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specialty was municipal bonds, not covert action. But Nixon trusted him deeply in the realm of secret operations; Mitchell had displayed utter discretion in the sabotage of the Paris peace talks. The president placed him on the National Security Council, which met in the cloistered basement office that served as the White House Situation Room. The membership of the NSC and its six subcouncils included the director of central intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the deputy secretary of defense, and the undersecretary of state.
    But they all would have one chairman: the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. And Nixon wanted Mitchell to keep an eye on him, for he hardly knew Kissinger when he hired him.
    Kissinger had met Nixon once, at a Christmas party in 1967; small talk with strangers was not Nixon’s strong suit. But Kissinger had shown a talent for conspiracy in the crucial moment of the 1968 campaign. A politically ambitious Harvard professor, Kissinger was seeking high office in the next administration no matter who won. He was dealing with both parties, trading in the hardest political currency: secret information. He had two contacts among the American delegation at the Paris peace talks; they never dreamed that Kissinger would back-channel their conversations to Republican headquarters. On October 9, 1968, Kissinger called Mitchell with a report that LBJ would stop the bombing of North Vietnam and offer a cease-fire to the Communists. Kissinger’s tip proved accurate; with that inside information, Nixon began to plan his counterstrategy to lure South Vietnam away from the peace talks.
    Nixon decided to take Kissinger on board as national security adviser after a three-hour meeting at the president-elect’s Pierre Hotel command post in December 1968. “I had a strong intuition about Henry Kissinger,” Nixon wrote ten years later. “The combination was unlikely—the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany.” But Nixon recognized something of a kindred spirit.
    Nixon was the grand strategist, Kissinger the great tactician, and this working relationship between two strangers grew quickly and powerfully. Together they set out to destroy and re-create the foreign policy architecture of the United States, to break and remake the Pentagon and the State Department and the CIA, to bend and reshape the instruments of American power at their will. These were not figures of speech for Nixon and Kissinger, but the daily reality in their relationship.
    Both men had clandestine minds. Both had a brittle brilliance. Both were talented liars; both saw that talent as crucial to diplomacy and politics. Both shared a sense that history was a tragedy.
    Both wanted to change the world they had inherited from Presidents Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman. Nixon and Kissinger ripped out the wiring mechanisms of power, destroyed structures that had served those four presidents since World War II, and created a system that placed the powers of statecraft in their hands and theirs alone. They overhauled the National Security Council system and usurped the powers of State and the Pentagon. Every important decision, and every document, on the foreign policy of the United States would henceforth flow to Kissinger as the NSC chairman. All power and all decisions regarding war, foreign policy, diplomacy, and covert operations would be concentrated in his hands. *
    Then Kissinger would consult the president on the crises of the moment. Kissinger’s aides joked that world-shaking decisions would go to Nixon with three options: (1) unconditional surrender, (2) nuclear war, or (3) Kissinger’s recommendation. Nixon invariably chose option three. The intent was to immensely increase the power of the president to make life-and-death decisions in secret.
    Nixon presented this radical reorganization over cocktails in Key Biscayne, Florida, on December 28, 1968, to the men he had chosen to