Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
—NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, 1963
That man is unfit to be president.
—KISSINGER ON NIXON, 1968
When Nixon decided to run again for president in January 1968, he knew that however well known he might be and however clever his campaign strategy, circumstances would be the final arbiter of who won the election. And at the start of the year, they seemed to both favor and impede him. Despite Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Goldwater in 1964 and his extraordinary legislative record of success in 1965–1966, the three years leading up to 1968 had sharply reduced Johnson’s popularity.
The principal culprit, as Johnson himself described it, was that “bitch of a war in Vietnam,” a seemingly endless struggle that had cost the United States more than twenty-five thousand lives and over 100 billion dollars. By 1968, millions of Americans saw the conflict as a mistaken intrusion into a civil war that had less to do with U.S. security than Vietnamese national self-determination. The resilience and determination of the Communist Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, which became all too transparent during the Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968, made the conflict seem like an unwinnable stalemate that undermined the support that most Americans normally gave their government in wartime. The erosion of popular support was reminiscent of the U.S. military setback in the Korean War and the downturn in Harry Truman’s domestic political standing.
Ironically, Johnson’s passage of the War on Poverty and the Great Society laws were also playing havoc with his political fortunes. Governor Ronald Reagan of California ridiculed Johnson’s programs by saying, “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won.” Reagan was only half right: Johnson’s reforms reduced the number of Americans living in poverty by over 12 million people—from roughly 22 percent to about 13 percent of the population. Yet at the same time, the poverty war gave big social engineering programs a bad name. Most of those leaving the poverty rolls did so not as taxpayers using newly developed skills in decent jobs but as welfare recipients under Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Only a modest number of the impoverished received a hand up rather than a handout, as the war against want had promised.
Inner-city riots between 1965 and 1968 had also eroded Johnson’s political standing. His sponsorship of the 1964 Civil Rights bill, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and a program of affirmative action described in a 1965 speech at Howard University had made Johnson a hero among antisegregationists. But his reforms also made him vulnerable to charges that he had opened the way to black violence by indulging minorities and encouraging their sense of victimization. In 1966, 90 percent of the country opposed additional civil rights legislation, while 88 percent favored self-improvement over more government help to disadvantaged citizens.
Nixon believed that Johnson would be a formidable opponent in spite of his troubles. The power of incumbency, coupled with his affinity for the rough-and-tumble politics Nixon himself had used so freely, made Johnson a serious contender for another term. Nevertheless, Nixon hoped that rumors of Johnson’s retirement would prove false. In 1966, when the Republicans made strong congressional gains, Nixon had led the way with attacks on Johnson’s domestic and foreign policies. As Johnson’s political fortunes declined further in 1967 and early 1968 (in December 1967, U.S. News & World Report predicted that Johnson would win only twelve states), Nixon became all the more convinced that he could take LBJ’s measure in a fall campaign. Johnson, however, surprised Nixon and most political pundits by taking himself out of the race in a March 31 speech in which he also announced a reduction in the bombing of North Vietnam as a possible prelude to peace talks.
Johnson’s withdrawal reminded Nixon of how uncertain a presidential race could be. The Democrats might now nominate Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, New York Senator Robert Kennedy, or Vice President Hubert Humphrey—any one of whom could be more difficult to defeat if Johnson managed to end the fighting in Vietnam.
It was also conceivable that a peace agreement might bring Johnson back into the race as a more popular candidate. In fact, in August, even without a settlement in the war, Johnson secretly tried to arrange a draft for himself at the Democratic convention. “What will throw a new wrinkle into history,” former Texas Governor John Connally said in 1990, “is that I could make a very strong case that, notwithstanding his statement of withdrawal, he [Johnson] very much hoped he would be drafted by the convention in 1968.” LBJ sent White House aide Marvin Watson to Chicago to “assess the possibility of the convention drafting LBJ.” Connally himself “was asked to go to meet with the governors of the southern delegations…to see if they would support President Johnson in a draft movement.” But to no avail. Vietnam had permanently ended Johnson’s political career.
During the first half of 1968, however, concerns about winning the Republican nomination were a higher Nixon priority than mapping out plans for the fall campaign. Nixon’s principal challengers were Rockefeller, Michigan Governor George Romney, Illinois Senator Charles Percy, and California Governor Ronald Reagan. Nixon saw Rockefeller and Reagan as his least serious opponents: A divorce and remarriage in the early sixties and continuing refusal to make an open fight for the nomination convinced Nixon that Rockefeller was not a serious contender. Likewise, despite his national recognition as a Hollywood celebrity, popularity as a governor, and appeal to party conservatives, Reagan’s inexperience (he had been governor for only two years) made it premature for him to be taken seriously as a Nixon competitor.
Percy and Romney were another matter. Both were moderate Republicans who could make a case against Nixon as unelectable. “My biggest problem is ‘Nixon can’t win,’” he told supporters. But Republican county chairmen disagreed: They favored Nixon over Romney by 4–1 and by 10–1 over Reagan. In May 1967, Newsweek expected Percy to be a front-runner at next year’s convention. But like Reagan, he had won his first major election in 1966 and lacked the party support Nixon enjoyed. As Garry Wills said, in spite of his attractive image—fresh, handsome, moderate—Percy “had no clout; could not even count on his own [Illinois] delegation at the convention. He was pretty, and resonant, and politically nubile—and, by the time he reached [the] Miami [convention], all alone.”
Romney was apparently a better bet. A moderate from a big industrial state with a reputation for religiosity and personal integrity, he initially seemed like a formidable challenger. In the summer of 1963, the Kennedys saw him as a serious threat to the president’s reelection. “People buy that God and country stuff,” Bobby Kennedy said when hearing that Romney “was awaiting a message from God on whether to run.”
But Nixon accurately sized him up as a political lightweight who would not do well in a national campaign. In September 1967, Romney destroyed his candidacy with a verbal gaffe that made him a memorable also-ran. Asked by reporters why he was so inconsistent on Vietnam—a hawk turned dove—he famously declared, “Well, you know when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam. Not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job.” After reading some history about Vietnam, he had “changed his mind…. I no longer believe that it was necessary for us to get involved in South Vietnam to stop Communist aggression.” Instead of bringing antiwar supporters to his side, Romney’s remarks marked him out as lacking the good judgment expected of a president.
When Romney dropped out of the nomination fight in February 1968 after polls demonstrated the hopelessness of his candidacy, Rockefeller immediately declared himself open to a draft. But he still refused to enter any primaries or campaign for the nomination. Then in April, he changed his mind and announced his active candidacy. In June, he spent $5 million on ads in the country’s forty-one leading newspapers, citing polls showing that he, not Nixon, was the one who could defeat McCarthy or Humphrey. Though Rockefeller kept up a drumbeat of anti-Nixon self-promotion before the convention in August, it was a foregone conclusion that Nixon would win the nomination on the first ballot.
But Nixon’s relatively easy victory guaranteed nothing about the outcome in November. The likelihood in the spring that Bobby Kennedy would become his Democratic opponent sent a shiver of fear through the Nixon campaign. On hearing of Bobby’s entrance into the race, a shaken Nixon privately declared, “Something bad is going to come of this.” As a war opponent who had broken with Johnson, Kennedy would not bear responsibility for the stalemate in Vietnam that Humphrey, Johnson’s second in command, would have to take. Where Hubert would “have to admit the mess” in Washington, Bobby would be insulated from such attacks: “We can’t hold his feet to the fires of the past,” Nixon said.
In June, after a decisive victory in the California primary against McCarthy, Kennedy looked like the sure nominee. But Bobby’s assassination by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a crazed Palestinian blaming Kennedy for his people’s troubles, made Humphrey the likely winner at the Chicago convention in August. Nixon was as horrified as everyone else by Bobby’s death, but it seemed to improve his chances of winning the White House. Humphrey, who had not won a single primary and had to defend Johnson’s war policies at the convention, began the campaign with not only personal political negatives but also the burden of a divided party associated with civil strife. A tumultuous Democratic convention, highlighted by ugly street violence between antiwar, counterculture activists and the Chicago police, whose excesses matched and at times exceeded those of the protesters, made Nixon’s familiar face and voice an attractive alternative to more upheaval. “See America while it lasts,” a French travel agent advertised. Nixon began the fall campaign with a twelve-point lead over Humphrey; 43 percent to 31 percent.
Yet Nixon took nothing for granted. He worried that former Alabama Governor George Wallace, who had entered the race in February as the candidate of the American Independent party, might take enough votes away from him in the South and among conservatives to give Humphrey the presidency, especially if Johnson engineered a last-minute truce or peace agreement that relieved Humphrey of having to defend an unpopular war. Polls showed Wallace commanding as much as 20 percent of the popular vote. Yet Wallace’s candidacy also gave Nixon more of a claim on the broad political center, positioning him between Humphrey on the left and Wallace, an out-and-out segregationist and reckless war hawk like Goldwater, on the right.
Nixon’s strategy, then, was to woo conservative Republicans and try to ensure against a sudden outbreak of peace on the eve of the voting that would shift centrist votes to Humphrey. By making Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew, a law-and-order Republican, his running mate, Nixon hoped to blunt some of Wallace’s appeal. But Agnew turned out to be as much of an embarrassment as an asset: he described Polish-Americans as “Polacks” and a Japanese-American reporter as a “fat Jap.” Nixon quickly relegated Agnew to a limited role in the campaign, keeping him at arm’s length and never mentioning him during public appearances. Though Agnew unquestionably appealed to Wallace voters, Nixon’s assertion that conservatives would be casting a wasted ballot if they backed Wallace probably did more to reduce his vote count than Agnew’s presence on the ticket. In November, Wallace won only 13.5 percent of the popular tally and 46 votes in the Electoral College.
Knowing that as a fifty-five-year-old one-time loser this would be his last chance to win the presidency, Nixon urged “his staff to treat the campaign as if it were an all-out war.” The 1968 election was one of the hardest fought and most emotional since 1860, with more skullduggery than in any previous twentieth-century presidential campaign.
Nixon was particularly on edge about his old enemy, the liberal press, as he described journalists covering his campaign. He tried to freeze out reporters from major newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He avoided talking to them, substituting interviews with local papers and TV stations.
When Don Oberdorfer, the Post correspondent covering the campaign, asked for an interview about Nixon’s views on a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Johnson had negotiated with the Soviets, Nixon’s aides put him off. Oberdorfer, joined by colleagues from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, pressed for an interview, which the campaign took more than a week to arrange at a TV studio in North Carolina at the conclusion of a live Nixon broadcast. After a brief conversation about the treaty, Oberdorfer asked Nixon if they could put a system in place for future meetings. “If looks could kill, I would have been dead,” Oberdorfer recalled. “Go ask Humphrey,” Nixon shouted at him and stormed out of the studio.
Nixon and Johnson, who were schooled in the business of cutting political corners, collaborated to do in Humphrey. Sensing that Johnson was less than happy with Humphrey’s candidacy and the likelihood that he would break with administration policy on Vietnam if he became president, Nixon made a shrewd appeal to Johnson that enlisted his hidden support. Nixon’s TV campaign ads on Vietnam cleverly courted antiwar sentiment. In a series of sixty-second spots, Fred Panzer, Johnson’s White House pollster, told the president that Nixon was using “war footage in the best antiwar new wave style. Punctuating the visual shock was Nixon’s calm voice promising to end the war and correct the mistakes of the old set of leaders who were responsible.” At the same time, however, Nixon tried to appease Johnson by telling a group of reporters that “the President and Vice President of the United States should have the respect of all citizens and he would do nothing to destroy that respect. He said anyone speaking on public policy in this country must be aware that he is being heard in Hanoi and that voices heard in Hanoi are of major importance to our country.”
Nixon followed this up with a more direct appeal to Johnson through the Reverend Billy Graham. Graham carried a message to LBJ saying that Nixon would “1…. never embarrass” Johnson “after the election. I respect him as a man and as the President. He is the hardest working and most dedicated President in 140 years. 2. I want a working relationship with him…. And will seek his advice continually. 3. Want you (President Johnson) to go on special assignments after the election, perhaps to foreign countries. 4. I must point out some of the weaknesses and failures of the administration. But will never reflect on Mr. Johnson personally. 5. When Vietnam is settled he (Nixon) will give you (President Johnson) a major share of credit—because you…deserve it. 6. [I] will do everything to make you a place in history because you deserve it.”
In a memo about their conversation, Graham told Nixon that Johnson “was not only appreciative but I sensed that he was touched by this gesture on Mr. Nixon’s part.” Johnson responded to each of Nixon’s points: “The substance of his answers was warm appreciation. He said, ‘I intend to loyally support Mr. Humphrey but if Nixon becomes the President-elect, I will do all in my power to cooperate with him.’” In a follow-up phone conversation with Johnson about the meeting, Graham told Nixon “that the President was deeply appreciative of [your] generous gesture.”
Nixon’s initiative and Humphrey’s growing public opposition to Johnson’s Vietnam policies translated into LBJ’s indirect help to Nixon in the campaign. At the end of September, after polls showed Humphrey trailing Nixon by between eight and fifteen points, Humphrey began promising an unconditional halt to bombing North Vietnam “as an acceptable risk for peace.”
Publicly, Johnson said nothing that revealed his unhappiness with Hubert’s announcement. But privately, he was furious and refused to aid Humphrey’s campaign. When Hubert had given Johnson advance notice of what he was going to say, Johnson “tartly” dismissed Humphrey’s assurances that he would neither embarrass him nor jeopardize peace negotiations. Later, when Larry O’Brien, Humphrey’s campaign manager, passed along information from a journalist about a $500,000 contribution to Nixon’s campaign from Greece’s military rulers, Johnson would not ask CIA Director Richard Helms to verify the report or, should it be true, consider secretly leaking it to the press (a common Johnson political maneuver to outflank opponents). In October, after polling data from eighteen states indicated that Humphrey was behind in thirteen of them, Humphrey campaign adviser James Rowe, an old LBJ friend, asked Johnson to make speeches for Hubert in New Jersey and some crucial border states. Johnson refused. “You know that Nixon is following my policies more closely than Humphrey,” he told Rowe.
Humphrey tried to see Johnson about their differences. But Johnson put him off. Although he agreed to meet with Hubert in the Oval Office, he used Humphrey’s late arrival from a local campaign rally as an excuse to cancel the meeting. Humphrey now reciprocated Johnson’s anger: “That bastard Johnson…” he told a campaign aide, “I saw him sitting in his office. Jim Jones [an LBJ aide] was standing across the doorway, and I said to him: ‘You tell the President he can cram it up his ass.’ I know Johnson heard me.”
It was clear to Nixon throughout the campaign that Vietnam was the central issue and that he needed to generate hope that he would end the war. As a hard-line cold warrior who had supported Johnson on the fighting and criticized him for failing to defeat the Communists (Vietnam “is the cork in the bottle of Chinese expansion in Asia,” was a standard Nixon line), he now saw fit to promise an end to U.S. involvement through a negotiated settlement that preserved South Vietnam’s autonomy. Following Nixon’s lead, the Republican convention endorsed a Vietnam platform “plank” that was, Tom Wicker says, “just dovish enough to make Humphrey look like the hard-liner” and Nixon the sensible peacemaker.
The Democratic convention, which met two weeks after the Republican assembly, struggled to find a formula for a Vietnam plank that would appease Johnson and help Humphrey. But Johnson rejected any wording that seemed even slightly at variance with administration policy, and the result was a plank that endorsed Johnson’s hard-line approach to peace negotiations. Johnson defense secretary Clark Clifford believed that the president’s victory “was a disaster for Humphrey. At a moment when he should have been pulling the party back together to prepare for the battle against Nixon,” Clifford said later, “Humphrey had been bludgeoned into a position that had further split the party and given more evidence of his own weakness.”
But Humphrey’s Vietnam bind did not guarantee Nixon a pass on the issue. After pledging in New Hampshire in March that he would “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific,” reporters kept pressing him to explain how he would achieve these ends. Although he never spoke of “a secret plan to end the war,” he did keep his counsel on just how he would ensure peace and security. He spoke vaguely of mobilizing “our economic and political and diplomatic leadership,” and emphasized the need for pressure on Moscow to use its “leverage” on North Vietnam as a “key to peace.” He also invoked Eisenhower’s successful 1952 campaign promise to go to Korea to break the stalemate in that war.
He refused, however, to provide any details on how he would end the conflict, saying that if he revealed what he intended, it “would fatally weaken his bargaining position if he became President.” Ambrose said, “Hidden in all the verbiage was a clear-cut change in Nixon’s thinking about Vietnam. No longer was he calling for victory. No longer was he calling for escalation. Never before had he suggested cutting a deal with the Russians. For the first time he was using the words ‘honorable peace,’ not ‘victorious peace.’” And yet, as subsequent events would show, Nixon spent the next four years battling to ensure that neither the United States nor South Vietnam suffered defeat.
After Johnson announced the cutback in bombing on March 31 and preliminary peace talks began in Paris, Nixon took refuge in the argument that for him to keep speaking out on Vietnam would subject Johnson’s representatives to “partisan interference…. The pursuit of peace is too important for politics as usual,” Nixon declared. But because Nixon had a reputation for deceit, he had trouble persuading independent voters eager for an end to the fighting that he in fact had a prompt solution to the Vietnam problem.
And of course he didn’t. And so at the end of September, after Humphrey had publicly stated a more flexible position than Johnson’s on ending the war by promising to make peace in January, Nixon worried that the administration might come up with an October surprise that decisively wrested the peace issue from him and assured Humphrey’s election. Fueling Nixon’s concern were October polls showing that two-thirds of voters preferred a candidate who promised to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam in January 1969. The polls also showed that Humphrey’s September peace speech was having an impact: Where he trailed Nixon by fifteen percentage points on September 29, he had closed the gap to two points by November 2. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Nixon wanted inside information on Johnson’s peace campaign if he was to blunt or head off an initiative that might tip the balance to Humphrey.
Nixon found a willing collaborator in Henry Kissinger. His involvement in the abortive Pennsylvania negotiations in 1967 had been at the highest levels: On October 18, for example, he had met at the White House with the president, secretaries of state and defense, Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Maxwell Taylor, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a close LBJ friend and adviser, and future Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. Kissinger did not have the same access through the first half of 1968 because he was part of Rockefeller’s on-again, off-again bid for the Republican nomination; as a result, he had no part in the preliminary Paris peace talks following Johnson’s March 31 speech. Rockefeller’s statements in May and July on Vietnam, which criticized the Johnson administration’s negotiating strategy, were drafted by Kissinger.
Kissinger’s Rockefeller connection did not automatically bar him from the Johnson circle. Johnson was in fact warmly disposed toward Rockefeller, who he hoped might succeed him in the White House. At the end of April, during a White House dinner, Johnson urged Rockefeller to run: “He was very friendly about ’68, and very supportive of me for ’68,” Rockefeller said afterward. In June, when Johnson gave him a briefing on Vietnam, “Rockefeller vowed to toe [the Johnson] line on Vietnam, expressly assuring the President: ‘Believe me, I’d like to get the nomination, but I’m not going to do it at the expense of this country.’”
Kissinger’s ties to Rockefeller were no deterrent to continuing contacts with Johnson administration officials. David Davidson, a former Harvard student and aide to Averell Harriman, who was LBJ’s chief negotiator in Paris, kept Henry posted on developments in the talks. Kissinger passed along what he knew to Richard Allen, a thirty-two-year-old staff member at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who had become Nixon’s principal foreign policy aide. To shield their phone conversations from eavesdroppers, Kissinger and Allen spoke in German.
During the Republican convention in August, Kissinger collaborated with Allen on the Vietnam platform plank. And in early September, after Nixon’s nomination, Allen asked Kissinger to join a Nixon foreign policy advisory board. Because this would have meant openly identifying himself with Nixon, Kissinger suggested instead that he work “behind the scenes.” Joining the Nixon campaign would have precluded an appointment in a Humphrey administration, which Kissinger saw as a distinct possibility. In 1973, Humphrey said that he would have appointed Henry National Security Adviser if he had become president. Working openly for Nixon would also have made Kissinger appear to be a hypocrite. He privately made scathing comments about Nixon to several people during the 1968 campaign, saying that he was “unfit to be president” and that a Nixon presidency would be “a disaster” for the country.
In his eagerness for a White House appointment, Kissinger was cozying up to both Democrats and Republicans. It reflected not only his ambition but also his genuine ambivalence about the candidates. “I cannot deny that I said most of the bad things about Nixon attributed to me at the time of the nomination,” he later acknowledged. “But in the end I was reluctantly for Nixon, and I voted for him.” Henry told someone in the Humphrey campaign, “Six days a week I’m for Hubert, but on the seventh day, I think they’re both awful.”
Nonetheless, he was confident that regardless of who won the election, he would be invited to take a significant job in either the state or defense department. His confidence rested less on his ties to both political camps than on his understanding that his analysis of contemporary foreign and security problems had registered forcefully on political leaders in both parties. At a moment when the U.S. foreign policy establishment was reeling from its evident defeat in Vietnam, Kissinger published a 1968 essay, “Central Issues of American Foreign Policy,” that provided a compelling intellectual framework for thinking about current international difficulties.
The essay was not a policy blueprint for Vietnam, Europe, Latin America, or any other region of the world but a broad discussion of global structural problems that a new administration would need to consider before making specific decisions on challenges abroad. Kissinger’s essay dispelled some of the gloom that had descended over the country about its international relations. “The central task of American foreign policy,” Kissinger wrote, “is to analyze anew the current international environment and to develop some concepts which will enable us to contribute to the emergence of a stable order…. It is part of American folklore that, while other nations have interests, we have responsibilities; while other nations are concerned with equilibrium, we are concerned with the legal requirements of peace…. A mature conception of our interest in the world…would deal with two fundamental questions: What is it in our interest to prevent? What should we seek to accomplish?”
Kissinger’s answers were too abstract for the sort of verbal briefings he had unsuccessfully put before JFK. But as written analyses that Washington policy makers could digest at their leisure, they resonated effectively. The essay, coupled with his earlier writings, strengthened his appeal as America’s chief practitioner of realpolitik.
He asserted that the United States principally needed “to think in terms of power and equilibrium” instead of legalities and principles. “The task of defining positive goals is more difficult,” he said, “but even more important…. Our pragmatic, ad hoc tendency [in the two postwar decades] was an advantage in a world clamoring for technical solutions.” But the situation was now “more complex.” It was essential for the United States “to generate coalitions of shared purposes.” Local powers would have to take responsibility for regional issues, with America more concerned about “the over-all framework of order than with the management of every regional enterprise.” Kissinger doubted that “such a leap of imagination is possible for the modern bureaucratic state,” which “widens the range of technical choices while limiting the capacity to make them.”
A major challenge of a new administration, then, would be to shift control of foreign policy from the bureaucracy to the chief executive and his principal deputies armed with a broad conception of how to bring order to world affairs. Nothing was better calculated to appeal to Richard Nixon, who was intent on doing just that, should he become president.
For all his expectations of becoming a leading foreign policy official in the next administration, Kissinger believed that he needed to demonstrate a more concrete value to the Humphrey and Nixon campaigns than the power of his ideas. Consequently, in September, before going to a conference in England, he traveled to Paris, where he discussed the Vietnam peace talks with several members of the American delegation. No one in the delegation saw him as anything but helpful, and in December 1968, when Johnson asked Rusk for his impressions of Kissinger, Rusk replied: “Theoretical more than practical. Kissinger handled himself in an honest fashion on the Paris talks.” Walt Rostow then chimed in: “Henry is a man of integrity and decency.” But he “doesn’t understand [the] emergency [in] Asia.”
None of the Johnson or Humphrey advisers apparently knew that Kissinger had also been talking to Nixon’s advisers about what he had learned in Paris. According to Nixon foreign policy historian William Bundy, John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and future attorney general, had enlisted Kissinger as a secret consultant before he went to Paris. On September 26, after he had returned from Europe, Kissinger called Mitchell and, according to Nixon, reported “that something big was afoot regarding Vietnam. He advised that if I had anything to say about Vietnam during the following week, I should avoid any new ideas or proposals. Kissinger was completely circumspect in the advice he gave us during the campaign,” Nixon asserted. “If he was privy to the details of the negotiations, he did not reveal them to us. He considered it proper and responsible, however, to warn me against making any statements that might be undercut by negotiations I was not aware of.”
During the next five weeks, Kissinger had at least two more conversations with Mitchell in which he warned that a bombing halt might come as soon as mid-October or in the closing days of the month. Nixon described Kissinger as saying that the bombing pause would “be tied in with a big flurry of diplomatic activity in Paris which will have no meaning but will be made to look important.” Kissinger predicted that Johnson “will take some action before the election.” Nixon received similar information from Bryce Harlow, a former Eisenhower White House staff member and a Nixon campaign adviser. He claimed to have “a double agent working in the White House” who informed him “about every meeting they held. I knew who attended the meeting. I knew what their next move was going to be. I kept Nixon informed.”
Kissinger and Harlow accurately predicted an important Johnson action before the November 6 election: On October 31, after Hanoi had promised to reciprocate a bombing halt by giving Saigon a place at the peace table, Johnson announced a complete stop to the air war over North Vietnam. The Nixon campaign saw Johnson’s announcement as a last-minute attempt to swing the election to Humphrey. “The word is out that we are making an effort to throw the election to Humphrey,” Florida Democratic Senator George Smathers told Johnson. “…Nixon had been told of it.” But Johnson was less interested in whether Humphrey or Nixon succeeded him than in improving his historical reputation by making peace. Nixon’s resistance to a rapid end to the fighting pushed Johnson back into Humphrey’s camp.
Was Kissinger guilty of any wrongdoing in passing along his predictions to Mitchell and Nixon? There was no legal breach in what he did; but in his eagerness to win a government appointment did he commit an ethical lapse? William Bundy, Johnson’s assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, has provided the most thoughtful response to these questions.
“There is of course nothing wrong in offering advice and judgment to a candidate in the hope of preferment,” Bundy wrote. “Such action is open to harsh criticism only if it involves the use of inside government information. Yet that is where the charge collapses…. There simply was no useful inside information” about a new departure in the peace talks that Kissinger could have obtained during his Paris visit. Kissinger’s advice rested not on special knowledge of decision making at the White House but on an astute analyst’s insight into what was happening. “Almost any experienced Hanoi watcher might have come to the same conclusion” as Kissinger did, Bundy believes. He “does not rule out the possibility that he [Kissinger] said or hinted that his advice was based on contacts with the Paris delegation. This sort of self-promotion,” Bundy says, “while unattractive, is at worst a minor and not uncommon practice, quite different from getting and reporting real secrets.”
How did Nixon use the information provided by Kissinger and Harlow? And more important, did Nixon’s response to Johnson’s peace campaign break any laws and bend accepted political practices? Convinced that Johnson’s bombing halt was politically motivated, Nixon had no hesitation in exerting pressure on the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Van Thieu to reject Washington demands to begin participating in the Paris talks on November 2, three days before the U.S. elections. Everyone involved in the negotiations believed that progress in the talks partly depended on Saigon’s presence in Paris, and most everyone inside the Nixon and Humphrey campaigns, as well as outside political observers, thought that surging hopes of peace could affect the outcome of an increasingly close presidential election.
From early in his campaign, Nixon had seen a peace settlement or even substantial movement in that direction as crucial to Humphrey’s chances in November. Consequently, in July 1968, Nixon had begun discouraging Saigon from accepting a possible invitation to join the ongoing Paris discussions. During that month, he and Mitchell met in Nixon’s New York apartment with South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem, and Anna Chennault, a co-chair of Republican Women for Nixon and the widow of General Claire Chennault of China’s World War II Flying Tigers. Nixon asked Chennault to be “his channel to Mr. Thieu via Bui Diem.” She agreed and periodically reported to Mitchell that Thieu had no intention of attending a peace conference before Nixon, hopefully, became president.
On October 31, after Johnson announced the bombing halt, Mitchell phoned Chennault to say, “Anna. I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that very clear to them.” Despite Chennault’s assurances that Thieu would not agree to send a South Vietnamese delegation to the talks in early November, Mitchell said, “They really have decided not to go to Paris?” Chennault answered: “I don’t think they’ll go. Thieu has told me over and over again that going to Paris would be walking into a smoke screen that has nothing to do with reality.”
When Thieu continued to resist U.S. embassy pleas that he join the Paris talks, and Johnson heard that someone “very close to Nixon” believed he was encouraging “Saigon to be difficult,” Johnson blamed Nixon for Thieu’s uncooperativeness. At a White House meeting with diplomatic and military advisers on October 29, Johnson said, “It would rock the world if it were said [that] he [Thieu] was conniving with the Republicans. Can you imagine what people would say if it were to be known that Hanoi has met all these conditions and then Nixon’s conniving with them [the South Vietnamese] kept us from getting [a peace agreement]?”
Because he believed that Thieu might still be persuaded to join the peace talks and because he wanted to learn precisely what the Nixon camp was telling Saigon, Johnson instructed the FBI to wiretap Chennault and keep her under surveillance. He also ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept cables between the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and Saigon. Since the White House believed that violations of national security laws might be involved, it saw the bugging and surveillance as legal. But there were other risks: National Security Adviser Walt Rostow warned Johnson that the taps posed “real difficulties. She lives at Water Gate—a huge apartment. She is constantly seeing Republicans—the risk of discovery is high.” It was a warning that surely could have been useful to Nixon and John Mitchell in the future.
The intercepts and wiretaps, including taps on “the telephone connection in vice-presidential candidate [Spiro] Agnew’s chartered campaign plane,” confirmed that the Nixon campaign was discouraging Thieu from a part in the Paris talks. As Johnson described it later to Cartha DeLoach, the deputy director of the FBI, Chennault told the South Vietnamese ambassador on November 2, “‘I have just heard from my boss in Albuquerque [Agnew, who was campaigning in New Mexico that day] who says his boss [Nixon] says we’re going to win. And you tell your boss [Thieu] to hold on a while longer.’”
With only four days left in the campaign, Humphrey, who learned about Nixon’s activities from Johnson, wrestled with questions about whether to leak the information to the press or openly accuse Nixon of undermining the peace talks. Johnson was furious at Nixon. Aides recalled that Johnson described Nixon as guilty of “treason”: American boys were losing their lives in the service of Nixon’s political ambitions, Johnson said. The fact that Nixon frustrated Johnson’s hopes of getting a settlement before he left office also incensed Johnson, who wanted the historical record to show that he had made peace as well as war in Vietnam. Because they knew that they would have to disclose how they obtained their information if they revealed it and because they feared it might provoke a constitutional crisis and make it nearly impossible for a Nixon administration to govern, Johnson and Humphrey decided against revealing Nixon’s secret intrusion into the Paris discussions.
Nixon knew that Johnson was “mad as all get-out” over what he was doing to impede the talks. After Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen told Harlow that Johnson had called in a rage, Harlow urged Nixon to speak to Johnson. “Someone has told him that you’re dumping all over the South Vietnamese to keep them from doing something about peace…. If you don’t let him know quickly that it’s not so, then he’s going to dump” on you. Nixon denied any involvement, but Harlow never believed him. Stopping the peace talks “was too tempting a target. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there were some shenanigans going on,” Harlow said later.
On November 3, Nixon called Johnson and categorically denied that he was doing anything to disrupt the peace negotiations. Nixon’s call strengthened Johnson’s decision not to publicize the allegations, and according to a later story in the Sunday Times of London, “Nixon and his friends collapsed in laughter” after he and Johnson hung up. “It was partly in sheer relief that their victory had not been taken from them at the eleventh hour.” William Bundy says that Nixon’s “barefaced lie was his only tenable line of defense.” In 1997, Chennault revealed that Nixon and Mitchell knew everything: “I was constantly in touch with Mitchell and Nixon,” she said.
Did Nixon’s pressure on Thieu have an impact on the 1968 election? The popular vote favored Nixon by only .7 percent, 43.4 percent to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent; 13.5 percent of the votes went to Wallace. The Electoral College was a different story: Nixon had a decisive edge of 301 to 191. If Wallace had not been in the race, it seems almost certain that a majority of his votes would have gone to Nixon.
It is doubtful that successful peace talks or the likelihood of an early peace settlement would have changed the outcome. Humphrey was too clearly identified with Johnson’s unpopular administration. And though some voters might have concluded that Humphrey would steer the country on a new course, the majority saw Humphrey as likely to continue much of what Johnson had been doing in domestic affairs, where many Americans now felt he had overreached himself. And even if Humphrey ended the war, he would remain tainted with his earlier support of Johnson’s actions in Vietnam.
The country wanted a clean break with the immediate past. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, inner-city riots, militants demanding black power, campus upheavals, and the turmoil in the streets at the Democratic convention in Chicago exasperated the country and turned it against Johnson, Humphrey, and the Democrats, whom it identified with all the difficulties. Nixon, however familiar a face, presented a chance for something of a fresh start. Moreover, in a less overt way, he had used the appeal to values that had been so instrumental in ensuring his political success in the 1940s and 1950s—his 1968 campaign promised to reflect the concerns of “the Silent Majority, Middle America, the white, comfortable, patriotic, hawkish ‘forgotten Americans.’”
Yet Nixon received less than a mandate. The Democrats held on to both houses of Congress: despite losing five seats, they continued to have a 16-vote Senate majority; in the House, where they lost only four seats, the Democrats emerged with a 51-seat edge. The voters preferred Nixon over Humphrey in the White House, but, apparently remembering Nixon’s controversial history, they were also eager to give Congress a check on his powers.
Nixon’s pressure on Thieu’s government to reach a settlement probably made no difference. Even if Nixon had not been discouraging Thieu from joining the Paris talks, Thieu was unlikely to have sent a delegation. He didn’t need Nixon to tell him that participation in the discussions would improve Humphrey’s chances of winning, and Thieu clearly preferred a more hard-line Republican administration to one that was almost certainly going to make unpalatable concessions to the Communists in a peace settlement. And even if Thieu had decided to go to Paris, which the presence of the National Liberation Front (NLF) made more than unlikely, he and the Communists would have entered into protracted negotiations that could have lasted by fits and starts for years.
Still, even if Nixon’s worries about a last-minute peace surprise were overdrawn, his secret undermining of the peace talks does him no credit. “From a moral and political standpoint,” William Bundy asserts, “Nixon’s actions must be judged harshly. Certainly if the full extent of those actions had become known then—or indeed at any point during his presidency—his moral authority would have been greatly damaged and the antiwar movement substantially strengthened.”
But it was not only Nixon’s moral authority that could have been called into question; his actions were a contravention of the 1799 Logan Act prohibiting a private citizen from conducting diplomatic negotiations with foreign officials. Johnson and Humphrey were correct in believing that if revelations about Nixon’s messages to Thieu did not deny Nixon the presidency, a constitutional crisis could have followed his election. A Democratic Congress would probably have investigated the Nixon pressure on Thieu through the Agnew–Mitchell–Chennault–Bui Diem connection, which could have led to a court contest over access to FBI wiretaps and CIA intercepts and ended in impeachment proceedings. Humphrey’s decision not to go public with the information was, in the journalist Theodore White’s judgment, an uncommon act of political decency.
The greatest actual consequence of Nixon’s request to Thieu was the obligation Nixon incurred to him. It would become a significant impediment to Nixon’s freedom to influence Thieu’s conduct of the war and reduce Vietnam’s dependence on the United States for its security and autonomy. “That a new American President started with a heavy and recognized debt to the leader he had above all to influence,” Bundy asserts, “was surely a great handicap brought on by Nixon for domestic political reasons.”
NIXON’S VICTORY INCREASED the possibility that Henry Kissinger would achieve his ambition of serving in a high government position as a foreign policy adviser. Although he believed that the information he had passed along to John Mitchell might result in an offer to join a Nixon administration, he was uncertain that someone as remote from Nixon as himself would be asked to take an important post. (They had met only once in 1967 at a Christmas party in New York given by Claire Booth Luce, the widow of Time publisher Henry Luce, and that meeting had taken all of five minutes and consisted of unmemorable small talk.) After the journalist Joseph Kraft told Kissinger that if Nixon won the presidency he was thinking of making Henry national security adviser, Kissinger begged Kraft not to publish the story. Kissinger feared that such a rumor might destroy his chances of joining a Humphrey administration and worried that it would provoke a hostile reaction from Harvard colleagues and Rockefeller associates describing him as an unprincipled opportunist.
Intrigued but unconvinced by Kraft’s titillating information, Kissinger’s principal hope for a high-level appointment rested on his association with Rockefeller. On November 22, sixteen days after Nixon’s election, when Rockefeller discussed the possibility of serving in Nixon’s cabinet, Kissinger urged him to become secretary of defense, a job that would allow him to serve the nation and implicitly make Kissinger a principal deputy.
At the same time, on the off-chance that Nixon might appoint him to a high-level job independent of Rockefeller, Kissinger reminded Nixon of his usefulness by sending word to the president-elect through conservative journalist William Buckley that defense secretary Clark Clifford might be arranging a coup against Thieu to ensure a South Vietnamese government willing to participate in the Paris talks. If Thieu were assassinated, as Diem had been in November 1963, Kissinger advised Nixon, “word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
Kissinger could not have been totally surprised then when Nixon asked to see him on November 25 at his transition headquarters on the thirty-ninth floor of New York’s Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Nixon’s uneasiness surprised Kissinger, who “did not know then that Nixon was painfully shy. Meeting new people filled him with vague dread, especially if they were in a position to rebuff or contradict him…. Nixon entered the room…with a show of jauntiness that failed to hide” his “extraordinary nervousness…. His manner was almost diffident; his movements were slightly vague, and unrelated to what he was saying, as if two different impulses were behind speech and gesture.”
Nixon spoke about his “task of setting up his new government,” and of establishing a foreign policy apparatus that would serve his aims. He had no confidence in the state department or foreign service officers who had treated him with disdain as vice president. “He was determined to run foreign policy from the White House…. He felt it imperative to exclude the CIA from the formulation of policy; it was staffed by Ivy League liberals who behind the facade of analytical objectivity were usually pushing their own preferences. They had always opposed him politically.”
Now that he had power, Nixon was all but saying, he would not let a bunch of uncooperative bureaucrats deprive him of his rightful control of foreign affairs and a record of presidential greatness which he thirsted after. Asked his opinion on Nixon’s views of the foreign policy bureaucracy, Kissinger assured him that “a President who knew his own mind would always be able to dominate foreign policy.” He shared Nixon’s view on the “need for a more formal decision-making process…A more systematic structure seemed to me necessary.” Invited to describe his vision of a Nixon foreign policy, Kissinger emphasized the need “to free our foreign policy from its violent historical fluctuations between euphoria and panic.” The task was to identify “basic principles of national interest that transcended any particular Administration.”
The conversation ended inconclusively or with at least no discernible offer to serve in the administration. “Nixon’s fear of rebuffs caused him to make proposals in such elliptical ways that it was often difficult to tell what he was driving at, whether in fact he was suggesting anything specific at all,” Kissinger wrote later. As best he understood the conversation, Nixon was asking “whether in principle I was prepared to join his Administration in some planning capacity.” Nixon suggested that Kissinger prepare a memorandum on “the most effective structure of government.”
The following day, John Mitchell’s office called to schedule an appointment for November 27 to discuss “my position in the new Administration.” Kissinger was unclear on what position was being offered, if any, or whether they were to have “another exploratory talk.” When they met, Mitchell asked, “What have you decided about the National Security job?” “I did not know I had been offered it,” Kissinger replied. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Mitchell exclaimed, “he has screwed it up again.” After a five-minute conversation with the president-elect, Mitchell escorted Kissinger in to see Nixon, who made clear that he wanted Henry to become his security adviser and to help him run foreign policy from the White House.
After consulting Rockefeller, some friends, and Harvard colleagues, Kissinger accepted the offer. At a press conference on December 2, Nixon “announced a program substantially at variance with what he had told me privately.” He described Kissinger’s role as principally devoted to planning; as security adviser, he “would not come between the President and the Secretary of State.” Nixon also declared that the unnamed secretary was going to have a “strong” influence on the making of foreign policy.
In recounting the story of his appointment, Kissinger seemed to have misread Nixon’s behavior. His oblique references to a Kissinger appointment had much less to do with any characteristic shyness or an aversion to being rebuffed or contradicted than with Nixon’s ambivalence about Kissinger as someone he could trust to accept his control over foreign affairs. The “two different impulses behind speech and gesture” Kissinger saw was a desire on one hand “to co-opt a Harvard intellectual,” especially one identified with Rockefeller and the liberal wing of the Republican party, and, on the other, a fear that Kissinger might eclipse him intellectually and become the administration’s substantive foreign policy leader. Nixon’s decision to appoint Kissinger had less to do with any political intrigue over the Paris peace talks than with his impressive credentials as a foreign policy analyst.
Circumstance and shared interest in great foreign policy issues was the ostensible bond bringing Nixon and Kissinger together. But the connection rested on larger commonalities. True, their backgrounds and experience could not have been more different: the small-town Southern California Quaker who gained prominence through political combat and the German-Jewish émigré whose innate brilliance elevated him to the front rank of American academics. But they were as much alike as they were different: both self-serving characters with grandiose dreams of recasting world affairs.
Their coming together also represented a union of two outsiders who distrusted establishment liberals: Nixon, their great antagonist, and Kissinger, the academic, who was held at arm’s length by the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. In addition, harsh life experiences had made both men cynical about people’s motives and encouraged convictions that outdoing opponents required a relaxed view of scruples. Ironically, their cynicism would also make them rivals who could not satisfy their aspirations without each other.
After Nixon had offered Kissinger the security adviser’s post and he had asked for a week to consult with Harvard colleagues, Nixon “rather touchingly…suggested the names of some professors who had known him at Duke University and would be able to give me a more balanced picture of his moral standards than I was likely to obtain at Harvard.” Nixon may have used the word “moral,” but he was referring to his intellect and powers of analysis. He wanted Kissinger to understand that he was as thoughtful about foreign affairs as Kissinger was and had no intention of ceding control of policy making to a subordinate, however considerable his talents as an academic. In short, Nixon was saying, I am no intellectual slouch who can be led around by a Harvard professor.
Nixon was determined to be his own secretary of state, with the support of national security advisers. He had first revealed this intention during the campaign when he had relied on the thirty-two-year-old Richard Allen to oversee foreign policy research. A meeting with Johnson and his foreign policy advisers on November 11 for a pre-presidential briefing without Allen demonstrated Nixon’s intention to control all major foreign policy decisions.
An additional indirect statement of Nixon’s plans came after the November 25 meeting with Kissinger, when H. R. (Bob) Haldeman asked Kissinger into his office, where he described his job as Nixon’s chief of staff. He would be preventing “end-runs” around the president—all memoranda reaching Nixon would go through him or an appropriate White House staff member. The message to Kissinger was clear enough—if you join this administration, there won’t be any grandstanding on your part; you will work through me and consistently stand in the president’s shadow. Nixon and Haldeman did not know Kissinger well enough to understand that his drive for influence was a match for theirs. The professor would give them some lessons in bureaucratic in-fighting that even as experienced a politician as Richard Nixon would find painfully instructive.
Yet nothing demonstrated Nixon’s preoccupation with controlling foreign policy more than his appointment of a secretary of state. His selection of Kissinger before choosing his chief diplomatic officer underscored his intention to largely ignore anyone who took the job. Moreover, he didn’t believe that foreign ministers counted for much anywhere. In 1971, when Nixon confronted the prospect of a foreign ministers meeting to discuss Soviet relations, he called it a “goddamn façade…In dealing with the Soviets…they can’t do a goddamn thing,” he told Kissinger. Henry, who enjoyed Nixon’s preference for his advice over that of the secretary of state, confirmed Nixon’s assumption: In no modern government, he told him, France, Britain, or Germany, did a foreign secretary actually conduct foreign policy; they were little more than administrators of large bureaucracies.
Nixon chose William P. Rogers, a New York attorney who had been Eisenhower’s attorney general and a Nixon friend and ally in the 1950s. But their long-standing relationship had almost nothing to do with Rogers’s appointment; by 1968, they were no longer close. Rather, Nixon chose Rogers mainly because he had so little background in foreign affairs. Nixon told Kissinger that he “considered Rogers’s unfamiliarity with the subject an asset because it guaranteed that policy direction would remain in the White House.” After Nixon asked Kissinger to meet Rogers and to report his reactions, he appointed him without ever hearing Kissinger’s impressions. (In addition, though Kissinger was one of only two men Nixon asked for suggestions on what to include in his inaugural speech, he discarded most of what Kissinger proposed.) Nixon was showing Kissinger that his advice would have only limited influence in shaping what he did.
Nixon rationalized Rogers’s appointment by emphasizing his likely loyalty, discretion, and tough-mindedness. Nixon described him as one of the “most cold-eyed, self-centered, and ambitious men” he had ever known. “As a negotiator he would give the Soviets fits. And ‘the little boys in the State Department’ had better be careful because Rogers would brook no nonsense,” Nixon told Kissinger. Kissinger marveled at the irony of a president’s attraction to a secretary of state notable for his “ignorance of foreign policy.” (It was not the first time a president had selected an unworldly political ally for the job: William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’s first secretary of state, was transparently uninformed about international affairs. Although this seemed to matter less in 1913 than in 1969, Wilson’s problems in Latin America and the challenges presented by World War I gave the lie to this assumption.)
Nixon saw a reliable secretary of defense as another priority in ensuring his control over foreign affairs. He did not want someone who would have as much visibility and influence as the Kennedy-Johnson secretaries, Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford. Instead, he preferred a party wheelhorse who would be more an administrator and liaison with Congress, which, under Democratic control, seemed likely to be troublesome in setting a timetable for leaving Vietnam, endorsing treaties, and supporting defense budgets.
Nixon settled on Melvin Laird, a sixteen-year Wisconsin House Republican with credentials as an expert on defense appropriations. Nixon also liked the fact that he had a reputation for deviousness. “Of course Laird is devious,” Eisenhower told Nixon, “but for anyone who has to run the Pentagon and get along with Congress, that is a valuable asset.”
With the formalities of choosing cabinet and subcabinet officials out of the way, Nixon instructed Kissinger to plan a new bureaucratic structure that would assure his control of foreign policy. His eight years as vice president had taught him to despise the state department’s professionals, who he believed had “manipulated and subverted” Eisenhower in the service of “their special interests.” Nixon instructed Henry to begin his service as national security adviser by reforming the National Security Council. He wanted the changes to be more than cosmetic; they should “‘give the people of this country the foreign policy they want,’ a system that took power from the bureaucrats and placed it where it belonged, in the White House.”
There was more at work here than Nixon’s or Kissinger’s egotistic assumptions about their superiority as foreign policy makers or a compulsion to create an “Imperial Presidency.” The miserable failure in Vietnam had cost the United States not only thousands of lives and billions of dollars but also the freedom to focus on larger Cold War tensions with Moscow and Peking and Middle East dangers, where the 1967 Arab-Israeli war had turned the Middle East into an area of East-West confrontation.
Kissinger shared Nixon’s belief that the primary enemy of a wise, more successful diplomacy was a turgid, self-serving bureaucracy. His study of past and contemporary history convinced him that a successful foreign policy began at home, where a statesman needed to free himself from the accepted wisdoms of cautious bureaucrats frightened by innovative thinking. “It seemed to me no accident that most great statesman had been locked in permanent struggle with the experts in their foreign offices,” Kissinger asserted.
Kissinger, with the help of a brilliant group of aides he recruited to serve on the National Security Council, devised a plan that shifted control over policy making from state department and Pentagon committees to a new Review Group at the NSC: it allowed Kissinger to set the agenda for White House foreign policy discussions. Although Rogers ultimately joined Laird in opposing a restructuring that was condemned by their bureaucracies as inimical to their respective departments, Nixon, after some hesitation (he abhorred confrontations with dissenting colleagues), ordered implementation of the Kissinger plan. He and Henry saw it as a vital first step in extricating the United States from Vietnam and creating an international balance that reduced the chances of a Soviet-American conflict and opened the way to a more stable world order.
Yet no bureaucratic arrangement or even the most carefully thought out plan could guard against the vicissitudes of world politics. Reading the eight-page outline of the new NSC system that Kissinger urged Nixon to put in place, with a “Review Group, Ad Hoc Under Secretary’s Committee, Inter-Agency Regional Groups, Ad Hoc Working Groups, and Outside Consultants,” analysts can marvel at how this shuffling of deck chairs was supposed to change the course of American foreign relations. True, the “system” indisputably aimed at enlarged presidential control over foreign policy. But, as Roger Morris wrote later, “It was the man who ruled, and not the mechanism. As Kissinger’s power and fame widened, the system became less and less used.”
Yet it wasn’t simply the Nixon-Kissinger affinity for personal control that diminished the importance of their organizational arrangements. True, their reasoned consideration of how to manage international conflicts sharply reduced the influence of other government agencies responsible for national security during their five-and-a-half years together in the White House. But unforeseen and uncontrollable domestic and international crosscurrents pushed them in unanticipated directions. They would have done well to recall Abraham Lincoln’s famous comment on his direction of affairs during the Civil War: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”
This is not to suggest that circumstances can excuse the many controversial actions that have generated criticism and, in some instances, condemnation of Nixon and Kissinger. Their decisions and behavior left indisputable marks on America and the world and historians will judge what they did. At the same time, commentators will want to see the men and their actions in context. Their collaboration is part of a history that tells us as much about the opportunities and limits of national and international conditions as about the men themselves.