It is not unfair to say that Henry Kissinger, who died Wednesday, November 29, at age 100, owes his role in history to one man: Richard Nixon. It is also not unfair to say that their partnership ranks as one of the most productive, complicated, paranoid, and downright weird relationships this side of Martin and Lewis. At times, each man loathed the other, often for showing the exact same insecurities he himself possessed.
What would Kissinger have become if Nixon had not telephoned him shortly after winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, and asked him to be on his foreign policy advisory group? Here was Nixon reaching out to a man who not only had been a close adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s rival for the nomination, but who had made no secret of his antipathy for the nominee. And, in fact, Kissinger said no, preferring to advise him personally. How much of that he actually did during the campaign remains murky, since Kissinger also sent friendly signals to the camp of Hubert Humphrey during the general election.
Humphrey later would tell The New York Times that if he had been elected president, he would have made Kissinger his national security adviser, just as Nixon had. It never would have worked, of course. Humphrey was too happy a person to connect with Kissinger in the way Nixon did. As Walter Isaacson points out in Kissinger, his 1992 biography that remains the best and most definitive account of the man, Nixon himself saw even his own partnership with Kissinger as unlikely: “the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany, the politician and the academic.” But what the two had in common was a deep love of foreign policy, not just in the way it is discussed at the Council on Foreign Relations, but in the dark and complex ways that diplomacy and force are practiced, complete with stabbed backs and revenge served ice-cold. “My rule in international affairs,” Nixon once told Golda Meir in a meeting with Kissinger, “is, ‘Do unto others as they would do unto you.’” Added Kissinger, with impeccable timing, “Plus 10 percent.”
This made for a particularly activist presidency, as evidenced not just by the Vietnam War and the endless peace talks and the bombing campaigns (including the secret ones in Cambodia), but by genuine and dramatic outreach, most notably Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 and, to a lesser degree, détente with the Soviet Union. There is a much darker side, of course, perhaps best exemplified by the overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected Socialist leader, Salvador Allende, in a 1973 coup engineered by the CIA. In Robert Dallek’s astute study, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, he describes the two men discussing the result, with Kissinger complaining about press coverage (as he often did) and Nixon proudly saying that “our hand doesn’t show on this one.”
We know about this conversation thanks to transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls. As The New York Times pointed out in a 2007 profile of Dallek, “this most secretive of presidencies had gradually become the most transparent” thanks to the gradual release of tapes, transcripts of phone calls, and diaries kept by Nixon, Kissinger, and others. Little of this casts Kissinger in a kinder light, especially in his obeisance to Nixon in person and his mocking of him to others. Mr. “Meatball Mind” somehow does not have the same ring as “Mr. President.”
The struggle between these two men for credit may be best illustrated by the tussle over who would be Time’s Man of the Year in 1972: Nixon alone, as Nixon unsurprisingly preferred, or Nixon and Kissinger. As recounted in Isaacson’s book, Nixon got wind of talk that Kissinger might be Man of the Year and complimented Kissinger by note; behind the scenes, he felt otherwise, as John Ehrlichman’s notes from a Camp David meeting that fall make clear: “President’s genius needs to be recognized, vis-à-vis HAK.”