As a graduate student at Harvard, Kissinger had written his thesis on that classic period after the French revolutionary wars, in the 1820s and 1830s, when the peace of Europe depended on the balance of power and when Lord Castlereagh and Prince Metternich, those great practitioners of diplomacy, had made the system work. “Their goal,” wrote Kissinger approvingly, “was stability, not perfection, and the balance of power is the classic expression of the lesson of history that no order is safe without physical safeguards against aggression.”13 The best and most effective statesman, in his view, was the one who understood the world and that other nations than his own had interests and goals. Such a person worked with the world as it was, not as he hoped it might be: “His instrument is diplomacy, the art of relating states to each other by agreement rather than by the exercise of force, by the representation of a ground of action which reconciles particular aspirations with a general consensus.”14
For Kissinger, diplomacy was a marvelously enjoyable art, and a very important one. The great statesmen, he believed, embraced their calling, even the moments of crisis. “The few prepared to grapple with circumstances are usually undisturbed in the eye of a hurricane,” he wrote.15 He admired, of course, both Metternich and Bismarck, the great German statesman, and, like Nixon himself, Churchill and de Gaulle. When necessary, they had boldly gone against conventional wisdom. Such statesmen, Kissinger complained, often went without honor in their own countries because it was difficult to get domestic support for policies that appeared to require compromises, with other powers or of a nation’s own dearly held principles.16 In what became a notorious interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1972, the short, plump Kissinger compared himself to the great American icon of the cowboy. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse,” he told her. “He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time.”17
Nixon knew something of Kissinger’s ideas but not the man himself when, in late November 1968, after the presidential election, he thought about making Kissinger national security adviser. It was, as Nixon himself said, “uncharacteristically impulsive.” Kissinger had worked for a rival Republican candidate, Nelson Rockefeller. What is more, it was well known that Kissinger was not a Nixon fan. “The man is unfit to be president,” he had said repeatedly during the primaries.18 Nixon was forgiving, saying, “I expected this from a Rockefeller associate, and I chalked it up to politics.” On November 25, as Nixon was putting together his new administration, he summoned Kissinger to meet him in New York in order to invite him to fill the post first created by Harry Truman, in 1947, to provide the president with comprehensive advice on American foreign affairs. Both the position and the National Security Council itself had been sidelined in earlier administrations. Nixon was determined to make the NSC the vehicle for his foreign policy.
It was only the second time the two men had met. Kissinger found the conversation interesting but unsettling. Nixon, as he usually was with unfamiliar people, was shy. He avoided small talk and plunged straight into a discussion of foreign affairs. He wanted, he told Kissinger, to avoid Johnson’s trap of devoting all his time and energy to the Vietnam issue. The United States must concentrate on the more long-term problems that threatened its very survival: disunity in the North Atlantic alliance, the Middle East, and relations with the Soviet Union and Japan. Nixon also mentioned one of his major preoccupations—the need to look again at American policy toward the People’s Republic of China. “We also agreed,” said Nixon, “that whatever else a foreign policy might be, it must be strong to be credible—and it must be credible to be successful.”19
The conversation ended without any mention by Nixon of a post for Kissinger. “After frequent contact,” Kissinger later wrote, “I came to understand his subtle circumlocutions better; I learned that to Nixon words were like billiard balls; what mattered was not the initial impact but the carom.” Nixon also hated being turned down, so as much as he could, he avoided being put in a position where that might happen.20 Kissinger went back to Harvard, intrigued but uncertain about where he stood. Two days later, he was asked to return to New York for a meeting with Nixon’s friend John Mitchell. What, asked Mitchell, had Kissinger decided about the National Security Council job? Kissinger replied that he had not been offered it. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Mitchell, “he has screwed it up again.”21 Kissinger, after some thought, accepted. He had now, he wrote in his memoirs, changed his mind about Nixon: “I was struck by his perceptiveness and knowledge so at variance with my previous image of him.”22 Just after Nixon’s inauguration, Kissinger made sure that Haldeman knew how enthusiastic he now was about Nixon. “K. is really impressed with overall performance,” Haldeman recorded in his diary, “and surprised!”23
“The combination was unlikely,” Nixon himself admitted, “the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic. But our differences made the partnership work.”24 And Henry Kissinger, the chubby professor with the thick glasses, the heavy German accent, and the fingernails bitten to the quick, was an unlikely American statesman. Yet although Nixon and Kissinger had followed very different paths to power, the two also had much in common. Nixon was a politician through and through, but he was also a highly intelligent and reflective man. Of all American presidents, with the exception perhaps of Bill Clinton, he had the best grounding in foreign relations. He had been preparing for years. Kissinger, it is true, was an academic, but he had a tremendous instinct for power. He knew how to get it and how to use it. Even as a professor at Harvard he had shown himself adept at attaching himself to powerful patrons. Every summer he had run a special international seminar at Harvard that brought together young leaders from the United States and its allies. Over the years, this gave him a network of contacts that included prime ministers, presidents, and foreign ministers around the world.
That Kissinger was at Harvard at all is an indication of his extraordinary talent and determination—and perhaps some luck as well. Born in 1923 into a solid middle-class Jewish family in a small Bavarian town, he had seen his happy and secure childhood overshadowed by the rise of the Nazis to power at the beginning of the 1930s. Like other Jewish children in Germany, he found himself forced out of the local school and barred from ordinary activities, whether sports or dances. Jews were taunted in the streets and beaten up. Kissinger’s gentle, scholarly father was shattered by the change in the Germany he had loved. In 1938, Kissinger’s energetic and practical mother decided that the family must leave for the United States, where her cousin was ready to welcome them. The Kissingers, both parents and two sons, were among the fortunate ones; many of their relatives and friends died in the concentration camps. Kissinger rarely talked about that period in his life, but it is hard not to imagine that it had something to do with his antipathy to revolution and revolutionary ideologies or with his insecurities as an adult. His first significant mentor, Fritz Kraemer, a Prussian who fought for the Americans in the Second World War, believed that “it made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”25
And most people were Kissinger’s intellectual inferiors. He was a brilliant student. In his American high school, his unfamiliarity with English scarcely held him back at all. His grades were virtually all 90s or higher. (Unlike his younger brother, Walter, though, he always kept his pronounced German accent; in Walter’s view, this was because Walter listened to others, whereas Henry did not.)26 Henry sailed into the City College of New York and was doing equally well when, at the start of 1943, the draft took him into the army and a new life.
Kissinger learned much in the army, both in special courses for particularly bright soldiers and from his fellow conscripts, most of whom came from backgrounds very different from his own. He began to develop his famous charm and his ability to laugh at himself. Thanks to a chance encounter with Fr
itz Kraemer, who had a keen eye for talent, he soared through the ranks to become a counterintelligence officer in occupied Germany at the end of the war. He did a superb job, rooting out senior Nazis and getting local administrations running again, and he did so without vindictiveness. Thanks to Kraemer again, when his military service finished, in 1947, he decided to apply to Harvard.
The Henry Kissinger who joined the Harvard faculty in 1954 was a mature intellectual who had already seen much of the world. He was drawn by academic life, but even then he found it limited. Early on, he developed contacts in the centers of power in New York and Washington. In 1955 he took a leave from Harvard to research and write a book on nuclear weapons for the Council on Foreign Relations, the preeminent foreign policy forum for the East Coast establishment. The project brought him into contact with a number of powerful people, among them Nelson Rockefeller, who was to become another Kissinger patron. The resulting book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, surprised everyone, including Kissinger himself, by becoming a best seller. Richard Nixon read it and was impressed. The book also made Kissinger’s name outside the university world as someone to watch and, for his critics, as a cold and calculating strategist who talked calmly about using nuclear weapons in limited wars.
Kissinger spent much of the next decade at Harvard, broadening his already wide range of acquaintances and burnishing his academic reputation with articles and lectures. He often used the university as a base. In the 1960s he spent much time in New York and Washington, working as a consultant on and off for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Politically, though, he was finding that his natural home was with the Republicans. In personal terms, he was drifting away from his first wife, a childhood sweetheart whom he had married in 1949. In 1964, they divorced and he became, for a few years, a dashing bachelor. In the White House, Nixon loved the stories of Kissinger’s reputed girlfriends and made ponderous jokes about his sex life.
Although they had much in common and were going to spend huge amounts of time together while Nixon was president, the two men never became real personal friends. “A marriage of convenience” was how Pat Nixon described it.27 Unlike President Bush and Condoleezza Rice, the two men did not watch football together. They rarely socialized with each other. John Holdridge of the State Department, who came to know both men well, was once struck by a photograph of Thanksgiving dinner at Nixon’s house at San Clemente. “Here were the Nixons with the people who were invited in to have Thanksgiving dinner, and Bob Haldeman, Ehrlichman, those two principally, and some other people from the White House staff, all more or less informally dressed. And here was Kissinger looking very German with a coat and a tie and with kind of a frozen expression on his face, and I thought, my God, the sort of unlikeliest guest.”28 After Nixon left office, he and Kissinger met only infrequently.
“Each of them,” said a diplomat who worked with them, “saw the other as a friend poised with a potential dagger in his back; there is a little paranoia in both men.”29 In his own way, Kissinger was as insecure and as suspicious as Nixon. He was as sensitive to slights and criticism. It was not easy to be Henry Kissinger, the professor and the son of Jewish refugees, in Nixon’s White House. He was treated, said Leonard Garment, himself a Jew, “as an exotic wunderkind—a character, an outsider.” His colleagues admired him but also laughed at him for his thick German accent and his glasses. He had to endure, said Garment, “the railings against Jewish power which were part of the casual conversation among Nixon’s inner circle.”30
Leslie Gelb, who knew Kissinger well from their Harvard days and who also became part of the foreign policy establishment, saw him as “the typical product of an authoritarian background—devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors.”31 Where Kissinger was different from Nixon, though, was that he had an ability to see himself from outside. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” he told a reporter when he took a call from Nixon, “just because I was on my knees when I answered the phone.”32
Perhaps he had to be a courtier because he had no independent power base; he was Nixon’s appointee, and Nixon knew that. “Henry is a genius,” Nixon told Gerald Ford as he was preparing to hand over the presidency, “but you don’t have to accept everything he recommends. He can be invaluable, and he’ll be very loyal, but you can’t let him have a totally free hand.” He advised Ford to keep Kissinger on as his secretary of state but hoped, he told an aide, that the new president would be tough enough. “Ford has just got to realize that there are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts.” At other times, though, “you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.”33
Nixon, who was determined that American foreign policy be run through the White House and not by the State Department or any other government agency, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, knew that in Kissinger he had the subordinate he needed. With Kissinger’s encouragement and advice, Nixon gave approval to a new committee, to be chaired by Kissinger himself, that would review and approve all policy papers sent by the various branches of government, including the State Department, before issues and recommendations went on to the president. Kissinger also had the power to order major studies on important issues from any department. Richard Helms, the experienced head of the Central Intelligence Agency, was startled to be informed by Kissinger that from now on all intelligence reports, even oral briefings, were to go through the national security adviser. Furthermore, Nixon had decided that Helms was to attend meetings of the National Security Council but leave before the policy discussions started. (Nixon later forgot that he had given the order.) Kissinger became the doorkeeper in all matters that went up to the president for decision.34
The National Security Council itself became like a second State Department. Kissinger brought in bright young men from top universities and ransacked State for experts. It was an exhilarating and challenging experience to work for someone so intelligent and so demanding. He threw memoranda and reports back until they were right yet rarely praised the final product. “One of the most mercurial and difficult bosses it has ever been my pleasure or peril to know,” said Robert McFarlane, who became Kissinger’s military assistant in 1973. His temper was famous and, being Kissinger, he made fun of it. “Since English is my second language,” he said, “I didn’t know that maniac and fool were not terms of endearment.”35 To his credit, he never minded a good argument; on the other hand, he watched his staff carefully to make sure they did not outshine him. When he became secretary of state in Nixon’s second term, a sour joke ran around the State Department about why working for him was like being a mushroom: “Because you’re kept in the dark all the time, because you get a lot of shit dumped on you, and, in the end, you get canned.”36
In a very short time, Kissinger became virtually indispensable to the president. He was prepared to sit for hours, if necessary, while Nixon, as was his way, worked out his ideas in rambling conversations. As he told a journalist, “If I’m not in there talking to the President, then someone else is.”37 In Kissinger, Nixon had found someone who was his intellectual equal, who understood his policies, and who could carry them out. Haldeman, who never much liked Kissinger and found his repeated outbursts and threats to resign tiresome, nevertheless concluded early on that he was “extremely valuable and effective.”38 In August 1970, when Kissinger was in yet another state about a perceived slight, Nixon wondered about letting him go. Haldeman disagreed: “We have to recognize this weakness as the price we pay for his enormous assets, and it’s well worth it.”39
Most observers agree that it was Nixon who set the strategic directions for the United States and Kissinger who worked out the tactics. “It was understood,” said Viktor Sukhodrev, who interpreted for the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, “that while Kissinger was playing a major role, I would have to say that in all the negotiations with Nixon, he [Nixon] was very much in command.”40 Nixon, in the view of one of his closer associates, the speechwriter Raymond P
rice, created the framework within which Kissinger operated. “In the final analysis, each major turn got down to a presidential decision, and Nixon gave more care to these decisions than to anything else in his presidency.”41
Although Kissinger has since maintained that he and Nixon were always as one on the opening to China,42 the initiative clearly came from Nixon. Kissinger, it is true, had considered the possibility that one day the United States might be able to improve its relations with China. In a speech he wrote for Nelson Rockefeller in the 1968 presidential campaign, he included a phrase about “a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union,”43 but his main concerns in his first months as national security adviser were improving America’s relations with its European allies and dealing with the Soviet Union. By temperament and background, he was firmly focused on Europe and the great struggle between the two superpowers, not on Asia. Vietnam had to be dealt with, of course, because of the damage it was doing to the United States in other areas. Although Kissinger came to loyally and, indeed, enthusiastically support Nixon’s opening to China, he still tended to see it in terms of what it could do for relations with the Soviet Union.44
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