Waiting for the Senate
IN the first few hours after my nomination, I was as if suspended in a vacuum. I was numb from weeks of uncertainty, and seized by wonder at what had transpired. Thirty-five years earlier I had come to America as a refugee from persecution. I had worked in a shaving-brush factory, joined the US Army as a private, and become a naturalized citizen. America had been a distant dream when as a young boy I experienced intolerance and hatred under totalitarian rule. Now I was being given the responsibility to help steer my adopted country through one of the gravest constitutional crises of its history. I felt a stirring emotion, and not a little awe.
And I was also oddly relieved. On being made Prime Minister, Churchill remarked that he felt liberated: At last he alone would bear the responsibility. I had not reached that eminence. Nor were my feelings quite so unambiguous. But I did feel the quietude that comes with the’ knowledge that one’s convictions would stand or fall on their merits without being strained through the uncertainties of clashing personal ambitions.
Congratulatory phone calls cascaded in. Those from the veterans of many battles meant a great deal to me. From Dean Rusk, for example, suffering in noble silence the ostracism inflicted on him for the sin of having stood by his President in a bitter war. He spoke of the small community of ex–Secretaries of State who had a national duty to support each other across partisan divisions. And from Robert McNamara, nearly destroyed by many of those who had urged the war in Indochina and who had then left him alone to conduct it with all his inward doubt caged by a sense of duty to his President and his nation. No one had sustained me more on the human level during Nixon’s first term than McNamara, even though he was uneasy about many of the policies we thought necessary for our nation’s honor. And there were, of course, many calls from members of the Administration, including Elliot Richardson, who had been a strong partner when he had served as Under Secretary of State and who was now carrying out with some distaste the job of Attorney General during the Watergate period.
Members of the diplomatic corps offered their good wishes. While no special significance attached to this — getting along with the Secretary of State is, after all, the principal task of foreign chiefs of mission — I sensed that they welcomed the approaching end of our bureaucratic controversies. No doubt a few had seen the opportunity inherent in the White House-State Department split and used it skillfully. But it is easy to overestimate the ease with which foreigners can understand, much less manipulate, our internal conflicts. For most diplomats the rivalry between White House and State Department was a nightmarish complication of our already excessively complex political process.
And then, of course, there were the calls from the State Department itself. Kenneth Rush must have been aware that but for Watergate he would have been the recipient of these congratulations. And he had to realize that his role as Deputy Secretary would be diminished by the appointment of a Secretary with strong views and likely to bring his own circle of advisers into the Department. None of this, however, was reflected in his cordial call to me offering full cooperation during the transition. I invited him to an early meeting in San Clemente.
William Rogers telephoned from Washington even before Nixon’s press conference. He said he would do his utmost to bring about a successful transition in the national interest. “You’ll find it’s a great department,” he said. I told him that his personal staff would receive responsible assignments. I would be guided to the greatest extent possible by his recommendations about the future of his associates. We promised to consult frequently. It was a pointless assurance. Not having relied on each other’s judgments while we were both in office, it was unlikely that we should become confidants while Rogers was in retirement. In fact, we have had little contact with each other since that conversation.
Yet I owe it to Bill Rogers to point out that he left office with grace as he had conducted it with dignity. He showed none of the resentments he must justifiably have felt. And he behaved in an exemplary manner ever after. He engaged in no fashionable second-guessing; he did not join attacks on me, even though he had far more legitimate grievances than most. He reacted evenly to accounts — including mine — that showed his influence to have been less than dominant. He showed that to him national service was its own reward.
Nor should my tales of Rogers’s bureaucratic setbacks — put forward to explain the pathology of the Nixon Administration — obscure the fact that Rogers’s judgment on foreign policy was superior to the role that circumstances and his own personality permitted him to play. Rogers’s conciliatory instincts caused him to shy away from the public confrontations that marked Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam debate; within the councils of government he tended to oppose strong policies on Indochina even when he offered no strategic alternative. All this deprived him of influence on the one issue that obsessed Nixon’s first term. His advice was generally sensible; his values were humane. His predictions of the domestic consequences of actions that he opposed were usually correct. His special talent was the analysis of individual cases rather than the development of an overall conception. His views on particular plans, such as the ill-starred Laos invasion of 1971, were acute. He would have done yeoman work as a private counselor; his temperament and training caused him to recoil from extracting a coherent strategy from an ambivalent bureaucracy or from defending it against hostile media and Congress. There is no doubt that Nixon counted on these inhibitions to assert his own dominance. I certainly exploited them mercilessly. Yet nothing can deprive Bill Rogers of the final verdict: He was a man of decency and good judgment, qualities overwhelmed by the complex psychology of his President, his colleagues, and the passions of a divided country.
Confirmation Hearings
THE mood of exaltation passed rapidly. Within days I had to face the confirmation process before the Senate; in the Watergate atmosphere this was not without complexity. I was the first Secretary of State in many years — the last one had been Christian Herter — to be appointed in a Presidential mid-term and the first to reach the office after being perceived as a chief architect of the prevailing policy. And Nixon’s foreign policy, for all its successes, had been highly controversial even before Watergate. My confirmation thus lent itself to the public airing of many pent-up grievances. It provided, as well, an opportunity to publicize whatever peripheral aspects of Watergate involved the National Security Council, the principal of which was the wiretap issue I have described in Chapter IV.
The Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee found themselves in a dilemma. The influence of the committee parallels the importance of the Secretary of State. He is its channel to the executive branch; it is he who can be held accountable; it is he to whom the committee can convey its policy views systematically. When he is influential, the committee plays a major role. When the Secretary of State’s role dwindles, so does the committee’s. Yet the Secretary and the committee are also inherently competitive. The Secretary must seek to preserve a margin of discretion for executive authority; the committee will inevitably seek to impose its preconceptions. When both parties are restrained and compassionate about each other’s needs, they can be mutually reinforcing. If either the Secretary or the committee presses its claims to an extreme, the result can paralyze foreign policy.
The committee had been troubled by my preeminence as security adviser because as a White House staffer I was not subject to its control. From that perspective, most of the committee members welcomed the nomination of a Secretary certain to be the President’s principal architect of foreign policy. On the other hand, few of the Senators wanted to be perceived as having gone easy on an executive branch that had defied them on Vietnam and was deeply enmeshed in Watergate. And they had the pretext of looking into the seventeen wiretaps.
The result was one of the most extensive hearings on the appointment of a Secretary of State in the postwar period, extending over the two weeks from September 7 to 21, 1973. It was a strange ritual because the members of t
he Committee were to a man personally well disposed toward me and eager to confirm me. They were well aware that I had softened Nixon’s refusal, on the basis of executive privilege, to let his White House assistants testify before Congressional committees. With his approval I had met twice a year with the committee in circumstances we pretended were social but that soon came to resemble a Congressional hearing. At first we gathered in the home of the Chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright, later in a hideaway office in the Senate. The sessions grew increasingly formal; by 1972 the staff director of the committee, Carl Marcy, kept an official record. Throughout I had stayed in touch with many of the members of the committee on a personal basis. Senators Hubert Humphrey and Jacob Javits, in particular, were friends of long standing. I greatly respected Senator Fulbright across the chasm of our policy differences for his erudition, fairness, and patriotism. Now that Vietnam, the principal source of our disagreements, was behind us, the committee had reason to look forward to a new era in executive-legislative relations. My confirmation was a certainty.
Yet the committee had to be seen in diligent pursuit of any hint of executive malfeasance. It therefore spent over half its time on the wiretap issue. Despite its extraordinary exertion on the subject, it was accused, to its great chagrin, of letting me off too easily.6 In these strained circumstances I was not able, as I had hoped, to turn the confirmation hearings into the auspicious beginning of a bipartisan approach to foreign policy.
I tried to set a conciliatory tone. In my opening statement on September 7, which was nationally televised, I stressed how important a strong, self-confident America was for the peace of the world and why this required putting an end to our national divisions:
Americans have recently endured the turmoil of assassinations and riots, racial and generational confrontations, and a bitter, costly war. Just as we were emerging from that conflict, we were plunged into still another ordeal.
These traumatic events have cast lengthening shadows on our traditional optimism and self-esteem. . . . Where once a soaring optimism tempted us to dare too much, a shrinking spirit could lead us to attempt too little. Such an attitude — and the foreign policy it would produce — would deal a savage blow to global stability.
But I am hopeful about our prospects. America is resilient. The dynamism of this country is irrepressible. Whatever our divisions, we can rally to the prospects of building a world at peace and responsive to humane aspirations. In so doing, we can replenish our reservoir of faith.
The committee was in no position to respond to this overture during the confirmation hearings. It was not lack of goodwill on its part but the political requirements of public hearings. In addition to the Watergate atmosphere, there were the dynamics of television. Elected officials depend on publicity for survival. They know that the evening news programs rarely give more than two minutes to any news event and they are far more likely to use a segment reflecting confrontation or controversy than harmony. I used to joke with Jacob Javits that when he saw the red light of the television cameras he would ask even his most constructive questions in a loud voice, set off by a pointed finger and a throbbing vein in his forehead, leaving the unwary viewer with the impression that what I had been eager to put forward had been extorted from me by this vigilant defender of the public weal.
So it happened that Senator Fulbright responded to my opening statement by raising the subject of wiretaps. As in the periodic reexaminations of this issue that were to recur with almost annual regularity, no new facts emerged; this investigation and every other since has confirmed the sequence of events I have described in Chapter IV. Elliot Richardson, Attorney General, and William D. Ruckelshaus, Deputy Attorney General and Acting Director of the FBI, submitted a statement that no previous or subsequent inquiry has seriously challenged:
As best can be determined from the FBI records, Dr. Kissinger’s role included expressing concern over leaks of sensitive material and when this concern was coupled with that of the President and transmitted to the Director of the FBI, it led to efforts to stem the leaks, which efforts included some wiretaps of Government employees and newsmen. His role further involved the supplying to the FBI of names of individuals in the Government who had access to sensitive information and occasional review of information generated by the program to determine its usefulness.7
The problem with recurring investigations of old issues is not the facts. When there is controversy about the propriety of governmental actions, it can be stilled only by the fullest and most candid disclosure. The difficulty arises in determining what is relevant and what is self-serving, and in sorting out the different perspectives of the participants. Even if the investigator is fair and all witnesses are honorable, it is next to impossible to recreate the context of individual decisions made years before. For one thing, the investigator, be he journalist or Senator, finds it difficult to grasp the pressures of decision-making. To him the subject being investigated is paramount; he is not concerned with other governmental duties or contexts. He operates as if what he is looking into had been the sole activity of the participants and had commanded their undivided attention.
A distinguishing feature of high office, however, is the disproportion between the gravity of actions and the time available to deal with them. To tear any decision from its whole context distorts its essence. The decision-maker will almost certainly not have known as much of its ramifications as the ex post facto investigator now does. He may have spent a few minutes on it; the later investigator has days and weeks, the opportunity of acquiring different perspectives — and hindsight.
If there are several participants in the decision, some of the evidence is likely to be contradictory. Each department or agency keeps its own records, which are generally unavailable to other agencies. Its version of events is heavily influenced by its mission and the natural tendency to shift responsibility for controversial decisions. Even when the intention is to be scrupulously fair, each agency views events through the prism of its own preconceptions. When documents surface years later, one may be forced to comment on versions that are difficult to rebut so long after the event, and indeed on happenings of which one was only dimly aware.
My confirmation hearings spent more time on the wiretap issue than on any international problem. There was lengthy discussion in open session. Senators John Sparkman and Clifford Case were then designated as a subcommittee to review the FBI files, take additional testimony in closed session, and submit a report. There was another day of hearings in executive session in which I reviewed each individual wiretap case with the committee — though my recollection of several was hazy at best.I It was during these hearings that I saw for the first time the files kept by J. Edgar Hoover (who had died in May 1972). These included the listing of officials whom Hoover had recorded as having “requested” or “authorized” each tap. The authorizing individual was invariably Attorney General Mitchell. Equally invariably the request was listed as having come from some official outside of the Justice Department (in about a dozen cases either then-Colonel Haig or me) even when — as I knew in four or five instances from personal knowledge — it was J. Edgar Hoover who had first proposed to Nixon that the individuals be tapped. What the “request” usually amounted to, in fact, was my office’s submission of names of those who fulfilled the first of the categories established by the President: officials who had had access to the classified information that had been leaked. Nearly a year later the question of whether I had “initiated” or “requested” the wiretaps became a huge public issue again (see Chapter XXIV).
No attempt was made in the hearings to compare the practices of the Nixon Administration with those of its predecessors to determine whether any unusual amount of wiretapping occurred or whether, as I believe was the case, the seventeen taps so obsessively pored over were no greater a number than previous administrations had on average conducted. In any event, I strongly endorsed the Supreme Court ruling of 1972 — three years after the wiretaps in
question had occurred — that specified for the first time that wiretaps for national security required a court order. And I summed up my attitude in my testimony:
Since the time that [Nixon’s wiretapping] decision was made in May, 1969, the Supreme Court has made a new definition of the procedures to be followed in the use of wiretaps, and therefore, many of the issues that have been raised with respect to the previous wiretapping by this or by previous administrations have to a very large extent become moot. In any future national security cases we would expect to observe scrupulously the division between the concerns of national security and the requirements of liberty.
But beyond this, the issue of wiretapping raises the issue of the balance between human liberty and the requirements of national security. I would say that the weight should be on the side of human liberty, and that if human liberty is to be ever infringed, the demonstration on the national security side must be overwhelming.
The Foreign Relations Committee, following the recommendation of Senators Sparkman and Case, concluded without dissent that the wiretapping episode should not bar my nomination.
In addition to wiretapping, the so-called secret bombing of Cambodia received a great deal of attention, as did the coup that toppled Salvador Allende in Chile while the hearings were going on. Various Senators asked questions about particular concerns: Javits with respect to the War Powers Bill, about which I expressed serious reservations; Humphrey about a more comprehensive and humane use of our food assistance abroad. I promised Humphrey that I would put forward a new American policy to combat world hunger — a promise fulfilled the following year at a United Nations World Food Conference in Rome held at American initiative and at which I unveiled a comprehensive new program. A number of Senators raised the matter of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union as if it were their invention.II They took a run at implying that we neglected human rights or the moral dimension of foreign policy, seemingly oblivious to the fact that under the Nixon Administration the rate of emigration had increased from 400 to nearly 35,000 before there was serious Congressional agitation on the subject. Senator Edmund Muskie, who in January 1971 had told Soviet Premier Kosygin in Moscow that he thought Nixon’s policy toward the Soviet Union was too tough and would be eased by Congressional pressures,9 now insisted in his separate statement supporting my nomination that “progress toward détente must be accompanied by continued pressure on the Soviet Government for greater respect for human rights.”
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