Richard Allen was supposed to attend the celebration of what would have been the 100th birthday of Richard Nixon on Jan. 9, 2013. Allen, after all, had coordinated the foreign policy issues for candidate Nixon in 1968 and briefly served as his first national security adviser in the White House.

But he proved to be a "no-show." Laure Mandeville, U.S. bureau chief for the venerable French publication Le Figaro, had been invited by Allen to join him for the festivities at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. As the guests began to take their seats, she received an email from Allen informing her he would not attend because the main speaker was his arch-rival and the man who edged him out as national security adviser in the Nixon White House: Henry Kissinger.

Just as Allen refused to work under Kissinger in the White House back in 1969, the foreign policy expert would not sit through a speech by the man who would go on to hold the positions of national security adviser and secretary of state simultaneously.

"Dick just couldn't do it — he could not abide Kissinger," Mandeville later recalled to Newsmax. "But he did urge me in his email to have fun."

When Allen died on Nov. 19 at age 88, vignettes like those at the Nixon celebration abounded. The Notre Dame graduate and father of seven, who spent a lifetime analyzing international policy and doing business around the world, could register discontent over certain things (such as Kissinger) but always did so with humor and a smile — such as his urging Mandeville to "have fun" after announcing he wasn't coming.

After receiving his Master's Degree from Notre Dame, the young Allen worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 1962-66 and at the Hoover Institution from 1966-68. It was at Hoover he met Richard Nixon and soon became the coordinator on foreign policy for the Republican presidential hopeful.

Following Nixon's election, Allen, at age 31, eagerly anticipated becoming the new president's national security adviser. With his vociferous anti-Communism enhanced by his strong pre-conciliar Roman Catholic faith, Allen felt sure Nixon's reputation as a fierce anti-Communist was a good fit and they would work together to end the Vietnam War honorably and face down Gen. Sec. of the Communist Party Leonid Brezhnev and the Kremlin.

But it didn't work out that way. It was Harvard Prof. Kissinger, with his Metternichian worldview and vision of détente with the Soviet Union, who captured Nixon's imagination and who the 37th president made head of his National Security Council. Allen was given the no. 2 slot. However, his disagreements with Kissinger led to Allen leaving the NSC in less than a year and returning to Hoover. He was succeeded by Secretary of State-to-be Alexander Haig.

In Ronald Reagan, Allen saw someone with whom he shared a vision of the world. When he met with Reagan for lunch at his Santa Barbara ranch in 1977, the Californian revealed Allen his plan to defeat the Russians and win the Cold War: "We win, they lose."

Allen decided then and there to become Reagan's adviser on foreign policy and for the next three years, was at his side as the eventually 1980 Republican presidential nominee addressed issues such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the grain embargo against Russia, and the Iran hostage crisis.

It all seemed so familiar to Allen in 1980 — a Republican president he advised was elected president, but this time there was no Kissinger to block his path to the national security adviser's desk.

"The key to Dick Allen," a Haig ally in the State Department told the Washington Post's Elisabeth Bumiller in 1981, "is what happened in 1968. Henry Kissinger aced him out in a classic bureaucratic ploy and threw him into the right field. That's what changed him from being an idealistic intellectual into a tough, savvy, bureaucratic in-fighter."

He had a close relationship with Reagan as well as his immediate boss, White House Counselor Ed Meese. In his memoirs, Meese hailed Allen for "his encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet Union, communism in general, and the forces operative in the Third World, as well as matters pertaining to strategic defenses, technology transfer, and related issues."

In addition, Allen was working closely with fellow hard-liners on Communism whom Reagan had named as ambassadors to key hot spots — notably Curtin Winsor, Jr. (Costa Rica) and David Funderburk (Romania).

Then disaster struck.

In November 1981, Allen, who knew that the Japanese press often paid subjects of interviews, intercepted a $1,000 check from a Japanese journalist to save first lady Nancy Reagan from embarrassment. He gave it to his secretary, who put it in a safe, and when he moved offices, the check was found. The FBI cleared all people involved, but the story was leaked to the press and the Justice Department began its own investigation.

Reagan himself believed political sabotage was behind the story of money from Japan and in his diary branded the press reporting of his plight "a lynch mob." However, the negative publicity led Allen to resign from the job he coveted and loved in January 1982.

Allen would spend his remaining decades in international business consulting, lecturing, writing three books, and making the rounds on the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit (where he sometimes did a withering imitation of Kissinger). For all the bad blood between Allen and Kissinger, he graciously told Newsmax following his old rival's death last year, "Henry has been a singular person in our modern history, arriving on the national scene with his incisive study, 'Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy' in the mid-1950s. He has left an indelible mark on events of the last half-century."

That was Allen in a nutshell — combative, feisty, a true believer in causes, and always a true gentleman.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.