Robert Dallek: The Kissinger Presidency
Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public—not while he was alive, at any rate. And for good reason. It was Kissinger's practice while he served as Richard M. Nixon's national-security adviser and, later, as his secretary of state to have assistants listen in on dead-key extensions and make verbatim transcripts. The result is a record of conversations and decision-making rivaled only by the Nixon tapes—and a real-time rendering of events often at variance with official portrayals. It is ironic: Nixon and Kissinger presided over an administration that was unsurpassed (until the current one) in its secrecy, and yet produced the richest trove of presidential records in history, making the Nixon White House more transparent in retrospect than any before or since. During the past four years I have sifted through much of the Nixon administration's recently opened archives: all of those Kissinger telephone transcripts, for instance, along with the unpublished portions of the diaries of Nixon's first chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman; hundreds of hours of newly available Nixon tapes; and the national-security records (which total close to a million pages) that include Kissinger's private office files and the previously unread papers of Alexander M. Haig Jr., who was Kissinger's deputy at the National Security Council and then took Haldeman's place as chief of staff. Put it all together and an intimate picture emerges of the complex relationship between Nixon and Kissinger, men who were allies but also rivals—paranoid and insecure, deceitful and manipulative, ruthless and strangely vulnerable.
Nixon is dead, but Henry Kissinger remains very much a man in public life. In recent years, President George W. Bush has consulted him for advice on the Iraq war, which Kissinger has supported. Since 2001, Kissinger has, according to Bob Woodward's State of Denial, met with the president every other month, and with Vice President Dick Cheney every month, and he has advised President Bush that"victory … is the only meaningful exit strategy" for Iraq. So it is a good moment to visit the newly available documents and transcripts for the fresh detail they provide. They show Kissinger at moments of high drama—for instance, during the Yom Kippur War, when he made decisions of utmost gravity while keeping Nixon at arm's length. They show a man whose growing power derived from Nixon's deepening incapacity. And they reveal Kissinger's troubling personality and methods across a broad front....