When Eisenhower selected Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State, he wanted him to be his chief foreign policy adviser, a role Dulles was uniquely qualified to fill. From the outset of my administration, however, I planned to direct foreign policy from the White House. Therefore I regarded my choice of a National Security Adviser as crucial. Considering the importance I placed on the post, I made my choice in an uncharacteristically impulsive way.
I knew that Henry Kissinger had served for many years as a foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller. I had also heard that in the period before the 1968 Republican convention, while Rockefeller and I were rivals for the nomination, Kissinger had privately made a number of disparaging comments about my competence in the field. But I expected this from a Rockefeller associate, and I chalked it up to politics. During the last days of the campaign, when Kissinger was providing us with information about the bombing halt, I became more aware of both his knowledge and his influence.
John Mitchell arranged for Kissinger and me to meet on November 25 in my transition office in the Hotel Pierre in New York. Since neither of us was interested in small talk, I proceeded to outline for him some of the plans I had for my administration’s foreign policy. I had read his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy when it first appeared in 1957, and I knew that we were very much alike in our general outlook in that we shared a belief in the importance of isolating and influencing the factors affecting worldwide balances of power. We also agreed that whatever else a foreign policy might be, it must be strong to be credible—and it must be credible to be successful. I was not hopeful about the prospects of settling the Vietnam war through the Paris talks and felt that we needed to rethink our whole diplomatic and military policy on Vietnam. Kissinger agreed, although he was less pessimistic about the negotiations than I was. I said that I was determined to avoid the trap Johnson had fallen into, of devoting virtually all my foreign policy time and energy to Vietnam, which was really a short-term problem. I felt that failing to deal with the longer-term problems could be devastating to America’s security and survival, and in this regard I talked about restoring the vitality of the NATO alliance, and about the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Finally I mentioned my concern about the need to re-evaluate our policy toward Communist China, and I urged him to read the Foreign Affairs article in which I had first raised this idea as a possibility and a necessity.
Kissinger said he was delighted that I was thinking in such terms. He said that if I intended to operate on such a wide-ranging basis, I was going to need the best possible system for getting advice. Kennedy had replaced NSC strategic planning with tactical crisis management; and Johnson, largely because of his concern with leaks, had reduced NSC decision-making to informal weekly luncheon sessions with only a few advisers. Kissinger recommended that I structure a national security apparatus within the White House that, in addition to coordinating foreign and defense policy, could also develop policy options for me to consider before making decisions.
I had a strong intuition about Henry Kissinger, and I decided on the spot that he should be my National Security Adviser. I did not make a specific offer to him then, but I made it clear that I was interested in having him serve in my administration. I guessed that he would want to think about our conversation, and also that he would feel an obligation to discuss it with Rockefeller.
I met with Kissinger again two days later and asked him if he would like to head the NSC. He replied that he would be honored to accept. He immediately began assembling a staff and analyzing the policy choices that I would have to address as soon as I took office. From the beginning he worked with the intensity and stamina that were to characterize his performance over the years.
The combination was unlikely—the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic. But our differences helped make the partnership work.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan had one of the most innovative minds for domestic policy in the country. Like Kissinger a Harvard professor, he had served as Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. I had read several of his articles before the 1968 campaign, and I found his thinking refreshing and stimulating. Unlike so many liberal academics, Moynihan was free of professional jargon and ideological cant. He had helped design the Great Society poverty programs, but he was not afraid to acknowledge that many of them had failed, and he was ready to apply the lessons learned from that failure to devising new programs that might work.
I met with Moynihan to explore his views and to sound him out about coming to the White House. Although he quickly made known his opposition to the Vietnam war, he was clearly interested by the opportunity. Our shared conviction that the current welfare system had to be totally reformed helped to cement the rapport I immediately felt with him. I told Moynihan about my intention to establish an Urban Affairs Council, describing it as the domestic policy equivalent of the National Security Council in foreign affairs. “That’s a capital idea!” he exclaimed. Then I asked him if he would like to head it. He accepted immediately. Even when I thought Pat Moynihan was wrong about a particular issue or problem, I found his intellect scintillating and challenging. As I said after he had left the administration and returned to Harvard, “I disagreed with a lot of what he said—but he certainly did light up the place!”
I created a new Cabinet-level position, Counsellor to the President, for my old friend and adviser Arthur Burns. I thought that his conservatism would be a useful and creative counterweight to Moynihan’s liberalism.
I could remember as if it were only yesterday sitting in Eisenhower’s suite in the Blackstone Hotel in 1952 and wondering whether he knew what he was getting himself in for as I watched him sign his letter of resignation from the Army. He had not been in politics very long and was bound to be surprised by many of the things that happened. But I had been involved in presidential politics for almost two decades, and I was determined to be as prepared as anyone ever had been for the power and position I was about to assume. Therefore, despite the demands of daily events during this transition period, I set aside time to think about the condition of the nation and the world I would be inheriting from Johnson and about how I wanted my presidency to change and improve things.
Like Eisenhower, I was about to assume four different hats: as head of state I would have to deal with foreign affairs; as head of government I would have to provide domestic leadership and legislative programs; as Commander in Chief I would have the ultimate authority and responsibility for America’s armed forces; and as leader of the Republican Party I would have to do something to breathe new life into the national, state, and local party organizations.
As I looked at America’s foreign policy during the 1960s, I felt that it had been held hostage, first under Kennedy to the cold war and then under Johnson to the Vietnam war. Our tendency to become preoccupied with only one or two problems at a time had led to a deterioration of policy on all fronts. I did not feel that there should be any single foreign policy priority. There were many priorities, moving in tandem, each affecting the others. To the extent that I would have to start somewhere, I felt that I had to put Europe at the top of the list. Only when we had secured our Western alliance would we be on sufficiently solid footing to begin talks with the Communists. NATO was in disarray, largely because of the failure of the United States to consult adequately with our European allies.
In the Far East, Japan, now the second most productive nation in the free world, was beginning to have doubts about the credibility of America’s defense commitments. Our control of the island of Okinawa was a constant irritant in our relations.
In the Middle East the truce that followed the June war of 1967 was continually interrupted by intermittent fighting. The United States seemed to be unable to do anything more than arm Israel against the next Arab onslaught. Egypt and Syria, Israel’s two major potential enemies, were receiving Soviet arms, and this turned the already expl
osive area into an international powder keg, that, when it exploded, might lead not only to another war between Israel and its neighbors, but also to a direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
From Communist China there was only ominous silence. Except for sterile and sporadic talks between the American and Chinese ambassadors in Warsaw, a gulf of twenty years of noncommunication separated the world’s most populous nation from the world’s most powerful nation.
As I looked at America’s position in the world and examined our relations with other nations, I could see that the central factor in 1968 on the eve of my presidency was the same as it had been in 1947 when I first went to Europe with the Herter Committee: America now, as then, was the main defender of the free world against the encroachment and aggression of the Communist world.
For twenty-five years, I had watched the changing face of communism. I had seen prewar communism, luring workers and intellectuals with its siren call of equality and justice, reveal itself as an aggressive imperialistic ideology during the postwar period of the Marshall Plan. Despite the most nobly ringing rhetoric, the pattern was tragically the same: as soon as the Communists came to power, they destroyed all opposition. I had watched the Soviets’ phenomenal recovery from the devastation of war and their costly but successful struggle to achieve for communism the selling point of potential prosperity. At home I had seen the face of underground subversive communism when it surfaced in the Hiss case, reminding people not only that it existed, but that its purpose was deadly serious.
In the late 1940s and during the 1950s I had seen communism spread to China and other parts of Asia, and to Africa and South America, under the camouflage of parties of socialist revolution, or under the guise of wars of national liberation. And, finally, during the 1960s I had watched as Peking and Moscow became rivals for the role of leadership in the Communist world.
Never once in my career have I doubted that the Communists mean it when they say that their goal is to bring the world under Communist control. Nor have I ever forgotten Whittaker Chambers’s chilling comment that when he left communism, he had the feeling he was leaving the winning side. But unlike some anticommunists who think we should refuse to recognize or deal with the Communists lest in doing so we imply or extend an ideological respectability to their philosophy and their system, I have always believed that we can and must communicate and, when possible, negotiate with Communist nations. They are too powerful to ignore. We must always remember that they will never act out of altruism, but only out of self-interest. Once this is understood, it is more sensible—and also safer—to communicate with the Communists than it is to live in icy cold-war isolation or confrontation. In fact, in January 1969 I felt that the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union would probably be the single most important factor in determining whether the world would live at peace during and after my administration.
I felt that we had allowed ourselves to get in a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the Soviets. They had a major presence in the Arab states of the Middle East, while we had none; they had Castro in Cuba; since the mid-1960s they had supplanted the Chinese as the principal military suppliers of North Vietnam; and except for Tito’s Yugoslavia they still totally controlled Eastern Europe and threatened the stability and security of Western Europe.
There were, however, a few things in our favor. The most important and interesting was the Soviet split with China. There was also some evidence of growing, albeit limited, independence in some of the satellite nations. There were indications that the Soviet leaders were becoming interested in reaching an agreement on strategic arms limitation. They also appeared to be ready to hold serious talks on the anomalous situation in Berlin, which, almost a quarter century after the war had ended, was still a divided city and a constant source of tension, not just between the Soviets and the United States, but also between the Soviets and Western Europe. We sensed that they were looking for a face-saving formula that would lessen the risk of confrontation in the Mideast. And we had some solid evidence that they were anxious for an expansion of trade.
It was often said that the key to a Vietnam settlement lay in Moscow and Peking rather than in Hanoi. Without continuous and massive aid from either or both of the Communist giants, the leaders of North Vietnam would not have been able to carry on the war for more than a few months. Thanks to the Sino-Soviet split, however, the North Vietnamese had been extremely successful in playing off the Soviets and the Chinese against each other by turning support for their war effort into a touchstone of Communist orthodoxy and a requisite for keeping North Vietnam from settling into the opposing camp in the struggle for domination within the Communist world. This situation became a strain, particularly for the Soviets. Aside from wanting to keep Hanoi from going over to Peking, Moscow had little stake in the outcome of the North Vietnamese cause, especially as it increasingly worked against Moscow’s own major interests vis-à-vis the United States. While I understood that the Soviets were not entirely free agents where their support for North Vietnam was concerned, I nonetheless planned to bring maximum pressure to bear on them in this area.
I was sure that Brezhnev and Kosygin had been no more anxious for me to win in 1968 than Khrushchev had been in 1960. The prospect of having to deal with a Republican administration—and a Nixon administration at that—undoubtedly caused anxiety in Moscow. In fact, I suspected that the Soviets might have counseled the North Vietnamese to offer to begin the Paris talks in the hope that the bombing halt would tip the balance to Humphrey in the election—and if that was their strategy, it had almost worked.
After the election Johnson proposed that as President and Presidentelect he and I attend a summit meeting with the Soviets in the period before my inauguration. I understood his desire to make one last dramatic demonstration of his dedication to peace, but I saw no solid basis for concluding that the Soviet leaders were prepared to negotiate seriously on any critical issue. Nor did I want to be boxed in by any decisions that were made before I took office.
The most that might come from such a last-minute summit would be a “spirit,” like the “Spirit of Glassboro” that followed Johnson’s meeting with Kosygin in New Jersey in 1967 or the “Spirit of Camp David” that followed Eisenhower’s meeting with Khrushchev in 1959. It was my feeling that such “spirits” were almost entirely spurious and that they actually worked heavily to the Soviets’ advantage. Since public opinion played no role whatever in the Communist system, such summit “spirit” was a one-way street in their direction, because the optimistic attitudes that characterized American public opinion after a summit made it harder for us to assume a tough line in our postsummit dealings with the Soviets.
During the transition period Kissinger and I developed a new policy for dealing with the Soviets. Since U.S.–Soviet interests as the world’s two competing nuclear superpowers were so widespread and overlapping, it was unrealistic to separate or compartmentalize areas of concern. Therefore we decided to link progress in such areas of Soviet concern as strategic arms limitation and increased trade with progress in areas that were important to us—Vietnam, the Mideast, and Berlin. This concept became known as linkage.
Lest there be any doubt of my seriousness in pursuing this policy, I purposely announced it at my first press conference when asked a question about starting SALT talks. I said, “What I want to do is to see to it that we have strategic arms talks in a way and at a time that will promote, if possible, progress on outstanding political problems at the same time—for example, on the problem of the Mideast and on other outstanding problems in which the United States and the Soviet Union acting together can serve the cause of peace.”
Linkage was something uncomfortably new and different for the Soviets, and I was not surprised when they bridled at the restraints it imposed on our relationship. It would take almost two years of patient and hard-nosed determination on our part before they would accept that linkage with what we wanted fr
om them was the price they would have to pay for getting any of the things they wanted from us.
We made our first contacts with the Soviets during the transition period. In mid-December Kissinger met with a Soviet UN diplomat who was, as we knew, actually an intelligence officer. I wanted it made clear that I was not taken in by any of the optimistic rhetoric that had characterized so much of recent Soviet–American relations. Kissinger therefore stated that while the tendency during the last few years had been to emphasize how much our two nations supposedly had in common, the Nixon administration felt that there were real and substantial differences between us and that an effort to lessen the tension created by these differences should be the central focus of our relationship. Kissinger also said that I did not want a pre-inauguration summit meeting and that if they held one with Johnson I would have to state publicly that I would not be bound by it. Nothing more was heard about this summit project.
We received a prompt reply from Moscow. Our UN contact reported that the Soviet leadership was “not pessimistic” because of the election of a Republican President. He said that the Soviet leadership had expressed an interest in knowing if I desired to “open channels of communication.” It was with this in mind that I said in my inaugural address, “After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open.”
The most pressing foreign problem I would have to deal with as soon as I became President was the war in Vietnam. During the transition Kissinger began a review of all possible policies toward Vietnam, distilling them into specific options that ran the gamut from massive military escalation to immediate unilateral withdrawal. A strong case could be made for each option.
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