AAARGH
In the Sistine Chapel, Gore Vidal once
came upon Henry Kissinger "gazing thoughtfully" at the
Hell section of Michelangelo's Last Judgment. "Look,"
said Vidal to a friend, "he's apartment hunting." There's
nothing quite so funny in Christopher Hitchens' new book, The
Trial of Henry Kissinger, a criminal indictment of the former
national security adviser. But Hitchens frames his brief with
characteristic wit: "Many if not most of Kissinger's partners
in crime are now in jail, or are awaiting trial, or have been
otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is
rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we
shall shamefully vindicate the ancient philosopher Anacharsis,
who maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to detain
only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of
innumerable victims known and unknown, it is time for justice
to take a hand."
The great merit of The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which
was first published as a two-part article in Harper's,
is that it dismantles the Mount Rushmore image Kissinger has assiduously
carved for himself, and restores to the man his well-deserved
ignominy. Even when Hitchens' evidence is a stretch -- as sometimes
it is -- the skein of Kissinger's lawless intrigues, cagey denials
and outright lies leads inescapably to the conclusion that Richard
M. Nixon's and Gerald R. Ford's foreign-policy strategist has
a lot to hide; that, indeed, during his seven years as a "public
servant" he was responsible for numerous crimes. Following
the 1998 arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, in England
at the behest of a Spanish judge, and his recent house arrest
in Chile, Kissinger is no longer apt to be shielded behind sovereign
immunity.
Where Chile and Cyprus are concerned, the evidence of Kissinger's
involvement in murder, kidnapping and attempted assassination
has the power to repeatedly astonish and appall. The more so because,
in the case of Chile, his principal co-conspirator, Pinochet,
has been indicted while Kissinger himself still roams the halls
of power; collects $25,000 for one of his dull, mechanical speeches;
regularly appears as a paid consultant on ABC News; writes
brackish, if widely published, columns; and freely whisks off
to places like China (one among many of his rogue clientele) "to
smooth and facilitate contact between multinational corporations
and foreign governments." Not only is the man on the loose,
he profits handsomely from a reputation built on the fell deeds
he has massaged, over the subsequent two and a half decades, into
a reputation for "statecraft."
According to Hitchens -- full disclosure: I know him a bit --
Kissinger's serial crimes began in the fall of 1968 during the
tight presidential race between Vice President Hubert Humphrey,
a Democrat, and Republican challenger Richard Nixon. At the Paris
peace negotiations, the Johnson administration was on the brink
of a critical breakthrough to end the war in Vietnam. Nixon set
out to sabotage those talks by secretly offering the South Vietnamese
"more" than they would get from the incumbent Democrats.
He calculated that by thwarting the negotiations, he might finish
off Humphrey's "Peace Plank" campaign. (Humphrey had
distanced himself from "Johnson's war" and had pulled
to within just two points of Nixon in the polls.) Seymour Hersh,
in his 1983 Kissinger biography, The Price of Power, wrote,
"If word of a possible agreement leaked out, the [South Vietnamese]
government might be tempted by the Republicans to stall the negotiations
or find other ways to make it impossible to reach agreement before
the election." The leak arrived, and Nixon put this secret
and vital information to immediate use: Through "back channels,"
he urged Saigon's ruling clique to resist the settlement being
negotiated at Paris. On November 1, Johnson ordered a bombing
halt - a gesture that signaled the breakthrough - but he had already
been checkmated behind the scenes. The South Vietnamese regime
of Nguyen Van Thieu, Hitchens comments, made Johnson "look
a fool by boycotting the peace talks the very next day."
This may have tipped the election to Nixon.
Nixon's informant had been Henry Kissinger, who, at the time,
was considered a trusted ally of Johnson emissary Averell Harriman,
leader of the Paris talks. The result of his treachery, Hitchens
writes, was "four more years of an unwinnable and undeclared
and murderous war, which was to spread before it burned out, and
was to end on the same terms and conditions as had been on the
table in the fall of 1968."
Kissinger's betrayal of the Paris peace talks is by now well-known,
but it is Hitchens' accent on Kissinger's perfidy as a necessary
prologue to Nixon's extending and widening of the war in Vietnam
that kindles the appropriate response: indignation. That word
still had meaning, and political effect, back when Kissinger wielded
inordinate power under RMN's reign. At the time, many thought
of him as a usurper and a war criminal. The Trial of Henry
Kissinger, in recounting the horrors of the "secret"
and illegal carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, of the deliberate
massacres of tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, and of
the needless sacrifice of 32,000 additional American troops and
uncounted opposition guerrillas and North Vietnamese regulars,
might embolden us to think of him that way again. "He embarked
upon a second round of protracted warfare having knowingly helped
to destroy an alternative which he always understood was possible."
This is the gravamen of Hitchens' indictment.
On the exact point of war crimes, Hitchens' case is not airtight.
Take the deadly "Operation Speedy Express," for instance,
carried out under Kissinger's watch. In the first six months of
1969, U.S. troops "cleansed" the civilian population
of Kien Hoa, in the Mekong Delta. Perhaps 5,000 civilians died
- a death toll, Newsweek reported, that "made the
My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison." Although "Speedy
Express" had been hatched in the Johnson administration,
Hitchens argues, "We can be sure that the political leadership
in Washington was not unaware" of the atrocities. "Indeed,"
he goes on, "the degree of micro-management revealed in Kissinger's
memoirs quite forbids the idea that anything of importance took
place without his knowledge or permission." But this, as
lawyers say, is hardly dispositive.
Chile, by contrast, presents a much stronger case. Incensed at
the September 1970 election of Salvador Allende, Nixon assigned
Kissinger the job of denying Allende the presidency. The plan
was to make it appear as if the left were behind a kidnapping
of General René Schneider, a staunch defender of Chilean
democracy. It was hoped that the kidnapping would rattle centrists
in the Chilean congress into refusing to seat Allende. The United
States furnished tear-gas grenades, machine guns and, later, hush
money to right-wing gangsters, who duly nabbed and assassinated
General Schneider. It was "a 'hit' -- a piece of state-supported
terrorism," Hitchens writes, and of this there can be little
doubt. A string of formerly classified government memos, reprinted
here, underscore Hitchens' assertion that Henry Kissinger wanted
two things simultaneously. He wanted the removal of General Schneider,
by any means and employing any proxy. (No instruction from Washington
to leave Schneider unharmed was ever given; deadly weapons were
sent by diplomatic pouch, and men of violence were carefully selected
to receive them.) And he wanted to be out of the picture in case
such an attempt might fail, or be uncovered. These are normal
motives for anyone who solicits or suborns murder... We can say
with safety that he is prima facie guilty of direct collusion
in the murder of a democratic officer in a democratic and peaceful
country.
Hitchens adduces from the Kissinger oeuvre more of the same: Kissinger's
refusal, in 1971, to condemn Pakistan's genocidal invasion of
Bangladesh because the Pakistanis were a conduit for Nixon's secret
diplomacy with China; "his decision to do nothing... therefore
a direct decision to do something, or to let something be done"
when he learns of the 1974 plot by the ruling fascist Greek generals
to overthrow Archbishop Mihail Makarios, the democratic leader
of the "unarmed republic" of Cyprus; his green-lighting
of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975, in
which one-sixth of the entire Timorese population is eradicated
"with weapons that [Kissinger] bent American laws to furnish
to the killers." Much of this, again, is based on circumstantial
evidence, but then, good cases often are.
If The Trial of Henry Kissinger is left to make logical
inferences where the record is incomplete, it is partly so because
Kissinger himself hid much of the public docket. The man, plainly,
is afraid of what the complete record will reveal. And this is
a serious theme that asserts itself throughout Hitchens' book.
Kissinger is a former scholar who rebuffs scholarly access. He
is a frequent commentator who routinely denies requests for interviews.
When in power, he ruthlessly invoked the requirements of "American
prestige." Out of power, he disowns the consequences of his
hegemonic swagger. What emerges is an indictment not only of a
criminal, but of a coward too.
L.A. Weekly, April 27 - May 3, 2001
First Display on aaargh: 10 May 2001
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