Seymour M. Hersh - The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

F OR E LIZABETH , M ATTHEW , M ELISSA, AND J OSHUA

T HIS BOOK is an account of the foreign policy of the United States, presided over by Henry Kissinger, during Richard Nixons first term in the White House. It is also an account of the relationship between two men who collaborated on what seemed to be a remarkable series of diplomatic triumphs. These were the years when China was reclaimed by American diplomacy; when a much-praised agreement on strategic arms limitation (SALT) was negotiated with the Soviet Union; when a complex dispute in West Berlin was settled; and when American participation in the war in Vietnam, the most crucial issue facing the American presidency, was brought to a dramatic end with the signing of the Paris peace accords in January 1973, three days after Nixon was inaugurated for a second term.

The book had its beginnings in my experiences as a Washington reporter for the New York Times during those Watergate years when the pressand the nationbecame aware of the distance between the truth and what we were told had happened. But even at the height of the outcry over the methods and morality of the men at the top, foreign policy remained sacrosanct.

I began my research certain that, despite all that has been written, there was more to be known about the conduct of foreign affairs. It was no surprise to discover that personal ambition was sometimes entwined with diplomatic and strategic goals, that successful bargaining whether in White House meetings or at a summit was never an open process. No experienced reporter or government official expects otherwise. But as my interviewing proceeded I came to realize that even sophisticated public servants perceived something crucially different about the conduct of foreign policy in the Nixon White House. That difference and its cost both to the participants and to the country is what I have tried to describe.

My basic sources are more than 1,000 interviews with American and international officialssome retired, some still in governmentwho were directly involved in making and executing policy. Most of the people I talked with agreed to be quoted by name. I also relied on internal documents and on the published memoirs of those who themselves participated in the history of that time. Despite my many requests, neither Kissinger nor Nixon agreed to be interviewed for this book.

A FTER THE ELECTION , there would be much fancier offices, with antique desks, hand-woven rugs, possibly a view of the Rose Garden, and fireplaces that were kept burning year-round.

But now it was mid-September 1968, with the presidential election less than two months away, and the men who were responsible for drafting the foreign and domestic policy statements of the Nixon campaign were hard at work in their sparsely furnished New York City offices in what had once been the American Bible Societys headquarters. The old six-story building at Fifty-seventh Street and Park Avenue, scheduled for demolition, had been leased by the Nixon campaign that fall.

Richard M. Nixon was running far ahead of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in both the Harris and Gallup polls, but he and his staff knew that the race was far from over. For one thing, former Vice President Nixon had lost his last two electionsthe presidency to Senator John F. Kennedy in 1960 and the governorship of California to Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in 1962.

And then there was Vietnam.

Humphrey had yet to break with President Lyndon B. Johnson on the war, but what if he did? And what if Johnson decided to sue for peace in Vietnam in an effort to pull out the election for his Vice President and his party? Nixons vague campaign promisethat he would find an honorable solution to the warwould pale beside the real thing.

Most of the senior Nixon advisers were convinced that Nixons chance to become President hinged on Vietnam and the issues associated with it. One adviser, Bryce N. Harlow, a former speech writer and aide in the Eisenhower Administration, had already established liaison with a high official inside the Johnson White House, who was ready and willing to supply information about any last-ditch administration plans to settle the war. And clandestine contact had been made with President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam, in a carefully concealed effort to discourage him from participating in any peace talks prior to the election.

Given the immense stakes involved, Richard V. Allen, Nixons thirty-two-year-old coordinator for foreign policy research, was an important member of the Nixon campaign team. He was assigned a private office on the top floor of the old Bible Society Building, where, amid battered metal desks and squeaky typists chairs, he provided the traveling presidential candidate with drafts of speeches and statements.

Allen had been among the few to offer his support to Nixon in the months after his disastrous defeat in California. He believed even then that Nixon would be resurrected as President, or Secretary of State, or, at the least, as an minence grise in the Republican Party. Allen is a man of medium height, with the horn-rim eyeglasses, cherubic round face, and short hair that seemed the required style for the bright young Nixon men. By the mid-1960s he had become a minor figure among the conservative anti-Communist right in America, warning repeatedly in his articles and books that the Soviet call for peaceful coexistence was no more than a shield for its plan of world domination. By June 1968, when Nixon personally recruited him for his campaign staff, Allen had studied for a doctorate in political science at the University of Munich and was now a fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. He had not earned the doctorate but others thought he had. Throughout the 1968 campaign, his associates and the press often called him Dr. Allen.

For all his pretensions and rigid ideology, Allen could also be good company, and he enjoyed laughing at himself. Moreover, he realized that he did not yet have enough experience and expertise to serve as national security adviser in a Nixon administration. Allen did, however, have his personal choice for the jobHenry A. Kissinger, a Harvard professor of government who had served as New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefellers foreign policy adviser during Rockefellers campaign for the Republican presidential nomination earlier that year. He and Kissinger had first met in 1962, and Allen had renewed their acquaintance, shortly after he joined Nixons campaign, by telephoning Kissingerhis counterpart with Nelson Rockefeller.

Allen had long admired Kissingers hard line toward the Soviets and his published works on nuclear threats and deterrents, especially his Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which had been a best seller in 1957. Allen, then twenty-six, was among the founders of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C.one of the nations first conservative think tanksand Kissinger contributed to a collection of papers that Allen helped edit for the Center.

It made eminent sense for the two advisers to arrange breakfast together before the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach and agree to work together to avoid a bitter floor fight over Vietnam: Their collaboration resulted in a compromise plank, endorsed in advance by the Nixon and Rockefeller forces, that emphasized negotiations, not confrontation. The language was accepted without challenge at the convention. Allen had enjoyed staging clandestine meetings with Kissinger in Miami Beach, and somehow to escape the notice of the hordes of newspapermen who were everywhere that week.