HOLDING BACK THE WAVE

By Henry Kissinger

My predominant concern during Watergate was not the investigations that formed the headlines of the day. It I was to sustain the credibility of the U.S. as a major power. We could--and did--take diplomatic initiatives; we could-- and did--utter warnings against threats to our security. But the authority to implement them was beginning to seep away.

This erosion affected not only adversaries; it blighted as well relations with our friends. In August, Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, interrupted a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Ottawa to fly to New York for a meeting with me at Kennedy Airport. His sole purpose was to judge the impact of Watergate on U.S. foreign policy.

"You are the anchor of the whole non-Communist world," he said nearly in despair, "and because of righteous indignation this anchor is slithering in the mud." His fear was that in 1976 a new President would see his election as vindication of the antiwar, neo-isolationist position. This must not happen: "My survival depends on it," he said.

With every passing day Watergate was circumscribing our freedom of action. We were losing the ability to make credible commitments, for we could no longer guarantee congressional approval. At the same time, we had to be careful to avoid confrontations for fear of being unable to sustain them in the miasma of domestic suspicion. (When we went on alert at the end of the Mideast war in October 1973, I was asked at a press conference whether it was a Watergate maneuver.)

I was filled with foreboding. The country seemed in a "suicidal mood," I said to one friend in May 1973, and it was bound to erode our world position: "Four or five years of amassing capital in nickels and dimes is being squandered in thousand-dollar bills." To another friend I confided: "At no crisis in the last 15 years did I think the country was in danger. But I now believe that we could suffer irreparable damage." And later: "The difference in any effort between greatness and mediocrity is a nuance. It took us two years when no one understood what we were doing to get it. One success created the necessity of the other. When it unravels it will go the same way. For two years you won't see anything, and then you start pulling the threads out."

This is more or less what happened. Once Watergate erupted, many old-line opponents of Nixon understood very well what was happening to their country's prestige and were horror-struck. The best they could do was to ease the task of those few in authority trying to steer the wreck.

In this manner I, a foreign-born American, wound up in the extraordinary position of holding together our foreign policy and reassuring our public. It had nothing to do with merit; it was evoked by a national instinct for self-preservation. While I had not discouraged the public attention in the first term by which I was made the good guy, this responsibility was too elemental, too awe-inspiring, to be consciously sought. I would not have chosen the role, and I surprised myself by not feeling up to it. Increasingly, I sought bipartisan congressional support. While it proved impossible on some neuralgic issues such as Indochina or Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, there was more unity on foreign policy than in any other area. It was as if the congressional leaders too had become horrified by the tidal wave that was threatening to engulf just and unjust alike.

The worst punishment that befell Nixon was the knowledge that in the final analysis he had done it all to himself. Yet even in his extremity he acted with high purpose in the field of foreign policy; he seemed driven by the consciousness that even if his presidency could not be saved, the nation must be.

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