wait to be invited.

him, but that's the point: who outside of Establishment members themselves had heard of the man Rovere fingered as Chairman, John J. McCloy? The Vice-Chairmen are the better-known Lloyd Cutler (White House counsel and co-founder of an important Washington law firm) and Peter G. Peterson (former commerce secretary, head of a "boutique" investment bank, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, and anti-deficit crusader).

Past Chairmen Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher have both dropped a notch in status over the last year because of flawed diplomatic performances. The Establishment's Treasurer is Felix Rohatyn and its Chief of Communications is Bill Moyers. Its official lookout for threatening populist activity is Kevin P. Phillips. Co-chairman, with Gore, of the Under-50 Division is Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state. The Treasurer is Steven Rattner, a protégé of Rohatyn's, and the Chief of Communications is Walter Isaacson, editor of new media at Time Inc.

Recently, I dropped in to see the Chairman, a silver-haired, genial man who emanates sober trustworthiness, which, rather than intellectual brilliance, is the key quality a Chairman is required to have. As all Establishment Chairmen must, by ironclad law, he denied everything—that there is an Establishment, that he's in it—but the evidence is incontrovertible: Whitehead is former co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs & Co., the most important investment bank, and former deputy secretary of state, and has headed the Harvard Board of Overseers and the boards of the Asia Society, the Brookings Institution, the International Rescue Committee, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He did, however, seem to have a little time on his hands. Was this because he had the whole thing running so smoothly, or because business was slow?

There can be no doubt but that some important tasks will always be done by the Establishment. It will choose the presidents of the Ivy League universities and decide which artists get major retrospectives. Unless things

get really bad, it will run every presidential transition. The real question is to what extent the Establishment will be in on the big reorganizing developments in society: the mergers and financings of major economic entities, political realignments, and fundamental changes in government policy. Somehow knowing that the Establishment had controlled the Viacom-Paramount deal would make the Council on Foreign Relations luncheon on Brazil a lot more interesting.

The Establishment has done pretty poorly at bringing in the leaders of countervailing power groups. Only in the cultural wing of the Establishment, for example, do you consistently find real-estate, technology, and entertainment names on boards (such as Michael Ovitz at the Museum of Modern Art), and this is the result more of the time-honored desire of rich entrepreneurs to associate themselves with Art as a way to increase their respectability than of the Establishment's trying to form new strategic alliances. The only truly heads-up activity going on within the

Establishment is in the Under-50 Division, where many of the key players have begun repositioning themselves as more in tune with the post-industrial order. Al Gore, for example, was associated in the 1980s with two of the classic Old Establishment issues, environmentalism and arms control, but is now best known for his interest in regulation of information technology, which is the present-day analogue of trust-busting in Theodore Roosevelt's era.

It would take a lot for the Establishment to get back to the level of its apogee. Probably it will never happen. Still, counting the Establishment out entirely would be unwarranted. It may bungle; it may ignore developments it should have noticed; but it still has its hole card, the power to confer membership. Is anyone truly immune to the magical crook of the finger? Certainly no one who has answered it ever, ever quits. ☐

Revealed: The Chairman of the Old Establishment for 1994 is... the impeccably credentialed but almost invisible John C. Whitehead.

Photograph by JONATHAN BECKER

245

He had been one of the men chosen to eulogize Nixon, a decision which had confounded the old loyalists: the bond between Henry Kissinger and the former president, whom he had served as national-security adviser and then secretary of state, had never been warm. Nixon had always been hypersensitive to Kissinger's ambition and his tendency to

take credit with journalists for triumphs that Nixon considered his singular territory. H. R. Haldeman had once told John Ehrlichman that their former boss had bugged his own office in order to be able to demonstrate, in Ehrlichman's words, "that the foreign-policy initiatives of his Presidency were in fact his own, not Henry's." The Nixon-Kissinger relationship, frail and edgy at all times, was particularly fraught at certain junctures: such as the week when *Time* selected both as Men of the Year, which enraged Nixon, or the day when Kissinger won what Nixon regarded as his Nobel Prize. They survived as colleagues in no small part because they were, for better or for worse, bound to each other, essentially each other's hostage.

The immediate interests that joined them were complicated by larger tensions: there had been Nixon's unfortunate anti-Semitism, amplified on occasion—some observers believed—for Kissinger's benefit as a little test among the boys. Nixon sometimes used the description "Jewboy" (a term ranking right up there with "kike" for most Jews) to describe his top foreign-policy expert. As for Kissinger, known for his treacherous mouth, he was often scornful of the man who had helped advance him, something Nixon was well aware of. After Nixon left office, a group of Canadian reporters overheard Kissinger calling the former president an odd, artificial man, one of his milder epithets. From the beginning of his

White House tour, Kissinger often portrayed Nixon to his staff as unstable, irrational, given to heavy drinking. "My drunken friend," he liked to call Nixon, or sarcastically "our peerless leader."

The consequences of their union were historic. Given their personalities, their respective insecurities, and the effect they would have on each other, it was as if there had been some dark sun on the day they came together. Nixon was paranoiac, brooding, pessimistic—a man who stored up grievance. Much of that grievance was directed at the power and snobbery of what he considered the Eastern Establishment. Kissinger was paranoiac, brilliant, devious, manipulative, and neurotically territorial; he was, at least outwardly, a product of the forces Nixon most despised: Harvard, the Rockefellers, the old boys. On occasion, even after leaving office, Nixon would speak bitterly of those institutions, which he believed represented the weakening fiber of America. He referred to their members as *Henry's crowd*, and he did this long after Kissinger himself had been largely separated from the Establishment by the incursion into Cambodia.

The telephone call that signified the decline of the Eastern Establishment, as an instrument of class propelled by certain traditions of loyalty and honor, came for Henry Kissinger in November 1968 at a meeting with his patron, Nelson Rockefeller, at the latter's West 54th Street apartment in New York City. Kissinger and other Rockefeller staffers were trying to predict which position Nixon would offer their boss in his new administration.

It appeared likely to the Rockefeller insiders, if not to the Nixon insiders, that their man would be offered something major, probably secretary of defense. In turn, he would offer a choice appointment to Kissinger, probably assistant secretary for international security—a considerable plum and a perfect launchpad for a rising star. It was also quite possible, however, that Kissinger would be offered something higher: unbeknownst to Rockefeller, he

had made himself unusually helpful to Nixon, serving as his secret channel on the Paris peace talks. Kissinger had used his Democratic connections to gain access to privileged information in Paris and had funneled it to Nixon men Richard Allen and John Mitchell. He had more lines into the Nixon camp than his Rockefeller colleagues imagined, but then again he also had more connections to Hubert Humphrey than the Nixon group realized. Humphrey, in fact, had also spoken of giving Kissinger a top job if he was elected, quite possibly the role of the president's chief adviser for national security. Kissinger's capacity to be all things to all campaigns—an overt Rockefeller man, a semi-obvert Humphrey man, and a covert Nixon man—reflects the emergence of the rootless operator in the modern superstate. Kissinger was the first—though there were others to follow—of the wildly ambitious agents of opportunity set loose in the wilds of Washington and other capitals. They are interchangeable men, singular in their ambitions, unhampered by traditional loyalties or affiliations. They are men so cool and detached in their geopolitical views that they sometimes seem to be part of a new international elite, readily transferable to the governments of allies and adversaries alike.

It did not seem to occur to the Rockefeller camp that Nixon would not welcome its leader into the fold. But Nixon had not forgotten the humiliation inflicted by Rockefeller in 1960 when the former had won his first presidential nomination. The price of Rocky's support had been Nixon's consent to a platform which seemed more Rockefeller than Nixon to most conservatives and which had enraged the Republican right. There were less tangible resentments as well: old money, the East, all the associations that Kissinger inherited and Rockefeller embodied. There would, as it happened, be no job for Nelson Rockefeller. Instead, after the brief phone call, Kissinger became national-security adviser.

Many were surprised when Nixon offered and Kissinger accepted the job. Among those particularly sur-

prised were Kissinger's associates in the foreign-policy wings of the Rockefeller and Humphrey campaigns, people who had thought they were close to him, people who had thought they knew that he viewed Nixon as a kind of political devil incarnate. The reason they had thought they knew this was that Henry Kissinger had often told them so.

In early 1969 I lived a few blocks from the historian Teddy White on Manhattan's East Side. We often went for walks when our workdays were done, and on January 23, 1969 (I am grateful for H. R. Haldeman's diary for reminding me of the exact date), Teddy told me a story rich in its ironies. On the previous day, January 22, he had been at the White House for his final interview with Nixon—now newly installed as president—for *The Making of the President, 1968*. By chance, he had also seen Kissinger.

"The last time I had seen Henry was during the Miami convention, which nominated Nixon," Teddy said. "Nixon clearly had a lock on the nomination and so I decided to wander over to the Rockefeller headquarters to see what it was like there as the last of Nelson's presidential ambitions were coming to an end. It had the feeling of a morgue. Everywhere you looked there were old plates of take-out food and half-emptty coffee containers. And the only person I saw was Henry. I have never been greeted so warmly; it was as if I were his last friend on earth.

"Teddy," he said, 'we have to stop this madman Nixon ... ' Kissinger went on a prolonged indictment of Nixon, that he was not to be trusted, that he represented everything dark and dangerous, that he was not worthy of the office. He said that America might not survive a Nixon presidency."

Teddy White had not been greatly moved by this tirade; he had heard comparable Kissinger soliloquies. Then, just two days after the inaugural, he had visited Nixon in the White House. Nixon had welcomed him, outlining his vision of the presidency and then taking him to meet his new assistant for national-security affairs, *Doctor Henry Kissinger*. Teddy had been amused by Nixon's continuing emphasis of the

**WISE GUY**
John McCloy—
Wall Street attorney,
assistant secretary of war,
high commissioner for
Germany, president of the
World Bank, chairman
of Chase bank, chairman of
the Council on Foreign
Relations. More than any
figure of this century,
McCloy symbolized
Establishment values.

Establishment came for Henry Kissinger in November 1968.

Kissinger, serving as
Gerald Ford's secretary of state
in 1975, chats with then
vice president Nelson Rockefeller,
his old mentor.

"Henry, you're brilliant," Elliott began. "But you're arrogant."

It was as if both were equal beneficiaries of Kissinger's intellectual credentials. Kissinger, Teddy told me, had been extremely stilted, even after Nixon's departure, when they chatted for an hour before Teddy raced to catch the shuttle to New York.

That night, the phone rang just as Teddy entered his apartment. The voice, heavily accented, was familiar: it was Kissinger. "Teddy," he said plaintively, "that last conversation we had together in Miami—it was off-the-record, wasn't it?"

Kissinger's appointment brought to the inner circle of power the most complicated, brilliant, and controversial government servant of the postwar era, a man with a towering intellect, an unnerving appetite for power, and a reputation, as time passed, for conduct of the most devious sort. ("I admire Henry," said Richard Allen, a conservative Nixon adviser who helped bring Kissinger into the Nixon camp and was later squeezed out by him. "What is troubling about him is why he needs to be so devious and manipulative—he's so brilliant, he works so hard. He sees connections before everyone else. He could rise just as high if he played straight. But for some reason, he just can't play straight. He *has* to manipulate.")

Kissinger was the first great figure of the meritocracy to play so great a role in the foreign-policy superstruc-

ture, the first (but certainly not the last) who came from the seemingly disinterested ambience of Harvard to use that institution as an elegant but glorified trade school. The contradictions in his life were dazzling: He was a firsthand observer of our fragmented and less than generous refugee policy toward the Jews of Europe, but for much of his life seemed to downplay systematically the importance of human rights in foreign policy. He often seemed uneasy with the American instinct for goodness and morality in foreign policy, as if it were the weakness of a youthful, innocent nation lacking in its sense of realpolitik. Though he had been propelled to the inner sanctum of power by the forces of the Eastern Establishment, his willingness to go along with Nixon's actions on Vietnam, and most specifically Cambodia, had a profound impact on his relationship with the Establishment, which effectively broke with the Nixon administration over these policies.

Kissinger's role in the Nixon White House signified a sea change in the nature of the American Establishment, which, in the past, had prided itself on the now seemingly archaic notion that character and integrity were more important than brilliance and originality. The greater good of the ruling class, which of course meant the greater good of the country, was more important than self-advancement. Kissinger's rise to power, his ability to retool and repackage himself, his

cultivation of journalists, represented something else, something contemporary, a different kind of man who played by different rules in a new, media-driven age. His success signaled the end of the Establishment as it had existed in the past, the Establishment as written about by Richard Rovere and John Kenneth Galbraith, a group united not merely by certain goals and ideals but also by immutable rules of behavior. More, it signified the coming of a new ethos: character and traditional standards of loyalty were no longer, as they had been, a requisite; more important, they could now be viewed as a weakness. The more loyal a man was, the more he was burdened by the past. One should not be tied to people who were out of favor.

The Establishment's high-water mark was probably 1960 and the election of John Kennedy. Vietnam was its nadir, when it lost something critical: the belief on the part of ordinary Americans that it possessed a rare expertise that those of more plebeian backgrounds lacked. Vietnam, among other things, revealed the Establishment as poorly informed on a vast landmass which included, among other countries, China. The Establishment's elite was made up of men who looked toward Europe. They had seen Vietnam as essentially peripheral, and they had made a fatal error in failing to understand not only the ineffectiveness of American technology there but also the revolutionary forces driving their opponents. These

250

Kissinger with
Ali MacGraw
at the world
premiere of
*The Godfather*
in 1972.

Kissinger and wife Nancy
with *The Washington Post's* Kay
Graham aboard Rupert
Murdoch's chartered yacht,
*Midnight Saga*.

In fact you're the most arrogant man I've ever met."

miscalculations cost them and the class
they represented dearly.

The Establishment's decline stemmed not merely from the loss of its myth of expertise. Its base was torn asunder by domestic change. The G.I. Bill had altered the very nature of American society. America had gone from political democracy to econom ic democracy with the New Deal, and to social democracy with the coming of the G.I. Bill. The nation's great elite colleges were no longer private sanctuaries of privilege. In the years after World War II, they were being opened to the children of the meritocracy, and once this happened, the very nature of the Establishment was transformed. It had to adapt quickly, admitting new members such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would ultimately become Jimmy Carter's na tional-security adviser, and Kissinger, whose fathers had not even been born on American shores.

The power of privilege and the con-
nections that came from being a lega-
tee of a great family fell into decline.
It was harder for the children of by-
gone glories to assume command, for
they were often outstripped in college
by the hungry, driven children of the
meritocracy. It was an article of faith
that the prep-school graduates per-
formed better during freshman year than
the public-school graduates, but that late
in the sophomore year the hungrier pub-
lic-school boys passed them by. The
world changed similarly. In later years,

Henry Kissinger would reflect this
contrast when he upstaged Secretary
of State William Rogers, whom he
saw as his principal rival for influence
in foreign policy during the Nixon ad-
ministration. Rogers—certifiably Waspy,
demonstrably clubbable—belonged to
Burning Tree and to the Racquet and
Tennis Club as well as the Metropoli-
tan. But he never craved power as
Kissinger did. Rogers, although per-
ceived as a Washington insider, be-
came stunningly vulnerable almost
overnight.

The Establishment declined for oth-
er reasons: American power and mon-
ey moved south and west, and the
consequences for the Republican Par-
ty, and thus the Eastern Establishment,
were profound. (While the Establish-
ment liked to think of itself as non-
partisan, it was essentially genteel
centrist eastern Republican.) The final
decline of that wing of the party was
foreshadowed in 1964 when Goldwater
won the Republican nomination from
the main liberal candidate, Nelson
Rockefeller. After 1968, no Republi-
can liberal would run for at least a
quarter-century, although John Ander-
son ran as an independent and John
Lindsay campaigned as a Democrat.
George Bush transmogrified from the
son of Prescott Bush, good eastern lib-
eral internationalist, to George Bush
of Texas, a man who played to (but
never really won over) the Republican
right. Late in his career, in one of his
less successful transformations, Kis-

singer—after having served Nixon and
Ford, the Republican center’s surviv-
ing figures—attempted, albeit unsuc-
cessfully, to recast himself yet again to
satisfy the new right wing.

Another factor in the Establishment's
decline was rising media power. The
failure of U.S. Vietnam policy dimin-
ished the Establishment but strength-
ened the media, which reported the war
more accurately than the government
did. The media, bolstered by network
television, arrived as a power center
rivaling government itself. Previous
Establishment media people working
Washington had known their place; they
were ancillary to their government
betters. But the new generation, demon-
strably less responsive to men in of-
fice, was more independent and more
aggressive. Within government, there
was far greater pressure to leak, which
undermined many Establishment norms,
most notably secrecy, which had worked
through the 50s and 60s.

The arrival of men such as Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski at the forefront of the national-security complex signaled the first surfacing of a professional class of foreign-policy experts, a new generation for America's postwar incarnation. (In time, this nucleus of experts trained specifically for the role of foreign policy would expand further with the coming of the representatives of human-rights groups and

PHOTOGRAPHS: LEFT, BY SANTI VISALL; RIGHT, BY DAFYDD JONES

251

They joined the best clubs within the colleges, Porcellian and Fly, Skull and Bones...

[LC]

**Above:** General George Marshall makes a stop in Paris on his way to Moscow for a meeting at the Kremlin.
**Right:** Elihu Root, who served as secretary of state under Theodore Roosevelt, helped define the Establishment's internationalist stance.

shared a special kinship with England, a vague tolerance—and certain irritability—toward France, and a wary acceptance of Germany. Almost all of its senior figures had been interventionists in those lonely, desperate years before World War II when America was still isolationist and Hitler was on the rise, threatening England and the democracies of Europe. If there was a thread which bound together the great American diplomats and policymakers of that era—Henry Stimson, George Marshall, John McCloy, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Averell Harriman, and Bob Lovett—it

was their common role in that great struggle to move America toward preparedness before the war. The later battle for the containment policy which stalemated Soviet aggression in Europe seemed easy by comparison.

They were eastern men, even if they were not all eastern-born (Lovett came from Texas, Kennan from Wisconsin). Educated in New England, they had joined the great banking houses and law firms of Wall and State Streets and were groomed in the verities and politics of the world to which they had been born or become apprenticed. They accepted its internationalism, its dress codes, its restraints, its mastery of ego. Their preferred continent was Europe, not Asia, the preferred general Eisenhower, not MacArthur, the preferred sports tennis and sailing, not baseball or basketball. They rendered these decisions with finality, a certainty inculcated in the great prep schools, where their values and friendships had been solidified and where they had learned to distinguish who among them was worthy and sound. From the right preps they had moved on to the right colleges and, more important, to the best clubs within the colleges, the Porcellian and the Fly at Harvard, Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key at Yale, and Ivy and Cap and Gown at Princeton. They were

united by styles and manners that symbolized everything they shared; in the 50s at least, they were known as “Shoe” (for “White Shoe”) or “Clubby,” which has over the years mutated to “Preppy.”

The better young men were not so much brilliant as clubbable, vouchable. The bloodlines were tested, the values confirmed early on. The legatees knew who had “the right stuff” and who, conversely, would never pass muster; they knew what was to be discussed only in private. They knew—and this was perhaps the most elemental rule of all—that they were not to take credit for anything, even if the credit was rightfully theirs. They tended to be self-deprecating and detached, stoic. (Many were uneasy with John Foster Dulles not just because of his slowness to perceive the danger of Hitler but also because he was considered too partisan and vainglorious.) They were sound; they were solid: the Establishment resisted fashion. It was important to hold the center; it was important not to embrace new ideas too quickly—it was better to be wrong than to be hasty.

Issues of class were critically important to the men who inhabited this inner circle. By all rights, these centrist Republicans should have supported Richard Nixon in 1960, but the Establishment had never warmed to Nixon. John Kennedy may have been a Catholic, he may have been a Democrat, he may even have been old Joe Kennedy's son. But he was *cool*, innately patrician, clearly the first Irish-Catholic Brahmin. Having dealt all his life with his father, an autocratic tycoon, he was equipped to charm even the most towering figures of the Establishment on their home turf.

Nixon was another matter. In 1960, Henry Luce, patriarch of *Time*, was fond of saying that he was supposed to be for Nixon, but he didn't like him very much. He was supposed to be against Kennedy, but he liked him a great deal. Nixon—a striver, awkward and uncomfortable, too nakedly ambitious—conducted himself quite differently from someone raised in the culture of Luce and the others. Years earlier, when Nixon had gone to New York for an interview at the Establishment law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell,

refugee organizations.) The new class, trained quite specifically for the task, was created not to wrest power away from the older, more traditional Establishment, but ostensibly to serve it. Its rise created a dramatic impact. Before World War II, the ruling class had drifted through the Ivy League, turning rather casually to careers in government if they were bored with more traditional careers in finance and the law. There was nothing casual about the new generation. They sought advancement in the most singular way.

The Wasp Establishment as it existed in the 50s and early 60s was a select group of prominent men whose job was to guide American foreign policy, which they had done with considerable success for much of the earlier part of this century. The term “Wasp” should not lead one to assume that the sole qualifications were to be white and Protestant. There were millions of good, God-fearing white Protestants who were not, by standard definition, true Wasps. Rather, the term referred to a class within a class, a governing elite which had served, earlier on, as both upper and ruling class. Most of its members were men of the Atlantic, Republican internationalists who—because of financial interests—tilted toward Europe. They

252

John Kennedy tries out a director's chair during a visit to Hollywood in 1940.

the partner interviewing him had made notes on his shifty-eyed manner. Nixon was, to this world, forever the outsider. Even when he tried to be friendly, it seemed artificial.

Kennedy was filled with the kind of easy confidence that was crucial to being an Establishment member in good standing. He was secure not only in the belief that good things would happen to him but also with the idea that they *should* happen to him. He deserved them. Doors would open readily, important men would seek his company, appealing women would find him attractive. Kennedy accepted his good fortune without doubt; he never questioned his entitlement. Nixon, with all his stored-up anger, was untrustworthy. The insecure were *always* untrustworthy. And the Establishment was premised, as much as anything, on trust.

In the years after W.W. II, the Harvard Government Department was not a place for the faint of heart. Of the young men who were teaching fellows there in the early 50s, three went on to become national-security assistants to the president of the United States: McGeorge Bundy, Kissinger, and Brzezinski. It was the hot place, offering instant connection to power. With the growth of the Cold War and the coming of America as a superpower, the country needed an entire new class of bright young men to serve. Harvard was the magnet for those who would fill the vacuum—a new breed of action intellectuals, men not content with academia, men determined to create and act on new policies.

Kennedy was cool, innately patrician, clearly the first Irish-Catholic Brahmin.

From the start, Kissinger seemed a less than passionate teacher. His lectures on occasion, said one observer, resembled modern press conferences. At the beginning of class, he answered questions about world events; if there was time at the end, he *might* discuss the assignment. Those who wanted to see him were told to make three appointments. He would, he promised, be sure to keep one. He was interested in those above him in the hierarchy, and was one of the earliest networkers. Christmas cards, oddly enough, were one of his chosen instruments. On the surface, the young Kissinger might have appeared an unlikely holiday celebrant, but he kept the names and addresses of everyone on hand, including those young foreigners who had come through the Harvard international program and who seemed destined for something.

He had the ability to find the right older man to sponsor him. At Harvard, it was William Yandell ("Wild Bill") Elliott, one of the towering figures of the Government Department. Bill Elliott was a former college football star who took great pleasure in the roughness of his language and manner. If he did have, as he was certain, one of Harvard's best minds, it was clearly matched by the dimensions of his self-regard. He became an important Kissinger booster, but being an Elliott protégé was not always an unmixed blessing. Bill Elliott was not above letting his acolytes know the price they paid for his sponsorship. In 1955, a classmate of mine named Richard Ullman (later a distinguished political scientist at Princeton) was working as the editor of the summer *Crimson* at Harvard, and he went to see Bill Elliott for a story about the International Seminar then conducted at the university. When Ullman asked Elliott a procedural question, he replied, "Go see my water boy about that."

"Who's your water boy?" the puzzled Ullman inquired.

"Henry Kissinger."

"Why do you call him that?"

"Because he does everything I ask him to," Elliott answered.

Somehow in those years Kissinger managed to offend Elliott; no one knew how. Perhaps Elliott sensed that Kissinger was intent on transfer to a larger field of action. But something happened, and

in 1963, at the time of Elliott's retirement, there was a scene that became legendary. Elliott's senior colleagues had gathered at a dinner to say farewell and the guest of honor had visited each with parting words. Almost all his comments were generous, until he came to Kissinger: "Henry," he began, "you're brilliant. But you're arrogant. In fact you're the most arrogant man I've ever met." Kissinger became ashen-faced. "Mark my words," Elliott continued, "your arrogance is going to get you in real trouble one day."

Because of the unique force of his will, Kissinger's weakness became his strength. His insecurity in the end became his weapon; he needed success more than others, and he would do more to attain it. Sensing himself an outsider, disconnected and rootless, he acted with fewer restraints on his conduct. The key factor here was his insecurity, produced as it had been by his terrible childhood in pre-Holocaust Germany. Uprooted, the society around him destroyed, his most cherished institutions corrupted and made evil, Kissinger arrived here badly damaged, wary, extremely suspicious. He gave his trust and loyalty to no one, and in personal and professional dealings (for a man like him the two were never separated), he was always on red alert: *Is this friend or enemy? What are his weaknesses, prejudices? Can he be flattered, neutralized?* Unsure of his place in the new world, he could theoretically understand its protections but could never entirely trust in them. This damage, however, only made him more brilliant, more interesting—and finally more devious. He could never relax or let down his guard. Despite the blessings of a free society, he could never entirely overcome the warieness of those whose childhoods have been lost in the totalitarian states they have left behind. (Though Kissinger has often denied that his childhood is in any way part of the psychic key to him, his longtime associates feel otherwise.)

He was ferociously territorial, with the tendency to interpret the simplest of moves in the darkest of lights. He squabbled constantly with Bob Bowie, his superior at the Center for International Affairs. At a department meeting, Bowie suggested that a noted professor be

[10]

254

"I can do you more good if I am not public,"
Kissinger told the Nixon people.

[L.C.]

brought in. Kissinger was furious. Later, he turned to his colleague Mort Halperin. "Do you know what that was about?" he asked. Halperin did not. "It was an attempt to embarrass me," said Kissinger, explaining that the professor in question had written unfavorably about one of Kissinger's books. Bringing him to Harvard, Kissinger suggested, would lend the university's imprimatur to the review.

He was a brilliant man with a capacity not merely to reinvent himself but to become—at least momentarily—the person that others wanted him to be. As Walter Isaacson has noted in his excellent biography, Kissinger was the prototype of someone who had grown up in an authoritarian society, obsequious with those above, overbearing with those below, and devious with peers. There is an additional consideration: more than one acquaintance has pointed out Kissinger's own internal resentment of the flattery that had become his trademark. This, perhaps, explains his unattractive tendency to privately ridicule—as if to gain some kind of revenge—the very people he had just courted.

At Harvard he was acutely aware of and quite resentful of the success of another rising star, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose talents and ambition were quite similar to his own. If anything, in those days, Brzezinski—slim, attractive, and roguish—was perceived as socially more presentable than the somewhat overweight Kissinger. And Brzezinski had one additional advantage: in those early, overheated days of the Cold War, he was automatically regarded, by virtue of his genes (he was an émigré Pole), as a hard-liner. Kissinger, a Jew, inevitably aroused somewhat more suspicion on the right for possible left-wing sympathies. He had to work harder than Brzezinski to show his bona fides as an anti-Communist.

In the 50s, Kissinger made a lateral move to the Rockefeller operation, becoming an adviser on foreign policy. His book on the use of tactical nuclear weapons was published and was a surprising success. It even made the best-seller lists. But Kissinger was hardly a commanding figure; his massive insecurities about being an immigrant Jew were not assuaged by working for

one of America's first families. His reputation for sycophancy increased, as did his talent for flattery of the most skilled sort: intellectual flattery. He was very aware of where powerful men stood on all issues, who their enemies were, and—far more than the norm—he had the capacity to play to these men, to bring up subjects and prejudices close to their hearts. So often the men were stunned by this brilliant young mind who seemed to feel as they did about so many things and expressed their very own feelings with such conviction. Kissinger was not someone, it was said, who ever disagreed with anyone more powerful than he, at least face-to-face.

As his power within the Rockefeller organization grew, Kissinger began to think of himself as increasingly grand. When a press liaison who had an almost perfect ear for Rockefeller's speech patterns once tried to rewrite a Kissinger speech, Kissinger was not pleased. "When Nelson buys a Picasso, he does not get a housepainter to go and retouch it," he said. Inevitably, Emmet John Hughes, for many years the ranking Rockefeller intellectual and a man who watched Kissinger's rise with a combination of resentment and disdain, retaliated. In 1968, before the Rockefeller presidential run, frustrated by what he perceived as constant Kissinger undercutting, Hughes suggested that the Rockefeller people bring in Brzezinski as an adviser. Brzezinski, Hughes said, had a far better mind than Henry's. Soon there were rumors not only of a Brzezinski opening (playing the Polish card, one Rockefeller staffer called it) but also of sightings: Zbig and Emmet lunching at a place where rising stars were offered important jobs. Kissinger was appalled. He was heard to say that there was no need to bring Zbig into the campaign; there was already plenty of intellectual firepower. Rockefeller, however, was intrigued by Brzezinski; if two intellectuals were better than one, then certainly three were better than two, and they clearly cost a good deal less than Picassos. For a time, Brzezinski responded to the seduction: he was closer to Humphrey politically, but thought more highly of Rockefeller as an administrator. But by the time the Rockefeller offer

was tendered, he had signed on with Humphrey.

But Zbig remained something of a thorn. Years after the Rockefeller faceoff, after Carter had given Brzezinski Kissinger's old job as national-security adviser, Kissinger was invited to a dinner at Kay Graham's in honor of Frank Wisner, who had just been named ambassador to Zambia. During the festivities, Kissinger had been extremely bothered by a photo on the mantel of a slim, handsome young man. "Kay," he asked, "how could you do it to me?"

"Do what, Henry?" she asked, genuinely puzzled.

"Put up a photo of Zbig, and so quickly, too."

"Henry," she said, "that is a photo of Phil Graham" (her late husband).

To all intents and purposes, Rockefeller's 1968 loss of the Republican presidential nomination seemed, at least to the outside world, a loss for Kissinger as well. His surprising move to Nixon, however, signaled the coming of a new age and a new type of foreign-policy adviser. What was stunning to many people was the degree to which the qualities that had been important in the past, those of character and loyalty, were discredited. Gradually, after Kissinger surfaced in the Nixon camp, some of his old friends in the Johnson administration came to believe that he had betrayed them by feeding vital information on the Paris peace talks to the Nixon people, information which—when relayed back to Saigon—had a critical effect on the negotiations. Kissinger fed this information first through Richard Allen and then through John Mitchell, the general campaign manager. Allen, who had brought Kissinger into the Nixon campaign, later told *The New York Times's* Seymour Hersh: "I became a handmaiden of Henry Kissinger's drive for power. I was naïve. I had my zipper wide open."

After Rockefeller's defeat at the convention, Allen—who greatly admired Kissinger's intellect—offered him a chance to be a Nixon foreign-policy adviser. Kissinger had told Allen that he was positively inclined toward Nixon, but that he could

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work more effectively if he did not come out publicly with his support. His exact words: "I can do you more good if I am not public." Kissinger became a secret source for the Nixon people while simultaneously assuring friends in Paris that he held Nixon in contempt. Clearly, the old codes that had existed in the world of foreign policy had been detonated.

At the same time, as reporter Seymour Hersh later discovered, Kissinger had made an offer to pass on information about Nixon to Humphrey, information accumulated by the Rockefeller organization throughout the years when Nixon and Rockefeller were rivals for the Republican nomination. "The Shit Files," they were called. "My God," Hersh told me, "I started checking around and I found out he was a double agent, not only giving stuff to Nixon on the Democrats, but offering the Rockefeller stuff to the Humphrey campaign."

To Dan Davidson, a young Harriman aide working in the Paris peace talks, the subsequent revelation that Kissinger was passing information to the Nixon campaign was stunning. "Later," says Davidson, "long after it was over, we found out that he was sending our stuff back to the Nixon people, though we never knew exactly what he was sending back. Knowing Henry and his eagerness to impress Nixon, and to win some kind of place in the Nixon administration, there is no reason to believe that he held back anything." It was one thing for an eager would-be officeholder to play both camps by straddling the middle. It was another thing entirely to use credentials gained from one camp to penetrate another and pass on its secrets.

Kissinger's move to the Nixon camp, Dan Davidson believes, reflected a significant change in the delicate area of foreign and national-security policies. The old boys of the Establishment, Davidson says, had character and operated within certain boundaries that were clearly outlined and that one did not violate lightly.

Recently I asked Davidson if now, more than 25 years later, Kissinger's double game still bothered him. "Not if you come to realize that you were dealing with someone who is completely without character," Davidson answered, as if he were amused by the idea of Kissinger scurrying back and forth between the camps, trying to gain favor and somehow come out on the winning side.

For a brief time, Davidson worked under Kissinger at the National Security Council, but it was not a mutually satisfying experience. He was one of the

aides who left early on, and later it was discovered that he had been one of the staffers who had been wiretapped. Talking about what eventually happened in the White House, specifically the wiretapping of N.S.C. staff members with Kissinger's authorization, Davidson makes this point: "You cannot imagine McGeorge Bundy and Carl Kaysen sitting around in the Kennedy White House saying to each other, 'Let's wiretap our N.S.C. people.'"

That Nixon, with the knowledge he had of Henry Kissinger's fundamental character, found a place for him at the highest level of his administration is not, upon consideration, surprising. Kissinger had proved his value with his actions during the 1968 campaign. He had, ironically, proved his loyalty, if that is the word. He was a player. When I suggested that a dark sun brought Nixon and Kissinger together, I used the description advisedly. Nixon was from the start, for whatever intelligence and political skill he possessed, a damaged man. It was one thing for Kissinger to be a courtier in the world of Nelson Rockefeller, where the abundant confidence of the candidate permeated all meetings. It was quite another thing to be insecure, without connections, and rootless in the administration of the most insecure and disconnected of modern politicians: Richard Nixon.

The Nixon White House had an unusually ugly atmosphere, a kind of swaggering macho style reflecting the lowest common denominator of American social behavior. Because it was believed that people who sounded tough were tough, points were awarded to those who seemed manly and hard. From the start, the union of Nixon and Kissinger in this environment was not merely unhealthy but also dangerous. Here were two highly intelligent men, each relentlessly ambitious, each significantly damaged and distrusting, each in his own way insecure and vulnerable. Unsure of himself, unsure of his relationship to his president, Kissinger set out to consolidate power.

Dick Allen was the first to learn that Henry Kissinger was not your average professor, ill-prepared to face the demands of the political bureaucracy. He quickly recognized the fact that standing before him was a superb and relentless bureaucratic infighter, a man for whom issues of power, down to the tiniest details, were always in play. Kissinger moved Allen, who was serving as his deputy in the Nixon White House, out of the action quite skillfully and almost im

mediately. When Richard Moose, a young staffer, asked Kissinger what he should do with Allen, Kissinger replied, "Give him the largest office we have, but no telegrams." That is, flatter him, but keep him off the cable traffic. Allen was quickly stranded; his assignments took him far away from central issues.

What Kissinger managed in the White House during those early years was something of a bravura performance. He knew that for a variety of reasons he was culturally unacceptable, that there was a severe allergy to him, and that he had to pass a kind of Caesar's-wife test almost every day. After all, he was Jewish, he represented Harvard and the Rockefellers, and he was the butt of jokes. One of his aides remembered being with Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman in the West Wing elevator. One of the men commented on a *Washington Post* item about Kissinger's having dinner with a young woman the night before. There was a quick suggestion that the idea of Henry's liking girls was a surprise; they had always heard that he preferred boys. There it was—the reminder that he was the man outside, the one who would be required, again and again, to prove himself.

At first, as he gradually made his accommodations to the norm of the White House, some of his more idealistic staff members were staggered by the level of his duplicity. What amazed them was not the dishonesty or ruthlessness, but the fact that what was at issue was frequently stunningly inconsequential. There would be a modestly successful press conference and soon the phone would ring and it would be Nixon calling Kissinger to ask how it had gone. Kissinger would launch, full throttle, into the flattery that seemed to come so naturally: it had been magnificent; the reporters had looked like children. Then Haldeman would call and upbraid Kissinger for Nixon's weakness on foreign policy, and a different Kissinger would seem to accept this. Later, Kissinger would call Rockefeller to tell him how terrible Nixon had been.

Kissinger's first great challenge in the Nixon White House was to prove his usefulness to the practical Nixon and his toughness to Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He had to show that he was not faint of heart like Bill Rogers, their secretary of state. Kissinger's strength in the early formative months was that he could offer the president one thing at all times: total agreement on Vietnam. He had made his separate peace; he would be their man. Bill Rogers, saddled with a clumsy, less than hawkish bureaucracy, was his perfect

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Kissinger said he was on his way to
China with Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta.

*Above:* Kissinger with media baron Rupert Murdoch in June 1994. *Right:* Richard Nixon greets Kissinger at a party for former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in the late 80s.

foil. Lacking Kissinger's innate talent for the subtleties of infighting, Rogers seemed unable to grasp the fact that Kissinger intended to take him out as a player—using Vietnam as the instrument. In an entry in *The Haldeman Diaries*, dated March 3, 1971, Haldeman describes himself joking with the president (labeled here as “P”) about which of his two foreign-policy experts—Kissinger and Rogers—would, if need be, throw himself on a sword out of loyalty. The president repeatedly emphasizes that he realizes Kissinger is both more valuable and more *loyal* than Rogers. “The P made the point,” says Haldeman, “that if we got to the stage where somebody had to fall on a sword in order to save the P, Henry would do it, but Rogers wouldn’t. I made the point that I agreed with that, but that if Henry did it, he would do it with loud kicking and screaming and make sure that the blood spurted all over the place so he got full credit.”

Kissinger put together a brilliant young staff at the N.S.C. But most of the staff were deeply suspicious of Nixon; they were men who had turned on the war some time ago and who were inclined by background to favor Kissinger over Nixon. They savored Kissinger's anecdotes about Nixon's drinking and about his general emotional volatility. Among other things, it made their jobs psychically more palatable: they were, it seemed, working for Kissinger, not Nixon. There was an additional benefit in this for Kissinger, some of them later suspected. Surely they would report back to their friends in Georgetown and elsewhere on his lonely, liberal fight against the forces of darkness.

So he was a man playing different

roles to warring constituencies. A dangerous game—and Kissinger was nervous about what might happen if his staff mixed socially with the other aides. He couldn't risk having his people discover his support for Nixon's policy in the meetings with the president. Al-

though it was White House custom for a rising figure to display his power by maximizing the number of his staffers he could get into the White House Mess, Kissinger cut off mess privileges for his staff.

Nixon's great policy problem was Vietnam and his pledge to end the war with peace and honor. Simply stated, this was not doable if the U.S. continued the process of troop withdrawal. Nixon could not adjust his rhetoric to the realities. The idea that the South Vietnamese ARVN—already a defeated army—could achieve what 500,000 Americans, backed by the most formidable assemblage of airpower in the history of mankind, could not was simply ludicrous. The war was over and the other side knew it. What was being debated was forms of withdrawal, fig leaves really. Peace would come only with defeat. No one, I suspect, had a better grasp of this than Henry Kissinger, master of realpolitik.

The Cambodian invasion was—according to Roger Morris, one of the most brilliant members of Kissinger's N.S.C. staff—the fateful moment for Kissinger in the Nixon White House, his personal crossing of the Rubicon. (When I spoke to Kissinger, he agreed with this, although, I suspect, with a significantly different view of who the ultimate victim in all this was.) Up until now, Kissinger had been able to be two different men, answerable to both the Nixon hawks and the more liberal Establishment. Now he faced a choice between the part of himself that courted favor with Nixon and the part of himself that needed the goodwill of Harvard and Georgetown, the political-social-journalistic world where he had invested

20 years building up friendships and credibility. He chose, of course, to maintain power. Though he continued to portray himself to some columnists and journalists as a man agonized by the Cambodian bombing and invasion, his staff realized during the Cambodia crisis that this was not, indeed, the case. The young men watched with increasing distress the growing duplicity of his performance, alongside what Roger Morris referred to as Kissinger's self-absorption, megalomania, and gamesmanship.

Cambodia tore Kissinger's staff apart, not unlike the country itself. “The bleeding hearts,” as he liked to call them, these young men whom he had cherished and admired, were appalled. The move into Cambodia was to them a disastrous move in terms of domestic politics; it would imply a wider, not smaller, war. The Americans, Kissinger's staff realized, would never be able to locate the COSVN, the Communist headquarters in Cambodia, and they felt the invasion would drive the Khmer Rouge westward toward Phnom Penh. It was, at least one of the staffers believed, the needless sacrifice of a small, powerless nation to a flawed, indeed failed, military policy.

The meeting of Kissinger's staff where he told them about the coming move into Cambodia was, in its own way, as skilled a piece of bureaucratic manipulation and duplicity as one could imagine. The goal was to dampen and limit staff dissent. What was not discussed was the critical incremental jump in the policy, not merely the use of fixed-wing aircraft in this strike but also the fact that South Vietnamese combat troops would be joining U.S. forces in the invasion. Some of the staff people attending the meeting knew this, but they had not been told who else, if anyone, knew it. Therefore, they could not mention it at the meeting. Thus was debate—and dissent—on the most important aspect of the operation effectively suppressed. (Later, when they spoke among themselves, they would find out the degree to which they had been had. Many had, in fact, known of the escalation, but Kissinger had skillfully tied them up.)

Bill Watts, one of three who actually resigned over Cambodia, had come to the White House from the Rockefeller

SONIA MOSKOWITZ

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