Henry Kissinger’s death at 100 is an appropriate occasion to read Andrew Ferguson. (What occasion isn’t?) In September, Ferguson wrote for the Atlantic about his time reading through former president Richard Nixon’s own books, held at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Calif. While Ferguson was “beavering away in the basement research room,” the former secretary of state “twice came into view—in the flat, cursive form of Nixon’s scrawl in the margins of the book I was reading, and then in the rounder corporeal form of the man himself, in the hallway outside the door.”

A Kissinger appearance at the library last year accounts for the latter sighting. But the origin of the former is more interesting. Researching for his own book on Nixon, Ferguson found in Nixon’s underlinings and annotations “small but tangible fragments of Nixon himself.” The fragment he happened to encounter while Kissinger was in the building came from Bad News: The Foreign Policy of the New York Times, a book by New York Daily News foreign correspondent Russ Braley that “is a blistering indictment of the Times’ coverage of the Nixon administration.” Nixon took kindly to this work.

And to what it had to say about Kissinger:

When I got to a chapter on Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, I found an unmistakable pattern: Most of Nixon’s markings involved the man holding court across the hall. And Nixon wasn’t happy with him. Kissinger, Braley wrote, had actually invited Ellsberg to Nixon’s transition office in late 1968 to explicate his dovish views on Vietnam, more than two years before the Papers were released. Nixon’s pen came down: exclamation point! Kissinger gave Ellsberg an office in the White House complex anyway, for a month in 1969—a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Slash mark! Kissinger spent his evenings “ridicul[ing]” Nixon “in private conversations with liberal friends.” This last treachery summoned the full battery of Nixon’s marginalia: a slash running alongside the paragraph, a check mark for emphasis, and a plump, emphatic line under “liberal friends.”

Still, Braley went on, when the Pentagon Papers were leaked, their publication alarmed Kissinger, because they posed a “double threat” to national security and to the conduct of foreign policy. “And to K!” Nixon wrote in the margin.

Read the whole thing for an unsurprisingly insightful and enjoyable read from one of our best journalists.