WASHINGTON Even in the midst of grueling diplomatic crises as the secretary of state in the mid-1970s, Henry Kissinger always took time out for calls from the press. He schmoozed, spun and lectured his way into the heart of Washington's media establishment, and that transformed him into Super-K, escort of starlets, perennial magazine cover story and master of foreign affairs.
Reporters assumed the admiration and affection they expressed for Kissinger over the telephone would remain private. What they did not know was that he was having a secretary listen in and take down every word. Now, transcripts of 3,200 telephone calls have been released under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on the State Department's Web site, showing the chumminess of some journalists with the diplomat, whom some critics would subsequently accuse of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in pressing U.S. interests from Chile to Indonesia.
"The only reason for this call was to tell you that despite all appearances to the contrary in this city you still have some friends," the CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb told Kissinger during a chaotic period in 1975 when President Gerald Ford had just stripped him of his title as national security adviser, which he had held simultaneously while serving as secretary of state.
"I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that," Kissinger replied.
A year later, as Kissinger's tenure drew to a close, Ted Koppel, then a diplomatic correspondent for ABC News, told him: "It has been an extraordinary three years for me, and I have enjoyed it immensely. You are an intriguing man, and if I had a teacher like you earlier I might not have been so cynical."
"You have been a good friend," Kissinger replied. Koppel ended the conversation by saying, "We are lucky to have had you."
Newsmakers and news reporters use one another, and it may not be so surprising that they sometimes grow personally close. "Am I shocked by the notion that people were sucking up to a very powerful official they relied on for information?" asks Koppel, now the anchor of ABC's "Nightline." "Frankly, no."
But the calls offer a rare glimpse of relations between a top government official and the reporters who covered him. They illustrate Kissinger's powers of flattery and persuasion, and the sympathy he won from the professional skeptics of Washington's fourth estate.
"I'm calling you because you're the man I trust most," Kissinger told Time magazine's Hugh Sidey in a 1974 call. To the muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, he said: "I speak to you frankly because I know you are a decent man who uses whatever information he gets as fairly as you know how." He told Sally Quinn of The Washington Post, "I think it is suicidal to talk to you" - and then went ahead and talked, flirtatiously and at length.
Among the routine transactions with reporters looking for scoops on Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy are many entertaining tidbits: Koppel asking how President Anwar Sadat's dancing with Pearl Bailey at a White House dinner would be viewed in the Muslim world ("I don't think it will play well in Riyadh," Kissinger said); Kissinger inviting Katharine Graham, publisher of The Post, to a secret lunch in 1973 but warning that if President Richard Nixon found out, "I will be looking for a job"; Kissinger promising The Post's editor, Benjamin Bradlee, that he would inquire about a Post reporter marooned in war-torn Beirut but adding jocularly: "You had better not get caught somewhere, because I won't lift a finger to help you."
In telephone interviews, Kalb and Koppel said correspondents should be judged not by their phone calls, but by their coverage.
Kalb says he was bedridden with back problems and heavily medicated when he made his cheer-up call to Kissinger. Still, he says he should have heeded Kissinger's instructions to U.S. ambassadors: Do not trust sensitive messages to the phone or cables; deliver them face to face.
"I didn't think Kissinger would be so duplicitous - you can underscore that word - as to record my conversations for his future exploitation," said Kalb, 74, a senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. "I was very naïve. If I had anything of a personal nature to say, I should have followed the advice he gave to his ambassadors."
Koppel, 64, said he was not astonished to find that his calls had been recorded. "Hey, this was the Watergate era," he said. As an ambitious reporter in his early 30s, he said, he was influenced by Kissinger's superstar status. He believes he has "gotten tougher" as a reporter over the years, he said.
Thomas Blanton of the private National Security Archive at George Washington University, which asked the government to release the transcripts, says he finds them both heartening and disturbing.
"It's encouraging, in a way, to see how much information is changing hands," Blanton said. "But the other side is that anyone not disposed to trust the inside-the-Beltway crowd would have their views confirmed. The incestuousness is remarkable."
Kissinger, whose assistant said he was traveling and was unable to respond to e-mailed questions, was generous with editorial advice, telling David Binder, a New York Times reporter, that U.S.-Soviet détente would make "a thoughtful article for a Sunday paper."
Kissinger did not hesitate to try to block publication of stories he did not like. In 1975, Kissinger called James Resa New York Times columnist, to protest the newspaper's plans to publish his off-the-record remarks about Nixon. A Canadian radio reporter had recorded Kissinger telling a dinner companion that Nixon was "odd" and "unpleasant."
Binder, who retired in August after 43 years at The New York Times, recalled that in those days reporters and officials "went to the same dinners, the same parties, the same balls."
"On the positive side, from a journalist's point of view, was that you had a more intimate view of certain crises," he said. "The negative is that if you become too close to a guy you're covering, you become his spokesman."
Kalb said he believed that the Kissinger approach to handling the media would be unimaginable today.
Koppel is not so sure. "I think if you got the transcripts of yesterday's press phone calls, you'd find the same things," he said.