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Nixon takes a particular delight in Kissinger's secret operations and ruses. Sometimes Nixon has even helped to throw observers off the track — spending an apparently nonchalant weekend at Camp David when a secret meeting was on in Paris. So secretly have the Paris talks been held that only a handful of Administration officials saw the draft agreement that Kissinger hammered out with Le Due Tho in their five-day session last October. CIA Director Richard Helms obtained his copy through his sources in Viet Nam and asked Kissinger if the text was accurate. Said Kissinger suavely: "It has the odious smell of the truth." On another level, late one night before the election, Nixon came back to Washington from a campaign trip and Kissinger flew in from Saigon. The President told Kissinger that the two of them had been on different journeys that day, but he believed the roads led to the same goal.
The relationship between the two has occasionally been strained, however, most notably by a recent two-hour interview that Kissinger foolishly granted to Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci. The quotes in that performance were so startling and hubristic that some readers familiar with Kissinger's intellectual style suspected Fallaci of embroidery. "President Nixon showed great vigor, a great ability, even in picking me," Kissinger is quoted as saying, apparently in all seriousness; of course he was quite right, but perhaps he should not have been the one to say it. In an interview that fairly bristles with the first person singular pronoun, Kissinger revealed that he loved "acting alone" in his diplomacy: "The Americans love the cowboy who comes into town all alone on his horse, and nothing else. He acts and that is enough, being in the right place at the right time, in sum a western. This romantic and surprising character suits me because being alone has always been part of my style."
The idea of Kissinger as Jimmy Stewart has a certain ridiculous charm, although the notion is probably closer to Nixon's image of himself as expressed in Six Crises a decade ago. In any case, the President's men were not amused.
"About this point," says one White House source, "it was high noon in the old West Wing. At least a half dozen people who matter here in the White House hit the ceiling when they read that story. They called it the biggest ego trip any one had ever taken." Soon afterward, at press briefings, Ziegler pointedly and repeatedly emphasized that the President was "giving instructions" to Kissinger about the Paris negotiations, deflating any suggestion that Kissinger was a diplomatic Destry. Since then, Kissinger seems deliberately to have kept a very low profile — although that might have reflected discouragement with the progress of the peace talks.
The new spirit of national interest and Realpolltik naturally dictated disengagement from Viet Nam. Yet Saigon's hold on the U.S. was once again disastrously tenacious. Elected in 1968 on a pledge to end the war, Nixon chose an excruciatingly slow four-year policy of Vietnamization — turning the war over to Thieu's forces — as a means, so he thought, to salvage some "honor" from the commitment. His forays to Moscow and Peking this year were decisive in turning Hanoi toward