Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

Hitchens was a gifted polemicist; his abilities as a historian are more open to question. Nevertheless, for each of the cases he cited, more thoroughly researched studies exist that come to comparable if less bombastically stated verdicts: William Shawcross’s study of the “catastrophe” and “crime” in Cambodia; 39Gary Bass on the bloodbath in Bangladesh; 40José Ramos-Horta on East Timor; 41Jonathan Haslam and Peter Kornbluh on Chile; 42not forgetting Noam Chomsky on the missed opportunity for peace in the Middle East in 1970–71. 43Moreover, the charges of criminality have gained credibility from the attempts in 2001 and 2002 by various judges and lawyers in Argentina, Chile, France, and Spain to compel Kissinger at least to give evidence in cases relating to Operation Condor, the clandestine campaign by six South American governments to “disappear” left-wing activists. In the light of all this, it is not surprising that so many journalists now freely bandy about terms like “mass murderer,” “killer,” and “monster” when Henry Kissinger’s name comes up.

This volume covers the first half of Kissinger’s life, ending in 1969, at the moment he entered the White House to serve as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. It therefore does not deal with the issues listed above. But it does deal with the foreign policies of Nixon’s four predecessors. As will become clear, each one of these administrations could just as easily be accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is no doubt whatever, to take just a single example, that the Central Intelligence Agency had a direct hand in the coup that overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala in 1954. It also played an active role in the subsequent campaign of violence against the Guatemalan left. Nearly a hundred times as many people (around 200,000) died in this campaign than were “disappeared” in Chile after 1973 (2,279). Yet you will search the libraries in vain for The Trial of John Foster Dulles . According to a study by the Brookings Institution, the United States used military action or threats of military action three times more often in the Kennedy years than in the Kissinger years. 44Interventions ranged from an abortive invasion of Cuba to a bloody coup d’état in South Vietnam. And yet no great polemicist has troubled to indict Dean Rusk as a war criminal.

A similar argument might be made about American administrations after 1976. Twenty-five years after publishing Sideshow, William Shawcross argued that “after 9/11 the US had no choice but to overthrow Saddam [Hussein], who had defied the world for years and was the only national leader to praise that merciless attack.” 45In an article in The New York Times, coauthored with Kissinger’s friend and colleague Peter Rodman, Shawcross argued that “American defeat in Iraq would embolden the extremists in the Muslim world, demoralize and perhaps destabilize many moderate friendly governments, and accelerate the radicalization of every conflict in the Middle East. Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility.” 46Replace Iraq with Vietnam and Muslim with Communist, and you have precisely the argument that Kissinger made in 1969 against abandoning South Vietnam to its fate. Hitchens, too, discovered late in life that there were many worse things in the world than American power, going so far as to argue in 2005 that “prison conditions at Abu Ghraib [had] improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad.” 47

The interesting question, then, is why the double standard? One possible, if facile, answer is that no amount of self-deprecating humor would ever have sufficed to parry the envy of Kissinger’s contemporaries. On one occasion, at a big dinner in Washington, a man approached him and said, “Dr. Kissinger, I want to thank you for saving the world.” Without missing a beat, Kissinger replied, “You’re welcome.” 48Asked by journalists how they should now address him, following his swearing-in as secretary of state, Kissinger replied, “I do not stand on protocol. If you just call me Excellency, it will be okay.” 49The many lists of Henry Kissinger quotations all include the following one-liners:

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Each of these employs the same rhetorical device, the reductio ad absurdum. Reputed to be arrogant, Kissinger sought to disarm his critics by saying things so arrogant as to be patent self-mockery. Those who had been raised on the Marx Brothers doubtless recognized the influence of Groucho. But it was a characteristic feature of the “counterculture” generation of the 1960s and 1970s that it did not find the Marx Brothers funny. “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer” are among Kissinger’s most frequently cited words. Rarely are they acknowledged to be a joke, prefaced by “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings…” and followed in the official “memcon” by “[laughter].” If Kissinger had genuinely been “afraid to say things like that” since the Freedom of Information Act, presumably he would not have said them. 50

In dictionaries of quotations, Kissinger has more wisecracks to his name than most professional comedians. “Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.” “If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.” And a line worthy of Woody Allen himself: “Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There’s just too much fraternizing with the enemy.” His finest aphorisms, too, deserve to endure: “To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it,” “Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem,” and perhaps the most famous of all, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Yet the sharpness of Kissinger’s wit seems ultimately to have been in inverse proportion to his popularity. Perhaps the boasting about sex was simply a mistake. Kissinger’s line about the aphrodisiac quality of power was, once again, intended to be self-deprecating. Of the women he dated, he once said, “They are… attracted only to my power. But what happens when my power is gone? They’re not going to sit around and play chess with me.” 51This is not the language of Don Juan. Once again Kissinger was too candid with Oriana Fallaci:

When I speak to Le Duc Tho, I know what I have to do with Le Duc Tho, and when I’m with girls, I know what I must do with girls. Besides, Le Duc Tho doesn’t at all agree to negotiate with me because I represent an example of moral rectitude…. [T]his frivolous reputation… it’s partly exaggerated, of course…. What counts is to what degree women are part of my life, a central preoccupation. Well, they aren’t that at all. For me women are only a diversion, a hobby. Nobody spends too much time with his hobbies. 52

This was true. The glamorous women with whom Kissinger very publicly dined in the years before his second marriage were generally left to their own devices after dessert as Kissinger returned to the White House or State Department. We know now (see the preface) that none of these relationships was more than a friendship: Kissinger loved Nancy Maginnes, and she put up with the smoke screen in the gossip columns as the price of her privacy. Yet the starlets, combined with the attendant publicity, could only fuel the jealousy of others. Nor could Kissinger resist another one-liner: “I am,” he announced at a party given for the feminist Gloria Steinem by the television talk show host Barbara Howar, “a secret swinger.” 53There was of course nothing secret about it. A two-page spread in Life magazine in January 1972 pictured Kissinger not only with Steinem and Howar but also with “movie starlet” Judy Brown, “film star” Samantha Eggar, “movie actress” Jill St. John, “TV star” Marlo Thomas, “starlet” Angel Tomkins, and “bosomy pinup girl” June Wilkinson. 54Nor were all Kissinger’s dates from the second tier of acting talent. The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann had been nominated for an Oscar two years before she caused Kissinger to miss the announcement of his own nomination as secretary of state. Candice Bergen was a rising star when, over dinner, Kissinger gave her “the sense of shared secrets — probably the same set he gave every antiwar actress.” For the press, the story was irresistible: the dowdy Harvard professor reborn in Hollywood as “Cary Grant with a German accent.” 55When Marlon Brando pulled out of the New York premiere of The Godfather, its executive producer Robert Evans unhesitatingly called Kissinger — and Kissinger obligingly flew up, despite blizzard conditions and a schedule the next day that began with an early-morning meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss the mining of Haiphong harbor and ended with a secret flight to Moscow: