September 16, 2022

Former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger discussed what he thinks are the most important qualities in a leader in a September 14 appearance at the Nixon Library.

Kissinger, 99, was being interviewed by former Richard Nixon aide Frank Gannon about his new book, “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy,” which came out in July. Kissinger lauded Nixon for combining “vision and courage in an extraordinarily complex period in which the unity of the country was disintegrating and [in] which the international system was being attacked in so many places.” Kissinger went on to explain that he had never met Nixon before being tapped as his National Security Adviser (NSA); in fact, before Nixon was elected president, Kissinger was a close friend of Nelson Rockefeller, one of Nixon’s Republican presidential primary opponents.

“When President Nixon invited me to talk to him a few weeks after his election he didn’t do it to offer me anything,” Kissinger said. “We had a two-hour conversation as if we were college professors about the state of the world.” The meeting ended with Nixon requesting that one of his staffers and Kissinger establish a telephone line with each other. “As if Cambridge was a place that didn’t have adequate communication,” Kissinger quipped, prompting laughter from the audience. At the time, Kissinger was teaching at Harvard University.

During Nixon’s five-and-a-half years as president, Kissinger said that “peace in the Middle East was being advanced” and the “war in Vietnam ended on the terms that we set from the beginning: People who had relied on America should not be sacrificed.” And of course, the administration forged open relations with China. “People today often ask me what would Richard Nixon do today [with China] and I’m sure I know what he would do,” Kissinger said. “He would create a situation that makes it clear that threatening American security is too dangerous … but he would also simultaneously be in a dialogue to China.”

Kissinger explained that Nixon worked “within the framework of adult psychology” in his approach to leadership. “Nixon did not like enter a room and pound the table,” the former Secretary of State said, yet Nixon would still act “quickly and decisively” when a decision was made. As examples, Kissinger pointed to Nixon forging the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements with the Soviet Union in 1972, an election year in which Nixon was accused of not doing enough to achieve peace; at that time, the north Vietnamese was launching attacks against all of Vietnam with the help of the Soviets. The SALT agreements capped the United States and Soviets’ amount of antiballistic missile sites and put a freeze on each country developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Kissinger also pointed to Nixon’s decision to send military supplies to Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 as an example of the late president acting decisively, as a ceasefire was reached between Israel, Egypt and Syria a couple weeks later.

Kissinger said that the “key to Nixon’s thinking on these matters” was his viewpoint that “you pay the same price for doing something halfway as doing it completely.” “If you don’t know what to do tactically, ask yourself what you should want to be the end result of the process as a leader,” the former secretary of state said.

Kissinger proceeded to call Nixon’s resignation from the presidency during the Watergate scandal as being a “tragedy” because he and Nixon believed that the U.S. was growing “closer to either Russia or China than they were to each other” at that time. “The ultimate legacy of a leader is not the things he does himself but the process he starts and the thought that he leaves behind on which future societies can build,” Kissinger said.

The conversation then turned to Kissinger’s thoughts on the late Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister during the Nixon administration. Kissinger called Meir “a spectacular person.” “She could make herself look like your favorite grandmother but she was very tough,” he said. He praised her for keeping “her country together in the early days [of the Yom Kippur War] where it looked as [if] things might turn badly.” 

Kissinger also recalled that Nixon had suggested that the administration publicize their viewpoint that the Soviets needed to be expelled from the Middle East. “All hell broke loose when I said it [publicly],” Kissinger said.

Kissinger then turned back to Nixon’s leadership philosophy, explaining that his debates with Nixon would focus on “how we could be both strong and vigilant.” “Too often our professional debate is conducted as a debate of people who want to do away [with weapons] and others who think you can do everything with weapons,” Kissinger said, adding that Nixon wanted “to bring the two [viewpoints] together.” He proceeded to mention Nixon’s “prescient” 1967 essay in Foreign Affairs that suggested that the U.S. could take advantage of China and the Soviet’s deteriorating relationship with each other as a way for the U.S. to develop better relationships with both countries. And when Soviet and Chinese forces broke out into a military conflict in Siberia early in the Nixon administration, Nixon looked into which one of the two was weaker. “When you have two adversaries and you’re concerned about both of them and they’re in conflict, you should support the weaker against the stronger,” Kissinger said.

The former secretary of state proceeded to say that when working through a crisis like the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s important to determine “not only how you achieve victory but what you do after victory.” “When you talk about the Ukraine situation, do we want to create a situation in which a Russia that has been stopped in its tracks but in which Russia that becomes open to a new relationship with the west or that it looks to China for its support?” Kissinger said, adding that “the next three moves” after the war is over need to be determined.

Kissinger concluded the event by saying that leaders will drive themselves “crazy” if they care about public opinion and that in order to be a great leader, “you have to have a vision for your country because great leaders move people in their country from where they are to where they have never been.” He also recounted that during one of Nixon’s last nights in office, Kissinger told him that “history will treat you better than you can ever imagine,” to which Nixon replied: “That depends who writes history.” “Who writes history depends in large part on the memory that reflects society’s capacity for achievement,” Kissinger said, “and I think that remains to be true because if leaders are totally focused on themselves, they become overwhelmed by the communications of the moment and they expend so much of their effort trying to figure out the angle that they forget what the direction should be. I think that’s the overwhelming problem of our time.”