The World

‘Plus ten per cent,’ added his national security advisor, Dr Henry Kissinger. The two were an unlikely but effective double act. The forty-five-year-old Kissinger was instantly more important than the secretary of state. A Jewish refugee from Fürth, Bavaria, who escaped in 1938, he had come closer to the tragedies of European extremism than any other American statesman: ‘Having lived through totalitarianism, I know what’s it like.’ It made him a connoisseur of power. After serving in the US army he became a Harvard historian, writing his thesis on Metternich. Inevitably he compared himself to Metternich and America in 1969 to Austria in 1809: ‘a government that had lost its élan and its self-confidence, which knew its limits but hardly its goals’, goals that could only be achieved by ‘the subtlety of its diplomacy’.

Coming from different worlds, Nixon and Kissinger were both secretive and pragmatic, both impressed and repelled by the other, both adroit players of the World Game. But while the president was morose and solitary, the gravel-voiced, German-accented Kissinger was a showman who, during a long career, delighted in analysing the personalities he had known: at regular dinners for the antique Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Teddy, Nixon encouraged his Harvard professor to perform and Kissinger became the most glamorous wonk since Palmerston, revelling in being the cynosure of attention, joking that ‘Power is the greatest aphrodisiac’ as he dated film stars. ‘The focused energy of the first months in office,’ Kissinger told this author, ‘are always vital and we had a grand design.’ Perhaps the conjunction was right: on 16 July 1969, 650 million people watched two American astronauts walk on the Moon.^* ‘The Heavens,’ Nixon told them from the White House, ‘have now become part of man’s world.’ Astronaut Buzz Aldrin described the Moon as ‘magnificent desolation’. First Nixon had to deal with the desolation of Vietnam.

‘A sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem,’ said Kissinger, who sought to change the relationship with Russia and China. ‘The challenge for the US was to make sure it always has more options than either of the other two parties within the triangle.’ He planned to negotiate with Brezhnev, reach out to Mao and leave Vietnam in a blaze of gunpowder. He managed all three. But in the process Nixon’s flaws tainted American democracy as much as the bruises of Vietnam had done.

In March, Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Communist trails in Cambodia. Prince Sihanouk had failed to keep Cambodia out of the war. As thousands of anti-war students protested across America, Nixon and Kissinger launched counter-offensives as a basis for starting secret negotiations, yet the policy expanded the war before it ended it. Sihanouk, trying to keep the Americans and Communists out, did not wish to lose the eastern part of his country to the Vietnamese nor to encourage his local Communists, whom he called Khmer Rouge. Instead he was ground between the two.

In early 1970, the ex-teacher and French student Saloth Sar, general secretary of the Cambodian Communists, adopted a new name, Pol Pot, and arrived in China, where Mao promised military aid for a revolution that was no longer an obscure dream.

KILLING B -52: MAO AND POL POT

While Pol was in Beijing and Sihanouk – the Prince Who Was King – was visiting Moscow, his pro-American commander Lon Nol seized power in Phnom Penh. Yet such was the prestige of the monarchy that peasants rebelled and killed Lon Nol’s brother in revenge for the coup, reportedly eating his liver. Lon Nol knelt at the feet of the queen mother to ask forgiveness for overthrowing her son, but his attacks on the North Vietnamese brought not just more Viet Cong but American troops into Cambodia – an operation ironically codenamed Freedom Deal. Determined to get power back, Sihanouk flew straight to Beijing, where Mao and Zhou welcomed their friend, whom they persuaded to join in an alliance with their other Cambodian guest, Pol Pot. Sihanouk’s vanity helped bring about a tragedy. Mao kept Sihanouk in Beijing and sent Pol Pot to Cambodia – just as he faced his own crisis.

In September 1971, Mao arrived back in Beijing unaware that his heir, Marshal Lin Biao, and son ‘Tiger’ Lin Liguo were planning to assassinate him in a drama that would mystify the outside world for decades.