Worldmaking (64 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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?'”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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!”
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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.
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