Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Later that evening, around 7:00 P.M., I received a phone call from Nixon that made no reference to what had occurred earlier in the day and was convulsing the nation. He had just — as a matter of a bureaucratic routine that followed its own drummer — received an Israeli request for long-term military assistance. He would disapprove it, he said. In fact, he would cut off all military deliveries to Israel until it agreed to a comprehensive peace. He regretted not having done so earlier; he would make up for it now. His successor would thank him for it. I should prepare the necessary papers.

  Was it retaliation for our conversation of a few hours ago — on Nixon’s assumption that my faith made me unusually sensitive to pressures on Israel? Or was it the expression of a long-held belief? Almost certainly both. I told Haig about the conversation. Nixon did not return to the subject; the relevant papers were prepared but never signed.

  The next day, Wednesday, August 7, I began with two hours at my White House office so as to be available for talks with Haig and with the President. Nixon did not call for me, but I learned from Haig that he (Haig) was making “progress.” He was encouraging old friends of the President who stood by him in difficult times to tell him frankly about the prospects in Congress. There would be a meeting that afternoon between the President and a delegation of key Republican leaders of the Congress: Senator Hugh Scott, Congressman John Rhodes, and the respected conservative Senator Barry Goldwater. That might well prove decisive.

  Despite the mounting tension, I spent the day conducting foreign policy, partly to maintain the appearance of normality. I asked Brent Scow-croft and Larry Eagleburger — on a strictly personal basis — to prepare what in bureaucratese is called a “scenario” for the eventuality of resignation: how to notify foreign governments and in what order; who would get letters and what they would say; what foreign ambassadors, if any, the new President should receive. I would submit this to Ford for his approval once the decision was made.

  I met with State Department staffers working on my détente statement for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; I had a meeting on the Cyprus crisis; I lunched with Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll; I had meetings with Jordanian Prime Minister Rifai and Moroccan Foreign Minister Dr. Ahmed Laraki. The consultations on next steps in the Middle East could hardly have taken place under more preoccupying circumstances.

  At 5:58 P.M. Haig called me, interrupting a staff meeting on the Middle East with Sisco, Saunders, and Atherton. Could I come right over to the White House? He did not tell me the reason. It was not necessary; the decision had obviously been made. When I entered the Oval Office, I found Nixon alone with his back to the room, gazing at the Rose Garden through the bay windows. I knew the feeling from the time when as a boy I had left the places where I had been brought up to emigrate to a foreign land: attempting to say goodbye to something familiar and beloved, to absorb it, so to speak, so that one can never be separated from it. In the process, sadly, one loses it imperceptibly because the self-consciousness of the effort destroys what can only be possessed spontaneously. I knew the way each minute would now seem infinitely precious and inexorably terminal; I felt his torment of seeking both to prolong the moment by an act of will and to get it over with. And I understood above all that there was absolutely nothing I could do or say to ease the solitary pain he was experiencing.

  Nixon turned when he heard me. He seemed very composed, almost at ease. He had decided to resign, he said. The Republican leaders had reinforced his instinct that there was not enough support left in the Congress to justify a struggle. The country needed some repose. He could save our foreign policy only by avoiding a constitutional crisis. He would speak to the nation the very next evening, Thursday, August 8; he would resign effective at noon Friday, August 9. He hoped I would stay on to help the new President continue the foreign policy of which he was so proud.

  The effort seemed to drain him and I feared for his composure. “History,” I said, “will treat you more kindly than your contemporaries have.” What I remember is that at that moment I put my arm around him, bridging at the end the distance that had separated us on the human level all these years. Nixon does not report it in his memoirs. So perhaps it did not happen and I only felt like doing it. Or perhaps when writing his book Nixon did not want to admit that he needed solace, an emotion that he considered weak but that was in fact the most human reaction possible. It makes no real difference. At the moment of his fall, I felt for Nixon a great tenderness — for the tremendous struggle he had fought within his complex personality, for his anguish, his vulnerability, and for his great aspirations defeated in the end by weaknesses of character that became destructive because he had never come to grips with them. And if I did not in fact embrace him, I felt as if I had.

  I was at home having dinner that same evening with Nancy, my children, and my dear friend the columnist Joseph Alsop when near 9:00 P.M. the phone rang. It was Nixon, alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room. Could I come over right away? There had been many calls like this on happier occasions, for example, the evening in 1971 when we knew that the China breakthrough had become a reality. This, however, was the end, not the beginning, of an adventure. And nothing could be more poignant than that at the close of his political career Nixon was left with the one associate about whom he was the most ambivalent, who made him uneasy even while counting on him to embody the continuity of his achievements.

  I found Nixon sitting in a characteristic pose, slouched in the brown-covered chair, his legs on the settee, a yellow pad on his lap — a last crutch at the moment of despair. A reading lamp threw a thin beam on his chair; the rest of the room was in shadows broken only by the distant lights from the White House grounds. Other memories crowded in: I had called on the President there when the White House was besieged by passionate and vocal Vietnam protesters in the tens of thousands. Often I had sensed in that room the tangible aura of concentrated power. Now all was silence and solitude.

  There are several accounts of our encounter that night. Nixon has me summoned from my office for an hour-long, relatively businesslike meeting. There is also extant an unfeeling account of an out-of-control President beating his fist on the carpet and railing against a cruel fate.6 Neither fits with what I remember. There is no doubt that the meeting lasted nearly three hours. Nixon was not calm or businesslike. Nor was he out of control. He was shattered and he would not be worthy of further reflection had it been otherwise. But he was also in control of himself. There was no doubt he was deeply distraught; but I found his visible agony more natural than the almost inhuman self-containment that I had known so well. To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall — that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

  It was only natural, in a way, that Nixon should spend his last solitary evening in the White House seeking to distill some positive meaning from all those years of exertion. What would history say of him? That he made a difference? Was the world a safer place? Could we go over some of what we had done together? He kept pouring out questions, seeking some succor in his loneliness without either being able to believe what he was told or daring to reject it.

  What is the meaning of a political life? How does one assess a trend in international politics? Even in the best of times, no judgment is more tenuous than an assessment of the significance of a statesman’s actions. History is infinite compared to the human lifespan and the human perspective is even more foreshortened. Conventional wisdom often runs counter to the necessities of history, especially in times of great upheaval. The statesman has built truly only if he perceives the trend of events and puts it into the service of his purposes. For that task his scope is not unlimited. If he confines himself to riding with the tren
d, he will soon become irrelevant; if he goes beyond the capacity of his people, he will suffer shipwreck. If politics is the art of the possible, stature depends on going to the very limits of the possible. Great statesmen set themselves high goals yet assess unemotionally the quality of the material, human and physical, with which they have to work; ordinary leaders are satisfied with removing frictions or embarrassments. Statesmen create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator. Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.

  In his way, in the field of foreign policy Nixon met the test of his encounter with destiny. He understood what was at stake in the world. In the midst of unbridled emotions, he held fast to the truth that America’s credibility must not be squandered, especially by its leaders. He fought for America’s honor in distant jungles into which his predecessors had committed our troops, convinced that we had no right to abandon those who had depended on us and that tens of millions would curse the abdication his critics wished to impose on us. Against the rhetoric of a lifetime, he bravely affirmed the impossibility of an international order that excluded China, a quarter of the human race. Contrary to the simpler categories of an earlier period, he perceived that resistance to Communist aggression requires a psychological foundation that positions America as the defender of a structure of peace open even to our adversaries should their ambitions yield to the imperatives of coexistence. He identified the need of the industrial democracies for a moral rededication to common purposes. He broke through the congealed hatreds of the Middle East and at the very height of his agony showed a road toward peace where all had been frustration. And he was beginning to educate the American people to the permanent challenge of responsible American involvement in the world so that they might avoid their historical oscillation between extremes of crusading and of abdication, between impetuosity and naiveté.

  To be sure, Nixon had failed in the task of educator. He had been too unsure of himself to inspire his society not simply by technical virtuosity but by nobility of purpose. He had not met the moral challenge. And he was now paying the price for at a minimum neglecting that aspect of his trust.

  Nixon in the final analysis had provoked a revolution. He had been reelected by a landslide in 1972 in a contest as close to being fought on ideological issues as is possible in America. Neither Nixon nor George McGovern was a charismatic figure, to put it mildly. The American people for once had chosen on philosophical grounds, not on personality. Overwhelmingly, they had chosen the moderate conservative course rather than the radical liberal. For reasons unrelated to the issues and unforeseeable by the people who voted for what Nixon represented, this choice was now being annulled — with as-yet unpredictable consequences.

  So the verdict of history would be mixed. But I did not recite my caveats that evening; he would hear enough of that in the lonely months ahead — most tellingly from himself. I spoke less philosophically and more anecdotally than I write here but to the same effect. Occasionally Nixon interrupted to ask me to drink some brandy with him as we had done in happier days after some accomplishment. It was evident that he could hardly bear the thought of the indignity of a criminal trial for a former President. And neither, in truth, could I. If this came to pass, I told him, I would retire from office. And I believe I would have.

  I kept returning to the theme that the judgment of history would be less severe, that it would remember his major achievements. But Nixon was not easily consoled. “It depends who writes the history,” he kept saying. He did not do justice to himself in these desperate hours. He had built better than he knew: Nearly a decade later, the basic categories of our public discourse on international affairs — China, the Mideast, SALT and the strategic balance, energy policy, new initiatives with allies — are still those established during the years of upheaval now coming to an end.

  To professional Nixon-haters, all this may seem a maudlin rendition of a self-inflicted denouement that was entirely justified. I was too close to events to be able to see it that way. That night of August 7, in any event, I was nearly shattered by the human tragedy of the President seeking a solace beyond anybody’s capacity to furnish.

  Near midnight, after about two hours in the Lincoln Room, I prepared to leave. Nixon started escorting me to the elevator through the long hallway that bisects the Presidential residence. He stopped at the door of the Lincoln Bedroom. And he suggested that he and I pray there together. There was no good way to end that evening or to put a period to such a tempestuous career. And I am not sure that this was not as meaningful as any other and more appropriate than most.

  Nixon’s recollection is that he invited me to kneel with him and that I did so. My own recollection is less clear on whether I actually knelt. It is a trivial distinction. In whatever posture, I was filled with a deep sense of awe which seemed its own meaning so that I did not know exactly what to pray for. A passage from Aeschylus kept running through my mind — the verse that, as it happened, was a favorite of one of Nixon’s obsessions, Robert Kennedy:

  Pain that cannot forget

  falls drop by drop

  upon the heart

  until in our despair

  there comes wisdom

  through the awful

  grace of God.

  Shortly after midnight — after about a half hour in the Lincoln Bedroom — I returned to my White House office. Scowcroft and Eagleburger were waiting for me; Eagleburger had come over from the State Department to be on hand if I needed him. Within a few minutes, Nixon called. I must not remember our encounter that evening as a sign of weakness, he said. He hoped that I would keep in mind the times when he had been strong. How strange is the illusion by which men sustain themselves! There were many occasions that Nixon identified with strength that had made me uncomfortable. This evening when he had bared his soul I saw a man of tenacity and resilience. And so I told the stricken President that if I ever spoke of the evening, it would be with respect. He had honored me by permitting me to share with him his last free night in the White House where so many memories united us. And he had conducted himself humanly and worthily.

  The next morning, Thursday, August 8, resignation was transmuted from the tragic to the routine. During my sojourn at my White House office, Haig told me that Nixon would see Ford at 11:00 A.M. to tell him formally of his plan to resign the next day. I worked on draft letters for the new President to send to key heads of government. I also went over a plan for the new President to meet all of the ambassadors accredited in Washington in regional groups. It was important to demonstrate that a firm hand was taking over. There were many interruptions. Some Cabinet members called asking whether they should publicly announce their readiness to continue in office. I counseled against it; they should not seem to try to deprive the new President of options. Friends offered advice on how to resist assaults on my position after the change of administration. I was not in the mood for it. I had seen the beginnings of two Presidential terms. I knew that whatever decisions the new President might make now about formal assignments would not determine the ultimate hierarchy. Months of jockeying for position were ahead of us. I had no stomach for going through it all again. Yet there would be no choice; all that would come soon enough. This day we had to keep to fundamentals.

  At 12:30 P.M. Vice President Ford called. He was calm and steady. He had just left the President, he said. He wanted to waste no time in urging me to stay on and to “stand with me in these difficult times.” These occasions always seemed to bring out the banal in me, or perhaps it is the incongruity between the immensity of the occasion and the nature of language. I said he could count on me: “You know the whole world depends on you, Mr. Vice President.”

  Nixon was still President. I owed it to him to inform him of my conversation with Ford. I reviewed with Nixon how I would suggest to Ford to tak
e the helm and reassure foreign governments. Nixon was appreciative of the call though apathetic. He offered no comments on substance.

  At 3:00 P.M. I called on the President-designate in his office at the Executive Office Building. I had known Gerald Ford for many years. Over a decade earlier he had been a guest lecturer to my National Security Policy Seminar at Harvard. Since coming to Washington I had briefed him regularly, first as Republican leader of the House, for the past nine months as Vice President. We have since become such close friends that it is difficult to reconstruct my feelings at the time. I liked him immensely. Even then I knew he was a good and decent man. I had no idea how he would perform as President and almost certainly neither did he. But he seemed at ease, neither overawed nor falsely boastful. He urged me again to stay on and referred to the fact that we had always gotten along well. I pointed out that it was not his job to get along with me; it was my job to get along with him. We reviewed the scenario for informing foreign governments and demonstrating that the new President was firmly in control. Ford agreed to meet all the foreign ambassadors during his first twenty-four hours in office. He changed some of the letters to world leaders so that they sounded more like language he might use.

  When I left his office after an hour and a half, I suddenly realized that for the first time in years after a Presidential meeting I was free of tension. It was impossible to talk to Nixon without wondering afterward what other game he might be engaged in at the moment. Of one thing you could be sure: No single conversation with Nixon ever encapsuled the totality of his purposes. It was exciting but also draining, even slightly menacing. With Ford, one knew that there were no hidden designs, no morbid suspicions, no complexes. And I reflected again on the wisdom of Providence. Gerald Ford was clearly not Nixon’s first choice as successor; John Connally was. But for that moment of near-despair I could think of no public figure better able to lead us in national renewal than this man so quintessentially American, of unquestioned integrity, at peace with himself, thoughtful and knowledgeable of national affairs and international responsibilities, calm and unafraid.