Nixon & Kissinger: Dealing in Détente

Robert Dallek would appear an ideal choice to write a 700-page book on President Nixon’s collaboration with Henry Kissinger in the pursuit of realpolitik. Mr. Dallek has made a successful career of describing the links between presidential policy and private character. More importantly, Mr. Dallek has less ideological baggage than some other likely candidates, who would relish nothing more than one last shot at the reviled 37th president and his smarty-pants national security adviser.That said, “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power” (Harper-Collins, 623 pages, $32.50) is an oddly unsatisfying book in both its narration and conclusions about one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of American foreign policy. Addicts for this sort of thing will be far better served by Margaret MacMillan’s “Nixon and Mao” (2007) — a thoroughly gripping look behind the scenes of Nixon’s triumphant mission to China. Readers will grow tired of the repetitive litany of what made a power-obsessed president and his émigré co-dependent tick.Mr. Dallek provides more information than necessary on the future president’s withholding mother and bullying father, not to mention what he considers Mr. Kissinger’s pattern of denial regarding his sufferings as a Jewish boy growing up in Nazi Germany. It turns out that a little bit of this goes a long way and not all of it is helpful. He does quote Mr. Kissinger to this effect: “It is fashionable now to explain everything psychoanalytically,” he told an interviewer in 1971, “but let me tell you, the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life.” Mr. Dallek is far from persuaded.The author struggles mightily to make some news with his assertion that Mr. Nixon may have been so destabilized by the Watergate scandal that his authority could have been suspended by his own Cabinet under the terms of the 25th Amendment. That’s thumb-sucking of a pretty high order. Meanwhile, he’s just ticking the boxes with a damning rehash of the Nixon/Kissinger role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. He also thinks Nixon prolonged the Vietnam War to avoid being blamed for the collapse of Saigon during the 1972 election campaign. His evidence, which includes a 1971 Kissinger warning that turmoil in South Vietnam would be bad for business, is on the sketchy side. Mr. Dallek does, however, effectively nail them down on their decided tilt toward Pakistan in its hot and cold wars with India — it seems we’re still cleaning up after that one.On the big picture, Mr. Dallek is justifiably inclined to give his principals extremely high marks on the China initiative. And, like Ms. Macmillan, Mr. Dallek insists that the president was the author of the strategy, with Mr. Kissinger serving as an exquisite instrument. The author sides with the “realist” school in crediting Nixon and Mr. Kissinger’s policy of détente as being essential to ending the Cold War. Here is where the book really goes off the tracks:As important, the opening of Russia to Western influence through détente eroded communism’s hold on its peoples at home and abroad. Economic and cultural exchanges with the United States penetrated the Iron Curtain and made continuing Soviet insularity impossible. Détente did not end the Cold War, but in conjunction with deterrence and containment, which were central to America’s Soviet policy from Truman through Reagan, it set a process in motion that came to fruition under Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the 1980s.The “cultural exchanges” that arguably had the biggest impact on the Soviet Union had nothing to do with détente, but were transmitted much later over Soviet protest and jamming to short-wave radios throughout their empire. These broadcasts, carried by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, dealt with the plight of Soviet Jews, with the multiple economic failures of the communist system, and with the doings of a charismatic Polish pope. As for détente’s “economic exchanges,” they did much more to prop up than open up the failing Soviet regimes.Ronald Reagan — with powerful assists from other Western leaders — won the Cold War by rejecting accommodation, comparing and contrasting democratic and totalitarian ideas, enlisting powerful economic and technological advantages, and insisting on systemic change. Challenging Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall was considered gauche and even dangerous by the partisans of détente. But in the end, it worked.Mr. Willcox last wrote for these pages on Margaret MacMillan’s “Nixon and Mao.”

Nixon & Kissinger: Dealing in Détente

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