Jim Palmer/AP Photo
President Richard Nixon meets with his foreign affairs adviser, Henry Kissinger, in the White House, June 11, 1973. Despite the broad scope of the congressional investigation into Nixon’s misdeeds, Kissinger survived unscathed and went on to influence U.S. foreign policy for decades.
Last weekend, while President Trump and his operatives scrambled to come up with a plausible defense for the ongoing Ukraine scandal and subsequent impeachment inquiry, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo found time to meet with a special guest: Henry Kissinger.
Not long afterward, it was reported that Pompeo was ensnared in the impeachment inquiry himself, perhaps in a central role. After ten days of evading the question, Pompeo recently admitted he was among the administration officials who listened in on the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. That revelation puts the State Department, and Pompeo himself, squarely in the crosshairs of the House impeachment proceedings. Three House committees (Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Oversight) have subpoenaed Pompeo—who opposed the release of the call’s transcript and brushed off its significance by saying, “There’s a lot going on in the world”—for documents related to the inquiry. There’s an October 4 deadline for him to produce them, though he’s already said he won’t comply.
The visit with Kissinger, squeezed in before Pompeo departed for Europe on Monday, is portentous in multiple ways. Just weeks ago, when Pompeo was being floated as a possible replacement for outgoing national security adviser John Bolton, a column in the New York Post compared the two men favorably, proclaiming in apt fashion that “Pompeo should be the next Kissinger.” Indeed, Kissinger himself once served as both secretary of state and national security adviser from 1973 to 1975 under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
That consolidated role helped Kissinger to become the most influential and ignominious foreign-policy mandarin of the last 50 years. During his time in the Nixon administration, as secretary of state, national security adviser, and eventually both, Kissinger played a key role in the 1973 CIA-backed Chilean military coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, and helped expand the disastrous Vietnam War. He also masterminded the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, and was involved in disastrous, criminal wars in Argentina, East Timor, and elsewhere. He then went on to serve in the Ford administration, before resurfacing subsequently in various roles, including as chair of George W. Bush’s National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. He’s managed to turn up at the White House as well when Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama occupied it. He was embraced by Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign.
Kissinger, now 96, has made one other high-profile visit to the Trump White House, at the height of the first wave of impeachment fervor in May 2017. The timing of Kissinger’s arrivals within Trumpworld is far from coincidental; in fact, Kissinger may be the most important and influential figure for Democrats to consider as they work through the process of impeachment.
In 1974, as the Watergate impeachment inquiry reached its fever pitch, Kissinger looked like his fate was sealed. His influence was registered throughout the Watergate scandal, given his unique power role in the Nixon White House, which was staffed lean (like Trump’s) by design. Historian Greg Grandin wrote in The Nation that Kissinger “should have gone down with the rest of them—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and Nixon”—all Nixon operatives. In fact, it was a whistleblower, Major Hal Knight, who sent a letter to then-Senator William Proxmire informing him of Kissinger’s involvement in the record falsification that helped cover up the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969.
At that point, the Watergate impeachment inquiry, headed up by Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee, was broad in scope. It focused on Nixon’s misdeeds exhaustively, beyond just the break-in of DNC headquarters: everything from his illicit warmongering, to his improper use of government agencies, to accepting gifts in office, to his personal finances and taxes.
If Nixon sounds an awful lot like Trump, he should. And the choice by Democratic leadership to pursue an impeachment inquiry that covered the entirety of Nixon’s profligate corruption was an important one. They programmatically went after members of Nixon’s cabinet who abetted that corruption. The aforementioned aides—H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and John Dean—were all tried, for everything from conspiracy to perjury to obstruction of justice, and sentenced to prison terms.
The only one who managed to escape, thanks to a combination of deft showmanship, good luck, and savvy manipulation of the media, was Kissinger. After threatening to resign just months before Nixon’s own resignation, Kissinger, who was a media darling, enjoyed the benefit of newspapers and magazines scrambling to his defense. Democrats, no doubt exhausted by the proceedings and looking forward to the forthcoming election cycle, which resulted in a Democrat assuming the presidency, essentially let Kissinger off the hook. Kissinger not only resurfaced immediately, he went on to become arguably the most important unelected official since Andrew Mellon (the Treasury secretary under three presidents in the 1920s), working to stymie the Democratic agenda repeatedly.
Compare that to the impeachment strategy being championed by Nancy Pelosi. She’s advocated for a narrowly focused impeachment inquiry, just on Trump, and just on Ukraine. The risks of that approach, declining to go after Trump’s obvious and far-flung corruption, and a lack of willingness to wrangle his advisers, should be self-evident. Even in the fairly broad Watergate process, Kissinger managed to avoid both jail time and lasting damage to his reputation. One of Gerald Ford’s first statements upon assuming the presidency was his announcement that Kissinger would be staying. Fifty years later, Kissinger has continued to steer the foreign-policy apparatus in the United States. Democrats pursued an impeachment strategy only slightly too limited in scope, and that decision went on to haunt them for decades (it arguably continues to).
Pompeo, whose job prior to running the State Department was director of the CIA, differs from Kissinger in certain ways. He doesn’t have an influential theory of governance rivaling Kissinger’s, although part of that may be due to his relative youth and a lack of scholarship on his career. He’s less hawkish than Kissinger—there’s speculation that his limited zeal for regime change is part of why Trump likes him. But as the investigation continues to reveal that Pompeo’s fingerprints are all over the Ukraine scandal, history should show that the risks of a limited scope are enormous. The enduring presence of Kissinger should serve as a lesson for Democrats uncertain of how to deal with Pompeo and his ilk, who are deeply and intimately implicated in this scandal, just like Kissinger a generation ago. It’s likely that more details will emerge to confirm this; indeed it’s very much the obligation of the investigation to surface that information. A constrained impeachment process could give birth to a new generation of emboldened Republican apparatchik, long after Trump has left, continuing to steer the policy agenda of the United States.
