Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power by Robert Dallek

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
"No One Is Ever Going To Hear Those Tapes", June 10, 2007

Any overview of the Nixon-Kissinger collaboration is necessarily going to be at least partially derivative and while Dallek leans on William Bundy's Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency and to a lesser extent Walter Isaacson's Kissinger: A Biography, he also did his own exhaustive research, including access to much new material from Kissinger's archives. The resulting synthesis is an excellent one-volume overview.

Presidential historian Dallek presents here the full tale of the Nixon-Kissinger era for scholar and general reader alike. Dallek mostly allows the story to tell itself and is even-handed when he does insert his own views. Of course, even-handed means a largely negative evaluation. While Dallek rightly praises Nixon for the China opening and to some extent for detente with the Soviet Union, he also covers the criminal overthrew of Chile's elected Socialist leader Allende and their nearly catastrophic tilt toward Pakistan in its conflict with India - and of course, Vietnam.

As Dallek once again establishes, Nixon and Kissinger deliberately extended the Vietnam War to aid Nixon's 1972 re-election. They distinctly did not want the war to end too early and risk the premature collapse of the South Vietnamese house of cards in advance of the election. The exit of US ground forces was cynically calibrated to be just completed by the fall of 1972. And as Dallek relates they expanded the war to Cambodia and Laos with disastrous results for those peoples.

The story of the Nixon era ultimately becomes the story of Watergate. At bottom Watergate was about the tapes. After the discovery of their existence, Nixon's resistance to releasing them led to charges of cover-up, and their ultimate release confirmed his criminality. Dallek does necessarily delve a bit into the details of Watergate, but the best source for that story remains Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon by Stanley Kutler.

When the taping system was first installed, Haldeman asked whether Nixon wanted transcripts prepared. Nixon declaimed, "Absolutely not. No one is ever going to hear those tapes but you and me." The delicious unintended irony of this answer is irresistible, but also revealing. Nixon seems to have had the self-awareness to know in advance that his tapes were not going to be pretty.

Indeed, one of the strengths of Dallek's book is the extent to which the mostly repellent personalities of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger are on display: paranoid, ruthless, secretive, conspiratorial, and deceptive. Kissinger at least possessed a charm that Nixon completely lacked. Nixon did not like people much and people reciprocated.

While Dallek does not add any big new important pieces to our knowledge, his exhaustive research does add authoritativeness to what we thought we already knew. Dallek does highlight the shocking extent of Nixon's drinking - he was often drunk and asleep or out of control, in particular during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

'Nixon and Kissinger' is the work of a worthy professional historian and Dallek has given us a complete and even-handed treatment without polemics (however, his repeated suggestion that Nixon's aides and Kissinger in particular should have pushed Nixon's temporary removal under the 25th Amendment is perhaps the book's weakest point).

Dallek also made a special effort to make his work accessible to a younger generation of readers who did not live through the Watergate-Vietnam immersion experience. Highly recommended for both seasoned Nixon hands and newcomers alike.