Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

*Goldwater had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act on ground that Titles II and VII unduly extended the power of the federal government over business.

*“His view of priorities is not always mine. He is very literal minded and very aggressive in carrying out what he understands to be your wishes. His insistence sometimes makes me very nervous.”

*Later the same day Kissinger was “accosted in the street by Rep. [Graig] Hosmer, [the] ranking Republican House member on the Joint Atomic Energy Committee. He stopped me with the words: ‘I notice you have gone over to the enemy.’” Kissinger had never previously met Hosmer.

*Eisenhower warned against “maudlin sympathy for the criminal who, roaming the streets with switchblade knife and illegal firearms seeking a helpless prey, suddenly becomes, upon apprehension, a poor, underprivileged person who counts upon the compassion of our society and the laxness or weakness of too many courts to forgive the offense.”

*David Brinkley and Chet Huntley were the liberal hosts of NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report, a nightly news broadcast. Howard K. Smith: News and Comment aired on ABC on Sunday mornings.

*Battle deaths per month were roughly 469 in Vietnam compared with 909 in Korea.

*The reader may legitimately wonder if a draft speech such as this can be regarded as an expression of Kissinger’s own views, as opposed to views that Kissinger understood Rockefeller to want expressed. But Kissinger was no mere speechwriter. While some of the language he used here was clearly intended to suit Rockefeller’s lofty style as an orator, the ideas were clearly Kissinger’s own. It was for his ideas that Rockefeller paid him, not for fine phrases.

*The Harvard Defense Policy Seminar had been started by Barton Leach at the Law School and continued to meet there even after Kissinger took it over.

*Commander in chief, Pacific Command.

*PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam — North Vietnamese army. ARVN: Army of the Republic of Vietnam — South Vietnamese.

*Kesey is the central figure of Wolfe’s later Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . In the fall of 1965 he delivered an incoherent ramble on the subject of Vietnam, which ended, “There’s only one thing to do. There’s only one thing’s gonna do any good at all…. And that’s everybody just look at it, look at the war, and turn your backs and say… fuck it.”

*Churchill’s wartime retreat near Charlbury in Oxfordshire — originally built in the early eighteenth century for the Earl of Litchfield — had been established by Sir David Wills as a center for conferences on international (and especially Anglo-American) relations in 1958.

*An allusion to the South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, who ruled his country from 1961 until his assassination in 1979.

*Bui Diem returned the backhanded compliment. After the dinner at which he and Kissinger first met, other Vietnamese guests “wondered what he was doing in the country, asking as many questions as he had in his strange-sounding English. Whatever his reasons, my own opinion, gained at the dinner and at a meeting between Kissinger and Ky that I had sat in on, was that the man was brilliant. For someone relatively ignorant of Vietnamese affairs, his questions had been practical and acute, not at all what I expected from an academic.”

*The heavily mined hill was also known as Nui Dat Son or Camp Muir, after Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Muir, commanding officer of the Third Battalion, Third Marines, who had been killed there the previous September.

*Also spelled Chu Hoi, this is loosely translated as “Open Arms.” Invitations to defect were scattered in combat zones in waterproof bags used to carry M-16 ammunition. By 1967, approximately 75,000 defections had been recorded, though not all of them were genuine.

*The Joint United States Public Affairs Office, which was supposed to coordinate “information operations” between the military and civilian authorities.

*Special Forces and CIA operations classified as “psychological warfare,” e.g., the Phoenix Program of assassination of NLF members.

*The Revolutionary Development Division of J-3, the Operations Division of MACV.

*Close Air Support.

*The handwritten insertions are in fact in capital letters in the original.

*The references are to the chancellor, Ludwig Erhard; the foreign minister, Gerhard Schröder; the mayor of Berlin and SPD candidate for chancellor, Willy Brandt; the parliamentary leader of the SPD, Fritz Erler; and the Free Democrat leader and vice-chancellor, Erich Mende.

*Bahr had the good sense to laugh when Kissinger shot back that “there was always the danger that a bridge is something everyone walks over.”

*It did not hurt that Jean Sainteny’s wife was a favorite student of Kissinger’s, having attended the International Seminar at Harvard.

*Set up in 1958 by Kissinger’s friend Michael Howard, along with the Labour politician Denis Healey and the journalist Alastair Buchan, the ISS (later renamed the International Institute for Strategic Studies) was both bipartisan and, like Pugwash, a way through the iron curtain, though not only for academics.

*Brezhnev had been one of the leaders of the plot to get rid of his fellow Ukrainian and patron Khrushchev in 1964. Brezhnev took over the more powerful party post of first secretary, while Alexei Kosygin became the head of the Soviet government (premier). Formally, there was something more like collective leadership after Khrushchev’s removal; in practice, power tended to gravitate toward Brezhnev.

*Kazan-Komarek was charged with high treason, espionage, and murder, crimes allegedly committed in the late 1940s when he had helped people escape from Czechoslovakia. His trial began on January 30, 1967, the day of Kissinger’s arrival in Prague. After diplomatic pressure from the United States, he was charged with the lesser crime of subversion and then expelled. Five years later his decomposed body was found in the Spanish countryside, near his home in the coastal village of Estepona.

*As George Brown remarked, “Never before or since has the ‘hot line’ between No. 10 and the White House been so hot as it was during that period.”

*He was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, as well as being stripped of his world title and banned from boxing in the United States.

*In addition to Rotblat, Marcovitch, and Kissinger, the participants were the Soviet economist Ruben Andreossian, Étienne Bauer (who worked at the French Atomic Energy Commission), Paul Doty, the MIT physicist Bernard Feld, the vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Mikhail Millionshikov, and the French physicist Francis Perrin.

*Kissinger also described to Schlesinger a comparable scene he had “witnessed in the Cabinet Room: Johnson harrying McNamara, saying to him insistently: ‘How can I hit them [the North Vietnamese] in the nuts? Tell me how I can hit them in the nuts.’” As a devout Kennedy loyalist, Schlesinger was the perfect audience for such anecdotes.

*Bo referred them to an article published in the National Guardian by the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, based on an interview with Nguyen Duy Trinh, which stated, “Hanoi is in no mood for concessions or bargaining and there is an absolute refusal to offer anything — except talks — for a cessation of the bombardment. The word stressed is ‘talks,’ not negotiations…. It is repeated at every level that total independence with complete American withdrawal from South Vietnam is the unalterable aim of the Hanoi government and the Liberation Front for South Vietnam. They are prepared to fight 10 or 20 years to achieve this, and life is being reorganized on this basis.” Burchett was not only a Communist Party member but also a KGB operative.