The Calm After the Storm

DAVID HUME KENNERLY -- THE WHITE HOUSE
APRIL 1975: AS VIETNAM WAS FALLING
He understood global business better than American politics

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THE WHITE HOUSE

AN UNUSUAL COLLABORATION
Kissinger and Nixon shared a view of the world

The President and His Adviser
The breakthroughs of the Nixon administration were due to the fact that both Nixon and I subordinated our reservations about each other to a close collaboration based on mutual respect. The Quaker's son from Yorba Linda and the son of a secondary school teacher in Bavaria complemented each other's qualities in a special way. Nixon had the best personal knowledge of leaders around the world of any American political figure I have met. Foreign policy was his hobby, and he deepened his understanding of it by frequent travel. I had a better knowledge of history and of the conceptual side of geopolitics. Nixon operated by flashes of insight, to which he clung with remarkable persistence. My forte was translating general goals into long-range strategies--a task for which Nixon lacked the requisite patience.

Nixon had an instinct for the jugular. With respect to several key decisions, even when I came to view their necessity somewhat before he did, once Nixon decided to act, he went frequently beyond my recommendations. In 1970, after the North Vietnamese forces stationed in Cambodia broke out of their base areas and threatened to take over the entire country, Nixon and I were studying ways to neutralize the North Vietnamese offensive in Cambodia and prevent the whole country from being turned into a vast base area aimed at South Vietnam. I recommended an assault on Parrot's Beak, the communist base area closest to Saigon; after hesitating for nearly a month, Nixon opted for attacking every base area along the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. In 1973, when I tried to organize the Pentagon's civilian reserve air fleet for an airlift to Israel, Nixon overcame Pentagon foot dragging by ordering a military airlift and using the giant C-5 planes. In each case, Nixon's decision was vindicated by events.

The cooperation between the President and the National Security Adviser worked not just because we complemented each other's strengths (and perhaps reinforced each other's weaknesses with respect to our sensitivity to criticism and proclivity for sudden diplomatic coups), but above all because Nixon and I viewed international relations from a nearly identical perspective. Both of us believed that we were in trouble in Vietnam because our predecessors had launched the U.S. into an enterprise in a distant region for worthy causes but without adequately assessing the national interest and the likely cost. America's historic idealism had to be leavened with an assessment of national interest, and our approach to international relations had to move from episodic interventions to a strategic design that took account of the requirement of equilibrium. This was then--and probably still is at this writing--a minority view in a society which, never having experienced national tragedy, identifies the quest for peace with the missionary vocation of spreading its own domestic values around the world.

In the end, this vision led both the President and me to be harassed by what had been our normal constituencies. Liberals accused me of abandoning them in quest of power; conservatives thought Nixon had been seduced by the Establishment.

Nixon could have greatly eased his presidency by simply abandoning our allies in Indochina and placing the onus on his predecessors. He was surely given every incentive to do so when the architects of the debacle, in a collective fit of amnesia, constantly pressured him to go down the road of unconditional abandonment. Believing such a course to be dishonorable and against the national interest, Nixon played the hand he had been dealt and achieved a settlement his critics had declared unattainable--though it later unraveled, in large part because Congress cut off economic and military aid. Even while engaged in this searing process, Nixon managed to forge new policies toward China, strategic arms limitations, the Middle East peace process and access to beleaguered Berlin. In their essence, these policies set the course for the remainder of the cold war.

Nixon the Person
In the mythology of his traducers--and of some film portraits--Richard Nixon was a man given to histrionics, to shouting his prejudices at cowed subordinates and to dominating his environment by conveying his views with great, even overpowering insistence--frequently under the influence of alcohol. Nothing could be further from the real Richard Nixon--at least the Richard Nixon with whom I dealt.