Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Mistakes and misjudgments have been made. Perhaps Kissinger should not have come here at all. Perhaps he should have sent Sisco to do the basic diplomatic spade work and come here only when the differences had narrowed sufficiently for him to use his influence and crack the deadlock. Perhaps after two weeks he should have gone home and not wait[ed here] for the chance to conclude a final agreement. . . .

  He invested so much and he did not get his deal. It is unlikely that he will ever invest so much again on a single negotiation. He will return to Washington probably tomorrow and then he will have to answer the many questions that will be raised about the negotiation, about his judgment, about the future of the Middle East. Kissinger has always been fatalistic about negotiations — there are things that can be done, there are things that cannot be done. The worst thing for him is not to have tried. He will not be guilty of that.

  But if I had succeeded in the shuttle, I knew also it was only a beginning, in the manner of an Alpine climber who pauses for a brief respite at the top of a hilly meadow and sees the distant peaks as far away as ever. We had gained maneuvering room but I had learned the price of it. The period for apparent miracles was over. To build upon the two agreements a durable peace in the Middle East, which was our firm resolve, would dwarf in complexity the disengagements that had required such massive labors; and it would in its course evoke passions far more elemental than those that had already driven all of us, as Abba Eban said on my departure, more than once beyond the point of despair.

  In these first days back in Washington, I wondered how we could begin such an odyssey while poised over the widening fissure of Watergate. By now I considered Nixon’s impeachment inevitable. The release of even his version of the taped conversations in the Oval Office had removed the last inhibitions. Almost no major figure was prepared to speak out on his behalf. His public support had dwindled to a hard core of about 25 percent. The disintegration of the Presidency was painful to observe. Nixon’s self-discipline was extraordinary, but it only masked his vulnerability and he was drained now of a sense of proportion. One could not work with a man for over five years as I had without being touched by the sinking of a spirit that had so often borne us up.

  It was in this mood, suspended between awe and dread, and seeking to regain my balance amidst adulation and disintegration, that with stunning unexpectedness I found myself drawn into the pit.

  By now the lust for revelation had developed its own logic. What had started out as a means to break through official obfuscation of wrongdoing had become an insatiable demand for a “truth” that often was itself a distortion. Each inquiry was treated as if it stood entirely by itself; any official document was handled as if it were the revealed truth and as if no one had ever heard of the self-serving papering of files, of memoranda written to cover the author’s tracks. There is no question that the Watergate investigations dramatized the indispensable principle that not even the highest in the land are above the law. By the summer of 1974, however, Watergate turned into a kind of national masochism that threatened to consume our substance in an obsession with our failings. Suddenly it was my turn.

  The occasion was yet another regurgitation of the twin issues of wiretapping and the “Plumbers.” The first rumblings had been apparent during the Syrian shuttle. John Ehrlichman was due to go on trial later in the summer for offenses related to the activities of the “Plumbers,” including the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Seeking to justify his actions on grounds of national security, Ehrlichman filed a court affidavit on May 1 asserting that the “Plumbers” unit had been formed at three meetings in 1971, one of which I had attended. Charles Colson, indicted for other offenses, on April 29 had filed an affidavit for the Ehrlichman trial making the same point.I Both these events made headlines. The implication was that I had known about the “Plumbers” and their illegal activities all along and that my denials had been untrue. It was a replay of issues that had surfaced in my confirmation hearings in September 1973 and that had then been rehashed in the January 1974 investigation of the Navy yeoman who had rifled my briefcase (see Chapters X and XVIII). Repetition did not make the accusations any more valid.

  In July 1971, while I was on my secret trip to China, Ehrlichman had asked David Young, then an aide of mine, to join his staff. On my return on July 13, I protested to Ehrlichman that he should not have done this in my absence. Two days later, Nixon invited a number of his senior staff, including Ehrlichman and me, to dine with him in Los Angeles to celebrate his television appearance in which he announced my secret trip. After a convivial evening with Nixon basking in one of the rare moments of general public approbation, Ehrlichman and I shared a forty-minute helicopter ride back to San Clemente and fell into another bicker about David Young. Ehrlichman boasted that he was better able to use talent than I was, as demonstrated by his ability to attract Young; I put it down to jealousy over the attention paid to my China exploit. If Ehrlichman mentioned “Plumbers” or that Young was intended for such a group, it passed me by. My perception was that Young had been assigned to a project involving declassification of documents. As I have said earlier, I would not have seen anything wrong with a small unit in Ehrlichman’s office charged with investigating security leaks. And nobody ever claimed that I knew of the “Plumbers’ ” later illegal activities.

  No matter; in May 1974 following Ehrlichman’s and Colson’s affidavits, we were back to the nightmarish speculation on whether I should have deduced Young’s other duties from the interview of an Admiral who reported a security violation in December 1971 or on how I recalled a July 1971 helicopter ride at the end of an emotion-filled day entirely devoted to the China breakthrough. On May 11, Morton Halperin, a former NSC staff aide whose telephone had been wiretapped and who was making a career out of pursuing me in the courts and in the media, told a conference of journalists in Boston that I was guilty of perjury. The Boston Globe reported this on May 12, while I was in the Middle East.

  A week later, newspapers of the Knight newspaper chain published revelations about a White House tape recording leaked by the House Judiciary Committee. On a garbled tape of an Oval Office conversation with John Dean on February 28, 1973, Nixon said something that sounded as if he was recalling a request by me for a wiretap on my former aide Anthony Lake after he had gone to work for Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie.1 Such a request by me would have contradicted my testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that I had only followed security criteria established by Nixon in submitting names for the investigation. Joining the staff of a Presidential candidate was obviously not one of those criteria. It was also untrue. The President’s taped recollections three years after the event were clearly erroneous. (The tapping of Lake had begun in May 1970, while he was still in the government, long before he went to work for Muskie — and around the time that, at Nixon’s orders, wiretap reports from the FBI ceased being sent to me.) What Nixon’s comment quoted out of context might have meant was never cleared up. The key words were practically inaudible. Nixon’s meaning — and what he might have been trying to accomplish by telling such a story to Dean — would depend largely on the context, however. Nobody familiar with Nixon would treat an isolated sentence as being anything other than part of a design.

  But the media, riding high on the Watergate wave, were more interested in publishing secret documents than in subjecting them to any critical scrutiny. On May 21 — still on the shuttle — I was sent an article appearing in the left-wing magazine New Times, which was rather revealing of the mood developing among some journalists:

  The honeymoon is over for Henry Kissinger. There are signs that the media is [sic] going after him for the first time. . . . And a Washington editor told me: “There’s a strong feeling that Kissinger may get indicted for perjury for telling the Senate he didn’t know about those wiretaps. We’re going to look dumb if we don’t get off our asses before a grand jury does.”

  The rumblings turned int
o an avalanche just as I returned from the shuttle. In early June, as part of the impeachment proceedings, the House Judiciary Committee began reviewing the FBI records on the wiretaps. This material, too, was leaked.

  Whoever on the Judiciary Committee (or committee staff) was leaking these documents to the press was unaware that the same material had been examined in September 1973 by Senators John Sparkman and Clifford Case, who had been charged by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to review that aspect of my record in executive session during my confirmation hearings. As I have discussed in earlier chapters, my recollection of events contradicted some of the memoranda in the internal files of the FBI; J. Edgar Hoover had invariably listed some official outside the FBI hierarchy as “requesting” each wiretap even in cases where I had heard Hoover himself specifically recommend them to Nixon. As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk later testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when it looked into the subject, Hoover was a very experienced and astute bureaucrat who understood the importance of protecting his flanks and his rear.2

  In 1973 I had reviewed each wiretap and the FBI documents with Senators Sparkman and Case and explained my recollection. Elliot Richardson, then Attorney General, and William Ruckelshaus, then Deputy Attorney General and Acting Director of the FBI, supported my testimony. Afterward, in executive session with the Senate Committee, I had gone over each case of which I had personal knowledge. None of this was known to the House Judiciary Committee when it started reviewing the records. Eager staffers, sensing a fresh victim, leaked what they considered “new evidence” that my earlier public testimony was untrue. The air was heavy with hints of perjury. The Washington Post, loath to fall behind in the pursuit of evildoers, rehashed the earlier stories in its edition of June 6.

  That day — barely six days after my Mideast shuttle — I held my first press conference since my return. For nearly five weeks I had been far away, geographically and mentally, from the fevered atmosphere of Washington. I had been preoccupied every waking moment with matters very distant from the semantic hairsplitting over who had “initiated” or “requested” wiretaps five years earlier. Nothing was further from my mind than the possibility that I was about to be cross-examined about Watergate. I was soon brought to earth.

  Bizarrely, none of the first six questions touched upon the Golan disengagement. The first question concerned the imminence of the signing of the Atlantic Declaration; the second inquired whether we still sought to “expel” the Soviets from the Middle East, as I had hinted some four years earlier in San Clemente. After that, it was open season. A journalist inquired about the “Plumbers” and the Ehrlichman and Colson affidavits. Then a question was asked about “evidence” before the House Judiciary Committee that I had been one of those who had “initiated” the wiretaps. After a few more perfunctory questions on the Middle East, the press returned to the charge. I was asked once again to reconcile my claimed ignorance of the “Plumbers” with awareness of Young’s investigation of the Navy yeoman. The next question transformed requests for elucidation into thinly veiled accusation: Had I retained counsel for a possible perjury indictment? That prospect had never occurred to me. By now I was rattled and I replied querulously:

  I have not retained counsel, and I am not conducting my office as if it were a conspiracy. I stand on the statements that I have made and I will answer no further questions on this topic.

  There is no more provocative posture in a press conference than a flat refusal to answer questions on a particular subject. And it showed how much I had lost control. My insecurity had the same effect on the reporters present as the thrashing of a wounded fish has on a shark. Up jumped Clark Mollenhoff, long known as the scourge of evasive officials, shouting in a stentorian voice:

  Mr. Secretary, on that question — what you have engaged in here, it’s been a matter of evasion and failure to recollect and some other patterns that we’ve seen over a period of weeks through the Watergate period. I wonder why you cannot answer the direct question if you had any role in initiating the wiretaps on your subordinates.

  When I referred to my testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he shouted me down with four follow-up questions each of which got me deeper into the morass of how one defined “initiate,” until I said rather plaintively: “I think this is a press conference, not a cross-examination.”

  I was learning that in the Watergate atmosphere, an official was suspect if he did not have at his fingertips all the data required to respond on matters that might have occupied him for only a few minutes four or five years previously. And the slightest hesitation — even if caused by consternation — attracted to the story other journalists who were afraid that failure to pursue the wounded quarry would reflect on their professional reputations.

  The June 6 press conference opened the floodgates. There was next to no coverage of the foreign policy questions and answers. The New York Times over the next three days devoted four news stories to the wiretap issue under such headlines as: “Kissinger Again Denies Initiating Taps” (June 7); “Data on Politicians Traced to Wiretaps on ‘Security’ ” (June 7); “Kissinger Rebuts Nixon on Wiretap” (June 8); “Kissinger Linked to Order to F.B.I. Ending Wiretaps” (June 9).

  The Washington Post and other leading newspapers followed more or less the same pattern — picking up stories from one another, so that (though there was essentially no new material) a sense of momentum was maintained. The Washington Post took up the charge: “What about Kissinger?” read its lead editorial on June 7, recommending a new investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Dissembling Intelligence,” read the New York Times editorial of June 11, hinting at the need for prosecution:

  We regretfully observe that Secretary Kissinger seems to be vulnerable to the charge of dissembling about his role in this distasteful affair. If there are to be more serious charges, that is up to the Congress and the courts to decide.

  The weekly news magazines followed suit. Time headed its story: “A Kissinger Connection?” Newsweek’s lead was: “An Ugly Blot on Mr. Clean?”

  I was shattered. I had tumbled in one week from the exaltation of the Mideast breakthrough into the squalor of Watergate. What had sustained me through the bitter years of Vietnam and the pain of Watergate was the belief that I was repaying the country that had rescued my family from tyranny by upholding its honor and values in a time of crisis. I had been involved in many difficult decisions leading to strong and often forceful actions. But I persevered, convinced — perhaps arrogantly — that when the final balance sheet was drawn, to have helped sustain the world position and creative engagement of the United States of America during an era of turbulence was a contribution to freedom everywhere. Statesmen, after all, are not entitled to insist on serving only in simple periods. If the moral basis of my service were lost, public life would have no meaning for me. I am aware that high officials often find it hard to distinguish between the general welfare and their own role, but my concern was not totally a matter of personal vanity. Almost miraculously, our country was surviving the trauma of a disintegrating Presidency without a mortal foreign challenge. Our risks would multiply if a President in danger of impeachment were saddled with a tainted Secretary of State.

  By Tuesday, June 11, the leading news media of the United States — the New York Times, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek, the Washington Star-News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and many others — had taken the position that serious new evidence had raised suspicion of perjury requiring a new investigation. Given the symbiotic relationship between Congress and the press, and the usual workings of the news cycle, I reasoned that if I did nothing, the next stage would see members of Congress take up the same theme. In the normal course — particularly since no one except me was in a position to rebut it — Congressmen and Senators would feel obliged to appear on television seconding the call for a new investigation. The legislators’ charges would be the subject of further news coverage and news c
ommentary, creating the impression of a torrent of revelations. The tide would be against me; I would have to stay on the defensive while touring the Middle East with Nixon and in no position to offer a sustained defense.

  It was essential to bring matters to a head quickly and either clear my name or turn my office over to some less controversial figure. No doubt I was deeply distressed. But I also made a cold analysis of the situation. I knew the FBI material that was before the House Judiciary Committee, having gone through it with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the previous September. I judged that if the documents were leaked out one at a time, there would be an endless series of questions and denials all about essentially the same body of fact. By the time Nixon and I returned from the Middle East, my reputation would be so tarnished that it might be irrelevant whether I stayed or left. Against the advice of all my close associates (Larry Eagleburger excepted), I decided to hold a press conference staking everything on one throw of the dice. I would lump all the arguments against me into one coherent account; I would then refute the charges. I would insist on complete exoneration or I would resign. It was strong medicine. But it would force a rapid showdown and end the slow hemorrhaging of the past few weeks. My colleagues — including Al Haig — thought that holding a press conference would attract attention to a story we should prefer to let peter out. I was convinced that the story would not peter out unless we went on the attack.

  That was the background to the extraordinary news conference I held in Salzburg on Tuesday, June 11, 1974. Nixon was on the way to the Middle East and had stopped in Salzburg for two nights and a full day to get used to the change in time zones before going on to Cairo. It was also an exercise in nostalgia. He had stopped there in May 1972 before his triumphal visit to Moscow following the mining and bombing of North Vietnam. He wanted to recapture the moment when he had defied his critics and some of his advisers and risked his career defending his conception of the national honor in the face of a cynical North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. Now, in June 1974, he was besieged and in great pain from phlebitis. Disconcertingly, a journey that he hoped would demonstrate his foreign policy achievements seemed about to be swallowed up by a scandal involving me. The last thing he wanted was headlines that deflected attention from the substance of his Middle East trip. On the plane I did not discuss my travail with him. He did not raise it — in itself an interesting commentary on our relationship. But Haig made clear enough either what the President’s preferences were or what his chief of staff would recommend to him: that I endure the assault, just as he had, until the story had spent itself.