Literary Review - August 2007

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BIOGRAPHY

CHRISTOPHERCOKER

THEY DESERVED EACH OTHER

RICHARDMILHOUS NIXON: THE INVINCIBLEQUEST

★By Conrad Black (Quercus 1152pp £30)

NIXONANDKISSINGER: PARTNERSINPOWER

★By Robert Dallek (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 740pp £30)

ON14 FEBRUARY1971 Andréé Malraux visited the President of the United States and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who was already secretly planning the coup de thééââtreof the Nixon presidency: the visit to China. Malraux said absolutely nothing that would be of any assistance to Nixon during his own visit, but, in a manner cultivated by the French, spoke mostly in allegory. Mao, he claimed, had had ‘a fantastic destiny ... You may think he will be addressing you, but in truth he will be addressing Death ... There’s something of the sorcerer in him. He’s a man inhabited by a vision, possessed by it ... No one will know if you succeed, Mr President, for at least fifty years. The Chinese are very patient’. After Malraux left, Kissinger flattered the President: ‘I thought your questions were very intelligent.’ Nixon: ‘I tried to keep him going.’ Kissinger: ‘Well, you did it very beautifully.’ In Nixon’s presence, Kissinger was invariably sycophantic. Malraux had pitched it exactly right. Both Nixon and Kissinger had an overinflated sense of China’s importance, as well as of the mystique of Mao and Chou En Lai, so desperate were they for some new dimension in the Cold War. They saw themselves as explorers in the footsteps of Marco Polo (the code name of the Kissinger visit); they fooled themselves that they were going to a magic place, or another planet. Indeed Nixon almost affected to be emulating the astronauts he had sent to the moon two years earlier. In China’s eyes, both men cut a sorry figure. Chou En Lai told his Politbureau that the President had ‘eagerly presented himself like an overdressed whore at China’s door’. Mao particularly disliked courtiers and was suspicious of the Kissinger type. ‘Just a

funny little man. He is shuddering all over with nerves every time he comes to see me.’ In the end, however, it was Kissinger who was to do best from the China venture. He managed to convince the Americans that he was an authority on the Middle Kingdom. He became a flourishing China expert in the private sector, and to be fair, it was through his efforts that Chinese–American relations took on a fairly positive life of their own. The China trip is one of many stories that Conrad Black presents us with in another 900-plus-page biography of an American president, coming hot on the heels of his study of a much greater president (and man), Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is an accomplished work which is positive about its subject without being unnecessarily adulatory. There’s not much I can find to fault in Black’s final conclusion that Nixon was treated unfairly over Watergate in large part because he was so hated by the Establishment. No one was hurt by the Watergate affair (‘no one drowned in the Watergate’ was a frequently seen bumper sticker, referring to Teddy Kennedy). History may treat him more kindly. He was instrumental in taking the Republican Party away from the isolationists and country-club plutocrats who had led it to disaster again and again against Roosevelt and Truman. And he, more than anyone else, engineered the downfall of Joseph McCarthy as well as ‘outing’ Alger Hiss, for which he was never forgiven by the liberal intelligentsia (whom Spiro Agnew, his ghastly Vice President, liked to call ‘the nabobs of negativism’). Robert Dallek’s book is very different. It is a highly illuminating study of one of the most remarkable foreign policy partnerships of the twentieth century, a partnership between two largely self-made men who were ruthless in pursuit of their own ambition. A vast array of previously untapped records has served his reconstruction of their histories. The recent opening of the bulk of these materials – millions of pages of national security files; 2,800 hours out of 3,700 hours of Nixon tapes; and 20,000 pages of Kissinger telephone transcripts that were made by aides listening in on the two men’s conversations – makes yet another re-examination of the men and their relationship both timely and instructive. Inevitably, perhaps, their similarities made them rivals. In fact, Nixon distrusted Kissinger from the moment he appointed him as National Security Advisor. He was far from deceived by his constant flattery. His principal advisor’s craving for the spotlight and too obviously self-serving ambition made him question his ultimate loyalty. On mischief bent

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BIOGRAPHY

Distrustful of all intellectuals, he disliked Kissinger’s associations with the Georgetown elite and imagined him sitting around at dinner tables telling his friends about the President’s bumbling manner, for he was as socially awkward as Gerald Ford. ‘Jew boy’, Nixon used to call Kissinger behind his back, and occasionally to his face as a way to keep him in his place. Kissinger reciprocated the nastiness by privately referring to Nixon as ‘our drunken friend’ and ‘the meatball mind’. The journalist Marvin Kalb recalls numerous occasions on which Kissinger would remark: ‘Marvin, you see him as the President of the United States. I see him as a madman.’ The relationship rested not on trust but on deception and even hostility to one another. Nixon was simultaneously happy to rely on his advisor’s diplomatic skills while secretly resenting his emergence as a celebrity. Kissinger’s insistent need for attention incensed the man he served but his undoubted skill in dealing with the Chinese, Russians, Vietnamese and later Arabs made it difficult to fire him. Watergate made it impossible. Clemenceau may well have claimed that ‘the cemeteries are full of indispensable men’. In this case it was actually true. Neither book adds very much to what we already know of their foreign policy successes and failures. But both flesh out some of the details about the men themselves. If there is a villain in Dallek’s account, it is Kissinger. Historians, he reminds us, tend to treat the partnership as a coalition which enabled the US to end the Vietnam War, turn China, and ease the tension with the Soviet Union through déétente. But what the hitherto untapped sources confirm is what others have known or suspected, that the personal flaws of both men had an impact on their making of foreign policy. Nixon’s drive to win re-election, which he equated with his bid for presidential greatness, and Kissinger’s ambition to become the most memorable National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in history (his only rival is Acheson) skewed their judgements and produced some terrible decisions in Vietnam and Chile. On every occasion, they put themselves first. In Nixon’s case it ended in tragedy. There was an old joke at the time of Watergate: ‘If Nixon were captain of the Titanic, he would have told the passengers he’d stopped the ship to take on ice.’ And there’s something of the famous ship’s fate about Nixon, even if the icebergs were of his own making: his excessive secrecy, paranoia and complete inability to admit to his own mistakes. Kissinger’s reputation survived his master’s fall but it is beginning to wear rather thin. In the end, one must conclude that both men deserved each other. At the beginning of one of his chapters Dallek places an epigram from Kissinger’s memoirs, Years of Renewal: ‘Deep down one could never be certain that what one found so disturbing in Nixon might not also be a reflection of some suppressed flaw within oneself.’ Each offered a window into the other’s soul. To order these books, see LR Bookshop on page 37

PETERWASHINGTON OUT OF THE FOG

JOSEPHCONRAD: A LIFE

★By Zdzislaw Najder (Translated by Halina Najder) (Boydell & Brewer 745pp £30)

THESEVERALLIVES OFJOSEPHCONRAD

★By John Stape (William Heinemann 378pp £20)

IF EXILEANDalienation are the defining characteristics of twentieth-century literature, Joseph Conrad is the quintessential twentieth-century writer. From Roman poets to modern playwrights, many have written well in places and languages other than their own, but Conrad was more deracinated than most. The man who has been called the best French novelist in English (a compliment also paid to Henry James and Ford Madox Ford) was a Pole from what is now the Ukraine, stripped by circumstance of his culture, his class, his family, his language, his country, and even his name. But against these blows of fate Conrad fought back in original ways. Born in the landlocked backlands of Central Europe, he made a living for nearly twenty years working tramp steamers for the British merchant navy. Schooled in a rough and ready way of life, he changed tack at thirty-seven, started writing in English and published his first novel at thirty-eight. Remaining single until he was thirty-nine, he married a workingclass girl from London and became a family man, ending his life as a rich and respected member of the Establishment with a mansion in Kent which looks not unlike a Polish manor-house. Quite a journey. As usual with Conrad, this story – poor refugee unexpectedly makes good – is not quite what it seems. Konrad Korzeniowski had small private means and some connections to help him make his way in the world, not the normal lot of a working man in the late nineteenth century. He was the son of upper-middle-class parents from the radical intelligentsia, so it could be argued that the ordinary seaman who became a serious, politically aware novelist with a country estate was not rising in the world but returning to his proper milieu: socially and intellectually his friend H G Wells made a far greater leap, from the lower middle class to the elite. The same consistency of purpose applies to his private life. Given his background, Conrad’s marriage might look like a solecism but, despite a botched proposal, it seems to have been a result of the realism

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