'Nixon and Kissinger': Partners in paranoia

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

from the May 15, 2007 edition

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Dallek is especially vivid when he succinctly describes the Nixon Administration's interference with events in Chile. Obsessed with Communist inroads even in the seeming backwater of South America, the White House helps bring about a right-wing coup that spells disaster for the country in the form of dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Kissinger scorns the "political mythology" of the administration's supposed role in the downfall of Chile's democratically elected leftist government. But Dallek finds evidence of a "concerted effort" to bring down the country's president that was both secretive ("our hand doesn't show on this one") and, ultimately, effective.

Why favor anticommunism over support of human rights? Dallek traces the seeds of Kissinger's motivations to the 1950s, when someone asked him which was worse, a revolutionary nation serving a just cause or a stable nation serving unjust goals. He replied that he would always choose "injustice and order."

"It was an article of faith," Dallek writes, "that would lead him into a number of questionable ... actions."

Dallek's voluminous book is sometimes bogged down by research, and he strangely fails to draw much from his own conversations with surviving players, Kissinger included. Still, the decades-old transcripts speak for themselves, revealing contrary tendencies toward both peace and war, all tinged with shades of political manipulation. At one point, Kissinger advises Nixon to postpone a pullout from Vietnam in 1972 "so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election."

As Dallek points out, "he had nothing to say about the American lives that would be lost in the service of Nixon's reelection."

Dallek provides plenty of other evidence to suggest that his two subjects fell victim to cynicism and their own flawed personalities, losing the chance to make better decisions. Both make "bargains with the devil," he writes: Nixon lies to everyone, from Congress to the public and the press, while Kissinger relentlessly refuses to confront his boss and insist on truth-telling.

Dallek explains their deception this way: "It was partly the product of arrogance – they believed they knew better than anyone else what best served the nation – and partly an aversion to criticism that any open debate was sure to bring."

The verdict of history – only one of their many obsessions – may be anything but kind to these most remarkable, powerful, and vainglorious men.

• Randy Dotinga is a Monitor correspondent.

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