Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  I did not believe such a course of action possible. Passivity would see the destruction of our foreign policy, together with me, in daily sensations. Nixon would not be permitted a triumphal Middle East tour focusing only on substance. Once the assault on me had started, it would not stop by itself; indeed, the media would feel obliged to continue it to justify having begun it in the first place. Our choice, I thought, was either to force a showdown or to be gradually worn down by techniques refined over a year and a half of aggressive journalism.

  Haig, Eagleburger, Scowcroft, and I discussed the matter at anguishing length on the plane to Salzburg. I had tried to regain the initiative by writing on June 10 to Senator Fulbright, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asking his committee to review the allegations:

  You will remember that my testimony concerning the national security wiretaps ordered by the President and carried out by the FBI under the authority of the Attorney General was in three parts: public testimony, an extensive executive session, and a session with Senators Sparkman and Case in which we went over relevant FBI files. The meeting with Senators Sparkman and Case was conducted in the presence of the then Attorney General Richardson and the then Deputy Attorney General Ruckelshaus.

  I emphasize this because no new material has appeared since my testimony except a brief excerpt from a Presidential tape, a large part of which is described as unintelligible. The documents now being leaked were, to the best of my knowledge, available to me before my testimony; they were given to Senators Sparkman and Case prior to my meeting with them. In a few cases my recollection differed in emphasis from the documents; in those cases I pointed out apparent discrepancies and explained them at the time. The innuendos which now imply that new evidence contradicting my testimony has come to light are without foundation. All the available evidence is to the best of my knowledge contained in the public and closed hearings which preceded my confirmation.

  What tipped the scale in favor of a full-dress press conference was the New York Times editorial on June 11, quoted above, implying that legal proceedings against me might be indicated. By the time the plane reached Austria, I had decided to reject my colleagues’ advice; Haig remained reluctant but acquiesced. It was unclear to me whether he had consulted Nixon. I had not.

  And so it was that I stepped before the hastily assembled White House press corps on June 11 at the Kavalier Haus on the grounds of the state guest house, Schloss Klessheim, in picturesque Salzburg, the home of Mozart. The Kavalier Haus was a “training hotel,” used for the staffs of guests staying at Klessheim and in general for schooling hotel personnel to high Austrian standards. The large room where the press conference was set up had enormous, beautiful tapestries on the walls. The television lights were hot, the atmosphere highly charged.

  I led off by reading aloud my letter to Senator Fulbright calling for a reopening of the investigation to lay the innuendos to rest once and for all. I reviewed the circumstances of the origins of the wiretapping, my role, the FBI memoranda, the Foreign Relations Committee’s awareness of all the above, and various specific issues that had come up in the press. I then addressed the matter of the “Plumbers” and my relationship to David Young. I defended my public honor, and pledged to repeat the same explanations under oath before the appropriate Congressional committee:

  [O]ur national debate has now reached a point where it is possible for documents that have already been submitted to one committee to be selectively leaked by another committee without the benefit of any explanation, where public officials are required to submit their most secret documents to public scrutiny, but unnamed sources can attack the credibility and the honor of senior officials of the Government without even being asked to identify themselves.

  At the end of my opening presentation, I hinted — and in response to questions I stated flatly — that I could not continue to perform my duties unless I was exonerated:

  QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, you seem to imply here that if this campaign is not stopped, you are going to resign. Is that a fair assumption from what you said?

  KISSINGER: I am not concerned with the campaign. I am concerned with the truth. I do not believe that it is possible to conduct the foreign policy of the United States under these circumstances when the character and credibility of the Secretary of State is at issue. And if it is not cleared up, I will resign.

  The White House reaction was churlish. Nixon would not speak to me. Even Ron Ziegler would not speak to me. Haig in background comments to the press implied that I had been overwrought and cranky from the prolonged Mideast negotiations. At the end of the day, Ziegler issued an artful statement in Nixon’s name recognizing my “desire” to defend my honor, but asserting that “those in the United States and in the world who seek peace and are familiar with Secretary Kissinger’s contributions to international trust and understanding share his [the President’s] view that the Secretary’s honor needs no defense.” (In other words, my press conference had been gratuitous.)

  In Washington, the Salzburg press conference was a bombshell. Congressional comment was overwhelmingly favorable, and on a bipartisan basis. Senators Muskie, Mansfield, Fulbright, Humphrey, Cranston, Javits, and Percy made strong statements of support. Representative Robert Drinan, a virulent Administration critic serving on the Judiciary Committee, stated that he would be happy to be able to report that I was directly responsible for the wiretap program but he could not do so. By the end of the day on Thursday, June 13, a resolution introduced into the Senate by conservative Senator James B. Allen of Alabama, expressing support for me, had picked up fifty-one cosponsors. It did not deal with the wiretap issue directly; its main thrust was praise for my diplomatic achievements coupled with an expression of the Senate’s “complete confidence” and conviction that my “integrity and veracity” were above reproach. The sponsors ran the gamut from conservative Senators Barry Goldwater and Henry Jackson — and Sam Ervin — to liberals John Tunney and Thomas Eagleton. William Ruckelshaus, Acting FBI Director during the previous investigation — and now one of the heroes of the “Saturday night massacre” — stated on “Face the Nation” on June 16, 1974: “I think his role, as best I’ve been able to determine, is pretty much as he’s described it.”

  Under that counterassault, the media soon began to retreat. The dominant theme was that I had overreacted; I was tired from overwork, oversensitive, and too thin-skinned for the rough and tumble of politics. My old friend Hubert Humphrey struck that chord:

  We obviously do not want Dr. Kissinger to resign. I want to say to him as a friend “stay with it — cool it.” I think he’s tired. He’s working too hard. He’s not an elected official. He’s not accustomed to some of the body blows that some of us in politics are used to. Just cool it.

  Other secretaries of state had taken their lumps, so another argument ran, without threatening to resign. The main criticism soon shifted from allegations of perjury to my proneness to temper tantrums.

  Nothing could have proved more convincingly that I was right to force a showdown and that there was no alternative to the press conference. For the four days before Salzburg, the air had been full of ominous insinuations of new malfeasances; afterward, the implicit charge was that I had been oversensitive to accusations that were all good clean political fun, hence not all that serious. Being the butt of various jokes about being thin-skinned was far preferable to being inundated by a mounting tide of charges of having lied to a Senate Committee under oath. It may have been true, as some critics argued, that Secretary of State Dean Acheson had endured serious calumny without threatening to resign. But it is one thing to be attacked on questions of policy and judgment, quite another — in the middle of a constitutional crisis — to be accused of perjury. It was my view that I had to bring matters to a head. I could do so only by threatening to resign; any other course would have appeared too plaintive. I did not see how a country whose Vice President had resigned in disgrace and whose President was near to being impeached c
ould afford a Secretary of State under a moral cloud. I meant it when I said at the press conference:

  I have believed that I should do what I could to heal division in this country. I believed that I should do what I could to maintain the dignity of American values and to give Americans some pride in the conduct of their affairs.

  I can do this only if my honor is not at issue and the public deserves to have confidence. If that cannot be maintained, I cannot perform the duties that I have exercised, and in that case, I shall turn them over immediately to individuals less subject to public attack.

  Had the reaction been otherwise, I would have carried out that intention.

  As it was, I paid a heavy price for the press conference. No one gets away with an attack on the media. And I had concentrated my criticism on its use of unnamed sources. I continue to believe that anonymous accusers give journalists a power no branch of government possesses and expose public officials to much scurrilous abuse by individuals whose motives — and veracity — escape examination. But a news conference was not the ideal place to make these points, even if necessity gave me no other choice. My relations with the media never fully recovered. While there was no systematic assault, I was thereafter exposed to much more criticism than before. And my threat of resignation made it legitimate to speculate on my decline thereafter.

  The impact on my relationship with Nixon was more serious still, if of necessity short-lived. Though he never said anything to me directly, it was clear from his aloof manner that he was extremely displeased. Why he should have been quite so upset is difficult to fathom. To be sure, I stole — if that is the right word — the limelight for one day. But this should have been weighed, and would have been by a calmer President, against the steady seepage that would have occurred otherwise. Or was it that I succeeded in lancing the boil by the full disclosure which in retrospect he knew he too should have made and for which it was now too late? Had Watergate not soon overwhelmed him, I doubt whether I could have maintained my position in his Administration.

  The Salzburg press conference achieved its immediate objective; it broke the wave of anonymous accusations. It forced a consideration of the documentary evidence. No doubt some of the Nixon-haters eased up on me because they concluded that opening a new line of inquiry might complicate or delay the pursuit of their principal quarry. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee started another set of hearings on July 10. On July 12, President Nixon sent a letter to Senator Fulbright, reciting his version of events. Fulbright had asked Nixon particularly about his public statement of May 22, 1973, in which the President had taken responsibility for the wiretapping: “I authorized this entire program. Each individual tap was undertaken in accordance with procedures legal at the time and in accord with longstanding precedent.” Nixon’s letter of July 12, 1974, reaffirmed his earlier statement and also his judgment that the wiretapping was justified and legal. He said that my account of his role was “entirely correct,” and he (Nixon) took full responsibility.II Attorney General William Saxbe, FBI Director Clarence Kelley, and other FBI officials gave evidence that sustained my version of events and made the interesting point that the average number of national security wiretaps had not varied significantly among the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. Dean Rusk appeared, as noted earlier, and described J. Edgar Hoover’s bureaucratic methods and imperious style: Giving orders to Hoover would be like giving orders to General de Gaulle, he observed. I testified on July 23, going over the same ground as before and reviewing each tap with which I was familiar. All the hearings were in executive session, but the transcripts were later released with only minor deletions.4

  On August 6 the committee published its report. Unanimously it held that the record “should lay to rest the major questions raised about Secretary Kissinger’s role.” The dispute was in a large sense semantic; “there are no significant discrepancies between the new information developed and Dr. Kissinger’s testimony before the Committee during the confirmation hearings last year.” The committee therefore reaffirmed its conclusion as stated the year before: that my role in the wiretapping “did not constitute grounds to bar his confirmation as Secretary of State.” The August 6 report effectively ended the controversy over my role in wiretapping for the remainder of my term of office. It was quickly engulfed by the cataclysm of Nixon’s resignation three days later.

  Nixon’s Middle East Trip

  NIXON’S journey through the Middle East was both a triumph and a nightmare, a climax and an augury of the end. For several months, Nixon had indicated a growing eagerness to undertake the trip, and in May he had intensified the pressure on me to arrange it. I believe that by then he was beyond hoping that it might deflect his critics from Watergate. Deep down, he must have realized that matters were out of control, that his political fate would be settled by accidents or the actions of others. I was on the Syrian shuttle while the Nixon trip was being planned and was therefore not privy to his inner thoughts. My own view was that a Presidential visit was important to symbolize America’s new role in the Middle East and our commitment to the peace process — provided we succeeded with disengagement on the Golan.

  Visits of a head of state serve many purposes. Not the least significant is to give tangible expression to a new departure. In that sense the drama of Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 was even more important than the talks he held there, useful as they were. Nixon in Peking conveyed to the world that the period of Sino-American hostility was over — indeed, that the two great nations were moving toward cooperation on fundamentals of foreign policy. The same was true of Nixon’s journey through the Middle East in 1974. In all the capitals Nixon’s would be the first visit ever by an American President, except for Cairo, where Franklin Roosevelt had gone for a wartime conference in 1943.

  Anyone would have been considered mad who predicted a year earlier that an American President would be greeted by millions of delirious Egyptians in Cairo, Alexandria, and every village in between. Or that radical Syria would extend an invitation and warmly welcome an American President to Damascus. Or that in nations as bitterly opposed as Israel and Saudi Arabia, leaders would extol the central role of the American President, however wounded he might be. And that all this would be happening eight months after a Mideast war that saw America as the armorer of Israel, the Arabs imposing an oil embargo on us, the Soviets threatening to intervene, and the Europeans desperate to put as much distance between themselves and the United States as possible.

  These pages recounting my own personal experiences may well leave an impression that the reins of this diplomacy were in my hands alone. This was not the case. I certainly managed the tactics. But no Secretary of State, however influential, can make strategy by himself. Only a President could have imposed the complex and tough policy that got us this far and sustained it against a hesitant bureaucracy, vacillating allies, a nervous Soviet Union, and the passionate combatants of the Middle East. The applause Nixon was harvesting reflected the faith of the peoples of the Middle East in an America that had shown firmness, strength, and the vision of a more hopeful future; it was also a personal tribute.

  Even in the midst of Watergate, the media seemed to recognize this. Editorial writers, while noting the public relations benefits of the trip, were on the whole sympathetic. Some now worried in fact that, far from proving irrelevant, the President’s tour might succeed so well as to exacerbate US–Soviet relations. (This was the editorial line of the New York Times on June 10, the Baltimore Sun on June 11, and columnist Joseph Kraft the same day.) But other papers — the Los Angeles Times (May 31), the Christian Science Monitor (June 5), the Wall Street Journal (June 10), and the Chicago Tribune (June 11) — all published editorials supportive of the trip.

  What even the most understanding editorialist could not penetrate was the personal tragedy of the journey. Nixon was being feted but the noisy celebrations, the elaborate machinery of State visits, alternately buoyed and depressed him. As the vari
ous leaders unburdened themselves about their hopes for the future, one could sense the relief with which Nixon engaged in the discussions. This was the subject that interested him and about which he had thought a great deal. Yet within moments the relief and elation gave way to despondency. The conversations illuminated what Nixon’s policy had accomplished; they also faced him with the stark truth that he would not be part of the future he had made possible. His visit was celebrating an achievement that was as yet only a longed-for opportunity. More and more often as the trip progressed, his face took on the waxen appearance and his eyes the glazed distant look of a man parting from his true — perhaps his only — vocation; it was excruciatingly painful to watch. In Washington he had been inundated by the sordid details and desperate struggles of Watergate, yet ironically it was on his triumphant Middle East travels that the true dimension of his personal disaster was being brought home to him: He was being vouchsafed a glimpse of the Promised Land that he would never be able to enter. Afterward, Golda Meir made the penetrating comment to me: “We still have never had a visit from an American President. Nixon was here but his thoughts were far away.”