HENRY KISSINGER
Henry was too tricky to get along with—nobody in the U.S. government liked him at all because he tricked and deceived everybody.
—PAUL NITZE
Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has.
—GEORGE KENNAN
By the fall of 1967, Robert McNamara was absolutely certain that the Americanization of the Vietnam War had been a mistake. Determined to halt a debacle that was largely of his own making, the secretary of defense urged Lyndon Johnson to appoint Henry Kissinger to lead third-party negotiations to end the conflict. Kissinger was a noted scholar and public intellectual, the author of acclaimed books on nuclear strategy and the Congress of Vienna, a Harvard professor with a fierce ambition for government service. McNamara reasoned that Kissinger’s deliberative style, moderation, and varied international connections made him the ideal person to move negotiations forward. On September 12, President Johnson’s advisers gathered to consider McNamara’s suggestion. Secretary of State Dean Rusk endorsed Kissinger’s “trustworthiness and character,” noting that his centrist politics and seemingly orthodox Cold War views means that he is “basically for us.” The hawkish Walt Rostow conceded that Kissinger was a “good analyst” but worried that “he may go a little soft when you get down to the crunch.”1
McNamara won the argument—for the last time in the Johnson administration—and Kissinger began meeting in Paris with two French intermediaries with Hanoi connections, Herbert Marcovich and Raymond Aubrac, through September and October. The negotiations—code-named “Pennsylvania”—foundered on Hanoi’s reluctance to talk until the United States stopped bombing North Vietnam. While McNamara lauded Kissinger as “a very shrewd negotiator … the best I have seen in my seven years,” Johnson grew increasingly impatient as the weeks passed.2 During a tense telephone conversation in which the president addressed Kissinger as “Professor Schlesinger,” LBJ issued a blunt final warning in the style of Al Capone: “I’m going to give it one more try,” said Johnson, “and if that doesn’t work I’m going to come up to Cambridge and cut off your balls.”3
The channel quietly expired late in 1967 (though the president declined to carry out his threat). Kissinger drew at least two conclusions from this dismal affair. First, he needed to serve a president who trusted his judgment and was willing to give his diplomacy some time to work. Second, he would boost his prospects of securing a powerful position in the next administration if both major parties viewed him as a potential appointment. Having previously worked for the centrist Republican Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger turned swiftly to advise the victorious Nixon campaign after Rockefeller was defeated in the summer of 1968. His contact was Richard Allen, a thirty-two-year-old member of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University whom Nixon had appointed his principal foreign-policy aide. Allen and Kissinger worked together on the Vietnam platform plank. Allen was sufficiently impressed to invite Kissinger to join Nixon’s foreign-policy advisory board.
Assuming this position would have required Kissinger to break cover, however, so he declined and continued his dual-focus charm offensive. Kissinger also rationalized that he could better serve Nixon by retaining the Johnson administration’s confidence, securing access to whatever useful information might come his way. So Kissinger reached out to members of the administration with whom he had previously worked and who considered him an ally. One was Daniel Davidson, one of Kissinger’s former students at Harvard, who served as a member of Averell Harriman’s delegation in Paris and who kept his old tutor up to date with what was happening. Kissinger then forwarded this information to Nixon via Allen, unbeknownst to Harriman and Davidson. As Allen described it:
Henry Kissinger, on his own, volunteered information to us through a spy, a former student, that he had in the Paris peace talks, who would call him and debrief, and Kissinger called me from pay phones and we spoke in German. The fact that my German is better than his did not at all hinder my communication with Henry and he offloaded mostly every night what had happened that day in Paris.4
Kissinger was brazen in carrying out this task. On August 15, 1968, for example, he wrote to Harriman that there “is a chance that I may be in Paris around September 17, and I would very much like to stop in and see you then. I am through with Republican politics. The party is hopeless and unfit to govern.”5 A few weeks later, Harriman replied, “All is forgiven. Welcome back to the fold.”6 When Kissinger’s double-dealing was publicized in later years, through the publication of Seymour Hersh’s exposé, The Price of Power, Harriman’s team in Paris was appalled. Richard Holbrooke, who would later embark on a celebrated diplomatic career, was one member of the Paris delegation who found Kissinger’s behavior tawdry. “Henry was the only person outside of the government we were authorized to discuss the negotiations with,” Holbrooke said bitterly. “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.”7
Kissinger’s devious method of gathering intelligence was not nearly as problematic as what Nixon chose to do with it. In late September, Kissinger informed John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, “that something big was afoot regarding Vietnam.” A few weeks later, Kissinger fleshed out this insinuation, predicting that the Johnson administration would announce a bombing halt in mid to late October. On October 30, LBJ confirmed Kissinger’s expectation and announced that a unilateral U.S. bombing halt would take effect the following day—meeting Hanoi’s substantive precondition for peace talks. As the skies above North Vietnam cleared of American B-52s, Mitchell got in touch with Anna Chennault, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman who headed the nationwide Republican Women for Nixon, and who had close links to the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem. Mitchell said, “Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Richard Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made this very clear to them.”8
The “Republican position” was as follows: South Vietnamese President Thieu should refuse to attend peace negotiations under a Democratic president and instead wait to secure more generous terms under a Nixon administration. The advice was received loud and clear. On November 1, Thieu delivered a belligerent speech that disassociated himself from LBJ’s speech and Harriman’s efforts in Paris. The next day, Ellsworth Bunker reported that Thieu had “closeted himself in his private apartment in independence palace” and was refusing to meet with him. Bunker surmised correctly that Thieu was “convinced that Nixon will win and will follow a hawkish policy, and therefore he can afford to wait.”9 Wait Thieu assuredly did.
The margin of Nixon’s victory on November 5 was wafer-thin. Nixon secured 43.4 percent of the popular vote compared to Hubert Humphrey’s 42.7—this translated into a wider victory of 301 to 191 electoral votes. The segregationist third-party candidate, former Democratic governor of Alabama George Wallace, won 13.5 percent of the popular vote, providing an early portent of how LBJ’s greatest domestic achievements—in the sphere of civil rights—had destroyed Franklin Roosevelt’s uneasy coalition of northern liberals, African Americans, college professors, blue-collar workers, and southerners of all stripes, including bigots. Nixon also used Johnson’s progressive legislation as a useful foil, pursuing the so-called Southern strategy of exploiting the racism and fears of lawlessness of many southern voters, whose world LBJ had upended. In appealing to “states’ rights” and “law and order,” Nixon deployed euphemisms that resonated through the history of the South and that would serve the Republican Party well in the future. The year 1968 was pivotal in American political history—a defining moment for modern conservatism. But George Wallace got it wrong when he crowed that the “great pointy heads who knew best how to run everyone’s life have had their day.”10
The election was seminal in regard to foreign policy too, where pointy-heads like Kissinger were much in evidence. Nixon made two major decisions after defeating Humphrey. First, the president-elect decided to marginalize the State Department and concentrate foreign policymaking in the White House, ensuring that he could pursue his agenda without excessive interference from an arm of government he viewed as an adversary: a competing power base with an institutionally liberal bent. Second, Nixon appointed Henry Kissinger as his national security adviser, with all the power that Nixon’s first goal promised this position. The appointment marked a grand strategic break with the escalation and broadening of the Cold War since 1950. Kissinger was allergic to Woodrow Wilson’s moral certainties and viewed the Kennedy and Johnson years as an era in which American commitments were expanded—in accordance with Paul Nitze’s NSC-68—to unsustainable levels. Kissinger’s geopolitical views held important points of convergence with those of Alfred Mahan, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan.
Yet the manner of Nixon and Kissinger’s coming together created problems that bedeviled their working and personal relationships. Both were adept at secrecy and duplicity, and they viewed their assuming power as an essential good in itself, regardless of the means used to achieve it. Kissinger was thus willing to lie to Averell Harriman, one of America’s most distinguished public servants, in the hope that he might gain useful information to win favor with Nixon. At the same time, he flirted with the Humphrey campaign, whispering enticing promises—such as one to present the Humphrey campaign with a large incriminating file on Nixon that he’d prepared while advising Nelson Rockefeller—without actually delivering. He was so skilled at convincing people that he was on their side that Humphrey acknowledged, “If I had been elected, I would have had Kissinger be my assistant. That fellow is indestructible—a professional, able and rather unflappable. I like the fact that he has a little fun too.”11 The flappable Kissinger—for Humphrey misread him on that score—would have been pleased by this endorsement, which validated his acting skills as well as his bipartisan credentials.
For his part, Nixon was comfortable sacrificing a peace settlement in 1968 to the greater good of his assuming power. Passing advice to Chennault via Mitchell that he knew would reach Bui Diem was technically treasonous: frustrating the declared intentions of the U.S. government in concert with a foreign nation. Kissinger and Nixon’s first meaningful collaboration therefore laid bare the worst of their traits. Even Nixon’s announcement of Kissinger’s appointment was presented with a glaring untruth. On December 2, Nixon unveiled his new national security adviser and “announced a program that was substantially at odds with what he had told me privately,” Kissinger admitted. Nixon said that Kissinger’s role would be limited to planning and that he “would not come between the President and the Secretary of State.”12 Yet that was precisely where Nixon wanted Kissinger—a like-minded barrier to the State Department.
Observing each other in action throughout 1968, Nixon and Kissinger must have struggled to discern when one was lying or being sincere. Indeed, during the 1972 election campaign, Nixon worried (in needlessly paranoid—or “Nixonian”—fashion) that Kissinger might jump ship and offer sensitive information to whoever was likeliest to promote his career prospects. “Remember,” Nixon said to White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, “he came to us in ’68 with tales.”13 These first actions evidently left a lasting impression. Nixon and Kissinger paired up after some scandalous infidelities—Kissinger betrayed Harriman; Nixon, his country. This was clearly not a solid foundation on which to base a long-term relationship. In combination the two men scored some remarkable achievements. But it was little wonder that each would habitually suspect the other of cheating on them.
* * *
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, where his father, Louis, was a teacher at the local school. A refined and articulate—though reticent—man, Louis Kissinger read and collected great books, revered classical music, played the piano, and proselytized on the pleasures of intellectual endeavor—reminding his children that they were engaged in a perpetual exercise in self-improvement, or Bildung.14 Bavaria, however, was a hostile environment for Jews. Louis’s Judaism barred him from serving his country during the First World War. Young Heinz himself was prevented from attending the gymnasium, or state-run high school, because of his religion. Instead he was enrolled at the Israelitische Realschule, a fine Jewish school where history, philosophy, and religion were taken very seriously; each student studied the Bible and Talmud for two hours every day.15
As Hitler consolidated power after 1933, it became increasingly clear that the Nazis viewed segregation as insufficient in itself. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 dissolved Jews’ German citizenship, forbade intermarriage, and barred Jews from numerous professions, including teaching. Heinz’s childhood friend Werner Gundelfinger described the suffocating nature of Nazi repression: “We couldn’t go to the swimming pool, the dances, or the tea room. We couldn’t go anywhere without seeing the sign: Juden Verboten. These are things that remain in your subconscious.”16
When Walter Lippmann observed in 1933 that Germany’s Jews might serve as a conveniently placed lightning rod, deflecting Hitler’s attention from the rest of Europe, he was thinking of families like the Kissingers and the Gundelfingers.
State-sanctioned persecution and the volatile passions of the masses were the dark mainstays of Heinz’s formative years. The rise and fall of Weimar Germany had exposed democracy’s deficiencies when confronted by a ruthless and opportunistic adversary; Hitler’s Germany illustrated the brute force of totalitarianism and the effectiveness of propagating simple and poisonous lies. Kissinger drew the attendant conclusions. Paraphrasing Goethe, Kissinger later observed that “if I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”17 Though their points of departure were different, Kissinger, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan all shared grave concerns about the naïveté of the masses. All were troubled by democracy’s gaping blind side.
After the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Heinz’s tenacious and farsighted mother, Paula, wrote to her first cousin, who lived in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, asking if her sons, Heinz and Walter, could come and live with her. Fearing for Paula and Louis’s safety, the cousin suggested that the whole family emigrate, not just the children. It proved to be lifesaving advice for Paula and her husband. On August 30, 1938, the Kissingers departed Bavaria for New York via London. A brave and defiant Heinz, who Anglicized his name to Henry upon arrival in the United States, told a German customs inspector at the border: “I’ll be back someday.”18
Heinz was prophetic, though his pluck could not mask a wrenching experience for a family that had venerated German culture only to have the nation turn on them. Louis was forced to leave behind his beloved library, the focal point of the family’s erudition and ambition. Henry later responded stoically to questions that addressed the traumas of his childhood. In 1971, for example, he said, “That part of my childhood is not the key to anything. I was not consciously unhappy. I was not acutely aware of what was going on. For children, these things are not that serious.”19 Whether Kissinger’s response was brave or genuine, Hitler’s Germany took a terrible toll on the extended family members who chose to remain or were too old or infirm to leave. Thirteen perished in Nazi concentration camps.
Fürth and New York City were different worlds. America’s largest city was ethnically heterogeneous, entrepreneurial rather than hierarchical, and expanded at breakneck speed throughout the 1930s, serving as a haven for European Jews and as a magnet for the world’s brightest minds. After passing through Ellis Island, the Kissingers effectively started again with a blank slate. Paula Kissinger worked long hours as a housekeeper and a caterer to support her family. But her husband struggled to adjust to losing the status accrued through his refined tastes and teaching accomplishments in Bavaria. Louis Kissinger could not find the right map to navigate the New World.
Henry had no such status to lose and so managed the transition to living in New York City more comfortably. He attended George Washington High School—an excellent public school—and established himself as an outstanding student. He mastered English swiftly, though never losing his strong Bavarian accent; this part of his identity—conveying a seriousness of thought and purpose—was inviolable. Henry took a part-time job in a brush-making factory, providing additional resources for a family living in straitened circumstances. The comparison in life experience with Paul Nitze, who by that time had made all the money he could ever need, is stark. After graduating from high school, Henry embarked on an accountancy degree at City College, attended by many émigré Jews in New York. It did not charge tuition and the students could continue to live at home, the professors were excellent, and the students at this time—Jews in particular—became highly respected and well known in all fields of endeavor. Henry recalled, “My horizons were not that great when I was in City College. I never really thought of accounting as a calling, but I thought it might be a nice job.”20
After he had completed just a year at City College, the U.S. Army drafted Kissinger in February 1943. He was a serious and hardworking youth of just nineteen years when he left Manhattan for basic training at Camp Croft in Spartanburg, South Carolina—another jolting change in environment. In Fürth and Washington Heights, Henry had been immersed in an orthodox German Jewish milieu. The Army’s all-consuming demands of training—the drills, early starts, communal eating, cajoling, and bullying—ironed out the religious diversity of the draftees and ripped up the comforting routines of many recent immigrants. This had a positive dimension as well as a disorienting one, and Kissinger found that “the significant thing about the army was that it made me feel like an American … It was the first time I was not with German Jewish people. I gained confidence in the army.” Yet life in Spartanburg was not without difficulty, and he endured prejudice. After he scored exceptionally well on aptitude tests, the Army denied Kissinger the opportunity to become a doctor because of its quota on the number of Jews permitted to train as physicians. Impermanence, insecurity, and anti-Semitism—of different orders of magnitude—had been constants throughout his life: “Living as a Jew under the Nazis, then as a refugee in America, and then as a private in the Army isn’t exactly an experience that builds confidence.”21 But Kissinger secured one prize through his Army service that bolstered his sense of permanence and place: at Camp Croft he became a naturalized American citizen.
While Kissinger’s Judaism prevented him from becoming an Army doctor, his fluency in German and experience of life under Hitler made him a valuable commodity to the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the Army Specialized Training Program and given the brief of educating his fellow soldiers on the reasons why America was at war with Nazi Germany. Kissinger moved to Camp Claiborne in Louisiana, where he met Fritz Kraemer, another German émigré—though of aristocratic Prussian origin—whose job was to explain the peculiar evils of Nazism to American soldiers. Kissinger observed Kraemer in action and was impressed by the forcefulness of his speech and the quality of his insights. He wrote him a fan note: “I heard you speak yesterday. This is how it should be done. Can I help you somehow?” Kraemer met with Kissinger and was deeply impressed by his intellectual depth and seriousness of purpose, noting that Henry had “a sixth sense of musicality—historical musicality.” The two men became close; Kissinger had discovered his first mentor and won his patronage, marking an important stage in his career and intellectual development. Kraemer was deeply versed in philosophy and history—he had a bachelor’s degree from the London School of Economics and doctorates from the universities of Frankfurt and Rome—and Kissinger drew all the insight he could. “He would squeeze me for my ideas the way one would squeeze a sponge,” Kraemer recalled. “He hankered for knowledge, for truth. He wanted to know everything.”22
Kraemer recommended Kissinger for assignment to Germany as a translator for the division’s general. He informed his superiors that he had been thoroughly impressed by “this little Jewish refugee [who] as yet knows nothing, but already he understands everything.”23 And so, making good on his promise to the Nazi customs official in 1938, Kissinger returned to Germany in November 1944 as a translator for General Alexander Bolling. He was soon after promoted to a much larger role as the administrator of Krefeld, a small city in Westphalia, where he was instrumental in restoring order. Henry was promoted again to serve as a sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps, assuming control of a large district in the state of Hesse. What an empowering experience this must have been: returning to the scene of an awful crime visited upon him, his family, and millions of fellow Jews, and bringing some of its perpetrators to justice. With his keen insight into the German psyche, Kissinger was particularly effective at smoking out former Gestapo. As Jeremi Suri observes in Henry Kissinger and the American Century:
Decades later, Kissinger enjoyed recounting how he manipulated German habits for American purposes. In 1945 he posted signs in occupied areas requesting job applications from men with “police experience.” When an applicant arrived at Kissinger’s office, “I asked him what he had been doing, and he said Staats polizei [state police]. I then asked him in a joking manner, Geheim Staats Polizei [Gestapo]? And he said yes. So I locked him up … I locked up more Gestapo than the entire rest of the U.S. Army.”24
Though highly effective at his job, Kissinger had no appetite for the coarser aspects of revenge and scolded those who crossed the line in the interview room. He was awarded the Bronze Star for distinguished service.
Kissinger abandoned his religion during this time. He met many Jews who had survived Nazi concentration camps and was at a loss to find solace in the faith in which he had been immersed. “How could a benevolent God have allowed such horrors against his worshippers?” was Kissinger’s unanswered question, and that of many others beside.25 His vast energy and the self-reliance of the talented immigrant propelled his career forward while a deep pessimism about human nature cautioned him against trusting people too easily, or hewing too closely to the Wilsonian strain of thought regarding the world’s perfectibility. God was dead to Kissinger, and his worldview became accordingly fatalistic, anticipating worst-case scenarios. In this regard Fritz Kraemer is insightful on Kissinger’s experiences of Germany: “Kissinger is a strong man, but the Nazis were able to damage his soul … For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horrors of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse … It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”26
As his Army service in Germany approached its end, Kissinger pondered what he would do in the United States upon his return—the study of accountancy had lost all its limited appeal. Kraemer was on hand to dispense typically bracing advice to his protégé in 1947. Responding to Kissinger’s complaints regarding the shallowness of his education—“I know nothing,” Henry despaired—Kraemer said, “Go to a fine college. A gentleman does not go to the College of the City of New York.”27 Kissinger followed this advice and applied to Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. His application letter read: “In order to adequately prepare myself for a literary carreer [sic] with political history as the main field of interest, I consider it essential to acquire a Liberal Arts education.”28 Columbia and Princeton rejected him, but Harvard—at that time making a concerted effort to recruit veterans of exceptional promise—accepted him with a scholarship attached. This was a wonderful opportunity for a young man who only seven years before had been assembling shaving brushes after school to make ends meet. The Second World War gave a mighty boost to male social mobility; Henry Kissinger benefited from meritocratic principles taking deeper root in U.S. society.
* * *
Kissinger led a monastic life in Cambridge, working sixteen-hour days to make the most of the gilt-edged opportunity that was a Harvard education. The class of 1950 was the largest in Harvard’s history, and some three-quarters of the incoming sophomores were veterans who had benefited from the GI Bill. The class was more socially than racially diverse, however. James Conant’s presidency had made Harvard somewhat more accommodating to Jewish and nonwhite students, but many of the institutional slights present in Lippmann’s day remained. University administrators believed that housing Jewish students separately would better suit both Jews and Gentiles. So Kissinger was housed in Harvard’s oldest dormitory, Claverly Hall, where he shared accommodations with two fellow Jews. Henry kept these men at a distance, shunned extracurricular activities, and immersed himself in his courses, preparing assiduously for class. As his friend and biographer Stephen Graubard writes, “For the first time in his life, Kissinger experienced the exhilaration that came from habitual reading and writing, he became something of a recluse.”29 To relax, Kissinger set aside the assigned books and instead read novels or The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He avoided reading the editorials—“He said he had to form his own opinions,” remembered one of his roommates, “not learn those of the editors.”30
Professor William Y. Elliott performed a similar role at Harvard to Fritz Kraemer in the Army—swiftly identifying Kissinger’s gifts and encouraging his ambition. A magnetic presence, Elliott did not conform to the stereotype of a Harvard professor. A native of Tennessee and all-American football player at Vanderbilt, Elliott staged cockfights in the basement of his Cambridge town house and delighted in his nickname, “Wild Bill.” More conventionally, Elliott had been a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, and from that experience drew great pleasure in teaching students of uncommon ability on an individual basis. To test Henry’s mettle, he sent him off to the library with a reading list of twenty-five books, inviting him to compare Immanuel Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason. When Kissinger returned, three months later, with an outstanding paper, Elliott was bowled over. He began meeting with Kissinger frequently, lavishing attention in the Oxbridge style on his thinking and writing. Elliott later wrote to the Phi Beta Kappa selection committee that “I have not had any students in the past five years, even among the summa cum laude group, who have had the depth and philosophical insight shown by Mr. Kissinger.” Yet there was still work to be done. Elliott noted that Kissinger’s “mind lacks grace and is Teutonic in its systematic thoroughness.”31
Kissinger’s undergraduate dissertation became something of a Harvard legend. Whereas most students narrow their topic to boost the originality of their contribution—and to be able to finish more quickly—Kissinger chose to write on “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant.” At 388 pages, the dissertation was the longest submitted in Harvard’s history and led to the creation of a “Kissinger rule,” which limited subsequent students to one-third of this length. The dissertation discussed the ways Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Immanuel Kant grappled with the meaning of history, but also contained lengthy digressions on Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Spinoza, Goethe, Rousseau, Hegel, Dostoevsky, and others, proving to readers the breadth and ambition of Kissinger’s reading.
Given that the dissertation assessed Spengler, and was written by a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, it is perhaps unsurprising that a deep vein of pessimism informed the argument: “Life is suffering. Birth involves death. Transitoriness is the fate of existence. No civilization has yet been permanent … This is necessity, the fatedness of history, the dilemma of mortality … The generation of Buchenwald and the Siberian labor camps cannot talk with the same optimism as its fathers.”32 One of the dissertation’s most important themes, however, pertained to the inadequacies of theory testing when applied to politics and international relations. Or as Kissinger phrased it, “It does not suffice to show logically deduced theorems, as an absolute test of validity. There must also exist a relation to the pervasiveness of an inward experience which transcends phenomenal reality.”33 There were no “merely technical” solutions to “the dilemmas of the soul,” Kissinger cautioned, and “political scientists should cease condemning their profession for not living up to their misnomer.” Kissinger was developing a line of thought that Mahan, Lippmann, and Kennan would have cheered: politics and diplomacy are better understood and practiced as an art—requiring skill, craft, creativity, and intuition—than as a science, requiring prediction, hypothesis testing, and the application of theory. Clues to Kissinger’s later inclinations thus abound. The intellectual historian Bruce Kuklick believes that insufficient respect has been accorded Kissinger’s “The Meaning of History,” judging it “the most intellectually creative and sustained piece of work that he wrote, and a key exposition of his concerns.”34 If this is true, though, Kissinger hit his intellectual peak in his midtwenties.
After graduating summa cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1950, Kissinger was urged by Elliott to embark on doctoral work under his supervision. It took some persuasion, as Kissinger—like Kennan after his graduation—was keen to study for a graduate degree overseas, to broaden his range of experience, and then to join the Foreign Service. A major factor that convinced Kissinger to stay put was Elliott’s establishment of an International Seminar at Harvard, assisted by funding from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the CIA. The seminar was established to fund visits by exceptionally promising academics, politicians, and journalists from across the world. Here was a way to showcase the best of America—its premier research university and a bustling city—to the world’s embryonic elite. No wonder, then, that the program attracted lavish financial support. Some six hundred foreign students participated in the seminar up to 1969, including Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of France, Yigal Allon of Israel, Bülent Ecevit of Turkey, Leo Tindemans of Belgium, and Mahathir Bin Mohamad of Malaysia. American participants in the program were similarly distinguished, and included Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Herter, Walter Reuther, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and William F. Buckley Jr. To serve as his executive director, Elliott appointed Kissinger, who leapt at the opportunity to identify and cultivate remarkable domestic and global contacts. Some scholars at Harvard disliked the manner in which Kissinger used the seminar as a vehicle to serve his career goals. The eminent game theorist and nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling accused Kissinger of exploiting the seminar “to make Henry known to great people around the world.”35 This seems unfair, however, for who could have resisted such temptation?
Kissinger was based in Harvard’s government department but he continued to shun political science methods as inadequate to the task of drawing insight from the disordered world of international relations. As his doctoral cohort focused intently on U.S. Cold War strategy, identifying and testing the theories that best fitted their topics and emerging worldviews, Kissinger instead chose to write on the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In “A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822,” Kissinger studied the way Napoleon’s adversaries fashioned a stable and enduring structure of peace (by European standards) at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In Kissinger’s telling, Metternich of Austria had the star turn. Metternich was subtle and devious, and he eschewed morality as a guide to diplomatic action. It was through manipulating the balance of power in Europe that Metternich was able to create stability and a concert of mutual interests—without recklessly needling the defeated France—sufficient to sustain a commerce-facilitating peace through the nineteenth century in which all of Europe’s constituent nation-states were invested. Kissinger’s descriptions of Metternich were vivid and subconsciously autobiographical:
Napoleon said of him that he confused policy with intrigue … With his undeniable charm and grace, subtly and aloofly conducting his diplomacy with the circuitousness which is a symbol of certainty … He excelled at manipulation, not construction. Trained in the school of eighteenth-century cabinet diplomacy, he preferred the subtle maneuver to the frontal attack, while his rationalism frequently made him mistake a well-phrased manifesto for an accomplished action.
Walter Isaacson describes the dissertation as, “at its core, a tribute to Metternich’s mastery of complex diplomacy and his ability to play a game of sophisticated linkage among different negotiations.”36
This paean to Metternich and nineteenth-century balance-of-power diplomacy certainly caught Kissinger’s fellow students by surprise. One wondered aloud if Kissinger had heard of the atomic bomb; another suggested a transfer to the history department. As his biographer Walter Isaacson observes, “Kissinger rebutted coldly. Hiroshima had not created a new world; it merely showed that man had yet to learn history’s lessons about shaping a stable balance of power. So it made sense to explore the Congress of Vienna, one of the few successful peace conferences of the modern era.”37 The insights contained in “A World Restored” truly informed the policy career that followed. But Kissinger also penned his own elegy in the concluding chapter of the dissertation: “A statesman who too far outruns the experience of his people will fail in achieving a domestic consensus, however wise his policies.”38 Cold War America’s transparent, idealistic political context was vastly different from the closed arena in which Castlereagh and Metternich had plied their trade. Kissinger understood this only too well:
This book has dealt with conservative statesmen of countries with traditional social structures, of societies with sufficient cohesion so that policy could be conducted with the certainty conferred by the conviction that domestic disputes were essentially technical and confined to achieving an agreed goal. This enabled Metternich to pursue a policy of “collaboration” between 1809 and 1812 without being accused of treason and Castlereagh to negotiate with Napoleon without being charged with “selling his country.”39
Twenty years later, Paul Nitze accused Kissinger of committing these very same crimes.
* * *
Though Elliott regarded Kissinger’s thesis as first-rate, some of his colleagues worried about its shallow archival base, heavy reliance on secondary sources, and the sweep and generality of his conclusions—the same criticisms directed at Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History. For this reason and others, Kissinger did not secure tenure at Harvard in the years after completing his doctorate. While gaining tenure at Harvard was a Herculean task for anyone, Kissinger was disappointed nonetheless. Part of the problem was the sheer number of high-quality Ph.D.s vying for a permanent position at the same time, an imposing list that included Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and Stanley Hoffmann. But many at Harvard also detected in Kissinger a variety of unendearing traits: transparent ambition and the haughtiness and obsequiousness that sustained it. A significant problem was that Harvard—white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant to its very core—was not a conducive environment for Jews to prosper. McGeorge Bundy, whose parents’ families were both listed in the Social Register, was made dean of Harvard College in 1953. Bundy worked hard to reform Harvard on meritocratic lines. But Kissinger’s relationship with him was strained from the beginning, and he suspected prejudice played a part. In his 1979 memoir, Kissinger wrote that Bundy “tended to treat me with the combination of politeness and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people of, by New England standards, exotic backgrounds and excessively intense personal style.”40 Bundy, in fairness, actually deployed a different ethnic stereotype when criticizing Kissinger; he sensed a “certain Germanic cast of temperament which makes him not always an easy colleague.”41 Too Jewish and too German—here was a cruel twist of fate.
In 1955, Kissinger published an article in Foreign Affairs criticizing Eisenhower’s policy of massive retaliation. In a similar vein to Paul Nitze, Kissinger lambasted the strategy for being recklessly all-or-nothing. The gap between waging nuclear war and doing nothing was dangerously capacious. This would invite Sino-Soviet adventurism in the developing world, over which Moscow and Beijing knew Washington was unlikely to risk World War III.42 The article was Kissinger’s first foray into the contemporary foreign-policy debates and it raised his profile considerably. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the long-standing editor of Foreign Affairs, invited Kissinger to direct a new Council on Foreign Relations study group on nuclear weapons and foreign policy. Kissinger was thrilled to accept the job, which provided a wonderful entrée into the American foreign-policy establishment. It was quite an accolade for an untenured thirty-one-year-old instructor at Harvard.
The first meeting of the study group took place on May 4, 1955, and witnessed a testy exchange between Kissinger and Nitze, whose common concern about Eisenhower’s foreign policies appeared to unite them. In reference to the demarcation line between conventional and nuclear weapons, Nitze observed that “while the services still have a conventional ability of high order, some of their leaders seem to feel that non-nuclear methods may not be adequate to the tasks which have been outlined for the services to perform.” To fill the gap between the most powerful conventional bomb and the least powerful atomic one, Nitze suggested that low-yield tactical nuclear weapons could be developed to serve an important battlefield function. Kissinger was unconvinced by the merits of Nitze’s proposal, observing that “once a war becomes nuclear it is much harder to set any effective limits.”43 Nitze left the meeting with a distinctly bad impression, and relations would deteriorate from there.
The primary cause of their antagonism was Kissinger’s conversion to the merits of tactical nuclear weapons and the successful book he wrote based on the study group’s findings. On August 17, 1957, Kissinger wrote to Hamilton Fish Armstrong that “in a war among nuclear powers I have come to the conclusion—and this represents a big change in my own thinking—that limited nuclear war may actually prove to be a more stable situation than conventional war: thus, if we are concerned with avoiding all-out war, limited nuclear war might be the most effective strategy.”44 Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy that same year. The book took square aim at Eisenhower’s massive retaliation, advocated more flexible means of response to Sino-Soviet adventurism, and urged defense planners to devote more time to gaming scenarios in which low-yield nuclear weapons played a role. Kissinger was not exactly urging everyone to stop worrying and love the bomb—though he soon after earned the nickname “Dr. Strangelove East,” sharing the title with Stanford-based Edward Teller—but rather that the weapon should be normalized and rendered usable, in a similar fashion to certain hawkish Democrats.45 But rather than showering praise on Kissinger—a brother in nuclear arms—Nitze savaged the book.
In a long review in The Reporter, Nitze assailed Kissinger for misunderstanding weapons types, miscalculating blast effects, and engaging in vague generalizations that did not stand up to scrutiny. He even deployed the criticism that Kissinger had used against him the previous year, chiding Kissinger for failing to appreciate that waging “limited” nuclear war was incredibly challenging and dangerous. “If the limitations are really to stand up under the immense pressures of even a ‘little war,’” Nitze wrote, “it would seem something more is required than a Rube Goldberg chart of arbitrary limitations.”46 He found little of merit in Kissinger’s book, asserting that “I read the book with complete distaste. I felt that Henry had not really understood the discussion, he hadn’t been in this field. He didn’t understand thoroughly what we were talking about. The argumentation in the book was puerile and fallacious in many of its aspects.”47 Yet even the combative Nitze was surprised when Kissinger threatened to sue him for libel.
While vacationing in Maine, Nitze received a call from Philip Horton, the editor of The Reporter, who worriedly asked him if he was absolutely sure that his facts were correct. When Nitze said yes and asked why, Horton replied that Kissinger and the Council on Foreign Relations had threatened The Reporter with a libel suit. So Nitze took another look at the review, deleted a section that accused Kissinger of being contemptuous of democracy—in that the only historical figures Kissinger praised were Napoleon, Mao, and Stalin—and sent it back to Norton. The review was published, Kissinger remained silent, and the CFR’s lawyers stood down. A few months later, Kissinger spotted Nitze in Rome at a meeting of the Bilderberg Group—the secretive annual meeting of Western Europe’s and North America’s political and business elite—and told him what had happened: “Concerning that review you wrote of my book,” said Kissinger, “I made a deal with The Reporter that they could go ahead and publish it but I would be entitled to publish a rebuttal of any length. For the last couple of months I have been working, off and on, on that rebuttal. And you know what? I got to page 147 of my rebuttal and decided that if the rebuttal took that many pages there must be something wrong!”48 Kissinger had discovered the self-deprecating humor that would serve him so well in later years.
Nitze’s hostility toward Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was informed by many factors, one of which was simple jealousy. One reviewer observed cattily, “I don’t know if Mr. Kissinger is a great writer, but anyone finishing his book is a great reader.”49 But this was a rare note of criticism. Reviewing the book for The Washington Post, Chalmers Roberts hailed it as “the most important book of 1957, perhaps even of the past several years.”50 Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Edward Teller wrote, “In a limited nuclear war, as in any limited war, it is possible to avoid big-scale conflict if our aims remain moderate and our diplomacy skillful.”51 The Christian Realist thinker Reinhold Niebuhr endorsed Kissinger’s central argument in Christianity and Crisis: “No book in recent years promises to be so influential in recasting traditional thinking about war and peace in a nuclear age. We must be ready to fight limited wars in terms of our objectives and to win them with appropriate weapons. This circumspect and wise analysis of possibilities makes more sense than anything that has come to our notice in recent times.”52
The book stayed on the bestseller list for fourteen weeks and sold a remarkable seventy thousand copies in hardback. Vice President Richard Nixon was photographed carrying a copy and President Eisenhower ordered that a twenty-four-page synopsis of the book be prepared and distributed to members of his administration. The combination of a highly technical subject matter and leaden prose made the book an unlikely runaway success. Kissinger recognized this, observing that “I am sure that it is the most unread best-seller since Toynbee.” Nitze found the book’s success hard to accept, and Kissinger knew why: “Nitze wanted to do some work on the topic and maybe write a book of his own. He thought I should help him. I didn’t want to be a research assistant to Nitze. It got very personal. He should not have reviewed the book.”53
Regardless, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy won Kissinger a national and an international reputation as an important foreign-policy thinker. Though he finally secured tenure at Harvard in 1959, Kissinger had no desire to live the contemplative life in a gilded Cambridge cage. He wanted to work for government. In 1959, he wrote a long essay in The Reporter on “The Policymaker and the Intellectual.” It was a thoughtful piece that made some important cautionary points. For example, Kissinger observed that “intellectuals with a reputation soon find themselves so burdened that their pace of life hardly differs from that of the executives whom they advise … In his desire to be helpful, the intellectual is too frequently compelled to sacrifice what should be his greatest contribution to society: his creativity.” He also cautioned against the impossibility of achieving policy certainty:
The quest for certainty, essential for analysis, may be paralyzing when pushed to extremes with respect to policy. The search for universality, which has produced so much of the greatest intellectual effort, may lead to something close to dogmatism in national affairs. The result can be a tendency to recoil before the act of choosing among alternatives which is inseparable from policymaking, and to ignore the tragic aspect of policymaking which lies precisely in its unavoidable component of conjecture.54
It was a nuanced and impressive piece, an open job application to whoever won the presidential election. He followed this up with essays in Daedalus, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, also publishing a book, The Necessity for Choice: Prospects of Foreign Policy, which repeated and sharpened his criticisms of the Eisenhower/Dulles era. While engaged in this writing campaign, Kissinger had been on retainer as an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, with whom he had developed a strong bond of affection. But this most moderate and passive of Republicans stood little chance of wresting the Republican nomination from Nixon in 1960. And so presented with a straight choice between Nixon and Kennedy, Kissinger voted for JFK on Election Day. Nixon’s anticommunist stridency jarred with Kissinger’s moderation, while Kennedy’s advocacy of flexible response chimed with many of the policy recommendations in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Kissinger appeared well positioned to secure a spot in an administration intent on laying out the red carpet for policy-facing academics.
* * *
In February 1961, President Kennedy invited Kissinger to the Oval Office, praised The Necessity for Choice—“or at least a long review of it in The New Yorker,” in Kissinger’s view—and invited him to join his White House staff.55 Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, was less pleased at the prospect of having Kissinger back in his life. He persuaded the president to employ Kissinger instead as a “part time consultant,” subsequently making sure that he had little face time with the president. Their fellow Harvard colleague Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remembered that “Bundy pretty much blocked his access. Whenever Henry had a pretty interesting idea, I’d help perform an end run on Bundy. I’d bring him in to see Kennedy.” Eventually Kennedy grew tired of the small deceptions used to bring Kissinger into his office. “You know, I do find some of what Henry says to be interesting,” Kennedy told Schlesinger, “but I have to insist that he report through Bundy, otherwise things will get out of hand.” Carl Kaysen, a White House staffer, remembered: “Henry was not the president’s style. He was pompous and long-winded. You could be long-winded if the president liked you. But I never heard anyone say that Kissinger was likable.”56 Schlesinger was more generous, noting that it was “a great error not to put him into the center of political/diplomatic planning.”57 Looking back on his service to the Kennedy administration, Kissinger was clear as to where he had erred: “With little understanding then of how the presidency worked, I consumed my energies in offering unwanted advice and, in our infrequent contact, inflicting on President Kennedy learned disquisitions about which he could have done nothing even in the unlikely event that they roused his interest.”58
Kissinger did not help his cause with Kennedy when he responded belligerently to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. JFK understood the objections to the Wall, but he believed it would defuse tensions between East and West. Kissinger, on the other hand, favored a showdown in which he fully expected Khrushchev to cave. Kissinger believed that a nonresponse to Khrushchev’s decision would threaten America’s credibility as guarantor to West Germany, and thus Europe. “If present trends continue,” Kissinger predicted, “the outcome will be a decaying, demoralized city with some access guarantees, a Germany in which neutralism will develop, and a substantially weakened NATO.”59 Kennedy disagreed, and was quite content to lose a little face if it meant preventing a larger war. Kissinger’s marginal levels of influence and access waned sharply thereafter. The coup de grâce was applied in 1962 when, during a trip to Israel, Kissinger made some maladroit statements regarding Soviet adventurism in the Middle East.60 “If you don’t keep your mouth shut,” warned Bundy, “I’m going to hit the recall button.”61 After Kissinger returned in February, Bundy declined to renew his appointment as a consultant. Kissinger’s first experience of government service, his ultimate career goal, had ended in failure. He returned to Cambridge and the everyday demands of teaching.
The Johnson presidency brought similar disappointments, though he sensibly lowered his expectations. Kissinger accompanied Nelson Rockefeller, with whom he had resumed his advisory relationship, to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964. Barry Goldwater’s observation that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” was never likely to persuade a politically moderate Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.62 More noxious was the manner in which zealous supporters of Goldwater verbally abused Rockefeller during the convention. Kissinger voted for Johnson, and was relieved when he beat Goldwater so comfortably on Election Day. So began Kissinger’s fraught relationship with the right wing of the Republican Party.
When President Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War during the first few months of 1965, Kissinger lent his full support: “I thought the President’s program on Vietnam as outlined in his speech was just right,” he wrote McGeorge Bundy, “the proper mixture of firmness and flexibility.” Bundy had an awkward relationship with Kissinger, but this was an endorsement he could accept: “It is good to know of your support on the current big issue,” he replied, “[although] I fear you may be somewhat lonely among all our friends at Harvard.” In December 1965, Kissinger defended the Vietnam War in a televised CBS debate with Michael Foot, an influential figure on the left of the British Labour Party. “We are involved in Vietnam,” Kissinger declared, “because we want to give the people there the right to choose their own government.” Soon after, he joined a petition of 190 academics lending support to President Johnson’s policies in Vietnam.63
Although Kissinger was publicly supportive of the Vietnam War, privately he was ambivalent. In October 1965, the U.S. ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, invited Kissinger to tour South Vietnam and record his impressions. Kissinger’s private views echoed those of George Kennan:
We had involved ourselves in a war which we knew neither how to win nor how to conclude … We were engaged in a bombing campaign powerful enough to mobilize world opinion against us but too halfhearted and gradual to be decisive … No one could really explain to me how even on the most favorable assumptions about the war in Vietnam the war was going to end … [South Vietnam had] little sense of nationhood.64
In his formal report to Lodge, Kissinger kept his doubts to himself, observing that “you are engaged in a noble enterprise on which the future of free peoples everywhere depends,” and that Vietnam was “the hinge of our national effort where success and failure will determine our world role for years to come.” Perhaps Kissinger felt that divulging his unvarnished thoughts would harm his chances of securing a more significant role in the Johnson administration. In this he was undoubtedly correct. When the Los Angeles Times printed some unguarded remarks Kissinger made to journalists at the Saigon embassy, President Johnson was furious.65 When McNamara asked Johnson in 1967 that Kissinger lead third-party negotiations with North Vietnam, LBJ took a lot of convincing and never really gave him a chance to succeed.
Like Nitze, Kissinger struggled to formulate a consistent line on the Vietnam War. In June 1968, he took part in an academic panel on the war with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Daniel Ellsberg, Stanley Hoffmann, and Hans Morgenthau. Kissinger downplayed South Vietnam’s geostrategic significance, observing that the “acquisition of Vietnam by Peking would be infinitely less significant in terms of the balance of power than the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Peking.”66 The People’s Republic of China had tested its first nuclear device in 1964, suggesting that Kissinger did not think the fall of South Vietnam would be significant at all. A few months later, Morgenthau wrote an essay in The New Republic that, among other things, criticized Kissinger for lending the Johnson administration his support. Kissinger was stung by the critique, not least because he and Morgenthau viewed so many issues through a common realist lens. The letter he drafted in response to Morgenthau was forceful but disingenuous:
I never supported the war in public. Before 1963, this was because I did not know enough about it and because I tended to believe the official statements. After the assassination of Diem I thought the situation was hopeless. In 1965 when I first visited Vietnam I became convinced that what we were doing was hopeless. I then decided to work within the government to attempt to get the war ended. Whether this was the right decision we will never know, but it was not ineffective. My view now is not very different from what you wrote in the New Republic, commenting about Bundy, though as a practical matter I might try to drag on the process for a while because of the international repercussions.67
Dragging out the process of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam because of the “repercussions”—which sometimes he seemed to believe were negligible—would consume Kissinger for much of the next four years.
* * *
When Nixon defeated Nelson Rockefeller to secure the GOP presidential nomination in August 1968, Kissinger was distraught. He told Emmett Hughes, Rockefeller’s speechwriter, that Nixon was “of course, a disaster. Now the Republican Party is a disaster. Fortunately, he can’t be elected—or the whole country would be a disaster.”68 So when Nixon offered Kissinger the national security job after his election victory, “We were shocked,” said Rockefeller adviser Oscar Ruebhausen. “There was a sense that he was a whore.”69 Reactions such as these, and the anticipation of worse to come, led Kissinger to ask the president-elect for more time to consult with friends and colleagues at Harvard before accepting the offer. He told Nixon that he “would be of no use to him without the moral support of his friends and associates,” subsequently observing that this was “a judgment that proved to be false.” Fearing that Kissinger’s Harvard circle was unlikely to shower him with praise, Nixon “rather touchingly … suggested the names of some professors who had known him at Duke University and who would be able to give me a more balanced picture of his moral standards than I was likely to obtain at Harvard.”70
Unsurprisingly, Kissinger’s friends and colleagues, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Nelson Rockefeller, all urged him to accept—at the very least he could serve as a moderating influence on Nixon. Declining the offer, of course, would have been unimaginable under any circumstances; Kissinger’s deliberations had a strong element of theater. But these parting endorsements had some value. Though he was not firmly connected or committed to Harvard, he did worry that he might follow his predecessor, Walt Rostow, in burning bridges with academia. Rostow’s previous employer, MIT, had not invited him back to his professorship after his hawkish stint as LBJ’s national security adviser. Instead he moved to Austin, Texas, where Lyndon Johnson created a job for him at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. When Rostow discovered that Kissinger had made a dinner party joke about the probability that he would subsequently be “exiled in Arizona,” he failed to see the humor. During a painful telephone conversation in January 1970, Kissinger tried to salve Rostow’s hurt feelings: “That was not a crack at you … I said it at a party, it was meant to be a sarcastic remark. I love Arizona. In fact my desire to go back to Cambridge is practically zero.”71 This last sentence actually turned out to be true.
* * *
To say that Nixon was complex is to observe that rivers are wet. A self-made man—his father owned a grocery store, his mother was a homemaker, and a Quaker—Nixon was smart, driven, ruthless, and unable to transcend the insecurities born of his humble origins. Though marred by snobbery, Paul Nitze’s characterization of Nixon is perceptive:
Nixon could simultaneously kid himself into believing [three] different propositions concurrently … One, that he was a good and competent realistic analyst of foreign affairs and devoted pursuer of a foreign policy that was dedicated to U.S. security and he was the wisest, not only [as] an analyst, but also [as] the conductor of [a] foreign policy consistent with our security. The other was that he rather inherited from his mother, the passionate religious preacher, a lay preacher, this idea that because he could deliver sermons, he was holier than thou, somehow or another, and he could do this through the word regardless of what the facts were. The third role was that of being a lower middle class person who greatly admired those who had success, and the way in which you achieve success was to climb through every kind of trick you could think of, with no respect for any moral restraints as long as you climbed, as long as you made it. When you keep all those balls in the air concurrently, you can trip yourself up.72
Nixon displayed shocking levels of brutality toward his enemies—imagined and real—and could be spiteful toward those who worked for him. Yet he shrank from direct confrontation. In fact, he was stilted in most people’s company, with the exception of a small circle of long-standing friends—whom Kissinger described as a “gang of self-seeking bastards … I used to find the Kennedy group unattractively narcissistic, but they were idealists. These people are real heels.” Kissinger was scarcely less scathing about Nixon himself, describing him as “a very odd man, an unpleasant man. He didn’t enjoy people. What I never understood is why he went into politics.” His working theory was that Nixon leapt at the opportunity to “make himself over entirely,” to transform himself through force of will into someone he was not—gregarious, charismatic, dominant, larger than life. Yet, Kissinger noted, this was “a goal beyond human capacity” and Nixon paid “a fearful price for this presumption.”73
While Nixon normally preferred abusing people from a distance, Kissinger proved to be an exception to this rule. Kissinger’s Ivy League background, his connections to the northeastern establishment, his ambition, and his love of the limelight constantly riled the president and provided abundant vituperative fodder. Nixon rarely missed an opportunity to put him in his place, attacking supposed points of vulnerability. The president would muse aloud about his Jewish enemies in the media, the business world, and academia, mouthing hateful conspiracies that Kissinger felt unable to challenge. At one point Nixon called Kissinger in a rage, deploying ethnic slurs against blacks and Jews as one of Kissinger’s aides, Winston Lord, listened in, aghast, on another phone. “Why didn’t you say something?” Lord asked afterward. Kissinger replied, “I have enough trouble fighting with him on the things that really matter; his attitudes toward Jews and blacks are not my worry.”74 A basic dynamic emerged in their relationship: Nixon meted out abuse and sought validation in equal measure. Kissinger ignored the barbs and focused on bolstering Nixon’s confidence through his many hours of need.
Following a time-honored pattern, the bullied Kissinger took out his frustrations on his staff, who witnessed some remarkable tantrums. It was said that Kissinger treated aides like mushrooms: they “were kept in the dark, got a lot of manure piled on them, and then got canned.”75 His carefully selected staff included future luminaries such as Lawrence Eagleburger, Alexander Haig, Anthony Lake, Hal Sonnenfeldt, and Morton Halperin. Each man was expected to work fourteen- to sixteen-hour days seven days a week, all were prevented from enjoying any presidential access, a privilege (if this is the right word) that Kissinger closely guarded. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was willing to stay the course—Eagleburger, Halperin, and eight others resigned before the year was out. Eagleburger, in particular, suffered under Kissinger’s brutal regimen. Alexander Haig, a future White House chief of staff and secretary of state, describes one occasion when “after many hours of uninterrupted work, Kissinger asked Eagleburger to get him a certain document. Larry stood up, turned deathly pale, swayed, and then crashed to the floor unconscious. Kissinger stepped over his prostrate body and shouted, ‘Where is the paper?’”76 One aide observed that when “he stamps a foot in anger, you’re OK. It’s when both feet leave the ground that you’re in trouble.”77 The turnover in staff was becoming so problematic that Kissinger turned to humor to lighten the mood. He joked, after moving to a larger office, that it now took so long to march across the room and slam the door that he tended to forget who had committed the original offense.
* * *
The press was unanimous in praising Nixon’s appointment of Kissinger as national security adviser. The conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr., whom Kissinger had been courting for a number of years, observed, “Not since Florence Nightingale has any public figure received such public acclamation.”78 The Washington Post described the appointment as “welcome,” while James Reston in The New York Times called it “reassuring.” A common journalistic theme emerged: Kissinger was a good choice because he would keep Nixon under control and thus the world a little safer. Adam Yarmolinsky, a Harvard colleague of Kissinger’s who would serve in the Pentagon, observed that “we’ll all sleep a little better each night knowing that Henry is down there.”79 Reveling in this positive attention, Kissinger peddled this scenario to the press on a recurring off-the-record basis. He was the one indispensable man in the administration, preventing this “lunatic,” this “madman,” as he sometimes described his president, from wreaking merry havoc.
The reality was of course more complicated. Nixon’s nuanced presidential incarnation differed markedly from his hawkish vice presidency. Throughout the 1950s Nixon had served as a firm and vocal anticommunist on the world stage: Eisenhower’s respectful nod to the right wing of the GOP. He had performed this role effectively, haranguing Khrushchev on liberal capitalism’s superiority to Marxism-Leninism during the “Kitchen Debate” of 1959—so-called because the clash occurred in a model kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. He went after Democrats with relish, attacking their lackluster dedication to winning the Cold War on American terms. As president, however, Nixon left his attack-dog persona behind. Instead he delegated this role to his vice president, the hyperaggressive Spiro Agnew, whose wordy vitriol directed at political and ideological enemies—“a spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals,” to give one example—made Nixon’s vice presidency appear decorous in comparison.80
Nixon’s hawkish credentials were thus unimpeachable in 1969. This gave him the flexibility to pursue policies that were difficult for Democrats, such as reaching out to Beijing and Moscow in the spirit of reconciliation. As Nixon observed to Mao Zedong a few years later, “Those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about.”81 Like Kissinger, Nixon believed that Nitze’s NSC-68 no longer worked as a Cold War blueprint; something more cost aware and better tuned to the world’s fluid power dynamics should take its place. In light of the nation’s failure to quell the insurgency in South Vietnam, the fast-rising economic power of Western Europe and Japan, and America’s relative economic decline, the president-elect sought to recast the nation’s geostrategic posture. Nixon deemed it essential that the United States delegate peace- and warmaking responsibilities to increasingly wealthy regional allies; the diffusion of global power meant that assuming the entire burden of waging the Cold War was now economically unsustainable as well as strategically foolhardy. He also believed that the nation had to recognize the existence of the People’s Republic of China, particularly now that its path had diverged so violently from its supposed Marxist-Leninist brethren. The Soviet Union and China almost went to war in 1968 over a border dispute. In a seminal, widely discussed article for Foreign Affairs in 1967, Nixon wrote, “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” Nixon believed that Sino-American “dialogue” was essential to his Cold War restructuring.82
Engaging in meaningful dialogue with Brezhnev, reaching out to Mao, transferring power and responsibility to regional actors—all these policies were devised to facilitate one essential task: withdrawal from Vietnam without critically undermining U.S. credibility. For Nixon, closing down the Vietnam War made sound strategic and political sense. Indeed, he believed that his reelection in 1972 hinged on his signing a peace accord with Hanoi. “I’ve got to get this off our plate,” Nixon told Kissinger in the early months of his administration.83 Driven by such grand and vexatious goals—the plate was clearly overfull—Nixon accorded relatively little attention to domestic politics. The one constant throughout his vice presidency and presidency was his clear preference for matters of foreign policy, once dismissing the passage of domestic legislation as “building outhouses in Peoria.”84 Richard Nixon was Charles Beard’s negative image; their values, politics, and priorities were diametrically opposed.
That Nixon chose Kissinger to help implement his strategic vision made sense in spite of their differences. Kissinger also believed that the nation’s relative decline necessitated a strategic rethink. Kissinger would complain that Americans “never fully understood that while our absolute power was growing, our relative position was bound to decline as the Soviet Union recovered from World War II.”85 In August 1971, Kissinger met with a collection of conservative intellectuals, including William Rusher, the editor of The National Review, and Allan Ryskind, the editor of Human Events. Finding them locked in quite a different era—when Paul Nitze’s and Walt Rostow’s expansionary doctrines retained luster—Kissinger reminded them that Nixon was elected following “the collapse of foreign policy theory. A new frontier of the 1960s had ended in the frustration of Vietnam, a divided country, and vicious isolationism clamored [for] by liberals.”86
While Nitze and his ilk had badly erred, Kennan’s notion of containment, though admirable in certain ways, lacked the specifics to wage effective diplomacy in a multipolar world. As Kissinger observed in White House Years, “Containment treated power and diplomacy as two distinct elements or phases of policy. It aimed at an ultimate negotiation but supplied no guide to the content of those negotiations. It implied that strength was self-evident and that once negotiations started their content would also be self-evident.”87 Like Kennan, Kissinger strongly believed in the necessity of negotiating with America’s enemies—ignoring powerful nations was reckless and pointless, engagement brought significant rewards. But Kissinger was more comfortable deploying the military—to maintain and enhance U.S. “credibility,” a geostrategic attribute he valued above all others—where he deemed it necessary. So the United States intervened forcefully, and in many cases calamitously, in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and significant credibility was vested in the outcome of conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Latin America. Kissinger longed to liberate American foreign policy from the expensive demands of waging the global Cold War on the lines suggested in NSC-68. But he struggled to control his tendency to view all conflicts through a zero-sum lens, which artificially inflated the stakes involved. Kissinger’s Cold War perspectives were conventional in many respects.
Though Kissinger viewed containment as underdeveloped, George Kennan was delighted that a realist thinker partial to nineteenth-century European history had assumed such a prominent position. In 1966, Kennan met Kissinger for lunch in Cambridge and found him “now fully recovered from the militaristic preoccupations of earlier years,” a reference to Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which Kennan predictably abhorred.88 When Kennan called a few days after Nixon’s victory to offer his congratulations, Kissinger assured Kennan that the president-elect regarded him as “a leading example of people whose possibilities were not being used by the last administration.”89 Here Kissinger might have hurt Kennan in his kindness, building unrealistic expectations that his counsel would again be sought out, which proved not to be the case. Nonetheless, Kennan and Kissinger corresponded frequently and appreciatively, the older man advising the younger to hold to a steady course as Wilsonian-inclined criticism of his foreign policy sharpened from 1973 onward.
Paul Nitze, meanwhile, was not sure what to make of Nixon’s victory and Kissinger’s appointment. In the first few months of 1969, he was consumed by his campaign to save Safeguard—the antiballistic missile system designed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles—from an emboldened and increasingly cost-obsessed Congress. While Kissinger supported his efforts, Nitze also learned that one of the Nixon administration’s primary objectives was to improve relations with Moscow and to embark upon strategic arms limitation talks, a process soon known as SALT. Nitze supported nuclear arms limitation talks in theory, but only if they preserved America’s advantage. As he recalled, “I doubted Mr. Nixon’s interest in negotiating an arms control agreement with the USSR; other matters crowded his agenda. The major problems facing him were the country’s growing disillusionment with its involvement in Vietnam, a general weakening of our relative strategic military posture and capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, a worsening of our economic position relative to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the European Community, and a loosening of our ties to our allies and friends.” Nitze was surprised and delighted, therefore, when Secretary of State William Rogers invited him to join the administration as an arms control negotiator in a team led by Gerard Smith: “I assured Rogers that I was indeed interested in the job.”90
After Rogers informed the president of Nitze’s enthusiastic response, a meeting was arranged with Nixon and Kissinger in July 1969. The president came to the point with uncharacteristic clarity. “Paul,” he said, “I very much want you to take this job. I have no confidence in Rogers nor do I have complete confidence in Gerry Smith … So I want you to report anything you disapprove of directly to me.” Nitze could scarcely believe what he was hearing. The president wanted him to serve as a spy in an operation that would marginalize the State Department and the man Nixon had chosen to lead it. “If I am to be a member of the delegation,” Nitze replied, “it will be as a member of Gerry Smith’s team and not as someone reporting to someone else. And in any case, Smith reports to the secretary of state, who must have complete confidence in what Smith reports. That’s the way it has to work!”91 Nixon grew irritated: “God damn it, I’ve told you what the channel of communication is and if anything comes up, I want you to use it.” After negotiations began in Helsinki in November, a private line was installed to allow Nitze to communicate discreetly with the White House. Nitze never dialed the number. They “knew that I was not going to do anything like that,” he said, an assessment that underestimated Nixon and Kissinger’s views on the fallibility of man.92
Kissinger was exasperated, though not surprised in light of experience, by Nitze’s refusal to do as instructed. Clearly the only way to keep SALT under Nixon and Kissinger’s full control was to lead the process themselves. And as it happened, the architecture to do so was already in place. Soon after Nixon’s inauguration, Kissinger had established a secret back channel with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. Nixon told the ambassador that conventional State Department channels left sensitive communications “open to an excessively broad range of officials.”93 Instead, Dobrynin should communicate all important messages from Moscow directly to Kissinger, the president’s point man.
Dobrynin and Kissinger met frequently; as often as once a week when the situation demanded. The ambassador would enter the White House through a discreet entrance on the East Wing and meet Kissinger in the Map Room. Their conversations were remarkably free-flowing and familiar, interspersed with jokes and inquiries about family and mutual friends and acquaintances in Washington. Substantively, both men reveled in being indispensable to their political masters. The Soviet political scientist and U.S. specialist Georgy Arbatov observed that “the Channel was done largely to feed Kissinger’s ego and grandeur, if I may be so blunt. And perhaps for Dobrynin’s ego, too.”94
Although Arbatov’s assessment contains a measure of truth, it fails to do justice to the scale of their achievements. As Jeremi Suri observes, “In an unprecedented manner, Moscow and Washington cooperated to implement agreements on the permanent division of Berlin (the Four Power Agreement), nuclear non-proliferation (the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), arms limitation (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), security and cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Accords), and even basic principles of international conduct.”95 Kissinger would discover that there were significant costs, though, to brokering agreements in a manner that excluded—in order of importance—Congress, the State Department, the press, and the general public. And each group in time would turn on him. Like Kennan before him, there is little doubt that Kissinger envied the latitude afforded Soviet diplomats serving a totalitarian government.
Nitze discovered only after the fact that his negotiating efforts in Helsinki, and later Vienna, were a sideshow; the serious business was being done by Kissinger and Dobrynin in the Map Room. It infuriated Nitze, and with good reason. During a back-channel meeting on April 9, 1970, Nitze discovered that “Kissinger had effectively repudiated our initial Vienna proposals even before we offered them, telling Dobrynin that if the Soviet Union preferred something more limited, he would be happy to entertain it. Knowing in advance that the delegation’s proposals were not backed at the top, the Soviets lost nothing by stalling.” The executive branch was inadvertently sabotaging the delegation’s carefully calibrated efforts, and Nitze railed against this impotency: “For all practical purposes, this meant that there had been two sets of parallel negotiations—those between the officially designated delegations, and those between Kissinger and Dobrynin. I suspected that that was happening, but like the rest of the members of the delegation, I was kept in the dark.”96
In 1971, Kissinger attempted to use the back channel as a bargaining tool with Nitze, promising to divulge details of his discussions with Dobrynin in exchange for his keeping tabs on Gerald Smith. Nitze again declined to serve as a spy, though he promised Kissinger that he would not tell Smith about the back channel’s existence. This established a pseudoconspiratorial bond between them, though one NSC staffer observed that “it was not clear who was using who.”97 Nitze continued to fume about being left out of the loop. Kissinger grew ever more irritated by Nitze’s obstinacy. Relations between the two men, never warm, continued to deteriorate.
* * *
Nixon and Brezhnev signed the SALT I agreement in Moscow in May 1972 to the reassuringly bright glare of blanket media coverage. It was a historic occasion. The summit marked the first time since Roosevelt’s presidency that an American president had set foot in the Soviet Union. It was a high point of détente and of Nixon’s presidency. The substance of the summit, and the process it portended, followed Kissinger’s views on the importance of removing Wilsonian precepts from the nation’s diplomacy. Both Kissinger and Nixon agreed that morality and human rights were out of bounds. In a discussion about speeches on May 22, Kissinger observed: “I don’t think it is proper for you to start lecturing them about freedom of speech.” Nixon replied, “oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”98 Those seven “nos” told quite a story. An enemy previously characterized as hell-bent on global conquest had been normalized, the repressiveness of its system purposely downplayed. Castlereagh and Metternich would have cheered this infusion of cold reason into America’s external relations.
The summit made for great theater. After signing the world’s most significant nuclear arms control agreement in the splendor of the Kremlin’s St. Vladimir Hall—formalities were exchanged under a two-ton chandelier, which hangs from a glorious fifty-four-foot cupola—Brezhnev and Nixon retreated to the former’s dacha just outside Moscow, where they exchanged warm toasts and drank heroic quantities of cognac over the course of a two-hour caviar-laden dinner. After returning to Washington, an elated Nixon convened a joint session of Congress and delivered a nationally televised speech. Though Nixon cautioned that he did not “bring back from Moscow the promise of instant peace,” he added incautiously, “We do bring the beginning of a process that can lead to lasting peace.” There was much to be happy about. A major element of Nixon and Kissinger’s grand strategy—improved relations with Moscow—had been pursued with style, reaping a significant achievement. A major arms control agreement, laying down an important marker for the future, had been reached. Plus the State Department had been frozen out of the process and thus denied the credit that Nixon and Kissinger gathered solely for themselves. The president’s good spirits evaporated, however, when he began to notice that Kissinger was being accorded the lion’s share of the credit. In June 1972, the Chicago Sun-Times declared that Kissinger “had become a legend.”99 Kissinger could have done without such headlines, although he enjoyed them all the same.
Nitze had worked long, hard hours on the SALT negotiations in Helsinki and Vienna, and their essentials had been thrashed out elsewhere. This was a painful reality to accept, and Nitze’s assessment of the agreement was correspondingly harsh. SALT I comprised two parts: an ABM Treaty and the inelegantly phrased and capitalized “Interim Agreement Between The United States of America and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Certain Measures With Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.” The ABM Treaty limited each nation to just two sites where an anti-ballistic missile system could be located, foreclosing the possibility of a defensive race potentially more costly than the armed version. Unlike with the interim agreement, Nitze had played an important role in thrashing out its provisions: “I thought that the ABM treaty, which I had some hand in fashioning, was a definite step forward in arms control, a model perhaps for future agreements … The Interim Agreement covering offensive weapons, on the other hand, was flawed in that … it tended to accentuate the asymmetries that already existed in favor of Soviet land-based missiles.”100
Rather than safeguarding the United States, then, Nitze believed that the SALT I treaty had entrenched the Soviet Union’s advantage in “throw-weight” capability—the combined weight of each side’s ballistic missile payloads. In fact, one important missile technology that SALT I failed to ban was the development of Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (or MIRVs), which critically undermined the treaty’s ceilings on permitted missile numbers. A MIRVed missile was a single rocket carrying multiple nuclear warheads capable of striking different targets. Critics of the treaty observed with some justification that SALT I—symbolically important as it may have been—actually started a new arms race hidden within the carapace of the superpowers’ missile arsenals. George Kennan found the whole affair mystifying and distressing. After the Moscow Summit, Kennan wrote in his diary that Washington and Moscow should be working to eliminate nuclear weapons, not puttering around with “the wretched ABMs and MRVs and MIRVs and SALTs and what not.”101
For different reasons, Nitze believed that SALT I was an almighty mess, but he chose not to resign in protest. Instead he joined forces with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., chief of naval operations and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an effort to undermine Kissinger from within the administration. Zumwalt was a highly decorated veteran who feared, as Nitze did, that Kissinger was frittering away America’s military advantage. Zumwalt’s perception was that no one “knew better than Paul the way Henry Kissinger and his apparatus filtered all communications to the President so that, on the whole, Mr. Nixon only saw and heard what Kissinger wanted him to see and hear.”102 Whether true or false—and this assessment fails to comprehend the essential point that Nixon and Kissinger were on the same page—Zumwalt joined Nitze in viewing Kissinger as a threat to national security. Their anti-Kissinger machinations soon took something of a McCarthyite hue. Both men referred to Kissinger privately as a “traitor” and, as David Callahan observes, “gave credence to rumors that Kissinger had been recruited by the KGB when he worked for army intelligence in Germany. Nitze once even called a friend in the intelligence world to ask about Kissinger’s loyalty. No evidence ever emerged linking Kissinger to the Soviets, but Nitze remained suspicious.”103
Nitze’s assault on Kissinger’s loyalty was perhaps the ugliest, most dishonorable chapter of his foreign-policy career. And his rancor did not abate with the years. In 1985, Nitze registered a jarring assessment of Kissinger, comparing him unfavorably with Averell Harriman:
Harriman is the son of a very wealthy man, an aristocrat, an American-type patrician, very much imbued with the American liberal point of view, while Henry Kissinger, of course, is a European Jew, who had no such background whatsoever. Therefore he was not inhibited by any of the inhibitions someone brought up with the American liberal tradition had … So that Averell wouldn’t have thought of doing the tricky kinds of things that Kissinger did.
Worrying with good reason that his assessment might be interpreted as anti-Semitic, Nitze qualified his remarks, observing that “it wasn’t just Henry. There was the distinction between what I would call the climbers—the lower segments of the middle class were climbing up and their standards of what is proper are somewhat different than those in the patrician element in the United States.”104 Nitze disliked the substance of Kissinger and Nixon’s diplomacy and the equanimity with which they accepted Soviet nuclear parity. But it reflected poorly on him that he identified as explicatory the background of those at the helm: an émigré Jew and the son of a California grocer.
* * *
The Moscow Summit was certainly momentous, but the opening to China was the signature foreign-policy achievement of the Nixon presidency—and a hinge moment in modern world affairs. During the 1960s, few believed such a rapprochement was possible, or even desirable. How could Washington engage with Mao Zedong, the author of the Cultural Revolution, a program of state-sanctioned persecution that brutalized millions of alleged “revisionists” and “enemies of the revolution”?105 Yet some Americans were quite content to ignore China’s domestic tyranny in the name of a larger geostrategic good. Restoring relations with the world’s most populous country had been on George Kennan’s mind at least since 1963, when he observed in an interview—echoing Churchill’s oft-quoted remarks on endorsing the devil if Hitler invaded hell—that “we should be prepared to talk to the devil himself if he controls enough of the world to make it worth our while.”106 Nixon himself had recorded a similar view, albeit in more guarded prose, in his 1967 Foreign Affairs article “Asia After Viet Nam.”
Yet Kissinger was skeptical when Nixon told him of his desire to normalize relations with Beijing and to visit the nation in person. When in July 1969, H. R. Haldeman informed the national security adviser that Nixon “seriously intends to visit China before the end of the second term,” Kissinger could barely suppress laughter, replying “fat chance.”107 Perhaps Kissinger suspected that Nixon had taken flight into a Walter Mitty–type imagining; a pointed reference Kissinger sometimes made to the fantastical daydreams of an unremarkable man. If so, Kissinger was wrong, for the president’s hopes were firmly grounded in reality.
It did not take long for Kissinger to take Nixon’s ambitions more seriously, particularly as he quickly realized that establishing relations with communist China could reap significant diplomatic benefits. Indeed, Jeremi Suri argues that “Kissinger’s thinking was distinctive for its effort to integrate China in a systematic global strategy. Improved relations with Beijing were part of a fundamental structural shift from bipolar containment to multipolar federalism.” Here, Suri perhaps underappreciates the quality of insight contained in Nixon’s Foreign Affairs article. But he does marshal some compelling evidence to suggest that Kissinger deserves significant credit for pioneering what he defined in 1968 as “triangular diplomacy,” a three-point relationship that promised Beijing and Moscow an equal stake in improving relations with Washington. In 1968, Kissinger had advised Nelson Rockefeller that the “chances of peace are increased as we are able to develop policy options toward both Communist powers.”108 He was surprised when Nixon indicated his desire for a China opening, for he was no Rockefeller. But once the novelty of “Richard Nixon, Red China enthusiast” wore off, Kissinger joined his president in pushing vigorously for rapprochement with Beijing. And in time he would develop an enduring fascination with and admiration for the “middle kingdom,” one of history’s great civilizations.
The events leading to the normalization of Sino-American relations proceeded first in small steps, then a canter, and then at a gallop. These ranged from an invitation to the American table tennis team to play in China—a clear signal of Beijing’s willingness to begin the process of restoring relations, later characterized as “Ping-Pong diplomacy”—to Nixon’s use of Romania and Pakistan as channels through which to communicate his administration’s desire for engagement.109 Eventually, on June 2, 1971, a letter arrived from China’s premier, Zhou Enlai—Mao’s second in command—offering to host Kissinger as a prelude to a presidential visit. Rather than focusing solely on Taiwan’s contested status, which had earlier been a sticking point, Zhou indicated his willingness to discuss a broad range of issues, including the war in Vietnam. An elated Kissinger informed Nixon about Zhou’s letter. In a rare moment of bonhomie, Kissinger and Nixon celebrated with a fine bottle of vintage Courvoisier. Nixon proposed a toast: “Let us drink to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done.”110 William Rogers and the State Department, meanwhile, grew yet more frustrated at their isolation from the main events of the administration. “It was painful enough to see me and the NSC staff dominate the policy process in Washington,” observed Kissinger. “It was harder still to accept the proposition that I might begin to intrude on the conduct of foreign policy overseas.”111
Kissinger’s most galling intrusion occurred the following month when, using stomach complaints as subterfuge to fall off the accompanying media’s radar, he hopped on a Chinese aircraft and traveled to Beijing. Over the course of the long flight, Kissinger had time to mull over Nixon’s parting advice. In a two-hour briefing the previous day, Nixon had cautioned against abstract philosophizing. “I’ve talked to communist leaders,” Nixon reminded Kissinger. “They love to talk philosophy, and, on the other hand they have enormous respect if you come pretty directly to the point.” Nixon attributed his success with Khrushchev et al. to the fact that “I don’t fart around … I’m very nice to them—then I come right in with the cold steel … You’ve gotta get down pretty crisply to the nut-cutting … the stuff that really counts.”112 Kissinger decided that what worked for Nixon with the brusque Soviets might not necessarily impress his Chinese interlocutors. So he declined to apply the “cold steel” and instead engaged in a fascinating discussion with Zhou on America’s reluctant world role and how he and Nixon were recalibrating in the direction of modesty.
Kissinger and Zhou held a series of long meetings on July 9 that began at 4:00 p.m. and concluded seven hours later. Kissinger’s preliminary remarks were suitably charming:
For us this is an historic occasion. Because this is the first time that American and Chinese leaders are talking to each other on a basis where each country recognizes each other as equals. In our earlier contacts we were a new and developing country in contrast to Chinese cultural superiority. For the past century you were victims of foreign oppression. Only today, after many difficulties and separate roads, have we come together again on the basis of equality and mutual respect.”113
Kissinger and Zhou thrust and parried on issues such as Taiwan and the Vietnam War until the latter mentioned the blanket anticommunist hostility of America’s early Cold War posture. Kissinger reassured him that times had changed: “We do not deal with communism in the abstract, but with specific communist states on the basis of their specific actions toward us, and not as an abstract crusade.”114 Responding to this, Zhou reiterated China’s default diplomatic stance—noninterference in the affairs of other nations—and compared it unfavorably to America’s frenetic activism that had served to create so much conflict. Surprisingly, Kissinger agreed, blaming many of America’s missteps on a misguided “liberal” activism:
We didn’t look for hegemony as we spread across the world; this was an undesirable consequence and led us into many enormous difficulties. In fact, our liberal element, very often because of missionary tendencies, got itself even more involved, for example, as in the Kennedy administration, than the more conservative element. (Zhou nods.) So here we are. When President Nixon came into office, we found ourselves, as you say, extended around the world without a clear doctrine under enormously changed circumstances.115
Kissinger’s critique of U.S. Cold War strategy was thus as far removed from “nut-cutting” as it is possible to imagine. His exposition on his and Nixon’s strategic priorities was crystal clear and similarly cognizant of the limits to American power: “At any rate, this administration has had a very difficult task of adjusting American foreign policy to new realities at the same time we also have to conclude a very painful and difficult war. (Zhou nods.) We have established the principle that the defense of far away countries cannot be primarily an American responsibility … This has been our philosophy since we came into office.”116
Unsurprisingly, Kissinger and Zhou’s first meeting was an unalloyed success. Kissinger had thoroughly dismantled the confrontational logic of the early Cold War, which was much appreciated by his hosts.
Yet while Kissinger had succeeded in impressing Zhou Enlai, American conservatives were becoming increasingly hostile toward the policy of engaging with Moscow and Beijing. In August, a group of conservative businessmen close to Governor Ronald Reagan of California signed a public statement in the National Review expressing concern at the way Nixon’s America had bowed so obsequiously to its communist competitors. Governor Reagan called Nixon to register his strong opposition to the UN’s October decision to remove Taiwan (or the Republic of China) from the Security Council and replace it with the People’s Republic of China—a decision that Kissinger’s visit appeared to invite. But this was a rare discordant note across a near-unified chorus of adulation. Nixon poked fun at Reagan’s “typical right wing simplicity” and continued to enjoy the spectacle of Democrats puzzling over how to react.117
In October, Kissinger traveled to China again, where he warned Zhou of the media circus that would accompany Nixon on his visit. He observed that The New York Times viewed itself as a “sovereign country” and that he was “afraid the Prime Minister [would have] to deal with Walter Lippmann and James Reston in one year; and that is a degree of invasion no country should be required to tolerate.” Zhou replied with good humor that he “was not afraid of that”—and in fact he welcomed the intrusion. The Chinese policy elite were keenly aware that making a good impression on the American home audience, following events on television, was vitally important.
And so it was. Nixon’s visit took place in February 1972, and it produced indelible images of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square (which was not yet infamous), and the Great Wall—which Nixon described in underwhelming but accurate fashion as a “great wall.”118 The grand theater of the visit inspired the American composer John Adams to write his first opera, Nixon in China. In one of its memorable scenes, Nixon sings the following aria after disembarking Air Force One. It captures perfectly how laden with meaning this visit was:
News has a kind of mystery
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the whole world was listening
Though we spoke quietly
The eyes and ears of history
Caught every gesture
And every word, transforming us
As we, transfixed,
Made history.119
The real Nixon made absolutely sure that he was alone when making history. He firmly instructed Kissinger and Rogers to stay in the plane—on twelve occasions over the course of the flight, by Kissinger’s reckoning—until he had reached the bottom of the stairs and shaken Zhou Enlai’s hand, something John Foster Dulles had famously refused to do when he met Zhou in Geneva in 1954.120 This moment was achieved in near-perfect solitude; Nixon permitted his wife, Pat, to tag along. “Your handshake,” Zhou told Nixon, “came over the vastest ocean in the world—twenty-five years of no communication.”121
Soon after Nixon’s arrival, Mao issued an invitation to Nixon and Kissinger—William Rogers was not on the list, and Kissinger failed to make his case—to visit his quarters in the Imperial City. Nixon opened discussions by mentioning nations and regions of common concern—Japan, the Soviet Union—hoping to draw Mao into a substantive discussion. The chairman demurred, replying, “All these troublesome questions, I don’t want to get into very much.” Instead, Mao indicated a preference for engaging in “philosophic questions”—which were not Nixon’s natural forte. Taking his cue, Nixon replied gamely, “I have read the Chairman’s poems and speeches, and I knew he was a professional philosopher.” Mao pointed at Kissinger, asking, “He is a doctor of philosophy?” Nixon replied, with irritation, “He is a doctor of brains”—and whatever Nixon meant by that, it probably was not good.
Pleased nonetheless to have an entrée into the discussion, Kissinger—referencing his Ivy League pedigree—added that he “used to assign the Chairman’s collective writings to my classes at Harvard.” Immune to the flattery, Mao said, “Those writings of mine aren’t anything. There is nothing instructive in what I wrote.” Nixon interjected: “The chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world.” Mao disagreed, observing that “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.” Several moments later, Kissinger delivered an encomium to China’s brand of Marxism-Leninism that had recently wreaked such havoc: “Mr. Chairman, the world situation has also changed dramatically … We’ve had to learn a great deal. We thought all Socialist-Communist states were the same phenomenon. We didn’t understand until the President came into office the different nature of revolution in China and the way revolution had developed in other Socialist states.”122
It was a good thing that none of the embarrassing details leaked out. Ronald Reagan and his ideological cohort would have found Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “slobbering” over Mao—a word Kissinger often used to mock Anatoly Dobrynin’s warm and familiar diplomatic style—deeply troubling.123
In his memoir, Kissinger effusively summarizes the impact of the China opening: “In one giant step we had transformed our diplomacy. We had brought new flexibility to our foreign policy. We had captured the initiative and also the imagination of our own people.”124 This observation is hard to dispute. Downplaying ideological differences and restoring relations with a nation of China’s size and latent economic potential was a deft diplomatic move. Moscow was horrified, as one might expect, and Soviet fears of what this unexpected rapprochement portended added value to American diplomacy. It allowed Nixon and his successors to play the communist antagonists against each other. It gave China a direct stake in the timely resolution of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, a devotee of balance-of-power diplomacy, China’s entry to the concert of nations was an absolute gift. If the Cold War resembled a game of chess, as some strategists opined, then the United States had acquired at least a third rook.
Yet Kissinger’s regard for China and its leadership was almost too high. In February 1973, he informed Nixon that the United States “was now in the extraordinary situation that, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the PRC might well be closest to us in its global perceptions.”125 How does one take this seriously? As a cosmopolitan student of history, Kissinger was probably more susceptible than others to romanticizing China, a civilization whose diplomatic traditions he admired. The military strategist Sun Tzu, for example, held a prominent place in his pantheon of exemplary strategists, alongside Metternich, Clausewitz, and Bismarck. Kissinger later hailed Sun Tzu’s masterpiece The Art of War as possessing “a degree of immediacy and insight that places [Sun Tzu] among the ranks of the world’s foremost strategic thinkers.”126 Kissinger’s Sinophilia was laudable in many ways, but it led him to overestimate China’s geopolitical significance, as well as its ability and willingness to help the United States achieve its goals; this was glaringly apparent in respect to Vietnam. In describing Zhou Enlai as “one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met” and succumbing to something close to awe upon meeting Mao, Kissinger looked and acted more like a fan than a hard-nosed realist.127 Metternich and Sun Tzu would not have approved.
One thing about the China opening was incontestable. The “liberal” American media that Nixon reviled—but whose good opinion he craved—had little choice but to hail his breakthrough as epoch defining. “An opening exists where there has not been one for 22 years,” went an editorial in The Washington Post. “A beginning has been made; the potential is vast and for this much the President is entitled to great credit for it was a bold stroke … It was something like going to the moon.”128 Such endorsements thrilled Nixon. Yet as with the Moscow Summit, he was angry when he discovered that the media was praising Kissinger in at least equal measure. Nixon viewed the China gambit, with some justification, as a sole-authored breakthrough; this was clearly an affront. The cartoonist Bill Mauldin was ruthless in hitting the president’s (admittedly numerous) psychological weak spots. One of his cartoons showed an excited boy pointing at the presidential motorcade, exclaiming: “Look! It’s Dr. Kissinger’s associate!”129 When in 1972 Time magazine declared Nixon and Kissinger its joint “Men of the Year,” Nixon fumed and sulked. Ahead of publication, Kissinger implored the editor to remove his name and bestow the honor on Nixon alone, but to no avail. Kissinger described the designation a “nightmare” and said that accepting the honor was “almost suicidal.”130 Surrounded by silver lining, Nixon fixated on a cloud called Henry.
* * *
Détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China were significant breakthroughs in their own right. Indeed, a positive appraisal of the Nixon administration’s foreign policies is predicated on our viewing them this way. But Nixon and Kissinger did not view them in isolation at the time. Instead, both men believed that Moscow and Beijing, keen to extract economic and strategic benefits from an improved relationship with Washington, would apply pressure on Hanoi to agree to peace terms permitting a full American withdrawal. On this topic their reasoning was misguided. It did not accord sufficient respect to North Vietnam’s fiercely guarded status as an independent actor, or indeed to the ideological solidarity that existed on at least a bilateral basis between Hanoi and its two Marxist-Leninist patrons.
So when the United States withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, when “peace” was finally achieved, it came at a horrendous cost. Cambodia was dragged directly into the fray, leading ultimately to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and a genocide that killed approximately 1.7 million people—20.1 percent of Cambodia’s population.131 Hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers and noncombatants lost their lives. Of the fifty-seven thousand American soldiers who died on or above Vietnamese soil, twenty thousand perished during Nixon’s presidency.132 During the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon had stated his intention to achieve “peace with honor.”133 In 1971, a returning veteran named John Kerry testified powerfully before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He indicted the war as “the biggest nothing in history” and posed a powerful question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”134
Kissinger’s best answer to Kerry’s question was “for the sake of credibility.” The national security adviser understood that the United States could not “win” the Vietnam War and largely agreed with Kerry that the Americanization of the conflict had been a mistake. But he was adamant that the nation could not be seen to “lose” it either. In a widely noted essay in Foreign Affairs in January 1969 titled “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” Kissinger placed greatest emphasis not on the tangible ramifications of withdrawal but on the amorphous psychological ones:
The commitment of 500,000 Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Viet Nam. What is involved now is confidence in American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness … In many parts of the world—the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Japan—stability depends on confidence in American promises.135
Kissinger’s plan for a staged withdrawal from Vietnam was thus sustained by the logic of keeping up appearances. “We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one thousand dead,” Kissinger observed in his memoir, “as if we were switching a television channel.”136 More would die to display America’s continued potency to friends and enemies. The nation would not slink away under cover of darkness but depart with all guns blazing.
Credibility was important to nineteenth-century diplomats like Metternich and Bismarck. (The latter established extensive German colonies in Africa primarily for reasons of credibility, not because he believed that an African empire added much to Berlin’s strategic or economic strength.) But its logic was harder to sell in twentieth-century America, where battlefield deaths born of prestige-driven actions were tolerated less well by political elites beholden to mass democracy and subject to media scrutiny. In Paris in March 1969, President Charles de Gaulle asked Kissinger, “Why don’t you get out of Vietnam?” Surprised by de Gaulle’s bluntness, Kissinger answered, “Because a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem.” “Where?” demanded de Gaulle. Kissinger specified the Middle East. “How very odd,” said de Gaulle. “It is precisely in the Middle East that I thought your enemies had a credibility problem.”137 De Gaulle understood something that Kissinger did not: America’s allies—even ambivalent ones like France—believed Washington’s credibility would be enhanced, not diminished, by casting aside fictions, cutting its losses, and pursuing an expedited withdrawal.
Kissinger’s ostensible peace goals were twofold: that North Vietnamese troops leave South Vietnam at the point of armistice, and that North Vietnam respect South Vietnam’s independence after America’s withdrawal. Kissinger was not so naïve that he believed either goal was realistically attainable. Rather, as he observed to Hans Morgenthau in 1968, he would “drag on the process” of withdrawal “for a while because of the international repercussions.”138
This dragging effect would be achieved with multiple weights and pulleys. First, the withdrawal of American troops would commence at a steady rate—twenty-five thousand American troops left Vietnam in 1969 and hundreds of thousands soon followed. Second, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), whom the Americans would train and equip to the highest standards, would fill the gap left by the departing American troops—a strategy described as “Vietnamization.” Third, the United States would escalate the war in the most efficient (read destructive) manner possible. As the ground war was being deescalated, the U.S. bombing campaign increased sharply in intensity—and secretly, for such actions were always likely to create a firestorm of protest. Nixon and Kissinger expanded the U.S. bombing campaign in the spring of 1969 to include targets in Cambodia. This action caused two of Kissinger’s assistants, Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, to resign in protest. A year later, American troops began their “incursion” (read: invasion) of Cambodia in the hope—forlorn, as it turned out—of destroying North Vietnamese command facilities.
The bombing of Cambodia encapsulated all of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s failings regarding transparency, strategy, and morality. The bombings were conducted in total secrecy and were falsely designated as attacks on North Vietnam. Congress and the public were not informed. As per usual, many within the administration knew as little as Congress: the State Department, inevitably, and even the secretary of the Air Force. Yet keeping a large-scale bombing campaign under wraps was impossible. On May 9, 1969, The New York Times ran a front-page story publicizing this expansion of the war into Cambodia. Nixon was furious, exclaiming to Kissinger, “What is this cock-sucking story? Find out who leaked it, and fire him.” Without foundation, Kissinger pinned the blame on Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and confronted him directly: “You son of a bitch. I know you leaked that story, and you’re going to have to explain it to the president.” Laird simply hung up. Kissinger subsequently conceded that he had accused the wrong man. To identify the real culprit, he and Nixon requested the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, to install a series of wiretaps on three of Kissinger’s NSC staff: Daniel Davidson, Morton Halperin, and Hal Sonnenfeldt, as well as one of Melvin Laird’s assistants at the Pentagon, Colonel Robert Pursley. The number of wiretaps Nixon and Kissinger authorized on administration staff eventually totaled seventeen, but none captured anything incriminating. Nixon lamented that the wiretaps “never helped us,” they merely comprised “gobs and gobs of material. Gossip and bullshitting.”139 Only one recording device captured a detail that led to a high-level resignation. It was voice-activated and whirred into action whenever the president opened his mouth.
The bombing of Cambodia killed thousands of people and destabilized a sovereign nation to little if any discernible effect. The secret bombing raids—for the administration persisted in denying their existence in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary—continued for fourteen months, during which U.S. B-52s flew 3,875 sorties and dropped 108,823 tons of bombs.140 The objective of the raids was to destroy North Vietnam’s political and military headquarters—the Central Office for South Vietnam—and in this it failed. Kissinger felt no moral qualms about escalating the war in this fashion. The fact that the primary strategic objective had not been met seemed not to faze him. This was because the bombing had a negligible impact on the United States beyond the cost of the tonnage—and the lives of the airmen who died delivering their payloads.
Kissinger was as hawkish as Walt Rostow when it came to bombing, observing, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like Vietnam does not have a breaking point.”141 Unsurprisingly, Rostow was on hand to encourage Kissinger to stay the course, that the bombing was having its desired effect. In November 1970, he told Kissinger, “On Vietnam, I suggest you give some thought in light of intelligence coming from Hanoi, that they are having some difficult morale problems in the field as well as at home … I get word that for the first time in the whole thing leaflets saying go home, work the farms, grow some rice, raise some kids—that’s something the army in the field and the people at home may be ready to listen to.”142 Rostow’s words were an echo from the previous administration; he had told LBJ the same story for months in 1967 and 1968. It is hard to say whether Rostow’s observations pepped up Kissinger or depressed him.
Throughout this process of escalation, Kissinger was concurrently engaged in peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris. As Le Duc Tho, the chief North Vietnamese negotiator, well understood, “Vietnamization” was a patchy device designed to cloak an inevitable U.S. withdrawal. So he was not particularly amenable to granting concessions prematurely. The South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, was vehemently opposed to Nixon and Kissinger’s withdrawal strategy and drew only limited succor from the expansion of the war into Cambodia. Kissinger could not decide which side he disliked more. Thieu was “this insane son of a bitch,” and the North Vietnamese were “bastards … [who] have been screwing us.” Broadly speaking, he concluded that his Vietnamese interlocutors on both sides of the 17th parallel were “just a bunch of shits.”143
Thieu and Le Duc Tho understandably formed a similar view of Kissinger. Thieu’s South Vietnam was being given up for dead—this was the reality. The United States was bombing North Vietnam, meanwhile, to preserve Kissinger’s pool of “credibility” and as a parting gift to Thieu. In May 1972, the White House tried to solicit support from George Kennan for an escalation in the bombing campaign. Kennan’s “I thought it was inordinately costly in terms both of extraneous destruction and of our international reputation,” was not at all the hoped-for reply.144 The Christmas bombing campaign of December 1972 marked the first occasion that B-52 bombers, incapable of precision strikes, wreaked destruction on the centers of Hanoi and Haiphong—the destroyed wing of Bach Mai hospital was just one example of collateral damage.145 America’s allies and enemies universally condemned the campaign.
On the other side of the equation, in order to secure Thieu’s agreement, Nixon and Kissinger threatened to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and cast the nation adrift. The pursuit of “honor” thus played little role in any of Kissinger’s Vietnam gambits. The peace that came a few weeks later was not so much sullied as disfigured beyond recognition. On January 8, Kissinger shook Le Duc Tho’s hand and told him, “It was not my fault about the bombing.” Tho replied, “You have tarnished the honor of the United States. Your barbarous and inhumane action has aroused the general and tremendous indignation from the world peoples.” John Ehrlichman later asked Kissinger how long South Vietnam was likely to last. Kissinger predicted, “I think that if they’re lucky, they can hold out for a year or two.”146
For making peace in January 1973, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later in the year. Knowing what was around the corner, Tho refused the award. Kissinger had no such qualms, although he understood as well as Tho that the “peace” was stopgap—a sham. Edwin Reischauer, the Harvard scholar and former U.S. ambassador to Japan, observed that the award “shows either that the people of Norway have a very poor understanding of what happened out there or a good sense of humor.”147 The critic and humorist Tom Lehrer famously announced his retirement on the grounds that reality had rendered satire obsolete. Kissinger and Nixon complained that insufficient respect was being accorded to what was a significant achievement. On October 17, 1973, Kissinger asked Nixon if he had seen “The New York Times blasting the Nobel Prize.” “Why have they blasted it?” asked Nixon. “Because they can’t bear the thought the war in Vietnam has ended,” replied Kissinger. After Nixon observed, “that’s amusing,” Kissinger elaborated: “They can’t bear the thought—you know, Mr. President, when they said the détente wouldn’t work. They never say the détente enabled us to settle the Vietnam War because that’s the thing they cannot bear—with honor.” Nixon replied, “Yeah, that’s right. When we stick to the honor—that’s the last straw.”148
There was in fact a connection between détente and the settlement of the Vietnam War, and it had occurred six months previously at the Moscow Summit. Over the course of a wide-ranging discussion, Brezhnev recounted to Nixon an earlier conversation he had had with his national security adviser, during which “Dr. Kissinger told me that if there was a peaceful settlement in Vietnam you would be agreeable to the Vietnamese doing whatever they want, having whatever they want after a period of time, say 18 months. If that is indeed true, and if the Vietnamese knew this, and it was true, they would be sympathetic on that basis” to reaching an agreement.149 Brezhnev had outed Kissinger’s acceptance of a “decent interval” between American withdrawal and a North Vietnamese invasion of the South.150
This interval lasted a little longer than Kissinger had estimated. In March 1975, North Vietnam army regulars crossed the 17th parallel and advanced rapidly on Saigon, encountering token resistance along the way. The ARVN collapsed or melted from view, Saigon fell within a month, and a murderous final reckoning ensued. The abiding image of those harrowing events is an American helicopter perched precariously atop one of the embassy’s auxiliary buildings, a ladder dangling below providing last-gasp deliverance for a fortunate few. A little farther down, at ground level, thousands of desperate South Vietnamese citizens besiege the embassy’s gates, unable to escape, soon to enter a very different world.
George Kennan was pleased that the United States had terminated a meaningless conflict and shed an unreliable ally. “They won. We lost. It is now their show … our attitude should be: you are heartily welcome to each other; it serves you both right.”151 The callousness of Kennan’s appraisal is perhaps mitigated by the fact that his opposition to the Vietnam War was long and consistently disinterested in morality. Kissinger’s record is harder to defend. He had inherited a debacle, the escalation of which he supported from afar, and had failed to achieve any of his declared aims beyond a compromised peace agreement and U.S. withdrawal, on terms similar to those Averell Harriman had proposed in 1968. American credibility was already low when the nation took its gloves off and bombed Cambodia and North Vietnam with few restrictions; the world’s most powerful nation deploying its heavy bombers against tightly packed cities did not make for edifying viewing. American credibility was almost undetectable in 1975 as Saigon burned.
In an ideational sense, the Vietnam War combined the worst of two worlds. The conflict was made and escalated by liberal Cold Warriors—in the name of ideals that can be traced to Wilson—and was terminated by devotees of realpolitik at a deliberately glacial pace for reasons of credibility. Like the Civil War, Vietnam would cast a pall over American society, and its foreign policy, for decades. Like the Civil War, its history and meaning are fiercely contested to this day. In recent years, orthodox critics and revisionist defenders of the war have clashed over issues such as whether the war was ever winnable, and whether the United States really lost. So Ngo Dinh Diem was a disaster unworthy of American support; Diem was a heroic leader whom the United States fecklessly destroyed. South Vietnam lacked the wherewithal to stand alone; South Vietnam was pro-Western, growing in strength, and badly betrayed. LBJ’s bombing campaign was brutal; LBJ’s bombing campaign was timid. The United States losing the Vietnam War was inevitable; America would have won had its political leaders shown greater fortitude. So go the lessons of history—or not.
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Kissinger followed his hero Metternich in focusing most of his energy on great power politics. The affairs of smaller nations did not arouse his interest—unless, of course, their patrons were using them as part of a larger game. In language redolent of George Kennan, Kissinger in June 1969 upbraided Chile’s foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, for having the temerity to critique U.S. economic policy toward Latin America. Kissinger told him, “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You are wasting your time.” With some justification, Valdés replied, “Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South.” Kissinger agreed, before adding in the style of a sarcastic teenager, “And I don’t care.” An infuriated Valdés replied, “You are a German Wagnerian. You are a very arrogant man.”152
As it happened, Kissinger cared more about the “South” than he realized. Chile was a case in point. Kissinger once dismissed the 2,700-mile-long, 200-mile-wide nation as a “dagger pointed to the heart of Antarctica.”153 Yet on September 4, 1970, when the socialist Salvador Allende won Chile’s presidential election by a narrow margin, Kissinger stirred into action, visualizing only the worst-case scenarios. He saw, “Allende’s election [as] a challenge to our national interest … [Chile] would soon be inciting anti-American policies, attacking hemisphere solidarity, making common cause with Cuba, and sooner or later establishing close relations with the Soviet Union.”154 Kissinger chaired the Forty Committee, which oversaw the covert operations executed by America’s intelligence agencies. He informed the committee, tongue in cheek, “I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible.” Nixon and Kissinger instructed the CIA to foment instability in Chile to prevent Allende taking power in October. The Agency’s point man in Chile, Henry Hecksher, duly obliged, assisting a simple scheme to assassinate the commander in chief of Chile’s armed forces, René Schneider, and pinning the blame on the left. Schneider was duly murdered, but few Chileans swallowed the line that Allende’s supporters were responsible—foul play was immediately suspected.155 Alternative plans would have to be made.
On September 15, 1970, Nixon had ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream,” inviting its agents to try anything “your imagination can conjure.”156 So the CIA disbursed funding to opposition political groups, newspapers, and agitators for hire, and generally embarked upon a pervasive campaign of disinformation. Yet none of these ploys achieved the desired results, primarily because Allende was not the protocommunist hobgoblin of Nixon and Kissinger’s imagining. Land reform proceeded cautiously and compensation was efficiently arranged for private landowners. The constitution remained sacrosanct and civil liberties continued to be protected—at least when the CIA was not conspiring to violate them.157 It took three full years for the CIA’s destabilization campaign to produce a tipping point. The Chilean military overthrew Allende on September 11, 1973, and soon after he was found dead—he had either committed suicide, or had been murdered, with an AK-47 assault rifle.
While Kissinger did not accept full responsibility for this bloody denouement, he did concede that “we helped them” and was personally delighted with the outcome: the rise to power of Augusto Pinochet’s repressive pro-Western military junta.158 Historians estimate that the first, and most brutal, stage of Pinochet’s reign of terror resulted in nearly two thousand summary executions, tens of thousands of instances of torture, and upwards of eighty-two thousand politically motivated imprisonments.159 Kissinger—who had been promoted to secretary of state by that time, becoming the first man to concurrently head the State Department and serve as national security adviser—informed his colleagues that “however unpleasant [they] act, the [new] government is better for us than Allende was.” Indeed, Kissinger poked fun at America’s spineless diplomatic elite during his first meeting with Chile’s new foreign minister: “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.”160
Depending on taste, there are two ways to interpret the 1973 Chilean coup. It was either a big win for U.S. foreign policy in that a new Castro-type regime had been killed during its infancy, or an egregious example of a superpower blundering into a sovereign nation, hypocritically trampling its democratic will, and installing a regime capable of demonstrable evil. Although the administration was following a precedent set by the Eisenhower administration in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, one might have hoped for better from Kissinger, who claimed to understand that U.S. diplomacy required a more sober sense of what was vital and what was not.
Kissinger’s response to the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War displayed similarly skewed threat perception, and possibly looked worse to neutral observers of events. Pakistan and India had been at loggerheads for years because East Pakistan sought independence from West Pakistan—East and West were separate territories, some eight hundred miles apart, with quite different identities—and Lahore refused to grant it. In the election of 1970, the prosecession Awami League won 167 out of 169 seats in East Pakistan. In response, in March 1971, the Pakistani president, Yahya Khan, dispatched 40,000 troops to quell “disorder” and bring the region to heel. Within two months, 2.8 million residents of East Pakistan had fled across the border into India, creating a vast refugee crisis with which India—a painfully poor country—was ill equipped to cope. The Pakistani military crackdown on the breakaway region had been brutal, and its army committed widespread atrocities, including the targeted rape of Bengali women on a mass scale.161 On December 3, Pakistani troops crossed into India, sparking war, a decision that turned out to be as foolish as it was rash. It took India only thirteen days to defeat Pakistan. On December 16, Pakistan surrendered and East Pakistan became Bangladesh.162
This simple recounting of fact might lead one to conclude that the United States had no horse in this race—that, if anything, India and the emerging Bangladesh were on the side of natural justice. In fact, Kissinger and Nixon instinctively supported Pakistan in its struggle with India. While the CIA could not conclude with certainty which side commenced hostilities, Nixon and Kissinger blamed India—and its prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom Nixon detested—for starting the war. The president complained to Kissinger that Indian aggression “makes your heart sick,” particularly given that he had “warned the bitch.” “We have to cut off arms,” Nixon demanded. “When India talked about West Pakistan attacking them, it’s like Russia claiming to be attacked by Finland.” The less excitable William Rogers wanted nothing to do with the conflict and argued strongly against cutting off supplies to India. Rogers’s well-judged caution provided further impetus for Kissinger to side with his bellicose and emotionally volatile boss. He reported to Nixon that “it’s more and more certain it’s India attacking and not Pakistan.” In concrete terms, the two men secretly urged China to move troops to the Indian border and dispatched a U.S. aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal. On December 12, Nixon used the hotline to warn the Soviet Union of dark consequences if it became involved directly. Kissinger hailed the move as “a typical Nixon plan. I mean it’s bold. You’re putting your chips into the pot again. But my view is that if we do nothing, there is a certainty of disaster. This way there is a high possibility of one, but at least we’re coming off like men.”163
Credibility—“coming off like men”—was the reason Nixon and Kissinger sided so strongly with Pakistan. As Nixon recalled, Kissinger explained his reasoning to him in even starker language: “We don’t really have a choice. We can’t allow a friend of ours and China to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s.”164 It is difficult to improve upon William Bundy’s sharp assessment of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s actions, which were profoundly reckless:
The fundamental point is that a naked balance-of-power policy, going beyond recognized and accepted U.S. interests, was (and is) simply not possible under the American system, which compels concern for public opinion, for the separation of powers, and for the role of Congress. In the Indo-Pakistan crisis and war of 1971, the policy pursued by Nixon and Kissinger was not merely contrary to these American principles or misjudged at almost every turn: it was an excellent example of the weakness of any American policy that is based heavily on balance-of-power considerations without proper weight to other factors.165
In supporting Pakistan, come what may, Kissinger believed he was acting in accordance with Metternich’s precepts on the balance of power.166 Yet the great Austrian strategist did not have to deal with hotlines, nuclear weapons, and public opinion. And he certainly did not direct the diplomacy of a nation born of an idea—whose foreign policy through infancy, adolescence, and adulthood was driven by idealistic self-regard. And so as the trauma of Vietnam faded slowly, powerful elements of the Democratic and Republican Parties joined forces in labeling Kissinger’s worldview a tumor amid healthy tissue. They moved swiftly to purge it from the body politic.
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First came Watergate. In conversation with Kissinger in November 1973, Mao Zedong dismissed the fast-spiraling controversy surrounding the botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in May 1972—and Nixon’s increasingly desperate attempts to mask his involvement in the cover-up—as “a fart in the wind.” If only the stakes involved were so infinitesimal. Rather gracelessly during the same conversation, Kissinger had observed to Mao, “For me there is no issue at all because I am not connected with it at all.”167 This was strictly true, although Kissinger’s enthusiasm for wiretapping explains a certain jumpiness. Watergate cast a dark shadow over the Nixon administration from then on.
Yet there were large pockets of light in which to work, exemplified by Kissinger’s deft handling of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, during which an Arab attack on Israel, spearheaded by Egypt and Syria, was repulsed; Israel was victorious, thanks in no small part to U.S. arms, and then prevented from winning too huge a victory; and the Soviet Union was rendered largely inconsequential. This was one of Kissinger’s finest moments, alternating between the antagonists, offering inducements and threatening reprisals. He ensured that the war did not spill over into a larger conflict and, crucially, restrained Israel’s desire to press its advantage. He followed this up with some adroit shuttle diplomacy through which he brokered a remarkable rapprochement between Tel Aviv and Cairo. And most of this was achieved as Nixon languished in alcohol-soaked isolation—Kissinger made some crucial decisions without the president’s participation. In 1974, however, Watergate became a total eclipse, plunging Kissinger’s one-man diplomacy, and Nixon’s wounded presidency, into darkness.
As the possibility of impeachment proceedings moved closer in the first few months of 1974, Nixon’s foreign-policy options narrowed. In January 1974, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger—who had succeeded Melvin Laird in 1973—offered Paul Nitze, still serving the administration unhappily as an arms control adviser, his old job as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Nitze was pleased to accept the job—in spite of his contempt for Kissinger and Nixon—but then Barry Goldwater called a halt to proceedings. A powerful member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Goldwater declared himself “unalterably opposed” to Nitze’s nomination, as he belonged to “a group interested in bringing about our unilateral disarmament.”168 That Goldwater’s fears were comically off the mark—Kissinger attributed his opposition to the “liturgical implacability of the conservatives”—did not matter in the scheme of things.169 As The New York Times reported on March 22, “As analyzed by White House officials, Senator Goldwater is so strongly opposed to Paul Nitze that he could well switch on the impeachment issue if the White House insisted on proceeding with the nomination.”170 This was clearly a risk not worth running. Nitze was told that he had to remain where he was. This was quite a disappointment, and he did not stay in the post for long. On May 28, as the Watergate scandal approached its denouement, Nitze resigned from the Nixon administration. Receiving no reply to his letter, he released a public statement on June 14:
In my view it would be illusory to attempt to ignore or wish away the depressing reality of the traumatic events now unfolding in our nation’s capital and of the implications of those events in the international arena. Until the office of the Presidency has been restored to its principal function of upholding the Constitution and taking care of the fair execution of the laws, and thus be able to function effectively at home and abroad, I see no real prospect for reversing certain unfortunate trends in the evolving situation.
Kissinger was courteous in detailing his high regard for Nitze in his memoirs. Yet he could not hide his dismay at this “blistering public attack on Nixon.”171
On July 27, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach President Nixon for obstructing justice. After some prevarication—during which Kissinger advised Nixon that his options were now limited to a graceful exit—Nixon concluded he had little option but to resign. As George Kennan noted in his diary, Nixon’s resignation speech was “rather odd, since it showed appreciation neither of the real reasons for his personal disaster nor of the significance of it for his future career.”172 Vice President Gerald Ford, who had replaced Spiro Agnew following his involvement in a tax and bribery scandal, now replaced a president deep in denial. “Gerry Ford, fond as I am of him,” Kissinger told Nixon in October 1973, “just doesn’t have it.”173
Worrying, perhaps, for the soul of a relative innocent like Ford, Nixon briefed his successor on how to handle Kissinger. Crucially, Nixon urged Ford to retain Kissinger in his present role: he was “the only man who would be absolutely indispensable to him … His wisdom, his tenacity, and his experience in foreign affairs” were vital attributes at this volatile juncture. Yet he also cautioned Ford against giving Kissinger “a totally free hand.” As Nixon later observed, “Ford has just got to realize there are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts. Because sometimes Henry starts to think he’s president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.”174 One of Nixon’s last actions as president was to ask Kissinger to cut off all military aid to Israel until it left the occupied territories. A surprised Gerald Ford rescinded this order as soon as he discovered its existence. Kissinger could not help but wonder if this was Nixon’s attempt at “retaliation” for advising him to resign, and for a multitude of other perceived disloyalties.175
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Over the course of Nixon’s decline and fall, Kissinger’s enemies continued to assault him. The Democratic senator from Washington, Scoop Jackson, was a particularly resolute adversary. A liberal on most domestic issues, Jackson followed Paul Nitze’s hawkishness on matters of national security. Indeed, Jackson’s belligerence surpassed that of the author of NSC-68 in many respects—he joined Nitze in assailing Eisenhower for permitting the appearance of a missile gap but was consistently supportive of Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. In August 1972, the Soviet Union introduced an “exit tax” on departing citizens that affected Jewish emigrants disproportionately. Appalled by this policy, Jackson joined with the Ohio Democrat Charles Vanik in proposing an amendment to a proposed trade bill with the Soviet Union granting the nation most favored nation (MFN) status.
The Jackson-Vanik Amendment—successfully attached to the Trade Act of 1974—linked the granting of MFN status to the transparency and fairness of that nation’s emigration policies. Kissinger viewed the amendment as a sneaky attempt to involve the United States in the domestic affairs of another nation. Jackson-Vanik lay well outside the purview of Kissinger’s conception of proper diplomacy, and he believed that the amendment would limit Jewish emigration as Moscow dug in its heels. Observing these dispiriting events from afar, George Kennan began to fear for Kissinger’s political future: “with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment.”176 With good reason, Nixon had described Jackson as “our most formidable opponent.”177 And in Kissinger’s estimation, Jackson’s retinue were even worse. In 1975, the secretary of state described Richard Perle, Jackson’s most stridently anti-Soviet intern, as “a psychopath.”178
In conversation with J. William Fulbright in September 1973, Kissinger mused on his most vocal critics: “It’s a weird combination of right-wingers and intellectuals and Jewish pressure groups.”179 Some even technically worked for him. In May 1974, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s death, the U.S. ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, delivered a rousing speech that was reprinted in the influential journal Commentary, edited by the self-identified “neoconservative” Irving Kristol. Moynihan hailed Wilson’s “singular contribution” as establishing America’s core duty “to defend and, where feasible, to advance democratic principles in the world at large.” Moynihan wondered if Wilson’s inescapable legacy had been forgotten along the way by strategists who followed a different god: “We must play the hand dealt us: we stand for liberty, for the expansion of liberty. Anything less risks the contraction of liberty: our own included.” Moynihan’s article was titled “Was Woodrow Wilson Right?” and his answer was an unequivocal yes. Rather than slapping him across the wrist, however, Ford promoted the popular Moynihan to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations the following year. Though they had common academic roots—Moynihan had been a Fulbright scholar at the London School of Economics and had taught at Harvard—he and Kissinger shared little affection for each other. Moynihan observed that “Henry does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature.” As Walter Isaacson writes, “Moynihan would say that Kissinger’s conspiratorial nature ‘helped bring on’ Watergate.”180
In his memoirs, Kissinger laments the strategic naïveté of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Moynihan:
Tactics bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign policy short of total victory … The radical opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina to a moral defect and had preached the cure of abdication to enable the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neoconservatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise, but we also believed that the simple Wilsonianism of the early 1960s had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of criteria to define the essential elements of our national purpose … The neoconservatives … put forward not so much a new dispensation—as they claimed—but a return to a militant, muscular Wilsonianism. The fundamental aim of foreign policy as they saw it was the eradication of the evil represented by the Soviet Union without confusing the issue with tactics.181
This was a penetrating assessment of the neoconservative movement. Kissinger well understood their desires and influences and was correct to critique the way their overarching goals—eradication of evil, spread of democracy, and rejection of moral relativism—were effectively unattainable.
What Kissinger failed to recognize, however, was the degree to which his diplomatic worldview, and its five-year period of dominance, was a historic aberration created by a unique confluence of events. The popularity of Kissinger’s diplomacy is hard to imagine without the harrowing military stalemate in Vietnam, the election of a nuanced president with an unnuanced history of anticommunism, the first stirrings toward sociability from post–Cultural Revolution China, the Soviet Union’s attainment of nuclear strategic parity, and the Democratic Party’s leftward move toward unelectability, which selected the genuinely liberal George McGovern as its candidate in 1972, whom Nixon crushed by the margin of 61 to 37 percent in the popular vote and 520 to 17 in the electoral college. All these factors gave Kissinger the latitude to ape his hero Metternich on the world stage, focus unerringly on the balance of power, and downplay ideology as a factor in America’s external relations. But the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon’s fall from grace, the post-McGovern resurgence of the Democratic Party, the rightward turn of the GOP—all these brought the United States back to a default Cold War position that was inhospitable to realpolitik. Nixon and Kissinger had achieved a great deal in their narrow window of opportunity. By mid-1974, however, it had been slammed shut.
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Although Kissinger’s diplomatic options were more limited in 1974, a significant compensating factor provided cheer: the ascension of Gerald Ford to the presidency. Kissinger’s boss had morphed overnight from John Gotti into Johnny Carson, which was enough to please anyone. Ford was light in spirits and unburdened by self-doubt—assuredly not the type to detect dark portents in all events, whether good or bad. Kissinger describes a sense of palpable relief after their first meeting:
When I left his office after an hour and a half, I suddenly realized that for the first time in years after a Presidential meeting I was free of tension … No single conversation with Nixon ever encapsulated the totality of his purposes. It was exciting but also draining, even slightly menacing. With Ford, one knew that there were no hidden designs, no morbid suspicions, no complexes … I could think of no public figure better able to lead us in national renewal than this man so quintessentially American, of unquestioned integrity, at peace with himself, thoughtful and knowledgeable of national affairs and international responsibilities, calm and unafraid.182
In an interview with Walter Isaacson, David Kissinger—Henry’s son—identified another reason his father drew such pleasure from the transition: “President Ford made it clear that he considered my father intellectually superior to him, but he was comfortable with that.”183
Ford’s deference to Kissinger was clearest in the first year of his presidency. Critics of détente had long argued that Soviet dissidents such as the scientist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn had received insufficient encouragement from Washington. In September 1973, George Kennan had called Kissinger to lend him his support over what he denigrated as the “hysteria of the western press” in highlighting their plight. After noting that “nothing as yet has actually happened to either [Sakharov] or Solzhenitsyn”—“You know what would have happened to them under Stalin,” added Kissinger—Kennan observed that “many of the issues that they have with them are simply ones that they have provoked. So I just want you to know that I’m strongly with you. And I don’t think in any case that it’s right for a great country such as ours to try and adjust its foreign policy in order to work internal change in another country.”184 Pleased by this endorsement, Kissinger certainly followed Kennan’s logic when he advised President Ford against meeting Solzhenitsyn in early 1975 during his visit to the United States. “I decided to subordinate political gains to foreign policy considerations,” President Ford admitted in a matter-of-fact style that concealed much regret.185
In the pantheon of political missteps, the president’s decision was not quite as misguided as granting Nixon a full pardon and thus immunity from prosecution—as Ford did immediately after coming to office, with disastrous electoral consequences—but it came pretty close. An editorial in The New York Times asked, “Does President Ford know the difference between détente and appeasement?”186 One of Gerald Ford’s assistants, Dick Cheney, expressed his unease to Donald Rumsfeld, the president’s chief of staff:
I think the decision not to see him is based upon a misreading of détente … At most, détente should consist of agreements wherever possible to reduce the possibility of conflict, but it does not mean that all of a sudden our relationship with the Soviets is all sweetness and light. I can’t think of a better way [than meeting Solzhenitsyn] to demonstrate for the American people and for the world that détente with the Soviet Union … does not imply also our approval of their way of life or their authoritarian government.187
Cheney was absolutely right. And it hardly needs emphasizing that any decision capable of uniting Dick Cheney and The Times in well-reasoned opposition was likely to either have some serious flaws or be touched by a peculiar genius. The furor that engulfed the administration made clear that it was the former. Kissinger conceded so much in his memoir, lamenting that “our ability to conduct a balanced Soviet policy was far more damaged than it would have been had we found some way to meet with this great and courageous champion of freedom.”188
A month after the Solzhenitsyn snub, in Minneapolis, Kissinger responded to his legion of critics in a speech titled “The Moral Foundation of Foreign Policy.” The speech followed a familiar post-political-fiasco pattern in that regret appears to be expressed, critics appear to be disarmed, and then the essential point is made at the end: my critics are wrong and my approach is not just correct but unavoidably so. Thus Kissinger began by saying, “We have never seen ourselves as just another nation state pursuing selfish aims. We have always stood for something beyond ourselves—a beacon to the oppressed from other lands.” And he ended with a staunch defense of détente and brand Kissinger, reinforcing the advantages of engagement:
As a consequence of improved foreign policy relationships, we have successfully used our influence to promote human rights. But we have done so quietly, keeping in mind the delicacy of the problem and stressing results rather than public confrontation. Therefore, critics of détente must answer: What is the alternative that they propose? What precise policies do they want us to change? Are they prepared for a prolonged situation of dramatically increased international danger? Do they wish to return to the constant crises and high arms budgets of the Cold War? Does détente encourage repression—or is it détente that has generated the ferment and the demands for openness that we are now witnessing?189
The final sentence was a reference to the Helsinki Final Act, signed that same month, which confirmed Europe’s postwar borders, regulated and facilitated East-West exchanges on science, tourism, the environment, and trade, and devoted a discrete third section—or basket—to “humanitarian and other fields.” This final category committed all signatories to respect the inviolability of its citizens’ human rights. The first basket, formally recognizing Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, attracted the most attention. And at the time, Kissinger could scarcely imagine what that third basket would portend a generation later. But some historians now believe that Brezhnev effectively signed the Soviet Union’s death warrant in Helsinki. As John Lewis Gaddis writes:
Challenging authoritarian rule … was now a legitimate enterprise, because Brezhnev’s signature on the Helsinki Final Act formally endorsed the argument that the Soviet Union’s adversaries had been making throughout the Cold War: that the people, not the party and its leaders, had the right to organize, vote, and thereby determine their own future. Dissidents who had long hoped for reform could now claim it as their right, and within months their demands were sweeping the Soviet bloc.190
In an act of creative self-destruction, the full text of the Helsinki Accords—technically the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe—was printed in Pravda. Soon after the conference ended, Helsinki Groups sprang to life in the nations of the Warsaw Pact, including Václav Havel’s Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Lech Wałeşa’s Solidarity in Poland. Kissinger could not finesse the full significance of the Helsinki Accords at the time—how could he?—but the secretary of state was sharp enough to identify “ferment and the demand for openness” as an early reality. Gerald Ford’s speech at Helsinki represented his finest hour. The president focused particular attention on the human rights provisions, addressing Brezhnev directly: “To my country, they are not clichés or empty phrases … It is important that you recognize the deep devotion of the American people and their government to human rights and fundamental freedoms … History will judge this conference not by what we say here today, but by what we do tomorrow; not by the promises we make but by the promises we keep.”191 Yet Kissinger’s and Ford’s critics missed all this, assailing Helsinki as if it were Yalta’s second coming—without the mitigating factor of the wartime alliance.
George Kennan was never likely to warm to a diplomatic treaty signed by thirty-five states with domestic politics at its heart. He dismissed Helsinki as “a lot of nonsense … none of it committing anyone specifically to anything.”192 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, smarting from the presidential snub, described Helsinki as “the betrayal of Eastern Europe” and predicted darkly that “an amicable agreement of diplomatic shovels will bury and pack down corpses still breathing in a common grave.” Honing his forthcoming primary strategy of blaming the world’s ills on Kissinger, Governor Ronald Reagan said, “At Kissinger’s insistence, Mr. Ford snubbed Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the great moral heroes of our time. At Kissinger’s insistence, Mr. Ford flew halfway around the world to sign an agreement at Helsinki which placed the American seal of approval on the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe.”193 “I think we lost in Helsinki,” chimed in Governor Jimmy Carter, readying himself for his tilt at the presidency. “We ratified the takeover of Eastern Europe. We got practically nothing in return.”194 Kissinger and Ford understood that Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe had been ceded in 1945. The genius of Helsinki was that it grasped a validated, cocksure Brezhnev in a warm embrace—placing official imprimatur on a long-standing reality—and then planted a time bomb on his person.
* * *
Post-Helsinki validation was a long time away. The year 1975 was generally miserable. South Vietnam and Cambodia both fell to communist onslaughts in April. As Kissinger recalled, passively, “As for Indochina, I observed it with the melancholy shown toward a terminally ill relative, hoping for a long respite and miracle cure I was unable to describe.”195 Kissinger favored a military intervention, which Ford swiftly refused to sanction, leaving him to lament, “I’m the only secretary of state who has lost two countries in three weeks.” During an NBC interview with Barbara Walters, which garnered a large viewing audience, Walters asked what this loss meant to the United States. Where had we gone wrong in Vietnam? Kissinger began to answer the question conventionally, observing that there “is in almost every major event a domino effect” that one can attribute to “the general psychological climate that is created in the world as to who is advancing and who is withdrawing.” Then he paused, took a deep breath, and added that “we probably made a mistake” in believing such canards. “We perhaps might have perceived [the war] more in Vietnamese terms, rather than as the outward thrust of a global conspiracy.” Watching Kissinger channeling David Halberstam was an exhilarating moment for The Washington Post’s Stephen Rosenfeld, who hailed “a burst of historical revisionism fit to make his bitterest critics weep for joy.”196
There were few other validations for Kissinger during the remainder of his tenure as secretary of state. During the so-called Halloween Massacre of 1975, Ford ruthlessly restructured his administration, ceding the most significant gains to the right wing of the GOP. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, became secretary of defense. Dick Cheney was promoted to replace Rumsfeld. Ford’s vice president, and Kissinger’s friend and patron, Nelson Rockefeller, was persuaded to eliminate himself as a running mate in the forthcoming election. Finally, Kissinger’s national security brief was taken from him and handed to Brent Scowcroft. This was positive in the sense that Scowcroft and Kissinger had similar worldviews. But Kissinger had enjoyed the power vested in his unprecedented dual role and struggled to adjust to losing his White House perch. Kissinger retreated into a sulk and contemplated resignation. He soon concluded, however, that the prospect of a Rumsfeld or a Cheney replacing him was sufficiently horrifying for him to stay the course. “Don,” Kissinger said to Rumsfeld during a cabinet meeting to audible laughter, “your wife was over measuring my office today.”197
The massacre was not bloody enough for Ronald Reagan, who delivered an ominous threat: “I am not appeased.” Rather than challenging Reagan, Ford gave appeasement another chance. In November 14, 1975, Ford’s campaign adviser, Robert Teeter, warned the president that “détente is a particularly unpopular idea with most Republican primary voters … We ought to stop using the word wherever possible.”198 Ford agreed, and “détente” joined “liberal” in its lexical journey from descriptor to epithet. Kissinger’s grand strategy was being picked apart in full view.
Scenting more blood that same year, Paul Nitze and Eugene Rostow—Walt’s more belligerent older brother—gathered together a selection of prominent anti-Kissinger Democrats and Republicans to form a Committee on the Present Danger. The roster of members was highly impressive, ranging from Dean Rusk to Richard Perle to Saul Bellow. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a well-regarded professor of international relations at Georgetown University, was an important member of the committee, and she was highly effective at assailing Kissinger’s worldview: “[A] culture of appeasement which finds reasons not only against the use of force but denies its place in the world is a profoundly mistaken culture—mistaken in the nature of reality.”199 The executive committee was divided equally between Democrats and Republicans and its public stance was nonpartisan. This worked well in 1976 when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both assailed Kissinger in more or less equal measure. When their piñata departed the scene, however, and the GOP found a charismatic Cold Warrior in Ronald Reagan, the membership of the committee was almost unified in its support for the Republican Party.
Throughout 1976, Ford faced a fierce primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, which he only narrowly overcame, while Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, secured the Democratic nomination. When it came to foreign policy, Reagan and Carter had near identical messages. “Henry Kissinger’s stewardship of United States foreign policy,” Reagan repeated on the primary campaign trail, “has coincided precisely with the loss of United States military superiority.” He and Ford had presided over “the collapse of the American will and retreat of American power.”200 Reagan’s insurgent campaign ended in defeat when Ford secured the nomination in August at the party convention. But Reagan had won the GOP’s soul.
Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, picked up where Reagan left off. During the second presidential debate, for example, he name-checked Kissinger’s “secrecy” and “secret” diplomacy eleven times. During his powerful opening remarks, Carter observed that “our country is not strong anymore; we’re not respected anymore … We’ve lost, in our foreign policy, the character of the American people. We’ve ignored or excluded the American people and the Congress from participation in the shaping of our foreign policy. It’s been one of secrecy and exclusion.” Yet the principal architect of this dismal state of affairs was not the incumbent: “As far as foreign policy goes, Mr. Kissinger has been the president of this country,” Carter noted.201
Later in the debate, a weak-looking Ford made the worst gaffe in the history of presidential debates. In defending his policy of engaging with Moscow, Ford observed, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” When gently asked for a clarification, Ford simply made matters worse:
I don’t believe, Mr. Frankel, that the Yugoslavians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. Each of those countries is independent, autonomous; it has its own territorial integrity. And the United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.202
Few Cold War–era presidents have sounded quite so much like a Soviet propagandist. As well as being flat-out wrong, Ford’s remarks appeared to vindicate Reagan’s and Carter’s charges regarding his indifference to the Soviet menace and acceptance of its worst excesses. The opinion pollster George Gallup observed that the president’s gaffe was “the most decisive moment of the campaign. It fatally stalled Ford’s comeback.”203
Carter defeated Ford in the election of 1976 by two percentage points in the popular vote and by 297 to 240 electoral votes. With Ford’s defeat, America’s curious relationship with European balance-of-power politics came to a swift and ignominious end. It was a passionate and volatile affair—a holiday romance, perhaps. After the fling ended, however, the nation sheepishly returned to its long-standing spouse: Woodrow Wilson. Kissinger departed the scene with his wit and self-confidence intact. “Can you tell me,” one reporter asked him after his departure, “what you consider to be your greatest success and greatest failure?” “I don’t quite understand your second point,” said Kissinger.204
A little after leaving office, Kissinger made some unguarded remarks about Richard Nixon that were picked up on an open microphone. He described his former boss as an “odd,” “unpleasant,” “nervous,” and “artificial” man. Word got back to Nixon, who was predictably angered—though probably not surprised. It made for an awkward reunion in 1977 when the two men exchanged words at the funeral of Hubert Humphrey, who might have been president had events taken a different course in 1968. “You as mean as ever?” Nixon asked Kissinger. “Yes,” replied Kissinger, “but I don’t have as much opportunity as before.”205 When Nixon died in 1994, Kissinger quoted Hamlet during an elegant and affecting eulogy: “He was a man, take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.”206 The same might be said of Kissinger.