Kissinger on Kissinger
By Winston Lord
140 Pages, St. Martin's Press
Kissinger on Kissinger is about the momentous foreign policy achievements of President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the years 1969 to 1974. It's a conversation among old friends
In 2014 and 2015 Winston Lord and K.T. MacFarland conducted a series of foreign policy panels for C-SPAN. A video interview with Dr. Kissinger was planned to cap off the foreign policy panels. But one hour-long video interview was not enough to do justice to the extraordinary accomplishments of Nixon and Kissinger, and one interview turned into six interviews. Kissinger on Kissinger represents a transcript of those six interviews.
When Nixon took office in January of 1969, the nation seemed to be on the verge of coming apart. 1968 saw the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, which were followed by rioting in Chicago, Washington, DC, and Baltimore. At the same time America was obsessed with and exhausted by the Vietnam War, a war that, according to CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, was unwinnable. Yet through the support and leadership of President Richard Nixon and the negotiating skills of Henry Kissinger, South Vietnam, with the aid of American air and naval support, had achieved a military standoff and a peace settlement with the North.
In the midst of all this Nixon and Kissinger began efforts to establish relations with The Peoples' Republic of China. It was their most important and far reaching foreign policy achievement. China and the U.S. had been at war on the Korean Peninsula for two decades and considered each other arch enemies. Conventional wisdom had it that relations with Russia would suffer if Nixon moved to establish relations with China. Many even thought it would lead to war. The opposite occurred, and relations with Russia actually improved. Shortly after his summit with Mao Zedon, Nixon met with the Soviets in Moscow.
"The opening to China broke this logjam, spawning rapid progress toward a summit, arms control, and a Berlin agreement. The president's visit to Moscow in May 1972 produced major agreements.”
The Cold War was by no means over, but relations with the Soviet Union were at a level of stability not seen in decades. But the diplomat gains with the Soviets came only after Nixon and Kissinger had met with the Chinese, and only with Nixon's refusal to tolerate a North Vietnamese victory over the South.
The final foreign policy challenge to be faced by Nixon and Kissinger came with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East. It began in October 6, 1973. A coalition of Arab states lead by Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. Israel pushed back until a UN cease fire was put in place on October 26, 1973. It was during this crisis the Kissinger became associated with the term “shuttle diplomacy.”
While Kissinger as an academic had immersed himself in the historic details of diplomacy, Nixon preferred to stay out of the details until negotiations were complete. Nixon and Kissinger would work out the broad outline of where negotiations should lead. Kissinger would then have authority to hammer out the details of how to get there in the negotiations, and Nixon would approve the final results.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger formed a near perfect partnership. Both believed in bold moves. There would be no half measures, since you pay the same price either way. Both viewed foreign policy as a Grand Strategy. Establishing relations with China, a move so bold as to be previously unthinkable, was not simply about China and America. It affected how the rest of the world dealt with China as well.
“[W]e always began every diplomatic effort with a question: 'What are we trying to do here? What is the purpose of this exercise?'”
As a result of their unique relationship, Nixon and Kissinger put together a string of astonishing foreign policy achievements. Statesmanship takes character and courage which both Kissinger and Nixon possessed. They had the vision to establish long range goals, and they had the courage to make the harrowing decisions to achieve them.
In August of 1974 Richard Nixon left office. Not long after Nixon's resignation the Democratic Congress voted to cut off all aid to South Vietnam, even overriding President Ford's veto. In 1975 without U.S. aid, South Vietnam fell to the North. One can only speculate what Nixon and Kissinger might have accomplished, and what might not have come undone, had President Nixon paid more serious attention to a third rate burglary at the Watergate Hotel.
But Kissinger on Kissinger deals only with the foreign policy initiatives that went before. It is a short book in the format of an interview that makes it readable and memorable, one that brings us behind the scenes at some of our history's most consequential events.
