Melvin Laird—and the slyest bureaucratic move of the Cold War.

This past week, the world lost Melvin Laird, the 94-year-old former Secretary of Defense. You can read about his life, and his many controversies and achievements, in full here, or here, or here.

But I just want to tell one story from 1971, which I learned about while researching the lives of George Kennan and Paul Nitze, the latter of whom worked closely with Laird. It's one of my favorite moments of the Cold War and also a classic example of bureaucratic combat. Laird was then serving as Richard Nixon's Defense Secretary and he frequently found himself sparring with Henry Kissinger, who was then the President's National Security Adviser. Kissinger was planning his secret trip to China at the time and he was telling no one else about it. Kissinger, as historians have noted, was not a man devoid of ego. He had decided to tell the Defense Secretary only just before he told the public.

Laird, meanwhile, learned of the trip, which was scheduled to take place in the second week of July, because friends of his at the National Security Agency had intercepted messages that laid out Kissinger's plans. After learning this, Laird went to the national security adviser and, without revealing what he knew, started to talk about Asia, inviting his rival to tell him what was up. Kissinger declined to. And so, shortly before Kissinger was to leave, Laird announced that he would visit Taiwan to discuss its alliance with the U.S. on the exact day that Kissinger planned surreptitiously to arrive in Peking.

Had the trip actually taken place, it would have completely undermined Kissinger's carefully laid plans. He was furious, but he couldn't reveal why, so he found himself begging the defense secretary for two days to cancel his journey. Laird listened, and after he felt Kissinger had suffered enough, agreed to cancel the trip. As revealed in Dale Van Atta's biography of Laird, With Honor, Kissinger didn't know of Laird's trick for thirty years.

About eight years ago, I interviewed Kissinger about this period and mentioned Laird. He was, Kissinger responded, “One of the great rogues in Washington.”