History is the best antidote to illusions of omnipotence and omniscience.
—ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
Although Nixon suffered terrible health problems—phlebitis and depression—that almost took his life in the year after he resigned, he lived nearly twenty more years in relatively good physical and emotional condition. When he died at the age of 81 in 1994, only five other presidents to that point had had longer postpresidential careers—John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, and Harry Truman.
Like Adams and Hoover, Nixon made the most of his postpresidential years. Although he said in 1990 that “No one who has been in the Presidency with the capacity and power to affect the course of events can ever be satisfied with not being there,” he used his standing as an ex-president—however much shadowed by the unprecedented disgrace of a forced resignation—to travel and write in support of his historical reputation.
Liberated from continuing judicial fights by Gerald Ford’s pardon, Nixon was free to devote himself to a nineteen-year political campaign for himself as a world statesman. He traveled extensively in Europe and Asia, revisiting China and the Soviet Union, where he was lauded as an innovative foreign policy leader and a peacemaker. He published seven books, including a self-serving volume of memoirs and reflections on political leadership and international relations that he hoped would serve not only his standing as a wise leader but also the country’s search for lasting peace.
In retrospect, Nixon’s sustained postpresidential fight to overcome the stain of Watergate is not surprising. A drive for eminence—to be the best, to outshine the competition—had stood at the center of everything he did throughout his life. Long before Bill Clinton gained a reputation as the comeback kid, Richard Nixon had established a compelling claim to the label. Loss or defeat was not part of Nixon’s vocabulary; his resignation was an inducement to strive harder to become a memorable president with achievements that propelled him into the first rank of chief executives during and after their time in office.
Kissinger was not much different. His dominant role in the Nixon administration as secretary of state carried over into the Ford presidency, where, if anything, he was even more in control of foreign policy. His drive to stand out as the best secretary of state in the country’s history matched Nixon’s reach for historical greatness.
Similarly, after he left government service in January 1977 at the end of Ford’s term, Kissinger devoted himself to securing his reputation by publishing nine books, including three massive volumes of memoirs totaling nearly four thousand pages. Newspaper columns, public addresses, and appearances on television contributed to his status as America’s most prominent foreign policy expert.
Yet whatever the merits of the case he made for himself as the country’s foremost judge of what best served the national interest and world peace, no one could doubt that Kissinger’s strivings were also the product of a personal reach for power, as he himself acknowledged in his memoirs.
In 1974, after the journalists Bernard and Marvin Kalb published a well-regarded biography, Marvin asked Henry how he liked the book. “I have not read it,” Kissinger replied, “but I love the title,” Kissinger. In 1992, after Walter Isaacson’s notable Kissinger biography had appeared, the journalist Daniel Schorr had breakfast with Henry in Frankfurt, Germany, where they were attending a conference. During their hour or so together, Kissinger complained nonstop about Isaacson’s book, wondering why he had been so tough on him despite his cooperation with Isaacson. As Schorr was leaving, Kissinger said, “Dan, however much I hate this book, it is better than no book.” Nixon and his closest aides, as is evident in several of the White House tapes, understood and resented Henry’s need to hold center stage.
Nixon and Kissinger shared other traits. To advance themselves and their policies, they had few qualms about making bargains with the devil—Nixon deceiving himself, the Congress, the courts, the press, and the public; Kissinger endorsing or acquiescing in many presidential acts of deception and engaging in many of his own. William Safire said that both men were “convinced that consistent lying can be the right thing for the country.” It was partly the product of arrogance—they believed they knew better than anyone else what best served the nation—and partly an aversion to criticism that any open debate was sure to bring.
Neither man could stand to be told that he was wrong: With occasional exceptions, both hid their resentment of critics from public view—Nixon with false pronouncements on regard for the American tradition of civic dissent, and Kissinger with self-deprecating humor. Behind the facade, however, Nixon railed constantly against opponents with pronouncements on schemes to punish them—some of which White House aides foolishly acted on, to Nixon’s and their discredit. Kissinger’s anger generally took a more benign form—ugly comments about antagonists he snidely dismissed as “maniacs.”
It is not surprising then that their relationship also partly rested on deception and hostility toward one another. Nixon was simultaneously happy to rely on Kissinger’s diplomatic and policy making skills while secretly resenting his emergence as someone who put the president in his shadow. Henry’s insistent need for attention and control of foreign policy incensed Nixon and moved him to entertain thoughts of firing him. But Kissinger’s skill at public relations and his effectiveness in dealings with the Chinese, Russians, Vietnamese, and Arabs joined to make this difficult. Watergate made it impossible: Nixon’s need to use Henry and foreign policy to counter threats of impeachment made Kissinger an indispensable figure in a collapsing administration.
Kissinger reciprocated Nixon’s regard and hostility. He was less than enchanted with Nixon and his White House operators, as his comments captured in cables and telephone transcripts illustrate. Yet Henry felt beholden to a president whose faith in his talents gave him the opportunity for greatness as a foreign policy adviser. At the same time, however, he was full of disdain for someone he considered his intellectual inferior. Henry also despised Nixon’s insistent demands for ostentatious displays of deference, which Kissinger readily provided as the best way to ensure his influence with the president. Kissinger’s constant stroking of Nixon, again so abundantly clear in their recorded conversations, left Henry feeling compromised and sullied.
The tensions between them carried over into the post-Nixon presidency. A little after Nixon left office, Kissinger said some negative things about the president that were inadvertently caught on an open microphone. Nixon, he told Canadian dignitaries hosting a dinner for him, was an “odd,” “unpleasant,” “nervous,” and “artificial” man, who disliked people and lacked spontaneity. Kissinger’s private apologies to the president did not appease him. “You as mean as ever?” Nixon asked Henry when they were thrown together at Hubert Humphrey’s funeral in 1977. “Yes,” Kissinger replied, “but I don’t have as much opportunity as before.” In April 1994, Kissinger spoke feelingly about Nixon’s “astonishing life” and achievements at the president’s funeral in Yorba Linda, California. Kissinger described him as one of the country’s “seminal presidents,” who “laid the basis for victory in the Cold War.”
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s personal flaws had an impact on their making of foreign policy. Nixon’s drive to win reelection, which he equated with his reach for presidential greatness, and Kissinger’s ambition to become the most effective and memorable national security adviser and secretary of state in history skewed their judgments and produced terrible decisions in dealings with Vietnam, India-Pakistan, and Chile. Nixon’s unwise impulse, with Kissinger’s complicity, to use foreign affairs to counter Watergate was another negative consequence of their mutual inclination to put themselves first. A president free of a debilitating scandal that colored his judgment about international relations could have thought more clearly about the national interest.
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s reach for distinction also had its virtues. Self-serving motives as well as national security considerations spurred the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, arms control, and an end to the Vietnam War. The last of course was hardly an unqualified triumph, but a decisive conclusion to U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia was essential to the long-term national well-being.
The foreign policy record of Nixon and Kissinger is as ambiguous as the men themselves. Private and public documents make abundantly clear that domestic politics played a consistent and central role in their foreign policy decisions: Ensuring Nixon’s reelection was never excluded from considerations of how to meet overseas challenges.
The first twenty-seven months of the administration were a time of stumbling efforts in almost all its foreign dealings, especially with Vietnam. Only in the spring of 1971 did the Nixon-Kissinger reach for substantial changes in overseas relations begin to show significant results.
China led the list of gains. There is almost universal agreement that the opening to China was a wise act of statesmanship. Recognizing the achievement as a landmark moment in modern U.S. diplomatic history, Nixon and Kissinger vied for credit as the policy innovator. And although Nixon was the principal architect of the rapprochement, Kissinger was a highly effective instrument of his design. Regardless of their respective roles, however, the policy itself deserves acclaim as not only a step away from more than two decades of tensions that risked world peace but also a device for pressuring the Soviet Union into more accommodating relations with the West.
The Nixon-Kissinger reach for Soviet-American détente has spurred much greater controversy. Conservatives convinced that Moscow was an unreliable partner in the search for peace or that Soviet interest in peaceful coexistence was nothing more than a ruse to weaken Western determination to defeat communism were consistently antagonistic to the Nixon-Kissinger policy. In the 1980s, neocons, as they were dubbed, took much satisfaction in Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” and even greater pleasure in the collapse of Communist rule across Eastern Europe and in Moscow. “Reagan won the Cold War” is more than a celebration of Reagan’s presidency; it is an argument against the wisdom of détente.
No doubt, Reagan deserves credit for overseeing the collapse of Soviet power, but to say he won the Cold War is to overlook the larger contributions of containment and détente in bringing the forty-three-year contest with communism to a successful conclusion. Ultimately it was the profound flaws in the Communist system that brought it down: its disregard for individual freedoms and its inability to build a consumer economy in a society devoting so much of its resources to a warfare state. Soviet Russia developed a much deserved reputation as a behemoth that fell short of its promises and ultimately alienated peoples everywhere. The Harry Truman–George Kennan strategy of deterring and containing communism until internal contradictions destroyed it was the long-term U.S. policy that facilitated Soviet collapse.
Détente was the natural outgrowth of containment, the development of Soviet nuclear parity with the West, and the growth of a Chinese threat to Moscow’s national security. After Kennedy’s successful resistance between 1961 and 1963 to expanded Soviet military power in Europe and the Western Hemisphere drew Moscow into a Test Ban Treaty, the logic of additional accommodations with Soviet Russia to avoid a nuclear holocaust made eminent good sense. However enduring Nixon’s and Kissinger’s visceral antagonism to Soviet Russia was, they understood, as Khrushchev and Brezhnev did, that a Soviet-American nuclear conflict was impermissible. It would mean the annihilation of civilization as the world knew it.
As important, the opening of Russia to Western influence through détente eroded communism’s hold on its peoples at home and abroad. Economic and cultural exchanges with the United States penetrated the Iron Curtain and made continuing Soviet insularity impossible. Détente did not end the Cold War, but in conjunction with containment and deterrence, which were central to America’s Soviet policy from Truman through Reagan, it set a process in motion that came to fruition under Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the 1980s.
The Nixon-Kissinger policy in the Middle East, like everything else they did, was never linear. It was a mixture of failure and success. Between 1969 and 1973, the administration had little hope of mediating Arab-Israeli differences. True, it did step in to help preserve King Hussein’s regime in Jordan in September 1970, continued to supply Israel with the military wherewithal to defend itself against Arab attacks, and discouraged an expanded Soviet presence in the Middle East, but for four and a half years the region commanded less White House attention than Vietnam, Asia, or Europe.
The Yom Kippur War in October 1973 forced the Middle East to the center of the administration’s attention. With Nixon increasingly distracted by Watergate, the burden of ending the war without a Soviet-American confrontation and finding ways to head off future conflicts fell to Kissinger. His effectiveness in bringing the conflict to a close and relying on shuttle diplomacy to reduce Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Syrian tensions were the greatest achievements of his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state. The Camp David accords between Cairo and Tel Aviv under President Jimmy Carter in 1978 could not have occurred without Kissinger’s diplomacy in 1973–1974.
Kissinger was more deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize for his Middle East negotiations than for anything he did in Vietnam, which netted him the reward. He described Vietnam to me as the Nixon administration’s greatest disappointment. But it was worse than a disappointment; it was a cynical failure. From the start of their administration, Nixon and Kissinger placed the highest priority on ending the war before the conclusion of the president’s first term. They understood that if any considerable part of the 545,000 troops remained in Vietnam by 1972, with the continuing loss of American lives, it would jeopardize Nixon’s reelection.
Their solution—Vietnamization—was a fig leaf for American defeat. Determined to withdraw U.S. ground forces without conceding the likelihood of a South Vietnamese collapse, the White House alternated between expanded military action—the Cambodian “incursion” and massive air raids on North Vietnam—and slow withdrawal.
The entire policy was a disaster. Administration actions destabilized Cambodia, expended thousands of American, Vietnamese, and Cambodian lives, gained no real advantage, and divided the country. The Paris peace agreements of January 1973 neither ensured South Vietnam’s autonomy nor ended the fighting, which continued in muted form until a North Vietnamese offensive in 1975 brought the South under Hanoi’s control.
Similarly, a 1975 Communist offensive in Cambodia brought the Khmer Rouge to power and led to the annihilation of some two million people under their rule. California Republican congressman Pete McCloskey may have had it right when he said that America had inflicted on Cambodia “a greater evil than we have done to any country in the world.” No one, however, should leave Sihanouk and the Lon Nol regime out of the equation; events in that country were also the consequence of their doing.
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s concern that a premature withdrawal followed by South Vietnam’s collapse would seriously injure America’s international credibility was a flawed judgment. The torturous four years Nixon took to end the war at the cost of more than twenty thousand American lives was a heavy price to pay for a goal that likely could have been accomplished much sooner without significant consequence for America’s international influence. Hanoi’s conquest of the South proved to be no more than a ripple in the Cold War. It did nothing to discredit the United States with its allies or to embolden the Soviets or the Chinese. To the contrary, nations on both sides of the line saw America’s withdrawal from an unwinnable war as sensible realism allowing the United States to focus its energies on more compelling foreign policy challenges.
If one could say that the Nixon-Kissinger failure in dealing with Vietnam was the result of misjudgments, the four-year-fight-and-negotiate strategy might stand as simply a miscalculation by otherwise astute foreign policy leaders. But the failure is more deserving of condemnation. Both men knew from the first that the chances for South Vietnamese survival without continuing American military support were slim at best and that congressional and public weariness of Vietnam made such long-term backing unlikely.
Their determination “to stay the course” until Saigon could allegedly stand alone, was also the product of political cynicism. The domestic political consequences of a collapse were a primary consideration. They hung back from leaving Vietnam until the 1972 elections were behind them. As Kissinger had warned Haldeman when Nixon considered ending U.S. involvement by the close of 1971, turmoil in South Vietnam in 1972 might play havoc with Nixon’s return to the White House. To ensure against subsequent complaints of failure in Vietnam, which seemed certain to follow a quick Saigon collapse after a U.S. departure, Nixon and Kissinger hoped Hanoi would allow a “decent interval” before it toppled Thieu’s government.
Chile is another ugly stain on the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy record. Their efforts, first, to bar Allende from claiming his legitimate control of Chile’s presidency and then the use of economic and political means for toppling him is at odds with traditional U.S. claims to the right of national self-determination for all peoples. True, national security is a reputable excuse for undermining a hostile government capable of injuring fundamental U.S. interests. But exaggerated fears of Allende’s capacity to undermine U.S. security in the hemisphere speaks poorly of the Nixon-Kissinger judgment on what served America’s national well-being. And even if they were right about Allende’s threat to U.S. national security, a realistic assessment of his leadership would have led to the conclusion that his policies were creating more Chilean domestic problems than they solved and were likely to bring him down without direct U.S. pressure.
The tilt toward Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan war was yet another foreign policy blunder. Seeing the conflict as more an extension of the Cold War, with Pakistan and China pitted against India and Russia, than a regional conflict, the White House lined up with the Pakistanis and Chinese as a means to foster the opening to China and inhibit Moscow’s reach for hegemony in Asia. Yet neither Peking nor Moscow was as invested in the conflict as Washington believed. As the record shows, the contradictions between White House public statements and private actions, which became obvious at the time, undermined the administration’s credibility and weakened its capacity to persuade the press, Congress, and the public to take its pronouncements at face value.
Worse, as conversations between Nixon and Kissinger now show, their overreaction to the conflict led them into reckless discussion of a possible war with the Soviet Union. With the opening to China not yet consummated in December 1971 and U.S. withdrawal from Indochina in tow, the White House was eager to establish its bona fides as a meaningful counterweight to Soviet power in Asia. “We can’t allow a friend of ours and China to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s,” Kissinger told the president. But William Bundy persuasively describes this as “balance-of-power diplomacy at its most naked and extreme…No national interest remotely warranted the risks he and Nixon ran, not to mention the intense domestic controversy that surely would have ensued if there had been a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union.”
Genuine neutrality in the South Asian war would have better served American interests than the “tilt” toward Pakistan that largely ignored Karachi’s terrible repression of the Bengalis, angered India and Russia, antagonized a majority of attentive Americans, who principally blamed Pakistan for the fighting, and scored few points with Peking, which saw the emergence of Bangladesh as demonstrating U.S. ineffectiveness.
The administration’s greatest failure, of course, was Watergate. Although Nixon dismissed it as “a third-rate burglary,” it was the visible expression of Nixon’s affinity for the secret manipulation of presidential power with small regard for legal and constitutional niceties. It was also the occasion for a striking irony—as a response to the scandal, Nixon, the staunch anti-Communist, looked to better relations with the U.S.S.R. as a way to save his presidency.
The scandal justifiably compelled an end to the president’s political career. Nixon would never acknowledge wrongdoing. He attributed his resignation to errors that cost him his political support, but he refused to admit any legal misdeeds. The historical record, however, makes clear that he was guilty of obstruction of justice. History also refutes his assertion that resigning would injure the office of the presidency. To the contrary, Nixon’s departure from office has strengthened American institutions by demonstrating that even a president, however effective his policy making skills, cannot escape the rule of law.
This is not to suggest, however, that Nixon’s imperial rule hasn’t had negative consequences: His abuse of power has created a degree of distrust about executive authority that has made it more difficult for his successors to govern effectively.
Kissinger emerged from the Nixon presidency with his reputation largely intact. Clearly, he had no direct connection to the scandal. His telephone transcripts, however, underscore Kissinger’s uncritical pandering to the president. His expressions of optimism that the Congress would not dare oust the president will add nothing to Kissinger’s standing as a political prognosticator.
Nor can his readiness to help Nixon use foreign policy to counter Watergate be seen as honorable. His blind loyalty to Nixon was a disservice to the country. Because Nixon was so clearly impaired by Watergate in managing the Middle East crisis in 1973 and the peace negotiations in 1974, Kissinger would have done well to at least consult with other cabinet members about suspending the president’s authority under the Constitution’s Twenty-fifth Amendment. While any such discussion would probably have produced no action, and might have undermined Kissinger’s relationship with Nixon, at least it would have signaled Kissinger’s greater concern with the national well-being than with Nixon’s survival. As the inner workings of Nixon’s presidency amply demonstrate, Kissinger was as much the partisan supporter of a highly imperfect administration as he was its foreign policy expert serving the national security.
In the end, the Nixon-Kissinger relationship was one of or possibly the most significant White House collaboration in U.S. history. Their mutual interest in and knowledge of the world translated into some impressive achievements. But their shared affinity for exclusive control of foreign policy combined with their misjudgments on Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and South Asia also produced notable failures. Their association was a demonstration that talent, knowledge, and experience do not guarantee successful outcomes in foreign affairs. Surely, it is better to have leaders with those attributes than not. But it also suggests that no one has a monopoly on wisdom.
As Thomas Jefferson counseled, eternal vigilance is an essential element of a democratic system. A citizenry that takes the good judgment of its leaders for granted is a society that leaves itself vulnerable to disappointment and failure. The Nixon-Kissinger administration provides some constructive lessons for the present and the future on the making of foreign policy. But it also stands as a cautionary tale that the country forgets at its peril.