Using Henry Kissinger as an authoritative source
on Richard Nixon is a procedure rife with pitfalls. So involved was the
one with the other, on a political, as well as an intellectual level, that
it is difficult to separate where the history of one becomes the history
of the other. Tom Wicker records that on questions of foreign policy, the
two complemented each other perfectly: "the two men hit it off immediately."
Nixon himself recalled that he had "a strong intuition about Henry Kissinger."
[1]
However, it was also in more questionable inclinations
that the two most powerful men in Washington complemented each other: "Kissinger's
nature was as secretive as Nixon's", "they sensed in each other, in their
first meeting, a shared love of secrecy and surprise, a strong sense of
contempt for the bureaucracy, for established methods, for regular procedure.
They were born conspirators."[2]
No direct link has ever been proven between Kissinger
and the events that led to the Watergate cover-up and Nixon's
resignation. But Kissinger's methods were very similar to those that
led to calls for the impeachment of the president. During the 1968 election,
Kissinger used his position as a foreign policy consultant in President
Johnson's lame duck administration to feed information on the Vietnam war
to the Nixon campaign, giving it an upperhand in the contest. Upon winning
office, Nixon became concerned with leaks of military information, and
asked Kissinger to "suggest the names of some of his officials who had
acces to the secrets being leaked." Their phones were then tapped and conversations
monitored. [3] Some scholars have pointed to this invasion of privacy as
the first abuse of power by the Nixon administration that would lead in
a direct line to the Watergate scandal.
The actual development of Watergate
is far more complex and circuitous, but Kissinger has taken the threat
to his own historical image seriously enough to have made repeated attempts
to distance himself from the scandal: "In the months that followed, Watergate
... was never discussed at the White House meetings I attended", "I knew
nothing of the White House 'Plumbers unit' burglary of the office of psychiatrist
of Daniel Ellsberg." [4]
At the same time, Kissinger acknowledges the ethical and
legal complications of his own wire-tapping operations: "In retrospect
it is also clear to me that while electronic surveillance is a widely used
method of investigation in democracies, the wiretapping of one's associates
presents an especially painful human problem. I was never at ease with
it..." [5]
Associated with the deepest scandal of the Nixon administration,
as well as being one of the chief architects of its perceived foreign
policy successes, Kissinger has his own historical legacy to defend in
eulogising Richard Nixon. It becomes apparent, reading his speech, that
he is not so much reinterpreting Richard Nixon's place in history, as he
is defending his own. When Kissinger says that "In
the conduct of foreign policy, Richard Nixon was one of the seminal presidents",
and "Richard Nixon's foreign policy goals
were long range, and he pursued them without regard to domestic political
consequences", he is really talking about himself and his own successes.
[1] Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American
Dream, Random House, New York, 1991, 431
[2] Wicker, 432; Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon - Volume Two:
The Triumph of a Politician 1962 - 1972, Simon & Schuster, New York,
1989, 233
[3] Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American
Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon, Times Books, New York, 1994,
11
[4] Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, London, 1982, 76, 117
[5] Kissinger, 121