by Greg Grandin
But when Ellsberg tried, in their last meeting before leaking the documents, to get Kissinger to read the papers, Kissinger brushed him off. Kissinger, when he became national security adviser, was given a copy of the study, so he knew what it was: exactly the kind of history writing he had long warned about, designed to entrap executives into thinking that what was has to be, an endless chain of causes and effects resulting in doubt, guilt, and defeat. That the study was compiled by an amorphous committee of experts, analysts, and functionaries only underscored the danger.* “Research,” Kissinger wrote in 1966, “often becomes a means to buy time and to assuage consciences. Studying a problem can turn into an escape from coming to grips with it.”11
“Do we really have anything to learn from this study?” he asked Ellsberg, wearily. “My heart sank,” recalls Ellsberg.12
* * *
On Monday, June 14, 1971, the day after the New York Times published its first story on the papers, Kissinger, at a senior staff meeting that included Nixon, exploded. He waved his arms, stomped his feet, and pounded his hands on a Chippendale table, shouting: “This will totally destroy American credibility forever.… It will destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy in confidence.… No foreign government will ever trust us again.” “Henry was jumping up and down,” was how Nixon remembered the scene, which according to one biographer shocked even those used to Kissinger’s outbursts. By this point, Kissinger had become known for his “temper tantrums, jealous rages, and depressions.”13 “That poor fellow is an emotional fellow,” Nixon remarked in late 1971 to John Ehrlichman. “We just have to get him some psychotherapy,” Ehrlichman responded.14
The following days brought more phone calls and meetings, as Nixon consulted with his inner circle—Kissinger, Haldeman, Mitchell, and Ehrlichman, and others—on how best to respond. The Pentagon Papers were a bureaucratic history of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia up until Johnson’s presidency. There was nothing specifically damaging to Nixon. But it was Kissinger’s “fury” that convinced Nixon to take the matter seriously. “Without Henry’s stimulus,” John Ehrlichman said, “the president and the rest of us might have concluded that the Papers were Lyndon Johnson’s problem, not ours.” Kissinger “fanned Richard Nixon’s flame white hot.”15
Why? The leak was bad for Kissinger in a number of ways. He was just then negotiating with China to reestablish relations and was afraid the scandal might sabotage those talks. He feared that Ellsberg, working with other dissenters on the NSC staff, might have breached the closed informational circuit that he had worked hard to establish, perhaps even acquiring classified memos on Cambodia.16
But Kissinger’s rage was also as much about the leaker as about the leak, obvious in the way he swung between awe and agitation when describing Ellsberg to his coconspirators, as almost Promethean in his intellect and appetites. “Curse that son of a bitch, I know him well,” he began one Oval Office meeting:
He’s a genius.… He was a hardliner. He went—he volunteered for service in Vietnam. He was so nuts that he’d drive around all over Vietnam with a carbine when it was guerilla-infested, and he’d shoot at—he has My Lai cases on his—he’d shoot at peasants in the fields on the theory everyone in black—.… The man is a genius. He’s one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met.
In other conversations, Kissinger said that Ellsberg had hunted Vietnamese peasants from helicopters and was a drug-crazed sex maniac. “A despicable bastard,” Kissinger said. “Passionate in his denunciation of Daniel Ellsberg,” was how Ehrlichman remembered Kissinger.17 Kissinger keyed his performance to stir up Nixon’s varied resentments, depicting Ellsberg as some kind of liberal and hedonistic superman—smart, subversive, promiscuous, perverse, and privileged. “He’s now married a very rich girl,” Kissinger told Nixon. “Nixon was fascinated,” Ehrlichman said.
“Henry got Nixon cranked up,” Haldeman remembered, “and then they started cranking each other up until they both were in a frenzy.” “Kissinger,” he said, “was absolutely infuriated and, in his inimitable fashion, managed to beat the president into an equal froth of fury.” Haig said that Kissinger “did drive the president’s concern” about the leak.
“It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President,” Kissinger warned Nixon, if he were to let Ellsberg off.
It was in the meeting where Kissinger gave his most detailed description of Ellsberg (the one where he admitted that he passed on classified information to Nixon’s campaign in the fall of 1968) that Nixon ordered a series of illegal covert operations. “Blow the safe,” he said, hoping to get that bombing-halt file so he could “blackmail” Johnson into speaking out against Ellsberg. “I want it implemented on a thievery basis,” the president directed. It was also in this meeting that Nixon ordered the “plumbers” to be established, a clandestine unit headed by Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy that conducted a number of buggings and burglaries, including the one at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.
The plumbers were also responsible for breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in California, an operation that directly stemmed from Kissinger’s portrayal of Ellsberg as unhinged. According to Haldeman, “the reason for trying to get Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s files is explained by the desire to find evidence to support Kissinger’s vivid statement about Ellsberg’s weird habits.” The information was to be used to “discredit his character.”18
“He’s nuts, isn’t he?” Haldeman asked Kissinger in one of their meetings.
“He’s nuts,” Kissinger answered.
* * *
Earlier, in the meeting where he suggested that Kissinger survey the bureaucracy as a way of establishing his dominance over it, Ellsberg, who won the highest of security clearances at a very young age, had warned Kissinger of the danger of too much knowledge. It’s a lengthy speech, worth quoting in full:
Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all—so much! incredible!—suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t … and that all those other people are fools.
Over a longer period of time—not too long, but a matter of two or three years—you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the New York Times can. But that takes a while to l
earn.
In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues … and with myself.
You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.19
Ellsberg says he gave some thought to what he wanted to say before his meeting with Kissinger. The monologue is notable in that it reveals Ellsberg, the deductive rationalist, as the true appreciator of advice that Kissinger to this day likes to give: information isn’t wisdom and the truth of facts is found not in the facts themselves but in the questions we ask of them.
Kissinger, at a later date, complained to Ellsberg about his former Harvard colleagues, including Thomas Schelling, who had turned against the war. He was, reports Ellsberg, “contemptuous of their presumption that they could judge a policy when they knew so little about policy making from the inside.”
“They never had the clearances,” Kissinger said.
* * *
For what must have been for him a long year, between mid-1973 and mid-1974, it seemed Henry Kissinger, now holding the position of both national security adviser and secretary of state, was going down with Richard Nixon, along with his top aides: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Dean, who were all gone by April 1973. Kissinger almost got caught on Cambodia, when Major Hal Knight sent a whistle-blowing letter to Senator William Proxmire informing him of his falsification of records. The Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings through the middle of 1973, and Seymour Hersh came very close to establishing Kissinger’s involvement in setting up the dual record reporting system.* Hersh couldn’t confirm Kissinger’s role (he would at a later date) but that didn’t let Kissinger off the hook. In June 1974, Hersh, along with Woodward and Bernstein, had widened the net, filing stories fingering Kissinger for the first round of illegal wiretaps the White House set up, done in the spring of 1969 to keep the Cambodia bombing secret. Reporters, senators, and representatives were circling, asking questions, digging up more information, issuing subpoenas.20
Landing in Austria, en route to the Middle East, and finding that the press had run more unflattering stories and editorials, Kissinger took a gamble. He held an impromptu press conference and threatened to resign (this was June 11, less than two months before Nixon’s resignation). It was by all accounts a bravura turn. “When the record is written,” he said, seemingly on the verge of tears, “one may remember that perhaps some lives were saved and perhaps some mothers can rest more at ease, but I leave that to history. What I will not leave to history is a discussion of my public honor.”21
The bet worked and the press gushed.† He “seemed totally authentic,” New York magazine wrote. As if in recoil from the unexpected assertiveness they had shown in recent years, reporters and news anchors rallied around. The rest of the White House was being revealed to be little more than a bunch of shady two-bit thugs, but Kissinger was someone America could believe in. “We were half-convinced,” Ted Koppel said in a documentary in 1974, just after Kissinger’s threatened resignation, “that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man.” The secretary of state was a “legend, the most admired man in America, the magician, the miracle worker.” Kissinger, Koppel said, “may be the best thing we’ve got going for us.”22
6
The Opposite of Unity
You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary time.
—Henry Kissinger
Henry Kissinger has long expressed a more than grudging admiration for revolutionaries. Years before he would sit down with Mao to discuss philosophy or sneak away with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to sip scotch and carve out respective spheres of influence, he argued that “most great statesmen have been either representatives of essentially conservative social structures or revolutionaries.” The conservative is effective, he said, because as a defender of the status quo he doesn’t have to “justify” his “every step along the way.” But the revolutionary also has an advantage in that he believes himself liberated from the past. He thus has more freedom to act and more easily “dissolves technical limitations.”1 Kissinger was a conservative, but he was also a dialectician, and he believed that revolutionaries possessed a number of qualities—surety of purpose, a vision for the future, an ability to overcome institutional lethargy—that conservatives would need if they were to best the revolutionary challenge.
Kissinger strived to obtain them. He especially admired the discipline and resolve of his Marxist counterparts. At times, the envy was palpable. North Vietnamese negotiators, he wrote, remained true to their purposes, even as he found himself bowing to political pressure at home: they “changed nothing in their diplomatic objectives and very little in their diplomatic positions.” Their “fourth rate” peasant country was being bombed back to the Stone Age, but they “could keep us under constant public pressure.”2 Zhou Enlai was “electric, quick, taut, deft, humorous,” Kissinger wrote, and the two men “developed an easy camaraderie not untinged with affection.”3 With the autocratic Mao, he could fantasize about what it was like to conduct foreign policy and not be tormented by the press and Congress. “Why is it in your country,” Mao once asked him, “you are always so obsessed with that nonsensical Watergate issue?”
Mao and Kissinger shared a mutual appreciation of German metaphysics. “You are now freer than before,” Mao said to Kissinger in November 1973, meaning that with the Vietnam War over and Nixon reelected, he had more room to maneuver. “Much more,” Kissinger replied.4 Mao’s mention of freedom here was in a narrow, political sense, now that Nixon had his landslide. But it prompted the Chinese revolutionary to ask Kissinger a question about Hegel. The Chinese leader wanted to know if he was using the correct English translation of Hegel’s famous maxim “freedom means the knowledge of necessity.”
“Yes,” Kissinger replied. The conversation continued:
MAO: Do you pay attention or not to one of the subjects of Hegel’s philosophy, that is, the unity of opposites?
KISSINGER: Very much. I was much influenced by Hegel in my philosophic thinking.
MAO: Both Hegel and Feuerbach, who came a little later after him. They were both great thinkers. And Marxism came partially from them. They were predecessors of Marx. If it were not for Hegel and Feuerbach, there would not be Marxism.
KISSINGER: Yes. Marx reversed the tendency of Hegel, but he adopted the basic theory.
MAO: What kind of doctor are you? Are you a doctor of philosophy?
KISSINGER: Yes (laughter).
MAO: Yes, well, then won’t you give me a lecture?
Kissinger was familiar with Hegel’s “unity of opposites,” the notion that ideas, people, political movements, and nations are defined by their contradictions. He believed that effective diplomacy was the managing of those contradictions, that what made great statesmen great was their ability to “restrain contending forces, both domestic and foreign, by manipulating their antagonisms.”
By 1975, however, after six years in public office, Kissinger, now Gerald Ford’s secretary of state, had achieved the opposite of unity at home and something like perpetual war abroad. Rather than restrain contending forces, he had unleashed them. In the United States, the deceit, cruelty, and
corruption of Nixon’s inner circle, including Kissinger, were not the only cause of the crack-up taking place at all levels of society, among elites and within the broader population, that, by the early 1970s, had reached crisis proportions. But, as Nixon and Kissinger themselves put it, they used foreign policy to “break the back” of domestic opponents and “destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.” They had mixed results with the former (Nixon did win a landslide reelection, though he was subsequently driven out of office) but succeeded, stunningly, with the latter. By the end of Kissinger’s tenure, all of the institutional pillars of society that previous administrations could rely on to uphold government legitimacy—the press, universities, the movie and music industries, churches, courts, and Congress—seemed to be pushing against it, creating that entrenched adversary culture that so worried conservatives.
In assessing Kissinger’s legacy in the realm of diplomacy, one has to, as the New Yorker pointed out in late 1973, contend with the foreign policies of “two Henry Kissingers.” There was the Kissinger who “established relations with China, improved our relations with Russia, and successfully completed the first phase of SALT—and for these achievements most Americans are grateful.” These initiatives were meant to be the pillars of his “grand strategy,” stabilizing the post-Vietnam international order and allowing the United States, the Soviet Union, and China to stake out spheres of influence. One might add to this list the shuttle diplomacy that helped end 1973’s Arab-Israel War. But then there was the Kissinger who, with Nixon, “planned the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia … initiated the unauthorized wiretapping of members of Kissinger’s staff and of newsmen in 1969 … planned the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 … planned the use of American air power to support the invasion of Laos in 1971 … planned the mining and blockading of North Vietnamese harbors … planned the ‘Christmas bombing’ of North Vietnam—all this done in secrecy, and without congressional consent. While the President and the men of Watergate were, it now appears, undermining our democratic system of government in domestic affairs, the President and Henry Kissinger were undermining the system in foreign affairs.”5