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In 1961, Henry Kissinger visited Harry Truman at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. The former president gave him a personal tour and then invited him to his office.
Truman already knew that this “junior professor at Harvard,” as Kissinger described himself with coy modesty in his book Diplomacy, was a rising star of the foreign-policy establishment. He had directed study programs on foreign policy and nuclear weapons at the influential Council on Foreign Relations and served as a part-time consultant to the National Security Council, both during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.
Truman asked his visitor what he had learned from his government consulting experiences. As Kissinger recalled, he responded with “standard Washington cocktail-party wisdom” that the bureaucracy functioned as a fourth branch of government, limiting any president’s ability to act. Truman was not impressed, employing an expletive to make the point that this was empty “professor talk.” Truman added: “If the president knows what he wants, no bureaucrat can stop him. A president has to know when to stop taking advice.”