In October 1973, when the Arab-Israeli war threatened to erupt into a cold war confrontation, then US president Richard Nixon was too drunk to take a call from then British prime minister Edward Heath, according to telephone transcripts cleared for release on Wednesday.
The awkward maneuvering to conceal the president's indisposition from Heath was revealed in more than 20,000 pages of transcripts of telephone conversations conducted by Henry Kissinger at a time when he was Nixon's most trusted foreign-policy adviser.
PHOTO: AP
Kissinger served as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon administration.
According to the transcripts, Heath phoned the White House shortly after 8pm to speak to Nixon, five days after the start of the war.
"Can we tell them no?" Kissinger asked his assistant, Brent Scowcroft, who had told him of the urgent request. "When I talked to the president, he was loaded."
Scowcroft replied: "We could tell him: the pres perhaps he can call you."
Kissinger conveyed the message to Heath, saying that Nixon would be available in the morning.
Admittedly, Nixon had a lot on his mind that October. The Arab-Israeli war erupted on Oct. 6, 1973. Vice president Spiro Agnew resigned on Oct. 10, 1973, amid bribery charges, and Nixon was months away from his own ignominious departure because of the Watergate scandal.
Staff at the national archives say the boxed transcripts contain countless such episodes, documenting a tumultuous five years of US foreign policy, which spanned the Vietnam war and the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia; the 1973 Arab-Israeli war; the US' opening to China; and arms talks with the Soviet Union.
"We have a roomful of historians downstairs, practically drooling to get into the boxes," said David Mengel, who works on the Nixon presidential papers at the archives.
He said the body of transcripts offered a powerful glimpse of Kissinger's role in the administration, both as an adviser to Nixon and as a public relations expert.
It includes conversations with the president and cosy chats with journalists which Kissinger was known for.
"You really get the voices and intonements -- how adamant he was, how forceful on these issues," he said.
Although Kissinger was certainly privy to Nixon's thoughts on foreign policy, which occupied a great deal of his attention as president, he was out of the loop on domestic matters.
The day before Nixon was to announce a new vice president to replace Agnew, the transcripts suggest, Kissinger had no idea he was going to choose Gerald Ford.
With release of the Kissinger transcripts, historians now have access to three sources of raw and uncensored records of the Nixon 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.
Although Kissinger has a reputation for bouts of irascibility, the transcripts do not show a strong reliance on swear words.
"It's fairly G-rated," Mengel said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to