Content area
Full Text
Foreign policy is the area in which Richard Nixon's unprecedented resignation as president over Watergate has least obscured his achievements. The geopolitical and structural approaches he brought to foreign policy in a time of transition-marked by an end of the bipartisan Cold War consensus-have generally been praised, with the exception of his conduct of the war in Vietnam.
Any revisionist approach to Nixon's management of foreign policy must begin by attempting to place in perspective the complex interaction that developed between Nixon and Henry Kissinger, whose "advanced megalomania" remains legendary.l In retrospect, I believe that one of the most unfortunate decisions the president-elect made during the interregnum was to appoint Kissinger, about whom all Nixon knew was that as a Nelson Rockefeller supporter Kissinger had been openly disdainful of him and his bid for the Republican nomination in 1968. If Nixon thought Kissinger's views on U.S. policy were important, he could have employed him as consultant to the National Security Council (NSC), as the Kennedy administration had done. This opinion, however, was not shared either by Nixon or most of his former advisers, one of whom insisted to me that "the care and feeding of Henry" was worth all the paranoia, backbiting, leaking, rumor-mongering, and pseudo-intellectual posturing that Kissinger brought to the White House.2
Why Nixon chose Kissinger to head the NSC is still not entirely clear-given they had not met before the 1968 election and Kissinger's views on foreign policy did not coincide with Nixon's. A review of Kissinger's career only partially explains the president's choice.
Kissinger: The Best "Bastard Feudalist"
Paid, rather than unpaid service, gave rise to a system of patronage, known as "bastard feudalism," at the end of the medieval period that would continue to the present3 Payment for services rendered became the "quintessence" of that system. Once appointed Kissinger typically began to make himself indispensable to Nixon, as only the most skillful twentieth-century "bastard feudalist" could. He later referred to White House politics under Nixon as "not so different from life at royal courts." Others have referred to the intrigue permeating Nixon's Oval Office as having the "atmosphere of an Italian Renaissance Court." However described, one thing is true about Kissinger's brand of "bastard feudalism": "he derived his power wholly...