It is the argument of this discussion that the choice of Henry Kissinger as Nixon's chief foreign-policy advisor was uniquely sound one from a man who frequently showed poor judgment in his choice of the men he placed around him, and that it was Kissinger's own perspective and abilities that accounted in large measure for the generally successful performance of the Nixon administration in foreign affairs.

For the Nixon record is remarkably bifurcated. At home, the dominant fact of his presidency was the manner in which he left it. The deep atmosphere of suspicion in American public life did not begin with Watergate. It was already developing during the escalation of the Vietnam War, and in some ways it goes back to the early days of the Cold War. But it was greatly exacerbated under Nixon; it is not for nothing that "-gate" has become a conventional suffix for public scandals or even minor imbroglios. (Thus, a flap over the White House travel office in Clinton's first year was sometimes called "travelgate.") Nor does Watergate somehow stand apart from the rest of Nixon's domestic performance; indeed, as we shall see, it was in a sense the culmination of his entire domestic political career.

Abroad, however, and in spite of inh

Remarkably for a successful politician, Richard Nixon was never personally popular. He was admired rather than loved by his supporters, but he was passionately hated by his opponents. These emotions go back to his earliest political campaigns, after World War Two, when Nixon was a pioneering figure in the modern Republican Right. "From Nixon's early campaigns, he developed the reputation as a hard-hitting, slashing campaigner. His attack style and 'go for the jugular' approach became a Nixon trademark (Genovese, 1990, p. 2).

We must attribute much of that success to Kissinger. He makes a striking contrast to Nixon's other most influential appointments. On the domestic front, the men who had the greatest influence upon Nixon; Haldeman, Erlichmann, John Mitchell, tended to reinforce his most paranoid traits, and by and large they ended up as convicted felons. Kissinger, on the other hand, not only avoided embroilment in scandal, but more fundamentally served to reinforce Nixon's potential strengths rather than his weaknesses. Had Nixon's leading foreign policy advisor shared the traits of his chief domestic advisors, his foreign record might have been as disastrous as his domestic record--and, perhaps, immeasurably more so.

He did not see combat, but was assigned from the first to quasi-political and quasi-diplomatic duties. While serving in U.S. Occupation forces in Germany after the war, he showed his skills when assigned to identify former Gestapo members. He accomplished this by a simple but subtle measure: he ran an employment ad in a German newspaper seeking men with police experience. Dozens of ex-Gestapo men duly turned up for interviews (Kalb and Kalb, 1974, p. 41).

Kissinger, by nature diplomatic, never fully accustomed himself to the slashing Nixonian style. "There are times when one catches a glimpse of pained self-control as Kissinger listens to a presidential