Nixon was well aware of Kissinger’s “disparaging comments.” He knew that Kissinger had challenged his “competence” in foreign policy, but he expected this “from a Rockefeller associate” and “chalked it up to politics.”3 Others saw something more sinister behind Nixon’s willingness to overlook Kissinger’s comments and contact him. Journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that Nixon ignored Kissinger’s remarks because the Harvard professor had given the presidential campaign team secret information about the Johnson administration’s negotiating position during the Vietnam peace talks in Paris.4 “There is a better than even chance that Johnson will order a bombing halt at approximately mid-October,” Kissinger wrote to the Nixon campaign shortly after his September 1968 trip to Paris.5 With this information, Hersh claimed, the campaign could move behind the scenes to block progress in any negotiations that might surface.
As Kissinger predicted, on October 31, just five days before the 1968 presidential election, a desperate Lyndon Johnson publicly pledged to stop all US bombing and shelling of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam) for the first time since Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam, had begun in February 1965. Johnson also announced that he would expand the peace talks to include the South Vietnamese government and its sworn enemy, the National Liberation Front (NLF, derogatorily called the Viet Cong). He hoped that his October surprise would allow the Democratic nominee, his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, to close the narrow gap in the race with Nixon. On the eve of the election, Johnson’s plan seemed to have worked. There were only a few percentage points separating the two candidates, and momentum was in Humphrey’s favor—until the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, announced that he would not send a representative to Paris and that his government would never negotiate with the NLF without political guarantees.6
There was much speculation in the press at the time that Kissinger had not only told the Nixon campaign secret information about Johnson’s negotiating position in Paris, but had also used Anna Chennault, a longtime friend to Republicans and anti-Communists in Asia, to deliver a message to the South Vietnamese government telling it not to agree to negotiate in Paris. The implication was that Saigon would get a much better deal from the Nixon administration.7 In his 1987 memoir, In the Jaws of History, Bui Diem, who at that time was South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, has confirmed contact between Chennault, the Nixon campaign, and the Saigon government, but he has downplayed its influence, claiming that Thieu had already decided that he would not negotiate with the Communists.8
Newly released documents from Trung tam luu tru quoc gia II (National Archives II) in Ho Chi Minh City support Diem’s claim.9 The Saigon government was incensed by rumors that Anna Chennault influenced the decision not to negotiate. It was true that she had hosted many dinners at her Watergate apartment along the banks of the Potomac River in Washington that had included several top South Vietnamese officials, but Saigon’s leaders claimed that these events were seen as a way to convince the Americans to continue to support South Vietnam, not opportunities to listen to advice from Chennault. Having lost over 100,000 troops and an equally high number of civilians, and facing increased military pressure from Hanoi’s People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), Saigon government officials claimed that they did not need a dilettante to tell them how to deal with the Communists, no matter how many friends she had in Washington.10
But Anna Chennault was no dilettante. She was the widow of Lt. General Claire Chennault, the American leader of the Flying Tigers, who defended China against Japanese invaders during WWII. Born Chen Xiangmei, Anna was a war correspondent in China when she met her future husband. After the war, the two founded the Civil Air Transport that operated on mainland China until Mao’s victory. Fleeing to Taiwan, the Chennaults became fixtures of the “China Lobby,” an alliance of conservative Americans and Chinese nationalists who blamed the Truman administration for “losing” China. In the late 1950s, after her husband’s death, Chennault moved to America and took over the running of the Flying Tiger Line, then the biggest freight airline in the world.11 She became a steadfast supporter of Republican politics and politicians, and as one Nixon official observed, she was a “very shrewd operator.”12 She would have been a very likely go-between had Saigon not so readily dismissed this claim.
The idea that Kissinger was somehow behind a secret plan to convince Thieu not to negotiate with the NLF because Saigon would get a better deal from Nixon was even more preposterous. “Kissinger was totally irrelevant to our [South Vietnamese] deliberations,” one former South Vietnamese official later claimed. “We had been uneasy with the Johnson administration’s discussion of negotiations at our July 18 meeting in Honolulu and had long planned to back out of any talks that the White House was using to score political points during the 1968 presidential election. We did not need a college professor from Harvard telling us how to solve our diplomatic problems.”13
Kissinger, too, has always downplayed his role in the 1968 presidential campaign. In the first volume of his massive memoirs, White House Years, he argues that he had only met Nixon once prior to November 1968, and he repeatedly denies having had any direct contact with the Nixon team during the campaign. “During the national campaign in 1968,” Kissinger writes, “several Nixon emissaries—some self-appointed—telephoned me for counsel. I took the position that I would answer specific questions on foreign policy, but that I would not offer general advice or volunteer suggestions.”14 Nixon certainly had other sources of information inside the Johnson White House who were close to negotiations. But much of the evidence suggests that Kissinger did intervene on Nixon’s behalf, even if his meddling did not influence decision making in Saigon as much as Hersh and others claim.
It was not access to information that made Kissinger so appealing to Nixon. It was in equal measures Kissinger’s understanding of power—Nixon believed that he needed Kissinger to shape and implement his broad foreign policy designs—and his willingness to make difficult decisions in the face of public pressure. Nixon liked what Kissinger thought about the exercise of power. He had read Kissinger’s early scholarly work on foreign policy in a nuclear world and was impressed. He also believed that Kissinger shared his belief that domestic politics (not elections) was merely fixing “outhouses in Peoria.”15 Both men relished the arena of foreign affairs, and Nixon thought that Kissinger would be useful in creating the stable world order that he envisioned. Furthermore, Kissinger seemed to understand that Nixon’s foreign policy background made bold moves possible. He confided to close friends that Nixon might just be able to make huge inroads in bringing Moscow and Beijing in from the cold.16 By reorienting American power and prestige following a necessary withdrawal from Vietnam, Kissinger thought a Nixon presidency could tackle larger and more important foreign policy problems. In short, Nixon liked Kissinger as a potential junior associate in foreign policy and Kissinger admired Nixon’s willingness to hire someone for his expertise rather than for patronage. Kissinger and Nixon were two self-made men who would take on the world together.
When Nixon and Kissinger finally met at the Pierre, the president-elect did not talk about grand strategy or the war in Vietnam; rather, he outlined the massive organizational problems he faced. He had very little confidence in the State Department. He also thought that the Johnson administration had ignored the Joint Chiefs of Staff on most issues dealing with Vietnam at its peril. He thought that the CIA was staffed by “Ivy League liberals who behind the facade of analytical objectivity” were usually pushing their own agenda.17 Nixon also believed that the Johnson White House was run too informally, with key foreign policy decisions made over lunch.18 All of these concerns, and his personal insecurities, left Nixon with the desire to run foreign policy from the White House. He needed a strong national security adviser to help him centralize power and to develop a robust and credible foreign policy.
Despite his concerns about Nixon’s character
and capabilities, Kissinger agreed with the president-elect’s reorganization plan. He told Nixon that he should set up a strong National Security Council staff in the White House and then sideline the State Department. By cutting out the State Department completely, Nixon could control foreign policy discussions and limit the influence of career professionals who had snubbed him when he was vice president under Dwight Eisenhower. Like Nixon, Kissinger had a profound disdain for bureaucracy, going well beyond the usual carping that went on in Washington. He thought the seasoned experts at the State Department tended their own gardens but were incapable of broad strategic thought. Zhou Enlai, the Chinese prime minister, once told Kissinger, “You don’t like bureaucracy.” Kissinger replied, “Yes, and it’s mutual; the bureaucracy doesn’t like me.”19 After sharing their mutual suspicions and ideas about governmental reorganization, Nixon awkwardly showed Kissinger the door, making some vague references about continued conversations on these matters.
After his meeting with Nixon, Kissinger returned to Harvard that afternoon to teach his foreign policy seminar. The next day he received a phone call from John Mitchell, a senior member of Nixon’s campaign staff, asking him to return to New York for a follow-up meeting. When he arrived at the Pierre Hotel, Mitchell asked him, “What have you decided about the National Security job?”20 Kissinger had had no idea that he had been offered it—during their discussion the previous day, Nixon had never mentioned a specific job for him in the new administration. Once Nixon confirmed that he wanted him as his national security adviser, Kissinger uncharacteristically asked for some time to consider the offer. It now seems clear that his own insecurities caused him to ask permission from his Harvard colleagues and his former boss, Nelson Rockefeller, to join the president’s staff. Most agreed that Kissinger had a duty to accept the position, but some felt that working for Nixon was beyond the pale. No one questioned Nixon’s rationale in selecting him. As historian Robert Dallek has noted, both “were outsiders who distrusted establishment liberals” and both had “grandiose dreams of recasting world affairs.”21 They also shared an obsession with secrecy. One week later, Kissinger accepted the offer. He was the first of Nixon’s national security team to be announced, a telling statement of the new president’s desire to ignore the foreign policy establishment.
Kissinger was an able ally in pushing the State Department aside. He believed that the department was filled by “probably the ablest and most professional group of men and women in public service,” but the “reverse of their dedication is the conviction that a lifetime of service and study has given them insights that transcend the untrained and shallow-rooted views of political appointees.”22 Nixon was a little blunter: he wanted to take power “from the bureaucrats and place it where it belonged, in the White House.”23 Accordingly, Nixon appointed William Rogers, a lawyer and former attorney general, as secretary of state precisely because he lacked foreign policy experience. Nixon told Kissinger that he “considered Rogers’s unfamiliarity with the subject an asset because it guaranteed that policy direction would remain in the White House.”24 He also wanted a secretary of state who was a good negotiator rather than a policy maker—“a role he reserved for himself” and his national security adviser.25 Rogers was a skilled manager of people, Nixon explained, so the “little boys in the State Department” had to watch themselves, because he would not tolerate their nonsense.26
Kissinger, however, saw Rogers as an unqualified rival. Shortly after they met, he concluded that Rogers proved the old adage that “high office teaches decision-making, not substance.”27 He did not believe that Rogers would grow more perceptive about the intricacies of foreign policy simply by being on the job a long time. Rogers thought tactically, like the lawyer he was, but he did not possess a strategic or geopolitical mind. “The novice Secretary of State,” Kissinger wrote disparagingly of Rogers, “thus finds on his desk not policy analyses or options, but stacks of dispatches which he is asked to initial and do so urgently, if you please.”28 Kissinger himself treated Rogers like a petty clerk. He later explained that once Nixon had appointed “a strong personality, expert in foreign policy, as the national security advisor, competition with the Secretary of State became inevitable.”29 (Talking in the third person was a favorite way of Kissinger to insert objectivity into any conversation.) Throughout his time at the White House, he did what he could to undermine Rogers in the eyes of the president.
Melvin Laird was Nixon’s inspired choice as defense secretary. Laird (R-WI) was a longtime member of the House of Representatives and had considerable expertise in defense matters. On the surface, Laird was an odd choice for a president who wanted to consolidate power because of his years of experience in Congress, but Nixon thought he was reliable and did not crave the spotlight the way Robert S. McNamara and Clark Clifford, Johnson’s two secretaries of defense, had. Laird knew how Congress worked and how to count votes, two qualities that Nixon admired. Laird was also willing to mend fences between the White House and the Joint Chiefs, something the president strongly encouraged. Unlike Kissinger, Laird had sensitive political antennae and understood the political need to withdraw US forces from Vietnam. He came to the Nixon administration determined to rescue the prestige and capabilities of the American military, which he thought had suffered during the four years of war in Vietnam. Laird and Kissinger disagreed on most matters relating to the war, and their outsized personalities often led to clashes inside the Nixon administration. Kissinger saw Laird as a skilled policy maker, though he thought he “acted on the assumption that he had a constitutional right to seek to outsmart and outmaneuver anyone with whom his office brought him into contact.”30 Laird challenged Kissinger on Vietnam policy repeatedly, often getting the best of his more educated colleague.
Nixon liked his new triad, and he skillfully played Laird and Kissinger off each other to achieve his objectives and to satisfy his need for respect, attention, and power. But when it came to foreign affairs, Kissinger was his most trusted confidant. Nixon’s very first meeting on January 21, 1969, his first day in office, was with his national security adviser, cementing Kissinger’s role. Kissinger treasured Nixon’s confidence, and he would use his trusted role with the president to shape and influence the administration’s response to the war in Vietnam.
From his very first day in the White House, Kissinger plotted to overturn the bureaucracy and to control decision making. While others in the administration attended inauguration ceremonies, Kissinger was busy implementing Nixon’s radical bureaucratic revolution. Most important, three National Security Decision Memorandums (NSDM 1, 2, and 3) restructured the machinery of government, making the NSC the center of policy making and relegating the State Department to a secondary role in diplomacy. Kissinger also required that his NSC clear all policy cables before they were sent overseas, thus marginalizing the State Department from most foreign policy matters. Without informing Rogers, Kissinger then sent letters under Nixon’s name to heads of state around the globe, telling them of this important change. Relishing the speed and secrecy with which Kissinger carried out his plans, Nixon allowed the NSC to double in size, and he tripled its budget during his time in office. One of Kissinger’s most trusted aides, Lawrence Eagleburger, later noted that Nixon and Kissinger “developed a conspiratorial approach to foreign policy management”31 with the government’s reorganization. “It was a palace coup,” declared William Bundy, a former State Department official, “entirely constitutional but at the same time revolutionary.”32 Historian George Herring observed, “What had been created in 1947 as a coordinating mechanism [the NSC] became a little State Department.”33
But Nixon and Kissinger did more than just agree on process and the need for secrecy. They also generally agreed on key strategic issues. Both were rather pessimistic about the war in Vietnam and wanted to move on to what they considered more important foreign policy issues, such as arms limitations with the Soviets. Nixon told Kissinger that he did not want to devote all of h
is foreign policy time and energy to Vietnam, as Johnson had done, because the war was really a short-term problem.34 Nixon was more than willing to let Kissinger handle the task of developing policy options for Vietnam as long as he left the decision making up to the president. Kissinger agreed, stating that the general problem in Vietnam had been that military operations and diplomacy had been divorced. He believed that negotiations could provide a favorable, or at least acceptable, outcome for the president if the government’s various programs in Vietnam were studied carefully. The war could then be managed, coordinated, and “the whole puzzle put together.”35
Prelude: Designing a Policy
Kissinger had actually begun putting the whole puzzle together years before he joined the Nixon administration. While at Harvard, he used his prerogative as director of the Defense Policy Seminar to invite to campus experts who dealt closely with Vietnam. He understood that the conflict in Vietnam was the most pressing foreign policy issue of the day and that to gain influence in Washington, he would have to develop expertise on the war.
One of his first guests in early 1965 was John McNaughton, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s assistant and an expert on counterinsurgency. McNaughton had come highly recommended by Kissinger’s Harvard colleague Roger Fisher, who taught at the law school and was a specialist on international negotiations. Fisher would later write, “McNaughton did more sustained thinking about the benefits of both escalation and withdrawal [from Vietnam] than any of the advocates for either position.”36 Kissinger had also heard that McNamara relied thoroughly on McNaughton to develop policy options on Vietnam, so McNaughton became a source of information and a model for Kissinger.
Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam Page 2
