Reply #52: New look at Nixon-Kissinger decisions draws parallels to today's events

[ProSense]

New look at Nixon-Kissinger decisions draws parallels to today's events

BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI

New York Times
Article Last Updated: 05/23/2007 08:11:09 AM CDT

The current war in Iraq is mentioned only once in Robert Dallek's engrossing new book, "Nixon and Kissinger," and yet the reader cannot help regarding his account of the Nixon White House and its handling of the Vietnam War as a kind of parable about the presidency of George W. Bush and its determination to stay the course in Iraq.

Indeed, Dallek seems to have taken up the much-written-about subject of Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser (and later secretary of state) Henry A. Kissinger with just this sort of subtext in mind.

Though much of the Nixon White House's copious tape and paper trail has been available for years, and books by insiders like H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, have minutely chronicled the Jacobean atmosphere in that embattled White House, Dallek has shrewdly drawn upon recently declassified archives, including transcripts of Kissinger's phone calls and the papers of Alexander M. Haig Jr., Kissinger's deputy on the National Security Council and later Nixon's chief of staff.

Through these, the author has succeeded in drawing a compelling portrait of the two men while analyzing the momentous consequences their foreign policy decisions had on America and the world.

What Dallek has done, and done remarkably deftly, in this volume is focus on the relationship between the two men and the ways in which their personal traits - their drive, their paranoia and their hunger for power and control - affected their performance in office and informed their foreign policy decisions. Each was given to impugning the other's emotional stability: President Nixon would ask his aide John Ehrlichman to talk to Kissinger about getting therapy, while Kissinger would frequently refer to his boss as "that madman," "our drunken friend" and "the meatball mind." At the same time, the two men had more than a little in common, including tumultuous childhoods that left them painfully insecure and a self-serving grandiosity that made them feel they could rationalize dubious means to achieve their ends.

Nixon's determination to run foreign policy out of the White House meant that Congress and State Department analysts were often cut out of the loop on important decisions. Nixon, for instance, ordered the massive bombing campaign against Hanoi and Haiphong in December 1972 while Congress was in recess for the Christmas break, telling Kissinger that "one of the beauties of doing it now" is "we don't have the problem of having to consult with Congress."

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