Kit Mcmahon

Far from a sleeping partner

Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’

Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’

Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’ Kissinger, then at Harvard, had strongly supported Nixon’s rival for the Republican nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, openly deriding Nixon and calling him at one point ‘a hollow man … evil.’

Their subsequent longstanding and successful partnership, surviving Nixon’s pathological jealousy and suspicion of his adviser and his habit of telling crass jokes about ‘yids’ in his presence, is therefore a good example on both sides of Kissinger’s model for international relations: affectless, morally contentless, based simply on achieving the maximum that in his view could be achieved.

It is easy to forget that it was a partnership and that, until he was overborne by Watergate, Nixon’s contribution was as substantial and creative as Kissinger’s. The great opening to China was Nixon’s idea, not Kissinger’s and throughout his presidency his foreign policy was genuinely statesmanlike. I personally remember being addressed by him in September 1973, at a gathering of senior financial officials during the IMF Annual Meetings. Watergate dominated our image of him and in any case we would have expected no more than perfunctory banalities and homilies. But he surprised everyone with an undefensive, unjingoistic, genuinely intelligent, balanced and interesting survey of the world economy.

Alistair Horne, wanting to write about Kissinger, but faced with a personal archive weighing 33 tons, has decided to concentrate on a single year, 1973.

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