Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year

By any measure, 1973 was not an ordinary year. It should have been Kissinger's year of triumph -- a time to bask in his hard-won achievements and build on his successes. Kissinger's strategy of opening the door to China and détente with the Soviet Union had been judged an overwhelming more >>

By any measure, 1973 was not an ordinary year. It should have been Kissinger's year of triumph -- a time to bask in his hard-won achievements and build on his successes. Kissinger's strategy of opening the door to China and détente with the Soviet Union had been judged an overwhelming success. After furthering his policy of realpolitik through backchannel diplomacy during Nixon's first term, Kissinger was finally awarded the plum position of secretary of state. But then major events shattered whatever peace and calm America had attained in the early part of the decade: first came defeat in Vietnam; then Watergate, culminating in the president's resignation; war in the Middle East; and finally an economic collapse caused by the Arab oil embargo. All of these momentous blows to the country's security occurred on Henry Kissinger's watch. Rather than progressing on all fronts, as he had expected, Kissinger would confront some of the most critical policy challenges of his career.

Based on full access to the subject and his papers, Kissinger is an intimate portrait of a man, a country, and a presidency at a critical point. From the blowup in the Middle East, to détente with Russia, to the opening of the door to China, the United States' response to the pivotal events of 1973 -- and Kissinger's crucial role in the formulation of that response -- continues to shape and influence United States foreign policy today.

Nineteen seventy-two was a year Henry Kissinger was glad to see come to a close. After twelve months of turbulent activity, and nail-biting negotiations with the North Vietnamese, it had ended on an upbeat note of considerable optimism -- insofar as the global position of the United States was concerned -- yet one of some uncertainty in terms of his own private ambitions. A triumph in which Kissinger could claim to have played some little part, in the presidential elections that November President Richard Nixon had won the second greatest landslide in American history. Forty-seven million Americans had voted for him -- and for his and Kissinger's policies -- representing more than 60 percent of all the votes cast. It was an impressive endorsement of his strategy of opening the door to China the previous year, and détente with the Soviet Union. Moreover, despite the huge underswell of opposition to the ever-rumbling Vietnam War, it surely indicated that a majority also supported Kissinger's tireless trips to Paris in 1972, endeavoring to wrestle a "peace with honor" out of the granite-faced, unyielding men from North Vietnam.

Yet that strange human being, Richard Milhous Nixon, the strangest -- and perhaps the most fascinating if not egregious -- of all U.S. presidents, had celebrated his triumph, not with oysters and champagne as had British prime minister Harold Macmillan in a comparable triumph on coming to power in 1957, but with a demand for the resignation of his entire staff.

Christmas 1972 was a lonely time, for Kissinger as well as for his boss, and a period of serious reflection. Kissinger was then a bachelor, enamored of the tall, elegant, but elusive WASP Nancy Maginnes, but still very much a bachelor -- Washington's most sought-after bachelor. Each Christmas he would "ask her to marry me; every year she refused -- said she 'wasn't ready' -- and yet she wasn't seeing anybody else."1 So he continued to live in a cramped bachelor house, two up, two down -- one bedroom of which he used as an office -- on Waters << less