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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS