They ran US foreign policy at the height of the Cold War but doubted each other's sanity. Now their unlikely partnership has come under closer scrutiny than ever before

Apr. 05, 2007- Their entwined careers at the apex of American foreign policymaking followed exactly opposite trajectories. One was the ambitious Jewish professor who started as the creature of his anti-Semitic boss, yet rose to become the most powerful and - at least for a while - the most admired secretary of state in modern times. The other was the man who embodied the Imperial Presidency, yet whose blend of autocracy and insecurity led him to show such contempt for the law that he departed the scene disgraced as no president before him.

These two men were distrustful of each other to the point of paranoia. At various points, each expressed doubts to intimates about the other's very sanity. Yet they needed each other, and in many respects they were highly similar. Both were masterful strategic thinkers. Both were addicted to conspiracy and secrecy. Both took a profoundly cynical view of their fellow men; both were thus practitioners of realpolitik, accepting the world as it was, and assuming that other world leaders, whether in Moscow, Beijing, Paris or Hanoi, would act from the same ruthless self interest as themselves.

These two extraordinary individuals are of course Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. For nearly six years, until Nixon's forced resignation in 1974, they ran American foreign policy as their private fiefdom. The period saw some of the most momentous events of the second half of the 20th century: détente with the Soviet Union, the unwinding of the Vietnam War, the historic opening to Communist China, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War that came within an ace of producing a direct superpower confrontation to rival the Cuban missile crisis.

Their relationship has been well documented, not least thanks to the secret Oval Office taping system, the revelation of which, and of the Watergate conversations it had recorded, led directly to Nixon's downfall. Amazingly, however, there is more, revealed in a new book.

The historian and author Robert Dallek has already produced a magnificent two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, Nixon's equally complex (and scarcely less anguished) predecessor in the White House. Now, with Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, to be published this month, he has provided the most detailed, "warts-and-all" portrait of a relationship that shaped American and world history.

The source material is both new and exhaustive. Dallek has pored through 20,000 pages of hitherto unpublished pages of Kissinger's phone transcripts.

He has scrutinised yet another batch of Nixon Oval Office tapes, and examined unpublished parts of the diaries of H R Haldeman, Nixon's chief-of-staff - as well as previously unread papers of Alexander Haig, the Kissinger aide who replaced Haldeman and who had perhaps a closer view than anyone (even Kissinger), of Nixon's Shakespearian fall.

Out of this material, Dallek has constructed a riveting story, studded with extraordinary incident - how Nixon in 1971 wondered to an aide after a bout of Kissinger histrionics whether his national security adviser needed psychiatric help, and how Kissinger would grovel before his master, flattering him and even criticising his fellow Jews for their "self-serving" behaviour: "You can't even tell the bastards anything in confidence, because they'll leak it."

Later, of course, the roles were reversed. By 1973, Watergate was looming ever larger, and Nixon increasingly was a prisoner in the White House, alone and drinking, brooding and immersed in self-pity. As the shadow of possible impeachment lengthened, foreign affairs became both an escape and the sole means of maintaining his reputation.

But by then Nixon's energies were absorbed in fighting off prosecutors and the demands for surrender by those incriminating Oval Office tapes. Thus, as the administration unravelled, Kissinger became ever-more indispensable. By the time of the Yom Kippur War, he was in virtually complete control.

Informed by the Israelis on the morning of 6 October 1973 that they had been attacked by Egypt and Syria, Kissinger waited three hours before informing his president, so that he could organise the US response himself. On 19 October, Kissinger - not Nixon - conducted negotiations with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev.

A few days later, as the crisis reached its climax, when Brezhnev threatened a unilateral Soviet intervention to rescue a trapped Egyptian army, it was Kissinger and top White House aides - not Nixon - who took the decision to raise US global military readiness to "Def Con 3", a level reached only once before, during the Cuban missile crisis, and since, during the 1991 Gulf War and after September 11 2001.

So precise is Dallek's story that the relationship may be expressed as lines on a graph. The point at which the ascending fortunes of Kissinger and the descending ones of Nixon intersect may be plotted exactly: the December 1972 issue of Time magazine, depicting the pair as joint Men of the Year, with both their pictures on the cover. The honour marked Nixon's landslide re-election victory in the previous months, which in turn reflected the perceived success of his foreign policy - a policy, however, already largely identified with the tirelessly self-promoting Kissinger.

The US pullout from Vietnam was about to be enshrined in the January 1973 Paris accords, while six months earlier, Nixon had travelled to Beijing for his stunning summit with Mao. Yet he was acutely jealous of the equal prominence accorded to Kissinger by Time (and must have been even more furious when Kissinger, not he, was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts over Vietnam). Until the Time cover, Nixon had been the dominant element. Afterwards, as Watergate turned from a "third-rate burglary" into a scandal that engulfed and paralysed the White House, Kissinger increasingly held the reins.

Time, however, got it right. The pair were a tandem. The two partners were yoked to each other whether they liked it or not; each depended on the other for his success. Without Nixon's patronage, Kissinger would never have been in a position to shape events. Without the like-minded Kissinger, the president's policies would never have been as expertly implemented. Nixon is among the most fascinating and tragic of presidents: a gifted strategic thinker, who was flawed to the point of self-destruction. Kissinger was surely the most creative and powerful of foreign policy advisers to any president, first as national security adviser, and then as secretary of state when he held both jobs at once.

Comparison with the current regime at the White House only heightens that impression. The realism of Nixon and Kissinger could not stand in sharper contrast to the naïve idealism that prevails under George Bush. If Nixon was complex, Bush is simple, if not simplistic. In terms of foreign policy, Nixon was eminently prepared for the presidency. Bush's proper calling in life was as a commissioner of Major League Baseball.

But there are striking similarities as well. Both were obsessed by secrecy (though, as Dallek points out, thanks to the very paranoia of Nixon and Kissinger, no administration has ever left such extensive records to posterity). Urged by Dick Cheney, Bush has created a new Imperial Presidency to rival that of Nixon.

More importantly, both are war presidencies - although Nixon inherited his war, unlike Bush, who in Iraq launched a war of choice. As early as 1969, Nixon and Kissinger were privately accepting that they could not win in Vietnam - even as the then president was wading into Democratic critics of the war as "the party of surrender". Today, identical language issues from the Bush White House against advocates of withdrawal from Iraq.

As even some former allies now admit in public, Bush may live in a bubble of self-deception (indeed, without this bubble, he might be driven back to a Nixonesque reliance on the bottle). But it is hard not to believe that some of those close to him have concluded that Iraq is another unwinnable war, and privately agree with the Democratic "defeatists" who want US forces out of Iraq within 18 months.

Indeed, Kissinger might be among them, to judge from a recent interview in which he declared that "a military victory, in the sense of total control over the whole territory imposed on the entire population, is not possible". The most tantalising question of all is, of course, would realists as able (and cynical) as Nixon and Kissinger have launched the invasion in the first place? The suspicion must be that they would not have.

But that is another story. Their Middle East war was Yom Kippur. By that time, Kissinger was referring privately to Nixon as "that madman" and "our drunken friend". It was the secretary of state-cum-national security adviser who ran policy, to the point that Nixon was reduced to lamely asking Kissinger after the latter held crucial talks with Brezhnev, "What did he say?" But again, remember the circumstances. The surprise is not that Nixon was drinking, it is how, even with alcohol's assistance, he coped at all. Abroad, the Soviet Union was warning that it would send troops to the Middle East; at home, the president was sacking his attorney general and firing the Watergate special prosecutor in the "Saturday Night Massacre" of 20 October 1973 - the event which decisively turned the country against him.

Nixon did call Kissinger during those fraught days, to discuss not the Yom Kippur crisis, but his domestic difficulties. He was, Kissinger remembered, "as agitated and emotional as I have ever heard him" - a man, in short, buckling under unimaginable pressure. But one man's tragedy is another's chance of aggrandisement - especially in a relationship as edgy and fraught as that between Nixon and Kissinger. "What's been holding things together," Kissinger noted to a friend shortly before his boss resigned, "is my moral authority abroad and to some extent at home. If that's lost, we may really be in trouble."

When Tricky Dicky was too drunk to speak to Ted Heath

It doesn't happen these days - but once an American President was too drunk to speak to a British Prime Minister. It happened at 7.55 pm on 11 October 1973, five days into the Israeli-Arab "Yom Kippur" war, when Edward Heath told the White House he wanted to speak to Richard Nixon in the next half hour.

Informed of the request, Henry Kissinger replied: "Can we tell them no? When I talked to the President, he was loaded." In the end Heath was told that Nixon was "unavailable".

The British Prime Minister was on relatively good, if rather remote, terms with Nixon. Heath was one of the few European leaders not to criticise the President for the December 1972 bombing of Hanoi, a month before the Paris peace accords.

On 1 February 1973, a grateful Nixon thanked him, saying: "What you did, did not go unnoticed." He then added darkly, and more typically, "What others did, did not go unnoticed either. It's hard to understand when allies turn on you."

But the two otherwise had little in common. Heath's main interest was Europe. Nixon looked further afield, to the Soviet Union, the Middle East and China. Ultimately both were brought down by domestic crises in the space of six months - Nixon by Watergate, Heath by the miners' strike in 1974.