Kissinger’s Shadow (10 page)

But then came America's war in Southeast Asia. Kissinger, named national security adviser in the middle of that war, isn't singularly responsible for the undoing of America's Cold War consensus. But by executing Nixon's war strategy with such zeal, in Cambodia and elsewhere, he quickened the breakup. He did say that statesmen were prophets, and in a way he fulfilled his own prophecy, helping to bring about the dissensus he had warned about in 1954. It wasn't just the bombing of Cambodia. “Immense damage had been done by 1973–1974,” the diplomatic historian Carolyn Eisenberg told me after she generously read this chapter. “There were so many lies about so many things,” she said. “The biggest lie was that they had wasted thousands of lives and vast sums of money to achieve a peace settlement that they could have obtained four years earlier.”
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Kissinger recognizes that his time in public office marked a turning point, complaining that no other American statesman had to face the kind of criticism he faced. Differences of opinion over foreign policy were to be expected, he said. But during his tenure, “a natural critique of decisions that were arguable at various stages became transmuted into a moral issue, first about the moral adequacy of American foreign policy altogether, and then into the moral adequacy of America in conducting any kind of traditional foreign policy.”
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In trying to account for this turn, Kissinger over the years has occasionally referred back to the argument he made in his 1954 doctoral dissertation regarding the inevitable incongruity between domestic absolutism and international relativism: losing the war in Vietnam, he said in 2010, was “America's first experience with limits in foreign policy, and it was something painful to accept.” This is a disingenuous interpretation. It is true, as will shall see, that defeat in Vietnam provoked a conservative reaction against Kissinger. Grassroots activists were suspicious of Kissinger's “foreignness” and “internationalism” (that is, his Jewishness). First-generation neoconservative intellectuals objected strongly to the idea that there were “limits” to American power. But this isn't the sort of “moral” rebuke Kissinger is talking about, when he complains about the domestic response to his conduct of the war. Rather, the critics who most rankled Kissinger were those—protesters, Congress, and former Harvard colleagues like Thomas Schelling—who told
him
that there were limits to what
he
could do to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. As he complained to a reporter in early 1973, specifically about public oversight of his Cambodia strategy: “I don't see how it is possible to conduct foreign policy when there's a systematic attempt to destroy both your threats and your incentives.”
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Never has Kissinger acknowledged how his refusal to recognize limits in Southeast Asia accelerated the crisis, the way his war in Cambodia helped to bring about the end of the old “traditional” foreign policy establishment, transforming the early Cold War national security state, based on elite planning, gentlemanly debate, domestic acquiescence, and cross-party consensus, into what came next. Kissinger didn't use his time in office to “instruct” citizens in political realism, as he had earlier defined the responsibility of statesmen. Rather, he helped adapt the imperial presidency to new times, based on an increasingly mobilized and polarized citizenry, more spectacular displays of power, more secrecy, and ever more widening justifications for ever more war.

 

4

Nixon Style

Because, because, you've gotta remember that everything is domestic politics from now on. And, uh—. Everything's domestic politics. Maybe, maybe, maybe, Henry—. To hell with the whole thing. You know what I mean?

—Richard Nixon

In recent years, there's been an avalanche of declassified transcripts of phone conversations Kissinger secretly recorded, newly available Nixon tapes, White House memos, and the papers and diaries of Haldeman, Haig, and others. In this material it is hard to find a single foreign policy initiative that was not also conducted for domestic gain, to quiet dissent, best rivals, or position Nixon for reelection in 1972. An early push to build an antiballistic missile system had less to do with Soviet power than with staging a confrontation with Congress to establish Nixon's dominance over foreign policy. The president, with the help of Kissinger, won that fight by overstating the Soviet threat (something Kissinger had been doing since the 1950s). The president then gloated in a victory memo about the “‘Nixon style' in dealing with the Congress,” without making even a mention of national defense. In the Middle East, as the historian Robert Dallek writes in
Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
, “domestic politics was paramount.” Nixon wanted to press Israel to give up its nuclear program but, not wanting to lose pro-Israel votes in Congress, relented. The president also thought he would get “more political than national security value” from SALT talks with Moscow.

“We've got to break the back of this generation of Democratic leaders,” Kissinger said, referring to a plan to use the defense budget and an arms control treaty to discredit Nixon's domestic adversaries. Nixon responded: “We've got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.”

“That's right,” Kissinger answered.

Nixon: “And we certainly as hell will.”
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No one country of the globe claimed more of Kissinger's attention than the United States. He became fixated on its domestic politics because his boss, Richard Nixon, was fixated on domestic politics. And Kissinger knew that his position depended entirely on melding himself to Nixon. “I would be losing my only constituency,” he once said, about the consequences of displeasing Nixon.
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There's more, however, to the subordination of diplomacy to domestic politics than the attachment Kissinger had to Nixon. Vietnam polarized American society. It gave rise, on one side, to a dissenting, skeptical culture and, on the other, to a conservative movement that would eventually coalesce behind Ronald Reagan. As the schism deepened, politicians would increasingly use war—or at least the drumbeat of war—to contain the first and leverage the second to their advantage. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all played foreign policy for political gain (or loss: consider LBJ and Vietnam). But the Nixon White House raised the stakes.

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Startlingly fast after 1968, 1972 came into view. And then, even before 1972 arrived, 1976 loomed. The four-year presidential election cycle has speeded up in recent years, it is often said, but nearly half a century ago, Nixon and Kissinger, in a remarkably short period of time after having landed in office, were running their war in Southeast Asia with an eye on Nixon's reelection.

Here's Kissinger speaking to Senator George McGovern in early 1969 about Vietnam, just after Nixon's inauguration:

I think that it is clear now that we never should have gone in there, and I don't see how any good can come of it. But we can't do what you recommend and just pull out, because the boss's whole constituency would fall apart; those are his people who support the war effort: the South; the blue-collar Democrats in the North. The Nixon constituency is behind the war effort. If we were to pull out of Vietnam, there would be a disaster, politically, for us here, at home.
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The 1968 race for the presidency had been a three-way contest, with Nixon winning 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.7, and the segregationist George Wallace 13.5. Nearly ten million voters chose not just Wallace but his running mate, General Curtis LeMay, who made a number of alarming statements during the campaign. “I never said we should bomb them back to the Stone Age,” was his response to criticism of his plan for winning the Vietnam War. “I said we had the capability to do it.”
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Most of these votes would have gone to Nixon had Wallace and LeMay not run, and Nixon wanted to make sure he got them in 1972. To do so, he intended to implement his famous “southern strategy.” That Nixon cultivated racial resentment in order to win the South is well known. Less so is that his strategy had a foreign policy component: maximum air power in Southeast Asia—essentially LeMay's Stone-Age strategy, that is, bomb them into submission. “It was very clear,” George McGovern said about his talk with Kissinger, that “they were already starting to chart the so-called Southern Strategy of trying to develop an approach that would pull the South away from Wallace and into the Nixon column.… I never again could develop much respect for their Vietnam policy. I thought that they were willing to continue killing Asians and sacrificing the lives of young Americans because of their interpretation of what would play in the United States.”
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Nixon needed to placate conservatives to forestall another third-party challenge. In this, Kissinger, having established himself as the “hawk of hawks,” was a useful emissary. For the next five years, the extreme actions taken by Nixon and Kissinger—the mining of North Vietnam's harbor, the Christmas bombing, Operation Linebacker, the destruction of the Mekong Delta, and, of course, Cambodia and Laos, two countries that were effectively bombed back into the Stone Age—were blood tribute paid to the growing power of the American Right.

Nixon had Kissinger speak with prominent conservatives, including California governor Ronald Reagan, the Reverend Billy Graham, William Buckley, and the comedian Bob Hope: “The president wanted me to give you a brief call to tell you that with all the hysteria on TV and in the news on Laos, we feel we have set up everything we set out to do: Destroyed more supplies than in Cambodia last year. Set them back many months.… We achieved what we were after.”
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They achieved nothing. North Vietnam never wavered, never conceded to Nixon's demand that it remove troops from South Vietnam in exchange for US withdrawal. But that didn't matter, because the bombing was meant to win at home.

Nixon was particularly worried about Reagan, and Kissinger stoked his worry.

“He said that you have a real problem with the conservatives,” Kissinger told Nixon in November 1971, about a recent conversation he had had with Reagan.

“Oh, I know,” Nixon said.

Kissinger continued: “He says you're going to wind up without any friends because you can't win the liberals anyway.”

“Geez,” said Nixon.
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Kissinger told Nixon that he had counted off the administration's conservative achievements to Reagan, including the deployment, over liberal opposition, of MIRVs, or multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle nuclear missiles. “We wouldn't have had Cambodia,” Kissinger said, referring to the 1970 US invasion, “we wouldn't have had Laos … And we wouldn't have an $80 billion defense budget.”

At one point, Nixon cut in: “We wouldn't have had Amchitka.” “We wouldn't have had Amchitka,” Kissinger repeated.

The story of Amchitka, a small island off Alaska, is largely forgotten now, but here Nixon and Kissinger are talking about it as if it were a moment in human events equal to Winston Churchill's “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech to the House of Commons in 1940. In the early 1970s, Amchitka was the site of a pitched battle between arms control and environmental groups and the White House over plans to conduct a high-yield, extremely radioactive nuclear test there. The test had no military or scientific benefit but was seen as something of a ritual by the Right, fireworks to celebrate the end of Johnson's presidency, when many hawks (like LeMay) felt the United States had fallen behind on nuclear development. Then, when public opposition to the detonation began to grow, Nixon had a chance to show conservatives that he would stand up to “liberals.” He let it be known that, were the Supreme Court to issue an injunction against the test, he would go forward anyway.

The Court didn't block the test, but Haldeman told Kissinger to play it for politics anyway. “Tell Reagan we're taking unmitigated heat in order to keep that thing going. We need all the support of the right.” Later, after the test was conducted, Nixon met with Senator Barry Goldwater and mocked the fears of environmentalists. “The seals are still swimming,” the president said. “I'm damn proud of you,” Goldwater told him.
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*   *   *

What would become known as the Reagan Revolution was on the march and Nixon had a conservative majority (as long as it didn't split). Nixon's aides made a calculated decision to play this “positive polarization,” as Vice President Spiro Agnew described the breakup of American society, for advantage. “There are twice as many conservatives as Republicans,” said Haldeman, and the White House, especially after the Cambodia invasion in the run-up to the 1970s midterms, increasingly turned Vietnam into a “social issue,” linking the war to crime and protests at home, tagging dissenters as unpatriotic, blaming the murder of protesters on protesters themselves, on a “radical liberalism,” “whimpering isolationism,” and “pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.”
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But until conservatives became a dependable voting bloc, Nixon couldn't just govern from the right. Though their moment was passing, he still had to reckon with liberals and the Left, ranging from New Dealers who continued to believe that “Franklin D. Roosevelt was president,” as Nixon complained, to the churches, the war protesters, the civil rights movement, antipoverty and environmental groups, and more radical organizations.

To keep this wing of American politics at bay, even as he worked to build his “silent majority” into an electoral coalition, Nixon could count on the versatile Kissinger. “We knew Henry as the ‘hawk of hawks' in the Oval Office,” Haldeman recalled. “But in the evenings, a magical transformation took place. Touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.… And the press, beguiled by Henry's charm and humor, bought it. They just couldn't believe that the intellectual, smiling, humorous ‘Henry the K' was a hawk like ‘that bastard' Nixon.”
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