'Nixon and Kissinger': Partners in paranoia

New details on the Nixon-Kissinger power pair reveal their rivalry and dependency.

By Randy Dotinga

from the May 15, 2007 edition

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It's been a good decade for American presidents with bad reputations. Ulysses S. Grant, John Tyler, and even the hapless Warren G. Harding have gone through a kind of historical rehab thanks to sympathetic biographers.

But the buck stops with Richard Nixon. In a searing new double biography, one of our most prominent presidential historians argues that Nixon was less than the brilliant foreign-policy mastermind of popular memory. Instead, he's depicted as often craven, isolated, and reckless, tied into knots by his rivalry with an obsequious and cynical Henry Kissinger.

Despite significant victories on the international stage, these partners demonstrated that "talent, knowledge and experience do not guarantee successful outcomes in foreign policy," writes Robert Dallek in Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, an encyclopedic and revealing inside look at the two men who essentially – if not always effectively – ran the world in the early 1970s.

In this whopping 752-page book, Dallek draws upon recently released audiotapes and transcripts of thousands of hours of White House conversations. As Dallek notes, the most secretive presidential administration of all, at least up to that point, is ironically the most "transparent" in history thanks to its fanatical record keeping.

Armed with the transcripts and tapes, Dallek provides new insight into the disasters and near-disasters of the Nixon administration on fronts ranging from the Soviet Union and Vietnam to the Middle East and South Asia.

As Dallek himself notes, much in his book is not new. His portrait of Nixon as ogre – paranoid, bitter, obsessed with his own reputation and reelection – is hardly groundbreaking. Neither is the portrayal of Kissinger, his national security adviser and later secretary of State, as egomaniacal sycophant.

But the details still hold the power to shock, from Nixon's profane diatribes and emotional breakdowns to his undermining of Vietnam peace talks immediately before the 1968 presidential election in order to scuttle his opponent's chances.

Even during the breakthrough in relations with China, perhaps Nixon's most lasting legacy outside Watergate, the president and his minions can't rise above "political image-making and petty bickering."

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