Nixon Too Boozed For War
PRESIDENT Richard M. Nixon was so drunk one night after the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973 that his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, wouldn't allow him to take a call from the British prime minister. The story is told in 20,000 pages of telephone transcripts and nearly 1 million pages of national security records gone over for the last four years by historian Robert Dallek, whose new book, "Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power," is excerpted in Vanity Fair. On Oct. 11, 1973, at 7:55 p.m., Brent Scowcroft called from the National Security Council and told Kissinger that British P.M. Edward Heath wanted to talk to Nixon within the next 30 minutes. "Can we tell them no?" Kissinger responded. "When I talked to the president, he was loaded." Elsewhere in the book, Nixon says of the press he famously loathed for most of his career: "Goddamn newspaper ----. They're a bunch of sluts."