Chapter 1: A Ford, Not a Lincoln The Changing of the Guard Gerald Rudolph Ford was an uncomplicated man tapped by destiny for some of the most complicated tasks in the nation's history. The first nonelected President, he was called to heal the nation's wounds after a decade in which the Vietnam War and Watergate had produced the most severe divisions since the Civil War. As different as possible from the driven personalities who typically propel themselves into the highest office, Gerald Ford restored calm and confidence to a nation surfeited with upheavals, overcame a series of international crises, and ushered in a period of renewal for American society. A year before his inauguration, it would not have occurred to Ford that he was about to be thrust into the presidency. The highest office to which he had ever aspired was that of Speaker of the House of Representatives, and that had appeared out of reach because of the Democratic Party's apparently invulnerable majority in Congress. Ford had, in fact, decided to retire after the next election in November 1974. Suddenly, in October 1973, Richard Nixon appointed him Vice President in the wake of Spiro Agnew's resignation. "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln," Ford said modestly when he assumed that responsibility on December 6, 1973. Having never felt obliged to participate in the obsessive calculations of normal presidential candidates, Ford was at peace with himself. To a world concerned lest America's domestic torment impair its indispensable leadership during what was still the height of the Cold War, he provided a sense of restored purpose. On his own people, Ford's matter-of-fact serenity bestowed the precious gift of enabling the generations that followed to remain blissfully unaware of how close to disaster their country had come in a decade of tearing itself apart. The ever-accelerating pace of history threatens to consume memory. Even those of us who experienced firsthand the disintegration of the Nixon Administration find ourselves struggling to reconstruct the sense of despair that suffused the collapsing presidency and the sinking feeling evoked by seemingly endless revelations of misconduct, by the passionate hostility of the media, and by the open warfare between the executive and legislative branches of our government. In my dual role of National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, my constant nightmare as Watergate accelerated was that, sooner or later, some foreign adversary might be tempted to test what remained of Nixon's authority and discover that the emperor had no clothes. Probably the greatest service rendered by the Nixon Administration in those strange and turbulent final months was to have prevented any such overt challenge. For even as it approached dissolution, the Nixon Administration managed to navigate the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, diminish the Soviet position in the Middle East by sponsoring two disengagement agreements, and conduct successfully a complicated triangular diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing. The disintegration of executive authority in the democratic superpower did not lead to a collapse of our international position as any standard textbook on world politics would have predicted, partly because the sheer magnitude of the disintegration of presidential authority was unimaginable to friend and adversary alike. Together with the prestige Nixon had accumulated over five years of foreign policy successes, we were able to sustain what came close to a policy of bluff. In October 1973 at the end of the Middle East War, it even saw us through an alert of our military forces, including of the nuclear arsenal. But with every passing month, the sleight of hand grew more difficult. We were living on borrowed time. As the impeachment proceedings gathered momentum, Nixon's personal conduct began to mirror his political decline. He kept fully abreast of the various foreign policy issues and at no point failed to make the key decisions. But, as time went on, Watergate absorbed more and more of Nixon's intellectual and emotional capital. As day-to-day business became trivialized by the increasingly apparent inevitability of his downfall, I felt enormous sympathy for this tormented man whose suffering was compounded by his knowledge that his tragedy was largely self-inflicted. Yet by early July 1974, I, like the other few survivors of Nixon's entourage, was so drained by the emotional roller coaster that I was half hoping for some merciful end to it all. The brutal process of attrition seemed both endless and incapable of being ended. Even when, on July 24, the Supreme Court ordered the White House tapes to be turned over to the special prosecutor, I was so inured to daily crises that I doubted anything conclusive would emerge. On July 25, I escorted the new German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to the summer White House at San Clemente for a meeting with the President. After an hour with a ravaged-looking Richard Nixon the next day, Genscher asked the question tormenting me as well: "How long can this go on?" On July 31, Al Haig, then Nixon's chief of staff, requested an urgent meeting during which he informed me that one of the tapes the Supreme Court had ordered to be turned over to the special prosecutor was indeed the long-sought "smoking gun" -- the conclusive proof of Nixon's participation in the cover-up. Haig would not divulge the contents. Even at the edge of the precipice, the surreal aspect of Watergate continued. The White House decided to release the tape on August 5 in order to be able to put its own "spin" on it. The day before, my friend Diane Sawyer -- at the time, assistant to Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and now a national television personality -- came to my office to check some public relations detail on an unrelated foreign policy matter. She had not heard the tape, she said, but she was beginning to believe that a climax would never come and that we were doomed to bleed to death slowly. "As likely as not," she said, "the tape will be drowned out by the background noise." Clever, beautiful Diane turned out to be wrong. On the tape, Nixon was clearly heard instructing his chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, to use the CIA to thwart an FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary. This proof of an attempted obstruction of justice provided the catharsis for the Watergate affair. I have elsewhere described in detail the outburst that followed its release -- the Cabinet revolt, the decision of senior Republicans to abandon the President, and my meetings with Nixon, including the melancholy encounter in the Lincoln Sitting Room on his next-to-last night in the White House -- all of it culminating in Nixon's decision forty-eight hours later to resign, effective at noon on August 9. In these pages, I will confine myself to my interaction with the President-to-Be, Gerald R. Ford. On the morning of the tape's release, Nixon telephoned with a bizarre request: would I call the Vice President and ask him to invite key southern members of Congress to a briefing by me on foreign policy? Nixon did not explain his purpose, but obviously he thought it might persuade these representatives to vote against impeachment. I had first met Gerald Ford some ten years before when, as a Harvard professor, I invited him to address a seminar on defense policy I was conducting under the joint auspices of the Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Public Administration (now the John F. Kennedy School of Government). Ford discussed congressional control of the defense budget, a subject he knew well from his service as the ranking Republican on the Defense Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations. Although (and perhaps because) his presentation was delivered in the unassuming style of Grand Rapids rather than the convoluted jargon of the academic world, he left an extremely favorable impression on students who, in the prevailing atmosphere of the incipient anti-Vietnam protest, were anything but benevolently disposed toward advocates of a strong defense. After I became Nixon's National Security Adviser, Ford, in his capacity as Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, attended occasional White House briefings. His interventions were sensible, supportive, and good-humored. For the eight months of his vice presidency, Ford conducted himself with dignity and loyalty to the President. He remained aloof from Watergate controversies and displayed no designs on the highest office. Roughly once a month, I would brief him about major foreign policy developments. General Brent Scowcroft, then my deputy, saw him more frequently. Ford would limit himself to asking clarifying questions -- the appropriate course of conduct for a Vice President, who, since he has no clear-cut area of responsibility, should make any suggestions he may have directly to the President and not to a subordinate. I have never asked Ford what went through his mind when I called him on that fateful morning of August 5 with Nixon's request that he invite the southern congressmen to a foreign policy briefing. And he has never volunteered a comment. By then, we now know, a small group to advise him on the inevitable transition had already been formed. Did he think I was trying to bring myself to his attention? Did he believe Nixon was seeking to embarrass him? Whatever he may have thought, Ford played it straight. He would do what the President asked, he said, but -- demonstrating that he had seen through Nixon's stratagem -- he added that it would have little influence on the impeachment vote (which I had not mentioned). Matters had gone too far; foreign policy issues would not affect the decision of the House of Representatives. The tape having been released, Ford took the unprecedented step on August 6 of dissociating from the President at a Cabinet meeting. He would no longer defend the President's position on Watergate, he said, and indeed he would not have done so in the past had he known what was on the tape. Publicly he would maintain silence on the matter on the ground that he was a "party in interest" -- pointedly reminding everyone that he was next in line for Nixon's office. But Ford stressed that even though he was dissociating from the President, he would continue to support Nixon's policies: Everyone here recognizes the difficult position I'm in. No one regrets more than I do this whole tragic episode. I have deep personal sympathy for you, Mr. President, and your fine family. But I wish to emphasize that had I known what has been disclosed in reference to Watergate in the last twenty-four hours, I would not have made a number of the statements I made either as Minority Leader or as Vice President. I came to a decision yesterday and you may be aware that I informed the press that because of commitments to Congress and the public, I'll have no further comment on the issue because I'm a party in interest. I'm sure there will be impeachment in the House. I can't predict the Senate outcome. I will make no comment concerning this. You have given us the finest foreign policy this country has ever had. A super job, and the people appreciate it. Let me assure you that I expect to continue to support the Administration's foreign policy and the fight against inflation. I did not speak with Ford at that meeting or, indeed, until Nixon had decided to resign. It was now certain that Ford would become President. In that turbulent week of Nixon's resignation, I had no time to speculate on how it would affect my own position. Before I could address the subject, Ford took the decision out of my hands by telephoning me on the morning of August 8 after Nixon had informed him of his plans to resign. Ford asked me to come to see him and, in his unassuming way, left the time up to me. In the course of the same conversation, he asked me to stay on and in a way that made it sound as if I would be doing him a favor by agreeing. The conversation went as follows: FORD: Good morning.KISSINGER: Mr. Vice President.FORD: How are you, Henry?KISSINGER: Fine.FORD: I just finished talking with the President, and he gave me his decision, and we spent about an hour and twenty minutes over there. During the course of the conversation, he indicated that you were the only one in the Cabinet with whom he had shared his decision.KISSINGER: That is right.FORD: I would hope we could get together sometime this afternoon at your convenience. I have no plans other than to start getting ready.KISSINGER: Would 3:00 suit you, Mr. Vice President?FORD: That would be fine, Henry. I would appreciate it very much and whatever your schedule is -- mine is totally flexible.KISSINGER: After the President talked to me yesterday, I prepared some tentative suggestions for your consideration. Might I bring those along?FORD: Absolutely.KISSINGER: They are things that need to be done in the next two days.FORD: I will be delighted to see you and bring anything along that you want, Henry.KISSINGER: Right. One other technical thing. Can we say to the press that I am coming over to see you, or had you rather announce that? It is not particularly necessary. We can just avoid it altogether.FORD: I see no reason why you can't say that you are coming over to see me. I see no harm in that.KISSINGER: We would not say anything else.FORD: I think it important actually that it be announced -- so announce it, Henry.KISSINGER: I think from the foreign policy point of view it would have a calming effect.FORD: Why don't you state it or have it released and in any way that you think would be helpful? Don't hesitate to embellish it.KISSINGER: I think the best thing, if you agree, is to say you have called me, and you have asked me to come to see you, and I am coming to see you at 3:00.FORD: Very good, Henry.KISSINGER: I pray for you, and you know the whole world depends on you, Mr. Vice President.FORD: I know that, Henry, and I will talk to you more about it. As I have inferred in our previous conversations, I really want you to stay and stand with me in these difficult times.KISSINGER: You can count on me, Mr. Vice President. We will have a chance to talk about it.FORD: I wanted to get that in now so there is no doubt about it.KISSINGER: I am very, very appreciative of your thoughtfulness in mentioning it.FORD: We will see you at 3:00 then. Dramatic events are not always ushered in by dramatic dialogue. As I reread this conversation from the perspective of two decades, I am struck by its matter-of-fact tone and concerns. At the time, I was affected by the understated way in which Ford conveyed Nixon's decision which would make him President, without rhetorical flourishes and without mentioning the emotional impact on himself. And I was moved by his tact in so swiftly putting an end to any personal uncertainty I might be experiencing. The atmosphere of the conversation carried over into our meeting that afternoon. It took place in the Vice President's large office in the Old Executive Office Building, which, before World War II, had been assigned to the Secretary of the Navy. This gingerbread edifice is physically separated from the White House by a narrow passageway incongruously named West Executive Avenue and much more so by the nearly unbridgeable chasm of difference in actual power. As a general rule, the policymakers have offices in the White House; supporting staffs are installed in the Old Executive Office Building. In that respect, the location of the Vice President's office accurately reflects his real power. In less bureaucratic times -- until 1947 -- the Old Executive Office Building used to house the State Department as well as the Army and Navy Departments earlier. Each of these alone would today overflow its patrician corridors. No building in Washington has offices better calculated to stimulate reflection. The ceilings are high, the proportions vast by contemporary standards. The larger offices have exterior balconies, many with views of the White House lawn. During my meeting with Ford in the afternoon of August 8, I sat on a sofa near the balcony, Ford on an easy chair with his back to the window. He seemed casual and calm, neither grandiloquent nor pretentiously humble. He opened the conversation by saying that he intended to announce even before he had taken the oath of office -- in fact, that very evening -- that I would be staying. Ford added that he had felt comfortable with me ever since our first meeting at Harvard. Artlessly, he added that he felt confident we would "get along." I replied that it was my job to get along with him, not the other way around. With this, we turned to the practical problems of the transition. To avoid confusion abroad, it was important to establish a sense of continuity in our foreign policy, at least for an interim period until the new President could determine what changes, if any, he wished to make. To this end, I had brought along a transition plan, the essential feature of which was to put before every government around the world a personal presidential message. In addition, I recommended that the new President meet with all the ambassadors accredited to Washington so that they could report their personal impressions to their governments. These two steps were designed to prevent the various capitals from basing their initial judgments on rumor and speculation. Since it was physically impossible to see each ambassador individually, I proposed that Ford meet them in regional groups, allotting about an hour to each. The first group would be NATO ambassadors, followed by Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Since the nations of Northeast Asia did not fit any grouping, and since Japan was an indispensable ally and China a key element in our triangular diplomacy, I recommended that their diplomatic representatives be received individually. (Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, was on home leave; he would be received as soon as he returned.) Finally, there would be separate meetings with the ambassadors of South Korea and South Vietnam -- two countries on behalf of which American blood had been shed. Their ultimate safety depended on making sure that their adversaries understood the new President's commitment to their security. Ford took some time to look over the various documents. He invited John O. "Jack" Marsh, Jr., a longtime associate whom he was to appoint counselor, to join our meeting. After some desultory discussion, Ford agreed to the draft letters and to the meetings with the ambassadors. He demurred only when I handed him another document listing outstanding commitments, including some sensitive understandings with other governments. One of these had not yet been implemented and was, in fact, somewhat ambiguous. I told Ford that, if he felt uncomfortable with it, I could delay carrying it out: "They will blame me, not you," I said. But passing the buck was not a trait of this President-to-Be: "No, I will make that decision," Ford said. Perhaps the most lasting impact of that first conversation was its aftermath. For the first time since I came to the White House, I left the presidential presence without afterthoughts, confident that there was no more to the conversation than what I had heard. Nixon was one of the most gifted of American Presidents, prepared to make tough decisions and courageous in doing so. But he needed solitude for such an act. Face-to-face, Nixon was obsessively incapable of overruling an interlocutor or even disagreeing with him, as I shall elaborate in a subsequent chapter. Since one could never be certain that Nixon might not undo what he appeared to have just decided, wariness occasionally verging on paranoia prevailed among his entourage. With Ford, what one saw was what one got. Starting with that first meeting, I never encountered a hidden agenda. He was sufficiently self-assured to disagree openly, and he did not engage in elaborate maneuvers about who should receive credit. Having been propelled so unexpectedly into an office he revered but never thought he would hold, he felt no need to manipulate his environment. Ford's inner peace was precisely what the nation needed for healing its divisions. The New President The morning of August 9, 1974, witnessed one of the most dramatic moments in American history. At 9:30 in the East Room of the White House, President Nixon bade farewell to his staff, culminating the greatest rupture of the American domestic consensus since the Civil War. At 12:03 that same day, in the same room, Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the thirty-eighth President of the United States. The seats had been rearranged so that when Ford spoke, he was facing in a different direction than Nixon had, symbolizing a new beginning. Nixon's parting speech was an elegy of anguish. Usually so disciplined, he talked in a rambling, occasionally disjointed manner about the dreams of his youth, about his mother and family, and about the importance of putting into practice Theodore Roosevelt's injunction never to shirk the political arena. Having devoted so much of his effort to self-control all his life, Nixon seemed impelled to put on display the passions and dreams he had publicly suppressed for so long; he even wore glasses for the first time in public. For a staff drained by the unraveling of the presidency, it was almost too much to have to witness -- in this, Nixon's last act as President -- such a baring of the inner self of this anguished figure refusing to admit defeat, even as his life's work was in shambles. When, two and a half hours later, Gerald Ford took the oath of office, he declared calmly and confidently that "our long national nightmare" was over. And his audience, exhausted by struggling for nearly a year and a half against a premonition of catastrophe and by the emotional wringer of Nixon's parting speech, placed its hopes on this unpretentious man from Grand Rapids into whose hands an extraordinary twist of fate had placed America's destiny. As it happened, I played a conspicuous if technical role in the two resignations that had made Ford's ascent to the presidency possible. At 11:35 A.M., General Haig handed me Nixon's formal resignation addressed to me in my role as Secretary of State in the National Security Adviser's office at the White House. All presidential appointments are countersigned. by the Secretary of State and, by the same token, resignations of the President and Vice President are made to the Secretary of State as well. This is a vestige of the days when the Founding Fathers had designed that position to include major domestic functions -- somewhat similar to the prime minister in the French Fifth Republic. When the letters of resignation of Spiro Agnew as Vice President on October 10, 1973, and of Richard Nixon as President on August 9, 1974, were formally addressed to me, I achieved what one must hope will remain the permanent record for receiving high-level resignations. By the time of Agnew's forced resignation, Nixon's original entourage had been decimated, and the remnants were like shipwrecked sailors thrown together on some inaccessible island. In these circumstances, I became privy to the President's ruminations regarding the political choices before him -- a subject matter from which I had previously been excluded. He enunciated three criteria affecting his decision on the new Vice President: who would make the best President, who would be easiest to confirm without provoking further Watergate problems, and who would provide the least incentive for the advocates of impeachment to do away with Nixon. Of the potential candidates, Nixon considered former Texas Governor and Secretary of the Treasury John B. Connally by far the best qualified for the presidency, with New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller a close second in ability though not in terms of his attractiveness to Nixon. Connally, of whose brash self-confidence Nixon stood in awe and the only person about whom I never heard Nixon make a denigrating comment, would surely have been his first choice had he not been the subject of an investigation (which ultimately led to his indictment). Still confident of surviving Watergate, Nixon wanted to make sure that, despite Connally's obvious handicap, the ultimate vice presidential choice would not blight Connally's prospects for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination -- by which time the latter's legal troubles would presumably be behind him. Nixon's strong feelings about Connally would have been sufficient to eliminate Rockefeller's prospects even if Nixon could have brought himself to appoint the political adversary of a lifetime. Rockefeller's fatal handicap in Nixon's eyes -- at least the one Nixon stressed to me as Nelson's lifelong friend -- was that Rockefeller's nomination would utterly divide the Republican Party. (Nixon was to say later that he had also considered Ronald Reagan but had rejected him because he could not be confirmed. If so, he never mentioned it to me.) Through this process of elimination, Gerald Ford emerged as Nixon's choice. He would prove easy to confirm and be, in Nixon's words, an "adequate" Vice President. In addition to being acceptable to Congress, Ford carried another benefit in Nixon's eyes: his lack of experience on the executive level would give Congress pause in any plan to impeach Nixon. On several occasions, the President mused that Congress would not dare to assume responsibility for replacing him with a man who had so little background in international affairs. As it turned out, the choice of Vice President had no impact on Nixon's impeachment for, by then, Watergate had gathered its own momentum. Ford was nominated on October 13, 1973, and easily confirmed. And his elevation to President ten months later was welcomed with universal relief. When Ford took the oath of office, no one -- not even the new President -- could know whether he would be equal to the monumental task bequeathed to him. Without any executive experience, he assumed the presidency at a moment as desperate as our nation has known outside of wartime. Lacking a popular mandate and in the wake of the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, Ford was handed the responsibility for his country's renewal. And Providence smiled on Americans when -- seemingly by happenstance -- it brought forward a President who embodied our nation's deepest and simplest values. In no other country are personal relations so effortless as in smalltown America; nowhere else is there to be found the same generosity of spirit and absence of malice. The quintessential product of this environment, Gerald Ford performed his task of overcoming America's divisions and redeeming its faith so undramatically and with such absence of histrionics that his achievements have so far been taken far too much for granted. Only very recently have some journalists who used to mock him begun to reevaluate his period in office. To a great extent, this neglect was because Ford bore so little resemblance to the prototype of the political leader of the Television Age. The media and many of his colleagues were at a loss when it came to fitting him into the familiar stereotypes. The modern presidential candidate ends up making a kind of Faustian bargain: a full-scale national primary campaign costs a minimum of $15 million for television and print media advertising. But the money must be raised within strict limits defined by law. To remain credible, a candidate feels obliged to devote most of his energies for the better part of three years to accumulating a war chest from fragmented and disparate constituencies. In that process, his principal incentive -- approaching an imperative -- is to try to be all things to all people. What starts as a tactic, over the course of the grueling campaign easily and imperceptibly turns into a defining characteristic. National recognition is achieved at the price of nearly compulsive personal insecurity. The age of the computer and of television has compounded this insecurity. When the visual image replaced the written word as the principal means of understanding the world, the process of learning was transformed from an active to a passive mode, from a participatory act to assimilating predigested data. One learns from books via concepts that relate apparently disparate events to each other and require analytical effort and training. By contrast, pictures teach passively; they evoke impressions which require no act by the viewer, emphasize the mood of the moment, and leave little room for either deductive reasoning or the imagination. Concepts are permanent; impressions are fleeting and in part accidental. The new technology has fundamentally altered the way in which the modern political candidate perceives his role. The great statesmen of the past saw themselves as heroes who took on the burden of their societies' painful journey from the familiar to the as yet unknown. The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values, stars by consensus. When a candidate's views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchorpersons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital. Radicalism replaces liberalism, and populism masquerades as conservatism. A curious blend of brittleness and flamboyance thus defines the modern political persona: brittleness verging on obsequiousness in the quest for mass approval, flamboyance turning into panic when the public's mood shifts. Far more concerned with what to say than with what to think, the modern political leader too frequently falls to fulfill the role for which he is needed most: to provide the emotional ballast when experience is being challenged by ever-accelerating change. The inability to fulfill these emotional needs lies behind the curious paradox of contemporary democracy: never have political leaders been more abject in trying to determine the public's preferences, yet, in most democracies, respect for the political class has never been lower. In the United States, the dividing line between the new and old style of politics coincides roughly with the advent of the Kennedy Administration. A young and untested Senator achieved the presidency by eloquence and by his capacity to exploit the still novel medium of television. John F. Kennedy's presidency was too brief to require him to choose between heroism and stardom, or even to be conscious of the choice. Kennedy was able to practice both modes, unintentionally mortgaging the tenure of his immediate successors who fell prey to the illusion that no choice needed to be made. Lyndon Johnson, well grounded in traditional politics, tore himself apart in his quest for the kind of adulation Kennedy had evoked but which was destined to be beyond reach for a President of Johnson's generation. Immortalized by his untimely death, Kennedy, for his admirers, served as the embodiment of dreams turned legacy. Johnson's vain attempt to play the same role lured him into craving approbation from those who would never accept him. The case of Nixon proved even more stark. No modern president was more solitary, more studious, or spent so much of his time alone, reading or outlining options on his ubiquitous yellow legal pads. If ever there was a man from out of the age of books, From PART ONE: THE NIXON LEGACY Chapter 2: THE MAN AND THE ORGANIZATION At the Edge of Greatness 0n Nixon's forlorn next-to-last evening in the White House, he and I were together in the Lincoln Sitting Room, reflecting on his place in history. "History," I said, "will treat you more kindly than your contemporaries." Nixon was characteristically skeptical: "It depends who writes the history." It is difficult to write about Richard Nixon, who combined intelligence, patriotism, and courage with self-destructive flaws as in a Greek tragedy. The hatred he evoked in his political opponents was extraordinary even by the turbulent standards of American democracy. I served as his principal adviser on foreign policy for five and a half years and, when we were both in town, often saw him several times a day. Yet, to some extent, I still remain mystified by the personality of the perhaps most complex President of the twentieth century. One of the questions posterity will surely ask is what it was about Nixon that caused passions to run quite so deep. Was it because almost everything one could say about Richard Nixon was both true and yet somehow wrong? He was politically astute and highly intelligent yet prone to self-destructive acts; exceptionally analytical yet done in by yielding to ill-considered impulse; deeply patriotic yet wont to hazard his achievements on tawdry practices; possessed of a considerable capacity to feel guilt coupled with an instinct to gravitate toward actions guaranteed to evoke these very feelings; an outstanding judge of people except of those whose actions could affect his own interests; successful in the gregarious profession of politics although introverted, almost reclusive. Nobody who dealt with Nixon regularly has ever doubted that here was a man capable of imposing his will on circumstances. But he could not handle face-to-face disagreements and would go to extraordinary lengths to achieve his alms by indirection. Nixon aspired to greatness and came close to it, at least in the conduct of foreign policy. Yet he ruined his presidency by acts as unnecessary as they were unworthy. It would take a poet of Shakespearean dimension to do justice to the extraordinary, maddening, visionary, and debilitating personality of Richard Nixon -- at once thoughtful and quirky, compassionate and insensitive; sometimes fiercely loyal, at other times leaving in his wake the casualties of abandoned old associates. Yet ultimately Nixon's obvious and unending struggle with himself proved so unsettling, even threatening, because deep down one could never be certain that what one found so disturbing in Nixon might not also be a reflection of some suppressed flaw within oneself. I will always be deeply grateful to Richard Nixon for giving me the opportunity to serve the country which rescued my family from Nazi tyranny. He appointed me as his assistant for national security affairs even though all my previous political activities had been on behalf of Nelson A. Rockefeller, his principal rival for over a decade. Rare is the modern President who entered office under such brutally inauspicious circumstances -- asked to end a war in which his predecessors had involved our country without a strategy for either victory or extrication, and which, now out of office, too many of them in apparent quest of expiation seemed determined that the United States should simply abandon without regard for those who had staked their lives on our word. Inevitably our personal relationship exhibited the ambivalences Nixon inspired in his entourage. Nixon, who treated acquaintances with wary aloofness and even close associates as foils, provided few emotional footholds. His oblique, indirect method of government and his tendency to foment conflicts among his subordinates could be nerve-racking. Occasionally I would relieve the tension with exasperated comments. For his part, Nixon resented the publicity I attracted, starting with the secret trip to China on which he sent me in 1971. Presidents do not take kindly to assistants who compete with them for public attention -- especially when some of Nixon's closest advisers were arguing that I was upstaging him deliberately. While the word "deliberately" was inaccurate, it is certainly true that I did not exactly resist the media's favors. Nevertheless, and despite some mutual misgivings, Nixon and I worked extremely well together. Face-to-face, he always treated me with conspicuous courtesy. Though we were not emotionally close, I was touched by his vulnerability and often moved by his inner torments, as in the period just prior to his resignation (when I might well have been as close to Nixon as anyone, except his immediate family, ever got) or on the last evening of his China trip when, on a veranda in Shanghai, Nixon mused about his hopes for a peaceful world. I genuinely admired Nixon's contribution to America's foreign policy. The endless speculation about which of us contributed to what specific aspect of it misses the point. Whatever my advice, it was Nixon who made the final decisions, Nixon who, in 1971, assumed responsibility for sending me secretly to China and who would have borne the brunt of failure, and again Nixon who, in 1972, assumed the risks of responding to Hanoi's offensive by blockading North Vietnam, an ally of the Soviet Union, two weeks before a summit scheduled for Moscow and six months before a presidential election. Nixon could have greatly eased his presidency by simply abandoning our allies in Indochina and placing the onus for the debacle on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations; he was surely given incentives to do so when the American architects of the war constantly harassed him to travel the road of unilateral and unconditional extrication, unembarrassed by the fact that, under their aegis, our forces and our casualties were increasing until the very day they left office. Believing such a course to be dishonorable and against the national interest, Nixon played the hand he had been dealt and achieved a settlement the critics had declared unattainable -- though it ultimately unraveled through a combination of North Vietnamese implacability and a congressional cutoff of aid to Indochina, as I shall describe in a later chapter. Even while extricating our country from Vietnam, Nixon managed to forge new policies toward China, strategic arms limitations, American-European relations, and the Middle East peace process. Often controversial, these policies in their essence nevertheless set the course for the remainder of the Cold War and beyond. Nixon's single most important quality was the ability to make bold decisions. That attribute was all the more remarkable because he was not by nature daring and by no means a happy warrior. On the contrary, he made his major decisions with a joylessness verging on despair, as if he was doomed by some malign destiny to have so much anguish brought to naught despite all the meticulous reflection and all the notepads crammed with options. One of the paradoxes of the Nixon presidency is that the evidence on the tapes pictures him as impulsive, even reckless. But the Nixon with whom I worked on foreign policy reached his major decisions only after almost maddening deliberation. He might act intuitively, but he did not do so impulsively. Every significant foreign policy decision was preceded by weeks of solitary reflection and apparent indecision. Sequestered in his hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building with the curtains drawn, Nixon would work out on a pad of yellow sheets permutations of the options I generally had submitted to him. And since, in any major decision, the pros and cons are closely balanced and unanimity among advisers is rare, he would muse endlessly about how to overrule fractious subordinates. But once he had overcome his premonitions of catastrophe and found someone (usually Bob Haldeman or John Mitchell) to bring the bad news to the overruled associates, Nixon would almost invariably take a big leap. Afterward Nixon would retire to Camp David for a few days to recover from the ordeal but also to make it that much more difficult for opponents of the decision to reach him. It was hardly the decisionmaking process recommended in public administration textbooks, and it was emotionally exhausting for all the participants -- including, especially, Nixon. But Presidents could do worse than to place on their desks the dictum Nixon would invoke on such occasions: "You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely." The President and His Adviser The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once told me that exaggerating my influence was the American intellectuals' and media's alibi for their animosity toward Nixon. During a period of major accomplishment, Nixon's legion of enemies may well have given me disproportionate credit as a means of depriving the hated President of claims to a lasting legacy. In a strange way, some of Nixon's traditional supporters on the right strengthened the media's message by blaming me for what they considered Nixon's retreat from his original conservative vocation. At the same time, some of Nixon's entourage, in order to garner more credit for their chief -- and occasionally Nixon himself -- described me as a mere staff assistant, a kind of puppet pulled by strings in the hands of the master manipulator. Both versions -- that of the dominant adviser and that of the domineering President -- misstate reality. The breakthroughs of the Nixon Administration were due to the fact that both Nixon and I subordinated our reservations to close collaboration based on mutual respect. The Quaker's son from Yorba Linda and the son of a secondary school teacher in Bavaria complemented each other's qualities in a special way. Nixon had the best personal acquaintance with contemporary leaders around the world of any American political figure I have met. Foreign policy was his hobby, and he deepened his understanding of it by frequent travel. I had a better knowledge of history and of the conceptual side of geopolitics. Nixon operated by flashes of insight to which he clung with remarkable persistence. My forte was to translate general goals into long-range strategies -- a task for which Nixon lacked the requisite patience. Nixon had an instinct for the jugular. With respect to several key decisions, though I came to view their necessity somewhat before he did, once Nixon decided to act, he went frequently beyond my recommendations. In 1970, after the North Vietnamese forces stationed in Cambodia broke out of their base areas and threatened to take over the entire country, Nixon and I were studying ways to neutralize the North Vietnamese offensive in Cambodia and prevent the whole country from being turned into a vast base area aimed at South Vietnam. I recommended an assault on Parrot's Beak, the Communist base area closest to Saigon; after hesitating for nearly a month, Nixon opted for attacking every base area along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. In 1972, when we were discussing resuming the bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong area to break the deadlock in the Vietnam peace talks, I recommended the established method by fighter planes; Nixon ordered the use of B52s (I was not opposed to B-52s in principle; their use simply had not occurred to me). In 1973, when I tried to organize the Pentagon's civilian reserve air fleet for an airlift to Israel, Nixon overcame Pentagon foot-dragging by ordering a military airlift and using the giant C-5 planes. In each case, Nixon's decision was vindicated by events. Nixon was less hands-on with respect to diplomacy. He took an intense interest in strategy, but the give-and-take of diplomacy, the slow advance by accumulating nuances, made him restless. Nixon would carefully go over the various negotiating options, and he would skim the detailed reports of the actual negotiations. He would make insightful comments, especially on the memoranda outlining strategy. But the version of some spinmeisters of an eagle-eyed President spotting drafting flaws in evolving negotiations is nonsense. In the end, the cooperation between the President and the National Security Adviser worked not just because we complemented each other's strengths (and perhaps reinforced each other's weaknesses with respect to our sensitivity to criticism and proclivity for sudden diplomatic coups) but above all because Nixon and I viewed international relations from a nearly identical perspective. Both of us believed that we were in trouble in Vietnam because our predecessors had launched the United States into an enterprise in a distant region for worthy causes but without adequately assessing the national interest and the likely cost. In a more complex world -- of a China returned to international affairs, a resurgent Europe, a more flexible Soviet Union -- the United States needed a long-term strategy that would avoid the congenital oscillation between overextension and abdication. America's historic idealism had to be leavened with an assessment of national interest, and our approach to international relations had to move from episodic interventions to a strategic design which took account of the requirement of equilibrium. This was then -- and probably still is at this writing -- a minority view in a society which, never having experienced national tragedy, identifies the quest for peace with the missionary vocation of the spreading of its own domestic values around the world. Nixon and the Establisbment In the folklore of his enemies, Nixon was portrayed as an obsessive anti-Communist and as a standardbearer of right-wing conservatism. This was far from his own perception. Privately Nixon placed himself in a position well within Establishment orthodoxy. Having been closely associated with both Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, the latter beloved of the Establishment, I found no significant difference in their approach to foreign policy -- only in their personalities and in their respective attitudes toward the Establishment. In the course of one of his rambling discourses with me in 1970, Nixon argued that there were only three possible directions for American foreign policy: the conservative, whose dominant personality was Ronald Reagan; the liberal, whose most attractive representative was Hubert Humphrey; and the moderate, which he believed he himself embodied. The conservative policy, Nixon argued, would be belligerent without being effective and, being intellectually too "thin," would risk the support of American public opinion as well as that of our allies. The liberal position would "sell us out" and run the risk of war imposed by a frustrated right once the American public realized that the United States was losing ground. The American people, Nixon insisted, were not "losers" and would demand a strong, even violent, reaction to military defeats or even diplomatic setbacks. The moderate foreign policy for which he stood, Nixon averred, was "the only bulwark for international stability." Rockefeller would have endorsed nearly every word of that statement. (Nixon turned out to be wrong in his assessment of Reagan, though perhaps not of the dominant conservative trend. At the time he made that statement, the neoconservative intellectual wing did not yet exist.) Unlike Rockefeller, however, Nixon did not consider himself a member of the Establishment (although, in the case of Rockefeller, these ties were more a matter of entitlement than of any emotional linkage). As for Nixon, he felt ignored, even ostracized, by the elite before and throughout his period in office. He ascribed this rejection to his vocal anti-Communism of the 1950s and to his having brought down that epitome of the Eastern aristocracy, Alger Hiss. Reacting with bitter resentment, Nixon's conversation was suffused with outrage at the hypocrisy and implacable hostility of what he summed up with the epithet "Georgetown cocktail set" and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Establishment was the "enemy," and enemies should be "kicked in the groin." If one deduced from Nixon's disdainful, belligerent, and occasionally spiteful comments about the Establishment that here was a President on a crusade to destroy it, one would have been far off the mark. Behaving more like the rejected lover than a sworn enemy, Nixon was eager to be admitted into the club, not to destroy it. His ambivalent reverence for the Establishment came to expression when Harvard students occupied the university's administrative center, University Hall. Nixon told me that he was happy it had happened at Harvard. At first I thought he was gloating at the discomfiture of his enemies. In fact, he had something else in mind: "Harvard is the leading university in the country. It will set an example for how to handle student upheavals." Nixon was incredulous when I told him that, in my view, no one would know after two days who had done what to whom. At the conclusion of the first volume of my memoirs, I wrote: "What would have happened had the Establishment about which he [Nixon] 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?" Nixon's inveterate enemies have much to answer for; from the first, they never gave him the benefit of any doubt. And within less than a year of Nixon's taking the oath of office, the people he considered the elite of the country were organizing -- or acquiescing in -- massive demonstrations that paralyzed Washington with nary a word of understanding for the besieged President who was, after all, trying to deal with dilemmas they had left him. Nevertheless, the President is the symbol of national unity. This imposes an obligation to rise above the level of adversaries pursuing some special interest and to submerge the day-to-day battles in some more embracing national purpose. While in office, Nixon never managed any such act of grace. As an erstwhile refugee who was for decades self-conscious about my German accent, I had some understanding of Nixon's fear of rejection. The difference between us was in the way each of us dealt with this concern. Nixon tried to preempt rejection by assuming a posture of hostility. But I did not consider the intellectual Establishment as some strange, unapproachable enemy. It was part of a world I knew well and from which I had emerged into prominence. This was why, throughout my government career, I sought to stay in touch with the academic world. During the various protest marches in Washington, college students and their faculties converged on parks and other public places such as Lafayette Square to the north of the White House or the Ellipse to the south of it. I would send staff members out to invite student and faculty leaders to my office for a dialogue, and rarely did a week pass -- especially in my first two years in office -- without some visit from one faculty or student group or another. Ironically, the quest for dialogue achieved, if anything, the opposite of its intended purpose. For it laid the groundwork for a permanent misunderstanding between me and the intellectual community -- especially the part of it represented by the Harvard faculty. At first, the academic community interpreted my eagerness to exchange views as a sign of sympathy for its point of view and as proof that I was being overruled by a bellicose, unbalanced President. When it gradually realized that I was basically on Nixon's side, many liberal intellectuals began to treat me as an opportunistic traitor to their cause. So it happened that, by the end of the Nixon Administration, the President and I found ourselves being harassed by what had originally been our normal constituencies. Liberals accused me of abandoning them in quest of power; conservatives thought that Nixon had been seduced by visions of Establishment legitimacy. In this atmosphere, the extrication from Vietnam took on the character of a civil war. Nixon had inherited the war in Southeast Asia. Over 540,000 American troops had been sent to a part of the world as geographically and culturally remote from the United States as it is possible to be on this globe. When Nixon took office, their numbers were still being increased according to a schedule established in the Johnson Administration. We found no plans for withdrawal nor a White House-approved negotiating strategy. We were nevertheless prepared to assume the responsibility for extricating the United States from this debacle and never blamed our predecessors for the mess. We would not, however, leave the country for which nearly forty thousand Americans had already died by turning over to Communist rule tens of millions who had staked their lives on our word. But that for four years remained the ineradicable North Vietnamese precondition to any cease-fire. Yet as soon as they left office, the very people who had saddled Nixon with these tragic dilemmas either acted as if they were innocent bystanders or, more frequently, began harassing the Nixon Administration for failing to achieve in four months what they had never endeavored to accomplish in four years. High officials of the Johnson Administration participated in protest demonstrations as if the obstacle to peace was the White House rather than the intransigence of the North Vietnamese -- something they, better than anyone, should have known to be the underlying cause of the deadlock. Within a year, they were pressing us for concessions never even hinted at while they were in office. In 1968, the Democratic convention split over the so-called Peace Platform and fought out this division in the streets of Chicago. By the fall of 1969, Nixon had accepted and offered the key elements of this platform. Yet that was the time of the most massive antiwar demonstrations. The irony is that the self-righteous demonstrators were, in effect, arguing expediency in the form of peace for us at any price. They demanded an end to their own personal anguish over the war and would brook no policy short of unconditional withdrawal -- which we believed was risking the lives of the American troops amidst seven hundred thousand Communist forces and nearly a million armed South Vietnamese unlikely to be tolerant of being abandoned. Nixon simply could not understand how the favored of our society could embrace defeat with such insouciance or urge with so much passion the abandonment of millions to whom we had given our word. He withdrew unilaterally 150,000 troops a year. By the end of his first term, he had withdrawn over 500,000 troops and reduced casualties from 14,600 in 1968 to 300 in 1972 while keeping South Vietnam independent. Yet Nixon was accused of "killing Americans needlessly," motivated by some inexplicable blood lust. Nixon interpreted these attacks as the Establishment's permanent vendetta against him. What he (and I) did not understand was that the radical protest movement was not an arm of the Establishment. Rather, the radicals considered the traditional liberal Establishment as their ultimate enemy, were bent on extirpating it and with their tactics succeeded in intimidating it into acquiescence. Besieged, Nixon reacted with grandiloquently inflammatory statements against what was, in fact, a cowering Establishment. Strangely enough, while talking blood feud, Nixon held the touching belief that the civil war conditions were the result of some historic misunderstanding which I -- a Harvard professor, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a friend of Nelson Rockefeller -- might somehow help to overcome. In pursuit of that mirage, a flood of presidential missives descended on my office with instructions to brief the press or Establishment leaders and, at the same time, to punish recalcitrants. Punishment usually consisted of instructions that I refuse to receive specific journalists, even though they were the same ones who, on alternate days, I was being urged to court. These tasks fell to me not because of some special faith in my skill in dealing with the media -- I had, in fact, never held a press conference before being appointed National Security Adviser. It was an expression of Nixon's belief that the elite's hostility was due, above all, to class prejudice which I, with my assumed Establishment ties, might help ameliorate. The defining moment for both sides came with the disclosure of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. The event has achieved a nearly liturgical status and is still invoked at many ceremonial events as a classic demonstration of heroic journalism defying an oppressive government. One hesitates to challenge well-established orthodoxy, but Nixon's side of the story deserves expression. When seven thousand pages of highly classified documents appear in the pages of leading newspapers, it is far from axiomatic that the President's only obligation should be to the First Amendment to the exclusion of other basic American principles -- especially in wartime when several hundred thousand Americans were still at risk. Presidential concern became -- in Nixon's eyes (and mine) -- a duty because the publication of the Pentagon Papers occurred at a moment when preparations were under way for my secret trip to China, and confidential talks were taking place in Paris to end the war in Vietnam. Both of these extremely delicate enterprises stood to be jeopardized by a demonstration that the American executive authority was declining and that Washington's ability to maintain confidential discussions was falling into doubt. That Nixon's primary concern was to protect the national interest as he saw it is emphasized by an almost never mentioned fact: not one page of the Pentagon Papers was embarrassing to Nixon or to his administration; every last one of them came from the files of Nixon's predecessors, especially the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. I first learned of the disclosures from the Sunday New York Times of June 13, 1971, while I was on the West Coast. Because all the documents were from Defense Department files, I assumed that the leaks had been instigated by someone in the Defense Department to embarrass our predecessors in government. I called Al Haig, then my deputy, and asked him to warn Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird against letting his people use official documents for political ends; continuity would be lost by such tactics. Haig asked me how many documents I thought were involved. When I guessed the number to be around twenty, Haig replied: "How would at least seven thousand grab you?" Soon afterward, the perpetrators of the hemorrhage identified themselves. A cynical President could have publicly deplored the publication while using it to demonstrate the extent of the mess he had inherited. But when the issue was national security, Nixon was not cynical. The sadness is that, instead of fighting for the principle, he turned a valid case into yet another skirmish in his vendetta with the media. Going into civil court to argue for an injunction against publication was unwise and futile, but it was neither unethical nor dishonorable. There is no excuse, however, for the extralegal methods employed against Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the documents, especially for the break-in into the office of his psychiatrist. Nor were discussions of such acts (as revealed in the tapes) as breaking into the Brookings Institution, where a set of the documents was believed to be kept, compatible with the dignity and moral stature of the presidency -- no matter that they were never carried out. The breach was never healed while Nixon was in the Oval Office. Not until a decade later would a defeated and disgraced Nixon avow his refusal to wither in exile by reemerging from San Clemente and, by the end of his life, reaching a kind of armistice with his erstwhile tormentors. He did so by dint of thoughtful public commentaries and private meetings with the Washington foreign policy community. Did Nixon earn something close to the status of elder statesman because, defeated, he was no longer a threat? Or did Nixon's overtures -- for he clearly took the first step -- finally liberate both sides from their obsessions? Whatever the answers, in death, Nixon contributed to a healing never vouchsafed during his contentious career. Amazingly, in light of the disgrace that had befallen him, Nixon's funeral in April 1994 turned into a national occasion attended by all the surviving former Presidents, and the incumbent President Bill Clinton, a former Vietnam protester, delivered a moving eulogy. Nixon the Person In the mythology of his traducers -- and of some film portraits -- Richard Nixon was a man given to histrionics, to shouting his prejudices at cowed subordinates, and to dominating his environment by conveying his views with great, even overpowering insistence -- frequently under the influence of alcohol. Nothing could be further from the real Richard Nixon -- at least the Richard Nixon with whom I dealt. For example, the portrayals of Nixon drinking himself into incoherence with a bottle ever at his side are simply absurd. In my experience, Nixon never took any liquor during working hours or in the Oval Office. Only his closest associates ever saw him drink in any context. The trouble was that Nixon could not hold even a small quantity of alcohol. Two glasses of wine were quite enough to make him boisterous, just one more to grow bellicose or sentimental with slurred speech. Alcohol had a way of destroying the defenses he had so carefully constructed to enable him to succeed in a profession based on a conviviality unnatural to him. These episodes occurred rarely, always at night and almost never in the context of major decisions. The few of us who actually witnessed such conduct never acted on what he might have said; we felt we owed the President another chance to consider whatever the issue was. The Richard Nixon with whom I worked on a daily basis for five and a half years was generally soft-spoken, withdrawn, and quite shy. When talking to me or to George Shultz, he rarely, if ever, used the graphic language that proved so startling in the transcripts of his conversations with the political side of the White House. Nixon was capable of dominating a conversation only by conducting a monologue, never in a genuine dialogue. To passive admirers or people who sought his views, Nixon could appear overpowering and confident. But Nixon abhorred face-to-face disagreements of any kind. In his many conversations with me, he would ask many perceptive questions. And he would frequently make very astute observations. He was quite capable of changing his mind upon reflecting on a counterargument. But these were separate events. I cannot remember -- nor have I encountered in my records -- any real dialogue in which we argued clashing points of view. The way differences between us were handled was that I would register more or less passively some comment of Nixon's. Sometime later, I would revert to the same point without ascribing it to him and state my contrary view. After yet another interval, Nixon would either reaffirm his original position or change it without acknowledging the disagreement between us. Since this was a method involving a considerable risk of misunderstanding, I conducted most of the major policy discussions with Nixon and almost every presentation of options by memorandum. Relieved of the presence of the interlocutor, Nixon felt no in Excerpted from Years of Renewal by Henry A. Kissinger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
