The Psychology of Never Committing to Anyone: Kissinger's Double Game in 1968

In 1968, while the United States chose its president, a foreign policy adviser with no official position did something unusual: he promised inside information to Richard Nixon’s team and, separately, promised the same thing to the team of his rival, Hubert Humphrey. Whoever won, Henry Kissinger already had a position in the next administration secured.

Robert Greene tells the episode in The 48 Laws of Power (1998) as an example of his Law 20, “Do Not Commit to Anyone”: the idea that staying desired by two opposing sides gives more power than allying with just one.

An academic who had already lost a bet

Before 1968, Kissinger was the foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, in his bid for the Republican nomination. Rockefeller lost that internal race to Nixon.

A loyal adviser would have been left out of the game at that point.

Nixon and Rockefeller had years of internal rivalry within the Republican Party itself, and nothing obliged Nixon’s team to welcome with open arms someone identified with the losing side.

Kissinger, however, saw a different opportunity. Instead of disappearing from the scene along with Rockefeller’s candidacy, he decided that the general election, still to be contested between two parties, was a new game in which no one had assigned him a fixed side.

A source inside the Paris negotiations

Kissinger had a contact of his own: a former Harvard student of his who was part of the American delegation at the Vietnam peace talks, then under way in Paris.

He got in touch with Nixon’s team and offered something valuable: privileged, up-to-date information on how those negotiations were progressing, delivered through a channel neither campaign had any obvious reason to expect.

Nixon’s team accepted immediately, without asking too many questions about why a Rockefeller loyalist would suddenly be so useful.

”I’ve hated Nixon for years”

What Greene emphasizes is what Kissinger did next. He also approached Humphrey’s team, the Democratic candidate, and offered exactly the same kind of help: inside information, this time about the movements of Nixon’s campaign.

When Humphrey’s team doubted his loyalty, Kissinger settled the conversation with a line Greene quotes verbatim:

I’ve hated Nixon for years.

Sincere or not, it wasn’t the real motive. According to Greene, Kissinger had no interest in either side. He was interested in one thing only, and he asked both of them for it equally.

Whoever won

What Kissinger got from both teams was the promise of a senior cabinet position if they reached the White House.

Nixon won, and Kissinger was appointed National Security Advisor; in 1973 he would add the post of Secretary of State.

But even once inside the administration, he avoided appearing as Nixon’s man until the very end.

When Nixon was reelected in 1972, he purged collaborators who had been far more loyal than Kissinger. Kissinger survived that purge, survived the Watergate scandal afterward, and stayed in office under the next president, Gerald Ford.

Greene attributes that survival to the same strategy: never commit fully, not even to the person who already gave you the job. While other aides built their entire careers around loyalty to one man, Kissinger built his around not depending on any one person in particular.

The 2,500-year-old precedent the book itself invokes

Greene doesn’t present this as a new idea. He calls it “the Alcibiades tactic,” after the Athenian general and statesman who in the fifth century BC got Athens, Sparta, and Persia to court him all at once, without ever fully committing to any of the three.

It’s a story with nuances of its own that has its own article.

Greene adds yet another example, from a completely different field: Pablo Picasso, already the most sought-after painter in the world, never committed to a single dealer. He let several court him at once, and that calculated indifference drove up the price of his work.

The same trick, years later, with two superpowers

Greene argues that Kissinger himself used this same logic again later, now as Secretary of State, on a much larger scale.

In the early 1970s, the United States was seeking détente with the Soviet Union. Instead of negotiating directly by offering concessions, Kissinger did the opposite: he courted China, the other great communist power, with whom Washington had barely had any contact in two decades.

According to Greene, the effect on Moscow was immediate. The Soviet Union, at odds with China since the Sino-Soviet split and with border clashes in 1969, watched with alarm the possibility that Washington and Beijing might grow closer, and became more willing to negotiate with the United States. Nixon’s trip to Beijing in February 1972 came three months before the Moscow summit at which the SALT I agreements were signed.

Greene compares this maneuver to a piece of seduction advice he attributes to the writer Stendhal: if you want to win over a woman, first court her sister.

It’s the same architecture as in 1968, applied to a much bigger board: generating interest by competing, without committing to anyone until the other side moves first.

What the book celebrates without asking

Here it’s worth pausing on something Greene doesn’t examine: it isn’t clear that Kissinger’s maneuver was harmless.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in The Price of Power (1983), argued that the information Kissinger leaked to Nixon’s team about the progress of the Paris negotiations went beyond a simple electoral advantage: it may have helped Nixon’s campaign calculate the political timing of a bombing halt that the Johnson administration was negotiating those very same days, in the middle of an active war.

Kissinger’s exact role is still debated. What is better documented is that Nixon’s campaign tried to obstruct those negotiations. Through Anna Chennault, a Republican fundraiser with contacts in Asia, the South Vietnamese government was encouraged not to come to the table before the election, with the promise of a better deal if Nixon won.

In 2017, biographer John A. Farrell made public handwritten notes by H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s future chief of staff, taken during a phone call on October 22, 1968. They include phrases such as “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN” and the question of whether there was any other way to “monkey wrench” the process. The Nixon Foundation maintains that they refer to political maneuvering against Johnson, not diplomatic sabotage. In that same account, Kissinger appears as the one who had warned Nixon that a deal was in the works.

Greene mentions none of this. He tells the anecdote purely as a piece of clever positioning, the same category in which he places Picasso negotiating with art dealers.

Treating a wartime peace negotiation with the same language as an auction of paintings is, at the very least, a simplification worth pointing out.

If Hersh’s reading holds any truth, “not committing to anyone” wasn’t just a career strategy: it was using information about an active war, with soldiers dying every week, to secure a position.

One anecdote, two possible readings

The psychology Greene describes is real and observable: whoever appears available to several sides at once concentrates more attention and interest than whoever has already committed to one.

That explains, with no need for any dark intent, why it was in Picasso’s interest not to tie himself to a single dealer.

But when the “side” in question is a presidential campaign in the middle of a war, that same mechanism stops being a curiosity about human desire and starts to carry consequences that no strategy book should sum up in a clever line.

It’s worth keeping the underlying observation (that availability spread across several interested parties generates more appeal than early commitment) and setting aside the implicit conclusion that any arena, including a peace negotiation, is just another board to apply it to at no cost.

Staying available to several sides at once is, at bottom, one negotiation style among others; you can explore yours with our negotiation style quiz. It shares a decade and a setting with the story of how a freshman senator came to control the US Senate in four years, though from an almost opposite strategy: building personal loyalties instead of avoiding commitment.

Sources

• Farrell, J. A. (2017). Richard Nixon: The Life. Doubleday.
• Greene, R. (1998). The 48 Laws of Power. Viking.
• Hersh, S. (1983). The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. Summit Books.