The Wise, the Worldly and the Wicked : DIPLOMACY, <i> By Henry Kissinger (Simon & Schuster: $35; 912 pp.)</i>

Each new American President chooses those of his predecessors whose portraits he wants to hang in the Cabinet Room. In the Nixon White House, certainly Eisenhower, Nixon’s political patron, had to be one of them, but “the President most admired by Nixon,” Henry Kissinger tells us in this analysis of European and American diplomacy, “was Woodrow Wilson.”

Franklin Roosevelt also chose to hang Wilson’s portrait in the Cabinet Room. But he did so in a somewhat different spirit: he wanted to be reminded constantly of who he did not want to be. Robert Sherwood, one of FDR’s principal speech writers, remembered:

“As Roosevelt sat at the end of the long table in the Cabinet Room working on. . .speeches during the war years, he would look up at the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, over the mantelpiece. The tragedy of Wilson was always somewhere within the rim of his consciousness. Roosevelt could never forget Wilson’s mistakes. . .and there were was no motivating force in all of Roosevelt’s wartime political policy stronger than the determination to prevent repetition of the same mistakes.”

It was Wilson whose spirit was conjured up by President Bush in pretending that the Gulf War was a step on the road to a New World Order. And it is Wilson’s ghost that must be appeased if Americans, in their idealism, ever are to support with any genuine enthusiasm the Realpolitik or practical politics that Kissinger proposes in the final chapter of “Diplomacy.”

Wilson was the President who brought the United States out of the western hemisphere and into the wars and politics of the world. He did not do so willingly. Like his countrymen and his predecessors, he believed that Americans should focus on fulfilling their dreams in their own sector of the globe. He agreed with his fellow Americans that the politics of Europe--which then dominated all of the planet outside our hemisphere--were not only corrupt but corrupting; and that it would be dangerous for us to become ensnared in them.

But Wilson’s United States was given no real choice. Germany went back to unrestricted U-boat warfare in 1917, and sank the U.S. merchantman Algonquin on March 12; three more American merchant vessels March 18; and another, the Aztec, on April 1. These five sinkings (though Kissinger claims it was that of the liner Lusitania two years earlier) were the proximate cause of American entry into the war.

Even in breaking with America’s isolationist past, though, Wilson reaffirmed its underpinnings. In his view Europe’s politics remained corrupt and corrupting; so, since the United States no longer had the option of staying out of them, it had no alternative but to change them. The countries of Europe, Allied and enemy alike, were going to have to be persuaded to give up trade barriers, empires, militarism, and foreign policies that were motivated solely by selfish material interests.

In the somewhat misleadingly titled “Diplomacy,” Kissinger outlines the international relations of the European great powers from the 17th Century onward in order to contrast their theory and practice with those urged upon the world by the American government between 1917 and 1919. This conflict between wise and worldly but often wicked Europe, and foolish and naive but often virtuous America, has been a quarrel running through the 20th Century; and it provides Kissinger with his theme. He makes sympathetic comments about statesmen on both sides, but seems especially admiring of the morally deplorable Europeans.

His point is that the United States has much to learn from the realism--some would say, cynicism--of such historical figures as Cardinal Richelieu. Richeliue was a Roman Catholic prelate but at the same time was the chief minister of the King of France. It was the first half of the 1600s, and war raged across Europe between Catholics and Protestants. The Cardinal opportunistically threw France’s support to the Protestants, subordinating the interests of his church and whatever religious principles he may have had to his goal of making his country the most powerful in Europe. Kissinger approves.

For hundreds of pages, in a simplified college outlinestyle, Kissinger recounts such selected tales from history. His goal, it transpires, is to persuade his readers that leaders who are devious, who scheme, who lie, who are unscrupulous, who will throw beliefs and principles overboard to see their country get ahead--leaders such as Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger are said to have been--often accomplish more good than an idealist like Woodrow Wilson does. But whether what Nixon and Kissinger did when in power, especially in Vietnam, proved the superiority of their approach to foreign policy, is open to question.

The author’s idea is to call all of modern history to bear witness to the proposition that, much as liberals may deplore their methods, the Kissingers and Nixons of this world achieve the results that liberals and idealists want to see achieved.

Kissinger’s ambition is grand--he wants to help America’s idealistic foreign policy makers and followers learn from Europe’s more realistic power politicians--but it falters in the execution. It is not a matter of mistakes; those are to be expected in the book trade nowadays: fact checkers are not what they used to be. The problem is that the author has not always mastered his material. An example: his treatment of the career of John Foster Dulles.

In about 1941 Dulles became an active religious layman and headed a Protestant church group preparing plans for an international organization to preserve peace in the postwar world. Kissinger wrongly tells us that this was Dulles’s “first experience with international affairs.’ In fact Dulles began in 1907, as secretary to his grandfather, who served as China’s representative to the Second International Peace Conference at the Hague. He was involved in international affairs from then on.

Dulles was in complete charge of foreign policy for Thomas E. Dewey, front runner for the Republican presidential nomination between 1938 and 1940. An apologist for Nazi Germany and an opponent of U.S. aid to Britain, Dulles was the architect of the isolationist program on which Dewey ran in 1940. One has to know that in order to appreciate the bridge back to internationalism that Dulles constructed for himself, as war approached.

Kissinger’s ignorance of Dulles’ background leads him to suppose that Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, the “war guilt clause,” was intended to provide “moral justification” for the reparations that followed World War I. But had Kissinger known that clause 231 was crafted by Dulles, then a lawyer acting in a legal capacity, he might have surmised more plausibly that the clause aimed to provide legal , not moral, justification.

The Allies wanted Germany to sign a treaty committing her to pay reparations, but were unable to agree on a specific figure. They decided to commit Germany to pay but not tell her the amount until later, a strategy that led to the German resentment that some say spurred the rise of Nazism. That was the legal problem Dulles resolved by drafting for Germany’s signature an admission of liability so broad that it provided a basis for German responsibility to pay whatever the Allies demanded.

As a student, Dulles had attended Wilson’s lectures at Princeton; he hero-worshipped the President. It was odd that he and his idol allowed themselves to be won over to the bad old entangling politics that Wilson had warned against.

Curious: America’s military and political enemies among the great powers of Europe were Great Britain in the 19th Century, and Germany and then Russia in the 20th, but our intellectual adversary throughout has been France. As Kissinger points out, however, France’s leading statesman, Gen. Charles de Gaulle, was only the latest exponent of a politically amoral view of statecraft that went back to Richelieu--and before.

Kissinger is brilliantly right about this. Moreover he has much of value to say, particularly in his last chapter, about how to retain the idealism in American policy while learning from Europe how to hedge it with realism. A Wilson may start us on the road to the Promised Land, but it takes a leader more worldly wise--a Theodore Roosevelt, a Nixon, or a Reagan, in Kissinger’s view; a Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt in mine--to get us there.