Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  RATHER: But in Washington, the State Department denied that there are any secret agreements of any kind with the Soviets on missile totals. A spokesman said Kissinger will go into the matter at a news conference on Monday, the same day Kissinger appears before Jackson’s committee.

  IV. This was the threshold test ban, discussed below in this chapter.

  V. Even though Daniel Webster was a Secretary of State — twice.

  VI. The Soviets in the summer of 1974 offered us a ceiling of 1,000 MIRVed missiles, which I believe hard bargaining could have reduced to the 800 range. The SALT II treaty of 1979 granted both sides 1,200 MIRVed ICBMs and SLBMs. If one assumes six warheads per Soviet missile, one reaches the figure of 2,400 additional Soviet warheads.

  XXV

  The End of the Administration

  The Long Voyage Home

  THE televised welcoming ceremony for the President’s return from the Moscow summit on July 3, 1974, was arranged for Loring Air Force Base in Maine. It was held at an air base at the farthest feasible remove from Washington because it would not have been a simple matter to organize a reception in the nation’s capital that was representative. Vice President Ford was there to praise Nixon for yet another contribution to the structure of peace in the world, and for a better foreign policy “than we have had in our lifetime and perhaps in the history of our country.” With the assistance of base personnel and a few local residents, a typically enthusiastic Presidential homecoming was arranged. Only its location testified to Nixon’s ordeals.

  I had stayed on in Europe to fulfill the commitment of the Atlantic Declaration to brief our allies about our talks with Brezhnev. I stopped at NATO headquarters in Brussels, then Paris, Rome, Munich, London, and Madrid. It was not entirely an accident that I met the German leaders in Munich, where they had assembled for the finals of the quadrennial World Cup championship soccer match. I told the press at the airport that I would let no sporting event stand in the way of my obligation to our allies. Knowing that I am a passionate soccer fan, the German government made sure that my briefing of them did not keep me from the Olympic Stadium for the final. It was a relaxed weekend. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the new West German Foreign Minister in Helmut Schmidt’s coalition cabinet, helicoptered me into the foothills of the Alps on Saturday afternoon, July 6, for a long exchange of views. In the evening he threw a huge party, including many key figures from politics, the media, and the entertainment world. The next day Germany won the final in a game that confirmed a theory I had long held about the relationship of national character and tradition to the style of soccer played. Germany used the methods of the Schlieffen plan, of complicated maneuver with intricately plotted designs, almost irresistible when everything worked as planned and with the psychological impetus of a friendly crowd. One could not be sure how the German team would react if its careful design were thwarted and it had to improvise. The Dutch lost, despite an even more cerebral style of soccer that was beautiful to watch but lacked the final will to prevail. (And so it was with other teams: England, once preeminent, now relying on condition and reputation to sustain its slightly old-fashioned, somewhat pedantic style, and therefore long since eliminated from the World Cup tournament. And Brazil, unsurpassed in daring virtuosity, but at that moment undecided whether to rely on its traditional spontaneity or to follow the more methodical European style. In 1974 it finished fourth, which is close to the Brazilian definition of national catastrophe.)

  Washington was calm. Scowcroft reported that “activity here, as far as I can determine, is nil. Everyone seems busily engaged in relaxing. Talking with Al [Haig] the mood seems to be relaxed.”

  It was the quiet before the final convulsion. I returned to Washington on July 9 to a city awaiting the catharsis of the Watergate obsession. No one knew when the climax would come; but there was no longer any doubt of its imminence or inevitability. On June 15 the Supreme Court had agreed to review whether the Watergate grand jury had the right to name President Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. The Supreme Court had agreed, about two weeks earlier, to rule on whether Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski could subpoena tapes of sixty-four White House conversations. On June 21 the House Judiciary Committee completed six weeks of closed hearings on the impeachment evidence. On June 26 former White House aide John Ehrlichman went on trial for complicity in the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and for making false statements under oath.

  The year before, the Senate Watergate hearings had descended on Nixon the very day his summit with Brezhnev ended. In 1974, the July 4 weekend intervened. But from then on, the impending denouement of Watergate dominated the national life.

  On July 8 the question whether Nixon should be forced to hand over the tapes of sixty-four conversations in the Oval Office was argued before the Supreme Court. On July 12 Ehrlichman, among others, was found guilty. The next day, the Senate Watergate Committee released its unanimous three-volume, 2,000-page report on the Watergate cover-up and financing irregularities in Nixon’s 1972 campaign. The Senators avoided stating whether the President had participated in the cover-up, but on July 19 the majority and minority counsels of the House Judiciary Committee joined in urging a Senate trial on one or more of five central impeachment charges, including obstruction of justice, abuse of Presidential power in dealing with government agencies, and contempt of Congress and the courts. “Reasonable men acting reasonably,” they maintained, “would find the President guilty.”

  These were the way stations on the road to the destruction of a President and I observed them with dismay. By now Nixon was in San Clemente awaiting the unfolding of events he could no longer control or even greatly influence. I stayed in Washington but flew to California for two brief stretches — July 19–20 and July 25–26 — to be with the President. He rarely spoke about Watergate; when he did, it was not about the substance but about the arithmetic of the impeachment vote, first in the House, then in the Senate. He was a man awake during his own nightmare. His vaunted self-discipline had not prevented the debacle and may even have caused it. For he had suppressed all the instincts that would normally have alerted him to his peril; he had been sustained on the fatal course by associates who subordinated policy to procedure and who were at a loss as to how to react when the procedures miscarried.

  Those of us who had worked with Nixon for five and a half years found it impossible to join in the wave of outrage sweeping through the media. We did not condone the shabby practices revealed by Watergate; we were as appalled as anyone. Nor did we have any illusions about the evasions and untruths unearthed. We had seen some of these tendencies at first hand. But we had a different perspective. We could see how they had helped to turn a serious error into a national disaster. We knew better than most that Nixon not so much lied as convinced himself of an expedient account. At various times we had been manipulated and set one against the other by the President. We were all too familiar with Nixon’s congenital inability ever to confide totally in anyone. Even his closest associates rarely were sure that they knew all the ramifications of his thinking and therefore did not know how to help him.

  Nixon had no truly close friends. Even his intimates lived with the consciousness that they might be abandoned or dropped if it served some inscrutable purpose. The atmosphere was summed up in a remark I made to the late John Osborne, one of the wisest of columnists, who manned the “White House Watch” for The New Republic. In 1971, shortly after my secret trip to China had made me a public figure, John asked me how it felt to be the director of the play. I replied truthfully: “John, I don’t know whether I am the director of this play or an actor in some other play whose plot they have not told me.”

  No modern President could have been less equipped by nature for political life. Painfully shy, Nixon dreaded meeting new people; only the anonymity of large, approving crowds could make him feel secure. Fearful of rejection, he constructed his relationships so that a rebuff, i
f it came, would seem to have originated with him. Fiercely proud, he could neither admit his emotional dependence on approbation nor transcend it. Deeply insecure, he first acted as if a cruel fate had singled him out for rejection and then he contrived to make sure that his premonition came to pass. It is a truism that none of us really knew the inner man. More significant, each member of his entourage was acquainted with a slightly different Nixon subtly adjusted to the President’s judgment of the aide or to his assessment of his interlocutor’s background.

  When the transcripts of the Oval Office conversations on Watergate were first published, I was astounded at the muscular language sometimes bordering on jive talk. Unless his more colorful expressions had become so much a part of the landscape that I took them for granted — which I doubt — the Nixon who talked with me on foreign policy did so rather with the prissy pedantry of his public personality. Moreover, as I have said many times, those closest to him had learned to discount much of what he said and to filter out many assertions made under stress. We were expected, we believed, to delay implementing more exuberant directives, giving our President the opportunity to live out his fantasies and yet to act, through us, with the calculation that his other image of himself prescribed.

  One of the Walter Mitty dimensions of his personality, and one of the causes, I am convinced, of Watergate, was Nixon’s love-hate relationship with the Kennedy family. He and John and Robert Kennedy had been bitter opponents in the i960 campaign and after. Nixon was thought to be at the opposite end of the political spectrum from his martyred rivals. Actually, it is probable that the Kennedys were (or at least started out to be) more conservative or more skeptical than many of their followers, while Nixon was far more moderate and sophisticated than his conservative constituency.

  Nixon, much like Lyndon Johnson before him, would have given anything to achieve the adulation that had come to John Kennedy. Nixon ascribed the successes of the Kennedy family to technique, not conviction, and he spent hours each week ruminating about the ruthless political tactics and public relations gimmicks that he thought had made the Kennedys so formidable. Nixon was convinced that wiretapping had been a key weapon in the Kennedy arsenal during the campaign of i960, a view doubtless shared by others around him. He never offered any evidence to that effect. Though there is nothing to show that Nixon ordered the wiretapping of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, the event might have had its origin in that obsession. When one asks oneself why the Nixon team in 1972 would run the risk of wiretapping an opponent in a campaign that was already won, a possible answer is that a victory was not enough unless it emulated the hated, feared, and at the same time admired Kennedys. It was an act of retaliation for perhaps imagined injuries, not a step to achieve a specific purpose. (Nixon used to hint darkly that his and Agnew’s planes had had listening devices installed in the 1968 campaign — though how this could be blamed on the Kennedys, even if true, was less clear in the telling.)1

  Most men mature around a central core; Nixon had several. This is why he was never at peace with himself. Any attempt to sum up his complex character in one attribute is bound to be misleading. The detractors’ view that Nixon was the incarnation of evil is as wrong as the adulation of his more fervent admirers. On closer acquaintance one realized that what gave Nixon his driven quality was the titanic struggle among the various personalities within him. And it was a struggle that never ended; there was never a permanent victor between the dark and the sensitive sides of his nature. Now one, now another personality predominated, creating an overall impression of menace, of torment, of unpredictability, and, in the final analysis, of enormous vulnerability.

  This is why at the end of the day those of us who worked closely with Nixon developed, despite the exasperations, the indirections, and the bizarre qualities, a grudging respect and something akin to tender protectiveness for him. We had witnessed how his maddening aberrations grew out of a desperate conflict of discordant elements so that he was in truth the first victim of his own unharmonious nature. We saw a Nixon who could be gentle and thoughtful; indeed, some of his most devious methods were mechanisms to avoid hurting people face-to-face. He was highly analytical; he had an acute ability to get to the heart of a problem, especially in foreign policy. He was a great patriot; he deeply believed in America’s mission to protect the world’s security and freedom. He did not blame the Vietnam war on his Democratic predecessors as he might have; he thought he owed it to the families of servicemen killed in Vietnam to affirm that their cause had been just. And he did believe that the cause was just. With all his tough-guy pretensions, what he really wanted to be remembered for was his idealism. On his first day as President he had called for Woodrow Wilson’s desk and he used it while he was in the Oval Office; a portrait of Wilson graced the Cabinet room. He spoke often of his mother, and the quality that he recounted most about her was her gentleness; he seems to have missed her dreadfully when she left him when he was quite young to take care of an older brother dying of tuberculosis.

  Of course, more than most, his close associates were familiar with the absence of any sense of proportion. His self-image of coolness in crisis was distorted by the dogged desperation with which he attacked his problems — born out of the fatalism that in the end, nothing ever worked as it was intended. His courage was all the more remarkable because it was not tied to a faith in ultimate success that distinguished leaders like de Gaulle or Churchill or Roosevelt.

  My own feelings toward Nixon were commensurably complex. I recoiled at some of his crudities. I resented being constantly manipulated. I would have felt more comfortable had his words been less ambiguous or his methods more explicit. Yet I was deeply grateful for the opportunity he had given me to serve my country, first as national security adviser, then as Secretary of State. Where outsiders saw a snarl, I saw the fear of rejection. What often appeared as deviousness I understood as a means to preserve his options in the face of inner doubt about his own judgment. Few men so needed to be loved and were so shy about the grammar of love. Complexity was his defense, a sense of inadequacy his secret shame, until they became second nature and produced what he feared most. I had seen the lonely process of decision-making: the struggle with self-doubt and the frequently brave outcome. In White House Years, I summed up my feelings about Nixon the night he announced the Vietnam cease-fire, and eighteen months later as the end of the Nixon Presidency approached I felt the words even more deeply:

  What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design. This man, so lonely in his hour of triumph, so ungenerous in some of his motivations, had navigated our nation through one of the most anguishing periods in its history. Not by nature courageous, he had steeled himself to conspicuous acts of rare courage. Not normally outgoing, he had forced himself to rally his people to its challenge. He had striven for a revolution in American foreign policy so that it would overcome the disastrous oscillations between overcommitment and isolation. Despised by the Establishment, ambiguous in his human perceptions, he had yet held fast to a sense of national honor and responsibility, determined to prove that the strongest free country had no right to abdicate. What would have happened had the Establishment about which he was so ambivalent shown him some love? Would he have withdrawn deeper into the wilderness of his resentments, or would an act of grace have liberated him? By now it no longer mattered. Enveloped in an intractable solitude, at the end of a period of bitter division, he nevertheless saw before him a vista of promise to which few statesmen have been blessed to aspire. He could envisage a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen friendships, and give new hope to emerging nations. It was a worthy goal for America and mankind. He was alone in his moment of triumph on a pinnacle, that was soon to turn into a precipice. And yet with all his insecurities and flaws he had brought us by a tremendous act of will to an extraordinary moment when dreams and possibilities conjoined.2

  In the months of Nixon’s final torment I o
ften reflected on a journey through his youth that he and I took in the summer of 1970. The incursion into Cambodia was behind us but its scars had not yet healed. Nixon was in San Clemente recovering from the ordeal of defending his decision — in his view essential if we were to extricate ourselves from Indochina honorably — against an extraordinary outburst of domestic violence and abuse. On a Saturday afternoon I had stopped off at the hotel in Laguna Beach that served as the press center when the ubiquitous White House switchboard operator reached me. Would I like to drive with the President and Bebe Rebozo to Los Angeles? We could have dinner at Chasen’s restaurant. The operator knew no precedent of an assistant’s refusing a Presidential invitation of this kind. She informed me that the President had already left and would pick me up shortly; I should be waiting on the sidewalk in front of the shops and restaurants opposite the hotel.

  It turned out that the President did not wish to go directly to Los Angeles. He had his heart set on showing Rebozo and me his birthplace in Yorba Linda. So we set off in a brownish unmarked Lincoln, driven by a Secret Service agent, to the unprepossessing house where Nixon was born. Until we reached it, it was like any other sentimental journey. For Nixon’s companions, the significance of the trip was the honor of being invited; we could not possibly share the emotion that obviously gripped him. We walked around the outside of the house when suddenly Nixon noticed that two cars had followed us; one was filled with Secret Service agents, the other contained the obligatory press pool.

  All of this — Secret Service and press — was standard procedure anytime the President moved; it was indeed a minimum Presidential entourage. But Nixon lost his composure as I had never seen him do before or after. He insisted that all follow-up cars leave immediately; he would not move so long as the Secret Service car and the journalists were in his motorcade. He did not want company. He was President and he was ordering privacy for himself. The orders were delivered at the top of his voice — itself an event so unprecedented that the Secret Service car broke every regulation in the book and departed, followed by the press pool.