President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were heavyweights who worked together to advance America’s interests.
Not long ago, America’s intellectual and political landscape was dominated by heavyweights: leaders with extraordinary gravitas.
President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were two such heavyweights who worked together to advance America’s interests — though not without controversy — during a particularly perilous period.
Both men are now gone, but their dynamic legacies, forever intertwined, endure.
I began working for former President Nixon fresh out of college, during the last few years of his life.
One day, as I sat with him in his office, a call from Kissinger came in.
I got up to give him privacy to take the call, but he waved me back into my chair. “Henry!” he bellowed. “How goes the world?”
It’s often argued that Nixon was the Doer and Kissinger was the Thinker.
But the truth is they were both men of deep thought and bold action.
Nixon was the rare political leader who possessed an uncommon intellect, and Kissinger was the rare academic who could implement policy effectively in the real world.
Their gifts were complementary.
Kissinger wrote his Harvard PhD dissertation on 19th-century European balance-of-power politics and remained a disciple of the realist approach to international affairs.
That philosophy dovetailed with Nixon’s own view, and the president, already impressed with Kissinger’s intellectual heft and foreign-policy work with his onetime political rival, New York Gov.
