What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.
—Henry Kissinger
At Harvard as a graduate student, Henry Kissinger and his doctoral adviser, William Yandell Elliott, often took long Sunday walks together in Concord. On one of these outings, Elliott—described by the Harvard Crimson as “a large, flamboyant Virginian … a grandiose, hulking figure who often wore a white plantation suit and a Panama hat”—urged his protégé to live his life by Immanuel Kant’s famous ethical imperative: “Treat every human being, including yourself, as an end and never a means.” That dictum was a response to the utilitarian calculus influential during Kant’s life that promoted the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the interests of the individual. Kant was especially appealing to arch–Cold Warriors like Elliott, who saw Soviet Communism as a vast, monstrous application of instrumental morality.
Kissinger was very familiar with Kant, having grappled, in his 1950 undergraduate thesis, with the paradox that is at the heart of Kantian philosophy: human beings are entirely free and history is inevitably advancing according to God’s divine plan toward a world of perpetual peace. Kissinger accepted Kant’s idea of freedom but, as a child of the Holocaust and an observer of the Gulag, couldn’t accept Kant’s theology, especially the belief that existence had a transcendent purpose. For Kissinger, the past was nothing but “a series of meaningless incidents.” History had no significance in itself. Whatever “meaning” human beings might assign to past events came not from the working out of a higher, external and objective moral plan, Kissinger argued, but subjectively, from within: “The realm of freedom and necessity can not be reconciled except by an inward experience.”1
Kissinger, as a diplomat, is often described as amoral, as believing that values such as universal human rights have no role to play in the implementation of foreign policy. He reportedly once said, paraphrasing Goethe, that if he “had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other,” he would “always choose the latter.”2 This vision, though, isn’t amoral. Rather, contrary to Elliott’s injunction, it suggests a utilitarian, or relative, moralism: a greater good can be achieved for the greatest number of people when great powers do what they need to do to create an orderly, stable, and peaceful interstate system, which, in turn, might nurture whatever fragile justice human beings are capable of achieving.
Kissinger’s embrace of a relative, rather than an absolute, morality is suggested in another story from his graduate school days at Harvard. In 1953, during a seminar, Elliott pushed Kissinger to acknowledge that “reality,” and hence ethics, must exist.3 “Well, now wait a minute, Henry,” the professor said, in reaction to Kissinger’s lengthy exposition that argued that there was no such thing as truth. “There must be a metaphysical structure of reality which is the true structure.”
Kissinger’s response effectively used Kantian existentialism (the idea that human beings are radically free) to undermine Kantian morality. “We can hardly insist,” he said, “on both our freedom and on the necessity of our values.” We can’t, in other words, be both radically free and subject to a fixed moral requirement. Kissinger admitted that some people might find such a position a “counsel of despair,” since it rejects the possibility of any foundational truth. But, he said, it was actually liberating since it allowed men to escape, however fleetingly, the misery of existence: “Our values are indeed necessary, but not because of an order of nature; rather, they are made necessary by the act of commitment to the metaphysics of a system. This may be the ultimate meaning of personality, of the loneliness of man, and also of his ability to transcend the inevitability of his existence,” Kissinger said.
Then, a bit later in the discussion, Kissinger quoted Kant’s moral imperative back to Elliott, with an addendum: “What one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system, and on the concept one has of one’s self and one’s relationship to the universe.”*
Elliott didn’t seem to quite grasp the radical existentialism of Kissinger’s position. When you talk about “contingent values,” he responded to Kissinger’s comment, you are referring to “that realm of freedom in which man has not learned that there is a plan beyond his own plan which he dimly and imperfectly recognizes that orients him toward God.” Elliott here was holding to a more standard interpretation of Kant, one that accepted the paradox that individuals were both radically free and that there was a divine “plan.” How, he asked Kissinger, could one “reconcile this demonic freedom … with a return to a divine will, through which man, through prayer, submits himself?” Kissinger didn’t answer, but a story told by the late journalist David Halberstam suggests that perhaps Kissinger’s relativism eventually rankled Elliott. At the professor’s retirement party, as colleagues gathered to say goodbye, Elliott “visited each with parting words. Almost all his comments were generous, until he came to Kissinger: ‘Henry,’ he began, ‘you’re brilliant. But you’re arrogant. In fact you’re the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.’ Kissinger became ashen-faced. ‘Mark my words,’ Elliott continued, ‘your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day.’”4
* * *
The details of Henry Kissinger’s political ascendance, how in a remarkably short period of time he became one of the most powerful men in American history, have been told before. And when they have, it has usually been to highlight their sordidness, to establish the transgression that made Kissinger’s rise possible: In late 1968, Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon were locked in a close race for the White House. The war in Vietnam was the critical issue of the election. With both candidates claiming to be the best chance for “peace,” any progress in informal talks then taking place in Paris between Washington and Hanoi would benefit Humphrey. Kissinger, still a Harvard professor, used his contacts in the outgoing Johnson administration, including a former student, to acquire information about the negotiations, which he then passed on to Nixon’s campaign. In turn, Nixon’s people used the intelligence to preempt a possible truce. Nixon won the election and, in gratitude, gave Kissinger the job of national security adviser.5
But the events need to be told again, not to rehearse culpability but because they capture nearly perfectly Kissinger’s philosophy of history. Kissinger in the fall of 1968 was applying in practice what he had long argued for in theory: an insistence that individuals have a degree of freedom in shaping historical events, that they are not bound by any “true structure,” that risk is a requirement of real statesmanship, that initiative creates its own reality, and that political leaders shouldn’t wait on the facts to seize that initiative. Transcendence was possible, despair could be avoided, and ends could be means or means could be ends. Quite so: negotiations to end the Vietnam War became the means of Kissinger’s ascent. Thus what William Elliott described as a “demoniac” individual freedom was reconciled to the metaphysics of the system—that is, to the national security state. Kissinger was working out his “relationship to the universe.”
* * *
The story of Kissinger’s involvement in the 1968 campaign starts with a question: Why did Kissinger—a close associate of the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller and occasional adviser to Democratic administrations—decide to throw in with Nixon, whom he considered a resentful right-winger?
“Richard Nixon is the most dangerous, of all the men running, to have as President,” Kissinger said just before the Republican National Convention in Miami.6Kissinger was stunned, therefore, when Rockefeller lost to Nixon at that convention, according to the journalists Marvin and Bernard Kalb. “He wept,” they wrote.7 “Now the Republican Party is a disaster,” Kissinger said.8 “That man Nixon is not fit to be president.” He knew of what he spoke, for Kissinger had been in charge of keeping Rockefeller’s “shit files” on Nixon, “several filing cabinets” containing what today is called oppositional, or negative, research.9 After Nixon’s nomination, Kissinger slept through the morning, woken only by a telephone call from a friend. Kissinger, the friend later remarked, sounded “more shaken, more disappointed, more generally depressed than I had ever known him.” “That man Nixon,” Kissinger said, “doesn’t have the right to rule.”
Kissinger himself, at a public conference organized in 2010 by the State Department on American involvement in Vietnam, cited his opposition to Nixon as evidence that he couldn’t have been involved in schemes to get him elected: “I had never met Richard Nixon when he appointed me. And I had spent 12 years of my life trying to keep him from becoming President. I was the principal foreign policy advisor of Nelson Rockefeller. So when I read some of these books of how carefully I plotted my ascent to that office, I think it is important to keep—to remember that I was a close friend of Nelson Rockefeller and, actually, I knew Hubert Humphrey a lot better. Well, I didn’t know Nixon at all.”10
At that same conference, however, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke told a story that helps explain Kissinger’s accommodation. Holbrooke spoke immediately after Kissinger, reminiscing about 1968, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and the protests and riots over race and war. “There’s never been a year like ’68 in our lives,” he said. Then Holbrooke described how that summer he and Kissinger were in Martha’s Vineyard, watching the Chicago Democratic Convention on TV. The police were beating protesters outside and Democrats were savaging each other inside. Nixon had already won his party’s nomination, and, with the “destruction of the Democratic Party” being broadcast to the nation, Kissinger turned to Holbrooke and said, “This is the end of me.” “You remember?” Holbrooke asked, gesturing to Kissinger in the audience. Kissinger is off camera, but the crowd laughed and maybe he did too.
Holbrooke sets an evocative scene: Kissinger, on a warm late August in Martha’s Vineyard, the summer heartland of America’s Eastern establishment, watching the televised disintegration of that establishment and experiencing one of the longest and darkest nights of his soul. He cried: “Nelson Rockefeller and Hubert Humphrey are being destroyed. I’ll never serve in the government again.”
The despair was fleeting. Kissinger acted immediately, positioning himself as useful to both the autumnal New Deal Democrats and the rising Republican Right. A few days after the Democratic Convention, Kissinger, still on the Vineyard and now sitting on a beach in West Tisbury, offered Rockefeller’s Nixon files to another summering Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, who was working for the Humphrey campaign. “It was a wonderful offer,” Huntington later recalled.11
One that Kissinger never made good on. Even as he was running down Nixon to the Democrats (“I’ve hated Nixon for years,” he said, stalling Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was trying to get Kissinger to turn over the files), he was reaching out to Richard V. Allen, one of Nixon’s top foreign policy advisers, to say that he would soon be traveling to Paris to assess the status of talks between Washington and Hanoi and would be available to advise the campaign on the matter. In Paris Kissinger cultivated contacts on Johnson’s negotiating team, including a lawyer named Daniel Davidson. Davidson admitted he was “charmed and enchanted” by Kissinger. As he put it, “he had an intelligence, a sense of humor, and a conspiratorial manner that swept you into his camp.”12
Holbrooke was also in the delegation: “Henry was the only person outside of the government we were authorized [by the White House, because of his past position as an adviser] to discuss the negotiations with,” he told Kissinger’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.”13 When Kissinger returned to Cambridge two weeks later, he called the Nixon campaign again, reporting that “something big was afoot regarding Vietnam.” Kissinger advised that Nixon keep any statement on the war he might make vague, so as not to be “undercut by negotiations.” Diplomats in Paris were working on a deal: Johnson would halt the bombing of North Vietnam, and Hanoi would reciprocate by agreeing to enter into formal negotiations with South Vietnam.
Kissinger contacted Nixon’s staffers a number of times thereafter, speaking most often with Allen. It was Allen who first described, to Seymour Hersh, Kissinger’s role in derailing the talks and over the years he has elaborated: “Henry Kissinger, on his own, volunteered information to us through a spy, a former student, that he had in the Paris peace talks, who would call him and debrief, and Kissinger called me from pay phones and we spoke in German. The fact that my German is better than his did not at all hinder my communication with Henry and he offloaded mostly every night what had happened that day in Paris.”14
Kissinger placed his last call at the end of October. “I’ve got important information,” he said: the North Vietnamese had agreed to participate in official peace talks, scheduled to begin November 6, one day after the presidential vote. They had “broken open the champagne” in Paris, Kissinger reported. A few hours after Kissinger’s call to the Nixon campaign, Johnson suspended the bombing.15 Announcement of a deal between Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi might have pushed Humphrey, who was closing in on Nixon in the polls, over the top. But there would be no deal: the South Vietnamese scuttled the settlement, after hearing from Nixon’s campaign that they could get better terms from a Republican administration: “Saigon Cannot Join Paris Talks under Present Plan,” ran the above-the-fold November 2 headline of the New York Times.
Later that day, Nixon, campaigning in Austin, Texas, said: “In view of early reports this morning, prospects for peace are not as bright as they were even a few days ago.”16
Nixon’s people had acted fast. Using Kissinger’s intelligence and working through Anna Chennault (the Chinese-born widow of a World War II lieutenant general and a prominent conservative activist), they urged the South Vietnamese to derail the talks, promising better conditions were Nixon to be elected. President Johnson was informed of the meddling. Through wiretaps and intercepts, he learned that Nixon’s campaign was telling the South Vietnamese that Nixon was going to win and “to hold on a while longer.” If the White House had gone public with the information, the outrage might also have swung the election to Humphrey. But Johnson hesitated. He feared that “Nixon’s conniving” was just too explosive. “This is treason,” he said. “It would rock the world.”17
Johnson stayed silent, Nixon won, and the war went on.
* * *
The fact that Kissinger participated in an intrigue that extended the war for five pointless years—seven, if you count the fighting between the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and the 1975 fall of Saigon—is undeniable.* Adding to the evidence is Kissinger himself. He’s been caught on tape twice, on recordings recently released, admitting he passed on useful information to Nixon.
The first recording is of a meeting held by Nixon, Kissinger, and Bob Haldeman in the Oval Office on June 17, 1971. The three men were trying to come up with a plan to contain the fallout from Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. One idea, suggested by Haldeman and seconded by Nixon, was to “blackmail” Lyndon Johnson and force him to issue a public statement condemning Ellsberg’s leak. Nixon believed that a file existed—the so-called “bombing halt” file—that held proof that Johnson stopped bombing North Vietnam to help Humphrey win the election.* The material was thought to be in a safe at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, and Nixon, in this meeting, ordered Haldeman to use “thievery” to get it. This was the beginning of the black-bag group known as the “plumbers,” who would go on to burgle the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.18 “Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it,” Nixon instructed.
It’s a disreputable scene: a president and his top advisers, including Kissinger, sitting around discussing blackmailing a former president and blowing up safes.† For our purposes here, what is important is that Kissinger reveals that he knew that Johnson didn’t time the bombing halt to help Humphrey because, contrary to his latter statements, he had access to classified information about the Paris negotiations:
KISSINGER: I used to give you info—I used to—you remember, I used to give you information about it at the time so I have no—
NIXON: I know.
KISSINGER: I mean, about the timing.
NIXON: Yeah.
KISSINGER: But I, to the best of my knowledge, there was never any conversation in which they said we’ll hold it until the end of October. I wasn’t in on the discussions here. I just saw the instructions to Harriman.
The reference is to Averell Harriman, who headed the US Paris delegation. Kissinger is admitting not only that he passed on information to Nixon’s campaign but that he had access to specific, classified negotiating instructions—that is, the terms the White House was willing to accept, the concessions it was offering, and the timeline it was proposing for drawing down hostilities.
Kissinger’s second admission, which came nearly a year later, on April 19, 1972, is more succinct. It was in response to Nixon’s opinion that the North Vietnamese would begin to soften their negotiating position in the period prior to the 1972 presidential elections. The reason he thought this was because that’s what they did in 1968, compromising with Johnson’s envoys in Paris prior to the presidential elections. “They are quite aware of American political things,” Nixon told Kissinger. Kissinger agreed: “As I told you all that fall, what the game was.”19 “Only eleven words,” the historian Jeffrey P. Kimball writes, “but with these words Kissinger affirmed that in the fall of 1968 he had passed to ‘you’—that is, not only the Nixon camp but Nixon himself—information about the looming diplomatic breakthrough in Paris.”20
Guardians of Kissinger’s legacy say his accusers misread or overstate the importance of such evidence: Nixon would have won the election anyway; the information Kissinger passed on wasn’t very specific; the Nixon campaign had other sources, so sabotage of the talks would have taken place even without Kissinger’s participation; and the South Vietnamese didn’t want a Humphrey presidency and would have balked of their own accord, without any prompting from Nixon. Intentionally or not, these excuses mimic the approach to the past Kissinger outlined in his undergraduate thesis. Truth is not found in “the facts of history” but from a “construct” of hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and conjectures.
Yet, in a way, Kissinger’s defenders are right. Not that Kissinger wasn’t implicated in Nixon’s preelection machinations. He was. But focusing too intently on the search for evidence establishing culpability can miss the episode’s larger meaning, its importance in Kissinger’s ascent, how it allowed him to perform a trial run of his philosophy of politics.
* * *
Four years earlier, Kissinger had elaborated on the importance of political imagination in his discussion of JFK’s response to the Cuban missile crisis. The “essence” of good foreign policy, Kissinger wrote, “is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural.”21 The problem, though, is that successful nation-states rationalize their foreign policy. They create a foreign service, with protocols, guidelines, clear procedures, and grades for promotion, administered by functionaries who depend on experts deeply versed in the particularities of their particular region. The whole system is set up to strive for “safety” and “predictability,” to work for the maintenance and reproduction of the status quo. “The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability which tends to become a prisoner of events.” Routinization leads to caution, caution to inaction, inaction to atrophy. Success is measured by “mistakes avoided rather than by goals achieved.”22
In contrast, great statesmen, the ones who will truly make a difference, never let themselves become paralyzed by a “pre-vision of catastrophes.” They are agile, thriving on “perpetual creation, on a constant redefinition of goals.”23
This was a good description of Kissinger in late 1968, nimble and fleet-footed, acting incisively on conjecture and seizing the spirit of the moment. No matter how many contacts he cultivated, no matter how many late nights he spent in Parisian cafes whispering into the ears of young staffers or how many German conversations he had from street-corner pay phones, his defenders probably are right. Even with access to Johnson’s negotiating instructions, he couldn’t have had exact information about the decisions being made at the White House. He had to have been winging it, at least to some degree, guessing at what others knew, imagining what others would do with that guess, playing the angles, sussing out the chance, all the while giving the appearance of composure and certainty. Nixon himself called the information Kissinger passed on “uncomfortably vague.” Though he was impressed by his flair for the covert: “One factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger’s credibility was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy.”24
Sailing to Europe shortly after the start of Harvard’s fall term, Kissinger might have feared that the trip was time wasted, a fool’s errand. And once back, he took an enormous risk. If things had broken a different way, he could have been burned with both political parties or, even worse, brought up on charges. It is illegal for private citizens to interfere in the foreign relations of the United States. “Kissinger had proven his mettle by tipping us,” Richard Allen told Hersh. “It took some balls to give us those tips”; it was a “pretty dangerous thing for him to be screwing around with national security.”
Brushing aside any “pre-visions of catastrophes” he might have had, Kissinger leveraged a high-stakes, dead-heat presidential campaign, using the anxieties of those around him as the raw material of “fresh creation.” Rather than fall “prisoner of events,” as he feared he might during that moment of weakness on the Vineyard, Kissinger busted out. He wasn’t so much seizing an opportunity as creating one. After Nixon’s victory, Kissinger did what he could to keep Nixon’s attention, including starting the false rumor that the outgoing Johnson administration planned to either depose or assassinate the president of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, before leaving office. He then arranged, via William F. Buckley, to have the rumor passed on to Nixon. Kissinger said he wanted the incoming president to know that “if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem [an earlier South Vietnam leader who was deposed and executed in a coup that the Kennedy administration helped initiate], the 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.” The historian Stephen Ambrose says that what Kissinger was doing was playing to Nixon’s keenness for “secrecy, rumor, intrigue, and circuitous communication, all covered by a veneer of concern for high principle (America must stick by its friends) and highlighted by Kissinger’s dramatic phraseology.”25
Kissinger wanted a top spot in Nixon’s White House, but even in his wildest dreams he couldn’t have imagined the reward his risk taking would bring. A victorious Nixon not only made him the head of the National Security Council but instructed him to reorganize that institution so as to take control of foreign policy from the State Department and the Defense Department.
It’s worth pausing a moment to consider the above narrative in truncated, chronological form, since it conveys just how fast Kissinger’s wheel of fortune was spinning, the quickness with which he went from hopelessness, from believing his career was collapsing along with the middle ground of American politics—from being confused with Professor Schlesinger!—to being anointed Nixon’s national security adviser.
August 5–8 |
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Republican Convention. Rockefeller loses nomination to Richard Nixon. Kissinger is devastated. |
August 9 |
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Kissinger gives interview on New York radio voicing “grave doubts” about Nixon. A few days later, Kissinger calls Nixon a “disaster.” |
August 26–29 |
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In Chicago, Humphrey wins Democratic nomination. In Martha’s Vineyard, Kissinger, watching the protests outside the convention center on TV, despairs that American politics is radicalizing and he will have no place in it. |
Late August |
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A few days after the convention, Kissinger offers Rockefeller’s oppositional files on Nixon to Humphrey’s campaign. He never delivers. |
September 10 |
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Kissinger calls Allen, saying he is going to Paris and offering to relay information he obtains on the negotiations. |
September 17 |
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Kissinger arrives in Europe on the SS Île de France.Harvard’s fall semester will soon begin. Kissinger scheduled to teach two classes: an undergraduate lecture course, Principles of International Relations, and his graduate seminar. |
September 26 |
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Back in Cambridge from Paris, Kissinger calls John Mitchell and says “something big was afoot.” |
October |
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Kissinger has at least two more conversations with Nixon’s people, according to the historian Robert Dallek, warning of the possibility of a bombing halt. He continues, though, to disparage the Republican candidate, describing him in mid-October as “paranoiac.” |
October 31 |
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Kissinger calls Allen: “I’ve got some important information.” Twelve hours later, Johnson halts bombing. |
November 2 |
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South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu announces that his country will not participate in peace talks under the terms agreed on by Washington and Hanoi. |
November 5 |
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Nixon beats Humphrey. Kissinger (around November 12) arranges to have a false report passed on to Nixon that the outgoing Johnson administration planned to depose or assassinate Thieu. |
November 22 |
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Nixon summons Kissinger to his headquarters at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. The meeting takes place three days later, on November 25. The men discuss the importance of setting up a centralized, strong National Security Council that will run foreign policy from the White House. |
November 26 |
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Kissinger officially offered job of national security adviser. |
December 16 |
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Kissinger’s last class at Harvard. |
Late December |
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Kissinger submits detailed plan to reorganize the NSC, investing enormous power in the council and its director. |
December 27 |
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Nixon approves the plan. |
Nixon’s inauguration was still a month away and Kissinger was already one of the most powerful men on the planet.
* * *
Having now lived a very long life, first acting in the name of the strongest state in world history and then moving into a realm of unparalleled private privilege, Kissinger has enjoyed great luxury, wealth, and public acclaim. He even won a Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that he encouraged in its inception and helped extend in its duration. That he was able to pull off the original gambit that brought such attainment—that, instead of being banished to Harvard or indicted, he became the most powerful national security adviser in American history—proved the validity of his theories, that with imagination certain individuals could grasp the inner movement of history and manipulate it to their advantage.
From this point forward, every single policy that Henry Kissinger advocated as being good, both materially and morally, for the long-run, strategic ends of the United States also happened to be good for the personal advancement of Henry Kissinger.