In October 1973, when the Arab-Israeli war threatened to erupt into a Cold War confrontation, Richard Nixon was too drunk to take a call from the British Prime Minister Edward Heath, according to telephone transcripts cleared for release on Wednesday.
The awkward manoeuvring to conceal the president’s indisposition from Heath was revealed in more than 20 000 pages of transcripts of phone conversations conducted by Henry Kissinger when he was Nixon’s trusted foreign policy adviser.
Dr Kissinger served as national security adviser and secretary of state for Nixon.
According to the transcripts, Mr (now Sir Edward) Heath phoned the White House just after 8pm to speak to Nixon, five days after the start of the war. ”Can we tell them no?” Dr Kissinger asked his assistant, Brent Scowcroft. ”When I talked to the president, he was loaded.” Scowcroft replied: ”We could tell him: the president is not available and perhaps he can call you.”
Kissinger conveyed the message to Heath.
Admittedly, Nixon had a lot on his mind that October. The Arab-Israeli war erupted on October 6 1973. Spiro Agnew, the vice-president, resigned on October 10 amid bribery charges and Nixon was months away from resigning over Watergate.
The boxed transcripts contain countless such episodes, documenting a tumultous five years of US foreign policy, which included the Vietnam war, the bombing of Cambodia, and arms talks with the Soviet Union. ”We have a roomful of historians, practically drooling to get into the boxes,” said David Mengel, who works on the Nixon presidential papers at the archives.
He said the transcripts offered a glimpse of the role of Kissinger, as an adviser to Nixon and public relations expert. ”You really get the voices and intonements — how adamant he was, how forceful on these issues,” he said.
But Kissinger was out of the loop on domestic matters in the US. The day before Nixon was to announce a vice-president to replace Agnew, Kissinger had no idea the choice was Gerald Ford, the transcripts suggest.
The Kissinger transcripts mean historians now have access to three sources of uncensored records of Nixon’s administration. In the case of the Nixon tapes, the record is particularly raw — the late president was known for his foul language and racial abuse. – Guardian Unlimited Â