“I am not President until this G[od]D[amn] constitutional amendment” allowed a foreign-born to hold the office. Of course, there is nothing in the Constitution “against [my] being emperor.”
—HENRY KISSINGER JOKING WITH BRENT SCOWCROFT, JANUARY 30, 1974
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, 1907
On October 30, the House Judiciary Committee, by a partisan vote of 21 to 17, granted Peter Rodino of New Jersey, its chairman, subpoena powers to open impeachment hearings against the president. Nixon countered the committee’s action on November 1 by announcing the appointments of Ohio Republican Senator William Saxbe as the new attorney general and Texas Democrat and former head of the American Bar Association Leon Jaworski as the new Watergate special prosecutor. Both men were notable for their independence from White House influence. Although Jaworski had chaired “Democrats for Nixon” in Texas in 1972, one Texas Republican privately warned Nixon that Jaworski was “an extreme liberal”; the president would “live to regret” his appointment.
On the same day, news that two of the nine tapes subpoenaed by Sirica were missing eclipsed the good impression made by the Saxbe and Jaworski appointments. A White House explanation that the missing conversations were not recorded deepened suspicions that Nixon was hiding his involvement in the scandal. The revelation produced a fresh barrage of public calls for Nixon’s resignation, from some Republicans as well as Democrats.
For Kissinger and Haig, the principal challenge was still to make foreign policy an effective argument against impeaching the president. Specifically, they hoped to use the Middle East cease-fire to Nixon’s advantage by turning it into viable peace talks.
For Kissinger, it was like being in the eye of a storm. He had to deal with a distracted president, unbending Israeli and Egyptian negotiators, and a U.S. defense secretary convinced that we needed to send troops to the Middle East to ensure the continuing flow of oil to the West. “He is insane,” Kissinger told Haig about Schlesinger. “I do not think we can survive with these fellows in there at Defense—they are crazy…Will you please help me with him?” Henry asked Haig.
Nixon pressed Kissinger to ensure that congressmen saw the president as indispensable to effective Middle East negotiations. On October 29, after Henry had a closed-door session with the House Foreign Affairs committee, he told Nixon, “I really hit them about the crisis.” The president asked: “They got the feeling that the President was on top of the damn thing?” Henry replied: “Absolutely. I told them. This constant attack on domestic authority is going to have the most serious consequences for our foreign policy.” Nixon complained that he had “to deny that publicly,” but he urged Kissinger to “say it because it is totally true.”
Arranging a longer-term truce between Tel Aviv and Cairo was as daunting a task as bringing the Vietnamese together. “I think these various maniacs are going to work me into a nervous breakdown,” Kissinger complained to Nixon about the Israelis and Egyptians. When Henry told Haig that he was “working on the oil problem,” Haig declared, “Good…that is where we have to get something.” But Henry feared that Nixon might jeopardize his efforts: “We will get it,” he told Haig, “as long as we keep him [Nixon] from getting over eager…He shouldn’t give any bullshit about how much he loves Cairo and how much he wants to go there.”
As he prepared to go off to the Middle East on November 6, Kissinger wanted Haig and Scowcroft to assure him that Nixon was under control. Specifically, he worried that Dobrynin might get in to see the president and extract unwise commitments. “I have to talk with you about how to conduct yourself while I am gone,” he told Scowcroft. “I am sure the Russians will try something…to get hold of the President. It is essential they don’t get anything I didn’t give them.”
Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig shared the conviction that talk of impeaching the president was jeopardizing their foreign policy. They endorsed Nixon’s impulse to fight back with everything at his command. “Don’t be panicked by the New York Times calling for resignation,” Nixon told Kissinger as he was about to depart on his trip. “I don’t pay any attention to it,” Kissinger assured him. Nixon reinforced Kissinger’s resolve by saying that his opponents “don’t really realize what that would do to the country…We’re going to stand firm, old boy,” Nixon declared. Henry said that the current battle was nothing more than what had been going on since the start of Nixon’s presidency. Nixon was confident they could survive, even with his approval rating at only twenty-five percent.
Kissinger’s strategy in his Middle East talks, first in Morocco and Tunisia, and then in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran was to establish a more durable truce between Cairo and Tel Aviv; and by so doing, convince the Arab states that successful negotiations ran through Washington and not Moscow and that an oil embargo, which they had started against the West and Japan in response to America’s resupply of Israel, was counterproductive to their long-term interests. The oil-producing states understood otherwise. Withholding cheap energy from the West was an effective means of punishing it for supporting Israel and compelling it to meet at least some Arab demands.
On November 7, Kissinger met with Sadat at the president’s palatial headquarters in suburban Cairo. He was the child of Egyptian peasants whose aristocratic bearing made him seem taller and more imposing than Henry had anticipated. Both of them affected a “nonchalance” that belied the seriousness of their meeting. It may have expressed their mutual determination to find common ground in meeting the grave differences that separated them. Once they set aside initial diplomatic inanities, they quickly agreed to extend the existing cease-fire and to propose additional steps to Israel on behalf of disengagement. They also agreed to a resumption of diplomatic relations, which had been broken since the 1967 war. Relying on their considerable skills as master psychologists, the two men eased existing hostility between their countries by convincing each other that a prompt agreement would serve their respective interests. “K—Congratulations—great job,” Nixon scribbled on a Scowcroft memo summarizing the results of the talk.
Nixon tried to capitalize on Kissinger’s success. Understanding that effective White House leadership to overcome a gas shortage produced by the oil embargo offered a significant opportunity to raise his standing with the mass of Americans, Nixon spoke to the country on the evening of November 7. Because it was a problem that required national solutions to which every American could contribute, Nixon tried to rally the country by proposing a variety of conservation measures and congressional action that could increase energy supplies. Not content to focus public attention on the energy problem, however, he closed his speech with a recitation of administration achievements, a defense of his integrity, and a rejection of suggestions that he resign. Because his closing remarks came across as self-serving, he did more to exacerbate than ease his Watergate difficulties.
As a follow-up to his speech, Nixon had Haig cable Kissinger in Cairo that “due to overriding necessity to reinforce confidence here, the President feels strongly that there should be no, repeat, no announcement of any easing of oil restrictions…if you are also able to add this feather to your cap.” Nixon wanted any announcement to come from the White House, but only after he had met with Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal in Washington. Haig predicted that such a development would “assist us in dramatically healing recent wounds.” Haig said he sensed a sharp upturn in public approval.
Kissinger replied at once pledging his commitment to a White House announcement on any oil accord. But he warned that an invitation to Faisal to meet in Washington would be “total insanity.” An easing of the oil embargo would be far easier to arrange as an unannounced de facto action than a “public Arab policy…Invitation to Faisal would be interpreted throughout Arab world as U.S. collapse. It would magnify, not reduce, Arab incentives to keep pressure on us via oil weapon.” Kissinger “absolutely insist[ed] that P.R. tendencies must be kept under control. We could lose everything if these hotshot schemes are allowed to wreck negotiations.” He threatened to resign—if Nixon insisted on following his proposed course, he did not see “how it was possible for me to continue in this job.”
Kissinger couldn’t resist parodying Nixon’s demand for public credit. “If present negotiating phase produces dramatic success,” he told Haig, “perhaps we can arrange ecumenical joint communiqué at presidential tête-à-tête with Faisal and Golda in a New York synagogue just at Christmas Hanukkah season. Would be great photo opportunity.” Henry’s message made its point: “Touché!” Haig responded. “Your message is clear. All is under control and President has accepted overwhelming logic.”
For another week, between November 8 and 14, Kissinger traveled to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, China, and Japan. The only notable discussions were in Riyadh and Peking. Persuading the Saudis to ease the oil embargo was crucial for ending the energy crisis. Kissinger won a sympathetic hearing when he pointed out that the embargo strengthened the hand of the president’s opponents in the United States, who were also Saudi antagonists. The Saudis hoped to get the oil flowing again after Washington announced plans for a Middle East peace conference Kissinger intended to schedule for Geneva in December.
In China, Kissinger received his “usual cordial welcome” with warm approval for U.S. efforts to reach a Middle East settlement without significant Soviet involvement. Mao’s expressions of support for the president privately and in front of the Chinese press pleased Nixon. Mao worried, however, that Watergate might return the Democrats to power and result in an isolationist policy. Henry assured Mao that the president was “sure to master the situation.”
The visit ended with “a positive joint communiqué” that expanded the Shanghai declaration of 1972 to oppose hegemony in every part of the world, not just “the Asia-Pacific region.” More important, normalization of relations would now depend only on “the principle of one China as opposed to requiring the practice” or making it a reality.
Haig cabled Kissinger that Nixon saw the press reports on his trip as “a major plus for the White House.” Because Watergate continued to be their greatest problem, however, they were eager for references to the president at all of Henry’s press briefings. Haig reported that a diagnosis of “hyper-paranoia” was the best description of the Washington scene. Scowcroft described the president as “really active with the Congress this week.” Although these had been “grueling” sessions, Nixon “was very tough but kept his cool, stayed restrained, and managed most of the time to be on the offensive.”
Yet the harder Nixon fought to save his political life, the worse matters seemed to become. His “offensive” came across to most people as defensive and unconvincing. On November 12, an attempt to explain the two “missing conversations” raised further suspicions that Nixon or someone else in the White House had destroyed them.
Worse, on November 17, during a question-and-answer session in Orlando, Florida, with four hundred Associated Press editors, they embarrassed the president with questions about his honesty and commitment to the rule of law. Could the republic survive his tenure, one asked. They pressed him on everything from the missing tapes to his possible part in the Ellsberg break-in, his defense of Ehrlichman and Haldeman, failure to ask John Mitchell about Watergate, abuse of executive privilege, improper use of government funds for personal gain, and evasion of income taxes.
The tough questions penetrated the veneer of calm Nixon tried to maintain throughout the mortifying ordeal. “Scowling fiercely, his body tense, his hands clasped behind his back, he leaned forward,” Stephen Ambrose said. “Beads of sweat popped up on his brow.” Speaking to the larger television audience watching the event, he plaintively declared: “I made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service…And in all my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And…I welcome this kind of public examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.”
His performance was reminiscent of the Checkers speech in 1952, but the twenty-one years since of suspicions and recriminations about his personal integrity and political actions made his self-justification less than convincing. He came across as too full of self-pity, too engulfed by charges of illegal actions to be believable. He had lost the one essential element an officeholder needs to sustain his political power—credibility. Even if he could remain in office for the rest of his term, he had squandered the public trust. He was now, at best, a lame-duck president.
More than ever, it fell to Kissinger at this point to manage foreign policy. While the president spent most of his time speaking out on the energy crisis, reiterating his innocence of any wrongdoing, and urging an end to calls for his resignation, Kissinger worked sixteen-hour days trying to hold things together. “Our domestic situation is obviously of grave concern in every country,” Henry told his state department staff on November 19. They worried “whether we will be able to sustain any foreign policy to which other countries can gear themselves.”
Henry had his hands full with everything from Vietnam, where a cease-fire was proving as illusive as ever, to arranging the Geneva Middle East conference, managing détente with the Soviets, and trying to end the oil embargo that was disrupting the United States and allied economies.
Managing the president had also become something of a full-time job. On November 17, Kissinger complained to Haig that Nixon’s statements on the “oil thing” are “totally contrary to my strategy and just about kill us…My strategy has been and it has worked at least somewhat to tell the Arabs if they want progress, they better lift the oil” embargo. He saw Nixon’s belief that advances in Middle East talks would restart the flow of oil as contrary to his conviction that relaxed restrictions on oil would facilitate Middle East negotiations.
Renewed press reports of strains between Nixon and Kissinger did not help the president’s standing. The New York Times printed a story saying that Henry had “told an associate” that his “phone had been tapped.” Henry admitted to Haig that “I maybe said that at one time,” but he denied saying anything about wiretaps recently. Similarly, when Haig mentioned rumors quoting him “as saying the President, if he keeps it up, in a few weeks will suffer from a nervous breakdown,” Henry emphatically denied it. “The opposite is true,” he told Haig. “That’s the newest one,” Haig said. “That they are trying to push that he has a mental problem.” Henry assured Haig that he had never said a word about the president’s mental condition. “On the contrary, I always say it is amazing what he has withstood.”
Given Kissinger’s affinity for describing people as maniacs, the reality of Nixon’s erratic response to calls for his resignation or impeachment, and Henry’s complaints about Nixon’s suggestions during the Middle East crisis, it’s entirely plausible that he described the president as in less than full control of himself. But regardless of whether he had said anything that found its way into news stories, it is clear that during the Yom Kippur War Henry saw Nixon as performing much less effectively than in the past and as presiding over a besieged administration with diminished prospects for major foreign policy accomplishments.
The state of Nixon’s presidency registered clearly on former defense secretary Robert McNamara. He told Kissinger that he was urging Henry’s former aide Larry Lynn to reenter the government. “I said I despised Nixon more than he did. I told him the only place to do any good today is with you, with…a very weak executive there is no chance in hell he could do anything outside more important than he would be able to do with you. I told him it was a tremendous opportunity compared to whatever opportunities there might be outside” the state department and NSC.
Kissinger’s dominant role in Middle East policy making was apparent during a White House briefing of congressional leaders on November 27. Henry did almost all the talking. Nixon offered a brief summary at one point during the hour-plus meeting, but he was uncharacteristically subdued. Although he said nothing about his tense relations with Congress over the impeachment hearings in the House, his silence was indicative of how angry he felt at lawmakers who were considering his impeachment. Public revelations five days before that the tape of a June 20, 1972, White House conversation with Haldeman had an 181/2-min-ute gap had raised additional suspicions about a cover-up of Nixon’s role in Watergate and had made an impeachment more likely.
Nixon also was unhappy about the lack of a congressional response to his appeal for an energy program. His speech of November 7 had fallen on deaf ears. With the Senate holding hearings that laid blame for oil shortages more on big oil companies than producer embargoes and the Congress poised to do no more than maintain price controls and require allocation plans that met the needs of the country’s different regions, Nixon largely lost hope that he could respond to the energy problem in a way that might help reestablish his standing with the public.
Kissinger’s continuing centrality in Middle East negotiations underscored the limits of Nixon’s influence. Exchanges between Henry and Sadat, Egyptian Foreign Minister Fahmy, and the Egyptian ambassador in Washington included no mention of Nixon. Moreover, as Kissinger prepared to travel to Europe and the Middle East again beginning on December 10, he spoke not to Nixon but to Gerald Ford about the upcoming discussions. “I have asked Brent Scowcroft to keep you informed of my trip and to keep you posted,” he told Ford. Kissinger had never been so solicitous of Agnew. But during the first week of December, with Nixon so distracted by assaults on his authority, Henry saw Ford as the responsible executive authority.
Because Nixon’s denial about being a crook had generated more bad press than expressions of public support, he felt compelled to back up his assertion with what he saw as exonerating documents. On December 8, he released a statement accompanied by a sheaf of papers about his financial affairs during his presidency. His “full disclosure of…assets and liabilities, expenses and income,” however, did little to quiet suspicions that he had cut corners to enrich himself.
Between December 10 and December 22, Kissinger was fastidious about reporting to Nixon through Scowcroft on his meetings, first, with NATO allies and then with Arab and Israeli officials prior to and during the Geneva conference.
But Kissinger could not hide the extent to which he was managing the Middle East negotiations. Prior to the conference, when tensions erupted with Tel Aviv over Palestinian participation in Geneva, the role of the United Nations, and the return of POWs from Syria, Kissinger put considerable pressure on Israel to come to the talks. Henry warned Meir that a failure to participate in the discussions could lead to another outbreak of fighting and “the impossible position we would be in in trying to support Israel in [the] face of its failure to go to the conference.”
In response to Kissinger’s pressure, friends of Israel inside and outside of Congress launched an attack on him for usurping authority. “We are seeing the beginnings of…a systematic attempt by Jewish groups to portray me as operating alone, without Presidential guidance, and without checking with him,” Henry cabled Scowcroft from Riyadh. “The purpose is clearly to show that I am carrying on a solo act, without the support or backing of the President. Their purpose is to…wreck our Mideast policy.” Henry was eager to learn who in Congress was making such claims. He stated that nothing he had said publicly could support assertions that he was operating on his own. He asked Scowcroft to pass this on to the president.
Despite Henry’s denials, Nixon’s domestic woes had reduced his attentiveness to the details of Middle East policy, and Kissinger, aided by Haig and Scowcroft, had become the principal responsible party overseeing negotiations. It did not make Nixon happy, but he felt that his Watergate troubles gave him no choice. They saw no likelihood that “the present difficulties would disappear,” Haig told Henry, and they would have “to continue to cope” with these problems. Haig assured Henry that his management of the negotiations was “a great source of comfort at a difficult time domestically.”
After ten hours of meetings on December 17 with Meir and members of her cabinet, the Israelis agreed to attend the Geneva meeting from December 21 to December 23. Kissinger made the meeting possible by a commitment to limit the initial sessions to public speeches followed by the creation of committees to address Arab-Israeli problems; the United States was to play the role of mediator. Although the Soviets were a Geneva co-sponsor, they were promised no part in the subsequent negotiations. Nor was the UN assigned any role in the future discussions; Kissinger saw it as likely to impede rather than facilitate the talks.
Nixon was delighted that Kissinger had managed to bring the Middle East combatants together while limiting Moscow’s role. On the eve of the conference, he sent Henry a congratulatory message for his “crucial role in this great enterprise.” When the president suggested a more substantive part for himself in facilitating the discussions, Kissinger vetoed it. Nixon wanted to issue a statement tying a promise of $2.2 billion in aid to Israel to its flexibility in the negotiations. Henry warned Scowcroft that any such statement “would have catastrophic consequences in Israel,” where it would be seen as a prelude to forcing Israel’s hand in negotiations by trading aid for withdrawal from occupied territories. Kissinger believed it would jeopardize Tel Aviv’s commitment to come to Geneva. “You should discuss this entire question with Haig urgently,” Kissinger concluded.
If Kissinger had any serious qualms about preempting Nixon’s management of Middle East policy, the results of his actions allayed them. He was elated about the outcome of the Geneva meeting. It came “off with no serious hitches,” he told Nixon. “We got two Arab states—Egypt and Jordan—and Israel around the same table.” They avoided “taking positions that could close the door to further negotiations…We kept Soviets engaged procedurally without their assuming a significant substantive role.”
At the same time, Kissinger reported to Nixon on another foreign policy success of a sort. On December 20, on his way to Geneva, he stopped in Paris to see Le Duc Tho. At the beginning of the month, the NSC had concluded that “Communist violations of the cease-fire have, from the outset, been massive, unceasing, and cynical.” Hanoi’s actions raised “grave doubts” about the peace agreement. The need was to ensure against the success of any future Hanoi offensive.
On December 7, during a meeting with South Vietnamese Foreign Minister Vuong Van Bac, Kissinger had promised to do all he could to meet Saigon’s needs, though he cautioned that Watergate made things uncertain. Yet, he said, “We did not go through all this agony to have the cease-fire agreement broken.” He could not resist a barb at Thieu, however. He shared a “secret wish” with Bac that Thieu would have to negotiate with Golda Meir “to see who would get our anti-tank weapons.”
Kissinger saw his December 20 meeting with Tho as a welcome surprise. Tho discussed the need to restore the cease-fire. Henry thought it signaled Hanoi’s uncertain military prospects. It convinced him that the North Vietnamese were weaker than he had believed and that the South had been handling its defense effectively.
Yet Henry’s success in the various talks did not impress Nixon as a likely antidote to his Watergate troubles. On December 19, Mel Laird, who had served since June as Nixon’s counselor on domestic affairs, resigned and stated that a House vote on the president’s impeachment “would be a healthy thing.” Rodino responded by declaring that his judiciary committee hoped to make a decision on impeachment by April.
On December 20, Barry Goldwater had dinner at the White House with nine other guests, including speechwriters Pat Buchanan and Ray Price, White House counselor Bryce Harlow, and the president’s daughter and son-in-law, Julie and David Eisenhower. After the guests had assembled in the second-floor living quarters, where Pat Nixon greeted them, the president entered, moving “quickly among us, rapidly jumping from one topic to another,” Goldwater recalled. “Then, unexpectedly, his mind seemed to halt abruptly and wander aimlessly away. Each time, after several such lapses, he would snap back to a new subject. I became concerned. I had never seen Nixon talk so much, yet so erratically.”
After they sat down for dinner, Nixon rambled on about whether he should take the train to Key Biscayne for a Christmas holiday. He asked Goldwater what he thought. “I was upset about Nixon’s obsession with Watergate and lack of leadership,” Goldwater said. “What was so important about a trip to Florida?…Such gibberish coming from the President of the United States, when the mood of the country was approaching a crisis, worried me…The whole conversation was without purpose.” Goldwater blurted out, “Act like a President.” After a few moments of embarrassing silence, “Nixon continued his ceaseless, choppy chatter.” Goldwater asked himself “the unthinkable: Is the President coming apart because of Watergate?” The answer seemed to be yes.
Nixon was preoccupied with whether the House would impeach him. He suddenly asked Goldwater: “How do I stand, Barry?” After Goldwater told him that sentiment was divided between those who wanted him to go and those who wanted him to stay, Nixon gave no response. After several moments of “complete silence,” Nixon spoke. “His mind had rolled back to the family vacation, and he was riding the rails to Florida again…Nixon was making no sense…I asked myself whether I was witnessing a slow-motion collapse of Nixon’s mental balance.”
Nixon’s monologue then focused on foreign policy. Pat, Julie, and David complained that Kissinger was taking too much credit for administration gains. “The President ruefully admitted that Kissinger was grabbing a lot of headlines. However, he firmly insisted…he was making the real decisions…Dinner ended on a somber, strained note with several stretches of silence—all except for the President. He jabbered incessantly, often incoherently, to the end.” Although Harlow told Goldwater the next day that Nixon had been drunk before and during dinner, Goldwater could not shake the feeling that “all might not be well mentally in the White House.”
Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations, recalled a similar encounter with the president on December 22. Before a breakfast meeting at the White House between Nixon and the Joint Chiefs, Zumwalt showed Schlesinger a statement he intended to make about the need for increased Navy funding. Schlesinger “vehemently” urged against doing it. “The President is paranoid. Kissinger is paranoid. Haig is paranoid. They’re down on the Navy and to present facts like these to them will drive them up the wall.”
Although Zumwalt reined in his remarks, he got “to deliver only a small fraction of it,” because “the President used the ostensible budget meeting to engage in a long, rambling monologue…about the virtues of his domestic and foreign policy. He repeatedly expressed the thought that the eastern liberal establishment was out to do us all in…It was clear that he saw the attacks on him…as part of a vast plot by intellectual snobs to destroy a president who was representative of the man in the street.”
Zumwalt did not see Nixon as “a haggard, palsied, drunken wreck” described in “the Washington rumor mill…But to me he did present the very disturbing spectacle of a man who had pumped his adrenalin up to such high pressure that he was on an emotional binge. He appeared to me to be incapable of carrying on a rational conversation, much less exercising rational leadership over a nation involved in a score of complicated situations, embarked on dozens of hazardous enterprises.”
The two episodes are a part of Nixon’s long history of battling inner demons. There is ample evidence that Nixon struggled with excessive drinking, suffered from paranoid fears, relied on medications to manage his personal problems, and consulted a psychotherapist to help him function—both before and during his time in the White House. One Newsweek journalist described Nixon during his presidency as a “walking box of short circuits.”
The full story of his struggle with emotional difficulties, however, remains unavailable—closed off in his medical records, which Dr. John Tkach, the son of Nixon’s personal physician, Walter Tkach, intends to deposit in the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. “My plans are,” Tkach wrote me, “to transfer these many large boxes to the Nixon Library with the stipulation that they remain sealed for 75 years.” Tkach believes that releasing the records “now would violate confidentiality, and there are some things about the Nixons,” he adds, “that are so confidential I shall never reveal them.” My argument to him that the public interest or the public’s right to know whether the president was incapacitated and should have had his authority suspended under the Twenty-fifth Amendment did not convince him. There are also numerous taped telephone conversations between Nixon and Walter Tkach at the Nixon Library that might deepen our understanding of Nixon’s physical and mental health, but they are currently closed under privacy limitations that only Nixon heirs can lift.
John Tkach offered the tantalizing comment to me that “there were significant attitudinal changes in Nixon between the Eisenhower days and Nixon’s presidency. Excluding medical records, much of what I know can be figured out by reading between the lines. Look for what’s missing,” Tkach counseled, “what things don’t fit together in a way that makes sense.” Exactly what he had in mind is unclear.
Yet for all Nixon’s emotional problems, it seems fair to say—unless other evidence eventually surfaces from the closed records—that he was more erratic than incapacitated. And though at times he seemed out of control, the fact that he relied on psychotherapy and medications to rein in his psychological difficulties suggests a greater degree of self-awareness and reasonableness than might otherwise be assumed.
Nixon matched his bouts of incoherence and paranoia with enough focused resolve and good sense to convince himself and Kissinger that he could still be an effective president. On the same day he saw the joint chiefs, for example, he released a cogent statement on the energy crisis. He reprimanded Congress for not passing an emergency energy bill, but praised the majority of Americans for responding positively to his calls for conservation and urged legislators to promptly pass an energy act when they returned in January.
Because Kissinger saw the rational as well as the irrational side of the president, he assumed that Nixon would not step down and that both the national well-being and his personal standing required him to do everything possible to help Nixon sustain an effective foreign policy. On December 26, he told Nixon that he had lobbied Nelson Rockefeller to “support you and to do it publicly…I said it is imperative for the country.”
Kissinger also encouraged Dobrynin to promote full support for the president in Moscow as a way to ensure détente. When Henry told Nixon that he would be holding a press conference on December 27, which would make the case for the president’s effective foreign policy leadership, Nixon approved and told him to say that they would be meeting at the western White House over the next few days for additional consultations on the State of the Union and the Middle East.
As the year came to a close, Nixon and Kissinger engaged in some autointoxication. On December 29, when the Washington Post criticized the administration’s Mideast policy, Henry told the president, “They are out to get you…They know this will be another big win for you in foreign policy.” Nixon replied, “We will win more…We will show them and don’t you get discouraged.” Henry reinforced Nixon’s illusions: “We are going to hold this together,” he said. “This is an attack on our institutions and it has nothing to do with you or Watergate.” He also urged the president to understand that the Soviets had a big stake in “your continuing in office.”
Nixon ended the year with private resolutions not to resign. He rationalized his decision by convincing himself that the press would be the principal winner if he quit, while the institution of the presidency in general and his foreign policy in particular would be the principal losers.
“The answer—” he told himself in diary notes made at 1:15 A.M. on the morning of January 1, “fight.” In another note made at 5 A.M., he called upon himself for self-control: “Above all else: Dignity, command, faith, head high, no fear, build a new spirit, drive, act like a President, act like a winner. Opponents are savage destroyers, haters. Time to use full power of the President to fight overwhelming forces arrayed against us.” It was the outcry of a besieged president denying responsibility for the disaster that had engulfed him, and hoping that he could find the wherewithal to survive yet another crisis threatening to end his political career.
ALTHOUGH NIXON REMAINED in California until January 13, where he had greater physical, if not psychological, distance from his troubles, he could not entirely insulate himself. On January 4, the White House released a letter to Sam Ervin rejecting a subpoena for “some 492 personal and telephone conversations of the President…from mid-1971 to late 1973 for which recordings and related documents are sought.” A second subpoena asked for “thirty-seven categories of documents or materials,” including the president’s Daily Diary for almost a four-year period. Nixon refused to comply, saying it would destroy presidential confidentiality and “irreparably” injure the office of the president. It was now an all too familiar clash with the Senate committee, which was destined to end up in the courts.
In the court of public opinion, however, it was another Nixon loss. A Gallup poll released on January 6 showed the president’s approval rating at only 29 percent. Sullen, depressed, and troubled by insomnia, Nixon found an outlet for his feelings at the piano, which he played in the hours between waking and dawn.
Kissinger, who was with the president in San Clemente during the first week of January, provided some solace to him through conversations with journalists. On January 2, in a background session with three print and three TV reporters, Henry discussed administration plans for disengagement talks between Egypt and Israel and the oil embargo. The reporters wanted to know whether the president can “travel abroad when there is the prospect of impeachment?” Henry insisted that “While he is President he should act as President.” The journalists then asked, “What impact would impeachment proceedings have on diplomacy?” Henry said, “None. Maybe down the road. But none now.”
The reporters pressed the question of whether Kissinger’s communications with Nixon were as substantial as before the current Watergate troubles. “Some in the White House said you didn’t communicate as often as before, on this [recent] trip.” Henry bristled. “Who told you that? Only Haig and Scowcroft know. I sent a full report every day. I see him automatically every day for a half hour, usually more. Before the trip we consult; we know where I’m going. On the way I don’t need detailed instructions. I talk to Haig and get the Presidential mood of things—what he’s worried about—and operational things with Scowcroft. These stories are totally wrong.” At a news conference the next day, when a reporter asked about leaks describing Kissinger as running foreign policy for an impaired president, Henry said, they were “totally incorrect.”
The reporter’s questions and Kissinger’s answers had private and public consequences. On the evening of January 4, after returning to Washington, he called Nixon in California. Mindful that he might need to blunt future assertions about operating without presidential oversight, he briefed Nixon on a meeting he had that day with Israel defense minister Moshe Dayan. He reported significant progress on a disengagement plan for Egyptian and Israeli forces in the Sinai. He also described newspaper headlines saying “You’re in full control of foreign policy.” Nixon wanted to know why Henry thought “they’re printing it now.” Henry credited his statements to the reporters.
Kissinger’s assurances, however, were not enough to convince journalists and the public that Nixon was in charge of his administration. As long as he remained in California, the feeling continued to grow that others were running the government. Scowcroft told Kissinger that some of Vice President Ford’s “statements and activities” seemed “to be completely uncoordinated with the White House…It is a serious and growing problem and, with the President away, Ford is becoming a sort of President in absentia.”
Kissinger was preoccupied with advancing Middle East negotiations. Because the Egyptians wouldn’t agree to direct talks with the Israelis, Henry believed it best for him to travel at once to Cairo and Tel Aviv rather than wait until the Geneva conference reconvened. Mediating between Sadat and Meir would free him from Nixon’s potentially unproductive interference and that of slow-moving Geneva committees, which would have to consult their respective governments. Nor would he then have to give Moscow even a symbolic role at another session in Geneva.
Nixon was reluctant to let Henry go. He was focused less on a disengagement agreement between Israel and Egypt than the need to lift the oil embargo. With more Americans seeing the energy crisis as a bigger issue than Watergate, Nixon believed that a direct part in responding effectively to the oil crunch could boost his approval ratings. A 387 percent increase in oil prices between October and December had convinced 54 percent of Americans that the country was heading into a recession. On January 10, the White House released letters Nixon wrote to oil-producing and oil-consuming nations proposing a Washington conference in February to develop policies that could propose constructive means to satisfy the needs of both producers and consumers.
Nixon worried that if Henry arranged an end to the oil embargo during his trip, he would get credit for something Nixon saw as vital to his political survival. He doubted that Kissinger would put the president’s political needs above his ambition for another major diplomatic success. Kissinger understood Nixon’s leeriness about his personal drive to become a great secretary of state. When Leonard Garment asked Kissinger to name someone for an administration job “who knows the government, who can write and talk well, who is very smart and ambitious and is prepared to be really nasty,” Henry replied, “I may take the job. You just described me.”
Kissinger tried to assure Nixon that any success in Middle East negotiations would be described as the president’s. In a conversation with Haig on the morning of January 8, Kissinger reported that Sadat was eager for him to come to Egypt and seemed ready to reach a rapid settlement. Henry feared that “if we don’t wrap this thing up fast, it will never happen.” He wanted Haig to tell Nixon that “I’m perfectly willing to give him a terminal date for my tenure, and that I’m off his back then…I’d be perfectly happy to resign as soon as this agreement is signed…And tell him we will stage it so that the embargo…lifting will be done by him. Anyway, he can have my resignation.”
In the afternoon, with still no answer from Nixon about his trip, Kissinger complained to Scowcroft that “instead of throwing our hats in the air at [Sadat’s invitation], we’re dancing around.” Scowcroft explained that the White House was preoccupied with answering ongoing scandal allegations. “That’s where our priorities have gone,” Scowcroft said. Henry responded that if they were attentive to the national interest, “we would be in touch with Fahmy. There are no earthly reasons to hesitate. If he [Nixon] refuses it, I will certainly leave.” Scowcroft shared Henry’s conviction that Nixon’s concern to lower Kissinger’s profile was partly behind his reluctance to agree to Henry’s return to the Middle East.
The planned release of the letters to the concerned oil countries that would put the president at the center of efforts to ease the energy crisis persuaded Nixon to let Henry go. But Nixon insisted that an announcement about Henry’s return to the Middle East come from the White House. Henry also promised to hold a joint press briefing with William Simon, the administrator of Nixon’s Federal Energy Office, about the February conference. By doing it with Simon, Henry told Haig, it would make the announcement “more clearly presidential.” Haig responded, “And that’s the big thing.”
Kissinger flew to Egypt on January 11, landing at Aswan, some four hundred miles south of Cairo, where Sadat had a winter residence. Although Henry arranged to arrive at 8:30 in the evening, so that he could enjoy a night’s sleep before beginning discussions in the morning, Sadat insisted on seeing him at once.
Their discussions were a demonstration of how two negotiators set on a common goal use flattery, humor, and charm to reach accord. On January 14, as they met for three and a half hours to consider proposals Kissinger had brought back from Israel, they played effectively on each other’s needs and vanity. If they were able to reach agreement, Henry joked, it would be described as “a Kissinger plan.” If they failed, it would be called “a Sisco plan.” Fahmy chimed in, “I told Joe, if it is a Joe plan, we’d send him to the Valley of the Queens. We’d preserve him.” To much laughter, Henry shot back: “Why preserve him?”
Kissinger presented himself as Egypt’s ally against Israeli manipulation. Henry described himself as rejecting an Israeli demand that a disengagement agreement include an Egyptian withdrawal from some of its territory along the Suez Canal. “I didn’t think it right that Egypt had to give up this territory. They wanted me to present this and come back to them. I said no.” After presenting Sadat with Israel’s “full plan,” Kissinger said, it “caused us unbelievable anguish to produce—even though you won’t like it.” When Henry asked if he should “sum up our understanding of our conversation,” Sadat replied, “Please. You are much cleverer.” To which Henry responded, “But not as wise.”
Fahmy was less taken with Kissinger than Sadat. Fahmy doubted Henry’s sincerity when he cursed the Israelis and made fun of their leaders. He was trying “to convince us that he was on our side,” Fahmy said. “Unfortunately, his rather obvious ruses were fairly effective with Sadat,” who told Henry, “You are not only my friend. You are my brother.”
Golda Meir, who had her share of differences with Henry, nevertheless, like Sadat, saw his vital role in the negotiations. After Sadat wrote her a letter, she replied, “It is indeed extremely fortunate that we have Dr. Kissinger who we both trust and who is prepared to give of his wisdom and talents in the cause of peace.” As Henry himself recognized, it wasn’t any idea he brought to the discussion that made a difference. It was the need for an intermediary who had the confidence of both sides.
The extent to which Kissinger had become the principal U.S. actor in the January negotiations was reflected in a cable Henry sent Scowcroft after his initial meeting with Sadat. He asked Scowcroft to discuss his report with Haig and “then pass it on to the President unless you and he believe that it would trigger frantic—and thus—extremely harmful—activity. You should not show the report if you feel there is any danger that you cannot control the reactions.”
Henry was worried that Nixon might leak news of a Sadat initiative to end the oil embargo as a way to boost his public standing. It seemed certain to weaken Sadat’s influence with other Arab leaders, who had not yet been consulted. Convinced that Nixon would wait until there was an actual agreement to restore oil supplies, Scowcroft and Haig reported Henry’s discussion with Sadat to the president.
To squeeze every possible political advantage from any Middle East settlement, Nixon wanted Kissinger to come home to stage a public appearance with him as a prelude to any announcement. It was meant to suggest that the president had a direct part in wrapping up the details of a cease-fire. But when Henry refused to leave the Middle East until he had firm commitments from Cairo and Tel Aviv to an agreement, Nixon made the announcement on his own in a nationally televised statement on January 17.
To Nixon’s dismay, it was Kissinger whose reputation gained the most from what was now described as the secretary’s shuttle diplomacy. By contrast with Nixon’s approval ratings in the high twenties, Henry had 85 percent support from the public. Nixon earned some collateral appreciation for Henry’s performance, but it was simply not enough to restore public confidence in his presidency.
On January 19, Nixon gave another national White House talk about the energy crisis. With millions of Americans convinced that U.S. energy companies were purposely creating oil and gas shortages to line their pockets, Nixon offered assurances that the tripling of prices at the gas pumps was the consequence of foreign actions. He praised Americans for efforts at conservation, promised to guard against excess profits by U.S. oil companies, and committed his administration to work toward energy self-sufficiency.
Although he said nothing about the likelihood of a restoration of oil supplies from the Middle East, he had begun working behind the scenes with American oil executives to pressure Saudi Arabia into lifting its embargo. Kissinger urged him not to rely on the oil men to reverse Riyadh’s action: “You should emphasize to the President that our best hope is Sadat,” Kissinger cabled Scowcroft on January 19, “and we must keep our oil men out of this affair, their interests are parochial and they clearly do not have the ear of the [Saudi] King.” Sadat was assuring him that the embargo would be lifted by January 28 and that he would “make a statement giving credit to the President.” Henry acknowledged that Sadat might be unable to fulfill his promise, but he warned Nixon that any other action seemed likely to fail.
After a largely unproductive five-hour discussion in Damascus with Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad on January 20, in which the Syrians demanded progress in negotiations with Tel Aviv as a prelude to ending the embargo, Kissinger put additional pressure on Nixon not to make premature statements about Arab intentions. A cable from Scowcroft saying that the president wanted to announce a lifting of the embargo in his State of the Union address on January 30 triggered a sharp Kissinger rebuke: “There is no possible way to arrange the lifting of the oil embargo in such a way as to permit the President to make the announcement of its lifting,” he cabled Scowcroft.
Henry warned that if “the President now indicates to the Arabs the vital importance to the United States and to him of ending the oil embargo—and ending it with an announcement from Washington—we will give strength to the Arabs in their determination to deal with us harshly.”
When Nixon complained to Riyadh about its failure to honor promises about lifting the embargo and threatened to publicize Saudi unreliability, the foreign minister warned, in what Kissinger described as a “cool (and not incorrect) response, that he would them make it known that our request [for ending the embargo] had as often been geared to Nixon’s domestic necessities as to the American national interest—underlining the humiliating position in which Watergate had placed us.” In this conflict between Nixon and Kissinger over how to deal successfully with Arab oil producers, Henry was clearly more mindful of the national interest than a president trying to overcome an international difficulty as a way to save his political life.
The climate of suspicion and recrimination generated by the numerous revelations about White House skullduggery cast a shadow over Kissinger’s mediation and muted praise for a major foreign policy achievement. On January 18, CBS’s Dan Rather pointed to administration “detractors” who asserted that in October, three days after the “Saturday Night Massacre,” “the U.S. called a general alert and now, two days after the 18-minute tape-gap episode, we get a Middle East agreement signed.” It reflected a depressing degree of cynicism that foreign policy actions were the captives of domestic politics.
Press accounts during his January trip accusing him of collaboration with Nixon’s Plumbers incensed Kissinger, who had previously denied these allegations under oath before congressional committees. Henry called news stories that he had something to do with wiretapping former defense secretary Laird “a vicious, malicious, outrageous lie.” With stories also circulating about the military chiefs spying on Kissinger in 1971 to obtain information he was withholding from them, Henry demanded that the White House deny these accounts.
“The recent spate of articles,” he told Scowcroft, “are being turned by some opponents of the administration, by some members of the administration, and by some former members of the administration into an attack on the last person of standing in the administration.” He asserted that people need to put the national interest above all this scandal mongering. On his first day back from the Middle East, he told Hugh Sidey, “It really was a moving thing to see the beginning of trust develop between people who’ve been fighting for 30 years. And we are so absorbed in every other thing that we can’t even focus on it.”
Kissinger’s complaint had merit. It was distressing that White House transgressions were eclipsing a major step toward peace in a region that threatened the tranquility not only of local states but also East-West stability. A possible answer was for Nixon to suspend his authority under the Twenty-fifth Amendment until he could be cleared of wrongdoing or to resign and allow the government to focus anew on vital national security and domestic issues. But Nixon continued to put his political survival ahead of the national well-being and to make the reasonable argument that suspension or resignation would make America more like a parliamentary democracy; it would be a change in the country’s system of government that was at variance with the Constitution.
In January, talk of Nixon’s resignation was a constant part of the political discussion. When rumors emanating from Israel on January 23 described Nixon as about to resign, Kissinger told Ziegler, “If the President leaves and Ford takes over, I will stay.” Nixon, who refuted all such talk, asked Henry later that day, “How’s your confidence? You’re not getting discouraged?” Henry replied, “Not at all,” and praised the president’s continuing effective leadership.
Publicly, Nixon and Kissinger seized every opportunity to describe the president as in charge and his tenure as synonymous with the national good. In a background briefing with the editors and reporters of the Washington Star, Kissinger said Nixon was in full control of Middle East policy and the force behind their recent success in the negotiations. Kissinger described himself during his trip as “in daily touch with the President—often several times a day…Foreign leaders wanted the President to continue because they knew and respected him.”
Nixon outdid Kissinger in trying to convince people that he remained the chief executive. On January 24, he met with the NSC, ostensibly to discuss ongoing SALT negotiations. It was “obvious” to Admiral Zumwalt “that, among other things, the meeting was a staged opportunity for Mr. Nixon to show that he was still in control. The demonstration was a mixed success. Some of the things Mr. Nixon said made perfect sense. At other times he rambled, or even indulged in non sequiturs. If it was not an alarming performance, neither was it a reassuring one.”
Nixon himself told Republican congressmen that “he could not resign under any circumstances because it would overturn the election result.” He said he anticipated “a real gut fight over impeachment, but” he intended “to fight like hell, even if only one Senator stands with him.” Ironically, for someone accused of covering-up involvement in an illegal break-in aimed at manipulating the outcome of an election, Nixon seemed to be saying that he was determined to preserve America’s democratic tradition of honoring the results of a free election.
Nixon continued to believe that the best way for him to serve the country and himself was by easing the energy crisis. On January 23, he sent a fifteen-page special message to Congress on a matter that “could affect the patterns of our national life for the rest of this century.” Breaking with the tradition of waiting to spell out national legislative needs in the State of the Union speech, he felt compelled to advise Congress beforehand on a challenge that required urgent attention. Although he believed that it would take until at least 1980 to ensure American independence of foreign energy producers, he thought it essential to make this the country’s highest priority and to initiate action at once.
Nixon remained convinced that the immediate answer to the country’s energy shortage and possibly his political difficulties, which long lines at gas stations were compounding, was a lifting of the Arab oil embargo. But it was proving much more difficult to achieve than Kissinger had led Nixon to believe. On January 24, in messages to Sadat, Nixon and Kissinger objected to Arab insistence on maintaining the embargo until Israel made a disengagement agreement with Syria.
Sadat and the Saudis sent assurances that the president could announce in his State of the Union message that Arab oil producers were meeting to discuss an end to the embargo. Nixon and Kissinger then agreed that the president could stretch this to mean that he had “assurances that the embargo will in the very near future be lifted.” Nixon wanted to tell the country “with full confidence” that “there will be no rationing.” His objective was “to get the damned embargo lifted…You know the point,” he told Henry, “to make it appear like a helluva foreign policy achievement of this administration…That will be the good news of this speech—just that—that’s all we need.”
On the morning of January 30, with Nixon set to give his speech that evening, the Saudis backed away from suggestions that the embargo would be lifted. Kissinger called their back-down “a revolting performance. If I was the President,” he told Scowcroft, “I would tell the Arabs to shove their oil and tell the Congress we will have rationing rather than submit and you would get the embargo lifted in three days.” Henry feared that if Nixon went beyond what the Saudis “authorized us to say…the President will be blamed for playing cheap politics, which God forbid he would not do.”
In his speech, Nixon limited himself to the observation that “through my personal contacts with friendly leaders in the Middle Eastern area, an urgent meeting will be called in the immediate future to discuss the lifting of the oil embargo. This is an encouraging sign. However, it should be clearly understood by our friends in the Middle East that the United States will not be coerced on this issue.” Later that night, Nixon told Kissinger, “I coppered down that Arab part. The coercion part bothers me, but Al said you thought it was important. It’s a shot across the bow. We gotta let them know we don’t have to have them.”
Because Nixon now understood that foreign policy was not going to insulate him from an impeachment inquiry and that his fate rested on access to the tapes, which he knew were damning, he considered destroying them and announcing it in the State of the Union address. It would be his way of saying “enough is enough…I was persuaded against it,” he recalled, “by the argument that using the State of the Union to draw lines and force confrontations would not only heighten the impeachment issue but completely overshadow the important national policy issues in the speech.”
Instead of destroying the tapes, Nixon ended his speech with a defiant extemporaneous declaration that he had provided the special prosecutor with all the material he needed to conclude his investigation and “to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent.” He believed it was time to end the investigation: “One year of Watergate is enough.” The Democrats responded with hisses and boos. It was an almost unheard of reaction to a State of the Union address—an occasion when opposing party members deferred to presidential authority with demonstrations of polite applause or muted opposition by sitting on their hands.
LINGERING HOPES that foreign policy could somehow rescue Nixon from his domestic troubles further receded during the first week of February. Saudi King Faisal sent word that the Arab states had ruled out a lifting of the oil embargo without a Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement that put some distance between their respective forces in the Golan Heights and reduced the chances of additional fighting. Although Kissinger urged Sadat to understand that a failure to end the embargo jeopardized a further role for the United States in Egyptian-Israeli negotiations, the Egyptian president lacked the power to force the oil-producing states to meet Washington’s demand.
At the same time, Middle East difficulties threatened to impede new advances in Soviet-American relations. On January 17, after Nixon announced the disengagement agreement in the Sinai, Brezhnev complained to the president that the Geneva commitment to a Soviet part in Egyptian-Israeli negotiations was not being implemented. He asked that Gromyko and Kissinger meet to discuss renewed cooperation to eliminate the “dangerous hotbed of tension” in the Mideast before Nixon came to Moscow in the spring for another Summit meeting.
In a discussion with Kissinger on February 1, Dobrynin was more direct. He described “a bitter debate” in Moscow over what many saw as a “setback” to the Soviet Union from Henry’s unilateral diplomacy in the Middle East. He warned that “an interval of bad feelings could do serious harm to our relationship.” Kissinger promised to be “very circumspect” and agreed to “periodic meetings of the [Geneva] Co-Chairmen” to “symbolize our common commitment.”
With Gromyko scheduled to arrive in Washington for meetings on February 4–5, Kissinger advised Nixon that reducing Soviet influence in the Middle East was placing “a certain strain on our relations.” Henry wanted the president to give a rhetorical bow to U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the peace effort. It could discourage Moscow from a “spoiling effort, while at the same time retaining freedom to keep the United States in the central role.”
During a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on the afternoon of February 4, Nixon assured Gromyko that the administration was committed to the spirit and the letter of détente. Gromyko was as effusive in his expressions of eagerness to continue the trend toward accommodation, but on the Middle East he was scathing about American indifference to a Soviet role in current negotiations. Nixon tried to blunt Gromyko’s concerns by declaring, “The Middle East is not pleasant for anyone.” And Kissinger joked: “I would like to make a deal with our Soviet friends to turn over the Israelis to them.” Gromyko was not amused. He complained that after seeming to commit itself to shared diplomatic action in the region, the United States was acting without the Soviet Union. The Geneva accord “was an empty and meaningless gesture.”
Nixon reassured Gromyko that permanent peace could occur only if it was the result of joint Soviet-American efforts. They had seized the opportunity to bring about Egyptian-Israeli disengagement, but Moscow should not take this to mean that the U.S. saw negotiations in the region as “a one-man show.” Henry declared: “We have no interest in proceeding unilaterally.”
But of course, this is exactly what Nixon and Kissinger intended. On the night of February 5, Henry cabled a confidential report to Sadat and Fahmy on the Gromyko conversations. Gromyko demanded that all Middle East negotiations should be conducted jointly. But Kissinger promised to honor an agreement with Cairo to keep Moscow at arm’s length. “Each of us will only tell the Soviets what we jointly agree to tell them.”
In freezing Moscow out of Middle East talks, Kissinger saw himself as on a tightrope. Détente was too important to jeopardize for U.S. diplomatic dominance in Mideast talks. “We are not going to humiliate the Soviets by playing up the lone U.S. role in the Middle East,” Henry told Time editors and writers in an off-the-record background discussion on February 5.
Yet he described himself as without illusion about Moscow. “The Soviet leaders are brutal, shortsighted, [and] unpleasant,” he said. “But we must bring about a qualitative change in our relationship. There is a real danger if the Soviet leaders should feel humiliated and this generation should become soured about the capitalists…The Soviets are not whole-hearted believers in détente. They are keeping up a big military effort.” But it was essential to understand that “the Soviets and the United States can destroy humanity.” It had created “the inevitable need for détente.”
At the same time, however, limiting Soviet influence in the Middle East was seen as an effective means to blunt attacks on détente from domestic critics. Henry belittled the criticism of détente as an offshoot of “hatred for the President,” which “is so great that people feel that no monument must be left to him, so they find flaws in détente.”
But this was hardly the principal source of opposition. Senator Henry Jackson of Washington and defense secretary Jim Schlesinger led an outcry against ties to a repressive dictatorship determined to defeat the United States in the Cold War. They saw Soviet professions of support for peaceful coexistence as a ruse to lull the West into arms limitations favoring Soviet power. U.S. labor leaders opposed to trade agreements buoying the Soviet economy and supporters of Israel critical of Soviet limitations on Jewish emigration also voiced intense doubts about détente. It was a measure of how widespread these misgiving were that Schlesinger, a sitting cabinet member, would feel free to make his dissent known. By reducing Moscow’s influence in the Middle East, Kissinger hoped to quiet détente’s most outspoken critics.
Nixon continued to hope that a Syrian-Israeli disengagement agreement and an end to the oil embargo could improve his chances of political survival. He believed it would forcefully demonstrate White House effectiveness, raise his approval ratings, and discourage House Democrats from ousting him.
But managing Middle East tensions and coordinating an effective response to the Arab assault on Western economies remained daunting challenges. On February 9, on the eve of the Washington energy conference, Nixon and Kissinger agreed that “the Europeans, especially the French, are playing a lousy game.” They feared that their “allies” would desert the United States for separate agreements with the Arab oil producers. “The Foreign Ministers are idiots,” Henry said. Regardless of what the talks produced, Nixon, ever mindful of massaging his public image, instructed the White House to “give the press something after each session so we get something positive on TV.”
Kissinger shared Nixon’s eagerness to push oil consumers into a common front. But he worried that the president might overreach himself in his effort to achieve unity. “I hope he [the president] doesn’t dribble over them too much tonight,” Henry told Haig. “Tell him to stay steady. Be conciliatory, but not groveling, but not to believe the bullshit about the great cooperation they are extending.”
Although the French Foreign Minister Jobert gave what Kissinger described as “a really vicious speech,” he and Nixon agreed to ignore “the bastard” and to have the president strike a conciliatory pose. In extemporaneous remarks to the conference that were anything but groveling, Nixon cautioned the foreign ministers against isolating their countries from the United States in pursuit of national advantages. Stable, affordable oil prices could only be achieved through a common policy.
Controlling allies at the conference proved easier than forcing the Saudis and Syrians to follow Washington’s lead. Reports out of the Middle East on February 11 indicated that the Egyptians were “deeply concerned that the Soviets are playing a spoiling role in Syria” by “exerting heavy pressure on Assad not to be flexible on disengagement terms.”
In remarks the following day at the Lincoln Memorial during a 165th-birthday celebration, a discouraged Nixon declared that the Civil War president “was very deeply hurt by what was said about him and drawn about him. But on the other hand, Lincoln had had that great strength of character never to display it, always to stand tall and strong and firm no matter how harsh or unfair the criticism might be.” Lincoln had become Nixon’s role model.
Nixon being Nixon, he talked himself into the belief that he and Kissinger could still blunt attacks on him with some spectacular foreign policy successes. “The main thing,” he told Henry on February 13, as the conference was winding up, is to remain “upbeat and things are going to work out; we are working on the embargo and all that.” Playing cheerleader, Kissinger said, “I am confident that it will be lifted in a week.”
After Kissinger managed to paper over differences with other oil-consuming countries at the conference with a bland public pronouncement, Nixon depicted it as a great victory. “It was an historic breakthrough, people will see it later, Henry,” he said in a phone conversation on February 14, “and by God, it was a hell of a thing.” Kissinger credited the president’s remarks at the conference as “terribly important…You made the connection between the economic and the military.” It “convinced them that we meant business.” Henry characterized Nixon’s talk and the outcome of the conference as “a major success.” As soothing to Nixon, Henry reported that the foreign ministers would tell their governments that the president was “in marvelous shape.”
Kissinger then came back to his expectation that the Saudis would lift the embargo by the end of the following week and that would be “a huge success.” Nixon planned to hold a press conference on February 25 to bask in the glow of their achievement.
In the meantime, the Saudi and Egyptian foreign ministers asked to see the president in Washington. They wanted Nixon to send Kissinger back to the Middle East for another round of shuttle diplomacy between Damascus and Tel Aviv. They described an Israeli-Syrian disengagement agreement as essential to lift the embargo. Henry favored a meeting at the White House. Nixon was more skeptical. “We’ve been around that track before,” he told Henry about another trip to the region, “and it hasn’t helped on the embargo. That’s the only thing the country is interested in. They don’t give a damn what happens to Syria.” With long lines still at gas stations, Nixon was right about public interest in increased oil supplies. Henry, however, convinced him to see the ministers by predicting that if an end to the embargo followed a meeting, the president could link it to their discussion.
Understanding how closely Nixon was tying the survival of his presidency to solving the oil crunch, Kissinger urged Haig to ensure that Nixon was “totally disciplined and aloof in the meeting…I don’t want him to salivate.” If he didn’t see the ministers, however, it would encourage fresh stories that Henry was preempting presidential authority. Henry shared Nixon’s belief that getting the embargo lifted would help save his presidency. But they also needed to guard against public recognition of the reality that the president wasn’t entirely in command, or that Kissinger was intermittently behaving as a surrogate president.
At his news conference on February 25, Nixon had nothing to say about prospects for lifting the oil embargo. And although he acknowledged long waiting lines at gas stations, he expressed satisfaction that there was no home heating fuel crisis and that gas rationing was unlikely as long as the public continued to conserve energy. He predicted national self-sufficiency if the Congress would enact his recommended energy program.
The reporters were not convinced. They responded with a series of questions about when the embargo might be lifted, the gas lines might shorten, and gas prices might fall. “Were you misled by the Arab leaders” when you assured the country that the embargo would end soon? one asked. Others wanted to know whether the administration could bring inflation under control and whether the president could avoid a recession in 1974. Nixon predicted a short life for the embargo and a robust economy. But his answers did nothing to bolster trust in his leadership.
If gas shortages were the public’s principal concern, the media remained focused on Nixon’s possible impeachment. “To heal the divisions in this country,” UPI’s Helen Thomas asked, “would you be willing to waive executive privilege…to end any question of your involvement in Watergate?” Nixon repeated earlier promises of cooperation that did not weaken the presidency. “I do not expect to be impeached” was Nixon’s mantra. Would he consider resigning if it appeared that his party would suffer a severe defeat in the 1974 elections? He had no intention of resigning and peace and prosperity would carry Republicans to victory in November. Reporters had other embarrassing questions about the president’s income taxes and Agnew’s resignation. On balance, the televised news conference did nothing to boost the president’s poor public standing.
Between February 25 and March 4, Kissinger resumed his shuttle diplomacy, traveling between Damascus, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Amman, Riyadh, and Bonn, before his return to the United States. Kissinger did not see the trip as doing more than starting preliminary disengagement negotiations between Syria and Israel. On his arrival in Damascus on February 25, Henry met with Assad from midnight to almost four in the morning. “What we have to do is to start a negotiation,” he told Assad. “And this negotiation will not in my judgment make very much progress. But during that period I can begin organizing public opinion in Israel and America. And at the right moment…I will come back and do my best to conclude it as I did with Egypt.”
Following through on his PR plan, which was aimed more at helping Nixon with domestic disputes than with building support for a disengagement agreement, he cabled Nixon on February 27 that if he were successful in selling the Israelis on discussions with Damascus, he would provide Scowcroft with a press release, which Ziegler could issue from the White House.
Nixon was delighted with Kissinger’s progress in mediating Syrian-Israeli differences. Nixon was even more pleased with the press coverage of Henry’s trip, which was making the front pages of all major U.S. newspapers. The Washington Post congratulated the administration on progress in the Middle East, and the Washington Star praised “détente with Cairo” as opening the way to peace in the region. Henry’s growing reputation as a miracle peacemaker also served Nixon’s purposes. A cartoon of Kissinger “perched on a dove with a briefcase flying over the Arabian Desert” was a welcome change from the numerous negative cartoons about the president. Articles in Time on “The Return of the Magician” to the Middle East and in Newsweek on “A Dove Named Henry” were also a relief from the hostile Watergate stories.
Nixon now laid plans to visit the Middle East as a follow-up to Henry’s restoration of relations with Egypt and potential disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria. Sadat welcomed the prospect of a Nixon visit and predicted that “you will receive a tumultuous reception” in Egypt.
The advances for U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, however, carried the continuing concern that it would undermine détente. With Walter Stoessel, the new U.S. ambassador to Moscow, slated to present his credentials on February 28, Kissinger instructed him not to discuss the Middle East unless Gromyko raised it. If he did, Stoessel was to say that the secretary’s trip was in response to an Arab request, that he expected to do no more than launch negotiations between Syria and Israel, and that he intended to “keep [the] Soviets informed of progress so we can together…consider when and how best to proceed to [the] next phase in [the] Geneva framework.”
During his stop in Bonn, Kissinger assured Willy Brandt that “we have no desire to humiliate the Soviet Union,” though he had every intention of consigning it to a minor role in the region. “We can’t brag about pushing the Soviet Union out of the Middle East,” Kissinger told Nixon’s cabinet on March 8. “We not only don’t need the Soviet Union, but their style is bad for the Middle East.” The goal was to hold them at arm’s length but also to keep them in line.
Yet the good news from Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy could not mute the new Watergate stories that emerged on March 2. A grand jury announcement of seven indictments, including Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson, “for forty-five overt acts of conspiracy” to cover up payoffs to the Watergate burglars and for perjury “resulted in a new Watergate orgy in the press,” Scowcroft wired Kissinger. “The Washington Post has indicated strongly that the ‘secret report’ of the grand jury, which it has passed to Judge Sirica, specifically ties the President to the Watergate cover-up.” The White House tried to put the best possible face on Nixon’s predicament by telling Henry that “the indictments have not really set the country on fire and that they had already been substantially discounted.” Yet they had to admit “that there were some on the Hill who felt that they [the indictments] brought impeachment closer.”
Nixon responded to the indictments and additional talk of impeachment by holding another nationally televised news conference on March 6. Ostensibly, he was meeting the press so soon again to explain a veto of an emergency energy bill passed by Congress and to urge adoption of an alternative White House program. But he knew that the questions would mainly focus on the scandal threatening his presidency. He responded to them with denials of wrongdoing and injunctions to assume that people are innocent until proven guilty, as was accepted practice in American jurisprudence.
The press conference “last night was a disaster,” syndicated columnist Rowland Evans told Kissinger on March 7. When Henry put him off by saying that he had to see the vice president in five minutes, Evans joked, “You want to be sure he will reemploy you.” Kissinger sprang to Nixon’s defense: “There will not be an impeachment,” he said. Evans disagreed: “I think there will be.” Kissinger replied: “It won’t succeed.” Evans took Henry to mean that Nixon “won’t be convicted”; he agreed.
Defending Nixon had become part of Kissinger’s routine. At a Nixon-Kissinger briefing of GOP congressional leaders on March 8, Henry described Nixon as indispensable to world peace. He suggested to Nixon that he summarize his basic world strategy. Nixon replied: In the Middle East, the administration had saved Israel in the recent war, but in a way that “enhanced our role with the Arabs and did not posture us as anti-Soviet.” Henry interjected, The president’s détente policy was a deterrent to a nuclear conflict. Nixon elaborated on the point. Détente had allowed the United States to end the Vietnam War with “peace and honor. We got our way in Vietnam, solved Berlin, prevented war in Cuba, and got the Soviets moderated in the Middle East. If détente breaks down, we will have an arms race, no trade…confrontation in the Middle East and elsewhere, and they [the Soviets] will go right on repressing their people.” The briefing was an argument against those in Congress who opposed détente or favored impeachment.
The positive talk about détente, the Middle East, and foreign policy in general could not counter unsettling foreign and domestic realities. Prospects for new gains in the Middle East were held hostage to a Syrian-Israeli impasse over Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights. “I must tell you in all frankness,” Kissinger advised Sadat on March 16, “that reconciling differences between Syria and Israel is likely to be a protracted process.” He anticipated a period of “deadlock before decisive progress can be made.”
An announcement by Arab oil ministers on March 18 of an end to the oil embargo gave the White House little to celebrate. The fact that the ministers might renew the embargo on June 1 unless there was progress in Syrian-Israeli negotiations made the development less than a satisfying victory. More discouraging was the little likelihood that oil prices would come down any time soon. Although Nixon was eager to score points for himself by describing it as an administration achievement, Kissinger warned against giving “the impression of enormous significance.” It would encourage the Arabs to “blackmail us by putting it back on…Let’s not put it on the level of the China breakthrough,” he told Haig. The White House took no special notice of the Arab action.
Nixon’s frustration with Middle East problems boiled over in remarks to Kissinger that he would publicly strike out at the Israelis for dragging their feet on a Syrian disengagement agreement. “He was in a rather sour mood again,” Henry told Haig on the morning of March 16. “If he goes publicly after the Israelis, he might as well start a war.” Haig urged Kissinger not to “be concerned about that. He is just unwinding.” Haig had concerns of his own: “Listen, I was told to get the football,” he told Henry. “What do you mean?” Kissinger asked. “His black nuclear bag,” Haig replied. “For what?” Henry wanted to know. “He is going to drop it on the Hill. What I am saying is don’t take him too seriously.” Kissinger understood that Nixon was just venting his anger at the limits of their influence in the Middle East and domestic opponents eager to bring him down. Nevertheless, he begged Haig to restrain the president from saying anything publicly about Israel. “I tell you, it would be a disaster,” Henry said.
A few days later, Kissinger asked Haig, “How’s our leader doing?” Haig replied, “He’s fine. He’s dead tired. I just went over there, he was crawling.” When Haig added that “the creepiest fellow I’ve ever seen” was in asking questions about you for a New York Post story, Henry was sure that the reporter was out “to screw” him. “My God, the questions he asked,” Haig said. “You were using devious methods in the bureaucracy. You were paranoiac. Whether you had scars of your youth? He just went on and on…I told him you once told me acute paranoia in Washington would be diagnosed as excess complacency…He wanted me to say you are an organizational disaster.” Haig denied it: “After all…we’ve kept the foreign policy and defense policy going for five years in a disastrous situation.”
Nixon remained restrained in public when questioners hammered him about Watergate and détente during an appearance at the Executives’ Club of Chicago. Couldn’t he clarify why he thought greater cooperation with the special prosecutor and the Congress in the Watergate investigations would weaken the presidency? Given how the Watergate battles were demoralizing the country and making young people cynical about ethics, wouldn’t it be better if the president resigned? Nixon’s answers were a restatement of what he had been saying for months: Allowing investigators unlimited access to executive records would produce lasting injury to the presidency and resignation of a president because he was low in the polls would permanently change our form of government.
As for détente, a member of the audience saw the policy not as advancing the world toward a more stable peace but eroding America’s power. Nixon’s compelling response that it was better to talk than to enter into a costly arms race and an eventual nuclear war could not convince skeptics that peaceful coexistence was anything but a Communist ploy to defeat the United States.
Conservative New York Republican Senator James Buckley publicly argued with Nixon about what was undermining the presidency. A Nixon resignation, he announced, would do more to preserve the presidency than the president’s continuation in office. The collapse of Nixon’s “credibility and moral authority” was causing an “agonizing inch by inch…attrition” of presidential power. Only a prompt resignation could save executive authority from long-term damage. Opposition to Nixon’s détente policy was also part of Buckley’s interest in seeing an end to his presidency.
More convinced than ever that détente was essential to international stability and his political survival, Nixon instructed Kissinger to visit Moscow beginning on March 25 to lay the groundwork for another Summit in June. But problems over Vietnam, SALT, Europe, and the Middle East, made it what Kissinger described as a difficult period in Soviet-American relations.
Although it was not at the top of the Summit agenda, Nixon and Kissinger worried that Vietnam might explode in renewed violence. They hoped they could use Moscow to discourage Hanoi from fresh acts of aggression. Complaints from the North Vietnamese that the United States was systematically violating the Paris agreement by secretly maintaining military personnel in Saigon, supplying the South Vietnamese with jet fighters, and encouraging Saigon to hold on to fifteen thousand POWs, who were being tortured and maltreated at detention centers, was seen by U.S. analysts as an excuse for continuing acts of aggression. Because North Vietnam Prime Minister Pham Van Dong was visiting Moscow in March, it suggested that Hanoi might be seeking Soviet approval for a new round of attacks. Any such development would be a blow to Nixon’s assertions about peace with honor. Although the state department drafted a reply to Hanoi, the more effective response to the North Vietnamese seemed through Moscow.
If a third Summit with Brezhnev was to be of any significance, Nixon and Kissinger believed that it would need to show progress on SALT II, with a focus on restraining Soviet MIRV deployments. The United States would also need to meet Soviet insistence on holding a European security conference aimed at reducing forces in central Europe and recognizing existing post-1945 borders. A third problem was Soviet sensitivity to being reduced to a minor role in the Middle East. Expanded trade was also part of the U.S. agenda. Agreements on these issues, Nixon wrote Brezhnev, “would be ample proof that the relaxation of tensions between the two strongest nuclear powers is not a passing episode but a continuing process leading to a fundamental change in the character of our relations.”
Nixon hoped that further advances in Soviet-American relations would force the president’s domestic critics to consider what ousting him might mean for world peace. Several of Jaworski’s Texas friends urged him to weigh the president’s removal from office for Watergate, admittedly a “most stupid thing,” against his mastery of foreign affairs and international stability. Jaworski responded that his legal obligation was to view Watergate as “not stupid, but serious offenses” that required investigation and prosecution.
As Kissinger prepared to leave for Russia, Nixon impressed him as “very preoccupied.” At the end of March, Nixon believed that the impeachment fight had turned “stormy and survival seemed unlikely.” The White House was under assault from a mountain of legal challenges. A staff of fifteen lawyers under James St. Clair, a Boston attorney Nixon had appointed at the beginning of 1974 to head his defense team, had to deal with a tangle of legal questions. Specifically, Jaworski and the House committee were asking for over forty more tapes, and Nixon saw “no practical choice but to comply…If I refused, they would vote me in contempt of Congress,” he said. “I made a note on March 22, 1974, at 2 A.M.: Lowest day. Contempt equals impeachment.”
The undiminished possibility of being driven from office, coupled with the likelihood that Henry might face a cool reception in Moscow, signaling limited prospects for significant agreements in June, added to Nixon’s distress. Ford told a reporter at this time that Nixon was driving him “close to distraction.” Ford thought it “indicates that the President has undergone a change of personality in the past year or so.”
In a well-meaning attempt to boost the president, Kissinger told a press conference on March 21 that a “conceptual breakthrough” in SALT negotiations had opened the way to a second SALT agreement. Henry offered no details of what this meant. And even if he had something specific in mind, he acknowledged later that it was an ill-advised prediction. This talk of a “conceptual breakthrough,” he says, was to take its place alongside his remarks about “peace is at hand” as an unrealistic assessment of what would emerge from current negotiations.
Press and public skepticism on SALT partly revolved around the fear that Nixon and Kissinger were playing what Senator Javits called “impeachment politics.” Conservative Republicans believed that any arms control agreement coming out of the next Summit would be aimed less at serving the nation’s security than at saving Nixon’s presidency. AFLCIO president George Meany said, “I pray every night that Henry Kissinger won’t give the Russians the Washington Monument—he’s given them every goddamn thing else.”
Admiral Zumwalt believed that Nixon “felt compelled to seek for foreign policy ‘successes’ to distract the country from his domestic mis-behavior.” Zumwalt feared that Kissinger, whom he saw preempting a weakened president’s authority, was convinced that the American people lacked the “stamina” and the “will” to compete with Moscow, and consequently hoped “to make the best possible deal with the Soviet Union while there is still time to make a deal.” (The extensive documentary record of Kissinger’s discussions with Nixon and numerous other officials about Soviet relations, including Kissinger’s telephone transcripts, are a refutation of Zumwalt’s assumption.)
“I was not in Moscow for long before I realized that things were not destined to go swimmingly,” Kissinger later recalled. “Each of the subjects on the agenda bred controversy.” In a contemporary report to Nixon, Kissinger described “a largely inconclusive seven hours” with Brezhnev during opening talks. “Brezhnev and Gromyko bitterly and at length, though calmly, gave vent to their resentment at Soviet exclusion from Middle East diplomacy. The discussion was one of the most acid I have had with Brezhnev.” The Middle East consumed three of the seven hours.
The Soviets wanted to conclude a European security conference before Nixon came to Moscow in June. But Henry held them off. “I think such timing would be undesirable from your standpoint and would also deny you leverage during the Soviet visit.” Not only were there no results to speak of from the discussion of major issues, there was a “somewhat desultory quality to the rest of the Soviet performance.” At the same time, however, Kissinger reported Brezhnev’s statement that the Soviet leaders had “recently decided to continue on course with us.”
Kissinger’s report spared Nixon Brezhnev’s comments on the president’s domestic problems over Watergate. Brezhnev did not want to get into “the various details of what is taking place in the United States—and we hear and read a lot about it,” he said. But he applauded the president’s “firmness and resolve to move ahead on the course we have charted.” Nevertheless, Brezhnev felt compelled to add “that in order to move further ahead we have to overcome a few difficulties and obstacles which are integrally linked to improving relations with us…And that fact [Nixon’s impeachment] may well come to be one of the difficulties we face.” Brezhnev worried that someone less sympathetic to détente might replace Nixon. “If we slipped back,” he said, “that would be a bad sign for our two peoples.”
Kissinger assured Brezhnev that Nixon and his administration remained committed to détente no matter what happened. In short, détente would continue with or without Nixon. Brezhnev expressed the hope that the improvements in their relations were “irreversible.”
Aside from an agreement that Nixon would come to Moscow for a week beginning on June 24, the differences over SALT and the Middle East made it impossible to produce any significant advances in the March talks. In a final report to the president, Kissinger put the best possible face on the conversations: The atmosphere was friendly, and Brezhnev believed they would have a successful Summit.
The U.S. press, however, saw no progress in Kissinger’s Moscow discussions, especially on SALT. Henry acknowledged the difficulties to Schlesinger: “Détente is in bad shape…and the press is building it into a crisis.” The Soviet description of the SALT exchanges made “the U.S. proposal look silly.” Moreover, the newspapers ridiculed Henry’s earlier comments about a breakthrough, observing that Soviet-American assertions of “progress” on arms control did not amount to a “breakthrough.” Nor did claims of “progress” generate much confidence in meaningful agreements at the June Summit.
Nixon was no more optimistic. The prospect of another meeting in Moscow could not counter a mood of despondency that had settled over him by the end of March. At a White House luncheon with the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale and a few others, Nixon was joyless. He “never ate a thing, just stared at his food,” one of the guests recalled. “Nixon never said a word. He was obviously too much in agony to have company, yet also too much in agony to be alone.”
Nixon found temporary relief from his anguish in evenings with his wife, Pat, daughter Julie, and son-in-law David Eisenhower at their secluded home in Bethesda, where they would eat dinner and sit on a closed-in porch reminiscing about past pleasures: the early years of Dick’s and Pat’s courtship and marriage and car and train trips. It was as if he were transporting himself away from Washington and all his current troubles into an idealized past or a happier future. The premium was on ignoring the present, Julie Eisenhower recalls. “He steadfastly was trying to sustain a lifelong philosophy of not giving in to defeat.”