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.

In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, traditional site of Jesus’ tomb, Greek Archbishop Diodoros was installed in March, 1981, as the new Eastern Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, one of the five ancient Orthodox patriarchates, is headquarters for a church whose domain is Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian West Bank and whose flock consists almost entirely of Arabs—some 120,000 in Jordan and 40,000 in Israel and the West Bank.

Many of Jerusalem's Christian, Jewish, and Arab leaders attended the installation ceremony at the twelfth-century Romanesque-Gothic church, as did representatives of the more than fifty local Orthodox. Catholic, Uniate, Monophysite and Protestant communities.

Often ignored in the flurry of contradictory facts and figures, charges and countercharges about the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the USSR and the conventional arms race between NATO and the Warsaw Pact is the degree to which Third World nations have been building large and increasingly potent armed forces. During the 1970s, Third World nations—some 130 of the world's 161 nations—spent more than $800 billion on military forces and munitions.

Heeding this cautionary note from a perceptive theorist who has explored the philosophical dimensions of rights policy, my limited purpose here is to examine three concepts from Roman Catholic theory that structure the Church's participation in the human rights debate. These concepts are: (1) the foundation of human rights; (2) the range of human rights claims; and (3) the conception of the state in international relations today.

Forty years ago, when the world was plunging headlong toward total war, the Soviel Union was America's ally. Ten years later the same Soviet Union was being scorned as the home of “Godless communism” and the enemy of everything sacred to ihe “free world.” With the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. the two nations were facing each other across an abyss so large that nuclear war seemed a distinct possibility. Ten years after that, at the Moscow Summit of 1972. an American president with unimpeachable anti-Communist credentials was supping with yesterday's devil in the very capital of world communism; Nixon and his hosts managed to produce an “orgy of agreements” (the phrase is Max Frankel's), including the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT 1) and the start of an era called detente. Within six years another American president was announcing that “America is now free of the inordinate fear of communism.”