Nixon and Kissinger

Robert Dallek

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061832956
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In this epic dual biography, one of our most distinguished scholars—the bestselling author of An Unfinished Life —probes the lives and times of two unlikely leaders whose partnership dominated American and world affairs and changed the course of history

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were two of the most compelling, contradictory, and important leaders in America in the second half of the 20th century. Both were largely self-made men, brimming with ambition, driven by their own inner demons, and often ruthless in pursuit of their goals.

Tapping into a wealth of recently declassified documents and tapes, Robert Dallek uncovers fascinating details about Nixon and Kissinger's tumultuous personal relationship—their collaboration and rivalry—and the extent to which they struggled to outdo each other in the reach of foreign policy achievements. He also brilliantly analyzes their dealings with power brokers at home and abroad, including the nightmare of Vietnam, the brilliant opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, the disastrous overthrow of Allende in Chile, and growing tensions between India and Pakistan, while recognizing how both men were continually plotting to distract the American public's attention from the growing scandal of Watergate.

Authoritative, illuminating, and deeply engrossing, Nixon and Kissinger provides a shocking new understanding of the immense power and sway these two men held in affecting world history.

PART ONE

BRETHREN OF A KIND

Chapter 1

NIXON

A man’s philosophy is his autobiography. You may read it in the story of his conflict with life.

—WALTER LIPPMANN, The New Republic, JULY 17, 1915

In the nearly twenty years following his resignation from the presidency in 1974, Richard Nixon struggled to reestablish himself as a well-regarded public figure. He tried to counter negative views of himself by writing seven books, mostly about international relations, which could sustain and increase his reputation as a world statesman. Yet as late as 1992, he complained to Monica Crowley, a young postpresidential aide: “‘We have taken…shit ever since—insulted by the media as the disgraced former president.’”

Above all, he craved public attention from his successors in the White House. The reluctance of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush to invite him back to the Oval Office for advice, particularly on foreign policy, incensed him. When Bush sent him national security form letters, “he erupted in fury. ‘I will not give them [the Bush advisers] any advice unless they are willing to thank me publicly,’” he told Crowley. “‘I’m tired of being taken for granted…. No more going in the back door of the White House—middle of the night—under the cloak-of-darkness crap. Either they want me or they don’t.’”

At the 1992 Republican Convention, after Bush publicly praised Nixon’s contribution to America’s Cold War victory, Nixon exclaimed, “‘It took guts for him to say that…. It’s the first time that anyone has referred to me at a convention. Reagan never did. It was gutsy.’” After Bill Clinton invited him to the White House to discuss Russia, Nixon declared it the best meeting “‘I have had since I was president.’” He was gratified that Clinton addressed him as “‘Mr. President.’” But when he saw his advice to Clinton being “diluted,” it “inspired rage, disappointment and frustration.”

Nixon’s postpresidential resentments were of a piece with long-standing sensitivity to personal slights. His biography is in significant part the story of an introspective man whose inner demons both lifted him up and brought him down. It is the history of an exceptional man whose unhappy childhood and lifelong personal tensions propelled him toward success and failure.

It may be that Winston Churchill was right when he said that behind every extraordinary man is an unhappy childhood. But because there are so many unhappy children and so few exceptional men, it invites speculation on what else went into Nixon’s rise to fame as a congressman, senator, vice president, and president. Surely, not the least of Nixon’s motives in his drive for public visibility was an insatiable appetite for distinction—a need, perhaps, to make up for psychic wounds that produced an unrelenting determination to elevate himself to the front rank of America’s competitors for status, wealth, and influence. Like Lincoln, in the words of law partner William Herndon, Nixon’s ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.

Like most political memoirists who romanticize the realities of their upbringing, Nixon painted a portrait of an “idyllic” childhood in Yorba Linda, California, a rural town of two hundred about thirty miles northeast of Los Angeles, and Whittier, a small city of about five thousand east of Long Beach. He remembered “the rich scent of orange blossoms in the spring…glimpses of the Pacific Ocean to the west [and] the San Bernardino Mountains to the north,” and the allure of “far-off places” stimulated by train whistles in the night that made him want to become a railroad engineer. “Life in Yorba Linda was hard but happy.” His father worked at odd jobs, but a vegetable garden, fruit trees, and a cow provided the family with plenty to eat.

When Richard was nine, the family moved to Whittier, where his mother’s Milhous family lived. He described growing up there in three words: “family, church and school.” There was an extended family with scores of people, including his grandmother, Almira Burdg Milhous, who inspired him on his thirteenth birthday in 1926 with a gift of a framed Lincoln portrait and a Longfellow poem, “Psalm of Life”: “Lives of great men oft remind us/We can make our lives sublime/And departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time.” Nixon cherished the picture and inscription, which he kept hung over his bed while in high school and college.

Richard remembered his parents as models of honest decency who endowed him with attributes every youngster might wish to have. “My father,” Nixon wrote, “was a scrappy, belligerent fighter with a quick, wide-ranging raw intellect. He left me a respect for learning and hard work, and the will to keep fighting no matter what the odds. My mother loved me completely and selflessly, and her special legacy was a quiet, inner peace, and the determination never to despair.”

But in fact, Nixon’s childhood was much more tumultuous and troubling than he let on. Frank Nixon, his father, was a boisterous, unpleasant man who needed to dominate everyone—“a ‘punishing and often brutal’ father.” Edward Nixon, the youngest of the Nixon children described his “mother as the judge and my father as the executioner.” Frank’s social skills left a lot to be desired; he offended most people with displays of temper and argumentativeness. As a trolley car conductor, farmer, gas station owner, and small grocer, he never made a particularly good living. Nixon biographers have painted unsympathetic portraits of Frank as a difficult, abrasive character with few redeeming qualities. Though Nixon would never openly acknowledge it, he saw his father as a harsh, unlikable man whose weaknesses eclipsed his strengths.

Frank was a standing example of what Richard hoped not to be—a largely inconsequential figure in a universe that valued material success and social standing. Richard was driven to do better than his father, but he also struggled with painful inner doubts about his worthiness. Despite his striving, Richard initially doubted that he had the wherewithal to surpass his father. Frank was not someone who either by example or direct messages to his sons communicated much faith in their worth. At the same time, however, Richard was his father’s son: his later readiness to run roughshod over opponents and his mean-spiritedness in political combat said as much about Frank as it did about Richard.

Richard felt much more kindly toward his mother, Hannah. But for all the descriptions of her as a “saint,” to which her son always subscribed, she was a remote person whom Richard saw as “intensely private in her feelings and emotions.” She was not the sort, in biographer Tom Wicker’s words, to offer “a close embrace, a kiss, a rollicking bounce on a mother’s lap.”

And Hannah was repeatedly absent during Richard’s early years. In 1913, nine months after Richard’s birth in Yorba Linda, she was hospitalized for mastoid surgery, followed by a period of recovery at her parents’ Whittier home. Richard’s maternal grandmother Almira cared for him and an older brother, but he felt his mother’s absence nevertheless. In subsequent years, when her demanding husband and their hard life in a bungalow house, where she and Frank lived with four small boys, overwhelmed her, she repeatedly returned home to Whittier for sometimes brief and sometimes lengthy stays. Hannah’s burdens, including two sickly sons, one of whom, Arthur, died at age seven in 1925, while the other, Harold, died in 1930 at age twenty-one, were reasons for her to give Richard less than full attention during his childhood and adolescence.

Although Richard sympathized with his mother’s need to attend principally to his afflicted brothers, his understanding could not fill the void he felt from her occasional physical, and more important, emotional absences. “‘My Dear Master,’” he wrote Hannah at the age of ten, in what biographer Roger Morris calls “the pitiable cry and fantasy of a lonely boy,” who disguised his unhappiness in a dog story. “‘I wish you would come home right now. Your good dog Richard.’” Hannah remembered that “as a youngster, Richard seemed to need me more than my other sons did. As a schoolboy, he used to like to have me sit with him when he studied…. It wasn’t that Richard needed my help with his work…. Rather it was that he just liked to have me around.”

As a boy and young man, Nixon impressed most classmates and teachers as a well-adjusted, socially engaged activist. At Whittier College, he was a class leader: a strong student with a record of campus activism as an actor, member of the debate and football teams. Those who got closer to him, however, recall “a solitary, shy, painfully uncertain boy amid all the apparent energy and versatility…Many saw him as strained and tightly strung.” A classmate recalled that “Dick was a very tense person.” Another schoolmate said, “He never had any close friends in college. He was a loner.” His Whittier debate coach thought “there was something mean in him, mean in the way he put his questions, argued his points.” Ola Florence Welch, Richard’s college girlfriend, with whom he had a stormy on-and-off again relationship, believed he suffered from “an underlying unease and awkwardness, a deeper unfulfilled need. ‘He seemed lonely and so solemn at school. He didn’t know how to mix. He was smart and sort of set apart. I think he was unsure of himself, deep down.’”

During his three years at Duke Law School between 1934 and 1937, he was nicknamed “gloomy Gus.” This was less because he was so glum as because he was a workaholic who strictly limited his participation in the social life of the campus. One classmate considered him “something of an oddball” and “slightly paranoid.” He was a compulsive student who spent most of his time in the law library “hunched over his books.” Only at Duke football games, to which he came and went by himself, did he give public vent to his emotions, yelling himself hoarse in support of the team.

When Tom Wicker first encountered the forty-four-year-old Nixon in the U.S. Senate lobby in 1957, five years after he had been elected vice president, he was “walking along rather slowly, shoulders slumped, hands jammed in his trouser pockets, head down and his eyes apparently fixed…on the ornate Capitol floor. What I could see of his face seemed darker than could be accounted for by the trademark five o’clock shadow; it was preoccupied, brooding, gloomy, whether angry or merely disconsolate I was unable to tell.” Wicker believed that he “had glimpsed a profoundly unhappy man,” and “found it hard to fathom why” a vice president, who might someday become president, “should appear so desolate and so alone.”

To Adlai Stevenson, one of Nixon’s principal 1950s political opponents, the man’s character registered clearly on his politics: “Nixonland—a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of a poison pen, the anonymous phone call, and hustling, pushing, shoving—the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” For Garry Wills, Nixon was “a brooding Irish puritan. And a lonely man.” Not the qualities one would normally expect in a president, but then “Lincoln was even more melancholy, and downright neurotic,” Wills believes. “I’m an introvert in an extrovert profession,” Nixon said of himself.

Like Nixon, who obviously puzzled over his success in a profession seemingly little suited to his temperament, his biographers will always wonder about Nixon’s career choice and how someone with limited affinity for small talk and so little personal charm could have run so often and so successfully for high office. In an age when personality had replaced character as the ostensible measuring rod for political advance, Nixon seems to have defied the odds.

His considerable intelligence, knowledge of American history, and ability to measure the current state of the nation were certainly attributes that served his career. But so did his work ethic and tireless efforts during the forty-two years he campaigned for everything from high school student body president to chief executive of the United States. Circumstance may have schooled him in the need to work hard: At the age of fifteen, he was responsible for buying and setting out vegetables at his parents’ grocery. He would begin work at 4 A.M., driving twelve miles to a Los Angeles market, where he could purchase the best and cheapest produce.

More was in play here than the need to ensure the success of the family store. Richard saw hard work as the means to make something of himself—to get beyond his parents’ cloistered world and break the chains that bound them to a life of relative drudgery in a small town. More than that, work seemed the best way to raise his self-esteem—to give him a sense of accomplishment and importance, to make him feel worthwhile, valued, and admired, even loved.

Involvement in productive activities became a mainstay of his life, but not just schoolwork, which as a teenager occupied his afternoons, nights, and weekends. In high school, he also devoted himself to acting, debate, football, and school governance. He attended to all these commitments as if his existence depended on it. In college, the pace became even more frenetic. “I won my share of scholarships, and of speaking and debating prizes in school,” he said later about his four years at Whittier, “not because I was smarter but because I worked longer and harder than some of my gifted colleagues.” In addition to the constant attention to his classes, which earned him second place in a class of eighty-five Whittier graduates, he played football and basketball, ran track, joined the debate team, acted in theater productions, participated in campus politics, and helped organize and lead a men’s society, the Orthogonians.

In law school at Duke, he displayed a “single-minded, often fierce diligence” he believed required to keep pace with his forty-three classmates, many of whom came from more prestigious institutions than Whittier. During his first year, when he confided to a third-year student his concern that he could not compete effectively against his better prepared colleagues, the older student, who observed him at the library seven days and five nights a week, advised him not “to worry. You have what it takes to learn the law—an iron butt.”

Although intelligence and high energy were essential elements in Nixon’s rise to political power, they were not enough to explain his extraordinary success. A visceral feel for what voters wanted to hear—expressions of shared values—also brilliantly served his political ambition.

Between 1946 and 1972, when he ran for high office seven times, the issues were no longer principally about the economic security of the middle-and workingclass voters he had to win over; years after the Depression, amid a booming economy, fears of economic problems and job loss were diminished concerns. Instead, public debate focused on the Communist threat. Below the surface was a concern with what the historian Richard Hofstadter called status politics. As in the progressive era at the start of the twentieth century, when politics revolved less around ensuring national prosperity than restoring “morality” to civic life, politics after 1945 centered on “status anxieties” and “status resentments…issues of religion, morals, personal style, and culture.” It was not the politics of who got what but of insistence on deference—the anger of ordinary citizens toward elites, the most privileged members of society who impressed less sophisticated, conventional-thinking folks as disrespectful of their standards. As Hofstadter stated it, these Americans “believe that their prestige in the community, even indeed their self-esteem, depends on having their values honored in public.”

Dick Nixon’s early life is a textbook example of status strivings. When he was a young man growing up in the 1920s and 1930s in Southern California, a developing region removed from the country’s power centers in the Northeast and Middle West, the recent migrants to the area were ambitious not only for economic success but also for recognition as valued members of American society. The status concerns of Nixon’s contemporaries in Yorba Linda and Whittier reinforced the intense desire for personal recognition of a boy from an unexceptional lower-middle-class family whose ownership of a grocery and a gas station gave it limited status in the community. A cousin remembered how Dick’s work at the store embarrassed him: “He didn’t want anybody to see him go get vegetables, so he got up real early and then got back real quick,” she said. “And he didn’t like to wait on people in the store.”

In college, Richard gave clear expression to his status concerns when he took a central part in creating and advancing the Orthogonians. Although he quickly established himself as someone of importance on campus by being elected president of his freshman class, the unwillingness of the Franklins, the leading campus men’s society, to offer him membership incensed him. When another new student responded to the same slight by proposing the organization of a competing society, Dick was so eager to help that the group made him its first president. The Orthogonians distinguished themselves from the Franklins, who were notable for their elitism, by emphasizing the square shooting unpretentious qualities of student athletes, its principal members. “They were the haves and we were the have-nots,” Nixon said later of the two groups. But others remember that the Orthogonians quickly took on the pretensions of the Franklins, asserting political influence, setting social standards, and excluding most of the college’s athletes and everyone else from its ranks.

Nixon later rationalized the snobbery of arrivistes by making a distinction between inherited and earned exclusivity. Reflecting on the status strivings of young people, he said, “What starts the process really are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. Sometimes it’s because you’re poor or Irish or Jewish or Catholic or ugly or simply that you are skinny. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.” During a 1968 interview, asked if he had a special affinity for Theodore Roosevelt, Nixon replied: “‘I guess I’m like him in one way only: I like to be in the arena. I have seen those who have nothing to do—I could be one of them if I wanted—the people just lying around at Palm Beach. Nothing could be more pitiful.’ His voice,” Garry Wills said, “had contempt in it, not pity.”

A winning campaign for student body president at the end of his junior year, in the spring of 1933, was his first schooling in the use of status politics. Although a Quaker, whose strict religious upbringing forbade dancing, Richard made a fuller campus social life, including monthly dance parties, his platform. The proposal appealed to a student majority which, unlike members of the elite campus societies, lacked a sense of belonging or involvement in the college. Although he raised other issues during the campaign, “the promise of dance parties on campus,” Roger Morris wrote, “inexpensive and open t...