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Rethinking the Alliance: Kissinger’S Year of Europe and the European Ambitions, 1972–1974

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Rethinking the Alliance: Kissinger’S Year of Europe and the European Ambitions, 1972–1974 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive - Università di Pisa Università di Pisa Dipartimento di Civiltà e Forme del Sapere Rethinking the Alliance: Kissinger’s Year of Europe and the European Ambitions, 1972–1974 Candidato: Relatore: Andi Shehu Arnaldo Testi Luglio 2015 Për mamin tim 1 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 5 The Year of Europe speech . 10 Methodology and Documents . 13 1 FRENCH– U . S . RELATIONS AND NUCLEAR COOPERATION 17 Personal relationships . 18 “One ball of wax” . 23 Nuclear cooperation . 25 The halt of the French-U.S. nuclear cooperation . 29 Conclusion . 31 2 THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OF THE YEAR OF EUROPE 33 Special relationship? . 35 British contribution to the genesis of the Year of Europe . 43 French origins of the Year of Europe. 48 Conclusion . 51 3 A “ NEW ATLANTIC CHARTER” FOR A “ NEW ERA OF CREATIV- ITY IN THE WEST” 55 The speech . 57 Kissinger’s Vision . 65 The U.S. origins of the Year of Europe . 67 Ideology and left-leaning Europe. 68 What role for the United States? . 72 Modified confrontation . 74 3 4 MONETARY TROUBLES 81 Transatlantic monetary tensions. 84 Brandt’s letter. 93 . and Kissinger’s reaction . 96 The European joint float. 103 A Temporary Conclusion on the Year of Europe . 107 5 FACING THE U. S . CHALLENGE 111 Un texte impérieux. 113 To put flesh on its bones. 117 A dialogue of the deaf? . 126 The Nine Unite . 132 The end of the Year of Europe . 134 CONCLUSION 137 The Year of Europe genesis . 139 The Year of Europe failure. 141 Further studies . 143 BIBLIOGRAPHY 147 Primary Sources. 147 Journals and Newspapers . 147 Published Primary Sources . 148 Memoirs and Other Writings by Policy-makers . 149 Books . 150 Articles . 159 4 Introduction On April 23, 1973, Henry Kissinger launched Year of Europe initiative. His mani- fest goal was to kick off a search for a “new Atlantic Charter” in conjunction with the European allies in light of the tensions that had beleaguered and weakened the Atlantic Alliance during the previous years. The peculiar personalities of Kissinger and Nixon reflected many of the procedures, of the ideology, and of the practical proposals that marked both the origins and the later development of the vaunted Year of Europe. Accordingly, the examination of their personalities is crucial for the comprehension of the entirety of the Year of Europe enterprise. On November 1972, Henry Kissinger was arguably at the zenith of his career as the President’s National Security Advisor. He decided to offer an interview, “largely out of vanity,”1 to the famous Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci. She slyly asked “How do you explain the incredible movie-star status you enjoy?” Kissinger balked at his own urge to answer probably sensing icy ground ahead. He admitted he had some theories, but wanted to hear hers first. After Fallaci’s suggestion that it could have been the sheer magnitude of his successes, he could contain himself no longer. He was in agreement with Fallaci’s theory, but for him those foreign policy triumphs were of minor importance in explaining his movies-star status in the eyes of the American public. He illustrated what he thought had brought him on the path to stardom: The main point arises from the fact that that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads 1 Henry Kissinger, White House Years. Little, Brown and Company, 1979, p. 421. 5 the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn’t shoot. He acts, that’s all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short a Western. He went on in this romanticized depiction of himself not knowing that, by this point, Fallaci’s noose was already around his neck. No one could stop the future Secretary of State when he decided to throw caution to the wind: All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into the town and does everything by himself. This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.2 Eventually Kissinger would specify that this interview had been “without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press” and he would refer to its contents as “the most self-serving utterances of my entire career.” He also hinted to the possibility that he had been misquoted or quoted out of context,3 but Fallaci later produced the tapes of the interview proving that she had not changed the gist of Kissinger’s description of himself.4 Looking back at this interview in his memoirs, Kissinger concluded that, despite Fallaci’s “skillful editing” and despite the fact that “she sought psychological, not factual truth,” still she had been “onto something.”5 Indeed it was difficult to obtain 2 Reproduced in Mark Feeney, Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief. University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 168–170; also Oriana Fallaci, “Kissinger rivela”. In: Europeo, 16 November 1972; the first publication in the United States was Oriana Fallaci, “Kissinger: An Interview with Oriana Fallaci.” In: The New Republic, 16 December 1976. 3 “Chagrined Cowboy.” In: Time, 8 October 1979; Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1409. 4 From the tapes emerges that Fallaci steered the interview, but she did not change the meaning of what Kissinger had expressed. See Alessandro Cannavò, “Fallaci contro Kissinger: aveva ragione lei: Il segretario di Stato americano ammise di sentirsi «un cowboy solitario»”. In: Corriere della Sera, 10 September 2007; the entire tape is reproduced in Oriana Fallaci, Intervista con la Storia. Bur, 2008, pp. 41–44.; also Christopher Hitchens, “Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview.” In: Vanity Fair, 1 December 2006. 5 Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1410. 6 factual truths from Kissinger’s dialogue with Fallaci, however the interview was successful in depicting his opinions on what he thought the American public ad- mired in him and in his style. The personal worldview of the man who had an very important role in setting the direction of the U.S: foreign policy was (and is) rele- vant for any historical analysis. Specifically, this interview was important because it offered a glimpse on a romantic and sentimental side of Henry Kissinger that is often ignored in the analyzes that depict him as the “ultimate realist.” Kissinger was certainly not alone in defining the course of U.S. diplomacy. None- theless, he and Nixon, were the absolute heavyweights in determining the course of U.S. foreign policy. Richard Milhous Nixon was a strange and fascinating man. He celebrated his triumph in the 1972 presidential elections – with the second largest landslide in U.S. history – with a demand for the resignation of his entire staff.6 Also he was that same man who saw himself and his Administration as being “in a deadly battle with the Establishment,” an amorphous hostile group who comprised college professors, newspaper reporters, television commentators, columnists, think tanks, the entire federal bureaucracy, Democrats outside of the South, Republicans from north of Potomac and east of Ohio, and all the élite.7 This “Establishment” was, he thought, the most significant constraint to the re- alization of his goals. In March 1973 he seethed with hatred at the “Establishment” for pushing so hard on Watergate and he vowed that “they are asking for it, and they are going to get it.” But why were “they” were so unrelenting? “They are having a hard time now. They got the hell kicked out of them in the election.” He made, finally, the logic leap to what was behind all of it: 6 Alistair Horne, Kissinger: 1973, the Crucial Year. Simon & Schuster, 2009, p. 2. 7 Quotes from Stephen E. Ambrose, “Comparing and Contrasting Ike and Dick.” In: Leon Friedman and William F. Levantrosser, eds. Richard M. Nixon: Politician, President, Administrator. ABC- CLIO, 1991, pp. 18–19; and from Robert Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority. University of North Carolina Press, 2005, chapter 2; Horne, Kissinger, pp. 26–27 7 But the basic thing is the Establishment. The Establishment is dying, and so they’ve got to show that despite the successes we have had in foreign policy and in the election, we are just wrong. They are trying this Watergate as the whole thing. The media who nicknamed Nixon “Tricky Dicky” responded by giving him neg- ative press coverage; arguably one of the worst in the history of U.S. presidents. The historian Robert Dallek concluded his analysis on Nixon writing: “The inner workings of the Nixon presidency [...] show a secretive, devious, thoughtful, ener- getic, erratic, and painfully insecure man who struggled against inner demons and sometimes uncontrollable circumstances to reach for greatnes.”8 The “improbable partnership” between a "secretive yet aloof old-fashioned politi- cian, given over to oversimplified rhetoric” and “a Harvard professor of urbane in- telligence”9 lies at the heart of this dissertation. The personal relationship of this very odd couple was itself an ongoing patch of strained relations. The aforemen- tioned interview with Fallaci provoked profound resentments in Nixon leading him to cancel his Kissinger’s Christmas invitation to the White House in 1972. This coupled with his staff’s resignation led to “the loneliest and saddest Christmas I can ever remember”10 and Nixon told David Frost that it had been “much sadder and much lonelier than the one in the Pacific during the war.”11 Another example of their strained relationship was illustrated by the monikers they used.
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