11

KISSINGER

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger formed one of the most intriguing foreign policy teams in the history of the U.S. presidency. From Vietnam to the Soviet Union, from China to the Middle East, from Chile to Bangladesh, they played a continuing high-stakes game routed in the school of “realism.” But while Americans and international observers debate the merits of détente with the Soviet Union, normalization with China, and Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, others have remained more fascinated with the personal relationship between the two than by their actions in the international arena. Their own relationship could be described as “love-hate.” Their grandiose international visions were often juxtaposed by a smallness of spirit vis-à-vis each other. Yet, like that of Gilbert and Sullivan, their music was never more appealing than when they acted in collaboration with each other. With their team severed by Nixon’s premature withdrawal from the presidency, Kissinger began a long but steady descent in the eyes of his Republican constituents. Nixon, of course, remained an active commentator on international affairs until his death, but the heady days with Kissinger were gone forever.

FROST: What did Chairman Mao make of Henry Kissinger? He must have found him an interesting phenomenon.

NIXON: They hit it off extremely well. You could tell from the bantering tones that he was…whenever he referred to Henry Kissinger, ah…I think one of the first he said was that, ah…Kissinger, ah…was a philosopher and, ah…he was as doctor of philosophy, as he put it, because I had referred to Mao as a philosopher and before…and before I arrived and I said…no, he’s a doctor of brains…then, as we began to discuss the situation in various parts of the world…you have to understand this…Mao didn’t know the world…not well. He had studied it, but he did not know it. Chou En-lai, on the other hand, did know the world. He had traveled broadly. Mao consequently left the discussion of the various sections of the world pretty much to Chou En-lai. He talked more in philosophical terms, and then Chou En-lai would take this little phrase or that little phrase or the other one and then use that to build a policy on. Ah…but when the policy…the question of the Mideast came up, he said, “I know the Mideast is a very difficult problem.” He said, “it’s particularly difficult for Dr. Kissinger because he’s a Jew.” And I said, “Mr. Chairman, it’s true that Dr. Kissinger is a Jew, but he is an American first, and you will find that, in his dealings with this problem and with any other one, he will put the interest of the United States first.”

Well…the other point…oh, there were so many that were…that came up involving various personalities…but one on Henry that was, I thought, particularly interesting was this whole business on secrecy and, ah…ah…as he looked over at Henry, he said, you know he really doesn’t look like a secret agent…And I said, well I don’t know any other man in the world that could possibly have gone from Paris twelve times and gone to Peking one time secretly without anybody knowing it except possibly two pretty girls. Mao listened to the translation…He broke into a sig…smile…two girls in Paris…and then Henry stepped in…he said, ah…well…I was only using them for a cover, and then I said, well…I certainly couldn’t use pretty girls for a cover in my position, and then En-lai said, “You sure couldn’t do it in the new election year?”

FROST: In terms of this close relationship with Henry Kissinger…ah…you must have had disagreements, I suppose. What were the most important ones?

NIXON: Well, I don’t think it serves a useful purpose for me to try to search my memory to think of every time Henry Kissinger and I had a conversation where we didn’t agree. Ah…when he came on board…one point that I emphasized to him is that I had sat in the meetings in the National Security Council for eight years under President Eisenhower, and the council, whenever he was in Washington, used to meet every week. And I said one of the things that was wrong about those meetings is that we would meet when there was nothing to meet about many times. And that the National Security Council staff would have a paper and at the end of the staff, which would be Bobby Cutler in earlier years and Dillon Anderson in later years and Gray in later years, they’d read the paper, and they were the most boring things in the world. Very seldom did we have give-and-take discussion where the president got the benefit of different views from the members of his team. So it was Kissinger’s responsibility not only to give me his views when they differed from my own but also to see that the secretary of state, Bill Rogers, Mel Laird, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Ah…sometimes the CIA would present their views. We tried to do that. Kissinger was…became less and less, ah…willing to do so as time went on because of the fear of leaks. But on the other hand, I found those sessions very valuable.

Now, as far as disagreements are concerned, I should emphasize what disagreements we had were always on tactics and never on strategy. People who think that Kissinger was basically a soft-liner and I was a hard-liner, ah…just don’t know, ah…what each of us believed. For example, in the soft-line/hard-line dialogue, the first crisis, so-called crisis, I guess we should say, ’cause we had so many that this gets now into perspective, ah…was very early in the administration, and the EC-121 was shot down by the North Koreans, and, ah…all the crewmen were lost. Ah…it was an unarmed reconnaissance plane, and it was shot down over international waters. Options were presented, ah…everything from doing nothing to, ah…taking out two or three airfields. Kissinger came down hard, this is in that very…in about the third month of the administration, for the hard option. He said that the Russians or possibly the North Koreans were testing us. If the Russians weren’t testing us, the North Koreans and the Chinese and the Vietnamese are all going to be watching to see how we reacted to this. And he said we must react strongly, and he advocated the option of airfields as a result of this. I considered the option. Frankly, I tilted towards it. Ah…Bill Rogers, Mel Laird thought it was too early in the administration for us to take us an option of this sort. Our ambassador in South Korea thought it would be a mistake…that it would have Kim Il Sung, the North Korean, take some action against us.

There was a question of what would happen, and this is what I think probably delayed me more than anything else. Or at least brought me to the conclusion not to take the hard option. I was concerned not so much about the effect on the Russians…but I was concerned by the effect on the Chinese. After all, we had fought the Chinese, in Korea, as a matter of fact; did you know one of Mao’s sons was killed in Korea fighting Americans? He never mentioned it to me, but I knew that that had happened. Ah…and I was concerned about that. And my other reason for not taking the hard option at that point, the other major reason, I didn’t know whether that kind of…of action…protective reaction after they had shot down the plane…taking out an airfield might escalate into a war. I figured having one war on our hands was enough without getting another war on our hands, particularly one in which the Chinese were very close and the Russians, too. But nevertheless there was an area where we disagreed.

Another area where Kissinger and I sometimes disagreed, we didn’t disagree but where our temperaments were different, were with regard to what one should do after a tough decision is made. What should your attitude be? Ah…I’m a fatalist…basically…Kissinger is more, despite his enormous intellectual capability, is one who, ah…is…perhaps somewhat less fatalistic and more determinist in his views. But more emotional…interestingly enough…ah…although I too have emotions…I tend to hide them perhaps more than he does or to submerge them or to suppress them. Ah…but be that as it may…we won’t try to psychoanalyze each other at the moment, ah…but Kissinger, I well remember, after we went into Cambodia, he was for going in, but here I made a decision on the spot, which we had not discussed before. He wondered about it at the time, but he totally supported it once it was made. We went to the Pentagon the day after the first movement, into two sanctuaries, and I asked the people at the Pentagon how many there were, and they said there were six, and I said, “Well, let’s move into all of them,” and I remember Westmoreland raised the point that he didn’t know whether or not we could even handle two.

However, the other chiefs and the rest felt maybe we could handle all of them, particularly with the way that the South Vietnamese in their early days were fighting. So right then the decision was made to go into six, and it was one of the best decisions we made. Then came Kent State, which was a terrible emotional shock to me…ah…and a very great shock to Kissinger and of course a torment of abuse because the implication was that because we did Cambodia, three [Frost N.B. It was actually four.] students were killed in Kent State, that one followed the other, although the student body president of Kent State pointed out, when he came to see me at the White House, that while the Kent State tragedy partly was due to the disagreement about the war, that long before the war there were other issues that were stirring people up.

Nixon sometimes painted his colleague as a brilliant but precocious fellow who required the president’s steadying hand to remain operational. Notice how, in an anecdote telling about what followed the tragic shootings at Kent State University, after the Cambodia incursion, Nixon “steadies” his excitable colleague.

NIXON: But I remember, right after that, Henry came in one day and said, “You know, I’m not sure that we should have gone into this Cambodia thing, and perhaps now has come the time when we should shorten the time and get out a little sooner.” He wasn’t seriously considering it, but he said, “I think”—and he always used to preface it by saying—“and I must warn you, Mr. President”—“that the situation that I hear from my colleagues from the colleges and the universities is very, very serious, and, ah…Cambodia is…it could have been a mistake.” And I said, “Henry,”…I said, “We’ve done it.” I said, “Remember Lot’s wife. Never look back.” I don’t know whether Henry had read the Old Testament or not. But I had, and he got the point. And from time to time Henry, who always supported an initiative once a decision was made and carried it out with a very firm and strong hand due to the fact that he was an intellectual, an honest intellectual, would always tend to try to reappraise a decision to…not to second-guess it so much as to say…well, I wonder whether we have made a mistake there so that we can avoid a mistake in the future. And then he would talk about it. He was tending to look back…I believe from history. When you can’t do anything about it…then, I say, go forward after that.

Whenever he would come in and say, “Well, I’m not sure we should have done this or that or the other thing,” I would say, “Henry, remember Lot’s wife.” And that would end the conversation.

FROST: In fact, you are different in the sense that he is, ah…probably more emotional, at least openly, publicly, than you. Ah, how many times, for instance, did he say he might resign?

NIXON: Oh, to me, he would hint it on occasion. How many times, ah…ah…not many, not often. Ah…when I say “he would hint it,” the way it would come up would be, and this really cut him to the quick, he would get letters, for example, from members of the Harvard faculty, ah, or other Ivy League colleges, or people he respected—like most intellectuals, he only respected intellectuals. Ah, he couldn’t abide fools. Ah, although he treated fools well at times. Sometimes better than he treated intellectuals who might be giving him a hard time. But be that as it may, in this case, he would come in and say, “Well, I, I just wonder if my usefulness isn’t finished, I wonder if I shouldn’t resign.” Ah, ah…he would get…Henry, Henry was a man who, for example, in all of our conversations with foreign leaders, particularly at the summit, he was cold and controlled. He would use his temper rather than have his temper use him. And I was somewhat the same way. In fact, we were almost totally alike.

Notice how, in the following account, Nixon perhaps reveals more about himself than about Kissinger.

NIXON: Ah, on the other hand, he had to blow off steam from time to time. He had a tendency to, to get highly elated by some piece of good news and very depressed by something that he considered to be bad news. Ah, that doesn’t mean that he was emotionally unstable, it simply means that having the kind of wide-ranging mind that he was a genius in this area, or intellectual has, and, ah…one of the…one of the characteristics of an individual with an exceptional mind is that he can see the heights and also see the depths. And he feels them both. And Henry was that way. Well, I, of course, don’t contend that I’m a genius, ah…and so forth. I usually can see the heights, and could be, feel somewhat elated, although I try to restrain elation, because I always know that the, ah, as Churchill once said, that “the brightest moments are those that flash away the fastest.” And so that when you’re up today, you may be down tomorrow. I, that was my political experience. And, so…Henry would feel highly elated by a conversation that he’d had with Dobrynin, and then we’d have a bad development or negative development and he would be greatly depressed, and I’d say…“Well, Henry, the situation hasn’t changed. We shouldn’t have been as elated as we were yesterday, and we shouldn’t be so discouraged today. Just keep plowing along.”

For example, that long and tortuous process of negotiations with Vietnam. There was time after time that I was, I just felt for him so. I’d always put a little note, a handwritten note, whenever we could get it delivered by a courier to Paris, on the bottom, just to encourage him and to tell him I was thinking about him and the rest. Ah, and then the tortuous process, and this was even more difficult because by this time I had to spend…as he knew it, ah…time on Watergate, and I was getting a lot of heat from the press and from the Congress and the rest, and, ah, and ah…therefore, Henry had…didn’t feel that he wanted to burden me as much with the day-to-day reports and activities, although I insisted he do so because I tend to compartmentalize things. I’ll think about the problems of fighting the Congress, or on one area for a few hours, and then think about foreign policy for a few hours.

But, in this case on the Mideast, there was one occasion, particularly, when he felt that he should come home. And, ah…he sent back a message. He was terribly depressed. He just didn’t think there was any way to break, break the roadblock, which seemed to exist insofar as negotiations in this case between the Israelis and the Syrians. Both of them were being unreasonable, he thought. And ah…I had to send back and did send back a very strong, but…but…ah…also understanding letter, ah…cable in which I said that he must make one more try. Let me point out, if I’d been in his place, I’d probably have packed my bags and sent the message in the air that I was on the way home. Ah, Henry at least gave me some advance warning, and I was able to catch him before the plane took off. Ah, so he had reason to be discouraged, but, ah…many times I think that the way in the instant historians write about the Kissinger-Nixon relationship, they…they misread it to an extent because they, they take, for example, an emotional statement which, ah…he may not really mean. Like his, you call, how many times he’s threatened to resign. He would come in and suggest that maybe he should because he was no longer useful. And, I, of course, then would say, “Look here, just stop all that talk, let’s talk about the real thing.”

FROST: That’s why, that’s why I phrased it the other way. How many times did he come in and say that maybe, maybe he should resign?

NIXON: Maybe a half a dozen.

FROST: Half a dozen times.

NIXON: That’s right. But to others, more often. He would talk to Haig and to, ah, Haldeman about this. And this would be when he would be in fights with the bureaucracy. He couldn’t stand the bureaucratic infighting. He had differences, you know, with Secretary Rogers. And, incidentally, this was a very painful thing for me because Rogers had been my friend. He was a personal friend. Henry, of course, was not a personal friend. We were, we were associates but not personal friends. Not enemies but not personal friends. Rogers was a personal friend. But, ah…Henry was fighting…first, they were…they were two very proud men. They were two very intelligent men. There could be only one person to handle some of these major issues, and where secrecy was involved, I mean, secret negotiations, it had to be Henry, ah, in the areas like Vietnam, China, Russia, and the Mideast. Now, in the case of Rogers, on the other hand, being a very proud man, ah, he did not resent Henry handling such things, but he objected to the fact that Henry got too much credit, and he felt was taking too much credit, and also he objected, and here I think he had a good case, and—I think Henry would have to agree—that he, Rogers, who had to make public statements all the time and testify and answer questions before the Congress, wasn’t informed about things. He wanted to be informed.

Rogers may have wanted to be informed, but from his jealously guarded NSC perch, Kissinger thrived on the belief that knowledge is power. This usually meant that Rogers was kept ill informed about many a critical U.S. initiative, including in the Middle East and China.

NIXON: Well, Henry would come to me, and we had several arguments about it. He would say, “I will not inform Rogers, because he’ll leak.” And I say, “Henry,” I must have told him this a dozen times. I said, “Henry, the State Department bureaucracy will leak. It always has. It always will.” I said, “But Bill Rogers will never leak if I tell him it’s in confidence.” “Well, I’m not so sure.” See, he didn’t know Rogers as well as I did. I knew that Rogers was a man of honor, and I knew he wouldn’t leak. And, that was why, on the China initiative, for example, we had a very good…we had an argument about that. Henry didn’t want to tell anybody, of course, except those on a need-to-know basis. And I said, “Rogers has gotta know.” And he said, “Well, he’ll leak,” or he said, “Well, he’ll leak, or he’ll object to it.” I said, “You cannot have the secretary of state not be informed, because he has got to take off the day that announcement was made.” And incidentally, that announcement took three and a half minutes when I announced that trip to China on July the fifteenth, 1971. But Rogers immediately had to call ambassadors all over…and heads of state all over the world, and Henry, of course, made a few calls and I made two or three.

I had heard that Kissinger had had the last laugh on Nixon, blocking the appointment of John Connally to replace Rogers as secretary of state, effectively ensuring that, to Nixon’s chagrin, Kissinger would hold both positions in the second Nixon administration.

FROST: Did Henry say that he’d resign if John Connally was appointed secretary of state?

NIXON: Not to me. I, ah…I have read reports to that effect, and I do know that he, ah…that his views with regard to Connally were mixed. He had…he respected him as a political leader. However, ah…I think Henry, ah, saw in Connally, let’s face it, a potential rival. Ah, Connally basically…everything that Connally touches, ah…in the political area, Connally controls. Henry’s the same kind of a person. And so Connally would be a very formidable fellow to have around. Ah, and also you have to remember that Henry, to his credit, was loyal to his former patron and still his patron, Nelson Rockefeller. And he felt that building Connally up might, ah, not be in the interest of Nelson Rockefeller. But as far as his discussion with me, he never said to me, “Look, if ah…Rocke—…if Connally’s appointed secretary of state, I’ll resign” or “If you name Connally as the vice presidential nominee, I’ll resign” or anything like that. Ah, I could sense that he would prefer somebody else, let’s put it that way.

FROST: Were you actually considering John Connally as secretary of state?

NIXON: Yes, I thought he would have made a very good secretary of state. However, in this case, while Henry did not have a veto power, ah…nobody can have a veto power where the president is concerned, ah, any president. But while he didn’t have a veto power, it was indispensable that whoever was secretary of state be able to work with Henry and Henry be able to work with him. Because he had his fingers in so many pies, ah…which were in various stages of development, and consequently, we couldn’t possibly have a situation where he’d be at odds. In other words, I had gone through the Rogers-Kissinger feud of four years, and I didn’t want to put another feud with another secretary of state for the…for the rest of the four years. And that’s why I finally made Henry…gave Henry both hats, which I, ah…in retrospect, probably would not have done had, ah…we…could we have found some individual who would be Henry’s equal or that would be considered his equal intellectually, and yet Henry would not feel was a competitor who would threaten his position of a…being the president’s major foreign policy adviser. That position, he felt…incidentally, not just ego, but because frankly, he honestly felt he knew more about it than anybody else did. He honestly felt he was the best adviser. That didn’t mean that from time to time, as we did at the time of the May 8 bombing, when, ah, we got advice from Connally and took his rather than Henry’s, ah…with regard to go ahead with the bombing and don’t cancel the summit, rather than the other way around, which is the way Henry first recommended it and the way I first approved it. But nevertheless, Henry felt that, ah…he had been…because of his experience, because of his background, and also because he was personally involved with so many leaders and they expected to deal with him, that he had to be the major foreign policy adviser, and he therefore couldn’t tolerate a secretary of state who would impinge on that position.

Nixon and Kissinger worked miraculously well together and also got under each other’s skin. Kissinger, in particular, was reported to have said things about Nixon that only a saint would have tolerated. As Nixon had few sainthood credentials, I could not wait to ask him about Kissinger’s occasional indiscretions.

FROST: Now, you said you were not personal friends. You were not enemies, but you were not personal friends. Dustin Hoffman once made a film called Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? Now, as you read accounts, knowing what a successful working relationship you had in many areas, of remarks attributed to Henry Kissinger, whether it’s in The New Republic or at the Ottawa Banquet, or whatever, you must sometimes feel, ah, you know who Henry Kissinger is, but did you sometimes feel, “Why is he saying all those terrible things about me?”

NIXON: Well, to answer the questions quite candidly, it drives my family right up the wall. And it’s only because, that, it bothers them that it would bother me at all. After such accounts appear, I know that, ah…I always get a call from Henry on the phone, ah…ah…explaining that, ah…that there’s been either a misquotation or misinterpretation or what have you. And I have always said to him, “Ah, forget it.” I said, ah…ah…“What your opinion of me is, ah…is, ah…however you express it, it isn’t going to affect our relationship unless you express it to me personally. I mean, what you say about me to other people isn’t going to bother me.”

That’s what I said. But in all candor, I would have to admit my family didn’t share that, and I think what we have to understand, too, is that Henry likes to say outrageous things. He’s kind of like Alice Longworth that way. She, as she puts it, she said, “You know, I like to be naughty sometimes. I like to say things that are devilish.” And, ah…ah…Henry was not really exactly that way, ah…in fact, it was quite different. Ah, but…he basically, as an intellectual, is, not typical in this sense. Ah…most people with great intellectual ability, ah…couldn’t care less about the so-called Hollywood celebrity set or celebrities of any kind. I mean, basically their only interest is in a person’s brains, and not particularly whether or not they have a lot of money or a lot of good news clippings or what have you. But Henry, on the other hand, was fascinated first by the celebrity set, and second, he liked being one himself. Not at first, but people would start coming up for his autograph and he was invited more and more to the Hollywood parties and the rest. And when you go to these parties, ah…I used to be in that category when I was vice president and even as a senator and congressman, a rather well-known one. And when the Georgetown hostesses had you in, they don’t have you over in order to feed you…they have you there in order to…for you to entertain their guests with some little tidbit that has happened that day. “What Eisenhower said” or “what had Dulles said” or “What kind of a man is Churchill? Did you really talk to him?”

Well, anyway, that’s Henry. Henry, when he goes to these parties, and he likes parties. I despise them because I’ve been to so many. I used to like them. But Henry will learn to despise them too after he’s been through a few more. But be that as it may, so he goes to a party, and I can see exactly what happened in Canada. He runs into a lady who…has a very low opinion of me…and, ah, ah…so Henry feels that really he’s defending me and that the way best to defend is to concede that, ah, “Well, he’s sort of an odd person, he’s an artificial person,” and so forth and so on and so on. The only problem was that he didn’t think to turn the microphone off. On the other hand, I didn’t turn it off either in the Oval Office on occasions, so I never held him for that.