Dallek Lectures on Nixon, Kissinger
Friday, May 18, 2007
By Emily Ghods-Esfahani
Robert Dallek, the eminent American presidential historian, author and professor, visited Dartmouth on Wednesday, May 09, 2007 to deliver a lecture on his latest important book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. Professor Dallek is the author of several valuable books about American presidents, among them: Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945; The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs; Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism; and Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. His latest book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power focuses exclusively on the Nixon presidency and specifically digs into President Nixon’s tortured relationship with his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.
The lecture itself, held in Filene auditorium, was more explicitly titled than the book on which it is based: “Nixon and Kissinger: Partner’s in Power and Deception” gave a snapshot of the power struggle between Nixon and his “co-president”—ostensibly Secretary of State—Henry Kissinger, and the deception that underlay not only their perpetual rivalry but also their foreign policy.
While Professor Dallek’s portrait is firmly rooted in historical events and the impact that these two historical giants had on the Cold War, he first sets a psychological foundation on which to understand these men and their deeply flawed natures; the nature of one would often exacerbate the frailties of the other. Professor Dallek, perhaps unintentionally, gives a brief taste of the tension within these men when he confesses that he was at first skeptical about beginning this book: he thought that Nixon’s inveterate secrecy and paranoia would prevent even a diligent historian from digging through the detritus of deception that Nixon piled on his presidency. Professor Dallek feared that cutting through this layer of secrecy would be no easy task.
But quite to the contrary, Professor Dallek found that Nixon’s vanity plus Kissinger’s diligence, amazingly, outweighed the president’s secrecy and paranoia. After scrutinizing 2,800 hours of Nixon tapes and 20,000 pages of Kissinger’s telephone transcripts, Dallek produced his latest book. “To my delight,” he says, “Nixon’s presidency is the most transparent of any in the American presidency, the body of material his administration left behind lets us reconstruct the presidency with crystalline transparency.”
Nixon was so obsessed with his public image that it distorted his perception of reality to the point of crisis. The tapes are what ultimately brought him down, so, in retrospect, it is reasonable to ask why he ultimately made them. Professor Dallek points to the cause: “The reason he began making them was that he had ordered Presidential aides to make a memorandum of the conversations and have them create a documentary record that would be available to historians but that would also be available to Nixon later on when he wrote his presidential memoirs. The aides, who were responsible for making a lot of these memos, were falling further and further behind, so Nixon’s chief of staff suggested to Nixon that he do what Lyndon Johnson had done, which was to tape conversations.”
With some assistance, Dallek sifted through the minutiae of these documents and tapes and found that “it made for what I felt was an extraordinary story.” His lecture unfolded the drama of two would-be tyrants constantly back-stabbing and deceiving one another, while they co-ran a White House that produced some of the greatest successes and greatest failures of American foreign policy; all the while, a commanding and ordered fortress was built up for the press to see, before it came crumbling down with the disaster of Watergate.
Contrary to the popular belief that Watergate caused Nixon’s presidency to buckle at the knees, Dallek maintains that the pathology ran far deeper than the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington D.C. Rather, Nixon was brought down by the aura of deception, manipulation and double-dealing that was endemic to his administration. Watergate was the well-earned comeuppance meted out to a corrupt character, in this narrative.
Despite stormy relations within the White House, Dallek points to three major foreign policy successes of Nixon’s administration: opening up relations with China in 1971, establishing a diplomacy that balanced the power of China against the power of the Soviet Union, and practicing “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East where the USA acted as an intermediary in conflicts between Syria, Egypt and Israel.
Nixon was bent on affecting and altering the course of American foreign policy: the Cold War was the game, and Nixon was eager to wager American power to foil the moves of the Soviet Union at every turn. Consequently, when it came to choosing his cabinet secretaries, he thought it best to choose individuals with weak personalities, more easily usable as his puppets, than critics. Unfortunately, he was to find no such man in Henry Kissinger, who once responded to a journalist’s question “How do you feel about not being able to run for president because you are foreign born, as expressed in the American constitution?” with “The document says nothing about not being made emperor.” Kissinger, as he confessed to Oriana Fallaci, fancied himself as a cowboy riding off into the sunset, not a wingman.
To undercut such Napoleonic outbursts, Nixon engaged in a painful rivalry with Kissinger. He was given to calling Kissinger “my Jew boy” behind his back—and to his face. When Kissinger would passionately vent his opinion about a given matter of international import, Nixon would coolly inquire, “Now can we get an American point of view?” Nixon, while accusing Kissinger, justifiably if vulgarly, of over-bearing micromanagement, said, “he has too many meetings, and they go on and on and on and on and on about crap.”
Kissinger, too, played the game. Realizing Nixon’s paranoia about being left out of the loop, Kissinger deliberately withheld crucial information from Nixon to undermine Nixon’s power: he took calls for Nixon from none other than the British prime minister; he did not notify Nixon about the Yom Kippur War until three hours of bloodshed had elapsed (Nixon ordered him to tell the press that he had been notified of it right away and updated every thirty minutes). The secretary would send cables to the White House updating the staff on his diplomatic missions to the Middle East and would deliberately withhold the critical information from Nixon, and—not to leave out the ad hominem insults—he called Nixon meatball-minded and a drunken fool.
In short, the animosity between these two was hidden from nobody—and yet, the adversaries would often powder each other’s backsides. To give just two brief examples, during Watergate Kissinger assured Nixon that “you will go down in history as the man who brought about the greatest foreign policy revolution in history… Mr. President, without you, this country would be dead.” Flinging some sugar back his way, Nixon would congratulate Kissinger on his great foreign policy successes—like his visit to China or the negotiation of disengagement agreements among Syria, Israel and Egypt—all the while resenting Kissinger for stealing the limelight from him, the president of the United States. Nothing infuriated Nixon more than when Time magazine put Nixon and Kissinger together on its cover; Nixon took care to remind Kissinger that he, the president, would be first off the plane when it landed, so that the he, the president, would receive credit for opening up relations with China. Despite what history and historians have determined with the benefit of hindsight, there certainly was no co-presidency nonsense in Nixon’s distorted perception of reality, and he made sure to remind Kissinger of that at every turn.
The image of a two-headed administration becomes all the more potent when you realize, as Dallek does, that though the two were as able to undercut each other as to breathe, they also collaborated as partners in deception against the American public on two major counts.
First, of course, was the Vietnam War. Within the first few years of the war, Nixon confided to members of his staff that “we cannot win this war,” and yet, the public was repeatedly told that America must “stay the course” to ensure South Vietnam’s autonomy. Even with Vietnamization—the policy which advocated the gradual replacement of American troops with South Vietnamese troops—Nixon knew that the situation was not only futile but a present failure: “If only they [the South Vietnamese] would take one goddamn hill, capture some prisoners…what the hell is wrong with them?” Even Kissinger admitted to the Soviet Ambassador that there is no hope in winning this war, and he advised Nixon not to call the peace accords “lasting” because violence was sure to erupt again. Instead, Nixon declared “peace with honor,” though it became quite obvious that Vietnam needed peace, America needed honor, and the Emperor needed his clothes, all in equal measure.
More egregious than Vietnam, however, was Nixon and Kissinger’s meddling in the Chilean election in which a plurality of votes, not a majority, legally determined the presidential winner. Unsatisfied with this practice, Nixon and Kissinger tried to topple the Chilean government by cutting off the International Monetary Fund’s aid to Chile and employing the CIA in Chile, to name just two of Nixon and Kissinger’s many measures.
When the Chilean government finally fell in 1973, the two publicly denied having anything to do with the coup, and yet, the following exchange reveals more sinister forces at work:
HK: “It’s amazing, the press is playing this off as an uprising.”
RN: “Isn’t that something?”
HK: “In Eisenhower’s period, we would be heroes.”
RN: “Well, our playing hands can’t be shown in this one.”
HK: “Well, we just helped them along, that’s all—nothing more than that.”
Though Professor Dallek admits that not being completely forthright with the press and public at large is part of the American democratic tradition and necessary for national security, he draws a line between deception for the sake of constructive ends and deception for the sake of destructive ends. Professor Dallek, the voice of history last Wednesday night, judged that Nixon and Kissinger’s deception was destructive to its rotten core. The irony, of course, is that each was obsessed with whitewashing his image so that he would shine in the eyes of future generations as the giant historical figure he so desperately wanted to be: giants, certainly. That the whitewash has been acidwashed away at least makes for good drama, as an historian with an imagination, Professor Dallek, was quick to see and re-play for his captivated audience last Wednesday night.
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