Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  At every press conference I was asked about the impact of Watergate on foreign policy. I consistently denied any relationship. Though everyone knew it to be untrue, only a show of imperviousness would enable us to salvage anything. A great power is given no quarter because it has trouble at home. We could surmount our perils, if at all, only by demonstrating self-confidence and continuing to insist that we would defend the national interest against all obstacles, foreign and domestic.

  But I was filled with foreboding. The country seemed in a “suicidal mood,” I said to one friend in May 1973, and it was bound to erode our world position: “Four or five years of amassing capital in nickels and dimes is being squandered in thousand dollar bills.” To another friend in July I confided: “At no crisis in the last fifteen years did I think the country was in danger. But I genuinely now believe that we could suffer irreparable damage.” And later:

  [T]he difference in any effort you have ever known as between greatness and mediocrity is a nuance. You can’t describe it. And it took us two years when no one understood what we were doing to get it. One success created the necessity of the other. When it unravels it will go the same way. For two years you won’t see anything, and then you start pulling the threads out. I can go to the Hill and say, gentlemen, here are the dangers. You will have a Mideast war if this keeps up.

  This is more or less what happened, though self-pity was no help. I could not go to the Congress with a warning because I would have been at a loss to recommend a different course of action. The Senate hearings were theatrical and procedurally unfair; there was no opportunity to cross-examine, no advance information of charges. But the rot it exposed was real enough. The essence of the problem lay within the Administration, not with those who were exposing it, however self-righteously. Once Watergate erupted, it was impossible to arrest its course. Many old-line opponents of Nixon understood very well what was happening to their country’s prestige and were horror-struck. The best they could do was to ease the task of those few in authority trying to steer the wreck.

  In this manner I, a foreign-born American, wound up in the extraordinary position of holding together our foreign policy and reassuring our public. It had nothing to do with merit; it was evoked by a national instinct for self-preservation. While I had not discouraged the public attention in the first term by which I was made the good guy, this new and higher responsibility was too elemental, too awe-inspiring, to be consciously sought. The responsibility that seemed to devolve upon me had to be used to foster the impression of continued American strength, resolve, and indeed active involvement in world affairs, to convey the conviction that amidst all our trials we remained masters of our fate.

  I would not have chosen the role, and I surprised myself by not feeling up to it, though I tried hard not to show it. But all survivors of the debacle had an inescapable duty to contribute what they could to a sense of national purpose, and I did my best. It imposed a style of diplomacy leaning toward the spectacular; a show of driving self-assurance that would cause potential adversaries to recoil from a challenge. Some of it no doubt reflected vanity; much was conscious decision growing out of awed reflection. We needed a visible, if necessary theatrical, affirmation that America would survive its anguish and still build a better world. It was a measure of the straits in which Nixon found himself that he accepted this state of affairs; it was a tribute to his tenacity and patriotism that he did so with good grace.

  Yet the political prerequisite for getting through this period was that decisions be seen to reflect a functioning Presidency. Nixon no longer had the margin of maneuver or the personnel for the intricate minuets with which he had managed affairs in the first term. Both he and I had been reduced to fundamentals. He governed by more conventional procedures. And I worked at holding together a national consensus on foreign policy. The rambling talks between us became more reflective just as the taping system stopped and, in a curious way, less anxious and frenetic; when the worst had already happened, only principles remained.

  Increasingly, I sought bipartisan Congressional support. While it proved impossible on some neuralgic issues such as Indochina or Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, there was more unity on foreign policy than in any other area. It was as if the Congressional leaders too had become horrified by the tidal wave that was carrying the country forward, threatening to engulf the just and the unjust alike.

  By holding foreign policy together I no doubt eased the consciences of some of Nixon’s more implacable adversaries. But there was no choice. And in the final analysis Nixon’s fate was ordained once the White House staff began to fall apart and to turn on him. From that point the duty to the nation was to preserve its security and credibility by creating a facade of unity and purposefulness. The edge of a precipice leaves scope for only one imperative: to obtain some maneuvering room.

  So it fell in part to me, in part to Haig, and to both our staffs, to bolster our wounded President whose fortitude compelled respect and whose suffering evoked a curious warmth. For the worst punishment that befell Nixon was the knowledge that in the final analysis he had done it all to himself. And in his extremity he acted with high purpose in the field of foreign policy; he seemed driven by the consciousness that even if his Presidency could not be saved, the nation must be.

  * * *

  I. I had published an article in the January 1969 Foreign Affairs with my ideas on the subject, written before I was appointed to be Nixon’s national security adviser. After criticizing the Johnson Administration’s strategy, I suggested a two-track approach: The United States and North Vietnamese should negotiate on the military issues (mutual withdrawal, cease-fire, and return of prisoners of war), while the South Vietnamese parties settled the political problems among themselves.1

  II. The next morning it became apparent that Nixon had been talking about the wiretap records. John Ehrlichman hinted to me that he had some “national security” records to turn over to me. I refused, and called Attorney General–Designate Elliot Richardson and suggested that he take custody of them.

  III. Hoover died in early May 1972.

  IV. The “Plumbers” issue came up periodically afterward. See Chapters XVIII and XXIV.

  V. Of the seventeen, only six were the subject of reports that were ever sent to my office. Three names (I learned later) were suggested by Haldeman’s office, not mine. Of the names listed in the FBI memoranda as “requested” by Colonel Haig or myself, four or five were in fact specifically urged on Nixon by Hoover in the April 25 meeting (including three members of my staff), and additional names came up in the course of the surveillance of others and were called to our attention by the FBI. Another four seem to have originated with Nixon.

  V

  The Year of Europe

  Origins

  LIKE the White House, the Elysée Palace serves as a combined residence and office of the French head of state. One approaches it through a majestic gate on the narrow and busy Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, then across a gravel courtyard that enhances the palace’s simple and elegant facade. Inside, at the top of a wide staircase, is a landing that serves as a waiting area. Though the President’s own room is not large by the standards of chief executives of major countries, it is exquisitely appointed with tapestries and French provincial furniture. It overlooks a peaceful, formal garden beyond which one can see the tops of the trees lining the Champs-Elysées; it is a bucolic refuge in the midst of a great bustling city.

  The serenity of the view was matched by the demeanor of the large, portly man with bushy eyebrows who sat behind the ornate table that served as his desk. Georges Pompidou, whom I visited in early December 1972, was formidable. Before he succeeded President Charles de Gaulle in 1969, he had served the great general as Prime Minister for six years and then had been suddenly removed in 1968 in the aftermath of the student rebellion that briefly took over large parts of Paris. It was Pompidou’s remarkable achievement to return from near-oblivion, at a time when de Gaull
e was still alive, and to maintain his hold on the Gaullist majority even while changing the style, if not the substance, of France’s foreign policy.

  When de Gaulle resigned from office in April 1969, I wrote Nixon that the French Presidency was more fragile than it appeared. Its power was dependent on Presidential control of a parliamentary majority, control difficult to sustain indefinitely since elections for the National Assembly followed a different calendar from those for the Presidency. Whenever a parliamentary election produced a majority not of the President’s party, or not controlled by the President, it would be able to nominate its own Prime Minister to whom the balance of power would then shift. The traditional pattern of French postwar politics — parliamentary instability — might then recur. De Gaulle had tried to close the door on France’s past. But it was not locked.

  My analysis was theoretically correct, but it has proved at least premature. Every French parliament since de Gaulle has been controlled by the President. Pompidou in his day was dominating French political life almost as de Gaulle had, and though his manner was less majestic, his style of government was no less regal. With a skeptical, penetrating intelligence that never descended to the cynical, he made up in analytical acumen and shrewdness what he lacked in international experience. He had been both professor and banker. He knew the world of letters as well as the world of affairs. While free of the anti-American bias of his predecessor (and of some of the top echelons of the Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Office), he shared the French intellectual’s assumption that in the long run America was too naive, clumsy, and unstable to be entrusted with the fate of Europe. On the other hand, he was realistic enough to understand that America was too powerful to be ignored and France too weak to go it alone.

  Pompidou had been deeply offended when demonstrators protesting French arms sales to Libya had jostled him and his wife in Chicago during their visit to the United States in early 1970. While it did not alter the courteous and conciliatory style of his diplomacy, it spawned an element of reserve, even of resentment, that was never completely dissipated; it burst forth with vehemence during his last tormented year when his reserves of self-control were strained to the utmost by a bone cancer whose ravages he managed to hide from all but a few intimates. I considered him a most farsighted and intelligent leader, a man who, whatever his doubts about America’s grasp of global events, would work within his principles to strengthen the values, the power, and the resolution of the democracies.

  During Nixon’s first term, relations between the United States and France flourished. Nixon and Pompidou were akin in their unsentimental recognition of the importance of the balance of power; they shared a skeptical assessment of Soviet motivations. Pompidou was leery of potential German nationalism; Nixon was uneasy about Willy Brandt — operationally the attitudes merged. Pompidou appreciated Nixon’s gallant gesture of announcing immediately his attendance at de Gaulle’s funeral, thus setting a protocol level all other countries had to emulate; and of unexpectedly appearing at a dinner in Pompidou’s honor in New York in March 1970 to show his disapproval of the anti-Pompidou demonstrations. Nixon was grateful for Pompidou’s discreet and practical help in arranging my secret talks with the North Vietnamese in Paris. Nixon respected Pompidou’s grasp of world affairs. Having admired de Gaulle, he had little difficulty with the Gaullist strain in Pompidou’s approach; he considered a strong France, even when it was occasionally difficult, overwhelmingly a boon to the West.

  On December 8, 1972, I called on Pompidou while I was in Paris for the final phase of the negotiations with the North Vietnamese. I briefed him in a detail not vouchsafed to our own Cabinet departments — a procedure that in retrospect strikes even me as astonishing. He never betrayed our confidence or sought any special favors for his assistance in making my journeys to Paris possible. He spoke French to me, which I believed I understood. I replied in English, which was translated for Pompidou by the brilliant interpreter Constantin Andronikov, whose accent in English was undoubtedly better than my own.

  This occasion was one of the low points of the Vietnam negotiations and indeed of my public life to that date. Le Duc Tho was stonewalling after we had come excruciatingly close to a settlement in October. He seemed to be gambling that if he held out long enough, American domestic pressures might force us to dismantle the Saigon government and deliver total victory to Hanoi.

  Pompidou listened to my recital with his characteristic courtesy before he calmly commented: “These are details. In my view you are condemned to succeed.” Pompidou had gone to the heart of the matter. The two sides were too committed to an agreement to turn back; one way or another the war was bound to end soon; our maddening frustration was in fact the final spasm of a decade of struggle. And to underline his confidence in his judgment, Pompidou asked me another question, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps to encourage me: “And afterwards, what will be the center of gravity of your policy?” It was oddly reassuring, even soothing, to be asked about a future no longer dominated by the nightmare of Indochina, to be invited in the midst of bitter divisions to speculate about a world of constructive ends.

  I said that after the war was over we intended to give more emphasis to Atlantic relationships. Europe and North America had made no serious effort in two decades to chart their larger common purposes. A suitably prepared summit meeting of leaders of the Atlantic community might do so. Pompidou was avuncularly encouraging.

  A few days later he showed that this was not simply politeness or an attempt to restore my flagging spirits; he took the unusual step of putting his authority publicly behind a new Atlantic dialogue. In an interview with New York Times columnist James Reston, Pompidou declared that in the new year of 1973 he favored consultations “at the highest level” to clarify economic and above all political relations among the democracies. He looked forward to discussions with his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic to define and reaffirm the shared objectives of the United States, the European Community, and Japan in a new era. Matters of money and trade were secondary to these larger political and philosophical questions that had been neglected in recent years.1 It was a far-sighted comment. In light of the controversies between France and the United States to which it later gave rise, there is no little irony in the fact that the ill-fated Year of Europe was born in the office of the President of the French Republic.

  Atlantic Relations in Disrepair

  THAT Atlantic relations needed a fresh look was by early 1973 almost conventional wisdom. For conditions had changed dramatically and on many fronts. On January 1, 1973, three new members were admitted into the European Economic Community — Britain, Ireland, and Denmark — joining the six that had founded it in 1958 (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). And the new Europe of the Nine was now committed to move toward political as well as economic unification. This expansion and strengthening of European unity marked the end of the matter-of-fact American preeminence in the West that had characterized the period since 1945. The two superpowers excepted, Europe’s economic and potential military strength was now larger than that of any region in the world. With unity it was bound to articulate its own identity. We for our part, spiritually liberated from the trauma of Vietnam, looked to Europe to share in the regeneration of our purposes; it was, after all, that part of the free world with which we had most in common in history, culture, and moral values.

  But I was not as sanguine as others were that this would come easily. For a generation, eminent Americans of both political parties had taken it for granted that a united Europe would ease our global economic burdens while continuing to follow our political lead. They remembered only the impotent Europe of the late 1940s, totally dependent on America for economic support and military security. They forgot the Europe that had invented the concept of sovereignty, whose centuries of statecraft had refined the philosophy of nationalism, and whose unwillingness to subordinate parochial interests to wider purposes had been a pr
incipal cause of the two catastrophic world wars of this century.

  While much had changed since 1945, I had always doubted that Europe would unite in order to share our burdens or that it would be content with a subordinate role once it had the means to implement its own views. Europe’s main incentive to undertake a larger cooperative role in the West’s affairs would be to fulfill its own distinctive purposes. These no doubt could be harmonized with America’s goals; on most issues European interests and ours indeed ran parallel. But it would be a different relationship from the “golden age” of the Marshall Plan, which had fitted in so well with the American penchant for taking charge and inundating problems with resources. After Europe had grown economically strong and politically united, Atlantic cooperation could not be an American enterprise in which consultations elaborated primarily American designs. A common focus had to be achieved among sovereign equals; partnership had to be evoked rather than assumed. This was easy enough to state as a theoretical proposition; it required painful adjustment and patience and sensitivity on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Charles de Gaulle had been the first to identify the potential contradiction in the American position between our advocacy of European integration and our simultaneous nostalgia for continued American leadership. No doubt de Gaulle expressed this insight in the most wounding possible way for us. He implied not only that Europe should be free to pursue its own interests but also that these interests would in all probability diverge from ours — indeed, that Europe’s identity derived in important measure from that proposition. It was therefore scarcely surprising that the debates of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations with de Gaulle over the nature of European unity and of defense cooperation resulted in bitter confrontation. In 1963, de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s entry into the Common Market on the ground that Britain was a “Trojan horse” for America. In 1966 he withdrew France from NATO’s integrated defense command and forced NATO headquarters to leave Paris. The sense of outraged hurt was reflected in Lyndon Johnson’s query whether we should move our military cemeteries as well.