Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  There was, hindsight makes plain, something that should have alerted me early in 1973. It was the behavior of Nixon himself. I found it difficult to get Nixon to focus on foreign policy, to a degree that should have disquieted me. In the past, even in calm periods, he had immersed himself in foreign policy to enliven the job of managing the government, which ultimately bored him. Now it was difficult to get him to address memoranda. They came back without the plethora of marginal comments that indicated they had been carefully read. On at least one occasion Nixon checked every box of an options paper, defeating its purpose.

  I ascribed this lassitude to his characteristic depression after success. Through my acquaintance with him, absence of tension provoked not elation but lethargy. Nixon’s most capricious actions had occurred in times of quiet, not in reaction to crises. Calm periods seemed to drive him to disequilibrium as if he could find his own balance only in tension.

  Throughout this period I remember only one conversation with Nixon that related directly to Watergate. In early April 1973, as Senator Sam Ervin’s Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the Watergate Committee) began its investigations, we were in San Clemente. One afternoon the President called me to his office and asked whether Haldeman should testify. I replied, naively as it proved, that this would be an admission of guilt and that only those with direct knowledge of the break-in should appear. Nixon gave no sign that based on his knowledge I had just put forward a proposition that contradicted itself. Impassively, he told me to repeat my views to Haldeman, a suggestion whose extreme ambiguity did not strike me for several weeks. When I did, Haldeman listened equally impassively and urged me to repeat my views to Ehrlichman. Ehrlichman, in turn, shrugged off the observation with the air of a man whose patience was barely equal — but might not always be — to my invincible ignorance of political matters.

  Now that Watergate was about to explode, I pondered Nixon’s options. I had my doubts about Garment’s proposed solution. The vision of Nixon’s putting himself at the head of a reform movement to clean up his own Administration stretched credulity. Nor was it all that certain to work. A massive purge in the fifth year of a Presidency raises profound doubts about the incumbent’s judgment for not having spotted the malfeasance earlier. Moreover, I thought that Garment’s diagnosis precluded his remedy. Anyone familiar with Nixon’s way of conducting affairs would know that he needed a strong chief of staff to carry out any plan, that in the absence of delicate pressure from those he trusted he would procrastinate; his usual coolness under fire always needed reinforcement by trusted aides. In other words, only Haldeman could get Nixon to fire Haldeman, an unlikely proposition. If Haldeman was involved even indirectly, there was no one else to shepherd such a program past our chief’s psychological defenses. On Garment’s diagnosis the Administration seemed headed for prolonged turmoil without a foreseeable outcome.

  If this was true, my duty as I perceived it was to rally those unaffected by the catastrophe for the ordeal ahead. I asked Garment’s permission to inform a few in the White House whose probity and integrity would help us preserve public confidence — George Shultz and Arthur Burns in particular. Garment agreed; I immediately set up a meeting for Sunday evening, the first time they were both available.

  In the meantime, on Saturday evening, April 14, I attended the annual dinner tendered by the White House correspondents. The guest of honor is putatively the President, together with the Cabinet. I say “putatively” because a point is usually reached in an administration — it came rather early in Nixon’s — where the President feels that his daily harassment by the media exhausts his tolerance for their company. Listening to the uneven sarcasm that is the staple of these evenings is not a duty foreseen by the Constitution. Presidential attendance begins to slip. Nixon used his absence to pretend an imperviousness to the journalists assigned to cover him — only reinforcing the reciprocal hostility and sensitivity of the President and the press.

  On this occasion, however, Nixon decided to show up. The evening went well enough; at least I remember no untoward incident, though the atmosphere was redolent with resentment. Afterward, several newspapers gave parties in various suites. While attending one of them, I was called to a phone. It was the President and he was highly agitated. It was not unusual for Nixon to call at all hours, nor for him to pose an odd-sounding question and hang up. But this evening the question sounded weird even for a late night call. “Do you agree,” he asked “that we should draw the wagons around the White House?”

  We know today from the mountains of Watergate revelations that the day had been one of frenzied meetings between Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and former Attorney General and campaign manager John Mitchell. But I was not aware of them. I would like to be able to report that I said something helpful or constructive to the obviously distraught President. But few advisers possess the fortitude to tell their President that they do not know what he is talking about, or that his query indicates a propensity toward melodrama. Nor did I feel up to it that evening. I mumbled something noncommittal that Nixon, not unreasonably, construed as assent. “All right,” he said, “we will draw the wagons around the White House.” He gave that enigmatic metaphor no further content before hanging up suddenly. Had it not been for my conversation with Garment a few hours earlier, I would not have known what agitated the President so much.

  Stung, I mentioned Garment’s worries to John Ehrlichman when he called me about something or other on Sunday, April 15. “Garment,” replied Ehrlichman, equably enough, “is a nuclear overreactor. Pay no attention to him. Our major problem is to get John Mitchell to own up to his responsibility.” Mitchell indeed! Did he have the major responsibility for the Watergate break-in — or was he chosen as the fall guy? I asked myself the question without any idea of the answer. What was clear was that if Mitchell was involved, the scandal would be uncontainable. John Mitchell, that epitome of loyalty, would never have acted without at least believing that he was carrying out Presidential wishes. Indeed, whatever hypothesis one considered — Garment’s, which saw Colson as the chief villain with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in supporting roles; or Ehrlichman’s, which now apparently placed the blame on Mitchell — Watergate was bound to rock the nation. It simply was not credible, least of all to those of us who knew how the White House operated, that Nixon’s paladins had acted totally on their own on a matter with such grave implications for the President.

  Thus, unless it could be shown unambiguously that the President was not involved, we would soon face a monumental crisis of institutions. Clearly, the President was severely wounded. Whatever the unimaginable outcome, Nixon would have to alter his system of management. He would no longer be able to dominate the government through White House assistants, harassing or bypassing the regular bureaucracy. The trusted political aides who, as part of the post-election shake-up, had been placed into every key department as a means of keeping an eye on the Cabinet member who was titular head, would lose their clout if not their positions. Challenges to White House predominance were increasingly probable. It was imperative to adopt rapidly a mode of government less dependent on solitary decisions at the top. However necessary existing procedures may have appeared to brave the Vietnam period, the moral, psychological, and political basis for them had now disappeared.

  My meeting with George Shultz and Arthur Burns was the evening of that same Sunday, April 15, in Shultz’s White House office. Shultz at that time combined the positions of Secretary of the Treasury and Assistant to the President in charge of economic policy. Burns was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board but wielded a wider influence than that title would indicate. The later debacle of the Nixon Administration has obscured the extent to which it included men and women of extraordinary character and intelligence.

  Shultz had entered the Cabinet as Secretary of Labor, had been moved to the Office of Management and Budget when it was given policymaking functions, and had succeeded John Connally as Secretary of the
Treasury in the summer of 1972. I met no one in public life for whom I developed greater respect and affection. Highly analytical, calm and unselfish, Shultz made up in integrity and judgment for his lack of the flamboyance by which some of his more insecure colleagues attempted to make their mark. He never sought personal advancement. By not threatening anyone’s prerogatives, and, above all, by his outstanding performance, he became the dominant member of every committee he joined. He usually wound up being asked to sum up a meeting — a role that gave him influence without his aiming for it. If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.

  It was easy to underestimate Arthur Burns. As he puffed on his pipe while considering a proposition, he seemed to be a fuzzy-minded, slightly abstracted academic, and indeed he had been a professor at Columbia University for three decades. His deliberate manner of speaking might be occasionally taken by the unwary as a reflection of the pace of his mind. But Burns had an unusual ability to get swiftly to the heart of any problem. He was both brilliant and incredibly persistent; and he proved to be one of the canniest bureaucratic infighters in Washington. He had not been filling his pipe reflectively throughout the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations without studying and learning what made government tick. He worked patiently at lining up support for his position; he lost few battles while I observed him in action. Yet this did not diminish the admiration for his integrity, dedication, and subtle intelligence held by those of us whom he usually outmaneuvered.

  When I confided Garment’s news to my two colleagues they were at first unbelieving. But we all shared a sense of impotence. We did not know the dimensions of the looming scandal. We agreed to keep each other informed of whatever we learned; we would tell each other of conversations with the President relevant to our concerns so that we would, if possible, offer unified advice. We would try jointly to develop policies and initiatives to maintain the confidence of the American people in their government even in the midst of a political crisis. The Administration had, after all, nearly four years to run; presumptuous as it may seem, we thought a duty had fallen on us to preserve as much moral substance for the national government as could be salvaged.

  The Legacy of Vietnam

  BEFORE continuing the tale of the unfolding of Watergate, I must stop to explain its context. Most of the voluminous literature of Watergate — a cottage industry — treats it as a personal aberration of Richard Nixon as if there had been no surrounding circumstances. And in truth Watergate is unthinkable apart from Nixon’s driven personality. But there was also a deeper background. Historians will misunderstand Watergate who neglect the destructive impact on American politics, spirit, and unity of the war in Vietnam.

  The United States had entered Vietnam during the Kennedy Administration, with sixteen thousand advisers, idealism, and a sense of mission producing an extraordinary activism. Communist aggression in Indochina was thought to reflect the cutting edge of a homogeneous ideology directed by a monolithic Sino-Soviet bloc. The Johnson Administration had escalated the commitment, sending more than 500,000 American troops to the inhospitable jungles of Southeast Asia to combat what it considered a test case of a theory of revolutionary warfare centrally directed from Moscow and Peking. That assessment proved to be mistaken. Hanoi was essentially acting on its own account though it could not have done so without the help of the two giant Communist powers, especially the Soviet Union.

  The frustrations of the Johnson Administration in Indochina made it an easy target for later abuse, aggravated when many of the policymakers who had involved us in Indochina became so demoralized that they in effect joined the critics who had destroyed them and their President. But their original perception was not so mistaken as their own loss of confidence in themselves made it appear. The rulers of Hanoi were anything but the benign nationalists so often portrayed by gullible sympathizers; they were cold, brutal revolutionaries determined to dominate all of Indochina. The impact of a North Vietnamese victory on the prospects of freedom and national independence in Southeast Asia was certain to be grave, especially on governments much less firmly established than was the case a decade later; the much-maligned domino theory — shared by all the non-Communist governments in the area — turned out to be correct.

  Whether the strategic stakes justified such a massive American involvement in Vietnam must be doubted in retrospect. But once American forces are committed, there is no logical or valid goal except to prevail. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations trapped themselves between their convictions and their inhibitions, making a commitment large enough to hazard our global position but then executing it with so much hesitation as to defeat their purpose. They engaged us in Indochina for the objective of defeating a global conspiracy and then failed to press a military solution for fear of sparking a global conflict — a fear that was probably as exaggerated as the original assessment. There are no awards for losing with moderation; neither domestic nor foreign critics are placated by failure.

  But it must also be said that the task was so novel, the undertaking so unfamiliar, that these failures deserve compassion rather than scorn. The men who involved us in Vietnam were neither frivolous nor callous. They ventured American prestige beyond the strategic merits of the local issue and risked infinitely more than they intended. Yet their purposes were far from ignoble; later events confirmed the validity of the view that American impotence in the face of aggression could have wider, and catastrophic, consequences. The global turmoil that followed the final collapse of the non-Communist governments in Indochina owed not a little to loss of confidence in the stabilizing role of America; Soviet adventurism accelerated with American weakness; for a time, military force seemed to become the arbiter of all political conflicts. And the horrible fate of the peoples of Indochina since 1975 — the mass murders, the concentration camps, the political repression, the boat people — is now rendering a final verdict on whether it was our resistance to totalitarianism, or our abandonment of our friends, that was the true immorality of the Indochina conflict.

  When the Nixon Administration came into office in January 1969, the wisdom of the commitment of over 500,000 Americans and nearly 100,000 allied soldiers had become moot. The troops were there. Thirty-five thousand Americans had already been killed. We did not question the desirability of American disengagement. Even before assuming office, we decided to withdraw American forces as rapidly as possible.I The Nixon Administration perceived also that far from coordinating their policies, Peking and Moscow were engaged in an intense geopolitical and ideological struggle. The difficulty was how to implement these judgments while maintaining our international responsibilities and our national honor.

  Our definition of honor was not extravagant: We would withdraw, but we would not overthrow an allied government. We were prepared to accept the outcome of a truly free political process in South Vietnam even if it meant the replacement of the personalities and institutions that we favored. What we were not willing to do was to accept the unconditional surrender Hanoi was in effect demanding, to mock our people’s sacrifices by collaborating in the imposition of Communist rule, betraying those who had believed the assurances of our predecessors and thereby putting at risk global confidence in the United States.

  But a free political process was precisely what Hanoi was determined to prevent. Its dour and fanatical leaders had not fought and suffered for all their adult lives to entrust the outcome to an electoral procedure that they had never practiced in their own country. They were dedicated revolutionaries whose profession was guerrilla war and whose method was the exhaustion of their adversaries. Their faith was in the balance of forces — military, psychological, and political, in that order of priority. Within Indochina they worked tenaciously, indeed heroically, to frustrate our military strategy, to demoralize our troops, and to defeat our South Vietnamese allies. In negotiations they did not budge from their central demands: that America had to withdraw from Indoch
ina unconditionally, that on the way out we must overthrow the governments allied to us. And they did not alter these terms until they were militarily exhausted.

  By then America’s national unity had been strained almost to the breaking point. Given the self-limiting strategies adopted by two Presidents — Johnson out of fear of expanding the conflict, Nixon to gain maneuvering room for an honorable extrication — the war was bound to be protracted and the outcome ambiguous. The process of an honorable withdrawal was inevitably confusing to a public that was still being asked to sacrifice in the name of an abstract, unprovable goal of maintaining America’s global credibility. Many of the young, on whom the burden of conscription fell, found a messy war in a faraway country incompatible with their ideals. For the first time in history, the average person could see the ugliness of war every evening on his television screen. Thousands of decent and patriotic Americans from every walk of life were moved to protest against an enterprise that exacted such a human toll. At the same time, poll after poll showed the overwhelming majority of the American public unprepared to accept an outright, humiliating American defeat. The result was an intractable and increasingly bitter domestic stalemate.

  In this impasse the attitude of two groups proved pivotal: the American foreign policy Establishment, and the tiny indigenous radical movement.

  The leadership group in America that had won the battle against isolationism in the 1940s and sustained a responsible American involvement in the world throughout the postwar period was profoundly demoralized by the Vietnam war. They, indeed, had launched their country in the 1960s into this war of inconclusive ends and ambiguous means. When it ran aground, they lost heart. The clarity of purpose that had given impetus to the great foreign policy initiatives of the late 1940s was unattainable in Indochina. The Marshall Plan, the Greek-Turkish aid program, the Atlantic Alliance, the reconstruction of Japan, had been of a piece with our domestic experience. Those economic programs had seemed to vindicate the premise of the New Deal: that political stability could be restored by closing the gap between expectation and economic reality. And the alliances had harked back to the lessons of the Nazi period: The threat of war was perceived to come from large armies attacking across an internationally recognized line of demarcation. Such policies had worked brilliantly in postwar Europe and Japan. There, political institutions had a long tradition. Overcoming the economic dislocations of World War II had the immediate effect of restoring the vitality of political life. And since military danger could come only from overt aggression, security could be defined in terms of clear-cut force levels.