Worldmaking

by David Milne

  Kissinger did not help his cause with Kennedy when he responded belligerently to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. JFK understood the objections to the Wall, but he believed it would defuse tensions between East and West. Kissinger, on the other hand, favored a showdown in which he fully expected Khrushchev to cave. Kissinger believed that a nonresponse to Khrushchev’s decision would threaten America’s credibility as guarantor to West Germany, and thus Europe. “If present trends continue,” Kissinger predicted, “the outcome will be a decaying, demoralized city with some access guarantees, a Germany in which neutralism will develop, and a substantially weakened NATO.”59 Kennedy disagreed, and was quite content to lose a little face if it meant preventing a larger war. Kissinger’s marginal levels of influence and access waned sharply thereafter. The coup de grâce was applied in 1962 when, during a trip to Israel, Kissinger made some maladroit statements regarding Soviet adventurism in the Middle East.60 “If you don’t keep your mouth shut,” warned Bundy, “I’m going to hit the recall button.”61 After Kissinger returned in February, Bundy declined to renew his appointment as a consultant. Kissinger’s first experience of government service, his ultimate career goal, had ended in failure. He returned to Cambridge and the everyday demands of teaching.

  The Johnson presidency brought similar disappointments, though he sensibly lowered his expectations. Kissinger accompanied Nelson Rockefeller, with whom he had resumed his advisory relationship, to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964. Barry Goldwater’s observation that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” was never likely to persuade a politically moderate Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.62 More noxious was the manner in which zealous supporters of Goldwater verbally abused Rockefeller during the convention. Kissinger voted for Johnson, and was relieved when he beat Goldwater so comfortably on Election Day. So began Kissinger’s fraught relationship with the right wing of the Republican Party.

  When President Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War during the first few months of 1965, Kissinger lent his full support: “I thought the President’s program on Vietnam as outlined in his speech was just right,” he wrote McGeorge Bundy, “the proper mixture of firmness and flexibility.” Bundy had an awkward relationship with Kissinger, but this was an endorsement he could accept: “It is good to know of your support on the current big issue,” he replied, “[although] I fear you may be somewhat lonely among all our friends at Harvard.” In December 1965, Kissinger defended the Vietnam War in a televised CBS debate with Michael Foot, an influential figure on the left of the British Labour Party. “We are involved in Vietnam,” Kissinger declared, “because we want to give the people there the right to choose their own government.” Soon after, he joined a petition of 190 academics lending support to President Johnson’s policies in Vietnam.63

  Although Kissinger was publicly supportive of the Vietnam War, privately he was ambivalent. In October 1965, the U.S. ambassador to Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, invited Kissinger to tour South Vietnam and record his impressions. Kissinger’s private views echoed those of George Kennan:

  We had involved ourselves in a war which we knew neither how to win nor how to conclude … We were engaged in a bombing campaign powerful enough to mobilize world opinion against us but too halfhearted and gradual to be decisive … No one could really explain to me how even on the most favorable assumptions about the war in Vietnam the war was going to end … [South Vietnam had] little sense of nationhood.64

  In his formal report to Lodge, Kissinger kept his doubts to himself, observing that “you are engaged in a noble enterprise on which the future of free peoples everywhere depends,” and that Vietnam was “the hinge of our national effort where success and failure will determine our world role for years to come.” Perhaps Kissinger felt that divulging his unvarnished thoughts would harm his chances of securing a more significant role in the Johnson administration. In this he was undoubtedly correct. When the Los Angeles Times printed some unguarded remarks Kissinger made to journalists at the Saigon embassy, President Johnson was furious.65 When McNamara asked Johnson in 1967 that Kissinger lead third-party negotiations with North Vietnam, LBJ took a lot of convincing and never really gave him a chance to succeed.

  Like Nitze, Kissinger struggled to formulate a consistent line on the Vietnam War. In June 1968, he took part in an academic panel on the war with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Daniel Ellsberg, Stanley Hoffmann, and Hans Morgenthau. Kissinger downplayed South Vietnam’s geostrategic significance, observing that the “acquisition of Vietnam by Peking would be infinitely less significant in terms of the balance of power than the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Peking.”66 The People’s Republic of China had tested its first nuclear device in 1964, suggesting that Kissinger did not think the fall of South Vietnam would be significant at all. A few months later, Morgenthau wrote an essay in The New Republic that, among other things, criticized Kissinger for lending the Johnson administration his support. Kissinger was stung by the critique, not least because he and Morgenthau viewed so many issues through a common realist lens. The letter he drafted in response to Morgenthau was forceful but disingenuous:

  I never supported the war in public. Before 1963, this was because I did not know enough about it and because I tended to believe the official statements. After the assassination of Diem I thought the situation was hopeless. In 1965 when I first visited Vietnam I became convinced that what we were doing was hopeless. I then decided to work within the government to attempt to get the war ended. Whether this was the right decision we will never know, but it was not ineffective. My view now is not very different from what you wrote in the New Republic, commenting about Bundy, though as a practical matter I might try to drag on the process for a while because of the international repercussions.67

  Dragging out the process of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam because of the “repercussions”—which sometimes he seemed to believe were negligible—would consume Kissinger for much of the next four years.

  * * *

  When Nixon defeated Nelson Rockefeller to secure the GOP presidential nomination in August 1968, Kissinger was distraught. He told Emmett Hughes, Rockefeller’s speechwriter, that Nixon was “of course, a disaster. Now the Republican Party is a disaster. Fortunately, he can’t be elected—or the whole country would be a disaster.”68 So when Nixon offered Kissinger the national security job after his election victory, “We were shocked,” said Rockefeller adviser Oscar Ruebhausen. “There was a sense that he was a whore.”69 Reactions such as these, and the anticipation of worse to come, led Kissinger to ask the president-elect for more time to consult with friends and colleagues at Harvard before accepting the offer. He told Nixon that he “would be of no use to him without the moral support of his friends and associates,” subsequently observing that this was “a judgment that proved to be false.” Fearing that Kissinger’s Harvard circle was unlikely to shower him with praise, Nixon “rather touchingly … suggested the names of some professors who had known him at Duke University and who would be able to give me a more balanced picture of his moral standards than I was likely to obtain at Harvard.”70

  Unsurprisingly, Kissinger’s friends and colleagues, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Nelson Rockefeller, all urged him to accept—at the very least he could serve as a moderating influence on Nixon. Declining the offer, of course, would have been unimaginable under any circumstances; Kissinger’s deliberations had a strong element of theater. But these parting endorsements had some value. Though he was not firmly connected or committed to Harvard, he did worry that he might follow his predecessor, Walt Rostow, in burning bridges with academia. Rostow’s previous employer, MIT, had not invited him back to his professorship after his hawkish stint as LBJ’s national security adviser. Instead he moved to Austin, Texas, where Lyndon Johnson created a job for him at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. When Rostow discovered that Kissinger had made a dinner party joke about the probability that he would subsequently be “exiled in
Arizona,” he failed to see the humor. During a painful telephone conversation in January 1970, Kissinger tried to salve Rostow’s hurt feelings: “That was not a crack at you … I said it at a party, it was meant to be a sarcastic remark. I love Arizona. In fact my desire to go back to Cambridge is practically zero.”71 This last sentence actually turned out to be true.

  * * *

  To say that Nixon was complex is to observe that rivers are wet. A self-made man—his father owned a grocery store, his mother was a homemaker, and a Quaker—Nixon was smart, driven, ruthless, and unable to transcend the insecurities born of his humble origins. Though marred by snobbery, Paul Nitze’s characterization of Nixon is perceptive:

  Nixon could simultaneously kid himself into believing [three] different propositions concurrently … One, that he was a good and competent realistic analyst of foreign affairs and devoted pursuer of a foreign policy that was dedicated to U.S. security and he was the wisest, not only [as] an analyst, but also [as] the conductor of [a] foreign policy consistent with our security. The other was that he rather inherited from his mother, the passionate religious preacher, a lay preacher, this idea that because he could deliver sermons, he was holier than thou, somehow or another, and he could do this through the word regardless of what the facts were. The third role was that of being a lower middle class person who greatly admired those who had success, and the way in which you achieve success was to climb through every kind of trick you could think of, with no respect for any moral restraints as long as you climbed, as long as you made it. When you keep all those balls in the air concurrently, you can trip yourself up.72

  Nixon displayed shocking levels of brutality toward his enemies—imagined and real—and could be spiteful toward those who worked for him. Yet he shrank from direct confrontation. In fact, he was stilted in most people’s company, with the exception of a small circle of long-standing friends—whom Kissinger described as a “gang of self-seeking bastards … I used to find the Kennedy group unattractively narcissistic, but they were idealists. These people are real heels.” Kissinger was scarcely less scathing about Nixon himself, describing him as “a very odd man, an unpleasant man. He didn’t enjoy people. What I never understood is why he went into politics.” His working theory was that Nixon leapt at the opportunity to “make himself over entirely,” to transform himself through force of will into someone he was not—gregarious, charismatic, dominant, larger than life. Yet, Kissinger noted, this was “a goal beyond human capacity” and Nixon paid “a fearful price for this presumption.”73

  While Nixon normally preferred abusing people from a distance, Kissinger proved to be an exception to this rule. Kissinger’s Ivy League background, his connections to the northeastern establishment, his ambition, and his love of the limelight constantly riled the president and provided abundant vituperative fodder. Nixon rarely missed an opportunity to put him in his place, attacking supposed points of vulnerability. The president would muse aloud about his Jewish enemies in the media, the business world, and academia, mouthing hateful conspiracies that Kissinger felt unable to challenge. At one point Nixon called Kissinger in a rage, deploying ethnic slurs against blacks and Jews as one of Kissinger’s aides, Winston Lord, listened in, aghast, on another phone. “Why didn’t you say something?” Lord asked afterward. Kissinger replied, “I have enough trouble fighting with him on the things that really matter; his attitudes toward Jews and blacks are not my worry.”74 A basic dynamic emerged in their relationship: Nixon meted out abuse and sought validation in equal measure. Kissinger ignored the barbs and focused on bolstering Nixon’s confidence through his many hours of need.

  Following a time-honored pattern, the bullied Kissinger took out his frustrations on his staff, who witnessed some remarkable tantrums. It was said that Kissinger treated aides like mushrooms: they “were kept in the dark, got a lot of manure piled on them, and then got canned.”75 His carefully selected staff included future luminaries such as Lawrence Eagleburger, Alexander Haig, Anthony Lake, Hal Sonnenfeldt, and Morton Halperin. Each man was expected to work fourteen- to sixteen-hour days seven days a week, all were prevented from enjoying any presidential access, a privilege (if this is the right word) that Kissinger closely guarded. Unsurprisingly, not everyone was willing to stay the course—Eagleburger, Halperin, and eight others resigned before the year was out. Eagleburger, in particular, suffered under Kissinger’s brutal regimen. Alexander Haig, a future White House chief of staff and secretary of state, describes one occasion when “after many hours of uninterrupted work, Kissinger asked Eagleburger to get him a certain document. Larry stood up, turned deathly pale, swayed, and then crashed to the floor unconscious. Kissinger stepped over his prostrate body and shouted, ‘Where is the paper?’”76 One aide observed that when “he stamps a foot in anger, you’re OK. It’s when both feet leave the ground that you’re in trouble.”77 The turnover in staff was becoming so problematic that Kissinger turned to humor to lighten the mood. He joked, after moving to a larger office, that it now took so long to march across the room and slam the door that he tended to forget who had committed the original offense.

  * * *

  The press was unanimous in praising Nixon’s appointment of Kissinger as national security adviser. The conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr., whom Kissinger had been courting for a number of years, observed, “Not since Florence Nightingale has any public figure received such public acclamation.”78 The Washington Post described the appointment as “welcome,” while James Reston in The New York Times called it “reassuring.” A common journalistic theme emerged: Kissinger was a good choice because he would keep Nixon under control and thus the world a little safer. Adam Yarmolinsky, a Harvard colleague of Kissinger’s who would serve in the Pentagon, observed that “we’ll all sleep a little better each night knowing that Henry is down there.”79 Reveling in this positive attention, Kissinger peddled this scenario to the press on a recurring off-the-record basis. He was the one indispensable man in the administration, preventing this “lunatic,” this “madman,” as he sometimes described his president, from wreaking merry havoc.

  The reality was of course more complicated. Nixon’s nuanced presidential incarnation differed markedly from his hawkish vice presidency. Throughout the 1950s Nixon had served as a firm and vocal anticommunist on the world stage: Eisenhower’s respectful nod to the right wing of the GOP. He had performed this role effectively, haranguing Khrushchev on liberal capitalism’s superiority to Marxism-Leninism during the “Kitchen Debate” of 1959—so-called because the clash occurred in a model kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. He went after Democrats with relish, attacking their lackluster dedication to winning the Cold War on American terms. As president, however, Nixon left his attack-dog persona behind. Instead he delegated this role to his vice president, the hyperaggressive Spiro Agnew, whose wordy vitriol directed at political and ideological enemies—“a spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals,” to give one example—made Nixon’s vice presidency appear decorous in comparison.80

  Nixon’s hawkish credentials were thus unimpeachable in 1969. This gave him the flexibility to pursue policies that were difficult for Democrats, such as reaching out to Beijing and Moscow in the spirit of reconciliation. As Nixon observed to Mao Zedong a few years later, “Those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about.”81 Like Kissinger, Nixon believed that Nitze’s NSC-68 no longer worked as a Cold War blueprint; something more cost aware and better tuned to the world’s fluid power dynamics should take its place. In light of the nation’s failure to quell the insurgency in South Vietnam, the fast-rising economic power of Western Europe and Japan, and America’s relative economic decline, the president-elect sought to recast the nation’s geostrategic posture. Nixon deemed it essential that the United States delegate peace- and warmaking responsibilities to increasingly wealthy regional allies; the diffusion
of global power meant that assuming the entire burden of waging the Cold War was now economically unsustainable as well as strategically foolhardy. He also believed that the nation had to recognize the existence of the People’s Republic of China, particularly now that its path had diverged so violently from its supposed Marxist-Leninist brethren. The Soviet Union and China almost went to war in 1968 over a border dispute. In a seminal, widely discussed article for Foreign Affairs in 1967, Nixon wrote, “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” Nixon believed that Sino-American “dialogue” was essential to his Cold War restructuring.82

  Engaging in meaningful dialogue with Brezhnev, reaching out to Mao, transferring power and responsibility to regional actors—all these policies were devised to facilitate one essential task: withdrawal from Vietnam without critically undermining U.S. credibility. For Nixon, closing down the Vietnam War made sound strategic and political sense. Indeed, he believed that his reelection in 1972 hinged on his signing a peace accord with Hanoi. “I’ve got to get this off our plate,” Nixon told Kissinger in the early months of his administration.83 Driven by such grand and vexatious goals—the plate was clearly overfull—Nixon accorded relatively little attention to domestic politics. The one constant throughout his vice presidency and presidency was his clear preference for matters of foreign policy, once dismissing the passage of domestic legislation as “building outhouses in Peoria.”84 Richard Nixon was Charles Beard’s negative image; their values, politics, and priorities were diametrically opposed.