Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’
Richard Nixon had met Henry Kissinger only once before he asked him, on his landslide victory in 1968, to be his National Security Adviser, saying to an aide, ‘I don’t trust Henry but I can use him.’ Kissinger, then at Harvard, had strongly supported Nixon’s rival for the Republican nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, openly deriding Nixon and calling him at one point ‘a hollow man … evil.’
Their subsequent longstanding and successful partnership, surviving Nixon’s pathological jealousy and suspicion of his adviser and his habit of telling crass jokes about ‘yids’ in his presence, is therefore a good example on both sides of Kissinger’s model for international relations: affectless, morally contentless, based simply on achieving the maximum that in his view could be achieved.
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