The Price of Power

excerpted from the book

The Price of Power

Kissinger in the Nixon White House

by Seymour M. Hersh

Summit Books, 1983, paper

p636
The Price of Power

Richard Nixon's collapse began early in 1973. Within weeks after his second inauguration, he became obsessed with the incessant plotting and Iying about Watergate that eventually destroyed his presidency. In his memoirs of this period, discussion of foreign policy issues all but disappears. At one point, he wrote, in mid-March of 1973, "I needed desperately to get my mind on other things. He knew by then, as his aides did also, that it would take all his abilities to keep the various White House illegalities from leaching into print.

It was sometime in these first few months of 1973 that Nixon's active collaboration with Henry Kissinger came to an end. No longer would there be elaborate scheming over Soviet policy and Soviet "threats." The "madman theory" died a natural death, as Nixon and Kissinger began their separate attempts to hide their secrets.

Kissinger had one shining moment before the crisis of Watergate set in. He made his fifth visit to Peking in mid-February and agreed with the Chinese leadership on an exchange of liaison offices in Peking and Washington. But the official American-Chinese relationship froze there, and full diplomatic relations were not established until the Carter Administration came into office.

Foreign affairs became all but moot in the remaining months of the Nixon Administration. SALT I did not lead to SALT II. A Kissinger attempt to proclaim 1973 the "Year of Europe" and reaffirm American dominance among its NATO allies turned into a fiasco as Europe's leaders assailed Kissinger's opinion, enunciated in April 1973, in his first major public address, that "The United States has global interests and responsibilities. Our European allies have regional interests."

Middle East policy remained stagnant; Kissinger and Nixon simply did not understand the message Anwar Sadat was sending in late 1972 and early 1973 -that he would be forced to invade Israel unless there were serious negotiations on Israeli disengagement from the Sinai. Sadat had ordered Soviet troops and advisers out of Egypt in mid-1972 in an attempt to convince the Nixon Administration that his government was not pro-Communist. The White House did more than miss the signal: Sadat was reviled as a fool who, by unilaterally ousting the Soviets, had thrown away an opportunity to bargain. If anything, Kissinger saw Sadat's move as a victory for his policy of support for Israel, a view he held throughout much of 1973. In October 1973, the Middle East war broke out, and Kissinger began what the press began to call his shuttle diplomacy, negotiations in which he managed to achieve the basic underpinning of the various Rogers plans that he had helped sabotage for years: an Israeli disengagement. Kissinger's much-vaunted success in the Middle East would be short-lived, for the negotiations never came to grips with the real issue at stake: a future homeland for the Palestinians.

Vietnam remained a quagmire but no longer a front-page quagmire. The Vietnam peace was, of course, not a peace but a continuation of war. The bloodshed, which was initially provoked by Nguyen Van Thieu and his army, surprised no one, except those Americans who wanted to believe that "peace with honor" had been established. In June 1973, Congress finally voted to ban funds for all military activity throughout Indochina, including the bombing of Cambodia, which was to cease on August ~5. Lon Nol thus joined Nguyen Van Thieu as a doomed leader. Throughout the spring, Nixon and Kissinger could do little more than repeatedly threaten to unleash the B-52s once again on North Vietnam. In their memoirs, both would blame Congress and Watergate for the failures of American policy. "With every passing day," Kissinger wrote, "Watergate was circumscribing our freedom of action. We were losing the ability to make credible commitments, for we could no longer guarantee Congressional approval." Kissinger's basic complaint was, astonishingly, not even disguised: Watergate had returned the American Constitution to the making of foreign policy.

There is little doubt that in early 1973, as Nixon and Kissinger insisted in their memoirs, the President was indeed prepared to live up to his secret commitment to Thieu and renew the bombing in North and South Vietnam. The Kissinger office journal, in an entry in mid-March, discussed the bombing decision as a fait accompli; the only issue was whether to wait for the final batch of American troop withdrawals. There was a series of leaked stories to the usual columnists that March in an attempt to mitigate what everyone in the White House realized would be another post-bombing wave of public condemnation. At a news conference on March 15, Nixon alluded to Hanoi's resupply efforts-which were not barred by the Paris peace agreements-and issued a warning: ". . . I would only suggest that based on my actions over the past four years, that the North Vietnamese should not lightly disregard such expressions of concern when they are made, with regard to a violation."

Watergate stopped Nixon. As the scandal flared in late March and April, with the first reports that the White House had made cover-up payments to buy the silence of the Watergate break-in team, renewed bombing became impossible. It would only have increased the pressure for full-scale investigations into the President's conduct, and such investigations would turn up-as Nixon, Kissinger, and others had to fear-the illegal wiretapping and spying that had been authorized by a President trying to hide his real policies in Vietnam and elsewhere from the public and his own administration.

It had come full circle. Nixon and Kissinger had designed a policy for Southeast Asia of secret threats and secret military activities. To protect those secrets they had resorted to illegalities. And then, years later, those illegalities had become a public issue just at a time when the administration was finally on the verge of achieving a stalemate in Vietnam. There is a strong possibility that the White House's secret peace agreement-based on a guarantee of continued bombing and aid on behalf of the South Vietnamese-might have succeeded in keeping the South non-Communist for many more years. Congress, which had refused throughout Nixon's first term to legislate an end to funding for the war, was now anxious to strike at the President, and Nixon knew that more bombing would lead to a congressional vote to cut off the money at once. Nixon's and Kissinger's contempt for Congress' delayed courage could only have been heightened by their belief that the vast majority of the American public, as the White House polls had shown in 1972, would have supported the bombing in the name of stopping communism and salvaging "peace with honor."

For Nixon and Kissinger, there could only be bitter irony: A war they could have won with a secret agreement had been lost because of the illegal steps that had been taken years earlier to win. As both the memoirs showed, neither man ever came to grips with the basic vulnerability of their policy: They were operating in a democracy, guided by a constitution, and among a citizenry who held their leaders to a reasonable standard of morality and integrity.

p640

... Kissinger and Nixon would repeatedly claim that the failures in South Vietnam and Cambodia were not their responsibility but the fault of Congress, which had cut off funding for the war. Even the public release of the secret Nixon-Thieu commitments in the spring of 1975, as Saigon fell, failed to provoke a reexamination of the Nixon-Kissinger war strategy. America proved a sore loser in Vietnam, and quickly turned its back not only on its policies but also on its young men who had fought, suffered, and died there.

In the end, as in the beginning, Nixon and Kissinger remained blind to the human costs of their actions-a further price of power. The dead and maimed in Vietnam and Cambodia-as in Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra, and the Middle East-seemed not to count as the President and his national security adviser battled the Soviet Union, their misconceptions, their political enemies, and each other.

The Price of Power

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