Worldmaking (69 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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With good reason, Nixon had described Jackson as “our most formidable opponent.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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?”
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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.
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