The Jewish Community. Nixon's deep antipathy toward Jews is well known, and he took a strange satisfaction in having Kissinger in his inner circle, where he could periodically taunt him. Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman, according to the transcript of a conversation, that "anybody who is Jewish cannot handle" Middle Eastern policy. Henry might be "as fair as he can possibly be, [but] he can't help but be affected by it. Put yourself in his position. Good God … his people were crucified over there. Jesus Christ! Five—five million of them popped into big ovens! How the hell's he feel about all this?" Kissinger acquiesced in Nixon's anti-Semitism, and more. He took care not to bring too many Jewish N.S.C. staff members to meetings with the president. On one occasion, speaking with Leonard Garment, a special consultant to the president on such issues as Israel and Jewish affairs, Kissinger asked, according to a transcript of the telephone conversation, "Is there a more self-serving group of people than the Jewish community? … You can't even tell the bastards anything in confidence because they'll leak it."
Vietnam. Using language that has a painfully contemporary echo, Kissinger and Nixon very quickly came to private conclusions about Vietnam that they never revealed publicly and denied entertaining. "In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory," Nixon told Kissinger, according to the transcript of a 1969 phone conversation. "But you and I know it won't happen—it is impossible." Even so, according to Haldeman's unpublished diaries, Nixon later urged that Democratic critics making this same point should be labeled "the party of surrender." When someone told Kissinger that Nixon could not be re-elected, because of Vietnam, he disputed it and added, according to a memo of a conversation, that "anytime we want to get out of Vietnam we can," and that "we will get out of Vietnam before the [1972] election." Nixon wanted to plan the removal of all U.S. troops by the end of 1971, but Kissinger cautioned that, if North Vietnam then de-stabilized Saigon during the following year, events could have an adverse effect on the president's campaign. According to Haldeman's diaries, Kissinger advocated a pullout in the fall of 1972, "so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election." He apparently had nothing to say about the American lives that would be lost by deliberately prolonging the war. Just before a peace treaty was signed, Kissinger in a phone conversation advised Nixon against stating that this was a "lasting peace or guaranteed peace because this thing is almost certain to blow up sooner or later."
Mental Health. Nixon confided to Haldeman, according to the unpublished diaries, that he was "quite shocked" at how Kissinger had "ranted and raved" at Alexander Haig during a 1971 phone conversation, telling Haig that he "had handled everything wrong," and calling U.N. ambassador George H. W. Bush "an idiot." Nixon believed that something more serious was going on, and it is known that he once mused to Ehrlichman that Kissinger might need psychiatric help. The subject of Kissinger's stability came up again in 1972. Having read The Will to Live, by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, his former psychotherapist, Nixon recommended it to Haldeman as providing a road map to what Nixon, according to Haldeman's unpublished diary notes, called "K's suicidal complex." Haldeman went on: "He also wants to be sure I make extensive memoranda about K's mental processes and so on, for his file."
Related;
Review of Robert Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger
Book says Kissinger delayed telling Nixon about Yom Kippur War
Another interview with Dallek
Drunk and Heavily Sedated Nixon;
PRESIDENT Richard M. Nixon was so drunk one night after the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973 that his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, wouldn't allow him to take a call from the British prime minister. The story is told in 20,000 pages of telephone transcripts and nearly 1 million pages of national security records gone over for the last four years by historian Robert Dallek, whose new book, "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power," is excerpted in Vanity Fair. On Oct. 11, 1973, at 7:55 p.m., Brent Scowcroft called from the National Security Council and told Kissinger that British P.M. Edward Heath wanted to talk to Nixon within the next 30 minutes. "Can we tell them no?" Kissinger responded. "When I talked to the president, he was loaded." Elsewhere in the book, Nixon says of the press he famously loathed for most of his career: "Goddamn newspaper ----. They're a bunch of sluts."
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