Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
by Robert Dallek
740pp, Penguin, £30

Henry Kissinger once gave the secretary of state, William Rogers, a transcript of a conversation with Nixon, in which the president had made unflattering remarks about his opponents. Rogers urged Kissinger "to keep in mind how [Nixon's comments] are going to look later on. He shouldn't talk that way in the first place . . . Somebody later on will go through his library and find the thing." "Okay, I'll edit that out," Kissinger responded. Notwithstanding expletives deleted (we owe the expression to the Nixon administration), and the fact that Nixon and Kissinger "presided over a government that was unequalled in its secrecy," it is Robert Dallek's claim that "the availability of the richest presidential records in history makes their White House more transparent than any before or since."

There's a troubling contradiction here. Millions of pages of national security files, 2,800 hours of Nixon tapes, 20,000 pages of Kissinger telephone transcripts, much of which has been recently opened - all this creates an expectation of clarity. And yet, as Dallek acknowledges, his subjects were neurotically concerned with how posterity would treat them, extremely distrustful of those around them, and accomplished in the arts of deception. In their actions, and the manner in which they recorded their actions, they trimmed, flipflopped, zigzagged. And they lied. For all Dallek's energetic buffing of the windowpane that gives on to their White House, the smudges they deliberately put there to obscure a complete view remain indelible.

What does emerge very clearly is the extraordinary codependency of two men who had so little in common. Nixon, a Californian Quaker, overcame humble origins (his father worked as a trolley car conductor, farmer, gas station owner, and small grocer) and rose to prominence as a political slugger. "Nixonland," wrote Adlai Stevenson, was "a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of a poison pen, the anonymous phone call, and hustling, pushing, shoving - the land of smash and grab and anything to win." Kissinger's early curriculum vitae was more refined. He was born into a middle-class Bavarian Orthodox Jewish family who enjoyed high social standing. They fled Germany in 1938 and resettled in the Washington Heights district of Manhattan, an area that became known as the "Fourth Reich". Heinz was naturalised during the war, became Henry, and cruised into the front line of American academia. Before he reached 30, he was running the esteemed Harvard international seminar.

The political bruiser and the Harvard intellectual: these men should have loathed each other, and indeed they did. Nixon snidely dubbed Kissinger "Sir Henry", called him a "crybaby", a "dictator", and suggested he put himself into the care of a psychiatrist. He also called him, to his face, "my Jew boy". (Nixon's "cultural anti-semitism", as Dallek defines it, embraced quite bizarre theories. "It's those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it!" he exploded when newspapers revealed details of the My Lai massacre.) Kissinger, who described his own behaviour in Nixon's presence as "obsequious excess", referred to him behind his back as a "madman", a "drunk", "unfit to be president", "the meatball mind".

Yet the dissimilarities and the mutual antipathies disguised a commonality. Nixon and Kissinger were both "self-serving characters with grandiose dreams of recasting world affairs". This amour propre, and their cynicism - about other people's motives, about scruples, about democracy even - roped them together as "rivals who could not satisfy their aspirations without each other".

Their aspirations were, it is now evident, dictated less by belief or ideology than the desire for self-aggrandisement. Nixon wanted to inherit the mantle of Woodrow Wilson as a great peacemaker, and indeed his foreign policy brought about the end of the Vietnam war, the opening of dialogue with China, and a period of détente with the Soviet Union. Kissinger wanted to bathe in the glory of brokering these deals, as a Castlereagh, a Metternich, or a Bismarck. Why stop at that? He couldn't become president because he wasn't born in America, but, as he once joked, he could play emperor. Short of this, the cover of Time magazine and anointment by the Nobel committee would have to do.

The complicated politicking, the endless negotiations leading to the "great events" of the Nixon-Kissinger "co-presidency", are rendered here with pointillist precision. The detail can be overwhelming, and Dallek's use of acronyms creates the kind of despair that makes one want to call the Samaritans. But Dallek captures moments that are worth the entry ticket, as when Kissinger holds secret talks with the North Vietnamese in a suburban house in Paris given to the French Communist party by Cubist painter Fernand Léger. Or in the following double-speak exchange, immediately after Augusto Pinochet's coup in Chile:

Nixon: "Our hand doesn't show on this one though." Kissinger: "We didn't do it . . . " Nixon: "That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played . . . "

Dallek doesn't quite nail the role of Nixon and Kissinger in toppling Salvador Allende, an event that made a mockery of their pious assertion that America respected the sovereign rights of other nations. They couldn't abide Allende's democratic mandate, and spent three years trying to overturn it, lying about it the whole time and, in Kissinger's case, for much longer. They lied also about extending the Vietnam conflict to neutral Cambodia, in a secret operation code-named "Menu". It started in March 1969 with an attack dubbed Breakfast, progressing on to Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert and Supper. Kissinger later said the code-name was "as meaningless as it was tasteless", though (and Dallek fails to mention this), he had quite an appetite for it at the time, even fiddling with the mission patterns and bombing runs. As B-52s ripped up Indochina, Nixon boasted to Kissinger, "That's a bigger artillery barrage than they had at Verdun." "Oh, much more", Kissinger replied. None of this produced a significant change in North Vietnam's determination to fight. "This shit-ass little country", Nixon railed. "Just, just, just cream the fuckers!"

Partners in power they may have been, but they were also partners in crime, worthy of Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen in The Godfather. Actually, they were worse, as even Frank Sinatra didn't want to be seen in their company.

· Frances Stonor Saunders is the author of Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta)