Nixon and Henry Kissinger

At least in modern times, no President and Secretary of State are more closely linked than Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Technically, Kissinger was Secretary of State only during the latter part of Nixon's time in office, but William P. Rogers, who held the office in Nixon's earlier years, when Kissinger was National Security Advisor, made little impact at the time and is largely forgotten now.

Indeed, though it has been nearly two decades since Kissinger had any public position, he remains by far the bestknown of recent American secretaries of state. Likewise, Nixon stands out, after two decades, as for good or ill the most "important" of recent American presidents. He had a greater and more enduring impact on America and the world than any of his successors, or indeed, any of his predecessors since Harry S Truman two decades earlier still; if John F. Kennedy looms large in legend, he does so precisely as legend, rather than for the actual events of his abbreviated time in office.

It is almost paradoxical that so dominant a president should be intimately linked to so dominant a secretary of state. In modern times, those presidents strongly interested in foreign affairs have tended to operate as their own secretaries of state, with the holder of that position reduced to managerial functions. No recent president was more internationally oriented than Nixon, yet though he limited his first Secretary of State, Rogers, to a functionary role, he presently placed Kiss

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ar Two, when Nixon was a pioneering figure in the modern Republican Right. "From Nixon's early campaigns, he developed the reputation as a hard-hitting, slashing campaigner. His attack style and 'go for the jugular' approach became a Nixon trademark (Genovese, 1990, p. 2). Yet he was capable of winning if not love, then support. Nixon had an extraordinary understanding of how to push political "buttons." In 1952, threatened with dismissal from the Republican ticket for accepting questionable gifts, he made a speech that referred to one gift he had received, a dog named Checkers. "While critics considered the Checkers speech 'a crude exploitation of sentiment,' for Nixon it was a phenomenal success" (Genovese, 1990, p. 3). He succeeded in casting himself as an ordinary American, and millions of ordinary Americans responded. He came from Whittier, California: not the California of beaches and Hollywood, but a sort of transplanted, and therefore rootless, Midwest. He appealed to a rootless and uneasy people. Henry Kissinger was not born an American; he was born Heinz Kissenger, a Bavarian Jew, and it has been suggested that he began to learn the nature of global power politics in the hardest of schools, when at age seven the

Category: Government - N