Nixon and Mao (9 page)

With Nixon, Kissinger was always deferential, sometimes to a fault. “When I’d be talking to Henry,” a friend of Nixon’s remembered, “and the president would telephone, his voice would shake; the whole tone of his voice would change.”
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Kissinger understood better than most the president’s insecurities and his insatiable need for reassurance. He assured Nixon that he was a tough leader. “It was extraordinary!” he told Nixon in his first year in office, after the president met with the Soviet ambassador. “No President has ever laid it on the line to them like that.”
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Nixon, Kissinger insisted, was a success. In 1971, for example, the president gave one of his talks to the American people about Vietnam. The broadcast was at 9:00
P.M.,
and at 9:35 Kissinger’s first phone call came in: “This was the best speech you’ve given since you’ve been in office.” Kissinger’s second call was at 10:21; he made another at 10:35 and yet another at 11:13. There were more the next day. This was not unusual; there had been many other Nixon speeches and equally fulsome praise. Kissinger knew what Nixon wanted to hear: that he was wise and statesmanlike and, as important, that the public was aware of it.
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In 1982 Kissinger ran into John Ehrlichman in Los Angeles while the legal struggle over access to the Nixon tapes was still going on. “Sooner or later those tapes are going to be released, and you and I are going to look like perfect fools,” Kissinger said. Speak for yourself, Ehrlichman thought to himself.
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Away from Nixon, Kissinger was less polite. “The madman” or “our drunken friend,” he would say when Nixon had been especially rambling.
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At Georgetown dinner parties, Kissinger would poke fun at Nixon’s foibles and give the impression that he was trying hard to rein in the administration’s wilder policies. Kissinger was a hawk in the White House, Haldeman later wrote, but a different person in the evenings. “Touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.”
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Nixon knew it was happening, but he was forgiving. “I know this. Kissinger likes to be liked. I understand that.”
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Even years later, when Kissinger published some harsh comments about him, Nixon would only say to the historian Joan Hoff, “I will be fair to Henry, even if he isn’t always to me.”
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For all the tensions between them, the two men made one of the most influential foreign policy teams in American history. “Nixinger diplomacy,” one academic has called their tenure.
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Not only did they have the same perspective on international relations, they believed in keeping all major policies and initiatives in their grip. They shared a penchant for intrigue and secrecy. Both had trouble trusting people, even their own staffs. Both spent much time and energy worrying about leaks. “They developed,” said Lawrence Eagleburger, a Kissinger aide who later became secretary of state for the first President Bush, “a conspiratorial approach to foreign policy management.”
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It was, on some issues, such as the breakthrough with China, a very effective approach because they cut through the bureaucratic thickets of precedence and caution that have hemmed in so many leaders. It did not always work when they did not keep the rest of the American government, especially the State Department, up to date on what they were doing. And it did not work when they tried to do too much themselves or when they simply ignored issues, such as economic ones, that did not interest them.

Kissinger, who Nixon later said admiringly was a “very good infighter,” took full advantage of his position to consolidate his power.
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He made good use of the new structure set up by Nixon for foreign affairs to make sure that he had the ultimate right of access to the president. Much to the annoyance of the State Department, he also started dealing directly with foreign representatives in Washington and abroad. After Nixon made it clear to Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that he should work through Kissinger, the two men met regularly in Kissinger’s office without anyone else being present. Dobrynin entered and left the White House by the service entrance. In time a private telephone line linked Kissinger’s office directly to the Soviet embassy.
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At Foggy Bottom, as the State Department building was known, they had only the vaguest idea of what Kissinger and Dobrynin were discussing, or even when their meetings were taking place.
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That was how both Nixon and Kissinger wanted it. They were at one in their contempt for the State Department, which they saw as filled with egghead liberals and, from Kissinger’s perspective, rivals. “Our basic attitude,” said Kissinger as he and Nixon discussed the major crisis in South Asia in 1971, “was the hell with the State Department; let them screw around with the little ones.”
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Major diplomatic secrets and initiatives could not be trusted to the State Department, Nixon and Kissinger believed, because it was incapable of moving rapidly and, in any case, was bound to leak information. It was, in their view, an incompetent, ineffective, and overstaffed bureaucracy. “I opened up China with five people,” Kissinger liked to say.
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In his first year in office, a senior State Department official remembered, “Nixon gave us a little harangue about what our jobs were and how, by God, he was going to run foreign policy.” What is more, the president added, “If the Department of State has had a new idea in the last 25 years, it is not known to me.”
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This was a view that Kissinger both shared and encouraged. “The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed,” he had written in his book on Metternich and Castlereagh. Policy makers had to take chances, while the whole instinct of bureaucracy was to take refuge in routine.
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Kissinger kept the State Department out of the plans for Nixon’s trip to China as much as he could, and he was determined to keep its representatives on the sidelines during the visit itself. The one thing he had not yet worked out, he told Dwight Chapin during his October 1971 visit to Beijing, “was how he was going to be able to keep Secretary of State Rogers from attending various meetings.”
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Now, at the Diaoyutai that February day, Rogers and his assistants were housed several hundred yards away from Nixon’s villa, in a smaller building. As Kissinger, who was in Nixon’s villa, remarked in his memoirs, “The Chinese well understood the strange checks and balances within the Executive Branch and had re-created the physical gulf between the White House and Foggy Bottom in the heart of Peking.”
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If the Chinese had not been aware of the tension between the State Department and Kissinger, he obligingly let them know about it at every possible occasion. In his talks with Chou En-lai on his trips to China in 1971, Kissinger had sighed about the difficulties of dealing with American officials. “We have not had the benefits of the Cultural Revolution,” he complained jokingly. “So we have a large, somewhat undisciplined, and with respect to publicity, not always reliable bureaucracy.”
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The Chinese, he advised, should discuss important issues such as Taiwan and relations with the Soviet Union with him, and not with representatives from the State Department. It was also not necessary for the State Department to be involved in the crucial meetings between Nixon and Mao. As he told Chou, “If those people who will not be meeting with Chairman Mao and the President could be separated from them in the most delicate way possible, it will help me tremendously.”
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Members of the State Department were torn between admiration for Kissinger’s intelligence and his abilities as a negotiator and resentment over his determination to keep their department out of all important areas. As one said, “If Henry Kissinger is not the bride, there’s going to be no other wedding anywhere else.”
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Kissinger at his best was “astute, articulate, a master of maneuver,” in the view of Marshall Green, who was the senior person responsible for East Asia and the Pacific during the Nixon presidency. “But he was also a megalomaniac, and as long as he was in the White House he lost no opportunity to build his power base at the expense of the State Department, undercutting the Secretary of State and shamelessly exploiting President Nixon’s long-standing suspicions and prejudices against careerists in the State Department (despite our loyalty to all Presidents and our high respect for Nixon’s extraordinary grasp of strategic issues).”
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Unfortunately, the man Nixon had chosen to be his secretary of state was no match for Kissinger. William Rogers, a handsome, affable, and well-connected Republican from the East Coast, chafed at times, but he was too gentlemanly to protest openly. “A very nice man,” said a diplomat who knew him, “a lawyer whose proudest achievement was some product-liability suits that he’d engaged in to defend Bayer Aspirin and other miscreants of great renown, and who was intensely loyal to the president on a personal level.”
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He and Nixon had worked together in politics for years; indeed, Rogers had stood by Nixon during the 1952 vice presidential campaign when Nixon was accused of using a secret slush fund for his own benefit. Yet like so many others who spent a lot of time with Nixon, Rogers always found the real man elusive. “His personality is more outgoing in his public appearances than in his private appearances,” he told one of Nixon’s biographers.
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Nixon, for his part, seems to have regarded Rogers with mingled envy, admiration, and contempt. In his memoirs he praised Rogers’s abilities as an administrator and negotiator, but to his White House aides he described him as “ineffectual, selfish and vain.”
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Rogers had few obvious qualifications for his position as secretary of state. He could not, said a leading conservative journalist, “find the State Department in broad daylight with a flashlight.”
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He had not shown much interest in foreign affairs before he was appointed and, according to some of his critics, never developed any. In the State Department, where he was regarded with a sympathy tinged with disdain, Rogers had the reputation of never reading anything that was more than three pages long. When Charles Freeman, from the China desk, tried to brief him during the layover in Hawaii on the trip to China, Rogers was his usual courteous self. He was, Freeman recalled, “able to sustain some interest in the trip for a while, but, as others seem to have remarked, did not have a great attention span for such matters and quickly drifted off and went off to play golf.”
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Nixon frequently complained about the tension between Kissinger and Rogers, but he also deliberately stirred it up. He would invite Rogers to private dinners in the White House, for example, something he rarely did with his national security adviser. Kissinger would stay in his office, checking with the Secret Service agents to see if Rogers had left yet. “He would seem paranoid,” said Haldeman, “ranting that he couldn’t understand why the president would want to talk to Rogers.”
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Nixon may have seen Rogers’s inexperience as an asset. “I recognized,” Rogers told the journalist Seymour Hersh, “that he wanted to be his own foreign policy leader and did not want others to share that role.”
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Rogers’s deputy, Elliot Richardson, felt that Rogers was not prepared to try to work seriously with Nixon in the making of American foreign policy. “Rogers felt that in terms of character and judgment he was a better man and he could not subordinate himself, which an effective Secretary of State must do.”
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He had not, perhaps, counted on having to subordinate himself to Kissinger as well.

Rogers allowed himself and the State Department to be outmaneuvered in the early days of the Nixon presidency, when Kissinger and the National Security Council became the center of policy making, and although he came to resent it, he never managed to recover what had been lost. He complained frequently to Nixon himself and to Nixon’s aides that the president did not trust him and that Kissinger did not treat him properly. “It would be goddam easy to run this office,” said Nixon after one conversation with Rogers, “if you didn’t have to deal with people.”
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Nixon tried to reassure him, but in the end, perhaps he did not entirely mind seeing Rogers humiliated by Kissinger. Rogers had helped him through the Checkers scandal, when Nixon was accused of accepting presents from lobbyists, but, as a result, had also seen him at a low point in his life.
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The president was clear, in any case, that Kissinger was the indispensable one. “If we got to the stage,” he told Haldeman, “where somebody had to fall on a sword in order to save the P, Henry would do it, but Rogers wouldn’t.” Haldeman agreed but added, “If Henry did do it, he would do it with loud kicking and screaming and make sure that the blood spurted all over the place so he got full credit for it.”
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AFTER THEIR WELCOMING REMARKS,
the Chinese gave the Americans a lavish lunch and left them to settle in. Kissinger wandered about aimlessly, waiting for his scheduled meeting with Chou at 3:00
P.M.
The three American interpreters were called in with Nixon to go over arrangements for the banquet that night. Charles Freeman, from the State Department, remembered being struck by Nixon’s pancake makeup: “There was a large glob of Max Factor hanging from a hair in the middle of the groove at the end of his nose.” (Ever since the debates with Kennedy, when his five o’clock shadow had given him a sinister cast, he had taken care to wear heavy makeup when there were cameras about.) The president merely shook hands and said how delighted he was to meet his interpreters but did not give them any instructions.
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Nixon also called Haldeman up to his room to go over the low-key welcome. “We talked a little,” Haldeman said, “about getting out the line that we weren’t concerned at all about the lack of people in the streets and so forth.” It was just what they had expected, Nixon insisted. What was more important was that the Chinese had played “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the airport.
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