My highest priority in foreign policy is to build a structure of international relations that will help to make a more stable and enduring peace in the world.
—RICHARD NIXON, “TALKING POINTS ON CHINA,” JULY 17, 1971
By April 1971, after twenty-seven months in the White House, Nixon and Kissinger had settled into a working relationship that aimed at ending the war in South Vietnam without a Communist takeover and ensuring a second Nixon term, when he would be freer to build a new structure of international peace.
They had no illusions that they could put an end to war; regional or small conflicts would continue to plague the world. But they hoped to prevent another global disaster, which would be even worse than World Wars I or II. As Nixon told the journalist Allen Drury in the spring of 1971, “Whoever is President of the United States, and what he does, is going to determine the kind of world we have.” He wished to fulfill Woodrow Wilson’s dream of bringing an end to “big” or “general” wars. “Of course, there will be brushfire explosions,” he said, “things like Pakistan, Nigeria, things like that. But any Soviet leader who comes along—or, any Chinese leader, for that matter—will know what I know: that if he begins a major war, he almost instantly kills seventy million of his own people. The same applies to me and my successors. I don’t think that kind of national suicide is feasible any longer, for any sane man.”
The international stability Nixon imagined depended on accommodations with Russia and China, America’s most likely adversaries in any large-scale conflict. In the spring of 1971, better relations with each of the Communist superpowers remained more a hope than a reality. Despite past frustrations, Nixon and Kissinger remained optimistic that Moscow and Peking could be drawn into productive discussions that would promote détente and simultaneously serve the president’s prospects for a second term.
Nixon believed that international achievements would ultimately be the measure of his effectiveness and standing as a president. But that was for the long run, for the judgment of history. In the short run, doing something newsworthy, spectacular, if possible, was essential for his reelection, or so he believed. “The P’s view is,” Haldeman noted, “that if we don’t get SALT, if we don’t get the Summit [with the Soviets], if we don’t get a Vietnam settlement, all during this summer—and all of which are likely, but not certain—then he’s got to go for a trip to China this fall. Henry is very strongly opposed to any trip to China this year, but understands the P’s theory.”
In May, foreign policy gains finally began coming together. Specifically, the Soviets signaled their willingness to announce an agreement with the United States about SALT. On May 13, after Moscow had indicated its readiness to go forward, Kissinger and Dobrynin struggled to fashion mutually acceptable language. “I have worked for nine years and it’s the first time that the whole government has worked on each sentence,” Dobrynin told Henry. “If you get a big promotion,” Kissinger joked, “it will be because of my showing you attention.” Dobrynin replied, “It’s sometimes better not to have attention. It’s a little dangerous.”
On May 20, Moscow and Washington issued identical statements promising to work out an agreement in the coming year that would limit the deployment of antiballistic missile systems (ABMs). They also expected to reach agreement on limiting offensive strategic weapons. The announcement then held out hopes for a Summit. In response to press questions about other discussions with Moscow, Nixon intended to say, “I have often said that negotiations in one area can lead to progress in others.”
Mutual self-interest motivated the announcement, which Nixon and Kissinger saw as a crucial moment in Soviet-American relations. Henry was “very pleased and thought he’s gotten over the first hurdle in his series of negotiating plans,” Haldeman noted. Kissinger told former National Security Adviser Mac Bundy that a breakthrough on SALT was “a significant turning point,” which opened the way to discussions about “trade and related fields.” Nixon was delighted because they had “finally progressed to the point of something that we can actually take to the people.” Kissinger agreed, telling the president that progress on SALT would “make a tremendous splash.”
To assure his political gain, Nixon wanted everyone to understand that he was the driving force behind the negotiations. “The USA-U.S.S.R. commitment had been made at the highest level,” he told a bipartisan group of House and Senate leaders. Everyone at the White House was instructed to emphasize that “this is by far the most important foreign policy achievement since the end of World War II.” The SALT discussions in 1971 were no match for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile crisis, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and the ongoing anguish over Vietnam, but in an election season foreign policy hyperbole was hardly unprecedented.
The Soviets echoed Nixon’s enthusiasm for the announcement. Ping-pong diplomacy with the Chinese had made Moscow eager to impede a possible Sino-American agreement aimed against Russia. “There wouldn’t be a chance of a Russian play [on SALT]…a year before the election if we didn’t have the Chinese warming,” Nixon told Kissinger.
Moscow had other reasons for cooperating with Washington on arms talks. They were viewed as an essential prelude to an agreement with West Germany on defining its ties to West Berlin, an enduring source of East-West tension in 1971. Kissinger saw the linkage between the two issues—in early May, he told Nixon that we should stonewall the Soviets on Berlin if they impeded the SALT talks.
Moscow also expected détente to lead to expanded U.S.-Soviet trade, especially in grain sales, which it badly needed to feed its people and others in Eastern Europe. Moreover, the Soviets were intent on reaching agreements on mutual troop levels in central Europe as a way to ensure against the creation of a large German army, which reminded them of their terrible World War II losses.
NIXON AND KISSINGER believed that the prospect of a major advance in Soviet-American relations would have a salutary effect on discussions with China and efforts to end the Vietnam War. On April 27, the Pakistani ambassador delivered a note from Chou En-lai to the president apologizing for the long delay in answering Nixon’s December message suggesting a preliminary conversation between Chinese and American representatives about a high-level U.S. visit to Peking. Chou’s message said, “As the relations between China and the U.S.A. are to be restored fundamentally, a solution to this crucial question can be found only through direct discussions between high-level responsible persons of the two countries. Therefore, the Chinese Government reaffirms its willingness to receive publicly in Peking a special envoy of the President of the United States (for instance, Mr. Kissinger) or the U.S. Secretary of State or even the President of the United States himself.”
Although the announcement of the SALT agreement with Moscow was not yet in hand, Nixon and Kissinger believed that it was fear of a U.S.-Soviet accommodation that was motivating Peking’s initiative. “They’re scared of the Russians. That’s got to be it,” Nixon told Henry on April 28. Henry believed that Peking saw the visit as a deterrent to a Soviet attack and wanted to delay the visit for as long as they could and at least until the spring of 1972.
The evening after getting Chou’s message, Nixon and Kissinger agreed on a positive response. They saw a visit to China as not only transforming relations with Peking but also “creating a diversion from Vietnam in this country for a while…We need it for our game with the Soviets” as well, Kissinger said.
They now went back and forth over who should travel to Peking. Henry badly wanted the assignment, but Nixon wasn’t ready to offer it and seemed to take some perverse pleasure in raising other names with him. Nixon said he was considering David Bruce, but his involvement in the Paris talks might make the Chinese uncomfortable. “How about Nelson” Rockefeller? Nixon asked. “Mr. President, he wouldn’t be disciplined enough,” Henry objected. “How about [U.N. Ambassador George H. W.] Bush?” Nixon suggested. “Absolutely not,” Henry replied; “he is too soft and not sophisticated enough.” Nixon responded, “I thought of that myself.” Nixon came back to Rockefeller and asked Henry to “put Nelson in the back of your head.”
Kissinger made an indirect case for himself by implying that no one was more conversant with Nixon’s thinking about international matters than he was. Moreover, Henry described distinctions between the Chinese and the Russians that appealed to Nixon. “The difference between them and the Russians is that if you drop some loose change, when you go to pick it up the Russians will step on your fingers and the Chinese won’t,” Henry said. “Mr. President, I have not said this before, but I think if we get this thing working, we will end Vietnam this year…Once this thing gets going—everything is beginning to fit together.”
When Kissinger discussed the question of Nixon’s emissary again the next day, he made the case more directly for himself. He told the president and Haldeman that he was “the only one who could really handle this.” He also said, “I don’t want to toot my own horn but I happen to be the only one who knows all the negotiations.” Nixon now agreed: “Oh hell fire, I know that,” he said. “Nobody else can really handle it.” Nixon now dismissed Rockefeller as an “amateur,” and “you can’t get amateurs in a game of this importance,” he said. “Jesus Christ, I could wrap Rockefeller around my finger and he’ll never know it.” Henry exclaimed, “That’s right,” in a private demonstration of disloyalty to his former mentor. A silent nod of assent would have at least preserved him from the embarrassment which should attend this revelation.
Nixon laid out a scenario for a secret Kissinger visit to Pakistan to meet with Chinese officials, followed by a presidential visit to Peking in the spring of 1972. Kissinger suggested that before Nixon went, he should reveal his plans at a press conference. “Press conference, shit,” Nixon declared. “I wouldn’t call a press conference.” He intended to announce it in a prime-time televised speech. “Let the world rock,” Haldeman said. “Let it rock,” Nixon enthused. “The hell with the press conference. Why let them [the journalists] piss all over it?” Haldeman added: “Drop your bomb and leave.”
On May 10, 1971, Kissinger asked the Pakistani ambassador to forward a message from the president to Chou En-lai. “Because of the importance he attaches to normalizing relations between our two countries,” Nixon said, he was “prepared to accept the suggestion…that he visit Peking.” He asked that a secret discussion between Kissinger and Chou or some other appropriate Chinese official take place in China as a prelude to the president’s visit. Nixon also emphasized that Kissinger’s trip be “strictly secret.” Nixon remained concerned to assure against an explosion of opposition from friends of Taiwan and against allowing Henry to steal some of the thunder from what Nixon now saw as his greatest potential triumph as president. He preferred that Henry meet his Chinese counterpart in Pakistan, allowing Nixon to become the first high-level American official to visit Communist China.
At the end of May, when Nixon received polls showing an American majority supporting Communist China’s entrance into the UN, he saw it as evidence that the public was ready for reconciliation with Peking. “A majority of people now favor the admission of Red China,” he told Rogers, “they’re sort of following what we’ve done.”
On June 2, the Pakistani ambassador brought Kissinger Chou En-lai’s reply to Nixon’s latest letter. The Chinese were ready to receive Kissinger in Peking as a prelude to a Nixon visit. They were prepared to have each side freely raise “the principal issue of concern to it.” If the Americans insisted on secrecy, they would conform to their wishes, but they were willing to make the meeting public. Barring that, they suggested a public announcement following successful talks.
Kissinger was “ecstatic” at Chou’s reply. He arrived “out of breath” and “beaming” at the White House to tell Nixon. “This is the most important communication that has come to an American President since the end of World War II,” Henry said. Chou’s willingness to discuss broad global issues rather than just Taiwan made the response especially satisfying. An elated Nixon brought out a bottle of very old Courvoisier brandy. He proposed “a toast not to ourselves personally or to our success or to our administration’s policies which have made this message and made tonight possible.” Having celebrated their achievement, Nixon now suggested they “drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done.” Kissinger thought that Nixon’s toast reflected “the emotion and rekindled hope that out of the bitterness and division of a frustrating war we could emerge with a new national confidence in our country’s future.”
To give resonance to the private communications, on June 10, after consultation with Congress, the White House announced a further relaxation in trade restrictions with China. Export controls on a wide variety of products were lifted, including an end to a requirement that 50 percent of all food shipments to Communist countries had to go on U.S. ships. The announcement was not only a concession to the Chinese but also to Moscow, which was being rewarded for the SALT declaration with the prospect of increased U.S. grain exports.
Throughout June, Nixon and Kissinger conferred repeatedly about Henry’s trip to Asia beginning July 1. The plan was for Henry to consult with David Bruce in Paris about the peace talks and then go on to Vietnam, Thailand, India, and Pakistan, as a prelude to secretly traveling on a Pakistani jet to Peking. Although elated at his participation in a history-making event, the unavailability of a presidential plane brought out Kissinger’s petty side. Because Nixon, Agnew, and Laird were using the three aircraft in that category in early July, Henry had to settle for “a command plane from the Tactical Air Command filled with electronic equipment, extraordinarily uncomfortable, and with engines so old-fashioned that it required long runways. On takeoff, one had the feeling,” he complained, “that the plane really preferred to reach its destination overland.”
Henry’s plane may have had something to do with Nixon’s envy at having Kissinger precede him to China. Sending Kissinger on a less than VIP plane was a way to diminish an achievement Nixon wanted for himself. He surely understood that Kissinger would be less than happy with the travel arrangements. He was right. For all his success as a professor, author, and now prominent and powerful member of the Nixon administration, Kissinger remained overly sensitive to anything he considered even the smallest personal slight.
Since this was Henry’s first publicized fact-finding trip as national security adviser, it stimulated new tensions with Rogers. “It was painful enough to see me and the NSC staff dominate the policy process in Washington”; Kissinger wrote, “it was harder still to accept the proposition that I might begin to intrude on the conduct of foreign policy overseas.” Haldeman tried to smooth matters over with Rogers, who warned that current tensions between India and Pakistan made Henry’s visits to those two countries unwise. Haldeman countered Rogers’s objections by advising that Pakistani president Yahya Kahn had a private communication from the Chinese which he wanted to hand directly to Kissinger. It was a way “to lay the groundwork” for later informing Rogers about Henry’s real mission. It would allow Rogers to save face by saying that he had been briefed about the real purpose of Henry’s trip. But the Yahya communication did not appease Rogers.
When the New York Times published an article on June 28, predicting that Kissinger would go to Peking sometime in 1972 as the president’s representative, the Rogers-Kissinger conflict intensified. Nixon instructed Haldeman to keep Henry “calmed down” and to blunt the press leak by directing Ziegler to “have no comment on these speculative stories.”
In response to Nixon’s wishes, Henry and Rogers tried to maintain a civil attitude toward one another. In a telephone conversation between them on the afternoon of June 28, Kissinger promised that he would avoid comments to the press on his trip, including backgrounders. Rogers assured Henry that no one at state had leaked the Times story. Henry described the China part of the account as “wishful thinking. They want me in Outer Mongolia,” he joked. “Not a bad trip if you want to get away from it all,” Rogers countered. “I love the food,” Henry added. To further appease Rogers, Nixon invited him to spend two weeks with him at San Clemente while Henry was in Asia.
On the morning of July 1, as Kissinger was about to leave, Nixon spent almost two hours with him giving final instructions on what he should say to Chou En-lai. Nixon approved of an opening statement Henry crafted that discussed philosophical matters. But Nixon counseled against any lengthy “philosophical talk.” He said, “I’ve talked to Communist leaders. They love to talk philosophy, and, on the other hand, they have enormous respect if you come pretty directly to the point.” His success in talking to them was because “I don’t fart around…I’m very nice to them—then I come right in with the cold steel…You’re never gonna sell them a damn thing” with philosophy. “They’re bastards; he [Chou]’s a bastard.”
Henry acknowledged that he needed more “cold steel” in his statement. Nixon also advised him to keep Chou off balance “with surprise, this is terribly important.” He instructed Henry to make clear that the president is a tough customer. Say: “This is the man who did Cambodia; this is the man who did Laos; this is the man who will…protect our interests without regard for political considerations…You’ve gotta get down pretty crisply to the nut-cutting…the stuff that really counts.”
With Kissinger cabling the president on July 7 that he would fly to Peking the next day, Nixon felt compelled to bring Rogers more fully into the picture. On July 8, he informed him that the message Yahya Khan handed Kissinger was an invitation to come to China at once. To hide his movements, Kissinger’s aides told the press that a stomach upset had forced him into a retreat at President Yahya Kahn’s home in Nathiagali. In fact, he was on his way to Peking, Nixon told Rogers, and predicted that it was a prelude to a presidential visit, which would include Rogers.
According to Haldeman, “Rogers took it all extremely well.” He recorded five days later, Rogers “didn’t raise any objection except to the idea of Henry backgrounding, and was most gracious in congratulating Henry on the work he had done, both on China and on Vietnam.” The previous day, Haig, under instructions from the president, had informed Rogers about Henry’s secret meetings with the North Vietnamese in Paris. For the moment, Rogers stifled his injured pride and played the good team man.
Kissinger’s meetings in Peking impressed Kissinger and Nixon as, in Nixon’s words, “the most significant foreign policy achievement in this century.” In a report on the discussions, Kissinger told Nixon, “We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history. The process we have now started will send enormous shock waves around the world…If we can master this process,” Kissinger concluded, “we will have made a revolution.” The hyperbole was partly the product of a hunger for a big foreign policy gain after two and a half years of frustration over Vietnam, unyielding Soviet-American and Middle East tensions, and unmanageable events in Chile.
Yet Henry was no Pollyanna. He also warned against “illusions about the future. Profound differences and years of isolation yawn between us and the Chinese. They will be tough before and during the Summit on the question of Taiwan and other major issues. And they will prove implacable foes if our relations turn sour. My assessment of these people is that they are deeply ideological, close to fanatic in the intensity of their beliefs.” He also worried that our opening to China might “panic the Soviet Union into sharp hostility. It could shake Japan loose from its heavily American moorings. It will cause a violent upheaval in Taiwan…It will increase the already substantial hostility [to the United States] in India.” Nevertheless, Henry came away from the visit hopeful about the likely consequences of a Sino-American rapprochement.
As the records of the conversations in Peking make clear, Kissinger had reason for optimism. Not the least of these was the evident Chinese eagerness for a dramatic shift in relations. They signaled their seriousness of purpose by sending four important Chinese officials to Islamabad to accompany Kissinger and his NSC aides, Winston Lord, John Holdridge, and Dick Smyser, to Peking. The point was not lost on Kissinger or Nixon: Henry asked Haig to “be sure and tell the President that our friends sent a four-man delegation to meet him.” Nixon thought it “very interesting.”
The almost five-hour plane ride and arrival in Peking a little after noon on July 9 deepened Kissinger’s impression of how serious the Chinese were about altering relations. During the trip, while they sat around a table in “easy conversation,” the Chinese asked about the insistence on secrecy. They wondered whether the Americans were reluctant to acknowledge the contact with China’s Communists? Was this a variation of John Foster Dulles’s refusal to shake Chou’s hand at a conference in 1954? The Chinese made clear that the humiliation had left an unhealed wound. Kissinger explained his presence as a demonstration of regard and interest in a new relationship.
A senior member of the Politburo and three other high-ranking officials met the delegation at the airport and escorted them to a comfortable guest house overlooking a lake in a secluded park once the province of Chinese royalty. Tea and a sumptuous meal filled the afternoon until the arrival at four-thirty of Chou En-lai for initial talks that would last for almost seven hours.
Chou’s presence was a transparent demonstration of Peking’s interest in ending the twenty-two years of Sino-American hostility. As Kissinger later told the president’s senior staff members, “I talked with Chou for 20 hours. This is more than all the Western ambassadors put together have talked with Chou En-lai in all the years they have had diplomatic relations…The Chinese talk when they have something to say; they don’t talk for talking’s sake.”
As premier under Mao Zedong, the seventy-three-year-old Chou was second in command of China’s hundreds of millions of people for the entire life of the Communist government. He was a historical figure whose command of world affairs was nothing less than “stunning,” Kissinger said. “Urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinarily intelligent, subtle, he moved through our discussions with an easy grace that penetrated the essence of our new relationship as if there were no sensible alternative.” He “was one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met,” Kissinger added. And Chou clearly considered America a country to be reckoned with and Kissinger a worthy counterpart. Chou was well schooled not only in American events but also Kissinger’s background and outlook.
Because there were no specific issues to settle between them except Taiwan, and that was too complicated to lend itself to any quick solution, the purpose of the meeting was primarily to establish a measure of confidence and trust as a prelude to Nixon’s visit. They needed to bridge “two decades of mutual ignorance,” Kissinger writes, and so, “Chou and I spent hours together essentially giving shape to intangibles of mutual understanding.”
“Reliability is the cement of international order even among opponents,” Kissinger believed. And so his opening statement, which he had prepared under Nixon’s watchful eye, was a bow to Chinese national pride. “We come together again on a basis of equality,” Kissinger said. Although Henry later described his remarks as “long and slightly pedantic,” they struck exactly the right note: “Because of its achievements, tradition, ideology, and strength,” the PRC was entitled to an equal role “in all matters affecting the peace of Asia and the peace of the world.” There would be no point in arguing about the superiority of one country’s ideology over the other, he declared. That was for the future to decide.
The principal purposes of their meeting were to work out the details of President Nixon’s visit, and more important, to lay the groundwork for discussions with Chairman Mao. Kissinger went directly to the heart of the matter—Chinese concern about any Soviet-American “collusion” against them. Kissinger promised that the United States would “never collude with other countries against the People’s Republic of China, either with our allies or with some of our opponents.” The president had authorized him to say “that the U.S. will not take any major steps affecting your interests without discussing them with you and taking your views into account.”
Chou welcomed Kissinger’s acknowledgment of China’s equal standing in the world. “All things must be done in a reciprocal manner,” Chou said. As important, it was essential to understand that the settlement of specific problems could only follow from an agreement on fundamentals. For China, the primary issue was Taiwan. “If this crucial question is not solved, then the whole question will be difficult to resolve.”
While not disputing the importance of Taiwan for China, Kissinger said that America’s greatest current concern was ending the war in Vietnam. But, Kissinger explained, it must be a peace that did not undermine America’s world position. Any other end to the war—the defeat of America’s commitment to Saigon’s autonomy—would run counter to China’s interests. “If we are to have a permanent relationship, it is in your interest that we are a reliable country.” Only a peace with honor would assure friends and enemies that the United States means what it says. It would serve their mutual needs if China would help in bringing an acceptable end to the war.
Chou countered by urging a U.S. military withdrawal from all of Asia—South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Indochina, and Thailand—and support for self-determination everywhere. “What we strive for,” Chou declared, “is that all countries, big or small, be equal.”
Kissinger assured Chou that the United States had no interest in long-term occupations. Its engagements all over the world were against traditional inclinations. We found ourselves involved in an unwanted hegemony, Henry explained. In the future, American intervention would occur only if a superpower threatened to establish control by force over a weaker nation. The great worry in this regard, Chou noted, was the Soviet Union. Chou ended the first day’s conversation by graciously declaring that he had “come to understand not only your philosophy but also your actual policies.”
The discussion skirted controversial issues. It was the measure of how determined both sides were to reach an accommodation on improving relations that they made conscious efforts to mute their differences, which had been so substantial for so long.
The tone changed dramatically on the second day. Reluctant to be seen as courting U.S. support, Chou took a hard line in their next meeting. After a morning touring the Forbidden City with its fifteenth-century Imperial Palace, which “awed” Kissinger and his party, the talks resumed in the Great Hall of the People—an edifice Kissinger described as “undecided between Mussolini neoclassicism and Communist baroque.”
In opening the discussion, Chou aggressively stated Chinese suspicions of its three international adversaries—America, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Chou’s monologue, or what Kissinger described as “Chinese Communist liturgy,” declared “that Taiwan was part of China; that China supported the ‘just struggle’ of the North Vietnamese; that the big powers were colluding against China…; that India was aggressive; that the Soviets were greedy and menacing to the world;…[and] that America was in difficulty because we had ‘stretched out our hands too far.’”
Chou described a possible conspiracy by Washington, Moscow, and Tokyo to occupy and divide up China. “You can say that such things will never happen,” Chou declared, but warned nevertheless that it might, and that China would fight a long-term struggle to free itself from the three oppressors. Although Chou took care not to set the settlement of these issues as a precondition, he did question the point of a presidential visit while so many of the tensions he described remained unresolved.
Kissinger later described himself as responding “equally firmly,” saying there could be no conditions on Nixon’s acceptance of Peking’s invitation, and then launching “into a deliberately brusque point-by-point rebuttal.” But the record of what he said reveals not a sharp refutation of Chou’s attack, but a conciliatory statement aimed at softening differences and securing Chinese agreement to the president’s visit. Sensing that Kissinger’s eagerness for Nixon’s trip gave him considerable leeway to denounce U.S. policies, past and present, Chou assumed correctly that Kissinger would not enter into a sharp debate about the relative virtues of U.S. and Chinese actions. So Chou could not have been surprised when Henry urged patience and understanding with each other. “We should not destroy what is possible by forcing events beyond what the circumstances will allow,” Kissinger said.
As for Nixon’s visit, Kissinger cautioned that “the only President who could conceivably do what I am discussing with you is President Nixon. Other political leaders might use more honeyed words, but would be destroyed by what is called the China lobby [the doctrinaire anti-Communist supporters of China’s defeated Nationalists in Taiwan] in the United States if they ever tried to move even partially in the direction” of friendship with Peking.
After lunch, Chou reverted to the cordiality of the first day. He proposed that the president come to Peking in the summer of 1972. Kissinger thought a spring visit might be best—before the U.S. presidential election got into full swing and the Summit could be set down to reelection politics.
A final evening and subsequent morning of negotiations subjected Kissinger to the Chinese Communist tactic of giving the obvious grudgingly. They postponed scheduled talks and kept the conversations going until early the next morning over not “an elaborate communiqué but…a statement of a paragraph or two announcing a presidential visit to Peking.” Trying to make it seem that the Americans were supplicants and that Nixon would come to China primarily to discuss Taiwan, the Chinese drafted a statement which was put into acceptable form only in the hour before Kissinger left Peking on the afternoon of July 11.
After Kissinger sent Nixon a one-word message, “Eureka,” confirming that the visit had been arranged, Nixon asked for a written report of the discussions before Henry arrived at the California White House on July 13. Nixon wanted not only a detailed account of the talks but also assurances that nothing would leak to the press before he gave a speech to the nation on the evening of July 15 revealing Henry’s trip and Nixon’s plan to visit China before May 1972.
In a telephone conversation with Haig on July 11, Nixon wanted to ensure that Kissinger and Rogers did not eclipse him in winning credit for the China initiative. “Once this hits,” Nixon told Haig, “the pressures…from the papers and magazines who want to see Henry will be just impossible. I will of course have a heart to heart with him. They will want to play on his ego. The magazines will want him for a cover. He is not to cooperate…It will project him into an enormous position in the press interest. They have a lot of tricks that they will try to play to get to see him. If they want to do a cover, fine, but with no cooperation.”
Nor did Nixon want the state department and Rogers in particular to discuss anything with the press. “The people at State will be speculating all over the place,” Nixon said. “I think I will just have to issue an order that there is to be absolutely no speculation and that anyone who does speculate is subject to removal.” As for Rogers, he asked Henry to prepare “a highly sanitized version of his discussions” that will keep him from knowing “everything that went on.”
Nixon had to be talked into letting Henry give a background press briefing. He was sure “the press will try to give K the credit in order to screw the P,” Haldeman recorded Nixon as saying. Kissinger convinced him that he could “shoot that down.” Nixon then instructed Henry to tell reporters “how RN is uniquely prepared for this meeting and how ironically in many ways he has similar characteristics and background to Chou…Strong convictions; came up through adversity; at his best in a crisis, cool, unflappable; a tough bold, strong leader, willing to take chances where necessary; a man who takes the long view, never being concerned about tomorrow’s headlines but about how the policy will look years from now; a man with a philosophical turn of mind; a man who works without notes…[while] covering many areas; a man who knows Asia…; a man who in terms of his personal style is…steely…subtle and almost gentle.”
Nixon’s comparison of himself to Chou was so preposterous that Kissinger never used any of it in his press briefings. Chou would have been highly amused to know that the man Dulles would not shake hands with was now the standard for measuring presidential excellence.
After Nixon “shocked” the world with his announcement, he “reveled” in his triumph, but not quite believing “what he had just announced.” Although “the media were nearly unanimous in their praise,” there were some complaints, especially about Nixon’s secrecy. The White House argued that public knowledge of Kissinger’s trip would have fueled speculation and inflated expectations that could not be realized. Moreover, if the conversations had led to a dead end, they would have exacerbated tensions with Peking and created a sense of failure that added to international gloom about the future. Kissinger believed that Bill Safire had it right when he said: “The most dangerous of all moral dilemmas: When we are obliged to conceal truth in order to help the truth to be victorious.”
But secrecy had its drawbacks. It added to long-standing beliefs about Nixon’s untrustworthiness. His and Kissinger’s growing reputation for deviousness intensified existing tensions with the press, and, along with admiration for a sensible China policy, provoked fresh public suspicions about a president and an administration that, as with Cambodia, seemed all too willing to act with little regard for congressional participation. Besides, the risk of a failed Chou-Kissinger meeting was considerably less than what the White House described; Peking had already made clear its desire for a Nixon visit.
The Nixon-Kissinger attraction to secrecy was a way to ensure their control over a policy for which they wanted exclusive credit. Neither man could rise above his affinity for backdoor operations or their own political interest to see that so large a shift in foreign policy was best done as part of a national dialogue rather than as the product of their inventiveness in managing foreign affairs.
Yet there were potential drawbacks to an open discussion of any rapprochement with China. It might have touched off a fierce debate that would have made it more difficult to convince the Chinese that Americans favored a new day in Sino-American relations. Besides, as Nixon and Kissinger understood, the boldness of their fait accompli, however much an administration rather than a national initiative, largely silenced critics and created a stable consensus for something that seemed so transparently sensible.
IN HIS BRIEF, four hundred-word announcement of the opening to China, Nixon emphasized that the new relationship with the PRC was “not directed against any other nation.” But, of course, Nixon and Kissinger saw the China initiative as a useful way to pressure the U.S.S.R. “The beneficial impact on the USSR is perhaps the single biggest plus that we get from the China initiative,” Henry told the president. But they saw advantages in muting the connection. “Pressure on the Russians is something we obviously never explicitly point to,” Kissinger also advised Nixon. “The facts speak for themselves.”
The White House did not want the opening to China to exacerbate tensions with Moscow. Nixon and Kissinger feared that it might move Russia to strike a relatively weak China with nuclear weapons in order to eliminate a two-front threat. Nor did Nixon and Kissinger believe that they could use détente with Moscow to directly pressure Peking; it might recoil from improved relations with Washington and “reexamine its options with the Soviet Union.” As Mao would later tell Nixon, we should not try to stand “on China’s shoulders to reach Moscow.”
Difficulties between the two Communist superpowers, however, gave anything the United States did with one or the other resonance in both nations’ capitals. The opening to Peking pressured Moscow into a Summit Nixon had been seeking since 1970. Conservative criticism of the SALT announcement made Nixon more eager than ever for a further advance in Soviet-American relations. Bill Buckley warned in the National Review that Nixon would lose in 1972 unless he won significant concessions from the Soviets for having agreed to an arms accord with them.
During a meeting at Camp David on June 8, Kissinger pressed Dobrynin for an answer on a Summit. “I…point[ed] out to Dobrynin that we had been talking about a Summit for 14 months, and there was nothing we were going to find out that we did not already know. It, therefore, now simply came down to the issue of whether a Summit was wanted.” Despite assurances in April that Moscow had no preconditions for a meeting, Dobrynin answered that a Summit would be in order after Berlin negotiations were concluded. Henry objected to the “blackmail,” and warned that if an agreement were not reached by the end of June, it would mean delaying a meeting until next year. Moscow was unconcerned. It called for “further substantive progress” in relations before committing to a high-level meeting at the end of the year. With the trip to China looming and expectations for a commitment to a Chinese Summit early in 1972, Kissinger had high hopes that the announcement in July of improved Sino-American relations would force Moscow to shift ground.
It did. On July 19, after he had asked Dobrynin to meet with him, the ambassador rushed back from New York. Henry was eager for Dobrynin’s response to the China announcement. “Dobrynin was at his oily best and, for the first time in my experience with him, totally insecure.” Henry didn’t mince words: “The Soviet response has been grudging and petty, especially on the Summit meeting,” he complained. Soviet willingness to consider a year-end meeting was unacceptable; he considered it a “rejection.” “Dobrynin in reply was almost beside himself with protestations of goodwill.” Moscow was eager for a meeting, but “would we be willing to come to Moscow before going to Peking?” Henry said, “No,” but softened the refusal by declaring U.S. readiness to announce plans for a Moscow Summit before Nixon went to Peking. Dobrynin expressed regret that Kissinger had not given him some advance warning of his trip to China; “it might have affected our decision.”
At the end of July, though Moscow was in no hurry to announce an agreement to Nixon’s visit, lest it seem like a direct response to the president’s announcement on China, they were committed to a Moscow meeting, and Dobrynin agreed with Kissinger that they “should now focus on working things out constructively in the future.”
On August 5, Nixon sent Brezhnev a placating letter. He assured the party secretary that he was mindful of the need to always consider the “legitimate interests of both sides.” Each of them had too much power to continue as antagonists that could provoke a terrible disaster. For the moment, he wished to make clear that America’s “better contacts” with the PRC and “my forthcoming visit to Peking have no hidden motives.” The new relationship with China was not aimed at the Soviet Union, but would contribute “to a wider normalization of international relationships.” Nor were better ties to any Eastern European country, an area “historically of special concern to the Soviet Union,” meant to detach any of them from connections to Moscow. Nixon praised the progress toward arms control and hoped that they could work together toward peace in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Although the Soviets welcomed Nixon’s expressions of friendship, they did not trust his professions of innocence about the Peking Summit. They wondered if the president’s failure to mention anything in his letter about a Moscow meeting indicated that “we were no longer interested in it.” When Kissinger assured Dobrynin that this was not so, the ambassador said that a formal invitation would arrive in the next two weeks. And so it did, though it would take until October 12 for a mutually acceptable announcement of a Summit meeting in the spring of 1972.
With the promise of a Summit and possible advances on arms control ahead, Soviet-American relations, like Sino-American relations, seemed to be taking an upturn. At the end of September, after Gromyko saw Nixon at the White House, he told Kissinger how “enormously impressed” he was by his conversation with the president. Both of them had “conducted the discussions in shirt-sleeves.” Nixon’s emphasis on the special importance of Soviet-American interactions especially pleased Gromyko. He said that Brezhnev held the same exact view. As Dobrynin escorted Henry to the door, he thought the meeting with Gromyko was “one of the best he had attended, and he had never seen his minister so relaxed.”
Both Nixon and Kissinger now felt as if their nearly three-year effort to reduce international conflicts, maintain U.S. security, and lead the world toward greater stability was paying off. But Henry cautioned against taking anything for granted. He refused to attach any significance to Gromyko’s “relaxed” attitude, for example. At the end of their meeting, when Gromyko invited him to come to Moscow before the Summit, Henry responded, “I have given you a way for me to be able to do that” (meaning, connect my visit to Vietnam). Gromyko snarled, “Always linkage.” Neither Kissinger nor the president assumed that a new world order was imminent.
Moreover, they now found themselves thrown on the defensive by hard-line anti-Communists. California businessman Henry Salvatori wrote Haldeman on July 21 that the China initiative was creating “serious doubts and consternation among the President’s conservative supporters.” Nixon commented to Haldeman on “how stupid the Birchers [John Birch Society anti-Communist ideologues] were in attacking us on this, because they should see this…[as] against the Russians and be delighted with it.” On July 22, Kissinger passed along a letter from a conservative friend warning that Moscow and others would see “China policy as but a symptom of our overwhelming desire to seek reconciliation and disengagement any way and everywhere.” Nixon responded: “This memo brilliantly points up the dangers of our move…Our task is to play a hard game with the Soviets and to see that wherever possible—including non-Communist Asia—our friends are reassured.”
In August, a number of conservative businessmen close to California Governor Ronald Reagan signed a public statement expressing great concern about Nixon’s détente policies with Russia and China. In an off-the-record meeting with eight of them, Kissinger tried to relieve their fears. He urged them to remember that when Nixon entered office in 1969, Vietnam had divided the country and the Soviets had equaled U.S. military power.
What had Nixon done to meet these problems? According to Kissinger, he had overcome “violent” congressional and bureaucratic opposition to an ABM system, which had opened the way to negotiations that seemed likely to rein in Moscow’s drive for missile superiority. We were asking for a freeze on the development of land-based missiles, Henry explained. If we achieved it, the United States would be conceding nothing and the Soviets, who were building them at a rate of approximately 120 a year, would be the losers.
As for Vietnam, the administration was holding out against critics who were ready to abandon the Thieu government. “We will not participate in an overthrow of an allied government,” Kissinger declared. “Today the prospects of a negotiated settlement are good; and if they do work out, it will have been as a result of the painful months that we have endured in the recent past.” As for China, the Chinese had given up “their revolutionary virginity” by inviting the president to Peking. Necessity had brought us together with the Chinese. It was an effective way to restrain Moscow. “Up to July 17 Dobrynin and the Russians were insolent in their dealings with us. Since July 17 we have had their full attention. Nor should anyone see the opening to China as a sellout of Taiwan at the UN. China had the votes to replace Chiang’s government and only a two-China policy would allow Taipei to keep a seat in the world body.
The need, Henry asserted, was for conservatives to line up behind the administration as a counterweight to the liberals. But Kissinger’s appeal did not persuade the men at the meeting. If we are declining militarily, one of them said, why doesn’t the president simply make an open appeal to the American people? It would chase liberals “up the road.” That’s a political issue, Henry responded, and declared himself unqualified to discuss it. “The only viable strategy,” another said, “is to gain and retain clear military superiority.” Henry protested that he was not sure what that meant. “I must be candid,” a third member of the group declared, “my prior opinion still holds…the Administration has a different strategic analysis from the one I support.”
Nixon and Kissinger saw the SALT and China announcements as foreign policy breakthroughs that not only advanced the cause of peace but also disarmed most of their liberal critics, who favored arms control agreements and efforts at reconciliation with Peking. Liberal backing, however, had come at the price of conservative opposition. For most people on the right, communism was an anathema with which free peoples could not live. They feared that détente and accommodation would lead not to a more peaceful world but to the defeat of democratic institutions at the hands of ruthless authoritarian regimes. They were astonished that Nixon, who had built his political career on uncompromising anticommunism, would now cozy up to Moscow and Peking.
Kissinger, by contrast, with his long-running connections to Harvard and Rockefeller moderates, was, in their view, part of the liberal foreign policy establishment. Many conservatives viewed his rhetoric about helping Nixon rescue U.S. foreign policy from the clutches of left-wing politicians and soft-minded government bureaucrats as an unconvincing cover for doing largely what a Democratic administration under Hubert Humphrey would have done. In the summer of 1971, the rise of conservative opposition to the administration’s foreign policy joined with ongoing difficulties in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Chile to cast shadows over the gains in dealings with Moscow and Peking.
Yet in retrospect, détente was not the product of a sellout to liberals or a president who had lost his moorings. It flowed naturally from earlier events and assessments of current realities. There was a long history of Soviet accommodation to the West between the 1920s and 1940s, followed by the Test Ban Treaty in 1963 that made détente in the 1970s less than unprecedented. More immediately, the growth of the Soviet nuclear arsenal in the sixties to levels comparable to the United States was a compelling argument for reining in Soviet-American hostility that could result in a mutually destructive nuclear war. As Nixon and Kissinger tried to make clear to conservatives, their China policy and development of MIRVs were fresh means of containing Soviet power, not giving in to it. In short, détente was foreign policy realism which guarded against national devastation and any sort of major Soviet victory in the Cold War.
Twenty years later, critics could argue against détente as an unnecessary policy that may have extended the life of the Soviet regime. But that complaint rested on the reality of Communist collapse. In the context of 1971, no one foresaw the Soviet demise in two decades. Sensible realism compelled accommodation to a superpower Russia that shared a capacity with the United States to produce a nuclear holocaust.
VIETNAM REMAINED Nixon’s and Kissinger’s greatest frustration. The war had become a national disaster, a constant irritant, and a divisive force in American life. At the end of March 1971, after a military court had convicted Lieutenant William Calley of premeditated murder in the My Lai massacre and sentenced him to life imprisonment, Nixon decided to confine him to barracks while Calley appealed his sentence. The court’s decision and Nixon’s action provoked criticism, adding to the unrelenting controversy that the White House dearly wished would go away. (In April 1974, Calley’s sentence was reduced to ten years, and the secretary of the Army paroled him in November.)
A series of antiwar demonstrations following the Laos invasion also upset the president. In the spring of 1971, “that uneasily dormant beast of public protest—our nightmare, our challenge, and, in a weird way, our spur—burst forth again,” Kissinger recalled. When the future senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he called the war “the biggest nothing in history,” and famously said, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
The White House had no clear idea of how to combat the protestors. “This fellow Kerry…was extremely effective,” Nixon told Kissinger and Haldeman. The plan was to do nothing that provoked a confrontation with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Pat Buchanan suggested waiting until “the ‘crazies’ came to town. If we want a confrontation, let’s have it with them.” They would be a more “advantageous enemy.”
To disarm what the White House saw as some of its more reasonable opponents, Nixon agreed to see college student leaders. The meeting left him with a sense of hopelessness about changing minds. “It’s just crap, you know,” he told Haldeman. “We have to sit and talk to these little jackasses…Why don’t I just…scratch all this crap, really, bullshit, all these meetings, this therapy meeting with the little assholes…and recognizing that we have a great crisis in this country in terms of understanding, recognizing that probably nobody can solve it.”
Nixon thought he could afford to ignore the unreachable students, but he couldn’t be so casual about members of Congress, especially senators who were increasingly aggressive about pressuring the administration to withdraw from Vietnam. In seventeen House and Senate votes between April 1 and July 1, some members of Congress wanted to set a fixed date for U.S. military withdrawal. Nixon and Kissinger opposed these resolutions less because they saw them undermining South Vietnam’s survival than because they feared accusations that the Nixon administration had a significant part in losing Vietnam.
By the spring of 1971, domestic pressure for U.S. withdrawal created a heightened sense of urgency in the administration about ending the war. At the end of April, Kissinger told the president, when I go to China, “I will tell the foreign minister…we must get it [the war] settled. That’s why we wanted to meet with you secretly…get the war in Vietnam over with.” Nixon wanted Henry to tell Chou that “before I get there [to China], the war has to be pretty well settled.”
In the following week, Nixon told Haldeman that on the second anniversary of the start of troop withdrawals, which was coming up in June, they had to “have some Vietnam movement…We have to move decisively and crisply for domestic reasons.” Conditions in Congress made it imperative that they show some greater progress. Nevertheless, Nixon remained determined to do everything possible to back Saigon. “He’s as hard line as he’s ever been about running out the war on a proper basis as we see it,” Haldeman said.
Prospects brightened a bit in May. The North Vietnamese asked Henry to return to Paris for a new round of talks at the end of the month. Moreover, Thieu advised Ambassador Bunker in Saigon that his army would soon be ready to fight without the support of U.S. troops. As Henry was about to leave for Paris, Nixon hoped for a breakthrough that would rid them of the war. When Kissinger reported that the journalist Marquis Childs said that “the Democrats look sick; all they talk about is Vietnam,” Nixon responded, “You tell him Vietnam is finished…The main thing is what is going to happen to Russia, China, the Middle East and the economy of the U.S.”
The hopeful notes struck by Nixon and Kissinger were wishful thinking. With the president’s approval ratings falling below 50 percent, and 61 percent of the public declaring American troops in Vietnam a mistake and favoring their withdrawal by no later than July 1, 1972, Henry returned to Paris eager for any hint of a settlement. Nixon instructed Kissinger to make a “final offer,” coupled with the warning that “time for negotiations is running out.”
Kissinger carried a seven-point plan with him to Paris. It promised to set a date for total withdrawal of U.S. troops in return not for North Vietnamese withdrawal but a commitment to end infiltration into South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This was a major departure from earlier insistence on mutual commitments to end North Vietnamese and American involvement in the fighting. It reflected the Nixon administration’s assessment that its drawdown of U.S. troops was depriving it of the capacity to compel Hanoi’s departure from the South. Saigon’s political future, which Hanoi had consistently demanded not include Thieu, was to be left to the South Vietnamese, who were slated to have national elections in the fall.
“Once again,” Kissinger said, “the American and Vietnamese delegations faced each other [in a dingy living room] across a narrow strip of carpet and a chasm of misperception,” which, Henry might have added, was principally on his side. The North Vietnamese were unyielding in their conviction that they could outlast the Americans and take control of South Vietnam.
Hanoi’s unbending attitude enraged Nixon. In a June 2 conversation with Kissinger and Haldeman, he banged his desk and threatened dire consequences if North Vietnam did not end the war soon. Nixon claimed that if he had been in office in 1966 and 1967, he would have committed sufficient resources to have won the war.
And if need be, he would do it now, or so he said in a private tirade. “If we don’t get any Soviet breakthrough, if we don’t get the Chinese, if we can’t get that ensemble, we can’t get anything on Vietnam, the situation is deteriorating—about November of this year, I’m going to take a goddamn hard look at the hole card…I’m not talking about bombing passes [or trails]…we’re gonna take out the dikes, we’re gonna take out the power plants, we’re gonna take out Haiphong, we’re gonna level that goddamn country! Now that makes me shout,” Nixon said at the top of his voice while pounding his desk. Kissinger chimed in, “I think the American people would understand that.” Nixon went on, “The point is we’re not gonna go out whimpering, and we’re not gonna go out losing.”
With Xuan Thuy making public statements urging Congress to set a deadline on American withdrawal, Kissinger told Nixon on June 8, “I am seeing Dobrynin and I will lay it into him. Tell their little yellow friends to stop these games. We are not going down quietly.” Kissinger spoke with Dobrynin on June 3, 7, and 21, but said nothing about Vietnam. Henry was covering his bets—he hoped additional Paris meetings at the end of the month might bring significant results, but if they didn’t, he would remain in good standing with Nixon by supporting his emotional outbursts about decimating Hanoi.
On June 13, a new problem erupted over Vietnam. The New York Times began publishing excerpts of “The Pentagon Papers,” a secret multivolume documentary history of the Vietnam War prepared at Robert McNamara’s request. The publication of classified materials outraged the Nixon White House: Nixon and Kissinger agreed it was “treasonable” because “it serves the enemy.” They thought it would further erode domestic support by revealing hidden actions under Kennedy and Johnson that had propelled the country into the conflict. Moreover, they feared that additional debate and dissent would weaken Nixon’s ability to pressure Hanoi into an honorable settlement.
The initial impulse, however, was to stand aside from the controversy. “I think our best bet is to keep clear,” Haig told Haldeman. While it might undermine the war effort, it seemed unlikely to have any political impact on the Nixon White House. “If it keeps it in the headlines about eight years ago, this is not so bad,” Haldeman said. Haig wanted press secretary Ron Ziegler to “take the position you inherited this thing,” he told Nixon, “and you have been trying to wind it down.” Nixon replied, “Yes, and to accomplish our goal. Let’s say this is a fight with the Democratic party and we are not going to get into it.”
Nevertheless, Nixon wanted “to be awful rough on the New York Times in terms of future leaks.” He ordered Haldeman to put out the word that “under no circumstances is anyone connected with the White House to give any interview to…the New York Times without my express permission.” But he wasn’t ready to prosecute the Times: “My view is to prosecute the goddamn pricks that gave it to ’em,” he told Erlichman.
After further consideration of what the publication of the Papers meant for the presidency and some prodding from John Mitchell and Lyndon Johnson, Nixon decided to seek an injunction against the Times’s additional release of government records. Bill Rogers thought the White House had to respond: “You can’t wink at a violation of the law,” he told Kissinger. Henry agreed. “It’s an outrage,” he said. “Inimical to the national interest. In Britain,” where a national secrets act would have made it a crime, “no one would publish this.”
Walt Rostow, LBJ’s national security adviser, told Kissinger that “Johnson and all of us feel there’s [a] serious matter for the fate of the country.” They saw a threat to governmental power, and promised to support any legal action to stop further newspaper publications. Kissinger agreed with Rostow that it was up to Nixon to move against the Times. Henry told Nixon, “The press has no freedom to publish highly classified materials.”
On June 15, Mitchell won a temporary restraining order against the Times. Nixon decided to file criminal charges. He saw two dangers to the government from the Times’s action. It jeopardized the executive’s ability to get candid advice from aides, and made it more difficult to deal with other governments. “The fact that some idiot can publish all of the diplomatic secrets of this country on his own is damaging to your image,” Kissinger advised the president. “And it could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy. If the other powers feel that we can’t control internal leaks, they will never agree to secret negotiations.” Nixon called Neil Sheehan, who was writing the Times’s stories, a “pluperfect son-of-a-bitch. We have to protect the integrity of the process of consultation and our relationships with foreign governments,” he told the National Security Council.
The internal discussion now turned to the search for the source of the leak. It brought Kissinger under suspicion and jeopardized his standing with Nixon. If someone on Henry’s staff were responsible, it would have destroyed the president’s already shaky faith in the NSC and possibly made him reluctant to rely on Kissinger for the secret diplomacy he was conducting with the Vietnamese, Soviets, and Chinese.
Kissinger took pains to exonerate himself. On June 14, when Rogers briefed him on who had access to the Papers and pointed out that he was on a list to receive them, Henry said, “I never had it…I didn’t know it existed.” He defended himself by saying that he “thought Laird leaked it.” But Rogers doubted that the leak had come from the government. Copies of the material were in the possession of several people outside the current administration. Relieved to hear this, Henry reiterated his innocence: “I didn’t know the thing existed. I am certain I have never seen it.”
The search for the culprit intensified on June 15. In conversations with Laird, Agnew, and Nixon, Kissinger echoed his concern that anyone would go public with such sensitive material, including Henry’s role in the 1968 Paris negotiations. He repeated his ignorance of the existence of such a study and promised to help find the guilty party.
On June 16, the name of Daniel Ellsberg surfaced as the possible culprit. A former New York Times reporter mentioned him in a radio discussion as someone who had access to the documents and the motive as an antiwar activist. That afternoon, Henry Rowen, the head of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where Ellsberg had copied the Papers, told Kissinger that suspicion had fallen on Ellsberg and that “his ex-wife is firmly convinced he is” the one. Ellsberg told his son that “he had done something at great risk, he was going to jail…His ex-wife is concerned about his stability…I think it is more than possible that he is the source.” Kissinger responded, “That is what I think, too.”
If Kissinger was relieved to hear that the culprit had probably been identified, he was thrown on the defensive again the next day during a conversation with Newsweek reporter Henry Hubbard. Hubbard recounted a discussion with Ellsberg, who claimed that during a conversation at Nixon’s San Clemente home Kissinger told him that there was a copy of the Pentagon Papers at the White House. “He is a liar,” Kissinger said angrily. Although he did not deny meeting with Ellsberg in September 1970 at the California White House, Kissinger said, “He never talked to me about it. We have never had a copy at the White House. I can prove I didn’t even know of its existence.” Henry acknowledged that Ellsberg “is a brilliant guy,” and that he had asked him in 1969 as a former Pentagon official and architect of the war to join six other analysts in writing a National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) on our options in Vietnam.
Despite his denial, Kissinger was eager to keep his ties to Ellsberg quiet. Henry wanted to know how important it was for Hubbard to mention their connection. Hubbard doubted that the magazine would want to get into too much detail on Ellsberg’s background, but he cautioned, “You are liable to get involved.”
The ties to Ellsberg renewed Kissinger’s fears of an unwelcome impact on his credibility with the president. Consequently, when he saw Nixon on June 17 and they discussed Ellsberg, Henry said, “That son-ofa-bitch. I know him well. He is completely nuts…He always seemed a little bit unbalanced.” Henry also called him “a genius…one of the most brilliant men I ever met.”
Much of the June 17 taped conversation remains embargoed, but Haldeman, who was present, said that Henry gave a “premier performance,” an outburst which exceeded anything he had ever before seen from him. He leveled charges against Ellsberg that went “beyond belief,” assertions that he was a drug addict, had sex with his wife in front of his children, and shot at innocent peasants from a helicopter while in Vietnam. Erhlichman, who was also at the meeting, remembered Kissinger’s saying that Ellsberg was “a fanatic, known to be a drug abuser and in knowledge of very critical defense secrets of current validity, such as nuclear deterrent targeting.” Erlichman took away the impression that Ellsberg was “a very serious potential security problem beyond theft of the largely historical Pentagon Papers.” It echoed what Henry had already said to Nixon in front of Charles Colson. Colson remembered his saying that Ellsberg was “the most dangerous man in America today” and had “to be stopped at all costs.”
“By the end of the [June 17] meeting, Nixon was as angry as his foreign affairs chief. The thought that an alleged weirdo was blatantly challenging the president infuriated him,” Haldeman recalled. Nixon told Kissinger that “any intellectual is tempted to put himself above the law,” especially if they were “Eastern schools or Berkeley.” Kissinger did not dispute Nixon’s characterization of leading intellectuals. Nixon felt “strongly that we’ve got to get Ellsberg nailed hard on the basis of being guilty of stealing the papers. That’s the only way we are going to make the case of the press having done something bad and having violated the law in publishing stolen documents.” As for the press, he said, “Goddamn newspapers—they’re a bunch of sluts.” Nixon told Henry, “I don’t give a goddamn about repression, do you?” Neither did Henry, who said, “No.”
Kissinger makes no mention in his memoirs of his attacks on Ellsberg. He rationalized going after him and the Times based on a current conviction that the publication of the Papers jeopardized the ongoing negotiations with Hanoi; it might be convincing the North Vietnamese that they didn’t have to settle with the United States because Nixon had no recourse but to capitulate to their demands. “I do not believe now that publication of the Pentagon Papers made the final difference in Hanoi’s decision not to conclude a settlement in 1971,” Kissinger wrote in 1979. “But neither those who stole the Papers nor the government could know this at the time.” It is an unconvincing argument. Hanoi did not need the publication of the Papers to convince it that the public, press, and Congress were fed up with the war and wanted out under almost any terms as soon as possible.
Later in June 1971, as Kissinger was about to return to Paris for another meeting with the North Vietnamese, Nixon doubted its good results. But not because of the Pentagon Papers, which the Supreme Court decided on June 30 the Times had a First Amendment right to continue publishing. Rather, the opposition to the war was made abundantly clear by the passage on June 22 of the Mansfield Amendment to a Senate bill: It called for a mandatory withdrawal of U.S. forces from Indochina nine months after the bill’s enactment and an end to all military operations after the release of all American POWs. The vote on the amendment was 57 to 42, which the White House saw as “pretty strong” and a victory for the antiwar forces.
The amendment enraged Lyndon Johnson, who, Haldeman reported to the president, said “I’m going to do everything I possibly can to beat the dirty rotten sons of bitches in 1972.” LBJ called Clark Clifford, his defense secretary, who had turned against the war, a “silly motherfucker.” Nixon complained that talking to congressmen was “the most miserable thing I deal with.” They are “spineless, incompetent people.” But he refused “to be all depressed about it.” In a conversation with Mansfield, he told him that they had ongoing secret negotiations and that “this action of the Senate may have destroyed it.” He warned him that the failure of negotiations would likely force him to bomb “the hell out of them.”
Mansfield’s Amendment discouraged Nixon’s and Kissinger’s hopes of a positive response from Hanoi. Henry “got very cranked up about it,” Haldeman noted, “because…it will mean not much chance for his negotiations in Paris.” Henry called the amendment “the most irresponsible performance I have ever seen for public short-term political gains.” Since the Communists were currently thinking things over, he told Kansas Republican Senator Robert Dole, “this is not the time for us to be put under more heat. These people [the Democratic senators] are prolonging the war.”
Henry “is very depressed about what’s happened,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I just had to buck him up. I said, ‘It’s going to come out all right. These boys [senators] have total disregard about national security. There’s nothing you can do about it. They’re going to pay a price.’”
Henry saw a drawback to keeping his Paris talks secret. If he could have revealed the administration’s peace proposals, it might have reined in the Senate, created stronger domestic support for the president in the negotiations, and made the North Vietnamese more forthcoming. But he wasn’t sure, and secrecy, including the imminent trip to China, was now so much a part of how he and Nixon had operated for over two years that it seemed all but impossible to abandon.
Nixon now considered aborting Kissinger’s stop in Paris and “flushing the whole deal.” He told Henry, “This is it; he’s got to get it settled.” If he didn’t, Nixon intended to end the negotiations and publicly blame it on Mansfield and the other fifty-six senators who voted for his amendment. Nixon said he had a plan for leaving Vietnam should the negotiations fail. He would rely on “a total bombing of the North to eliminate their capability of attacking.” Since air attacks on the North between 1965 and 1968 had had a limited impact on Hanoi’s offensive capabilities, it is difficult to understand Nixon’s reasoning. He was undoubtedly thinking about targets such as the Red River dikes and more massive assaults on Hanoi and Haiphong. But this risked unwelcome U.S. domestic turmoil similar to the aftermath of the Cambodian incursion.
Nixon and Kissinger were relieved to find that Hanoi was more pliant in the latest round of talks Henry had with Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy in Paris on June 26. Henry sent word to the president through Haig that “this was the most serious session they had had.” Nixon wanted to know if the North Vietnamese seemed affected by “the Senate action.” Haig didn’t think that came up. “It was all businesslike—not propagandistic. That was what surprised Henry.” Although “he was enthusiastic about the tone,” Kissinger was still uncertain about “where it would lead.”
Eager to keep the negotiations going until 1972, when they believed electoral pressures would force Nixon into a settlement, Hanoi gave the appearance of flexibility in the talks. The ploy worked. “There is nothing we lose by waiting right now,” Kissinger advised the president. Nixon agreed and told Kissinger: “Time to give in, Henry…We fought for years, we went through Cambodia, we’ve gone through Laos…Let’s face it. We’ve done [what we could]. And now? Who knows?”
With Kissinger set to leave on his Asian trip on July 1, he and Nixon agreed to craft a response to Hanoi after he returned. That day, however, the North Vietnamese published a new proposal calculated to appeal to U.S. public opinion. They would exchange American POWs for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, and called for a cease-fire and an end to the war. Mindful that Hanoi’s plan would win a positive response in the United States and abroad, the White House publicly described it as having good and bad points, but that Hanoi would do better to “conduct these negotiations within the established forums.”
In private, Nixon and Kissinger fumed at being unable to reveal the contradictions between Hanoi’s private and public statements. Its pretense at being flexible rather than unbending in its demand for an unconditional U.S. departure was hidden from public view. Nixon suggested canceling an upcoming meeting Bruce was scheduled to have in Paris. But Kissinger thought it would be better to go, “blister them, tell them at the next leak the channel is closed.” Nixon instructed Henry to advise the Chinese that he would protect U.S. interests in dealing with Vietnam and that unless there was a settlement he would have to resort to harsh measures. Bruce was instructed to give the Vietnamese a tough response without completely rejecting their proposals.
At the same time, Nixon bombarded Kissinger and other associates with strong talk about the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam, which was aimed more at making Nixon feel good than compelling effective action. On June 29, after Ellsberg had surrendered to authorities, Nixon told his cabinet that the government was full of “well-intentioned sons of bitches…who…are out to get us…We’ve checked and found that 96 percent of the bureaucracy are against us; they’re bastards who are here to screw us.” Ellsberg thought he was serving the country, but he had betrayed America like Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs had. Nixon said he intended to “prosecute” Ellsberg.
On June 30, after the Supreme Court handed down its New York Times decision, Nixon ordered Colson to “do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks…This government cannot survive, it cannot function if anyone can run out and leak.” He told Kissinger, Haldeman, and Mitchell not to “worry” about Ellsberg’s trial. “Try him in the press…We want to destroy him in the press.” He reminded them of the Hiss trial and reminisced about how he had leaked everything and got “Hiss convicted before he ever got to the grand jury.” The hypocrisy of leaking to punish leakers didn’t seem to occur to him. As for the New York Times, he said, “Those sons of bitches are killing me…We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?” he asked, doubtful that they would take his ramblings all that seriously.
But they did. In August, when Erlichman told the president that he could arrange “a black-bag” job or break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Beverly Hills, California, to get the information needed to smear him in the press, Nixon wanted the operative to “do whatever he considers necessary to get to the bottom of the matter—to learn what Ellsberg’s motives and potential further harmful action might be.” In September, a team of burglars rifled the psychiatrist’s files, but found nothing on Ellsberg. “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles,” Ehrlichman told Nixon, “which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.”
As Kissinger traveled to Vietnam, India, and Pakistan on his way to China, Nixon besieged him with “missives…to toughen up our stance in Paris and bring matters to a head.” The hallmark of his approach to the negotiations was “ambivalence.” He deluged Kissinger with “tough-sounding directives not always compatible with the plan, and some incapable of being carried out at all. The reason may have been his unease with the process of compromise or the fear of being rejected even in a diplomatic forum,” Kissinger later wrote.
It is difficult to understand how anyone could work for someone as volatile and irrational as Nixon sometimes was. Most likely, Kissinger and others rationalized their collaboration as helping to save Nixon from himself. After all, he was a democratically elected president and they saw themselves as serving the national well-being by reining him in. Yet what seems so striking in the record is how often the people around Nixon catered to his outbursts and flights of fancy rather than calling him back to reality by challenging some of his most unsavory and unenforceable demands. It was a way to remain at Nixon’s side but it was a disservice to sensible policy making. It also speaks volumes about the reluctance of high government officials to alienate a president and perhaps force their departure from an office they believe gives them the chance to shape history-making events.
On his way back from China, Kissinger traveled through Paris, where he secretly met again with the North Vietnamese on July 12. The preludes to the talks were familiar. Nixon, emboldened by the likelihood of improved relations with Peking, pressed Henry in “graphic and bloodcurdling terms” to demand a prompt settlement of the war. Convinced that only secret exchanges would allow for a prompt agreement, Henry, code-named General Kirschman, sneaked out the backdoor of the ambassador’s residence, where he slouched down in General Vernon Walters’s car, wearing a hat as a disguise. They drove to the North Vietnamese safe house for additional talks in the living room furnished with a rectangular table covered by a green cloth.
The pluses in the exchanges seemed to outweigh the minuses. The North Vietnamese were eager for “serious negotiations,” Kissinger told the president. “They repeatedly stressed—in an almost plaintive tone—that they wanted to settle the war.” They seemed ready to agree on a cease-fire, a return of prisoners, a withdrawal date, and the neutralization of Laos and Cambodia.
The sticking point was U.S. resistance to abandoning the Thieu government. But even here, the North Vietnamese showed some flexibility. They saw Thieu’s continuing presence in Saigon as making a settlement “difficult” rather than “impossible,” as they had previously said. Kissinger saw “a better than even chance that they will shift their position on the political issue and will do it by the next meeting,” which they agreed should be on July 26.
The meeting on July 26 was another disappointment. While the Vietnamese went “far toward our position on all non-political points,” they stubbornly clung to the demand that we oust Thieu, if need be by some “conspiratorial device” rather than the electoral process slated for the fall. As Henry interpreted it, control of South Vietnam, for which they had sacrificed so much, would elude them if Thieu, bolstered by Vietnamization, remained in power. The North Vietnamese promised to study our position further over the next three or four weeks, but Henry was uncertain whether they had “the imagination and confidence to go our way.” Also, they made clear that America’s new relationship with China would have no significant effect on the bilateral talks. The only certainty, Henry told Nixon, was that they would have to give a definitive response at the next meeting, which would be on August 16.
As they waited for the August 16 meeting, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to remain quiet about prospects for peace. At an August 4 news conference, however, Nixon declared that eventually critics of his policy would see that the United States had gone and was “going the extra mile on negotiations in established channels.” He assured the press that we were not missing any opportunities to reach a settlement.
Public statements by Hanoi “blasting” Peking for its dealings with the United States raised doubts about the likelihood of a breakthrough. A North Vietnamese buildup at the DMZ further troubled Nixon and Kissinger. The concerns were borne out at the August 16 meeting. Le Duc Tho’s absence from the talks immediately signaled that nothing would be settled. Thuy began his presentation on “a very hard note,” complaining that we had escalated the conflict with new air raids. Kissinger “replied in the toughest language he had ever used with them, accusing Thuy of having brought me there under false pretenses.” It quickly became clear that they remained at an impasse over U.S. unwillingness to abandon Thieu.
“Despite the absence of a breakthrough,” Henry agreed to meet with them again in a month. He explained his decision to Nixon as a way to continue to maintain a channel in case they decided to settle; and to keep them from escalating the fighting during South Vietnam’s electoral campaign. “We have nothing to lose,” Henry concluded, “except my 36 hours of inconvenience, and we achieve nothing by backing off now.” Although Nixon resisted, wishing “to break off the increasingly sterile contacts,” Kissinger “just managed to persuade him” to go along with “the flicker of hope” tied to another session.
Kissinger’s memo and recollections in his memoirs of the Paris exchanges and Nixon’s response do not entirely square with the transcript of a telephone conversation he and Nixon had fifteen minutes after Kissinger returned to Washington at 10 P.M. on August 16. Nixon was in an exuberant mood. His speech the previous night on a domestic economy plagued by increasing unemployment, inflation, and a falling dollar had won a positive response. Kissinger was fawning in his praise: “We stirred them up a little,” Nixon said. “It was absolutely spectacular!” Kissinger exclaimed. “The thing that’s so interesting about your style of leadership is that you never make little news, it is always big news…You are a man of tremendous moves.” It was essentially a repeat of what Kissinger often said to buck up and ingratiate himself with Nixon. “Mr. President,” Kissinger told him, “without you this country would be dead.”
As for the Paris talks, Kissinger conceded that they were “essentially a holding action.” But he brimmed with optimism: “I think we are moving toward a settlement,” he declared. He recounted how “absolutely brutal” he had been with Thuy, saying “it is absolutely a waste of time to talk to you…you don’t have any instructions.” Henry made his case for another meeting by promising that if nothing happened in September, “that will be it.” He predicted that Hanoi would settle in November after the South Vietnamese elections. “They have no place to go.” Kissinger also suggested to Nixon that he let him secretly go to Hanoi. But Nixon wanted no part of what he called “Henry’s delusions of grandeur as a peacemaker.” Nixon didn’t think it would work and would become known, which “would be a disaster.”
Nixon, however, did not resist Kissinger’s agreement to return to Paris in September. He was drawn to the possibility that he could follow an announcement in October of a forthcoming Moscow Summit with a triumphant declaration in November of peace in Vietnam. Both men had personal stakes in ending the war. Not only would it fulfill domestic and international hopes for peace in Southeast Asia but it would also be counted as their personal triumphs. For Nixon, it could mean assurance of his reelection, and for Kissinger, it would be considered the product of his negotiating skills and personal diplomacy. There was too much at stake for the country, the world, and themselves to abandon even the slightest hope that additional meetings could end America’s longest and most disastrous war.
The North Vietnamese continued to see reasons to draw out the negotiations. They hoped that in return for ending the war and the repatriation of POWs, the Americans could be drawn into abandoning Thieu and acquiescing in Hanoi’s takeover of the South. As long as Kissinger agreed to continue the talks, the Vietnamese harbored hopes that the Americans would give in on the political issue. In August and September, after Thieu’s political rivals dropped out of the presidential race, Hanoi assumed that U.S. embarrassment at “a rigged election” would make Nixon more receptive to abandoning Thieu.
But the president and Kissinger were still determined to back Thieu. They declared developments in the South Vietnamese election an internal matter in which we would not interfere. If we turned on Thieu, Henry told the president, we would do for the North Vietnamese “what they could not accomplish themselves, namely, overthrow the South Vietnamese Government.” Nixon rationalized support of Thieu by stressing that abandoning him would irreparably damage “the whole structure of stability in Asia.” Henry agreed. But domestic political pressure was also a consideration. Dropping Thieu would compound Nixon’s difficulties with conservatives, who were already put off by his openings to China and Russia.
In September, after former ABC diplomatic correspondent John Scali, who had taken a public relations post at the White House, saw South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem, he reported his conversation to Kissinger. Diem was deeply discouraged by political developments in Saigon and was considering a trip home to urge Thieu to make the election more democratic. “I told Henry, as he was standing in his anteroom, ‘The Vietnamese Ambassador seems quite unhappy.’ Henry looked at me, snorted and walked away without a word.”
When Henry met with Xuan Thuy in Paris on September 13, Le Duc Tho was absent again. That meant that nothing productive would come out of the discussion. The meeting lasted only two hours, the shortest Henry had with the North Vietnamese. No doubt feeling emboldened by the latest turmoil in Saigon over the election slated for October 3, Thuy spouted familiar homilies about the need for a change in South Vietnam’s government. The only agreement was to reopen the talks if and when either side had something new to offer.
The stalemate provoked fresh recriminations in the United States. When the Washington Star published a Pentagon leak on September 14 saying that all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam by the coming spring, Nixon and Kissinger were beside themselves with anger. Because General Creighton Abrams in Saigon was viewed as a possible source of the story, Nixon and Kissinger considered recalling “the son-of-a-bitch.” But fearful that it would look like the collapse of American resolve, Nixon suggested getting someone “second in command that will keep him from drinking and talking too much.” Kissinger called Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Moorer to read him the riot act. “The President just called me for the third time screaming,” he said. “No military officer is to say one goddamn word about withdrawals.”
On September 18, Kissinger sent the president a long memo on Vietnam. He was preaching to the choir when he warned against giving in to Hanoi. It would provoke a crisis of confidence in the United States and around the world, where friends and foes would see us as abdicating our responsibilities. Henry wanted to make yet one more try at a negotiated settlement. He suggested offering Hanoi an election six months after a peace agreement was signed. Thieu would leave office one month before the vote and an international commission would supervise the election, which would be open to all parties, including the Communists. Nixon agreed to Henry’s proposal on September 20 and Thieu followed suit three days later. Hanoi rejected it. It remained convinced that U.S. domestic divisions would force an American withdrawal before Nixon had to face the electorate in November 1972.
The North Vietnamese refusal to reach a settlement did not entirely discourage Kissinger. He saw a faint hope in the stalemate. In late August, he described the war to Haldeman as “a real heartbreak…because we really won the war, and if we just had one more dry season, the opponents [the South Vietnamese] would break their backs. This, of course, is the same line he’s used for the last two years, over and over,” Haldeman confided to his diary, “it’s amazing how it sounds like a broken record.”
The administration’s many critics in the Congress and the press disagreed with the Nixon-Kissinger resistance to ending the war promptly and leaving South Vietnam to its fate. They saw a continuation of the conflict as doing more to undermine the country’s confidence in itself than additional pointless fighting and loss of life, American and Vietnamese. Nor did critics believe that many people at home or abroad would complain that the United States was shirking its duty. American sacrifices in blood and treasure for Vietnam were already more than any reasonable person could have expected the United States to make. Moreover, critics predicted that other governments would view the United States as coming to its senses by closing out the war rather than complain that we could not be trusted to combat future Communist threats. They wanted the administration to follow Vermont Senator George Aiken’s prescription, “Declare victory and leave.” Nixon’s “peace with honor” was an equally acceptable disguise for American defeat.
ALTHOUGH THE MIDDLE EAST was less in the public eye than the administration’s struggles over Vietnam, it remained a daunting problem which seemed even more impenetrable than the difficulties with Hanoi. In the spring and summer of 1971, the White House found itself unable to do anything right in the region. “Frankly, Bill, nothing really can happen there,” Nixon told Rogers in April. The deadlock would have to become apparent to all parties before they would enter into serious talks, Nixon and Kissinger agreed.
In September, when Nixon saw Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister urged the president to exert America’s considerable influence over Israel. Nixon reminded him of “an old Hebrew proverb which, in discussing the question of which sex was stronger, pointed out that God had created Adam out of soft earth and had then created Eve out of Adam’s hard rib. If the Minister had ever met Golda Meir,” Nixon said, “he would recognize the truth of this saying.”
Like the Middle East, Chile remained a source of concern and frustration to the president and Kissinger. After Allende’s assumption of the presidency on November 3, 1970, the administration used economic and covert political actions to weaken him. The White House put up “an invisible economic blockade” of Chile, “intervening at the World Bank, IDB [Inter-American Development Bank], and Export-Import bank to curtail or terminate credits and loans.” In August 1971, when the president and board vice chairman of Anaconda Copper asked Kissinger to support international credits for Chile if they provided fair compensation for expropriations of copper companies, Kissinger refused. “If we agree to open up international credits,” Henry said, “we may just be speeding up the process of establishing a communist regime in Chile.” Foreign aid to Chile from U.S. government agencies and international institutions fell by 70 percent from $29.6 million in 1970 to $8.8 million in 1971.
At the same time, the administration stepped up anti-Allende covert operations. Although a National Intelligence Estimate in 1971 predicted that Allende “had a long, hard way to go” to establish a Marxist regime in Chile, which “was not inevitable,” and a state department intelligence report concluded that Allende was not providing financial aid or training to export insurgency, the CIA engaged in extensive covert operations against him. The administration increased spending from $1.5 million in 1970 to $3.6 million in 1971 on anti-Allende economic and political measures.
In public, Nixon gave no hint of U.S. determination to control Chile’s internal political developments. On December 30, 1970, when he granted an interview to Chile’s departing ambassador, a member of Frei’s Christian Democratic party, Nixon declared “that the U.S. was not concerned with the internal system selected by the people of Chile”; only “the present Allende foreign policy was of concern to this country.”
The covert efforts to weaken and impede Allende’s domestic policies were initially unsuccessful. Despite U.S. opposition, Allende expropriated and redistributed foreign holdings. On November 30, 1970, after reading a CIA analysis of conditions in Chile, the president told Kissinger, “Korry put his chips on the Christian Democratic party—and so did state—that was a mistake.” Henry replied, “State didn’t put the chips on anybody. The consequences are that we have suffered a major defeat in Latin America.”
Korry, who remained as ambassador in 1971, was a concern to them. In December, the state department told him that he was being recalled without a promise of another appointment. During a visit to the United States, Korry went to see Henry Raymont, a former colleague at UPI, at the New York Times. Raymont remembers Korry as agitated, pacing up and down. Korry then described his dismissal to Kissinger as “terribly unsettling.” Henry tried to soften the blow: “‘Of course, and you don’t deserve it.’ ‘I don’t know where I go from here…with four kids,’” Korry added. “‘You don’t deserve to have to panic, and don’t,’” Henry reassured him. “We will do what we can…I am prepared to intervene.”
More than compassion was at work in Kissinger’s promise to help Korry. In February, Haig warned Kissinger that “we must be very cautious in our dealing with this individual who has the ability and fund of knowledge to stir some embarrassing speculations in the months ahead. His own background and demonstrated emotionalism in the past would suggest that we must continue to be very cautious both in our communications with him, and, more importantly, in considering his future.”
In March, Haig reported his concerns “about the future status of Ambassador Korry.” It was worrisome: “He holds a great many secrets, including the fact that the President both directly and through you communicated to him some extremely sensitive guidance,” Haig wrote Kissinger. “I can think of nothing more embarrassing to the Administration than thrusting a former columnist who is totally alienated from the President and yourself, as well as the Secretary of State, out into the world without a means of livelihood.” It seemed essential to offer Korry “a suitable alternate assignment.”
The following day, Kissinger carried Haig’s concerns to Rogers. “I am worried that [Korry] is dangerous,” Henry told Rogers in a phone conversation. “We ought to find some job for him. I am terrified of his knowledge of some of these considerations in the 40 Committee [which planned secret operations] and what he will do when he is defected. I don’t like him; he has been a disaster there…He sat in on two 40 Committee meetings when we discussed [Chile’s] parliamentary ratification. He sent a long back channel of what to do. He is nutty enough to write a long exposé. He is broke, too.”
In May, Nixon directed that Korry be offered a “prestigious” post, “though not necessarily substantively important.” Although Rogers described him to Kissinger as “crazy,” he agreed to “find a place for him.” In July, the White House announced that Korry would be replaced in Santiago in the fall and would be assuming another ambassadorial position. When Korry was still without a new assignment in January 1972, state was told to “get him a good position. I believe this is essential as does Henry,” Haig wrote a White House aide. But Korry did not receive another appointment and found a job in the private sector.
The problems with Chile and the Middle East were more an irritation in the fall of 1971 than a crisis. True, Vietnam remained a constant and painful concern, but Nixon and Kissinger were not without hope that they could force a settlement before the elections in November 1972. The big news for them was that they had achieved breakthroughs in their dealings with China and Russia and could look forward to significant additional gains in the coming year.