Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger occupies two connected but distinct positions in the Watergate narrative: he is implicated by sources in the authorization of wiretaps during the Nixon administration’s earlier leak investigation, and he later urges Richard Nixon to break with former aides caught up in Watergate. The account does not resolve every question about Kissinger’s role in the taps. Instead, it records the claims made to reporters, his qualified response, and the limits of the reporting conventions through which that response was obtained.

Position in the Administration

Kissinger appears as a senior White House figure whose office and relationships brought him into both the administration’s handling of leaked information and its political response to Watergate. When Bob Woodward questioned him about the wiretaps, the subject was not an abstract policy dispute: two sources had told Woodward that Kissinger personally authorized taps on his own aides. Kissinger’s answer referred to individuals who had seen or handled leaked documents, and to information that might have passed from him through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The account also shows Kissinger acting as an adviser to Nixon during the Watergate crisis. For more than six months, he and Haig urged Nixon to sever his ties with H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Colson, the three former aides closest to the President who had become principal targets of the special prosecutor’s investigation. The reporting presents this counsel as a sustained attempt to change Nixon’s course, not as a response confined to a single conversation.

The Wiretap Questions

On May 14, William D. Ruckelshaus announced that 17 wiretaps had been ordered between 1969 and 1971 as part of the administration’s search for news leaks. The missing logs had been found in Ehrlichman’s White House safe. Ruckelshaus did not disclose the names of the 13 government officials and four reporters whose telephones had been tapped, leaving the central question of authorization unresolved in public.

Woodward called a senior Federal Bureau of Investigation official, who said that some authorizations had reached the bureau from Kissinger, orally or by letter. A former Federal Bureau of Investigation employee separately confirmed that Kissinger had given some authorizations. These accounts gave the reporters grounds to pursue the connection, but did not, by themselves, settle precisely which taps Kissinger had authorized or under what circumstances.

At about six in the evening, Woodward was put through to Kissinger’s office. Asked about the allegation that he had authorized taps on his own aides, Kissinger first said he did not believe it was true, then said he could not remember. He suggested that he might have given the bureau names of people who had handled particular leaked documents, and that the bureau might have interpreted this as authorization. In some individual cases, he said, he might have identified those people to Haig, who could then have relayed the information to the bureau.

When Woodward emphasized that his sources said Kissinger had personally authorized the taps, Kissinger answered that this had happened almost never. Pressed on whether that meant it had happened sometimes, he objected angrily that he did not have to submit to police interrogation. He then calmed down and said that if it was possible, and if it had happened, he would have to take responsibility for it: he was responsible for his office. That conditional statement neither confirmed the reporters’ account nor simply dismissed it. It acknowledged an obligation attached to his position while leaving the underlying facts uncertain.

The Dispute Over Attribution

The interview became a dispute not only about what Kissinger had done, but also about who could determine the terms on which he had spoken. After the exchange, Woodward checked whether he could quote Kissinger. Kissinger asked whether he was being quoted and later accused Woodward of violating the procedures he had observed with reporters. Woodward, in turn, said he would consult The Washington Post’s diplomatic reporters about the paper’s practice.

Murrey Marder, the paper’s chief diplomatic reporter, described a customary arrangement that was less simple than either side’s position: technically, Woodward was right, but reporters who covered Kissinger regularly often allowed him to place statements on background after a conversation. Kissinger called Marder to complain about the interview. Marder, Woodward, and Carl Bernstein then discussed the issue with Howard Simons. Marder took a middle position and joked that Kissinger might blame them for the collapse of the Paris negotiations. The episode exposes a practical tension in high-level reporting: a source’s established working conventions could shape attribution, while a reporter’s handling of a particular interview could challenge those conventions.

Counsel to Nixon and Its Rejection

During the summer of 1973, Kissinger tried to persuade Nixon to publicly disavow the former aides and accept some measure of responsibility for Watergate. The President angrily rejected the recommendation when Ron Ziegler delivered it, with Ziegler dismissing contrition as worthless. The contrast is sharp: while Kissinger had made a conditional statement about responsibility for his own office during the wiretap inquiry, he was also urging Nixon to acknowledge responsibility at the center of the Watergate crisis.

Nixon instead built his legal defense in concert with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson, continuing to meet and speak with them by telephone. Kissinger’s advice therefore marks a proposed break in the President’s course, not a break that actually occurred. The book’s portrayal rests on this contrast between counsel and outcome, and between an answer that leaves Kissinger’s earlier conduct unresolved and a later effort to persuade Nixon to act more decisively.