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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"The man is unfit to be President," Henry Kissinger said of Richard Nixon during the 1968 Presidential campaign. Kissinger was a protege and associate of Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon's chief competition for the Republican nomination, and he shared Rockefeller's opinion: that Nixon was an opportunist without vision. Kissinger was also a professor at Harvard, not a place where he was likely to rub up against a Nixon supporter. And he was a Jew. Nixon, of course, was a seething cauldron of ressentiment. He hated Harvard professors; he loathed rich East Coast establishment types like Rockefeller; he was suspicious of Jews. He despised these people because he believed that they despised him, but he could never let them alone. They were his motivation, his catnip. Less than three weeks after the election, Nixon put in a call to Kissinger, and when he was sworn into office, in January, 1969, Kissinger was sitting behind him on the platform, the new national-security adviser. Like all foreign-policy realists, Kissinger was drawn to power. For access to it, he could forgive much.
"The care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of his presidency," Nixon's speechwriter Raymond Price once said, "but he was worth it." The couple was odd in many dimensions. Kissinger was a ladies' man (or cultivated the reputation); Nixon had trouble opening a bottle of aspirin. Neither took pleasure in sharing credit. Each hoped to use the other to promote his own renown, and each was devious and paranoid enough to find ways of preventing the other from fully succeeding. The geopolitical consequences of their co-dependency will be topics of controversy and debate forever, but one adventure has earned almost universal respect: Nixon's trip to China, in February, 1972, which is the subject of Margaret MacMillan's "Nixon and Mao" (Random House; $27.95).
MacMillan is a diplomatic historian. Her previous book, "Paris 1919," was a revisionist study of the talks that produced the Versailles Treaty, at the end of the First World War. That book was subtitled "Six Months That Changed the World." The subtitle of the new book is "The Week That Changed the World." The phrase is Nixon's own: he used it in his parting toast, in Shanghai. Nixon was certainly entitled to some self-admiration. He had boldly...
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