HENRY KISSINGER ENTERED the White House on Inauguration Day with immense power and no illusions about its source. He understood that his authority would never be disputed as long as he kept his sole client—Richard Nixon—pleased. Kissinger knew that as an outsider he would never be totally trusted by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and other Nixon loyalists on the White House staff. But he also realized that he was an oasis of intellect and of knowledge about foreign policy in the Nixon White House.
Morale was high among the members of Henry Kissinger’s reorganized National Security Council staff. They considered themselves a hand-picked elite, assembled not as a result of postelection patronage but solely on the basis of their expertise in foreign affairs and policy making. Eight members of the roughly thirty-man staff held doctorates; eight had served in the State Department; six were former members of the Johnson Administration’s NSC who had been asked to stay on; some came from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and academia. Many were Democrats who viscerally disliked Richard Nixon, but Kissinger had been persuasive from the start in promising that his National Security Council would be above politics.
Roger Morris had handled African affairs for Walt Rostow and had been flattered to be asked to meet with Kissinger late in December 1968, at a time when the new Nixon appointees were still feeling their way around Washington. Kissinger was late for the interview—as he would be for nearly every meeting in the next eight years—and asked Morris to ride with him to his next appointment. Once in the car, Kissinger was direct. “You’re a Democrat, aren’t you?” Before Morris could answer, Kissinger said, “Well, you’ve got to remember that I didn’t support this man either. I worked for Nelson Rockefeller. I was asked to take this job and I was astonished to be asked to take it, but I consider that I am working for the presidency, for the institution, and I expect everyone on my staff to consider that we are not a part of the political side of the White House. I want the best people I can get regardless of their personal affiliation. I expect to have Democrats and Republicans and I expect decisions to be made and advice given to me entirely independent of partisan considerations. You are working for the presidency; do not consider you are working for the man.”
Morris readily agreed to stay on the NSC staff. Bureaucratic life in the last year of the Johnson Administration had been stifling: The White House’s foreign policy had been intertwined with the Vietnam War to the exclusion of nearly all other issues. This would change, Morris was told. There would be an open system in which all options would be analyzed and then presented to the President for his decision.
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Clearly, what Haldeman and others saw as an essential virtue in White House staff members—personal loyalty to Nixon—was being given a much lower priority by Kissinger. The President’s men, whose criteria placed such loyalty above all else, were inevitably suspicious of Kissinger’s generally young and moderate professional staff. Yet Haldeman, obviously acting on Nixon’s instructions, had not insisted on placing any of his people on Kissinger’s staff. There was tension, but even so, Kissinger immediately felt secure enough to take on and subdue Richard Allen, one of the few certified conservatives and Nixon loyalists on his newly formed staff, the man who had served so discreetly and loyally as the go-between while Kissinger was betraying both the peace talks and the Democrats that fall.
Allen had accepted a job as one of Kissinger’s chief aides in the National Security Council, and had even been introduced to the press along with Kissinger at the December 2 press conference. Kissinger had telephoned him a few days before to praise him effusively and invite him to breakfast. At breakfast, as part of the job offer, he promised to relay every one of Allen’s memoranda to Nixon “without any markings”: Allen’s access would be total. Kissinger then asked if Allen would escort his parents, who lived in New York, to the press conference. Allen was flattered. “I was sure of my role with Kissinger,” he recalls ruefully.
Allen learned much later that in those early weeks of December Kissinger privately complained to Nixon and Haldeman about an interview Allen gave shortly after the election to U.S. News & World Report, in which he suggested that the banning of antiballistic missile systems was an area “where agreement would be good for both sides.” Allen was told that Kissinger warned Nixon that the interview would “provoke” the Soviets. In mid-month, the New York Times published a friendly piece about Allen, describing him as “a hard worker, bright, articulate, open in manner, and plain-spoken.” The Times went on to note, without explaining further, that Allen had “maintained discreet contact with Dr. Kissinger” during the Nixon campaign.
The next blow fell two weeks after that. Allen, in Los Angeles for a meeting, was in a taxicab the day after Christmas when he happened upon a syndicated column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in the Los Angeles Times. The column title was: “Nixon’s Bizarre Choice.”
“I remember looking down and saying to myself, ‘Who is this poor man?’ I started reading and it is I.” The columnists, calling Allen a member of the “sandbox right,” wrote that “the gap between Kissinger’s sophisticated, adult anti-communism and Allen’s simplistic version is a chasm.” They further quoted Nixon aides as “apologetically” pointing out that Allen was no longer an assistant to Nixon, as he had been during the campaign, but “was specifically named as an assistant to the mature Dr. Kissinger.”
The day before the inauguration, after Allen had been assigned an office in the Executive Office Building, Evans and Novak reported, “A decision has been made at high levels of the new Administration . . . to isolate him from substantive duties.” It was the first Allen had heard of such a decision, but the column was prophetic. Indeed, as Allen well remembers, he was soon isolated and shunted aside by Kissinger, and widely believed to be a “spy” for Nixon by his more liberal colleagues on the National Security staff.I Cut off from all significant assignments, Allen resigned late in 1969. “I was still loyal to Nixon,” he says of his quiet departure. “I really was.”
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Within days a major reason for Kissinger’s confidence became apparent in the White House, Patrick Buchanan, the most conservative of Nixon’s speech writers, recalls. “All you had to do was talk to Bill Rogers, and you knew who was going to come out on top.”II
On January 20, as Rogers was participating in the Nixon inaugural, Kissinger’s staff was already dispatching the first of more than a dozen personal letters from Nixon to the heads of foreign governments, including France, Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Soviet Union. The letters were sent over Nixon’s signature and hand delivered by NSC aides to the various Washington embassies. Rogers spent the day celebrating and was told nothing of these high-level contacts. The letters were merely perfunctory expressions of good will; yet they were also, in a sense, the first official Nixon-Kissinger secret. One NSC aide described them as even more significant: They were “the beginning of the effort to establish channels directly from the White House.”
In February 1969, barely a month into his presidency, Nixon flew to Europe for a series of meetings with heads of state that were designed to “show the world,” as Nixon reported in his memoirs, “that the new American President was not completely obsessed with Vietnam.” On the flight across the Atlantic, the President read an essay on French President Charles de Gaulle that had been adapted from Kissinger’s highly publicized book on NATO, The Troubled Partnership. Nixon was proud of the Harvard professor who saw eye to eye with him.
The relationship quickly became hostage: Nixon had a consuming need for flattery and Kissinger a consuming need to provide it. Thus, after Nixon’s first meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Dobrynin, on February 17, 1969, the President repeatedly summoned Kissinger. “It was characteristic of Nixon’s insecurity with personal encounters,” wrote Kissinger, “that he called me into his office four times that day for reassurance that he had done well. He thought there had been a tough confrontation. My impression was rather the opposite—that the meeting had been on the conciliatory side.” Nixon did not discuss the February 17 meeting in his memoirs, but he reported Kissinger’s glowing assessment of his performance after a meeting with Dobrynin later that year: “Kissinger came back in after he had seen Dobrynin to the door. ‘I’ll wager that no one has ever talked to him that way in his entire career!’ he said. ‘It was extraordinary! No president has ever laid it on the line to them like that.’ ”
Kissinger’s fawning was obviously a significant part of the job, but it was not the only reason for his accumulation of power. He and Nixon had seized the government from the beginning, and less than a month after the inauguration they were in the process of applying a joint stranglehold. Both acknowledged in their memoirs that Rogers had been deliberately excluded from that first meeting with Dobrynin. “From the beginning,” Kissinger wrote, “Nixon was determined to dominate the most important negotiations. He excluded his Secretary of State, for example, from his first meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Dobrynin . . .” Kissinger begged off any responsibility for the treatment of Rogers, however, insisting that Nixon had been solely responsible—“it would have been inconceivable for me to suggest such a procedure.” The former President naturally had a different account: “Kissinger had suggested that we develop a private channel between Dobrynin and him,” Nixon wrote. “I agreed that Dobrynin might be more forthcoming in strictly private and unpublicized meetings and we arranged for him to arrive unseen through a seldom-used East Wing door so that no one need know they had met. Within a short time, they were meeting weekly, often over lunch.”
The significant point is that the practice of excluding Rogers was to continue throughout Nixon’s first term. Nixon and Kissinger were going to run the foreign policy of the United States from the White House, and Rogers was to be no more than an easily maneuvered and sometimes flattered pawn. Little was left to chance. By late March, Nixon and Kissinger had begun the practice of summoning senior American ambassadors to an Oval Office meeting and offering them a chance to please the new President by reporting sensitive information directly to Kissinger. The first ambassador known to have been approached was Jacob D. Beam, whom Nixon nominated in early 1969 as Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Beam was a career Foreign Service officer who had loyally worked with Nixon in 1959, when he made a highly successful vice presidential visit to Poland; eight years later, as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Beam was again a gracious host when Nixon the private citizen visited Prague.
Before leaving for his new assignment in Moscow, Beam was invited to lunch with Kissinger and Dobrynin at the Soviet Embassy, where, to Beam’s astonishment, Kissinger told both ambassadors that Nixon specifically wanted him to attend “all discussions with foreign officials.” A few days later Beam met with Nixon and Kissinger at the White House and was asked to help draft a presidential letter to Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Premier, outlining a new proposal for U.S.-Soviet relations. Beam was told he must treat the letter with the utmost secrecy. The discreet professional diplomat did so, of course, but also found it natural to write a private summary of the meeting to the Secretary of State. “All hell broke loose,” Beam remembers. Rogers was upset, and complained to the President. Nixon, in turn, sent word of his distress at Beam’s indiscretion through one of Kissinger’s aides; he had considered their conversation “purely a private talk.” Telling the Secretary of State about a presidential letter to the Premier of the Soviet Union wouldn’t do. Beam would pay a high price for his innocence. He was cut out of U.S.-Soviet policy making just as Rogers was, and his function was reduced to the ceremonial and routine, even during the 1972 Moscow summit.
To the dismay of his staff, Rogers chose to ignore the evidence and not make a stand against such White House operations. “I was aware and spoke to Nixon about it,” Rogers recalls impassively, “and he’d say, ‘I’ll see that it won’t happen again.’ And it would happen again.” Rogers was clearly not sure who would win in a confrontation, and he obviously knew who the real mastermind of the gamesmanship was: “I heard that Nixon was telling [foreign] ambassadors: ‘If you really want to get something done, call Henry.’ ”
Alexis Johnson has offered this personal explanation for Rogers’ inability to get angry: “I think Bill had an awfully hard time accepting the fact that this fellow he’d worked so hard for would treat him as dirty as he did.”
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Throughout this early period, there were only faint hints in public about what was really going on. In early April, U.S. News & World Report took notice of the Kissinger dominance that had been suggested during Nixon’s February trip to Europe. It was Kissinger “who seemed to be holding most of the background briefings for reporters” and Kissinger who was speaking for the President. Trying to be even-handed, however, U.S. News also reminded its readers that it was Rogers who was “a close friend and confidant” of the President, with “access that few in the Administration can match.”
Some administration officials knew the truth, but they weren’t talking. Attorney General Mitchell was among the insiders who made no secret to his immediate staff of his contempt for Rogers. One aide recalls dashing into Mitchell’s office on a Justice Department matter early in 1969 only to find Kissinger there, intent in conversation. Mitchell waved his aide off and later cautioned him: “You must not tell anybody that you saw Kissinger here. He and I were pretty unhappy about Rogers.” Some months later, the aide was answering telephones for Mitchell during an out-of-town trip when Rogers telephoned. “He asked for Mitchell, but Mitchell said, ‘Tell him I’m not in.’ ” Faced with the prospect of lying to the Secretary of State, the staff man said only that Mitchell couldn’t come to the telephone. “Please tell him I don’t understand what’s happening in Paris,” Rogers pleaded, distraught. “Something’s going on and I don’t know about it.” When the aide reported Rogers’ request, Mitchell said without explanation, “He’s not supposed to know.” Later, the aide realized that at the time Kissinger was meeting secretly with Le Due Tho, the chief peace negotiator for the North Vietnamese.
Other relative outsiders were also appalled by such goings-on. So were some officials who considered themselves insiders. Paul H. Nitze, a distinguished public servant who had served Republican and Democratic administrations for twenty-five years, was asked that June by Rogers to serve as a senior member of the United States delegation to the strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviets, working under Gerard C. Smith, Nixon’s new head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and chief delegate to the SALT talks in Geneva.
Nitze said yes. “I had always gotten along well with Nixon,” he recalls, “and Rogers said I had to go see Nixon and Kissinger. And so I went over.” Rogers was not invited. Nitze quickly found out why. “Nixon says, ‘Paul, I don’t have any confidence in Bill Rogers with respect to SALT. I don’t think he understands anything about it. And frankly, I don’t have real confidence in Gerard Smith.” The astonished Nitze said nothing. “I want you to go there and report directly to me about what’s going on,” Nixon said.
“Mr. President, that’s not the way it works,” Nitze replied. “I can’t go there and report secretly to you. I must have confidence in Smith and he must have confidence in me. The delegation can’t keep any secrets from the Secretary and Smith.” It was inconceivable to Nitze that anyone would ask him to spy on Smith; the two men were old friends with high regard for each other.
Nixon quickly retreated. “The situation might arise where you have to get in touch,” he said, and he then explained that Kissinger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had set up a separate, private line of communication—known in the government as a backchannel—to enable Nitze and other specially selected SALT delegates to communicate directly with the White House without Smith’s knowledge. These communication systems, as Nitze knew, with their encoded messages and guarded printout terminals, were an essential part of Washington bureaucracy, and the men at the top depended on such quick, private access to subordinates.III If Nitze saw the need, the President continued, he could use a backchannel to communicate directly with Kissinger, who in turn would relay Nitze’s report to his office. Kissinger said little, and the meeting concluded rather lamely. “They knew that I was not going to do anything like that,” Nitze says.
Not everyone had Nitze’s experience or his scruples. Throughout his career as national security adviser, and later as Secretary of State, Kissinger would repeatedly urge senior officials to report directly to him by backchannel, in an effort not only to keep control of an ongoing negotiation but also to prevent his peers and subordinates from finding out what was going on. Kissinger usually initiated such conversations—amid much flattery—but in the case of Nitze, who had advised such eminent men as Dean Acheson, when he was Secretary of State in the Truman Administration, Kissinger obviously felt the need to have Nixon make the backchannel pitch himself.
Sometimes Nixon refused to go along. In August 1969, William J. Porter, a veteran career diplomat who was then Ambassador to South Korea, came home for consultations and was summoned to meet with Kissinger and then with Nixon. The Ambassador recorded his impressions in his diary:
[Kissinger] greeted me effusively . . . provided me with compliments about the President’s high regard, and his own, for my performance. . . . The President had asked him to take up an important matter with me. He said that though the President had a low opinion of the State Department, he was aware that there were some “good officers” (“like you, Bill”) in it, but as a whole the Department was proving to be a disappointment. To counteract the inefficiency of the Department, and to avail himself of the services of able officers, the President had authorized him, Kissinger said, to open direct and private communications with half a dozen “key Ambassadors” around the world (“like you, Bill”). What did I think? he inquired.
I said it sounded like an impressive honor. Did “direct and private” mean through the Secretary of State?
Kissinger: Absolutely not. No one would know about this arrangement.
Porter: About what would I be reporting?
Kissinger: Anything you believe of interest to us. No subject limitation.
Porter: You say this has the President’s approval?
Kissinger: That’s correct. He’ll mention the subject when he sees you in a few minutes from now. Do you accept the proposal?
Porter reluctantly agreed. “The President is the boss. If he wants it that way, I’ll cooperate.” He asked Kissinger what would happen if Bill Rogers heard about the arrangement. Kissinger responded, Porter recalls, “That’s our problem.” The national security adviser “seemed rather elated” about their conversation, and Porter, with his thirty-two years in the Foreign Service, thought to himself, “Here’s the Nixon-Kissinger secret diplomatic service shaping up, secret codes and all.”
A few minutes later he had a pleasant private meeting with Nixon, who said nothing about the secret reporting arrangement. Porter’s account continues:
I returned to Kissinger’s quarters. He inquired whether the subject had come up. I said it had not. He then commented that lack of mention didn’t mean anything because it was all approved. He said we’d be in touch, at which point I took my leave of him.
During the long return flight to Seoul, I mulled over the meaning of Kissinger’s proposal. . . . Pretty rough on Rogers . . . They’ve only been in office a few months . . . if the President agreed to create a super-net of ambassadors under his security adviser without the knowledge of the Secretary of State something new was happening in American history. . . . I concluded that I was just a country boy and I’d keep my head down.
When he returned to Seoul, Porter tested the secret communications system, which had been arranged by the CIA. His test signal was promptly acknowledged. He remembers that he used the backchannel only once, to transmit a minor item about China, before leaving South Korea in 1971.
Nixon’s decision not to follow the prearranged agenda for his talk with Porter must have given Kissinger pause: Nixon, when he was angry with his national security adviser, invariably relayed that anger indirectly. He would, for example, refuse to take Kissinger’s telephone calls, or not summon him to Oval Office meetings, or, as with Porter, decide at the last minute not to go along with a stratagem. There is no evidence that Nixon ever confronted Kissinger with a complaint. Confrontations, always difficult for Nixon, were perhaps made even more complicated in Kissinger’s case by Kissinger’s overwhelming obsequiousness.
Inevitably, then, one of Kissinger’s early methods of determining the President’s attitude toward him in moments of stress was to measure the attitude of Haldeman and Ehrlichman. If they angrily complained to him about press leaks or another of the incessant admiring magazine articles about his NSC operation, Kissinger knew they were relaying Nixon’s views. What seemed to be Kissinger’s occasional attacks of paranoia about the White House “palace guard” were, in some cases, merely a rational fear of the only man who mattered for him in that administration. When Haldeman was representing Nixon, he was to be feared. But when he was trying to protect his own White House turf, he was not a threat—as Haldeman quickly learned.
Bryce Harlow recalls how Kissinger wriggled his way out of Haldeman’s control early in the Nixon Administration. During the first few months after the inauguration, Harlow says, while he was still an insider, he would join Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman in the President’s office every morning and afternoon for meetings. Haldeman, who from the very beginning “wanted to control everything,” soon demanded that the meetings with Nixon be preceded by short planning sessions in his office. “Henry started to skip those meetings right away, [and] I told Bob, ‘Don’t you let him do that to you.’ We had to relate foreign policy to domestic policy. Well, Bob’d force him in there—but then Henry just began slipping and slipping”—arriving later and later. “Finally, it ended up with Kissinger meeting alone with Nixon.”
Robert Finch, the California Republican who was Nixon’s first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, remembers Haldeman’s early worries about Kissinger’s role. “He thought Henry was consuming too much of Nixon’s time,” Finch says. “It was clear that Nixon’s preoccupation with foreign policy was a restraint on Haldeman’s ability to control Nixon’s schedule.” Haldeman’s dream, as Finch puts it, was to elevate the role of John Ehrlichman, who had been placed in charge of domestic affairs in November 1969, to a status equaling that of Kissinger in foreign affairs. “Then Haldeman could balance it,” said Finch. “They both would have to come through him” to Nixon. It was another unfulfilled White House dream.
Haldeman could not intimidate Kissinger, but he did serve as an effective role model. The way Haldeman ran his office was obviously the way Nixon wanted things done. Over the first few months of 1969, Kissinger emulated the tactics of his patron’s chief assistant. If Haldeman ruthlessly cut staff access to Nixon, so did Kissinger. If Haldeman moved swiftly against Harlow and Arthur Burns, senior aides with independent views, so Kissinger moved against those on his staff who might be dangerous to him. The first casualty was Richard Allen, who had direct access to Nixon and knew the secret of Kissinger’s campaign activities. Then Kissinger turned on those, such as Morton Halperin, whom Nixon and his chief aides considered too liberal.
Coping with Nixon, pleasing him, and trying to find out what he really wanted were the most important priorities for Kissinger. They would become even more important than his own convictions about American foreign policy. Even more important than finding a way out of the war in Vietnam.
I. Allen “was regarded as a very conservative element who had a line to Nixon that predated the NSC,” according to Donald R. Lesh, a junior Foreign Service officer who worked for Kissinger in 1969. Richard Moose, the first NSC staff secretary, recalls Kissinger’s telling him “right off the bat” that “Allen was to be put in a pigeonhole on the corner of a desk someplace and that Allen was not really going to figure in Henry’s operation.” Martin Anderson, a young White House economist and Nixon campaign worker who had become friendly with Allen, watched with fascination as Kissinger worked his will in the White House. Anderson says he was told of a high-level foreign policy meeting in the Oval Office sometime early in 1969 at which Nixon—seemingly concerned about the future of his former campaign aide—turned to Kissinger and said, “Have Dick Allen do this.” Kissinger agreed but, as Anderson subsequently learned, never discussed it with Allen. Weeks later, Anderson was told of a second meeting in the President’s office at which Nixon asked again about the project for Allen and Kissinger responded, in effect: I’m sorry. That man does not produce. I cannot get him to produce.
II. Buchanan first met Kissinger at the Florida White House in Key Biscayne, shortly after the inauguration. Swimming laps in a pool used by the senior White House staff, he noticed Kissinger beside the pool, his briefcase open and top-secret documents spilling out. Buchanan got out of the water, walked over, and said hello. Kissinger immediately responded, “You know, Burnham is right.” He was referring to James Burnham, the senior editor of the conservative National Review, whose columns repeatedly criticized American policy makers for their failure to support dissent inside the Communist bloc, beginning with the short-lived revolt in East Germany in July of 1953. Burnham was, as Kissinger obviously knew, an intellectual hero to Buchanan.
III. Most backchannel messages are routed through the facilities of the Central Intelligence Agency and of the National Security Agency—which is under the aegis of the Defense Department—where such messages are seen by only a few clerks and no copies are kept. One NSA official recalls that there were scores of informal government teletype links around the world in the late 1960s that were used for “OTR” (off-the-record) messages as well as highly classified reports. The Pentagon has a separate backchannel facility for its senior officers, who can use the system to complain about presidential policy or to make golf dates and hunting plans with the knowledge that the message will remain secure.