HENRY KISSINGER’S PERFORMANCE in the two months between his selection as Special Assistant for National Security Affairs and the inauguration of Richard Nixon seemed flawless. His academic credentials were widely praised in the press. He assembled a first-rate staff, and he successfully met his first presidential demand: new guidelines for the control of foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger wanted authority shifted to the White House and thus to themselves. In a pattern that was to become typical, Nixon stayed largely in the background during the struggle over the new NSC system in late December and January. It was Kissinger who dealt with the resentment of the State Department and of its newly appointed Secretary, William P. Rogers. And it was Kissinger, representing the insistent demands of his patron, who seemed to win the major victory over Rogers.
Kissinger’s goal was institutional power. The NSC had been set up, at the same time as the Central Intelligence Agency, by the National Security Act of 1947, which assigned it the task of advising the President “with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign and military policies relating to national security.” But the NSC was to be more than a clearing house for competing interests in the bureaucracy. Congress also ordered it to independently “assess and appraise the objectives, commitments, and risks of the United States in relation to our actual and potential military power.” Statutory NSC members included the President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the director of the Office of Emergency Planning, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of Central Intelligence serving as advisers.
The 1947 legislation also called for an executive director of the National Security Council, who, in theory, was to have immense influence on the control and monitoring of the overseas operations of the armed forces and the intelligence agencies. But each President, beginning with Harry S Truman, tended to delegate responsibility for national security affairs to a special assistant on his White House staff who operated independently of the NSC and its executive director. During the Eisenhower Administration, the NSC system became heavily bureaucratized, with the establishment of a formal Planning Board that monitored all foreign policy papers going to the President for review. The result was cautious consensus and generalized policy guidance that diluted the influence of the NSC and did little to challenge the authority of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had close personal and philosophical ties to the President. President Kennedy further eschewed the NSC’s formal apparatus and moved the job of assistant to the President for national security affairs into the limelight with the appointment of McGeorge Bundy, a Harvard professor and dean of faculty. In crises Kennedy consistently bypassed the NSC, with its interagency discussions and disputes, and brought decision making into the White House on an ad hoc basis. During the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962, for example, decisions were made and ratified through what was called the Excomm, a hastily assembled committee of Kennedy insiders, on which Bundy played a significant role. The NSC and its executive director continued to operate in these years, but had increasingly little of import to do. President Johnson also chose to maneuver informally on key issues, especially in dealing with the war in Vietnam, and eventually set up a regular Tuesday lunch at which the administration’s principals, including Walt W. Rostow, who became special assistant after Bundy resigned in 1966, would meet to discuss and formulate policy without any advance memoranda or planning. During those years, the staff aides on the NSC routinely found themselves serving in support of the President’s assistant for national security affairs, and the size of the NSC staff steadily increased. By the early 1960s, NSC staff aides were filling dozens of offices in the White House and the Executive Office Building. The NSC executive director, with his small staff, also maintained offices in the Executive Office Building. The two staffs were not formally consolidated until Richard Nixon took office.
—
Of the men closest to the President-elect in December 1968, Kissinger was the most experienced in national security affairs. He had been a consultant to the NSC under Kennedy, and was far from a newcomer to covert intelligence operations. He had served in the Army Counterintelligence Corps at the close of World War II and stayed on active duty in occupied West Germany after the war. He was eventually assigned to the 970th CIC Detachment, whose functions included support for the recruitment of ex-Nazi intelligence officers for anti-Soviet operations inside the Soviet bloc.I After entering Harvard as an undergraduate in 1947, at age twenty-four, he retained his ties, as a reserve officer, to military intelligence. By 1950, he was a graduate student and was working part time for the Defense Department—one of the first at Harvard to begin regular shuttles to Washington—as a consultant to its Operations Research Office. That unit, under the direct control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conducted highly classified studies on such topics as the utilization of former German operatives and Nazi partisan supporters in CIA clandestine activities. In 1952, Kissinger was named a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board, an operating arm of the National Security Council for covert psychological and paramilitary operations. In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed Nelson Rockefeller his Special Assistant for Cold War Planning, a position that involved the monitoring and approval of covert CIA operations. These were the days of CIA successes in Iran, where the Shah was installed on the throne, and in Guatemala, where the government of Jacobo Arbenz, considered anti-American and antibusiness, was overthrown. In 1955, Kissinger, already known to insiders for his closeness to Rockefeller and Rockefeller’s reliance on him, was named a consultant to the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board, which was then the highest policy-making board for implementing clandestine operations against foreign governments.
Kissinger has written and said little about his high-level exposure to clandestine operations in the early 1950s. Former intelligence officials recall that the young Harvard scholar had come to the attention of Allen Dulles, Eisenhower’s influential CIA director, even before the Rockefeller appointment. “He was highly regarded,” according to Elmer B. Staats, who was executive director of the Operations Coordinating Board from 1953 to 1958. “Allen spoke of his meetings with him. He and Walt Rostow [who then was a professor at MIT] were considered kind of a team.”
One little-known fact is that in late 1955 Rockefeller was replaced as the presidential adviser on Cold War strategy by Vice President Nixon. There is no record of Nixon’s having met Kissinger in those days, although many former intelligence aides consider it highly likely that Nixon was aware of Kissinger’s intelligence work.
There is evidence, however, that Nixon and Kissinger, within days of Kissinger’s appointment, were working in far more harmony than outsiders—and many Nixon insiders—could perceive. The grab for control had been signaled at President-elect Nixon’s news conference on December 2, 1968, at which he made the formal announcement of Kissinger’s appointment and introduced his national security adviser to the press. Nixon told the press that Kissinger would move immediately to revitalize the National Security Council system. He would set up “a very exciting new procedure for seeing to it that the next President of the United States does not hear just what he wants to hear, which is always a temptation for White House staffers, but that he hears points of view covering the spectrum. . . .” In addition, “Dr. Kissinger is keenly aware of the necessity not to set himself up as a wall between the President and the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense. I intend to have a very strong Secretary of State.”
Nixon’s public statements had little to do with what he wanted done. At their first meeting, on November 25, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, Nixon talked about “a massive organizational problem . . . He had very little confidence in the State Department. Its personnel had no loyalty to him; the Foreign Service had disdained him as Vice President and ignored him the moment he was out of office. He was determined to run foreign policy from the White House. He thought the Johnson Administration had ignored the military and that its decision-making procedures gave the President no real options. He felt it imperative to exclude the CIA from the formulation of policy; it was staffed by Ivy League liberals who behind the façade of analytical objectivity were usually pushing their own preferences. They had always opposed him politically.”
Kissinger records himself as merely agreeing that “there was a need for a more formal decision-making process.” Nixon recalls much enthusiasm. In his memoirs, he even credits Kissinger with actually articulating the notion of centralizing power in the NSC inside the White House: “Kissinger said he was delighted that I was thinking in such terms. He said that if I intended to operate on such a wide-ranging basis, I was going to need the best possible system for getting advice. . . . Kissinger recommended that I structure a national security apparatus within the White House that, in addition to coordinating foreign and defense policy, could also develop policy options for me to consider before making decisions.”
The dispute between Kissinger and Nixon over who proposed what remains, but the fact is that what they discussed in private that November—the centralization of power in the White House—was not hinted at in their news conference. Kissinger attributed Nixon’s misleading remarks to the press to the President-elect’s fear of criticism over the proposed NSC restructuring. “In his eagerness to deflect any possible criticism,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, Nixon “announced a program substantially at variance with what he had told me.” Kissinger was untroubled by such discrepancies. “The pledges of each new Administration,” he explained, “are like leaves on a turbulent sea.”
—
The press was handled readily enough, as it would be throughout their first term, but the President-elect and his new adviser had a much more formidable task convincing some of Nixon’s senior campaign staff that all authority should reside in the President’s office. During this intense and secret preinaugural struggle to gain control of the NSC, Nixon came out of the shadows at least once, to help Kissinger manipulate and deceive a senior member of the staff. Their first opponent was Bryce Harlow, the former Eisenhower aide, who had served Nixon faithfully during the 1968 campaign and who seemed to have authority in those early days. His first recommendation about the NSC was accepted, and Nixon brought in General Andrew J. Goodpaster, deputy commander of the American forces in South Vietnam, to serve as his temporary military adviser.
General Goodpaster had been on the White House staff during the Eisenhower Administration, handling national security matters. Those were the years, in Harlow’s eyes, when the NSC functioned as an advisory and analytic group rather than a policy maker, as it did under such strong-willed men as McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In mid-December, Harlow presented these views to Kissinger and Nixon. “My idea,” he says, “was that Kissinger should be a faceless, anonymous professional whose role is to produce papers for the great to work their will on. I told them they had to return the NSC to its rightful role.” He left pleased with the meeting and with Kissinger’s apparent assent, but he was already a marked man. Named as one of four presidential assistants after the inauguration, he quickly found his title meaningless and his duties constricted in a White House run by Nixon, H. R. Haldeman as Chief of Staff, John D. Ehrlichman, then White House Counsel, and Henry Kissinger.
Harlow would come to understand later that Kissinger and Nixon did not want the NSC to be an anonymous funnel, but to seize control, to tell the bureaucracies what to research and when to report. Setting up the new machinery was Kissinger’s first, and most vital, assignment. But heretofore he had served only as a part-time White House consultant and knew little of the day-to-day workings of the special assistant’s office and the National Security Council. How to begin? At this point, he turned to Morton Halperin, the thirty-year-old Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Halperin, aggressive, secretive, and ambitious, was considered among the brightest administrators in the Pentagon. He had played an important role in helping the Johnson Administration begin to reverse its policies in Vietnam, and had become a major force in that administration’s planning on strategic arms control. Working for the Nixon Administration posed no problem for him; he was a Republican who had been one of the founders of the liberal Republican Ripon Society in the mid-1960s. Early in 1967, when he was in the Pentagon, he had even been approached about becoming Nixon’s international policy adviser during the 1968 presidential primaries. He had also spent six years teaching a series of defense policy courses at Harvard with Kissinger, beginning in 1961, the year he earned his doctorate in political science at Yale. He had been lobbying for a NSC job since Kissinger’s appointment was announced.
Halperin was in the right spot at the right time. He was scheduled to give a lecture on December 16 to Kissinger’s national security policy seminar at Harvard—a Government Department course attended by many military and civilian officials in mid-career—and it turned out to be Kissinger’s last Cambridge appearance. The two men talked and Kissinger asked Halperin to join his staff. His first assignment would be to prepare a paper on systems-analysis techniques that could be used in foreign-policy decision making. Halperin, seizing the opportunity, took it upon himself to draft a broad memorandum that placed nearly all the power in the hands of the national security adviser.
Halperin understood the needs of his master as well as Kissinger understood the needs of his. The projected system gave Kissinger the power to decide the agenda for National Security Council meetings and also made him chairman of the review group that considered the various option papers prepared by the bureaucracy. Under the existing machinery, that function had been controlled by the State Department. In addition, Halperin’s memorandum gave Kissinger direct authority to order State and other agencies to prepare option papers on specific subjects; such orders were to be known as National Security Study Memoranda. The President’s policy decision, to be made after a National Security Council meeting, would take the form of a highly classified National Security Decision Memorandum written by Kissinger and his staff. Subsequent implementation of the President’s policy would be in the hands of an under secretary’s committee to be chaired by a State Department representative—the only important policy group that would still be led by State. That group would also handle issues not important enough for the full NSC. Under the proposed system, even the lower-level working groups for each geographical region would report directly to White House officials. Halperin’s paper was endorsed in full by Kissinger and became the basis for the subsequent NSC reorganization that Nixon approved.
It was now late December and Kissinger had begun assembling a temporary staff at Nixon’s postelection headquarters in the Hotel Pierre. One of the first aides was Lawrence S. Eagleburger, a Foreign Service officer with impeccable Republican credentials who was to emerge over the next few weeks as Kissinger’s personal aide and one of his closest deputies. Eagleburger, then thirty-eight years old, was a witty extrovert from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, with a very tough side—he was harshly anti-Soviet and a strong supporter of the use of force in diplomacy. His mother had worked in the local campaigns of Melvin R. Laird, the Wisconsin congressman whom Nixon had just nominated as Secretary of Defense. Kissinger turned the Halperin memorandum over to Eagleburger, directing him to recast it as a memorandum from Kissinger to the President—and to do so without telling Halperin. Another Kissinger aide, Roger Morris, also a Foreign Service officer, recalls Eagleburger’s immediate reaction to the Halperin paper: “Whatever happened to the Secretary of State?”
Eagleburger was nonplused by the Halperin document. Since he did not know enough about the procedural background to judge it, he quietly sought Halperin’s help and advice, as is normal in bureaucracy.II Despite their different backgrounds, Kissinger, Halperin, and Eagleburger were all superbly skilled at the bureaucratic game—with one exception: Kissinger did not at first seem to realize that he, as a senior government official, would certainly be the target of such maneuvers.
Halperin took the intrigue in stride: “I gave the paper to Henry and never saw it again. The next thing I knew Eagleburger saw me and said Henry wanted his help in redoing the memo for the President. Henry had told Eagleburger not to tell me, and so Eagleburger asked me not to say anything. Henry didn’t know that I knew what he’d done with my memo.” Halperin, eager for a major role on Kissinger’s staff, was not about to spoil his chances with unnecessary talk.
But Halperin had to suffer one minor indignity even then. Kissinger was afraid Goodpaster would want to leave his combat assignment permanently and remain the White House senior military adviser, as General Maxwell D. Taylor had been for Kennedy in 1961. Goodpaster would then be a direct competitor. Kissinger’s solution, Halperin says, was to demonstrate repeatedly to Goodpaster that the national security was in the hands of a tough-minded pragmatist. Since Halperin was viewed with suspicion by many Pentagon military men, he was to be kept out of sight. And so, as Halperin puts it, “One of Eagleburger’s jobs in the Hotel Pierre was to kick me out of Henry’s office if Goodpaster was coming.”
Goodpaster had been among the first to urge the President-elect to strengthen his control over the NSC. His goal, he told colleagues, was to provide a mechanism for presidential intervention on major policy decisions, thus preventing the Secretaries of State and Defense from getting locked into disputes from which they could not gracefully retreat. Goodpaster, of course, had no idea that his modest suggestions would be seized on to justify the drastic Nixon-Kissinger reorganization, which eliminated the potential for dispute between the Pentagon and State by eliminating the role of the latter. Under the new NSC procedure, senior military men would be able to present their important proposals directly to Kissinger without the prior clearance of the Secretary of Defense or his deputy.
On December 27, having successfully fooled Bryce Harlow and neutralized General Goodpaster, Kissinger submitted Halperin’s ten-page reorganization proposal to the President-elect. In a covering note, he apologized for the document’s length—even in 1967, ten pages was obviously too long for Nixon—and noted that General Goodpaster “agrees with my recommendations.” Nixon initialed his approval that day. The next day, the new administration’s principal foreign policy advisers were summoned to Nixon’s vacation home in Key Biscayne, Florida, for a five-hour meeting on foreign affairs. In attendance, along with Kissinger, were Laird, Rogers, Harlow, Goodpaster, and Spiro T. Agnew, the Vice President-elect. Kissinger had prepared a talking paper for the discussion, and Nixon, making it clear that he had already agreed to the reorganization, presented it for his advisers’ pro forma approval. He got it.
The press, briefed about the meeting on a background basis, was deliberately misled. Journalists were told, as the New York Times reported next morning, that Nixon intended to “enlarge the role of the National Security Council” and had ordered Kissinger to submit a reorganization plan for doing so “in the next few weeks . . . The President-elect is expected to give a sympathetic reception,” the Times said. The first stories on the proposed reorganization took what Kissinger and Nixon said at face value. James Reston, the eminent columnist for the Times, began what was to be a close relationship with Kissinger by noting two days after his appointment as national security adviser that it was “reassuring” that one of the new administration’s goals would be to rebuild the NSC and restore “the authority it had under President Eisenhower.” In an analytical article a few days later, Max Frankel, then the Washington bureau chief of the Times, elevated Kissinger’s academic standing to near-greatness. “At 45,” Frankel wrote, “he has become . . . a leader in the first generation of atomic-age scholars attempting to cope with the consequences of the balance of terror.” The warm notices for Kissinger undoubtedly reflected the Washington press corps’ immense relief that Nixon had not chosen someone with more right-wing views or of lesser intelligence. Another factor may have been the aura of Harvard. In any case, it seems clear that Kissinger did not have to cultivate a favorable press: It came with the job.
—
Within a few days, as word about the Kissinger-Nixon coup spread through the top ranks of the State Department, opposition mounted. But the would-be protesters first had to convince the newly nominated Secretary of State.
One of the mysteries of the Nixon era is why the President-elect decided to name William P. Rogers Secretary of State. Rogers, fifty-five years old at the time of his nomination, was a ranking Republican who had served as Attorney General in the Eisenhower Administration and who, with his wife, had befriended the Nixons in their years of crises while Nixon was Eisenhower’s Vice President. As Rogers grew more prosperous in his corporate law practice in New York City and Washington in the 1960s, he and Nixon, who had also begun practicing law in New York after his defeat in the California gubernatorial election, drifted apart. Rogers was not Nixon’s first choice for Secretary of State.III Nonetheless, Bryce Harlow recalls that when Nixon first discussed naming Rogers, it was agreed that he would be able to handle negotiations with the Russians. “He’s cold, mean and tough,” in Harlow’s assessment. Asked why, in that case, Rogers let himself and his department be overrun by Kissinger, Harlow could only say, “Rogers didn’t try. He could have whipped Kissinger easily.”
In reality, Kissinger won his bureaucratic wars not because Rogers did not try, but because Nixon wanted it that way. Rogers agreed to serve as Secretary of State with the knowledge that foreign affairs would be run from the White House and that he would have little to do with them. When Nixon first mentioned the job to him, Rogers says, he expressed reluctance to leave his law firm and recommended that the job be offered to Nelson Rockefeller. Rogers also told the President-elect that he knew little about foreign affairs. It was that ignorance, Nixon replied, that made the job his. “I was prepared to play a subordinate role,” Rogers recalls. “I recognized that he wanted to be his own foreign policy leader and did not want others to share that role. After all, the man who ran for office and won deserves [to make his own decisions]. I knew that Nixon would be the principal actor and, when Kissinger came along, I recognized that he would be a very valuable asset to the presidency.”
Rogers’ willingness to take a back seat insured the success of the bureaucratic restructuring. For all its failings, the new system might have operated in harmony—Nixon was, after all, the President—if Kissinger had not decided, sometime in his first years in office, that he should be Secretary of State in title as well as in practice. Rogers did seem to accept the limits of his role. One of Rogers’ aides remembers that in late December 1968 he urged his boss to discuss the revised guidelines directly with the President, but “Rogers told me that if we did go to the President, we wouldn’t win. He said it was better to ‘wedge out’ what we could.”
Rogers’ insight was correct—he was never to play a major role in the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy. Although most published accounts of the Nixon-Rogers relationship have stressed their personal friendship, there is evidence that at best it was bittersweet; according to Rogers, the two men saw each other only rarely during the years they both lived in New York. Many of Rogers’ friends believe that Nixon was jealous of Rogers’ success as a corporate lawyer, and also of his attractiveness to and ease with women. Rogers’ social graces, unfortunately, did little to make up for his lack of experience in foreign affairs. Kissinger and many of his aides wrote him off as uninformed, even stupid, and a coward. From the moment of his first talk with the President-elect at the Hotel Pierre, he was marked as an ineffectual Secretary of State—with substantial consequences for the foreign policy of the Nixon Administration, since he was one of the few inclined to be conciliatory in moments of international crisis. Advice from a man who was viewed as having participated in his own beheading simply provoked further Nixon-Kissinger estrangement from the State Department and its “soft” diplomats.
Some senior State Department officials concluded years later that much of Rogers’ problem with Nixon was his own doing. Elliot L. Richardson, who was Under Secretary of State, offers one explanation: “Rogers could not psychologically bring himself to subordinate himself to Nixon, and that played right into Henry’s hands. Rogers felt that in terms of character and judgment he was a better man and he could not subordinate himself, which an effective Secretary of State must do. It’s true that Rogers didn’t have any inclination to engage in the strategic planning process—but he didn’t try.”
Rogers’ reluctance to fight created an immediate loss of morale in the State Department. Even before the Halperin memorandum on the NSC was presented to Nixon in Key Biscayne, Eagleburger had told Roger Morris about it in confidence.IV Out of loyalty to the Foreign Service, the two aides had then told Arthur A. Hartman, a career diplomat who was in charge of the State Department’s Senior Interdepartment Group, which until the Kissinger era held the major responsibility for monitoring the flow of papers inside the State Department. “We said,” Morris recalls, “ ‘You’re going to get screwed; you’re going to lose all kinds of power. We don’t think this building should be cut out.’ ” Hartman, who later became an Assistant Secretary of State under Kissinger, apologetically explained that no one wanted to fight Kissinger. “We can’t get anyone to step forward,” Hartman told Morris.
Morris and Eagleburger were upset and angry. “It was basically a lost cause,” Morris saw. “State’s idea was to wait it out and see if once the first wave of White House enthusiasm had passed, the bureaucratic flow would go back to State.”
U. Alexis Johnson was the most experienced by far of Rogers’ senior appointees and the most aggrieved by what was happening. As Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs in the Johnson Administration, he fit the mold of the tough-minded, relentlessly anti-Communist State Department official who was the essence of discretion. He was a hawk on Vietnam, and this, plus his long tours in Washington, finally earned him a post he had long desired: In 1966 he was appointed Ambassador to Japan. Rogers brought him back before the inauguration, promising to upgrade his title to Under Secretary of State and assuring him he would have full authority as the senior operating Foreign Service officer. All these promises, Johnson learned in a few moments at the Hotel Pierre, were in jeopardy. He had helped restructure the NSC in the Eisenhower years, and had been instrumental in establishing State’s Senior Interdepartment Group, which Henry Kissinger had now dismantled. There was a brief and unpleasant meeting with Kissinger. “I told Henry I’d heard what was up and told him what was wrong with it,” Johnson says. “We had a vigorous five-minute exchange. I was seeking to get the same kind of relationship we had with McGeorge Bundy. I wanted it clear when it was the President who wanted something or when it was he.” Kissinger was equally direct: “It’s already been decided and this is the way it’s going to be.” Johnson realized, after brief chats with Rogers and Richardson, that neither “had any notion what it was all about.” He returned to Japan to make his farewells, knowing that “we weren’t going to have the same kind of relationship with Kissinger as with Mac.” He sent Richardson a private message from Tokyo outlining his reservations, but it was too late. Returning to Washington he learned that “it was a fait accompli.” When Johnson, ever the bureaucrat, began working closely with Kissinger, he was reviled by many in the State Department, but in his view he was only doing what was necessary. “He honestly believed,” one of his aides explains, “that it was in the best interest of the country; that he had to be subservient to Henry to protect the Foreign Service.”
As word of the White House takeover seeped through State, even junior officers perceived what Kissinger understood very early—that despite all of the public talk about “policy options” and free-flowing dissent, Nixon wanted to chart the future course of the United States in secret and without opposition. And only with Kissinger. The irony that the President and his chief advisers were refusing to listen to dissent over a policy allegedly designed to open up channels for dissent obviously escaped Kissinger, who minimized his role and the Johnson encounter in his memoirs. Johnson, Kissinger wrote, had only made a foolish effort “to encourage Bill Rogers to fight a rearguard action to defend the preëminence of the State Department—which even five minutes’ conversation with Nixon could leave no doubt that the President-elect would ever tolerate.”
One staff member who looked on at the process was Richard M. Moose, another former Foreign Service officer who had worked for Rostow’s NSC and was an early Kissinger recruit. A liberal Democrat by background and inclination, he watched bemused as the State Department cut its own throat. “I had come down, may God forgive me,” Moose recalls with a grin, “for a very strong NSC. The more the State Department fought, the worse they dug themselves in.” Protests from Alexis Johnson and others in State “allowed Henry to appear to be protecting the President and the State Department to be defending the status quo.”
The next step—imposing the system on the bureaucracy—was the most crucial. Three National Security Decision Memoranda formally promulgating the new procedures were drafted by Halperin and Eagleburger, approved and signed by Nixon, and circulated on Inauguration Day. In addition, Kissinger ordered his staff to begin writing National Security Study Memoranda on topics ranging from Vietnam to foreign aid. The formal requests for the NSSMs were distributed to government offices on January 21.
This first batch of “requests” seemed to have three goals: First, they were a sincere effort to get the bureaucracy to begin thinking in terms of different options to foreign policy questions; second, they asserted the ascendancy of the Kissinger apparatus; and finally, with their requirements of lengthy studies and impossibly short deadlines, they were intended to overwhelm the “faceless civil servants” so despised by Nixon. In its first month in office, Kissinger’s staff issued twenty-two NSSMs requesting broad studies on every important issue before the new administration. Yet, as Kissinger concedes in his memoirs, the most important decisions were made without informing the bureaucracy, and without the use of NSSMs or NSDMs.
Morton Halperin, analyzing the NSC in a scholarly article years later, argued that the initiation of the system was not a “cynical act. The President certainly wanted it and some on Kissinger’s staff struggled to make it work.” Nonetheless, Halperin conceded, the system, as it evolved, seemed best equipped to deal with the secondary problems of the Nixon Administration.V
Richard Allen recalls that he and Kissinger discussed the system before the Nixon inauguration and Kissinger “knew at the time that the best of these studies wouldn’t see the light for a year. He kept them busy. He wanted to demoralize the bureaucracy by keeping them overwhelmed.”
In his memoirs, Kissinger dismissed the disputes over the revised National Security Council procedures as “important less in terms of real power than in appearance . . . Nor was it a crucial grant of power to me to the degree that was often alleged.” He repeatedly purveyed that view in his first years in the White House, telling one group of reporters that “I cannot believe that with seven people I am going to be able to take over both the State Department and the Defense Department,” and insisting that it was the President, and not he, who made the final decisions. In the Kalbs’ biography, he is quoted as saying, “There is no ‘Kissinger policy’ on the questions of substance. My task is to convey the full range of policy options to the President. If there were a ‘Kissinger policy,’ the whole new mechanism we have set up in the National Security Council—not to speak of relations between the governmental agencies—would be in shambles.”
But, of course, revised national security procedures insured that, far from providing options to a President Nixon who brooked no dissent, Kissinger would be in sole control of the flow of documents for the President to study. And since one of the most carefully kept secrets of the administration was how little independent consulting and study the President actually did, only a very few understood that Kissinger’s private advice was inevitably the one most relied upon by Nixon.
Even Halperin, who prided himself on his pragmatism and who had as much to do with the new NSC system as anyone besides Kissinger, did not at the outset fully comprehend Kissinger’s real objectives. On January 25, 1969, five days into the administration, the NSC was convened for its first meeting. The issue was Vietnam, and Halperin, now clearly Kissinger’s top aide, was assigned to summarize all the papers and prepare a covering memorandum for the President. He carefully listed the various options in the two- or three-page summary, leaving boxes for the President to initial his choices. The idea was to reduce the President’s work load: If Nixon chose not to read the attached documents, he could merely review Halperin’s summary (which, of course, came with Kissinger’s imprimatur) and make his decision. “Henry loved the summary and thought it was terrific. But, ‘Mort,’ he said, ‘you haven’t told the President what options we should choose.’ ”
“I thought to myself,” Halperin recalls, “we’re not supposed to be giving positions; we’re just supposed to send summaries of the options.” Years later, Halperin would realize how naïve he had been: “Henry had been publicly saying that we were just going to sort out the issues for the President. I didn’t know that Henry wanted to give him the decisions he should take. I was surprised—because I still believed what Henry had said.” The Kissinger summary papers, with their recommendations, would become the most secret documents in the Nixon White House.
I. The 970th Detachment, later known as the 66th CIC Detachment, was under orders after the war to collect information on ex-Nazis who could be utilized for anti-Soviet intelligence operations. Documents from the 66th Detachment later made available to Justice Department officials showed that among the unit’s functions was the compiling of research for use in a series of anti-Soviet operations in the Ukraine and elsewhere inside Russia. Such work was carried out at secret bases in Germany. Kissinger later transferred to the Army’s Military Intelligence Service and became an instructor at the Army’s European Command Intelligence School at Oberammergau, in western Germany, at the same time the facility was training American intelligence officers to exploit the use of Nazi collaborators who had fled from Eastern Europe to the displaced persons camps of western Germany. Kissinger stayed on at Oberammergau as a civilian instructor for a year after being mustered out of Army military intelligence in May of 1946. There is no evidence that Kissinger knew what was going on in the 970th CIC Detachment or at Oberammergau, in terms of the recruitment and use of former Nazi partisans for operations against the Soviet Union, but such activities, although highly classified, were an open secret among many military intelligence and CIC personnel in western Germany at the time.
II. Some would go further and argue that in the national-security area, trading information is a necessary part of the bureaucratic makeup. Openness, in this view, is a detriment. In 1965, Daniel Ellsberg was working for the late John T. McNaughton, a Pentagon official who played a key role on Vietnam issues in the Johnson Administration. “One day,” Ellsberg recalls, “just to flatter McNaughton in a friendly way, I told him that I’d had lunch at the State Department with someone who said to me, ‘The nice thing about your boss is he’s absolutely open and straightforward.’ I want you to know I defended your honor,” Ellsberg quotes himself as telling McNaughton. “I told him you were the most devious man I knew. He laughed and said, ‘Thank you.’ ”
III. Nixon’s first choice was reported to be Thomas E. Dewey, the former New York governor who narrowly lost the 1948 presidential election to Harry S. Truman. It’s not known whether the offer, if made, was a serious one. Nixon wrote in his memoirs that he had sounded out Dewey, through John Mitchell, to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1969 after the resignation of Abe Fortas. “But, as I expected,” Nixon wrote, “he ruled himself out because of his age.” According to the Kissinger memoirs, Dewey was also one of three men, including Kissinger, whom Nixon later considered for the job of emissary to China during the secret Washington-Peking talks.
IV. Morris’ complex relationship with Eagleburger is a good illustration of one path to success in the Foreign Service. Eagleburger rose quickly in the State Department by getting the right assignments at the right time. During the early 1960s, he was a junior officer in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; then he returned to Washington to serve as a line officer in the State Department’s executive secretariat, the clearing house for all communications between Washington and American embassies throughout the world. During the 1966 crisis, when France withdrew from NATO, President Johnson summoned former Secretary of State Dean Acheson as his special assistant and consultant on NATO matters. Acheson selected Eagleburger, known as a hardliner, as his aide, and Eagleburger, with the advantage of having an office in State and working for the White House, immediately began a sophisticated intelligence operation. He would sit in meetings at State and relay anything significant to Francis M. Bator, the National Security Council’s aide for NATO. By providing Bator with such inside information, he was aiding Bator in his job and building up a credit. When Acheson retired later in the year, Eagleburger naturally found himself with a job working with Bator in the NSC. While Eagleburger was making those moves, Morris was assigned, as a very junior Foreign Service officer, to work in the State Department’s European Bureau as a special assistant to John Leddy, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs. Morris quickly began passing information covertly from the European Bureau to Bator’s office in the White House, helping both Bator and Eagleburger. In June 1967, McGeorge Bundy, who had been national security adviser to President John F. Kennedy, was recruited by the Johnson Administration for a special assignment and asked Bator, an old colleague from Harvard, for a bright young assistant. Bator assigned Morris to Bundy’s staff; eventually Walt Rostow asked Morris to stay on the White House staff. Eagleburger, meanwhile, had been reassigned as a deputy to Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, the Johnson Administration’s Under Secretary of State, after Bator left the White House. It was Katzenbach, among others, who recommended Eagleburger to Kissinger in December 1968, when Kissinger was looking for a compatible Foreign Service officer to be an aide. “These games, and this espionage, were gentlemanly in the Johnson Administration,” Morris insists. “It was not malicious compared to what happened later.”
V. One notable success, cited by many former National Security Council aides, was the Nixon-Kissinger decision to ban chemical and biological weapons unilaterally. In National Security Decision Memorandum No. 35 on November 25, 1969, the White House proclaimed, after a series of internal NSC reviews, that it was renouncing the first use of lethal and incapacitating chemical weapons and submitting to the 1925 Geneva Protocol barring all use of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases. A similar renunciation of biological agents was announced, along with a major cutback in the Army’s budget for the weaponry. Roger Morris has argued that the National Security Council review process was essential in achieving the renunciations. Kissinger saw, Morris wrote in Uncertain Greatness, his 1977 study of Kissinger, “the prospect of a relatively painless unilateral arms control initiative valuable in setting the stage for later diplomacy with the Soviet Union.” Another factor, perhaps, was the chance for the White House to make a public announcement that would undercut the antiwar movement, then protesting, among other things, the My Lai massacre.