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"Kissinger touched the President, and then held him, tried to console him, to bring rest and peace to the man who was curled on the carpet like a child."
Drained by the ordeal, Kissinger returned to his office. The phone rang. It was Nixon. Following custom, Kissinger's aide Larry Eagleburger listened on an extension—and was appalled. The President was drunk, rambling. Eagleburger hung up. The distraught Nixon requested of Kissinger: "Henry, please don't ever tell anyone that I cried and that I was not strong."
The fact that Kissinger obviously did tell someone is not surprising, given the book's descriptions of Kissinger's real attitude toward the President. Kissinger not only called Nixon "our meatball President" in front of aides, but at various times used such harsh terms as irrational, insecure, maniacal, dangerous, our drunken friend, like a madman, and said he possessed a "second-rate mind." He also thought Nixon was antiSemitic. Kissinger, explains the book, "saw in the President an antagonistic, gut reaction which stereotyped Jews and convinced Nixon that they were his enemies." One sign of that attitude was Nixon's frequent protest, "The Jewish cabal is out to get me."
On policy matters, Kissinger was impressed at times by Nixon's pragmatism in world affairs, but feared that he was not sophisticated enough to make the really complex policy decisions without help. "If the President had his way, we'd have a nuclear war every week," Kissinger sometimes claimed. When a Kissinger aide prepared a National Security Council briefing book on NATO for Nixon, Kissinger was impressed by it but ordered it rewritten nonetheless—to make it easier for the President to read. "Don't ever write anything more complicated than a Reader's Digest article for Nixon," he advised.
Distrusting the President, Kissinger set up a system of either taping or having an aide monitor every telephone conversation between the two. After such conversations, Kissinger would come out of his office, find out which of his secretaries had been listening, then ask: "Wasn't that the worst thing you ever heard in your life?" Once the eavesdroppers heard Nixon drunkenly pass along his friend Bebe Rebozo's advice on the Viet Nam War; another time they heard Nixon say of American servicemen killed or wounded in one major battle: "Oh, screw 'em." The secretaries also heard Nixon make what they considered "nasty references about the inferior intelligence of blacks."
Kissinger was fearful that Nixon's close aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman (he called them "idiots" and "the Nazis") might somehow learn of these transcripts of conversations. Kissinger spirited the documents off to the Pocantico Hills, N.Y., estate of Nelson Rockefeller, for whom he had long worked. But when Kissinger was reminded by one of his legal advisers that classified information must be retained on Government property, he retrieved the papers and hid them in Washington.