NIXON: "LONELY, TORMENTED "

By Henry Kissinger

Nothing is more askew than the popular image of Nixon as an imperial President barking orders at cowed subordinates. Nixon hated to give direct orders--especially to those who might disagree with him. He rarely disciplined anybody; he would never face down a Cabinet member. When he met insubordination he sought to accomplish his objective without the offender's being aware of it. Over time this led to a fragmented Administration in which under pressure almost every member looked out for himself. In the sense of isolation this produced in Nixon and the lack of cohesion among his team lay one of the root causes of Watergate.

Nixon's fear of rebuffs caused him to make proposals in such elliptical ways that it was often difficult to tell what he was driving at, whether in fact he was suggesting anything specific at all. To Nixon, words were like billiard balls; what mattered was not the initial impact but the carom.

Every President since Kennedy seems to have trusted his White House aides more than his Cabinet. In Nixon's case the role of the assistants was magnified by the work habits of the President. Nixon tended to work in spurts. During periods when he withdrew, he counted on his assistants to carry on the day-today decisions; during spasms of extreme activity, he relied on his assistants to screen his more impetuous commands. They were needed to prevent the face-to-face confrontations he so disliked and dreaded. And they were to protect Nixon against impulsive orders or the tendency to agree with the visitors he did receive. White House Adviser H.R. Haldeman's staff system did not "isolate" the President as was often alleged; Nixon insisted on isolating himself; it was the only way in which he could marshal his psychological resources.

It was part of the assistant's task--expected by Nixon--to winnow out those "decisions" that he really did not mean to have implemented. A good rule of thumb was that the President's seriousness was in inverse proportion to the frequency of his commands and the emphasis with which they were put forward. Haldeman's indispensability derived from his extraordinary instinct for fathoming what his mercurial boss really had in mind. Haldeman was later disgraced for orders he carried out; he must be given his due for those he ignored or mitigated. In foreign policy I had this responsibility.

The response was electric to a speech Nixon gave on Nov. 3, 1969, appealing to the "Silent Majority" to support the U.S. role in Viet Nam. From the minute the speech ended, the White House switchboard was clogged with congratulatory phone calls.

Tens of thousands of supportive telegrams arrived. Nixon was elated. Professing indifference to public adulation, he nevertheless relished those few moments of acclaim that came his way.

He kept the congratulatory telegrams stacked on his desk in such numbers that the Oval Office could not be used for work, and for days he refused to relinquish them.

In early 1971 an operation against the Ho Chi Minn Trail in Laos was being weighed. Nixon was determined not to stand naked in front of his critics as he had the year before over Cambodia. This time he would involve his key Cabinet officers in the decision making, to force them to take some of the heat of the inevitable public criticism. But this determination did not extend to confronting both Secretary of State Rogers and Secretary of Defense Laird at the same time. Judging Rogers to be the most likely recalcitrant, Nixon conceived the idea of first maneuvering Laird into the position of proposing what Nixon preferred, and then letting his Secretary of Defense become the advocate of the plan within the National Security Council. He therefore considered it time well spent to preside over a succession of meetings, each covering exactly the same topic. For each meeting one more participant was added--someone whose view Nixon did not know in advance or whom he judged to be potentially hostile. The theory was that any recalcitrant was more likely to go along with a consensus backed by the President than with a free-for-all. By late January, I had heard the same briefing at least three times and was approaching battle fatigue.

Nixon was earning high marks for acting ability. He listened each time as if he were hearing the plan for the first time. His questions--always the same--were designed to convey to the new recruit that his chief was well disposed. And since everybody else had already agreed, it took a strong individual to stand his ground in opposition. No one tried.

Nixon's journey to a decision was often tortuous. But when the final moment of decision was reached, nervous agitation would give way to a calm decisiveness. At moments of real crisis Nixon would be coldly analytical. He would withdraw to the Executive Office Building. He would sit there with his yellow pad, working out his choices. He would call in close associates, going over the same questions again and again until one almost began to hope some catastrophe would provide a pretext for going back to one's own office to work. But once launched on the process he would--in foreign policy matters--invariably get to the essence of the problem and take the courageous course, even if it seemed to risk his political interest.

Nixon and his senior staff went to Perino's Restaurant in Los Angeles after the surprise announcement on July 15,1971, of his forthcoming visit to China. The President reveled in his triumph, moving slowly to our table in a booth in a corner, savoring the congratulations of some diners and inviting the good wishes of others who had not yet heard the news. We celebrated with crab legs and a bottle of Chateau La-fite-Rothschild 1961. As we left he lingered once again in the foyer, stopping guests by introducing me as the man who had traveled to Peking, to the puzzlement of several who had not been glued to the television set. It was a touching occasion. In his hour of achievement Richard Nixon was oddly vulnerable, waiting expectantly for recognition without quite being able to bridge the gulf by which he had isolated himself from his fellow men. In this sense the scene at Perino's symbolized the triumph and tragedy of Richard Nixon.

On Aug. 19, 1971, Nixon stopped in Dallas and (proving that presidential minds run in tandem) uttered the following memorable words: "The great challenge of peace is for each of us individually and for all of us, as 'one nation under God,' to rededicate ourselves to this magnificent American dream. With this as our moral equivalent of war, we can move into a generation of peace." It was hard to go wrong with a platform that offered peace as the moral equivalent of war.

[Before his secret visit to Moscow in April 1972, Kissinger met with Nixon.] A fuller account will have to await release of the relevant Nixon tape recordings. My only source is the notes I jotted down on the yellow pad that was standard equipment in the Oval Office. According to them, my instructions were not free of Nixon's customary hyperbole. I was to stress that the summit had the potential of being the most important diplomatic encounter "of this century." My notes also contain the detailed characterization of Nixon that I should give Brezhnev: "Direct, honest, strong... fatalistic--to him election [is] not the key. Will not be affected one iota by public opinion."

The strangest period in Nixon's presidency followed his overwhelming victory on Nov. 7, 1972. As his hour of triumph approached, Nixon withdrew ever more. His resentments, usually so well controlled, came increasingly to the surface. It was as if victory was not an occasion for reconciliation but an opportunity to settle the scores of a lifetime.

Nixon's mood came to expression the morning after the election. The White House staff had been awake much of the previous night celebrating his victory, though even then the festivities seemed to lack the boisterous spontaneity that usually marked such events. The President was too withdrawn and shadowy a figure for most of his followers. And yet there was great pride in an Administration that had steered the country into a period of hopeful tranquillity.

The good feeling was shattered within twelve hours. The White House staff had been asked to assemble at 11 a.m. in the Roosevelt Room. On the dot Nixon strode in. He seemed not at all elated. Rather, he was grim and remote. Nothing in his demeanor betrayed that he was meeting associates from perilous and trying times; he acted as if they were from a past now irrevocably finished. Without sitting down, he thanked the assembled group in a perfunctory manner. After about five minutes he turned the meeting over to Haldeman and left.

Haldeman wasted no time getting to the point. Every member of the White House staff was to submit his resignation immediately; we were to fill out a form listing the documents in our possession. The President would announce his personnel decisions for the new term within a month. The audience was stunned. It was the morning after a triumph, and they were being, in effect, fired. Victory seemed to have released a pent-up hostility so overwhelming that it would not wait even a week to surface; it engulfed colleagues and associates as well as opponents. The same appalling performance was repeated with the Cabinet an hour later.

Nixon had always felt cheated because the narrowness of his 1968 victory and the pressures of Viet Nam had prevented a house-cleaning of the bureaucracy, which he had mistrusted as packed with holdover Democrats. Still, it does not explain the frenzied, almost maniacal sense of urgency about this political butchery. To ask for resignations en masse within hours of being elected, to distribute forms obviously mimeographed during a campaign in which many of the victims had been working themselves to a frazzle, was wounding and humiliating. Nixon's later troubles had other causes, of course; yet he surely deprived himself of much sympathy by conveying in his hour of triumph an impression of such total vindictiveness and insensitivity to those who were well disposed to him. (I was not directly affected, having been told by Haldeman that my letter of resignation would be a formality.)

Triumph seemed to bring no surcease to him. He withdrew into a seclusion even deeper and more impenetrable than in his years of struggle. Isolation had become almost a spiritual necessity to this withdrawn, lonely and tormented man. It was hard to avoid the impression that Nixon, who thrived on crisis, also craved disasters.

During the second Inauguration [Jan. 20, 1973], Nixon moved as if he were himself a spectator, not the principal. There was about him a quality of remoteness, as if he could never quite bring himself to leave the inhospitable and hostile world that he inhabited, that he may have hated but at least had come to terms with. Perhaps it was simple shyness or fatalism; perhaps it was consciousness of a looming catastrophe.

What extraordinary vehicles destiny selects to accomplish its design. This man, so lonely in his hour of triumph, so ungenerous in some of his motivations, had navigated our nation through one of the most anguishing periods in its history. He had striven for a revolution in American foreign policy so that it would overcome the disastrous oscillations between overcommitment and isolation. Despised by the Establishment, ambiguous in his human perceptions, he had yet held fast, determined to prove that the strongest free country had no right to abdicate. What would have happened had the Establishment about which he was so ambivalent shown him some love? Would he have withdrawn deeper into the wilderness of his resentments, or would an act of grace have liberated him? By now it no longer mattered. Enveloped in an intractable solitude, he nevertheless saw before him a vista of promise to which few statesmen have been blessed to aspire, a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen friendships and give new hope to emerging nations. He was alone in his moment of triumph on a pinnacle that was soon to turn into a precipice.

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