Consolidating Authority

excerpted from the book

The Price of Power

Kissinger in the Nixon White House

by Seymour M. Hersh

Summit Books, 1983, paper

p37
Consolidating Authority

Henry Kissinger entered the White House on Inauguration Day with immense power and no illusions about its source. He understood that his authority would never be disputed as long as he kept his sole client-Richard Nixon -pleased. Kissinger knew that as an outsider he would never be totally trusted by Haldeman, Ehrlichman and other Nixon loyalists on the White House staff. But he also realized that he was an oasis of intellect and of knowledge about foreign policy in the Nixon White House.

p39
... Nixon had a consuming need for flattery and Kissinger a consuming need to provide it. Thus, after Nixon's first meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Dobrynin, on February I7, I969 the President repeatedly summoned Kissinger. "It was characteristic of Nixon's insecurity with personal encounters," wrote Kissinger, "that he called me into his office four times that day for reassurance that he had done well. He thought there had been a tough confrontation. My impression was rather the opposite-that the meeting had been on the conciliatory side." Nixon did not discuss the February I7 meeting in his memoirs, but he reported Kissinger's glowing assessment of his performance after a meeting with Dobrynin later that year: "Kissinger came back in after he had seen Dobrynin to the door. 'I'll wager that no one has ever talked to him that way in his entire career!' he said. 'It was extraordinary! No president has ever laid it on the line to them like that.' "

Kissinger's fawning was obviously a significant part of the job, but it was not the only reason for his accumulation of power. He and Nixon had seized the government from the beginning, and less than a month after the inauguration they were in the process of applying a joint stranglehold

p41
Throughout this early period, there were only faint hints in public about what was really going on. In early April, U.S. News & World Report took notice of the Kissinger dominance that had been suggested during Nixon's February trip to Europe. It was Kissinger "who seemed to be holding most of the background briefings for reporters" and Kissinger who was speaking for the President....

p51
The Nixon-Kissinger plan, as it evolved over the first year, had three basic elements. Most important, the Hanoi government must be shown that the Nixon Administration would stop at nothing-not even the physical destruction of North Vietnam's cities and waterworks-to end the war on terms it declared to be honorable. Second, the Soviet Union would be warned that its relationships with the United States in all areas, especially foreign trade, would be linked to its continuing support for Hanoi. When these threats failed to force Hanoi to make concessions at the peace table, a third major policy goal emerged: The antiwar movement in the United States would be challenged and neutralized, to gain enough time to pursue complete military victory.

An essential facet of the policy was secrecy. Only without public knowledge and public protests could Richard Nixon carry out his plan to threaten North Vietnam so strongly that it would be forced to sue for peace. In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that shortly after taking office, "I confidently told the Cabinet that I expected the war to be over in a year." But his Cabinet, like the rest of the government, was kept in the dark about the real reason for his confidence.

Nixon's secret policy had its roots in the Eisenhower era.

As the newly elected Vice President in I953, Nixon watched Dwight Eisenhower fulfill a campaign promise and end the Korean War six months after taking office. In Mandate for Change, 1953-56, Eisenhower revealed what was not said publicly at the time: that he had explicitly threatened to use atomic weapons to end the war. When he took office, Eisenhower wrote, a military offensive in North Korea was being considered by the U.S.-led United Nations forces helping South Korea defend itself: "To keep the attack from becoming costly, it was clear that we would have to use atomic weapons." Eisenhower decided, as he wrote, "to let the Communist authorities understand that, in the absence of satisfactory progress, we intended to move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons, and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean Peninsula. We would not be limited by any world-wide gentlemen's agreement." According to Eisenhower, word was quietly passed to the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union, and the end of the war was quickly negotiated. Eisenhower's long-time assistant and confidant, Sherman Adams, wrote that the President told him later that he had made the threat "sure that there was not the remotest chance we would actually have to carry out our threat; the Communists would simply throw up their hands and the war would be over."

Along with the nuclear threat, Eisenhower ordered a sharp escalation of the air war over North Korea. In early May I953, American bombers destroyed hydroelectric power plants on the Yalu River, destroying dams and creating floods that swamped twenty-seven miles of farmland. It was the first deliberate military attack on irrigation targets since Hitler's Luftwaffe destroyed dikes and dams in Holland late in World War II.

Nixon's attempt in I969 to emulate Dwight Eisenhower's methods of extricating America from an unpopular war was not an unconscious act of hero worship but a carefully thought-out strategy. Nixon had spelled out his policy the previous August in what he thought was an off-the-record talk to a group of southern delegates at the Republican convention. "How do you bring a war to a conclusion?" Nixon said in response to a question. "I'll tell you how Korea was ended. We got in there and had this messy war on our hands. Eisenhower let the word go out-let the word go out diplomatically-to the Chinese and the North Koreans that we would not tolerate this continual ground war of attrition. And within a matter of months, they negotiated. Well, as far as negotiation [in Vietnam] is concerned that should be our position.... I'll tell you one thing. I played a little poker when I was in the Navy . . .1 learned this-when a guy didn't have the cards, he talked awfully big. But when he had the cards, he just sat there-had that cold look in his eyes. Now we've got the cards.... What we've got to do is walk softly and carry a big stick. And that is what we are going to do."

Nixon did not mention nuclear weapons in his talk to the delegates, but before the convention he had told Richard J. Whalen, one of his speech writers and advisers, that if elected President, "I would use nuclear weapons." Nixon quickly added, as Whalen later recorded, that he did not mean he would use them in Vietnam, only that he would be willing "to threaten their use in appropriate circumstances."

As President, however, Nixon was aware that his threat could work only if North Vietnam believed he was capable of anything. Sometime early in 1969, he explained his secret strategy for ending the war to Haldeman as they strolled along the beach at Key Biscayne. He told Haldeman about the Eisenhower nuclear threats in I953 and how those threats had quickly ended the Korean War. Eisenhower's military career-he had been commander of the Allied Forces in World War II-had convinced the Communists that the threats were real. Nixon said he planned to use the same principle: the threat of maximum force. "I call it the madman theory, Bob," he said. "I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry-and he has his hand on the nuclear button'-and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."

There was a basic flaw in Nixon's "madman theory." Eisenhower's threat had been made at a time when the United States had a virtual monopoly on nuclear weapons. That situation did not exist in the late I960S, and the credibility of Nixon's threat was reduced by the possibility that the Soviet Union, or even Communist China, would retaliate after an American first use of nuclear weapons. Another drawback was the fact that Richard Nixon did not have Dwight Eisenhower's military background. Nonetheless, Haldeman wrote, Nixon believed that the Communists regarded him as an uncompromising enemy whose hatred for their philosophy had been repeatedly made clear in his two decades of public life. "They'll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it's Nixon," Haldeman quoted the President as saying. Nixon not only wanted to end the war, Haldeman added, he was absolutely convinced he would end it in his first year. "I'm the one man in this country who can do it, Bob," he told Haldeman.

The administration's immediate problem was one of technique: how to convey its ominous message to the Hanoi government. It was not that easy. For one thing, such a threat had to be kept totally secret. To do otherwise would trigger renewed antiwar demonstrations and perhaps destroy the traditional honeymoon Nixon was enjoying in the first months of his presidency. The question was how to "signal" the other side that Richard Nixon was prepared to be far more ruthless than Lyndon B. Johnson. The men in the White House found a quick answer.

The Price of Power

Henry Kissinger page

Home Page