Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Anyone familiar with Nixon’s way of talking could have no doubt he was sitting on a time bomb. His random, elliptical, occasionally emotional manner of conversation was bound to shock, and mislead, the historian. Nixon’s indirect style of operation simply could not be gauged by an outsider. There was no way of telling what Nixon had put forward to test his interlocutor and what he meant to be taken seriously; and no outsider could distinguish a command that was to be followed from an emotional outburst that one was at liberty to ignore — perhaps was even expected to ignore.

  How Nixon would have used these tapes, had his Presidency run its normal course, I cannot say. I doubt whether anyone had begun to think about the problem of even transcribing, let alone organizing, seven years of conversation: A psychiatrist friend once told me that he taped his patients until he realized “it takes an hour to listen to an hour.” As for their value for historical research by some indefatigable listeners, it must be doubted. What could anyone uninitiated make objectively of the collection of reflections and interjections, the strange indiscretions mixed with high-minded pronouncements, the observations hardly germane to the issue of the moment but reflecting the prejudices of Nixon’s youth, all choreographed by the only person in the room who knew that the tape system existed and could therefore produce whatever tableau suited his fancy? The significance of every exchange turns on its context and an appreciation of Nixon’s shifting moods and wayward tactics. Remove these and you have but random musings — fascinating, entertaining, perhaps, but irrelevant for the most part as the basis for the President’s actions.

  One of Nixon’s favorite maneuvers, for example, was to call a meeting for which everybody’s view except one recalcitrant’s was either known to him or prearranged by him. He would then initially seem to accept the position with which he disagreed and permit himself to be persuaded to his real views by associates, some of whom had been rehearsed in their positions, leaving the potential holdout totally isolated. It took a strong man to maintain his position when the contrary arguments had obviously convinced the President.6

  If the President’s own words are a quicksand for researchers, the responses of his interlocutors are hardly solid ground. A Presidential Assistant has to balance the wisdom of scoring a passing point against the risk of losing the President’s backing in his area of responsibility. Presidents, by nature, desire to prevail. But it was especially tempting to fall in with Nixon’s musings because experience had taught that his more extravagant affirmations rarely had operational consequences. No doubt many of us in the inner circle listened in silence to reflections we would have challenged in abstract intellectual debate; we sometimes made a contribution more to meet the needs of the moment — one of which was to be able to depart quickly in good grace — than to stand the test of deferred scrutiny.

  After the taping became known, I understood various things in retrospect, both innocent and contrived. For example, I was present at practically every Presidential conversation with a foreign leader, formally as note-taker. In a bizarre memorandum in early 1971 Haldeman instructed the staff not to pay too much attention to substantive details in our records of Presidential conversations; we should concentrate on atmosphere and personal impressions. It was one of the orders I ignored, at least to the extent of making sure a good record existed. I thought it an undue burden for the President to have to dictate his own notes; they would, moreover, be highly unreliable and I said so to Haldeman. He did not enlighten me about the President’s other methods for making a record of substance.

  Other, more devious, patterns became clear when I knew about the taping. Many conversations that had made no sense at the time fell into place. I could see occasions where I was set up to prevent my dissociating myself from some course or to get me on record in supporting some complicated design. For example, on the day Nixon had ordered the bombing and mining of North Vietnam, I was called to his study in the Executive Office Building five minutes before the relevant order was to be signed. I was confronted by Haldeman, who listed all the arguments against proceeding, contrary to everything said the previous week. Nixon was silent. I defended the decision, insisted that it was now too late to change it, and rounded on Haldeman for mixing into substance. Nixon thereupon signed the order without comment. The tape will show counterargument by Haldeman, strong advocacy by me, silence by Nixon.7

  As Watergate made only too evident, however, no one could possibly prearrange every conversation during every waking hour over a period of years. The spider got entangled in its own web. Even had Watergate not occurred, the tapes would have damaged Nixon’s reputation severely and the more so the longer their release was delayed and the memory of Nixon’s idiosyncrasies faded. Had matters gone as planned — and the tapes trickled out posthumously — Nixon would have managed the extraordinary feat of committing suicide after his own death.

  Weirdly enough, I doubt that my new knowledge of the tape system in 1973 changed very much what I said to the President afterward. He was so much in need of succor, so totally alone, our national security depended so much on his functioning, that these goals overrode the knowledge that what was being said would be heard and read by posterity long after its context had been obliterated.

  The tapes came to my consciousness again in late June during the week that John Dean, the former White House Counsel, was testifying against Nixon on national television before Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate Committee. Haig told me that consideration was being given to releasing a tape that contradicted the testimony. He had not listened to any tapes himself. The lawyers, who had apparently been given a few (by whom I never learned), thought they had caught Dean in a serious misstatement. I warned Haig that the release of one exculpatory tape would reveal the system and lead inevitably to the demand that all the tapes be released. It should be done only if Nixon was prepared to take this step. Whether on the basis of my recommendation or because the lawyers found the tape less helpful than they believed at first, I heard nothing further of the proposition.

  The next time I thought about the tapes was when their existence was publicly revealed on television by Alex Butterfield before the Ervin Committee on July 16. Bryce Harlow and I chatted about it; he said his wife was jubilant; the foxy Nixon had once again confounded his opponents; the tapes were certain to exonerate him. Harlow and I were less confident. We had no knowledge of what the tapes might reveal with respect to Watergate. But from what we did know, about what happened when our leader was seized by either exaltation or despondency, we suspected that the release of the tapes would prove uniquely damaging.

  The day that Alex Butterfield publicly disclosed the existence of the tapes I had dinner with Nelson Rockefeller at the residence he maintained in Washington. He held that the tapes should be destroyed forthwith. They represented a breach of faith with anybody who had entered the Oval Office. Since no one could go through all of them concurrently, they lent themselves to a form of selective blackmail either by Nixon and his associates or by whoever wound up controlling them. But Nixon was at that time in a hospital with pneumonia. He was not soliciting opinions. When he emerged it was too late; legal processes to claim the tapes had started.

  In retrospect it is clear that from then on the Nixon Presidency was irredeemable. So long as the testimony of senior aides was in conflict, there was some possibility that once the Senate hearings had concluded, boredom and the impossibility of deciding among the different versions conclusively would cause the crisis to run out of steam. The revelation of the White House taping system ended any such possibility. The initial outrage at the practice of secret taping made it appear that Nixon had committed some unique wrong; the fact that his predecessors had also used taping systems was ignored. But if taping in the Oval Office was not unprecedented, it had never been given such painstaking publicity. Nor, more important, had there ever been an occasion when tapes could determine the potential criminal culpability of a President and his immediate staff. Thenceforth Watergate was tra
nsformed into a bitter contest between the President on the one side and the Congressional investigating committees and the Special Prosecutor (appointed in May) on the other, as Nixon sought to keep exclusive control over the tapes by invoking the constitutional principle of the separation of powers.

  Whatever the fine points of the legal debate, it necessarily placed Nixon in the position of withholding information that on the face of it could settle the various allegations once and for all. From then on, the issue was no longer the relative credibility of the various witnesses but the President’s attempt to withhold evidence. Regardless of the outcome of that litigation, its very nature — with the implication that there was guilty knowledge to hide — destroyed what was left of Nixon’s moral position. It made him a lame duck six months into a Presidency won by the second largest plurality in American history.

  The “Plumbers” and the Wiretaps

  WHAT did he know? When did he know it?” These questions by Senator Howard Baker became one of the hallmarks of the televised Watergate hearings conducted by Senator Ervin’s Select Committee. As the investigations and allegations spread, more and more members of the White House staff were being asked to account for a wider and wider range of decisions. The break-in and cover-up at Watergate and the burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist came to be linked with controversial foreign policy decisions that were totally unrelated. The bombing of Cambodia or covert operations in Chile were thrown into the cauldron and pursued in an effort to vindicate a philosophical and political point of view by quasi-judicial proceedings. Inevitably, I as security adviser during the period in question became involved in the controversy. Early in the Watergate ordeal, Nixon’s enemies had a vested interest in focusing all attention on him and in leaving those conducting foreign policy out of the general assault. As Nixon weakened, even more after he left office, the few survivors of the debacle became the targets for those drawing emotional sustenance from Watergate. That small minority feeding on its resentments sometimes seemed to imply that there had been no President making decisions, only a security adviser.

  I shall deal with Cambodia and Chile elsewhere. I knew nothing of the Watergate break-in, or the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The area of activity that critics have emphasized is the effort to protect national security information. For the sake of a complete record I shall deal with it here.

  The Office of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs must self-evidently be concerned with safeguarding military and diplomatic secrets. A nation that cannot be trusted to maintain the confidentiality of sensitive exchanges loses the ability to conduct diplomacy. It will be crippled in negotiations; it will be deprived of crucial information. If every exploratory contact immediately becomes public before even the reaction of the other side can be ascertained, the frank communications so necessary to clarify positions cannot take place. Diplomacy becomes trench warfare. If internal deliberations are leaked, foreign governments gain an advantage and candid advice to the President by his colleagues is inhibited.

  No doubt administrations tend to confuse what is embarrassing politically with what is essential for national security — the Nixon Administration perhaps more than most. Fairness dictates acknowledgment, however, that few administrations since the Civil War faced a more bitter assault on their purposes, a more systematic attempt to thwart their policies by civil disobedience, or a more widely encouraged effort to sabotage legitimate and considered policies by tendentious leaks of classified information in the middle of a war.

  As security adviser I thought it my duty to help stanch these leaks. We had to demonstrate to the world, to friends as well as adversaries, that we could conduct a serious foreign policy even in the midst of bitter controversy; that we were worthy of confidence and capable of guarding the secrets of others. If our government remained passive when stolen documents became media currency, confidence and the ability to negotiate would be undermined.

  The issue became particularly acute in June 1971 when 7,000 pages of confidential files on Indochina from the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies — the so-called Pentagon Papers — were leaked to the press. None of these documents was embarrassing to the Nixon Administration. They could have been used to support the proposition that we had inherited a mess, and some in the Nixon White House urged that we exploit them in this way. Indeed, at the beginning I thought that our own people had leaked the documents for precisely that purpose. When I learned of their publication, I spoke to Haig from California demanding that the culprit be severely punished.

  But from the beginning Nixon thought it improper to place the blame for the Vietnam war on his predecessors. In his view he owed it both to those who had given years to that struggle, and to the families of the dead, not to discredit their sacrifice as the error of one President. He was rewarded for this generosity by seeing many of those who had made the decisions to send troops encourage the civil disobedience that so complicated the efforts to extricate them. Thus, when the Pentagon Papers became public, Nixon was consistent. He rejected a partisan response. He took the view that the failure to resist such massive, and illegal, disclosures of classified information would open the floodgates, undermining the processes of government and the confidence of other nations. Nor was his a purely theoretical concern. We were at that very moment on the eve of my secret trip to Peking; we were engaged in private talks with Hanoi that we thought — incorrectly, as it turned out — were close to a breakthrough; and we were exploring a possible summit with Moscow, together with a whole host of sensitive negotiations from a Berlin settlement to SALT. All these efforts would be jeopardized if the impression grew that our government was on the run and its discipline was disintegrating. And it was obvious that the motive of both the theft and the publication of the Pentagon Papers was political warfare to force us to accept terms on Vietnam that we considered dishonorable.

  I shared Nixon’s views; I almost certainly reinforced them. I believed then, and do now, that our system of government will lose all coherence if each President uses his control over the process of declassification to smear his predecessors, or if he treats the defense of secret documents as a question of partisan expediency. I certainly felt strongly that the executive branch had to be perceived as resisting such a massive breach of trust. I was aware of the legal steps to attempt to enjoin publication in the courts; I was not formally consulted about them but I considered it the correct decision.

  But until I read about it in the newspapers, I knew nothing of the White House “Plumbers unit” burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the admitted perpetrator of the Pentagon Papers theft. The break-in was sordid, puerile, and self-defeating: It aborted the criminal trial of the individual who flaunted his defiance of the laws against such unauthorized disclosures. I have difficulty to this day understanding the rationale for the break-in; had the psychiatrist’s documents proved Ellsberg unstable it would have helped his defense rather than the government’s cause. But if it was stupid practically, it was inexcusable on moral grounds; a White House-sponsored burglary conducted with no color of law enforcement authority cannot be anything but a disgrace.

  The “Plumbers unit” — so called because its job was to stop leaks — was part of John Ehrlichman’s office. As with several other aspects of Watergate — the enemies list, for example — the infantile nomenclature did more than the substance of the activities to raise the presumption of sinister purpose. In itself there was nothing startling about assigning two staff members to look into leaks of classified documents. The need for it appears to have been compounded in Nixon’s mind by his growing distrust of J. Edgar Hoover, then the Director of the FBI. By 1971 Nixon had become convinced that Hoover would conduct investigations assigned to him capriciously, stopping at nothing to destroy individuals who had incurred his displeasure or jarred some personal prejudice, going easy on suspects where there was a personal link. Nixon believed that Hoover’s friendship with Ellsb
erg’s father-in-law would prevent a serious investigation of the Pentagon Papers theft. Moreover, Hoover was quite capable, Nixon thought, of using the knowledge he acquired as part of his investigations to blackmail the President. Nixon was determined to get rid of Hoover at the earliest opportunity after the 1972 election and he wanted to supply no hostages that might impede this process.III

  What was striking about the “Plumbers” was not their existence but that the assignment should have been given to two such clean-cut, middle-class young men who had no investigative training whatever. Egil Krogh and David R. Young looked like advertisements of the decent, idealistic young American. And fundamentally that is what they were. I barely knew Krogh, but had brought David Young to Washington after having made his acquaintance in Nelson Rockefeller’s office. He became my personal assistant because I wanted near me somebody who I considered had ability, high moral standards, and dedication. The appointment did not work out because Young ran afoul of the redoubtable Haig, who carefully protected his access to me, and because Young was overqualified for the kind of work the position required. In January 1971 Young was shifted from my immediate office to a make-work job of research in the White House Situation Room. He was rightly dissatisfied with this assignment and happy when Ehrlichman hired him in July 1971, while I was on the secret trip to China. Upon my return the job was presented to me as — and indeed it was, at first — an interagency review of the declassification system. Ehrlichman’s hiring of Young was not uninfluenced by the petty jealousies of the White House staff; he lost no opportunity to rub it in that he knew how to use talented men better than I. I, in turn, was displeased that Ehrlichman had recruited one of my staff members without consulting me and while I was out of the country. From this assignment, or as part of it — I never knew which — David Young found his way to the “Plumbers.”