Although they had much in common and were going to spend huge amounts of time together while Nixon was president, the two men never became real personal friends. ‘A marriage of convenience’ was how Pat Nixon described it. The two men did not watch football together like President Bush and Condoleezza Rice. They rarely socialized with each other. John Holdridge of the State Department, who came to know both men well, was once struck by a photograph of Thanksgiving dinner at Nixon’s western house at San Clemente. ‘Here were the Nixons with the people who were invited in to have Thanksgiving dinner, and Bob Haldeman, [John] Ehrlichman [Nixon’s Domestic Affairs Adviser], those two principally, and some other people from the White House staff, all more or less informally dressed. And here was Kissinger looking very German with a coat and a tie and with kind of a frozen expression on his face, and I thought, my God, the sort of unlikeliest guest.’15 After Nixon left office, he and Kissinger met only infrequently.
‘Each of them’, said a diplomat who worked with them, ‘saw the other as a friend poised with a potential dagger in his back; there is a little paranoia in both men.’ In his own way, Kissinger was as insecure and as suspicious as Nixon. He was as sensitive to slights and criticism. It was not easy to be Henry Kissinger, the professor and the son of Jewish refugees, in Nixon’s White House. He was treated, said Leonard Garment, a New York lawyer who became a special adviser in the White House and himself a Jew, ‘as an exotic wunderkind – a character, an outsider’. His colleagues admired him but also laughed at him with his thick German accent and his glasses. He had to endure, said Garment, ‘the railings against Jewish power which were part of the casual conversation among Nixon’s inner circle’.16
Leslie Gelb, who knew Kissinger well from their Harvard days and who also became part of the foreign policy establishment, saw him as ‘the typical product of an authoritarian background – devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors’. Where Kissinger was different from Nixon, though, was in his ability to see himself from outside. ‘I don’t want you to get the wrong idea’, he told a reporter when he took a call from Nixon, just because I was on my knees when I answered the phone.’17
Perhaps he had to be a courtier because he had no independent power base; he was Nixon’s appointee and Nixon knew that. ‘Henry is a genius,’ Nixon told Gerald Ford as he was preparing to hand over the presidency, ‘but you don’t have to accept everything he recommends. He can be invaluable, and he’ll be very loyal, but you can’t let him have a totally free hand.’ He advised Ford to keep Kissinger on as his Secretary of State but hoped, he told an aide, that the new President would be tough enough. ‘Ford has just got to realize that there are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts.’ At other times, though, ‘you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child’.18
Nixon, who was determined that American foreign policy should be run by the White House and not by the State Department or any other government arm such as the Central Intelligence Agency, knew that in Kissinger he had the subordinate he needed. With Kissinger’s encouragement and advice, he gave approval to a new committee, to be chaired by the National Security Adviser himself, which would review and approve all policy papers sent by the various branches of government, including the State Department, before issues and recommendations went on to the President. Kissinger also had the power to order major studies on important issues from any department. Richard Helms, the experienced head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was startled to be informed by Kissinger that from then on all intelligence reports, even oral briefings, were to come through the National Security Adviser. Furthermore Nixon had decided that Helms was to attend meetings of the National Security Council but leave before the policy discussions started. (Nixon later forgot that he had given the order.) Kissinger became the doorkeeper in all matters that went to the President for decision.19
The National Security Council itself became like a second State Department. Kissinger brought in bright young men from the universities and ransacked State for experts. It was an exhilarating and challenging experience to work for someone so intelligent and so demanding. He threw memoranda and reports back until they were right, yet rarely praised the final product. ‘One of the most mercurial and difficult bosses it has ever been my pleasure or peril to know,’ said Robert McFarlane, who became Kissinger’s military assistant in 1973. His temper was famous and, being Kissinger, he made fun of it. ‘Since English is my second language,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know that maniac and fool were not terms of endearment.’ To his credit he never minded a good argument; on the other hand, he watched his staff carefully to make sure they did not outshine him. When he became Secretary of State in Nixon’s second term, a sour joke ran round the State Department about why working for him was like being a mushroom: ‘Because you’re kept in the dark all the time, because you get a lot of shit dumped on you, and, in the end, you get canned.’20
In a very short time, Kissinger became virtually indispensable to the President. He was prepared to sit for hours, if necessary, while Nixon, as was his way, worked out his ideas in rambling conversations. As he told a journalist, ‘If I’m not in there talking to the President, then someone else is.’ In Kissinger, Nixon had found someone who was his intellectual equal, who understood his policies and who could carry them out. Haldeman, who never much liked Kissinger and found his repeated outbursts and threats to resign tiresome, nevertheless concluded early on that he was ‘extremely valuable and effective’. In August 1970, when Kissinger was in yet another state about a perceived slight, Nixon wondered about letting him go. Haldeman disagreed: ‘We have to recognize this weakness as the price we pay for his enormous assets, and it’s well worth it’.21
Most observers agree that it was Nixon who set the strategic directions for the United States and Kissinger who worked out the tactics. ‘It was understood’, said Viktor Sukhodrev, who interpreted for Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, ‘that while Kissinger was playing a major role, I would have to say that in all the negotiations with Nixon, he [Nixon] was very much in command.’ Nixon, in the view of one of his closer associates, the speechwriter Raymond Price, created the framework within which Kissinger operated. ‘In the final analysis, each major turn got down to a presidential decision, and Nixon gave more care to these decisions than to anything else in his presidency.’22
Although Kissinger has since maintained that he and Nixon were always as one on the opening to China, the initiative clearly came from Nixon. Kissinger, it is true, had considered the possibility that one day the United States might be able to improve its relations with China. In a speech he wrote for Nelson Rockefeller in the 1968 campaign, he included a phrase about ‘a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union’, but his main concerns in his first months as National Security Adviser were improving America’s relations with its European allies and dealing with the Soviet Union. By temperament and background, he was firmly focused on Europe and the great struggle between the two superpowers, not on Asia. Vietnam had to be dealt with, of course, because of the damage it was doing to the United States in other areas. Although he came to support Nixon’s opening to China loyally and indeed enthusiastically, he still tended to see it in terms of what it could do for relations with the Soviet Union.23
When Nixon first told Kissinger in February 1969 that he wanted to open up relations with China, Kissinger, according to Alexander Haig, who was then his aide, was dumbfounded. ‘Our Leader has taken leave of reality,’ he told Haig. ‘He has just ordered me to make this flight of fantasy come true.’ In a discussion a few months later at the National Security Council, he wondered about the consequences of bringing China out of its isolation, ‘whether we really want China to be a world power like the Soviet Union, competing with us, rather than their present role which is limited to aiding certain insurgencies’. In the late summer of 1969, when Nixon had already sent word indirectly to the Chinese that the Americans would like to establish
contact, Kissinger remained skeptical. As the President and his party were flying back from a world tour, Haldeman sat down beside Kissinger on Air Force One and remarked that Nixon intended to visit China before the end of his presidency. Kissinger smiled: ‘Fat chance.’24
In his memoirs, Nixon talks of ‘the China initiative’ and makes it clear that he was in control, giving Kissinger his instructions to pursue it. Kissinger, by contrast, refers to ‘our China initiative’ and claims that he and Nixon came to believe in the importance of the China opening independently. It is no wonder, of course, that both men would want to take full credit for a bold move that transformed international relations – and which was one of the good-news stories of a troubled presidency. It was, moreover, a pattern in their relationship. ‘P realizes K’s basically jealous of any idea not his own,’ wrote Haldeman in his diary. According to John Ehrlichman, one of the reasons Nixon taped his own conversations was to leave a record that his ideas were his own. Nixon was livid when he had to share Time’s Man of the Year with Kissinger in 1972, and was jealous and hurt when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in ending the Vietnam War. He resented the way the press paid attention to Kissinger. ‘H,’ he scribbled in one of his daily notes to Haldeman, ‘Again the theme of K’s power – Not helpful!’ From time to time, he issued orders, which he must have known would never be carried out, telling Kissinger not to give interviews to the press or appear on television.25
With Nixon, Kissinger was always deferential, sometimes to a fault. ‘When I’d be talking to Henry’, a friend of Nixon’s remembered, ‘and the president would telephone, his voice would shake; the whole tone of his voice would change.’ Kissinger understood better than most the President’s insecurities and his insatiable need for reassurance. He assured Nixon that he was a tough leader. ‘It was extraordinary!’ he told Nixon in his first year in office, after the President met with the Soviet ambassador. ‘No President has ever laid it on the line to them like that.’ Nixon, Kissinger insisted, was a success. In 1971, for example, the President gave one of his talks to the American people about Vietnam. The broadcast was at 9 p.m. and at 9.35 Kissinger’s first phone call came in. ‘This was the best speech you’ve given since you’ve been in office.’ Kissinger’s second call was at 10.21, then another at 10.35 and yet another at 11.13. There were more the next day. This was not unusual; there had been many other Nixon speeches and equally fulsome praise. Kissinger knew what Nixon wanted to hear: that he was wise and statesmanlike and, as important, that the public was aware of it. In 1982, Kissinger ran into John Ehrlichman in Los Angeles while the legal struggle over access to the Nixon tapes was still going on. ‘Sooner or later those tapes are going be released, and you and I are going to look like perfect fools.’ Speak for yourself, Ehrlichman thought.26
Away from Nixon, Kissinger was less polite. ‘The madman’ or ‘our drunken friend’, he would say when Nixon had been especially rambling. At Georgetown dinner parties, Kissinger would poke fun at Nixon’s foibles and give the impression that he was trying hard to rein in the administration’s wilder policies. He was a hawk in the White House, Haldeman later wrote, but a different person in the evenings. ‘Touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.’ Nixon knew it was happening but he was forgiving. ‘I know this. Kissinger likes to be liked. I understand that.’ Even years later, when Kissinger had published some harsh comments about him, Nixon would only say to the historian Joan Hoff, ‘I will be fair to Henry, even if he isn’t always to me.’27
For all the tensions between them, the two men made one of the most influential foreign policy teams in American history. ‘Nixinger diplomacy’, one academic has called their tenure. Not only did they have the same perspective on international relations, but they believed in keeping all major policies and initiatives in their grip. They shared a penchant for intrigue and secrecy. Both had trouble trusting people, even their own staffs. Both spent much time and energy worrying about leaks. ‘They developed’, said Lawrence Eagleburger, a Kissinger aide who later became Secretary of State for the first President Bush, ‘a conspiratorial approach to foreign policy management.’28
It was on some issues, such as the breakthrough with China, a very effective approach because they cut through the bureaucratic thickets of precedence and caution which have hemmed in so many leaders. It did not always work when they did not keep the rest of the American government, especially the State Department, up to date on what they were doing. And it did not work when they tried to do too much themselves or when they simply ignored issues, such as economic ones, which did not interest them.
Kissinger, who, Nixon later said admiringly, was a ‘very good infighter’, took full advantage of his position to consolidate his power. He made good use of the new structure set up by Nixon for foreign affairs to ensure that he had the ultimate right of access to the President. Much to the annoyance of the State Department, he also started dealing directly with foreign representatives in Washington and abroad. After Nixon indicated to Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that he should work through Kissinger, the two men met regularly in Kissinger’s office without anyone else being present. Dobrynin came and went at the White House by the service entrance. In time a private telephone line linked Kissinger’s office directly to the Soviet embassy. At Foggy Bottom, as the State Department building was known, they had only the vaguest idea of what Kissinger and Dobrynin were discussing, or even when their meetings were taking place.29
That was how both Nixon and Kissinger wanted it. They were at one in their contempt for the State Department, filled as it was with egghead liberals and, from Kissinger’s perspective, rivals. ‘Our basic attitude’, said Kissinger as he and Nixon discussed the major crisis in South Asia in 1971, ‘was the hell with the State Department; let them screw around with the little ones.’ Major diplomatic secrets and initiatives could not be entrusted to the State Department, so Nixon and Kissinger believed, because it was incapable of moving rapidly and in any case was bound to leak information. It was, in their view, an incompetent, ineffective and over-staffed bureaucracy. ‘I opened up China with five people,’ Kissinger liked to say. In his first year in office, a senior State Department official remembered, ‘Nixon gave us a little harangue about what our jobs were and how, by God, he was going to run foreign policy.’ What is more, the President added, ‘If the Department of State has had a new idea in the last 25 years, it is not known to me.’ It was a view that Kissinger both shared and encouraged. ‘The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed,’ he had written in his book on Metternich and Castlereagh. Policymakers had to take chances, while the whole instinct of bureaucracy was to seek refuge in routine. Kissinger kept the State Department out of the plans for Nixon’s trip to China as much as he could and he was determined to make sure that its representatives stayed on the sidelines during the visit itself. The one thing he had not yet worked out, he told Dwight Chapin, during his October 1971 visit to Beijing, ‘was how he was going to be able to keep Secretary of State Rogers from attending various meetings.’30
Now, at the Diaoyutai that February day, William Rogers and his assistants were housed several hundred yards away from Nixon’s villa in a smaller building. As Kissinger, who was in Nixon’s villa, remarked in his memoirs, ‘The Chinese well understood the strange checks and balances within the Executive Branch and had re-created the physical gulf between the White House and Foggy Bottom in the heart of Peking.’ If the Chinese had not been aware of the tension between the State Department and Kissinger, he obligingly let them know about it on every possible occasion. In his talks with Chou En-lai on his trips to China in 1971, he had lamented the difficulties of dealing with American officials. ‘We have not had the benefits of the Cultural Revolution,’ he complained jokingly. ‘So we have a large, somewhat undisciplined and, with respect to publicity, not always reliable bureaucracy.’ The Chinese
, he advised, should discuss the important issues such as Taiwan and relations with the Soviet Union with him and not with representatives from the State Department. It was also not necessary for the State Department to be involved in the crucial meetings between Nixon and Mao. As he told Chou, ‘If those people who will not be meeting with Chairman Mao and the President could be separated from them in the most delicate way possible, it will help me tremendously.’31
Members of the State Department were torn between admiration for Kissinger’s intelligence and his abilities as a negotiator and resentment over his determination to keep their department out of all important areas. As one said, ‘If Henry Kissinger is not the bride, there’s going to be no other wedding anywhere else’. Kissinger, at his best, was ‘astute, articulate, a master of manoeuvre’, in the view of Marshall Green, who was the senior person responsible for East Asia and the Pacific during the Nixon presidency.
But he was also a megalomaniac, and as long as he was in the White House he lost no opportunity to build his power base at the expense of the State Department, undercutting the Secretary of State and shamelessly exploiting President Nixon’s long-standing suspicions and prejudices against careerists in the State Department (despite our loyalty to all Presidents and our high respect for Nixon’s extraordinary grasp of strategic issues).32
Unfortunately the man whom Nixon chose to be his Secretary of State was no match for Kissinger. William Rogers, a handsome, affable and well-connected Republican from the East Coast, chafed at times but he was too gentlemanly to protest openly. ‘A very nice man,’ said a diplomat who knew him, ‘a lawyer whose proudest achievement was some product-liability suits that he’d engaged in to defend Bayer Aspirin and other miscreants of great renown, and who was intensely loyal to the president on a personal level.’ He and Nixon had worked together in politics for years; indeed Rogers had stood by Nixon during the 1952 campaign when the future President was accused of using a secret slush fund for his own benefit. Yet, like so many others who spent a lot of time with the man, Rogers always found the real Nixon elusive. ‘His personality is more outgoing in his public appearances than in his private appearances,’ he told one of Nixon’s biographers. Nixon, for his part, seems to have regarded Rogers with mingled envy, admiration and contempt. In his memoirs, he praised Rogers’ abilities as an administrator and negotiator, but to his White House aides he described him as ‘ineffectual, selfish and vain’.33
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