The Sunday Times Magazine • 35
- Rather than cut and run, they sought
to achieve “peace with honour”. Their
strategy of “Vietnamisation” was in fact a
version of what the US is doing in Ukraine
today: providing the arms so the country
can fight to uphold its independence, rather
than relying on US boots on the ground.
Harvard and Yale types will splutter even
more when they see Nixon as one of the six
exemplars in Kissinger’s Leadership,
rubbing shoulders with Konrad Adenauer,
Charles de Gaulle, the former Egyptian
president Anwar Sadat, Singapore’s first
prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, and
Margaret Thatcher (whose inclusion will
make the Oxford and Cambridge types
splutter too).
I ask Kissinger how Nixon — the only
president forced to resign — deserves a
chapter to himself in a book on leadership.
Isn’t he a case study in how not to lead?
Kissinger starts with the succinct verdict on
Watergate provided by Bryce Harlow, the
experienced Washington operator who had
been Nixon’s liaison man with Congress:
“Some damn fool got into the Oval Office
and did as he was told” — meaning
someone in the White House had taken
Nixon too literally.
“As a general proposition,” Kissinger says,
“assistants owe their principals in politics
not to be held to emotional statements
[about] things you know they wouldn’t do on
further reflection.” There were many times
when, in the heat of the moment, or to
impress present company, Nixon would give
intemperate verbal orders. Kissinger learnt
quickly not to act every time Nixon ordered
him to “bomb the hell” out of someone.
“If you look at Watergate,” he argues, “it
was really a succession of transgressions”
— starting with the break-ins at the rival
Democratic Party’s National Committee
headquarters, which were ordered by the
campaign to re-elect Nixon in 1972. Those
transgressions then “came together in one
investigation. I thought then and think now
that they deserved censure; they did not
require removal from office.”
From Kissinger’s vantage point,
Watergate was a disaster because it wrecked
the ingenious foreign policy strategy that
he and Nixon had devised to strengthen the
position of the United States, which had
effectively been losing the Cold War when
they came into office in January 1969.
“We had a grand design,” he recalls.
“[Nixon] wanted to end the Vietnam War
on honourable terms ... He wanted to give
the Atlantic alliance a new strategic
direction. And above all he wanted to avoid
a [nuclear] conflict [with the Soviet Union]
through arms control policy.
“And then there was the unexplored
mystery of China. [Nixon] proclaimed from
his first day that he wanted to open to
China. He understood that this was a
strategic opportunity, that two adversaries
of the United States were in conflict with
each other” — a reference to the border war
that broke out between the Soviet Union
and China in 1969, after the two biggest
communist powers had split over
ideological issues eight years before. “In his
name I gave an instruction to try to place
ourselves closer to China and Russia than
they were to each other.” These trends, he
says, were coming together in the year
before the Watergate scandal broke.
“By the end of [Nixon’s presidency] there
was a peace in Vietnam that in its terms was
honourable and was sustainable by a
president who had domestic support. We
had redone Middle East policy,” effectively
ejecting the Soviets from the region and
establishing the US as peace broker
between Arabs and Israelis. “And we had
opened to China and [negotiated strategic
arms limitation] with Russia. Unfortunately
the domestic support disintegrated. Instead
of exploiting those opportunities, we were
forced by Nixon’s domestic debacle into
just holding on.”
The Nixon that emerges from Kissinger’s
Leadership is a tragic figure — a master
strategist whose unscrupulous cover-up of
his re-election campaign team’s crime
destroyed not only his presidency but also
doomed South Vietnam to destruction.
Nor was that all. It was defeat in Vietnam,
Kissinger suggests, that set the US on a
downward spiral of political polarisation.
“The conflict,” he writes, “introduced a
style of public debate increasingly
conducted less over substance than over
political motives and identities. Anger has
replaced dialogue as a way to carry out
disputes, and disagreement has become a
clash of cultures.”
I ask if the US is more divided today than
at the time of Vietnam.
“Yes, infinitely more,” he replies.
Startled, I ask him to elaborate. In the
early 1970s, he says, there was still a
possibility of bipartisanship. “The national
interest was a meaningful term, it was not
in itself a subject of debate. That has
ended. Every administration now faces the
unremitting hostility of the opposition and
in a way that is built on different premises ...
The unstated but very real debate in
America right now is about whether the
basic values of America have been valid,” by
which he means the sacrosanct status of the
Constitution and the primacy of individual
liberty and equality before the law.
From top: Kissinger with Richard Nixon
on Air Force One in 1973; with Gerald
Ford in 1974; with Barack Obama in
2010; with Donald Trump in 2017; and
Joe Biden in 2016. Previous pages: at
his Connecticut retreat last month
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