Richard Whalen on The Retreat of American Power and Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind

The Retreat of American Power By Henry Brandon Doubleday, 368 pp., $8.95 Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind By Stephen R. Graubard Norton, 288 pp., $7.95 Until the Watergate revelations spilled into the Oval Office some months ago, the media consensus on the Nixon Administration was that its domestic policies were, of course, disastrous but its foreign policies, highlighted by the presidential journeys to Peking and Moscow and the SALT agreements, were bold and successful. As a result Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s one-man foreign ministry, enjoyed a singular position of favor. But no more. When it was revealed that Kissinger had approved tapping the telephones of his subordinates and their suspected contacts in the press, he too got his feet wet and the clay began to dissolve.

Now Kissinger, in the phrase of Newsweek’s, Shana Alexander, one of his circle of boosters in better days, is ”a sorrowful and bitter figure.” More interestingly, in a recent column she shared Kissinger’s assessment of what Watergate has wrought. “The American people don’t yet realize how gravely wounded the country is,” he reportedly told her. “This is Dunkirk.” Dunkirk? The analogy is peculiar, to say the least. Those taking to the boats in Washington these days bear no resemblance to a gallant but outgunned army; rather, they are failed apparatchiks who, having been found out, are not above ratting on one another.

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Richard J. Whalen

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The Retreat of American Power By Henry Brandon Doubleday, 368 pp., $8.95 Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind By Stephen R. Graubard Norton, 288 pp., $7.95 Until the Watergate revelations spilled into the Oval Office some months ago, the media consensus on the Nixon Administration was that its domestic policies were, of course, disastrous but its foreign policies, highlighted by the presidential journeys to Peking and Moscow and the SALT agreements, were bold and successful. As a result Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s one-man foreign ministry, enjoyed a singular position of favor. But no more. When it was revealed that Kissinger had approved tapping the telephones of his subordinates and their suspected contacts in the press, he too got his feet wet and the clay began to dissolve.

Now Kissinger, in the phrase of Newsweek’s, Shana Alexander, one of his circle of boosters in better days, is ”a sorrowful and bitter figure.” More interestingly, in a recent column she shared Kissinger’s assessment of what Watergate has wrought. “The American people don’t yet realize how gravely wounded the country is,” he reportedly told her. “This is Dunkirk.” Dunkirk? The analogy is peculiar, to say the least. Those taking to the boats in Washington these days bear no resemblance to a gallant but outgunned army; rather, they are failed apparatchiks who, having been found out, are not above ratting on one another.