Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  “You dreamer,” replies my hypothetical de Gaulle. “Don’t you understand that some possessions are meaningless if received as a gift? We will be able to use them only if we seize them.”

  It is quite possible that both would be right. There would have been no European unity without Monnet and no European identity without de Gaulle — producing the final paradox: that the most nationalistic country in Europe made the largest single contribution to the emergence of a European community.

  In January 1973 I saw Monnet, then eighty-four years old and frail, on another of my visits to Paris to wrap up the Vietnam agreement. Monnet always liked to check on whether his friends and disciples were living up to his impossibly high standards. If they were not, the eternal twinkle of his blue eyes would give way to a steely cast. If he detected any slackening of effort Monnet would mobilize his army of powerful friends, especially in the United States — a contingency no official faced with equanimity.

  On this occasion there was no need for pressure. He was convinced that his approach was good for at least one more act of creativity; I was eager to believe it. Monnet thought it imperative to tie the United States and Europe into a more coherent system on both economic and security issues; that was precisely what we intended with the Year of Europe. He urged that Nixon visit Europe, attend a meeting with the European Community’s Council of Ministers, and join in a collective declaration of common goals and objectives. America should begin treating Europe as a political unit whether or not it had fully articulated its institutions. In other words, the United States should complete the process of European unification it had started with the Marshall Plan whether the Europeans were fully ready for it or not.

  Nixon was receptive when I reported Monnet’s views, but balked at the proposition that we start dealing with Western Europe as a unit immediately. Where I recounted Monnet’s suggestion that we force our efforts on the Community, Nixon queried in the margin: “K — (1) is this possible? (2) is this in our interests?” In the end, no more than his predecessors could Nixon escape Monnet’s relentless logic. But while Monnet’s vision retained its intellectual force, his influence depended on Americans prepared to insist on their view of European institutions and on European leaders for whom Atlantic relations were the top priority. Both of these were in short supply in 1973. Nixon and I wished the European Community well, but we thought that it should evolve from European decisions, not American pressure; we were essentially agnostic about how and when political cohesion came about, provided it did not seek its identity in opposing us. And yet that is precisely the concept of European unity that was gaining ground. Those European leaders most dedicated to European unity were beginning to perceive a conflict between Atlantic unity and European identity. European unification was absorbing more of their energies and dedication than was the elaboration of Atlantic institutions, which they had come to take for granted. Some leaders, in fact, considered a new emphasis on Atlantic cohesion a diversion from their priority of constructing a united Europe; contrary to Monnet, they did not believe that we would be able to merge the two.

  These trends were nearly all personified by Edward Heath, Britain’s Prime Minister and the first European leader with whom Nixon discussed the Year of Europe. That we should choose Britain for the first of these consultations was natural; it was the essence of what was still called the “special relationship.” For generations successive administrations had synchronized their moves with London, especially over the Atlantic Alliance. The British had fought for this tenaciously. Their way of retaining great-power status was to be so integral a part of American decision-making that the idea of not consulting them seemed a violation of the natural order of things. So able and self-assured were our British counterparts that they managed to convey the notion that it was they who were conferring a boon on us by sharing the experience of centuries. Nor were they quite wrong in this estimate.

  But this pattern was precisely what Heath was determined to change. He preferred a leading position in Europe to an honored advisory role in Washington, and he did not consider the two functions compatible.

  Heath was the first Conservative Prime Minister to have achieved party leadership by election of the Tory members of Parliament instead of by the traditional method — effectively an informal consensus of key Conservative leaders talking privately in their clubs and elsewhere. And his background was as unprecedented as the process that had produced him. A product of the lower middle class, he had risen to leadership of a party still essentially upper-class in its orientation if no longer in its composition. He had the insecurity that the British class system inflicts on those not born into the upper echelons. Some compensate by disguise, affecting the accent, postures, and bonhomie of the well-bred.

  Ted Heath had clearly chosen a different course. He gave the impression of a man who was in essence warmhearted and must have been in his youth jolly and gregarious but who had steeled himself by iron self-discipline to rest his eminence not on personality but on performance. He eschewed any claim to personal charm even though at one time he must have had it in considerable measure; he insisted on prevailing through mental superiority and a somewhat aloof air. He made a citadel of personal excellence. In the process his smile grew mirthless; the few excursions into human warmth he permitted himself were tentative and sharply separated from his political actions. His personality and chilling integrity would have inhibited the “special relationship” even if his convictions had not.

  In many ways Heath’s psychology and complexes were similar to Nixon’s. Heath, however, was more versatile. He did not suppress entirely, as Nixon often did, the warm and generous side of his nature but sublimated it in his passions for music and sailing. As a result Heath rarely exhibited Nixon’s crippling diffidence even as he shared his essentially solitary nature. He could travel with an approximation of ease if not enjoyment in the class that disconcerted him; Nixon was always in enemy territory. Heath was more of a piece than Nixon; the various segments of his personality fitted together more snugly. Strangely, this made him somewhat more ideological, even doctrinaire. He was less flexible, less subtle. He was a better, more assertive talker, a less adaptable statesman.

  The similarity in psychological makeup was just great enough to make the ultimate differences unbridgeable. Nixon’s relationship with Heath was like that of a jilted lover who has been told that friendship was still possible, but who remembers the rejection rather than being inspired by the prospect. Nixon began with enormous admiration for Heath; he had exulted in Heath’s unexpected victory in 1970. He counted on establishing a close personal relationship. It was doomed.

  Of all British political leaders, Heath was the most indifferent to the American connection and perhaps even to Americans individually. Personally, I liked and admired Heath immensely; in many ways I have had a longer friendship with him than with any other leading British political figure. Yet this did not keep him from being the most difficult British head of government we encountered. Whether it was the memory of the American pressure that had aborted the Suez adventure in 1956 when Heath was Chief Whip of the Conservative Party (and he did refer to it from time to time), or whether the reason was dedication to a vision of Europe quite similar to de Gaulle’s, Heath dealt with us with an unsentimentality totally at variance with the “special relationship.” The intimate consultation through which British and American policies had been coordinated during the postwar period was reduced to formal diplomatic exchanges. Heath disdained the occasional telephone calls I urged upon the British Ambassadors to establish the personal relationship that Nixon craved, lest he be accused by France, as his predecessor Harold Macmillan had been, of being an American “Trojan horse.” Ten years before, Heath had led the British side in the negotiations for Britain’s entry into the Common Market, which de Gaulle had abruptly vetoed at least in part because of Macmillan’s Nassau agreement on nuclear cooperation with President Kennedy.

  There was a stubborn, a
lmost heroic, streak to Heath’s policy: He sought to alter not simply a diplomatic pattern but the attitude of his people. The heart of most Britons was with America and the Commonwealth. Europe for them began not in the British Isles but across the Channel, reflecting a history in which peril had almost always arisen in Europe and — recently, anyway — help had arrived from across the sea. To the majority of the British, entry into Europe reflected at best a distasteful adjustment to necessity. Heath, by contrast, not only accepted that Britain’s future lay with Europe, he preferred it that way. And so, paradoxically, from 1970 to 1972, when the other European leaders strove to improve their relations with us — Willy Brandt in Federal Germany to balance his overtures to the East, Pompidou to end the isolation that had threatened his predecessor — Heath went in the opposite direction. His relations with us were always correct, but they rarely rose above a basic reserve that prevented — in the name of Europe — the close coordination with us that was his for the taking.

  The very setting of the meetings between President and Prime Minister in early February 1973 highlighted the uncomfortable relationship. As a sign of special respect Nixon took Heath and his party to Camp David the second day so they could continue their conversations in a relaxed, informal, and personal atmosphere. But small talk was not the forte of either leader; they were both better off in set-piece encounters across a conference table. On the way to Camp David — about halfway there — the Presidential helicopter was forced to land because a heavy fog had suddenly enveloped the Presidential retreat. The journey had to be completed by automobile. British Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend (now Lord Trend) and I in the follow-up car speculated on what our two chiefs might be talking about, assailed in part by the usual fear of advisers either that they would be proved dispensable, or — more altruistically — that they would be held responsible for the execution of decisions that their chiefs would neglect to pass on. But above all we had trouble imagining how these two withdrawn men would conduct a social conversation in the back seat of a car when there was neither agenda nor any of the normal supports of governmental ambience. I have never learned what, if anything, was discussed. All I got was Nixon’s cryptic comment that it had been “tough going.”

  When we reached Camp David at last and managed to turn to the agenda, the meeting proved interesting but inconclusive. Nixon assumed that he was dealing with a kindred spirit and a partner in a common design. He was not wrong about the former. But for Heath, revitalizing the Atlantic relationship was simply not a priority. He agreed with Nixon’s analysis of world affairs and added thoughtful elaborations. But when it came to drawing joint conclusions, there was a nearly impenetrable opacity about Heath’s formulations, which, given his intelligence, had to be deliberate. Heath was acute in his assessment of Southeast Asia and the Middle East; he was scathing in his comments about the new, leftist Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, whose uninformed comments about our Christmas bombing had made him a particular object of Nixon’s wrath. But the harmony of views grew more complicated when we turned to Atlantic relations.

  In one of his more eloquent expositions Nixon explained the fundamental issue. An America in a dangerously isolationist mood and an inward-looking, protectionist European Community risked finding themselves in serious conflict. Public opinion and the realities of nuclear weaponry demanded visible efforts to relax tensions. Yet they could disrupt the Alliance unless we had first elaborated a shared set of purposes. Nixon urged that Britain and America form study groups to coordinate goals and strategies. He proposed a summit meeting of all the leaders of the industrial democracies to symbolize a new impetus to the cooperation of the free peoples.

  Heath could not have been more helpful on diagnosis or more evasive on prescription. He endorsed Nixon’s presentation of the problem. He agreed that a new initiative in Atlantic relations was necessary. But he wanted to postpone any elaboration of a partnership until Europe’s institutions had evolved further. He did not take up Nixon’s proposal for joint study groups. Naively, we ascribed this to the fact that the still flourishing “special relationship” seemed to make new groups unnecessary. So many exchanges were taking place, including bimonthly meetings between Burke Trend and me, that all issues could be discussed in existing forums.

  Heath’s reluctance was based not on tactical but on philosophical considerations. He did not dismantle the existing machinery of consultation; it was useful as a source of intelligence on our thinking. But he was reluctant to give it new assignments. He wanted Europe as a unit to formulate answers to our queries; he was determined to avoid any whiff of Anglo-American collusion. Heath’s attitude was partly obscured because his Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and his colleagues in the Foreign Office were still following more established habits of collaboration and did their efficient best to hide their Prime Minister’s foot-dragging. We in turn took silence as consent, especially since nothing very concrete needed to be decided right away, and counted on the British as supporters in what we took to be the common task of strengthening Atlantic unity. And so the meeting with Heath ended in ambiguity — though we did not at the time understand just how little progress we had made.

  Whereas with Heath we thought we had harmony on policy (and did have on global issues) and difficulties on the personal level, the opposite was true of our relationship with Chancellor Willy Brandt of the Federal Republic of Germany. I personally liked him — Nixon less so — but his policy worried us both. I avoided a portrait in White House Years because I was afraid my ambivalence might lead to misunderstanding, but I must make the attempt now.

  When I first met Brandt in the 1950s, he was the mayor of embattled Berlin, courageously vindicating the freedom of his people. He was bluff, strong, friendly, outgoing, and at the same time oddly remote from the drama in which he was a principal actor. He was committed to the liberties of his people but strangely detached from the issues that had imperiled them. I had the impression that had destiny not placed him on these particular barricades he would almost surely not have mounted them on his own. In part this was because while Brandt’s nature was passionate, he seemed to respond more to his intuition of the moment than to the logic of a guiding philosophy. There was even then a gap between the role in which fate had cast him — and which he played to perfection — and his own compulsions. What he said was usually commonplace; what he did symbolized the issues of the time without defining them.

  Brandt had lived through a decade of Soviet harassment. Inevitably, he was driven to thinking how the nightmare might be dispelled. American inaction during the trauma of the building of the Berlin Wall appears to have convinced him that German unity, or at least the easing of Germany’s divisions, could not be achieved through unquestioning reliance on America and NATO. German nationalism reinforced his pragmatic conclusion. Imperceptibly at first but with gathering momentum, Brandt set out to pursue the German national interest by a new course: not the rigid anti-Sovietism of Konrad Adenauer but a determined effort to reduce tensions and suspicions between East and West, in the hope that this would encourage the Soviet Union to permit a lowering of the barriers between the two halves of divided Germany.

  What started as a practical calculation was in time transmuted by Brandt’s emotional nature into a psychological necessity. Psychologists have remarked that prisoners sometimes ease their captivity by endowing their jailers with extraordinary qualities; hatred and a strange kind of respect coexist. There was an element of this in Brandt’s journey from endurance to conciliation, from resistance to Communism to the championing of a relaxation of tensions and to policies and, even more, rationales sometimes verging on a nationalist neutralism. Brandt’s warm, responsive personality was ideal for his symbolic role in reversing and transcending Germany’s postwar policy. Who can forget the historic, moving scene of the German Chancellor visiting Poland and kneeling spontaneously to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto? And yet once Brandt had accomplished his destiny of breaking ste
reotypes, he possessed neither the stamina nor the intellectual apparatus to manage the forces he had unleashed. He in fact became their prisoner, wallowing in their applause instead of disciplining it with a sense of proportion or a long-range policy.

  By 1973 Brandt was clearly under pressure politically and at war within himself. At first I ascribed his long moody silences to depression; later it occurred to me that having accomplished his major task he had in fact nothing left to say but could not admit to himself that he had no further contribution to make. He possessed the rare gift of embodying the hopes for a more humane world, but the very spontaneity of his gestures precluded him from managing his own achievements. He was a paradox: He had changed the course of history but by doing so had made himself irrelevant (and in some respects dangerous). Forever after, he sought the exultation of his moment of breakthrough, and that was attainable only by ever more daring and risky apologies for a version of East-West policy combining nationalism with resignation from any confrontation.

  Brandt’s historical accomplishment was to find a way to live with the partition of Germany, which for the entire postwar period his predecessors in Bonn had refused to accept. Under the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, Bonn had been pledged to break diplomatic relations with any government that recognized the Communist regime in East Germany. Under his new Ostpolitik (or Eastern policy), Brandt sought ties with East Germany, and relinquished German claims to the eastern territories that were now incorporated into Poland and the USSR. On one level Brandt’s wrenching decision to recognize the division of his country was a courageous recognition of reality. For German unification was not achievable without a collapse of Soviet power, something that Bonn was in no position to promote. That part of Ostpolitik the United States endorsed and facilitated, though we bolstered it by insisting on an acceptable agreement to safeguard Berlin.