Naughty Henry

Historian Robert Dallek was recently in the news for "revealing" in his new book that Henry Kissinger delayed telling Richard Nixon about the start of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

While Dallek's Nixon and Kissinger surely adds to the story, Kissinger's withholding has been known for some time. The late Stephen Ambrose noted in 1991 in the third volume of his Nixon biography:

Kissinger was willing, even eager, to take advantage of Nixon's preoccupations [with Watergate, etc.] to ignore the President as he dealt with the crisis. It was two and a half hours after he had the news that Kissinger called [chief of staff] Al Haig in Key Biscayne to inform him that war had broken out. He did not ask to talk to the President. He had already contacted the Israelis, the Soviets, the Syrians, the United Nations, the Egyptians, and Jordan. This set a pattern that persisted, justified by Kissinger on the grounds that "it was not clear that Nixon retained enough authority to manage the manifold pressures about to descend on him." He had no doubt about his own authority.

To quote Borat, "Naughty, naughty!"