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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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007