Friends and foes -- and ‘Partners’

ROBERT DALLEK already has established himself as one of our most formidable chroniclers of the modern presidency, but his new book, “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power,” sets a new benchmark for the field and surely will come to be regarded as a classic work of contemporary American history.

Dallek is the author of a magisterial two-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson and also of the deservedly bestselling “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.” This book surpasses them in the freshness of its research, the relevance of the author’s analysis and the subjects’ compelling nature.

When the newly elected President Richard Nixon hired the former Harvard professor Henry A. Kissinger as his national security advisor, they hardly knew each other. By the time Kissinger became Nixon’s secretary of State, theirs had become one of the most consequential collaborations in the history of American diplomacy. Dallek, a distinguished academic historian, has mined thousands of newly available transcripts of Kissinger’s phone conversations, newly declassified tapes from the Nixon White House and unpublished diaries of and interviews with H.R. Haldeman and Alexander M. Haig to construct this altogether fresh account of those tumultuous years.

The book brims with insight into the origins of detente with the Soviet Union, the epic opening to China, the torture of Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the era of shuttle diplomacy in the Mideast and, perhaps most chilling, the covert intervention in Chile that overthrew President Salvador Allende. (One of the most disturbing aspects of the last account is how diligently Nixon and Kissinger ignored the advice of U.S. diplomats on the ground there and how determinedly they had to search for marginal Chilean military figures prepared to overthrow that country’s democracy.)

What sets Dallek’s account of the Nixon-Kissinger partnership so forcefully apart from others who have attempted it is his carefully sourced insight into the sick psychodynamics of their relationship. While teaching history at UCLA in the 1980s, the author underwent several years of formal psychoanalytic training, and, while he is too faithful to both disciplines to play armchair shrink, the experience informs his judgments. He’s particularly shrewd and persuasive when it comes to Nixon’s and Kissinger’s mutual and tormenting anxieties as self-made men and with Kissinger’s strange accommodation to a casually and persistently anti-Semitic boss, who sometimes referred to him, even in his presence, as “my Jew boy.”

One of the telling aspects of the Nixon-Kissinger partnership that Dallek highlights over and over again is how both men, so seemingly unaware of their unexamined personal contradictions, were so attuned to and vigilant concerning the difficulties presented by the other’s problematic character. Both men seem to have worried continually that the other, while brilliant, was a treacherous and unstable nut.

Nixon’s behavior, so often strangely awkward when a touch of routine humanity was required, became increasingly bizarre as the Watergate crisis slid toward impeachment. When Kissinger married Nancy Maginnes in March of 1974, the couple honeymooned at a private estate outside Acapulco, Mexico. When the president made a personal congratulatory call to the bride, he spent most of it warning her “against poisonous snakes in Acapulco and the need to extract the venom promptly should either of them be bitten.” (Dallek’s psychoanalytic training gives him an eye for that sort of subtly telling detail, but his discretion as an historian and writer allows him to let the anecdote speak resonantly for itself.)

Issues of character bedeviled Nixon and Kissinger’s relationship from the outset. After hiring Kissinger, Nixon was soon telling his then-chief of staff and longtime confidant Haldeman that “Henry’s personality problem is just too Goddamn difficult for us to deal [with] ... Goddamn it Bob, he’s just psychopathic about trying to screw [then-Secretary of State William] Rogers.” At one point, Nixon told his domestic affairs advisor John Ehrlichman that he thought Kissinger needed psychiatric treatment.

For his part, Kissinger came to refer to Nixon as “our drunken friend” and as “that mad man.” When the 1973 Yom Kippur War brought the United States and Soviet Union into a perilous confrontation, now Secretary of State Kissinger -- with the complicity of his former National Security Council Deputy Haig -- cut the president of the United States out of the decision-making because he was concerned that Nixon was incapacitated and unstable as the result of depression, heavy drinking and prescription sleeping drugs. Kissinger’s control of the situation -- by then he was functioning, in foreign affairs, at least, as kind of “co-president” -- was so thorough that, on the night of Oct. 11, then deputy national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, another former Kissinger aide, telephoned the secretary of State to inform him that British Prime Minister Edward Heath, leader of America’s closest ally, was demanding a telephone conversation with Nixon in the next 30 minutes. As Kissinger’s telephone transcripts reveal, he instructed Scowcroft to put off Heath. “When I talked to the President, he was loaded,” Kissinger said, telling Scowcroft to have the prime minister call the secretary of State instead. More of what amounted to a bureaucratic coup followed, and on the night of Oct. 24, as the Soviet Union threatened to send troops into the Sinai to relieve an Egyptian army the Israelis had encircled, Kissinger -- acting on his own initiative and without either consulting or informing Nixon -- put the United States’ global military forces on “Def Con 3,” a state of global alert that had been activated only once before, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Nixon and Kissinger are admired in some quarters today as preeminent practitioners -- perhaps the last, in fact -- of a distinctive American brand of realpolitik, one that put a hard-headed appraisal of this country’s strategic and material interests ahead of any other consideration. So they were, though as Dallek so convincingly points out with one critical caveat: Time and again, both men subordinated their cold-eyed analysis of foreign affairs to what they regarded as more urgent -- and more urgently personal -- domestic considerations.

In Nixon’s case, that was his need for reelection, which certainly prolonged the Vietnam War far beyond what both the president and his foreign policy advisors correctly believed the facts on the ground justified. Both men knew and admitted that the war was lost long before Nixon’s reelection campaign, but they were unwilling to accelerate the U.S. withdrawal because it might have undercut the president’s prospects at the polls.

Kissinger’s concerns had mainly to do with his reputation as the greatest diplomat of his era -- or, as he seemed to think, ever. He did perform with great skill during an almost unimaginably perilous era, when the stakes at play on the international table literally were global life and death. And yet, that engendered not confidence but a malignant grandiosity. As he confided to a friend shortly before Nixon’s resignation: “What’s holding things together is my moral authority abroad and to some extent at home. If that’s lost, we may really be in trouble.”

Whatever forms of authority Kissinger may have exercised over the minds of others, “moral authority” clearly never was among them.

Dallek’s “Nixon and Kissinger” is everything one could want in a contemporary history -- a meticulously researched story, written with unobtrusive elegance, unsparing in its judgments, but tempered by sobriety and a genuine compassion for its compelling yet breathtakingly flawed subjects. It also fairly vibrates with up-to-the-minute relevance, since we now know that Kissinger has regularly advised both President George W. Bush (the onetime secretary of State regarded the chief executive’s father as “an idiot”) and, more regularly, Vice President Dick Cheney on the Iraq war. The origins of that advice, as well as Cheney’s and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s insistence on rolling back the post-Vietnam limits on presidential power, are clear from this book.

So, too, is this: Statecraft without calculation is chaos; statecraft that is only calculation is a deadly house of cards.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com