The Nation: Nixon and Kissinger: Triumph and Trial

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U.S. history. Among other things, it has been an odd arrangement for Secretary of State William Rogers, whose department Nixon has largely bypassed in the making of foreign policy. For the President, Kissinger has been a combination of professor-in-residence, secret agent, ultimate advance man and philosopher-prince. In an important sense, he is Nixon's creation, using the power base of the presidency to roam the world and speak for Nixon, to set the stage for summits, to negotiate war and peace. There have been similar relationships before, but none exactly the same: Richelieu and Louis XIII, Metternich and Hapsburg Emperor Francis I, Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson, Harry Hopkins and F.D.R.

The Loyalist Who Never Joined the Team

In their personal dealings, Kissinger and Nixon tend toward formality, with a certain restraint and distance that are natural to both men. Each, in his way, is a somewhat enigmatic character. Despite moments of humor, Nixon remains his intense, somewhat rigid self, even with Kissinger. Both men have their private lives, and Kissinger is not on the list (a short one) of the President's intimate friends. For all his outer ego, his fierce driving of subordinates and his international celebrity, Kissinger has a servant's heart for Nixon when it comes to power and ideas. He has been willing to subject himself to the scorn of his academic peers (after the Cambodian invasion) and serve the President with a total loyalty that is matched inside the White House only by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler and Kissinger's own deputy on the National Security Council, General Alexander Haig. Once, after listening to department spokesmen advocating their parochial concerns before the National Security Council, Kissinger stalked out of the room, grumbling that "not a goddamned one of them except the President cared about the national interest."

Kissinger is not a team player in the almost obsessive sense that the other Nixon loyalists are. He will, for example, lunch on occasion with a reporter and provide background on the peace negotiations. He has no close friends inside the White House — and not a few enemies who resent his power and personal style, his dates with beautiful women and access to a larger, more glamorous world. Kissinger's strength in the Administration, so far, has been that he has won the President's confidence and trust, that they enjoy a remarkable professional rapport. Says one high-ranking U.S. diplomat: "The halls of the State Department are littered with the bones of those who thought they could split the President and Henry." The President even wrote Kissinger once: "Frankly, I cannot imagine what the Government would be without you."

Despite their dissimilarities, they share some traits. One is a contempt for bureaucracy. "In the bureaucratic societies," Kissinger once wrote, "policy emerges from a compromise which often produces the least common denominator, and is implemented by individuals whose reputation is made by administering the status quo." Both tend toward perfectionism. Kissinger drives his National Security Council staff to strive for that state of refinement in their position papers and memos that he likes to define as "meticulous" — a favorite adjective of approval.

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