open that heart. In the past the lust for adventure and sudden wealth, the lure of the wilderness, drew some over the water highways to the outposts of the gem seekers. But no great number of Brazilians ever penetrated the Amazon region. It was always too difficult, the forest too resistant.

The sun comes suddenly each day over the Amazon: It warms the gliding brown rivers, the veins of the living forest that feed the giant trees. It gives the jungle back its voice, muted by the night.

In that short sentence Hans Morgenthau describes one role of the intellectual who relates himself to the political world. It is clear, from the way he states it, that he admires this vocation. It is also clear, from his own career, that he has often exercised that vocation.

Morgenthau's eminence is such that he needs no praise from me. As an analyst of international affairs he is a brilliant scholar, a shrewd observer of the actions behind the headlines, a puncturer of pomposities, and an irritant to sluggish minds. These qualities are sufficiently well known that I shall not elaborate them.

It seems as if we are entering an era similar to the period after die Congress of Vienna. The cold winds of reaction have prevailed. The fires of domestic reform have gone out, extinguished by the excesses of some reformers and by the tactics of the forces of the status quo. The nation that gave birth to the A-bomb has succeeded in shocking the numbed consciences of the world by carrying out on a peasant nation die most destructive aerial bombardment ever unleashed. As Russia, England, Austria and Prussia conspired in Vienna to put out the danger of revolution, so now Russia, China and the United States are cooperating to save South Vietnam, the United States's ally, to halt the rain of bombs on die troublesome, sometime ally of the Chinese and the Soviets, to put out die fire mat threatened for so long to lead to a major power conflagration.

I have been told that when Charles de Gaulle was asked what something he had said would mean to an ordinary Frenchman, he replied, "I do not know, I'm not an ordinary Frenchman." Similarly, I suppose I am not an ordinary reader of this book, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press; 1158 + xvi pp.; $19.95), but one who has for many years been surveying the same hills and valleys that Sydney Ahlstrom has traversed with camera and notebook. But while I have worked more as a topographer with the hope of making a usable map for the guidance of any who might wish to follow, Ahlstrom has pulled together an imposing slide show of the terrain and its inhabitants—a travelogue made up of thousands of discrete snapshots given unity primarily by the fact that all were taken by the same historically conditioned person.

To say that this is now Dr. Kissinger's world is more or less indisputable. But to say that his world includes the whole of the globe is inaccurate, In all Africa below the Mediterranean fringe there is not one leader who can refer to “our friend Henry.” As Dr. Kissinger admitted in his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, he had, after a quarter century as one of our leading academic authorities on foreign policy, not yet formulated any “philosophy” of African-American relations. He spoke vaguely of calling some of our ambassadors to Africa back to Washington “to give me their judgment on what the best U.S. philosophy should be in that area.”

The momentum of East-West detente has grown with the summer visit of the agreeable and businesslike Leonid Brezhnev. A burst of treaties, agreements and deals has noisily signaled a singular achievement of Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy. To most Americans the sole objections, raised by Senator Jackson and others in the name of Soviet Jews and liberal dissenters, must seem unwelcome throwbacks of the cold war or at least a parochial intrusion. With world peace and free trade seemingly at stake, even many intellectuals hesitate to belabor the narrowing liberties of those dissident groups.

Both Nixon and Brezhnev agree that trade and arms reductions are practical. While neither disavows ideological competition, both now say it should be channeled to peaceful outlets.

Upon careful examination it is clear the responses essentially support the purposes of the “Survey of Freedom.” Both Quigley and Goulet appear to believe that political and civil rights are valuable social assets and that their suppression is seldom justified. Major disagreement comes from their belief that I should take more seriously other factors that relate to “freedom.”