Worldmaking (60 page)

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.
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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.”
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A few weeks later, Harriman replied, “All is forgiven. Welcome back to the fold.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

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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
.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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