SUMMONS TO POWER

By Henry Kissinger

The Inauguration took place on a cold and windy day. I sat just behind the new Cabinet and watched Lyndon Johnson stride down the aisle for the last time to the tune of Hail to the Chief. Johnson stood like a caged eagle, proud, dignified, never to be trifled with, his eyes fixed on distant heights that now he would never reach. There was another fanfare and President-elect Richard Nixon appeared. His jaw jutted defiantly and yet he seemed uncertain, as if unsure that he was really there. He seemed exultant.

Yet he also appeared spent, like a marathon runner who has-exhausted himself in a great race. As ever, it was difficult to tell whether it was the occasion or his previous image of it that Nixon actually enjoyed.

My own feeling of surprise at being there was palpable. All my political experience had been in the company of those who considered themselves in mortal opposition to Richard Nixon. I had taught for over ten years at Harvard University, where among the faculty disdain for Richard Nixon was established orthodoxy. And the single most influential person in my life had been a man whom Nixon had twice defeated in futile quests for the presidential nomination, Nelson Rockefeller.

The rivalry between Rockefeller and Nixon was not without an ingredient of personal antipathy that transcended even that automatically generated by competition for a unique prize. Nixon thought of Rockefeller as a selfish amateur who would wreck what he could not control, a representative of the Establishment that had treated him with condescension. Rockefeller considered Nixon an opportunist without the vision and idealism needed to shape the destiny of our nation.

In 1968 I shared many of these attitudes toward Nixon, although I had little direct evidence on which to base a judgment. I attended the gallant press conference in which Rockefeller conceded to Nixon and I was sick at heart.

Some months after that depressing day--with Richard Nixon now President-elect--I was having lunch with Governor Rockefeller and a group of his advisers in New York City. We were discussing what attitude Rockefeller should take toward a possible offer to join the Nixon Cabinet. We were interrupted by a telephone call. It was a poignant reminder of Rockefeller's frustrating career in national politics that the caller was Nixon's appointments secretary, Dwight Chapin, who was interrupting Rockefeller's strategy meeting to ask me--not Rockefeller--to meet with his chief.

I presented myself at 10 a.m. on Nov. 25, at the Nixon transition headquarters in the Pierre Hotel. I thought it likely that the President-elect wanted my views on the policy problems before him. Chapin took me to a large living room and told me that the President-elect would be with me soon. I did not know then that Nixon was painfully shy. Meeting new people filled him with vague dread, especially if they were in a position to rebuff or contradict him. As was his habit before such appointments, Nixon was probably in an adjoining room settling his nerves and reviewing his remarks, no doubt jotted down on a yellow tablet that he never displayed to his visitors.

When at last Nixon entered the room, it was with a show of jauntiness that failed to hide an extraordinary nervousness. His subject was the task of setting up his new Government. He had very little confidence in the State Department. Its personnel had no loyalty to him; the Foreign Service had disdained him as Vice President and ignored him the moment he was out of office. He was determined to run foreign policy from the White House. He felt it imperative to exclude the CIA from the formulation of policy; it was staffed by Ivy League liberals who, behind the facade of analytical objectivity, were usually pushing their own preferences. Nixon invited my opinion.

I replied that he should not judge the Foreign Service's attitude toward a President by its behavior toward a candidate or even a Vice President. In any event, a President who knew his own mind would always be able to dominate foreign policy. I knew too little about the CIA to have an opinion. I agreed that there was a need for a more formal decision-making process. It should avoid the rigorous formalism of the Eisenhower Administration, but a new coherence and precision seemed to me essential.

Nixon outlined some of his foreign policy views. I was struck by his perceptiveness and knowledge so at variance with my previous image of him. He asked what in my view should be the goal of his diplomacy. I replied that the overriding problem was to free our foreign policy from its violent historical fluctuations between euphoria and panic, from the illusion that decisions depended largely on the idiosyncrasies of decision makers. Policy had to be related to some basic principles of national interest that would be maintained as Presidents changed.

At this point the conversation grew less precise. What I understood was that I had been asked whether in principle I was prepared to join his Administration in some planning capacity. I replied that in the event that Governor Rockefeller was offered a Cabinet post, I would be happy to serve on his staff.

In retrospect it is clear that my comment killed whatever minimal prospects existed for a Rockefeller appointment. Richard Nixon had no intention of having me join his Administration on the coattails of Nelson Rockefeller. One of my attractions for Nixon, I understood later, was that my appointment would demonstrate his ability to co-opt a Harvard intellectual; that I came from Rockefeller's entourage made the prospect all the more interesting.

The next day I received a phone call from John Mitchell's office, suggesting an appointment [to discuss] my position in the new Administration. It was not explained what position he was talking about.

I found Mitchell seated behind his desk puffing a pipe. Self confident and taciturn, he came straight to the point: "What have you decided about the National Security job?"

"I did not know I had been offered it."

"Oh, Jesus Christ," said Mitchell, "he has screwed it up again." Mitchell lumbered out. He returned in five minutes with the information that the President-elect wished to see me.

This time it was clear what Nixon had in mind; I was offered the job of Security Adviser. The President-elect repeated his view of the incompetence of the CIA and the untrustworthiness of the State Department. The position of Security Adviser was therefore crucial to his plan to run foreign policy from the White House.

Tensions on the Team

A ew days after my own appointment, Nixon informed me that William Pierce Rogers was to be his Secretary of State. He said that he and Rogers had been close friends in the Eisenhower Administration when Rogers was Attorney General, although their friendship had eroded later. Nixon considered Rogers' unfamiliarity with the subject an asset because it guaranteed that policy direction would remain in the White House. At the same time, Nixon said, Rogers was one of the toughest, most cold-eyed, self-centered and ambitious men he had ever met. As a negotiator he would give the Soviets fits. And "the little boys in the State Department" had better be careful because Rogers would brook no nonsense. Few Secretaries of State can have been selected because of their Presidents' confidence in their ignorance of foreign policy.

During his friendship with Nixon in the 1950s, Rogers had been much the psychologically dominant partner. He could not really grasp that now his was the subordinate position. Even less could he face the proposition that he might have been appointed, in part, because his old friend wanted to reverse roles.

This curious antiphonal relationship between the two men had the consequence of enhancing my position, but my own role was clearly a result of that relationship and not the cause of it. From the beginning Nixon was determined to dominate the most important negotiations. Throughout his term, when a state visitor was received in the Oval Office by Nixon for a lengthy discussion, I was the only other American present.

As time went by, the President, or I on his behalf, came to deal increasingly with key foreign leaders through channels that directly linked the White House Situation Room to the field without going through the State Department--the so-called back channels. Nixon moved sensitive negotiations into the White House where he could supervise them directly, get the credit personally, and avoid the bureaucratic dispute or inertia that he found so distasteful. In May 1971, the Secretary of State did not know of the negotiations in White House-Kremlin channels that led to the breakthrough in the SALT talks until 72 hours before a formal announcement. In July 1971, Rogers was told of my secret trip to China only after I was already on the way. In April 1972, my trip to Moscow was opposed by Rogers when he was told at the last minute.

Tensions in the Nixon policy machinery were produced also by an honest difference in perspective. Rogers had a shrewd analytical mind and outstanding common sense. But his perspective was tactical; as a lawyer he was trained to deal with issues as they arose "on their merits." My approach was strategic and geopolitical; I attempted to relate events to each other, to create incentives or pressures in one part of the world to influence events in another. Inevitably, Rogers must have considered me an egotistical nitpicker who ruined his relations with the President; I tended to view him as a neophyte who threatened the careful design of our foreign policy. The relationship was bound to deteriorate. Had both of us been wiser we would have understood that we would serve the country best by composing our personal differences and reinforcing each other. But Rogers was too proud, I intellectually too arrogant, and Nixon saw to it that we were both too insecure to adopt such a course.

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