AMID THE CONTROVERSIES over intelligence, the fallout from the withdrawal in Vietnam, and the doubts in Congress, in the press, and among the public about the presidency as an institution, President Ford decided to take action to make it clear who was in charge. On Sunday, November 2, 1975, in what the press called the “Halloween Massacre,” he announced his dismissal of several of President Nixon’s top appointees, including CIA director William Colby, defense secretary James Schlesinger, treasury secretary William E. Simon, and agriculture secretary Earl Butz. He also removed Kissinger from his post as national security advisor, while keeping him on as secretary of state. At the same time, the White House leaked the news that Vice President Rockefeller wouldn’t serve as Ford’s running mate for the 1976 presidential campaign.
President Ford had various reasons for this array of personnel changes. On the foreign policy front, he’d been unhappy with Colby for his willingness to cooperate with Congress by handing over sensitive CIA records. Whatever the CIA’s excesses, poor judgment, and egregious actions, the president and his top foreign policy advisers worried that additional disclosures by Colby or other agency employees would only make things worse. The White House no longer trusted Colby—and hadn’t for some time.399
So at eight o’clock on the morning of Sunday November 2, Ford summoned Colby to the Oval Office and told him he was reorganizing the White House. He then asked the DCI if he wanted to be US ambassador to NATO. Colby said he’d think about it and left the office. Later that day, after talking things over with his wife, he called in and declined the president’s offer.
After Colby left, the president called for Schlesinger, telling his deputy chief of staff, Dick Cheney, to “get that son-of-a-bitch in here so I can fire him.” Cheney said it was the angriest he had ever seen Gerald Ford.400
Ford had been increasingly frustrated with Schlesinger, mostly because of the secretary of defense’s attitude. During his weekly meetings with the president, Schlesinger would slouch in his armchair, wave his pipe around, and lecture Ford as though he were a none-too-bright student, not even bothering to button his shirt collar or tighten his tie. Schlesinger’s behavior “just infuriated Ford,” Scowcroft remarked, and over time Ford became less and less tolerant of his behavior. Scowcroft tried to intervene; he gently “tried to tell Schlesinger not to talk to him that way.” It did no good.401
By contrast, Kissinger was savvy enough to defer to Ford and to show him respect in public, whereas the secretary of defense simply didn’t bother. Reporters joked that “the difference between Kissinger and Schlesinger was Kissinger would come in to see the President and say, ‘Mr. President, as you are well aware . . . ’ and then he would explain what was going on. Schlesinger would come in and say, ‘Mr. President, you probably don’t know this, but. . . . ’”402
Ford did not like the constant clashes between Kissinger and Schlesinger, and their fractious relationship made his job and the process of policy making that much harder. His chief of staff, Rumsfeld, certainly had his own ambitions to become secretary of state and perhaps eventually run for president, and for months had been grooming Cheney to replace him as chief of staff.403 He probably helped persuade Ford to make the change. Schlesinger further damaged his cause by making a series of public statements that contradicted official administration policy—revealing, for example, that secret agreements had accompanied the Paris peace accords. Schlesinger appeared to be a loose cannon, creating more problems for the White House than he was worth.
Schlesinger tried to dissuade the president from firing him and pleaded for his job. But Ford was adamant, and Schlesinger wanted no part of the job being offered him—directing the Import-Export Bank. Their ugly, hour-long conversation only reinforced in Ford’s mind the correctness of his decision.404 The dismissal would soon cause trouble, however. Schlesinger, a proud and accomplished man, did not take his dismissal lightly. He would try to retaliate.
Donald Rumsfeld was now named secretary of defense; he was replaced in his position as chief of staff by his thirty-four-year-old deputy, Dick Cheney. Ford’s first choice for Colby’s replacement as director of intelligence was his friend and confidant, the powerful Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams. When Williams declined, Ford tapped George H. W. Bush.
Rumsfeld had started out as an Illinois congressman and was then appointed to a series of White House positions: counselor to the president under Nixon, director of the economic stabilization program in the office of the vice president under Ford, US ambassador to NATO, and White House chief of staff (if not officially). He was smart, driven, a skilled bureaucratic operator, and immodest about his abilities. Nixon called him “a ruthless little bastard,” meaning it as a compliment. Kissinger called Rumsfeld “a special Washington phenomenon: the skilled full-time politician-bureaucrat in whom ambition, ability, and substance fuse seamlessly.” This might have also been meant as a compliment, except that Kissinger couldn’t stand Rumsfeld.405
Almost everyone credits Rumsfeld with persuading Ford to reshuffle his cabinet—and many have commented about the personal political motives that may have been involved. Scowcroft, never one to cast aspersions on others without good reason, said that the entire reorganization was “Rumsfeld inspired,” since moving Bush to the CIA “presumably [took him] out of the political arena.” Rogers Morton, secretary of the interior under Presidents Nixon and Ford, told Bush, “I know damn well [the story is] true.”406
Ford and Kissinger had both come to appreciate George Bush’s talents. When Ford asked Kissinger about how Bush was doing as the United States’ liaison to China, Kissinger replied, “Magnificently. I am very, very impressed with him.” It was precisely because Rumsfeld viewed Bush as a fellow rising star within the Republican Party and a future presidential candidate that he wanted to isolate Bush in Langley, given how discredited the CIA was at the time. Rumsfeld was going to “bury the sonofabitch.”407
Bush himself, perhaps because of his own good manners, expressed doubt that Rumsfeld was behind the appointment, but he did say that a lot of his friends advised him, “Don’t do this, this will be the end of your political life.” So he then “talked to Brent about it,” and Scowcroft told him “Well, this is what the president wants you to do.” Bush even suggested Scowcroft might have played a role in the cabinet reshuffling, saying, “If Scowcroft had a hand in this, I don’t know.”408
Bush accepted the position, of course, and the appointment did not end his political life. But he did have to agree—reluctantly—to a demand by Democratic senators as a condition of their approval that he not run for the vice presidency in 1976.409
Rumsfeld had his own ideas about who should replace Kissinger as the new national security advisor. His first choice was his friend Arthur Hartman, the assistant secretary of state for Europe. But Kissinger made a strong case on behalf of Scowcroft, “believing him to be best qualified and also the person most comfortable with existing procedures.” Ford didn’t have to think long and offered Scowcroft the position of national security advisor.410
Many Washington observers criticized Scowcroft’s promotion, doubting that the change would actually reduce Kissinger’s influence. Columnist George Will wrote that Scowcroft was Kissinger’s “obedient servant.” “To say that Scowcroft is independent,” Sen. Henry Jackson commented, “is one of the [greatest] political fictions of all time.” Scowcroft was “pliable” and wholly “unthreatening,” according to Roger Morris, an NSC staff member in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while a United Press International wire story described the switch of national security advisors as being merely “cosmetic.” Many figured Scowcroft would continue to do Kissinger’s bidding—assuming that that was what he had been doing all along—thereby leaving what they considered to be Kissinger’s detrimental influence and flawed judgment in place. The eminent columnist Joseph Kraft characterized Scowcroft as “so much the loyal No. 2 that Dr. Kissinger’s power will only be clipped slightly.”411 Kissinger would simply be making foreign policy from Foggy Bottom rather than the West Wing—and now without Schlesinger to serve as a counterweight.
Ford sought to correct the popular misperception that Scowcroft was “a Kissinger man,” telling reporters his new national security advisor had “an independent mind.” Other White House officials pointed out that Scowcroft had “too much moral integrity to become anyone’s sycophant” and that he could scarcely be considered Kissinger’s “tool.” As one White House official explained, Scowcroft served “as a foil for the secretary” and as “a kind of alter ego.”412
The president was right, and the critics were mistaken. Scowcroft was his own person, and his promotion would result in a significant decrease of Kissinger’s authority. Part of the reason for Scowcroft’s eclipse of Kissinger was that the latter had been tainted by his close ties to the disgraced Nixon presidency and by the subsequent revelations that he had his own White House taping system. By late 1975, as a result, Kissinger was not the formidable political figure he had once been, and he started to attract harsh criticism from right-wing Republicans—including some of Ford’s own political advisers—as well as more criticism from Democrats.
Furthermore, Kissinger’s loss of his position as national security advisor reduced his influence over the rest of the government, particularly the Defense Department and Treasury, since he wasn’t any longer in a position to control the NSC process or NSC staff. He wasn’t quite so indispensable now in forming and executing US foreign policy. However, he retained some of his influence on the NSC process by virtue of the fact that Scowcroft agreed that Kissinger could continue as chairman of the Washington Study Action Group and the arms control Verification Panel; Scowcroft took over as chair of the 40 Committee in charge of covert activities (which would be renamed the Operations Advisory Group a few months later).413
Kissinger recognized the personnel shift as a blow to his authority, and he twice considered resigning after the Halloween Massacre. But Ford consistently reassured Kissinger that he couldn’t do without him and asked him to stay on as secretary of state.
The day after the announcement, the White House telephone switchboard was jammed with calls. Kissinger told the president that the flood of phone calls was the work of Schlesinger, who’d “obviously been very active,” and Al Haig said it revealed Schlesinger’s presidential ambitions.414
Presidential ambitions were certainly involved in the Halloween Massacre—but they were those of Gerald R. Ford. The president was very much aware of the pressure building on the Republican right. He was sensitive to the widely held view that he was too deferential to and too dependent on his secretary of state, and his political advisers had been urging him to show the American public who was really running the country. Ford may have had other good reasons for removing and reassigning several of his top advisers, but the “best two,” according to one anonymous White House official, were “New Hampshire and Florida, the first two Presidential primaries.”415
But the reshuffling came as a great surprise, and some in the press condemned the president for the suddenness of the changes and the fact that the White House hadn’t put up any trial balloons in advance of the announcement. Robert Hartmann commented, “The ‘leaks’ that give most Presidents so much pain serve a useful purpose by preparing people to accept sharp shifts in Presidential policies and dramatic personnel changes.” Even the New Republic’s usually sympathetic John Osborne thought President Ford’s decisions revealed him “to be intensely egoistic behind that humble façade of his . . . and desperately anxious to establish and prove himself as a national leader in his own right.” Others disagreed. ABC News’s David Brinkley said Ford “was in good shape,” and the New York Times’ James Reston wrote that “the shake-up didn’t hurt” the president at all. But most commentators thought the shake-up made Ford look insecure and confused.416
Unfortunately for the Ford White House, Schlesinger was a friend of Senator Jackson’s. Jackson thought of Schlesinger as a first-rate professional and a man of outstanding competence, courage, integrity, and honor. So he concluded that Ford, by firing Schlesinger, was manifesting his intolerance of differing points of view and lack of interest in receiving dispassionate, candid, and honest advice. Jackson further believed that with the dismissal of Schlesinger and Colby, Ford would be able to protect Kissinger’s involvement in “a whole series of doubtful activities.” He found risible the idea the president now had a new team of advisers: it was still the same old Kissinger-Scowcroft “machine.” Scowcroft, for his part, was “a snake in the grass,” in Jackson’s description, someone who didn’t explain his actions, who behaved in a cavalier manner, and who demonstrated a complete “lack of sincerity and credibility.”417 (Scowcroft attributed Jackson’s comment to the pernicious influence of the senator’s chief foreign policy aide, Richard Perle. Once Perle stopped working for Jackson in 1980, Scowcroft said, he found the senator to be “warm and friendly,” notwithstanding their policy differences.)418
The only concrete effort to block Scowcroft’s appointment was led by Representative Les Aspin, a young Democrat from Wisconsin. Aspin raised the point that according to Title 10 of the federal code, no military official could hold a civil office, and General Scowcroft’s appointment as the president’s assistant for national security affairs would make him the first military man to hold the position.419 Yet Title 10 hadn’t been much of an issue in the past. When President Harry Truman asked Gen. George Marshall to become secretary of state in 1948 and when Nixon selected Gen. Al Haig to be chief of staff in May 1973, Congress simply made exceptions. It would later do exactly the same with Lt. Col. Robert McFarlane, Adm. John Poindexter, and Gen. Colin Powell, each of whom was allowed to keep his military commission while serving as national security advisor.420 (The legal restriction has since been repealed.)
Yet Scowcroft agreed with Title 10: he didn’t think the national security advisor should be an active-duty military officer. For a senior White House official to retain a military commission would, he thought, divide his loyalty between his military superiors and the American president. Scowcroft was also concerned that members of Congress, the press, and the public might think that the national security advisor was providing the president with options and advice that favored the Air Force or the Department of Defense. With the precarious state of the presidency and the charged political environment of the mid-1970s, Scowcroft wanted to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. So he decided to retire from the Air Force effective December 1, 1975.421
Such conscientiousness was both highly unusual and unnecessary. Scowcroft could have fought to retain his commission, and had he chosen to do so, he almost certainly would have been able to keep his commission. In fact, toward the end of the administration, the president asked the national security advisor if he wanted to return to active duty; Scowcroft declined, telling Ford that it would smack of a political deal. Given his excellent reputation, any criticism and unwelcome attention would have in all likelihood dissipated quickly. Scowcroft would then have been able to receive a fourth star, as had Haig and as Powell later would—a fitting recognition of Scowcroft’s public service. Scowcroft was giving up his rank, military salary, and future Air Force career for what could possibly turn out to be merely fifteen months in office. It was a “hell of a price,” a White House official stated.422
The promotion barely altered Scowcroft’s daily routine. He had been the acting national security advisor for all intents and purposes for over two years, ever since Kissinger had gone over to the State Department. So he simply kept doing his job: advising President Ford, managing the NSC staff, and working with Kissinger. Although some wanted Scowcroft to speak out more, since Kissinger was by then unpopular, the national security advisor sought the president’s guidance. “Look, I work for you,” Scowcroft said. “I’ll do whatever you want.” Ford said, “No, I want you to stay behind the scenes where you are now.”423
Still, Scowcroft’s promotion changed some things. Kissinger still played a major role in making US foreign policy and dominated the news accounts, but on key issues the president increasingly consulted with Scowcroft, whom he trusted not to have a personal agenda or ulterior motives. Quietly, Scowcroft “managed to have a prevailing influence,” McFarlane observed.424
Scowcroft began to speak up more and took more initiative, especially on issues Kissinger didn’t care much about.425 For example, when Ford, Kissinger, and Scowcroft met in late 1976 to discuss how to handle wheat shipments to Israel, Scowcroft—who didn’t want any formal agreement on wheat between the United States and Israel—suggested the White House release the news that Kissinger was preparing to offer a larger amount of foreign food aid in 1976. “Why don’t we leak that?” he asked. Ford agreed.426
Scowcroft also began to talk to Kissinger as he would to a peer. After one of Kissinger’s press conferences, for instance, he remarked, “You sure did slam the Soviets. Got a little too much, didn’t you.” It was an observation, not a question, to which Kissinger replied simply, “Yes, it was a little too much.” As one former US ambassador who had formerly worked on the NSC staff told the author and foreign policy expert David Rothkopf, “Kissinger would expect Scowcroft to defer to him, and Scowcroft would very pleasantly say, you know, Henry, I don’t think that’s going to work.”427
When Ford, Kissinger, and Scowcroft met in the summer of 1975 to discuss SALT, Kissinger said they didn’t need a SALT meeting that week, whereupon Scowcroft replied quickly, “I think we should, just for the President to say he wants a SALT Treaty and expects everyone to focus on the national interest.”428 Ford held the meeting. In addition, meeting transcripts “may not reflect the whole story,” as one White House military assistant remarked. Scowcroft “always [had] access to the President after a meeting,” and Ford “undoubtedly asked him what he thought.” The two “worked together.” Scowcroft appreciated and respected the secretary of state, but by no means was he “overwhelmed” by Kissinger.429
With Scowcroft’s increased confidence in his role and own judgment, he began to put into practice his ideas about how the national security advisor should behave and how the NSC’s process should operate. He trimmed the NSC staff to about forty-five professionals (from about a hundred under Kissinger), reduced NSC expenses, added more women to his staff, and improved interagency coordination.
Scowcroft also changed the atmosphere of the NSC. Under Kissinger, the NSC process had been “a very shadowy operation.” Kissinger liked to hold all the cards and limited the information he shared with his staff—Scowcroft included. He had also discouraged his NSC staff from contacting their counterparts in other departments and agencies and went so far as to deny them White House Mess privileges so they wouldn’t fraternize with other presidential aides. The end result was rampant dissatisfaction and disillusionment among the NSC staff and a high turnover rate, despite the top-quality personnel Kissinger was able to attract.430
Although he’d never say so publicly, Scowcroft “strongly rejected Kissinger’s model for running the NSC,” one writer noted. Scowcroft sought to create a more open and friendly work environment.431 He gave the members of his staff the opportunity to express their dissatisfaction and make requests, and he listened. When the NSC’s chief of planning asked for better circulation and sharing of information, better feedback on decision papers forwarded by the staff, and a more open environment, Scowcroft largely complied. He shared the desire to make the NSC process more transparent.432
Scowcroft “was much more inclusive,” said Lt. Gen. Daniel Christman, an NSC staff member who worked under both Kissinger and Scowcroft. Scowcroft reached “out to junior members on the staff, and just welcomed the give-and-take by creating an environment in which these differing views were elicited with very little tension. That’s one of the reasons why I thought his model of dealing with complicated interagency topics was really very, very impressive.” Added Christman, “It was Brent’s ability to ensure that all thoughts were on the table, and to treat those who presented them respectfully.”433
Scowcroft also began to delegate more, especially to his new deputy, William G. Hyland (who had been serving as the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research).434 He began to hold more frequent meetings with the members of his NSC staff, he renewed their White House mess privileges, and he reduced the friction between the NSC and other departments and agencies. He reinstituted the position of NSC executive secretary to oversee the paper flow and provide institutional memory. And he leavened his directives and demands with humor and praise, believing he’d get much better work from his NSC staff through encouragement and empathy rather than by what he termed “whips” and “beatings.”435 Whereas Kissinger often got upset and screamed at his staff, Scowcroft stayed calm and under control, even—and perhaps especially—during crises. Almost never did he lose his temper, and rarely would he say anything stronger than “gosh.” The NSC staff became a lot happier under Scowcroft.436
He also rearranged how the NSC handled press relations. Kissinger had effectively run his own press operation, causing friction between the White House press office and NSC staff. Had the coordination been better, Ron Nessen argued, they “could have averted a catastrophe such as the Solzhenitsyn problem.” So when Scowcroft took over, he appointed a NSC press secretary, Margi Vanderhye, to work in tandem with Nessen and other press office officials, who, in turn, appreciated Scowcroft’s willingness to trust them and grew comfortable working with him.437
Scowcroft continued Kissinger’s practice of using background briefings. “I rarely do anything on the record,” he explained to ABC News’s Ann Compton. “I will talk to you on background or in some way that I can be more relaxed, and in which I can tell you more about what we both know is what you need to know.”438 What Scowcroft didn’t tell Compton was that he was far less inclined to bad-mouth others, leak information, distort facts, or willingly mislead people than was his predecessor.
He took additional steps to make the NSC process more effective. Because he knew Ford liked to read and to have open discussions on issues, he reduced the length of NSC memoranda to “no more than three pages,” in which he “summarized the issues to the extent I knew them, the views of the other senior advisers, and then my own judgments regarding the pros and cons of different opinions and recommendations.” He then appended the original documents to the NSC summary so that the president could go over them if he wanted to.439 These brief memos then became the basis for the larger policy discussions.
Most significantly, Scowcroft restored the NSC principals to their traditional status in the decision-making process. He reinstituted full meetings of the NSC as the primary venue for setting policy, thereby ensuring that “all the major agency heads got their say on key policy differences.” He didn’t take positions without first getting all the available facts on the table and letting all the principals give their positions. Rather than cutting Kissinger off from access to the president (as Kissinger had done to Secretary Rogers), Scowcroft made sure that all of the principals’ views were fairly and equally represented. He also discontinued Kissinger’s practice of drafting decision memoranda that predisposed the president to choose the option that Kissinger meant him to pick (it was always the second, or middle, option). Scowcroft himself acknowledged that he “was more solicitous of the need to try to co-opt people within the government in support of particular policies than Henry was, who was more inclined to move and let the chips fall where they may, and rely on the president to back him up.”440 The NSC process thereby became much more consensual and far less autocratic.
Contrary to the opinions of George Will, Henry Jackson, and others who’d believed that the locus of decision making would shift to the State Department, “the center of the interdepartmental policy-development process remained in the White House under President Ford and Scowcroft,” three analysts of the Ford administration wrote. The administration’s “handling of issues such as SALT, arms sales, economic development assistance, and of crises bears witness to this fact.”441 So even as Kissinger continued to strongly influence Ford’s foreign policy and attracted the lion’s share of media attention, Scowcroft, by virtue of his scholarship, honesty, and integrity, became that much “more valuable in shaping policy,” McFarlane said.442 But Scowcroft stayed very much behind the scenes, which both he and President Ford preferred.443
The president was comfortable working with Kissinger and Scowcroft both and appreciated their different contributions. “I used Henry for the primary purpose of executing and formulating foreign policy for my administration,” he explained. “At the same time, Brent, as head of the NSC, would make comments and observations and consult directly with me on policy and the choices we faced.” While Kissinger made the recommendations, Ford told David Rothkopf, he was the president and commander-in-chief. “And if I wanted additional background, I would turn to Brent.”444 Ford often wanted additional background.
As a result, Scowcroft played almost the opposite role as national security advisor that Kissinger had. He acted a mediator and conciliator of differences around the government. One of Kissinger’s former NSC staff members said that, as a legacy of Kissinger’s style, Scowcroft had to clean up after “all the breakage” his predecessor had caused in the State Department and other departments and agencies.445 In contrast to Kissinger, Scowcroft was “a skillful manager of the bureaucracy,” inclusive of the other principals, and respectful of others, one of his NSC assistants pointed out. Whereas power was “at the center” in Kissinger’s NSC, according to NSC staff member David Gompert, Scowcroft didn’t view the NSC “as sort of a platform from which to push a particular policy.” Scowcroft thought “much more deeply in the consequences of things,” McFarlane believed. This extended not just to international relations (where Kissinger himself was very capable) but to the rest of the national security bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press as well. In what was a “very, very difficult” period, Scowcroft was steadfast; he didn’t “get rattled.”446
Despite the changes Scowcroft introduced, Kissinger didn’t resent his former deputy or object to his growing influence. Thanks to both Scowcroft’s steadying influence and what Ford termed the “care and feeding of Henry Kissinger,” Kissinger was content to go along with the NSC reforms. Scowcroft “gave Ford his independent judgment in dealing with foreign policy issues,” Kissinger writes in Years of Renewal, “without ever giving me the feeling that he was competing with my responsibilities as secretary of state.”447 Kissinger “had total confidence” that his former deputy “would represent my views fairly to the president, the president’s views accurately to me, and his own views precisely to both of us, whether we liked them or not.” He was “the balance wheel of the national security process,” Kissinger noted, “and he has remained a national asset and personal friend.”448
Scowcroft recognized what he was doing. “I knew Henry very well. I knew how to get around the difficult side of him and appeal to the easy side of him.” It was Scowcroft’s emotional intelligence, coupled with his policy expertise and bureaucratic savvy, that allowed their role changes to go much more smoothly than might otherwise have been expected. “Henry Kissinger had worn two hats for a couple of years—that was a hard adjustment for him,” Scowcroft told the political scientist John Burke, “and I took account of that.”449
Henry Kissinger remains the most influential national security advisor in American history. By centralizing information and the NSC process, Kissinger and Nixon—and, for a while, Kissinger and Ford—were able to control both the NSC process and the content of US foreign policy, with the result that they were able to act precisely and adroitly within the international system of states.450
But the drawback of this concentration of power was that when the cabinet-level appointees or sub-cabinet officials in the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the FBI, and the Treasury Department didn’t buy into the White House’s policies, the result was serious news leaks, problems with policy coordination, and time-consuming and energy-draining bureaucratic battles. These divisions would then often pull Congress and the press into the fray, making matters yet worse.
The idea of an all-powerful Henry Kissinger, an image that prevails among many political writers, popular historians, and the American public, thus needs amending on several counts. Kissinger alone didn’t make the Nixon and Ford administrations function. Nixon was very much his boss; it was predominantly Nixon’s foreign policy. And if Ford was more dependent on Kissinger than Nixon, especially at first, he also frequently overruled his secretary of state.
In addition, Kissinger’s influence on Nixon and Ford would not have been possible without the assistance of Al Haig, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Lawrence Eagleburger, Winston Lord, and others, none more than Scowcroft. Specifically, much of what Kissinger did—and therefore much of what Nixon and Ford accomplished—he achieved by virtue of Scowcroft’s quiet abilities and complementary skills. “It would be difficult,” as Richard Head, Frisco Short, and Robert McFarlane write in their study of presidential decision making, “to overstate Brent Scowcroft’s contribution to both the substance and process of United States national security policy during his four years in the White House.”451
The notion of an all-powerful Kissinger further ignores the fact that Kissinger’s domineering and secretive style often alienated others within the government, leading to various forms of bureaucratic resistance—troubles exacerbated by Nixon’s own suspicious and secretive personality. And his penchant for holding information close to the vest and refusing to share it with others who had a stake in US policies prevented Kissinger from making the best use of the contributions and talent of others in the White House and around the government.
“Secrecy may have enabled Nixon and Kissinger to obtain better results in negotiations with the Vietnamese, the Soviets, the Chinese, and within the Middle East,” the writer and security analyst David Rothkopf pointed out, but it was hardly clear that the secrecy surrounding the Paris negotiations, the bombing in Indochina, the pacification program, and the covert efforts to upend the regime of Salvador Allende in Chile, among other initiatives, made those policies more effective. Kissinger’s secret diplomacy may have fueled media interest, but it also made him that much more intent on controlling leaks, withholding information, and managing external perceptions.452 That secrecy arguably caused the quality of US foreign policy to suffer, with the texts of the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty in 1972 and the Paris Peace accords of 1973 as cases in point.453
Kissinger’s management style exacted another cost. His attention to a few high-profile issues—the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and the Middle East, especially—deflected attention from other matters, which were left to lower-level officials in the relevant departments and agencies to sort out. Consequently, responses to these other issues were often not coordinated across the government. This was partly by design, a result of Nixon’s memo of March 1970 that instructed Kissinger to focus on East-West issues and delegate the rest.454 But with the concentration of power in two men with distinct, sometimes clashing personalities, Nixon and Kissinger often ended up worrying more about each other than about US foreign policy.
The opening to China and the triangulation of US-China and US-Soviet relations were foreign policy strokes of genius. Yet the concentration of power within the White House and the attendant secrecy ultimately made Nixon’s foreign policy less successful than is commonly thought. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s new diplomatic ties helped little with Vietnam and Indochina—the chief reason for Nixon’s overture, after all—and Nixon and Kissinger oversold détente and SALT to the American public. Kissinger’s “failing was that he never really understood the American democracy,” Eagleburger later remarked. “He never understood the fact that you had to have popular support—that was an issue that he didn’t think much about.”455
The consequence was the later demise of détente and the unhappy fate of SALT II, which disenchanted the public all the more. Americans had been led to believe that the rapprochement between the United States and the Soviet Union would greatly benefit them: détente would reduce military competition, lessen the US-Soviet rivalry, and result in more harmonious superpower relations. Kissinger similarly believed that détente “would spill over into other fields,” as one NSC staffer put it. But Kissinger “was repeatedly disappointed”—as were those who hoped détente would lead to a better world.456
In short, the promises that Nixon and Kissinger held out to the American public—and, indeed, to the world—with respect to the Vietnam War and Indochina, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East, and SALT and arms control never materialized. Nixon and Kissinger’s foreign policy failed to produce significant and lasting results, with the partial exception of China. Instead, as one scholar of US national security points out, “the to-ing and fro-ing concealed a lack of real achievement.” Indicatively, the subsequent US-Soviet summits in San Clemente in 1973 and Moscow in 1974 produced only “minor understandings and protocols.” Neither was Kissinger able to get the Department of Defense to agree to a mutually acceptable position on SALT II.457 Nor would there be “peace at hand” in Vietnam, per Kissinger’s announcement of October 26, 1972.
Meanwhile, the country became increasingly polarized, with Ronald Reagan and the Republican right on one side, and the Democrats and the left on the other. The Arab-Israeli conflict and other US foreign policy issues remained as difficult and seemingly intractable as ever, while the threat of nuclear war still hung over the world. Hence the backlash among the American public. Notwithstanding Kissinger’s and Nixon’s brilliance and the public acclaim bestowed on the two—Time proclaimed them its joint “Men of the Year” of 1972, and Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho in 1973—the Nixon presidency had to pay a steep price for its conduct of foreign policy.458
In contrast, Scowcroft never had to worry about his relationship with Gerald Ford, never lost sight of his goal of managing the NSC process as effectively as possible, and rarely ignored the lessons of history and the longer-term interests of the United States. And when he took over for Kissinger as national security advisor, he “surprised a lot of people” (as the editors of the Chicago Tribune later wrote) “by being very much his own man.”459
SCOWCROFT’S PERSONAL LIFE also changed over the course of the Nixon and Ford presidencies. Once he began working for Kissinger, he consistently put in extremely long hours, had very few off-days, even on weekends, and spent almost no time at home. Meanwhile, his daughter, with whom he talked every day—and he’d talk to her for hours on the telephone if there were things she wanted to discuss—finished high school in 1976, went off to college, and then law school.
More troublingly, Jackie, whose life revolved around Brent and Karen, had put on weight in the 1960s, following years of struggling with diets; although petite, she weighed over 200 pounds. She developed symptoms of type 2 diabetes in the 1960s, and her condition got worse in the 1970s. Very sweet but also somewhat shy, Jackie grew more and more self-conscious and agoraphobic. Although she had occasionally accompanied her husband to state dinners and other White House functions when he first began working in the White House, after the early 1970s Jackie didn’t even venture outdoors unless she had to. And when Scowcroft came home after the 1972 trip to Moscow, he found that she “had nailed the doors and windows shut.” President Nixon expressed concern for how many hours “the General” was working, and remarked to others in the White House that Scowcroft’s wife was an invalid (a fact that Brent would never volunteer).460
Brent consequently had to take care of his wife every day of the week, except on the days he was traveling (in which case their housekeeper took over). He prepared all her meals, ran errands, did the chores, and helped her move around the house (which included lifting her). As her condition worsened over time, this meant doing her kidney dialysis at home twice each day, including before he went into work in the morning—a difficult task, but easier than getting her into a car and taking her to a dialysis treatment center.
Scowcroft breathed none of this to his White House colleagues or his friends. And no one, not even his closest associates—including Robert Gates, his deputy under George H. W. Bush and one of his closest friends—went inside his house, even when they had to speak with him in times of emergency or international crisis. The extreme compartmentalization of Scowcroft’s life was yet another reflection of his intense self-discipline and dedication to duty—but one that suggests the enormous personal price he had to pay.