Can I tell what I said to Le Duc Tho when I needed to go to the bathroom? I said, “Objective necessity requires me to ask for a break.” And he then spent forty-five minutes explaining to me that I didn’t have the right to use communist jargon.
We never believed that negotiations by themselves would generate magically some outcome. We thought the process of negotiations would support what we were trying to achieve. You could apply that, I would say, to every negotiation that we conducted. We strove to enter negotiations by knowing what we thought the outcome should be and how it should be reached. The result of that attitude was that we made serious efforts to understand the thinking of the other side, so that we did not go in with a fixed notion of a permanent enemy as an abstract. So we tried to understand what the other side was trying to accomplish because, at the end of a negotiation, you must have parties that are willing to support it. Otherwise, you’re just negotiating an armistice. When we encountered irreconcilable hostility or unbridgeable conflict, we strove for a strategy to overcome it.
Then I had views on the practice of negotiating. The conventional approach to negotiations is to state your maximum objective, and then slice away at it and give up a little bit at a time until you come to a final conclusion.
I’ve always objected to that on the ground that when you engage in these so-called salami tactics, you never know when you have reached the end, and everything becomes a test of strength and endurance. So my general approach, and I say “mine” because I was the practical negotiator for much of this, was to offer very quickly the basic objective, the basic goals we were trying to reach, maybe plus 5 percent, and then explain it to the other side at great lengths. The purpose was to probe for a conceptual understanding.
I usually spent a lot of time in explaining our long-range goals strategically and philosophically. I thought the other side would have to make its decisions on the basis of some assessment of their aims, and they needed to hear ours.
And I would say the negotiations that succeeded occurred when the other side gave you a comparably frank explanation. I would say negotiations with Zhou Enlai and Sadat were examples of that, where we were not bargaining about little items, where we were making big jumps toward a defined objective.
If history is the memory of states, negotiating styles are often the product of history.
In dealing with diverse personalities, Kissinger found their techniques often reflected the historical psyches of their countries: a confident nation, with a glorious history, take the long view. A paranoid nation, subject to invasions, haggling like rug merchants. A revolutionary nation, allergic to compromise, wielding talks as a weapon. A wary nation, surrounded by hostility, examining texts with Talmudic fervor.
It was maddening to be accused of not having made offers which we knew we had already put on the table. There were always articles that alleged that we should do just one more little thing when most of the time, we had already done it. In any event, there was really only one issue: are we willing to overthrow a government which our predecessors had put into office to permit a Vietnamese society to be free, or as free as we could make it, and replace it by imposing a communist government? This would have been a violation of everything America stood for in the post-WW2 period.
Eisenhower used language which I had not previously associated with him, about what a disgraceful performance this was - everything we had told him was highly secret was in the newspapers.
So I said, “Are you blaming me for this?” This led to another outburst that said, in effect, “Keep your feelings out of this. This is your job for your country.” So then I said, “We’ve been here for six weeks, and we’ve been trying to get this leaking thing under control, and we don’t seem to be able to do it.” This led to an almost terminal outbreak of rage. Remember, he was at Walter Reed hospital with a heart condition. I think his last words to me were, “Young man, that’s one lesson you might learn. Never tell anybody that you can’t do the job that has been entrusted to you.”
Nixon was basically a loner, so he read a lot. Secondly, he felt more comfortable when he traveled abroad talking to leaders because they were not involved in the domestic disputes that characterized him. So he developed some very thoughtful insights over the years on the operational aspects of foreign policy. I had, for a variety of reasons, made the problem of peace and stability my intellectual concern. So I had read and studied and written books on that subject, but I was never much involved in the tactical decisions.
The one basic principle of an NSC organization has to be that the State Department must not run any interdepartmental group, because they are unable to do that well, and because the Pentagon will never take orders from the State Department.
He had one maxim that I often cite, which is you pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely. It characterizes many of his decisions.
The first thing one has to ask is, What is a leader supposed to do? Any leader has a series of practical problems that obtrude and that circumstances generate, and that I would call the tactical level. Beyond that, he has the task of taking his society from where it is to where it has never been. That’s the challenge of leadership, to build arising circumstances into a vision of the future.
With respect to the first task, it depends partly on the domestic structure of the society and partly on a certain tactical skill.
With respect to the leadership part, the qualities most needed are character and courage. Character because the decisions that are really tough are 51-49. The obvious decisions get made in the course of bureaucratic consideration. But when you have a very close call, it means that you have decided to go on one road rather than another. So you need moral strength to make a decision on which, by definition, you can almost not have a majority because you’re dealing with unfamiliar terrain. And you need courage to walk alone part of the way.
Now, of course you will say, “How about intelligence?” I would say you need a minimum of intelligence to understand the issues. You can always hire intelligent people, but you cannot hire character.
Much of the web of decisions is based on conjecture. You have to make an assessment that you cannot prove correct when you make it. You will know it only in retrospect. And the most different your assessment is from conventional wisdom, the more isolated you will be. But as a general proposition, by the time you know all the facts, it is too late to affect them. So the art is to make your judgment at a moment when you have enough facts to be able to interpret what will turn out the correct way, not so soon that you overthrow everything, and not so late that you are stagnating.
“The Agony and the Ecstasy.” That sums up my odyssey with Henry. Whatever my periodic pangs, I always shared the sentiment of Albert Camus: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” I am deeply indebted to Henry for the climb as well as the view.
While stretching my perspectives and capacities, he also stretched my patience and my nerves. Taunting me with, “Is this the best that you can do?” before actually, with a sly smile, reading my texts. Exuding disdain for mushy advocacy. Calling on Sundays to demand work on a speech just as the Redskins kicked off. Dismissing my forty-page draft of a white paper on Cambodia two days before the president’s deadline. Eighty-hour weeks and lost holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries.
I have known Kissinger for decades, but during these conversations I was struck by the sheer brilliance of his mind at work, how he would be discussing one decision made in the late 1960s and then explain how they were taking into account the impact it would have on another country, perhaps years later, and half a world away. By peering into the future in this way, Nixon and Kissinger were able to see opportunities and dangers others might have missed, and were able to use them to America’s advantage.
No matter how skilled a negotiator might be, no agreement can stand the test of time unless both sides are invested in its success.