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Richard Nixon: Advisers All his life, Richard Nixon suffered from an inferiority complex. He thought that members of the Eastern Establishment -- the Rockefellers, the Cabots, the Harvard boys -- had it out for him because of his blue-collar California background. At the same time Nixon wanted to be a part of that Establishment. Henry Kissinger once theorized that because he had been an aide to Rockefeller and was a professor at Harvard, Nixon wanted to "co-opt" him. Kissinger, who had fled Germany in the 1930s because his family was Jewish, became indispensable to Nixon's policies. The president and his national security advisor (later Secretary of State) thought about international relations in much the same way, each disdaining the traditional moralistic American approach in favor of a sophisticated balance-of-power analysis. For many Americans during Nixon's term, Kissinger grew to represent all that was wrong with American policy abroad. Indeed, Kissinger admitted that his view of how the world works was hard for a populace raised on dreams of global peace to accept. Yet the record is clear: with the constraints under which Nixon and Kissinger worked, and with the postwar American consensus on foreign policy shattered, the pair were enormously successful. Eventually, the Watergate scandal undermined Nixon, and Kissinger enjoyed a position of autonomy unknown in American foreign policymaking until that point. On more or less his own initiative, he began the process of brokering a Middle East peace settlement (for which he won the Nobel Prize) and continued to conduct "backchannel" negotiations with the Soviets. Since leaving office, he has become once more a part of the Establishment that rejected Nixon, appearing most recently as a featured guest at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. |
Advisers
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