My dance with Kissinger did not begin until early 1972 when I was asked by Abe Rosenthal, the executive editor of the Times, to join the newspaper’s staff in Washington and write what I wanted as an investigative reporter about the Vietnam War—with the proviso that I had better be damn sure I was right. By then, I had won lots of prizes, including the Pulitzer, for my reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and published two books, enough to land me a job at the best place in the world for a writer: as a reporter for the New Yorker. But Rosenthal’s offer and my hatred for the war led me to leave the magazine for the daily rush of a newspaper.
When I arrived at the Washington bureau in the spring of 1972, my desk was directly across from the paper’s main foreign policy reporter, a skilled journalist who was a master at writing coherent stories for the front page on deadline. I learned that around 5 pm on days when there were stories to be written about the war or disarmament—Kissinger’s wheelhouse—the bureau chief’s secretary would tell my colleague that “Henry” was on the phone with the bureau chief and would soon call him. Sure enough, the call would come and my colleague would frantically take notes and then produce a coherent piece reflecting what he had been told would invariably be the lead story in the next morning’s paper. After a week or two of observing this, I asked the reporter if he ever checked what Kissinger had told him—the stories he turned out never cited Kissinger by name but quoted senior Nixon administration officials—by calling and conferring on background with William Rogers, the secretary of state, or Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense.
“Of course not,” my colleague told me. “If I did that, Henry would no longer deal with us.”
Please understand—I am not making this up.