Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full

p. 575 - 576

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State, “frequently pandered to the media and social elite’s hostility to Nixon by privately disparaging the President he served, but played on Nixon’s susceptibilities, and perhaps thought he was atoning for his snide indiscretions, by scraping the barrel in his obsequious memos and asides. Nixon was too astute and well-informed not to know what Kissinger was doing, and tested his advisor by engaging in gratuitously anti-Semitic remarks and other conversational gambits to inflame Kissinger’s insecurities. . . After a brief honeymoon, Nixon and Kissinger were like two scorpions in the same bottle, sometimes friendly, often antagonistic, but almost inseparable.”