Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  Already in the 1950s and 1960s, in his days as a scholar and defense intellectual, Kissinger’s circular reasoning (inaction needs to be avoided to show that action is possible; the purpose of American power is to create American purpose) and ethical relativism (“what one considers an end, and what one considers a mean, depends essentially on the metaphysics of one’s system”) often led him to propose what he had warned against: power for power’s sake. Now in office, he reiterated his fallacy: we have to escalate in order to prove we aren’t impotent, and the more impotent we prove to be, the more we have to escalate. Kissinger helped transform Nixon’s madman policy from performance, an act meant to convey insanity, into an actual act of moral insanity: the ravaging of two neutral countries.

  Executed on the exclusive authorization of one man, Nixon, on the advice of another, Kissinger, the bombing of Cambodia—and Laos, for largely the same reasons—was among the most brutal military operations ever conducted in US history. According to one study, the United States dropped 790,000 cluster bombs on those two countries (as well as on Vietnam), releasing just under a trillion pieces of shrapnel—either ball bearings or razor-sharp barbed darts.21 More bombs were dropped separately on Cambodia and Laos than combined on Japan and Germany during World War II.22 For Cambodia, Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen provide a definitive tally. They write that it “remains undisputed that in 1969–73 alone, around 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs fell on Cambodia.” Moreover, “this figure excludes the additional bomb tonnage dropped on Cambodia by the U.S.-backed air force of the Republic of Viet Nam, which also flew numerous bombing missions there in 1970 and 1971.”23 The amount of bombs that hit Laos is even more stunning: US pilots flew, on average, one sortie every eight minutes and dropped a ton of explosives for each and every Laotian, delivering a total of 2.5 million tons in nearly 600,000 runs. Laos, says the Voice of America, is “the most heavily bombed country in history.”24

  The devastation wasn’t caused just by bombs. Defoliation chemicals did their work. Just over a two-week period (April 18 to May 2, 1969) US–dropped Agent Orange caused significant damage. Andrew Wells-Dang, who has long been involved in relief aid to Southeast Asia, writes: “both US Government and independent inspection teams confirmed that 173,000 acres were sprayed (7% of Kompong Cham province), 24,700 of them seriously affected. The rubber plantations totaled approximately one-third of Cambodia’s total and represented a loss of 12% of the country’s export earnings.” Washington agreed to pay over $12 million in reparations, but Kissinger tried to defer the payout to fiscal year 1972, when the money could be paid without a special request that would have revealed US cross-border activity: “Every effort,” Kissinger wrote, “should be made to avoid the necessity for a special budgetary request to provide funds to pay this claim.”25

  In his testimony before the Senate on the Cambodia bombing, Creighton Abrams, commander of the US military in Vietnam, said that the “principle limitations [to the air assault] were civilian population.” Not so much. According to Kiernan, a professor of history at Yale University, “from 1969 to 1973, the US bombing spread out across Cambodia and killed over 100,000 Khmer civilians.”26 Fewer people were killed in Laos, but only because the country is less populated. It is estimated that 30,000 Laotians died in the campaign. But it is hard to say. In 1972, Nixon asked “how many did we kill in Laos?” Ron Ziegler, White House press secretary, guessed, “Maybe ten thousand—fifteen?” Kissinger concurred: “In the Laotian thing, we killed about ten, fifteen.”27*

  These are ongoing crimes. As many as about 30 percent of the bombs dropped by the United States, the vast majority under Kissinger’s tenure, did not detonate. In Laos, there exist an estimated 80 million unexploded cluster bombs, hidden below a thin layer of soil and packed with ball bearings. In addition to the roughly 30,000 Laotians who died under the bombing, these devices continue to kill hundreds every year, a total of 20,000 as of 2009. Many more are scarred and maimed. In Cambodia as well, delayed explosions continue to kill.

  Some especially targeted areas of fertile land should be off-limits to human traffic. Laotians and Cambodians, though, are poor: to not farm could mean to die. Yet when their plows or feet hit these bombs, many find that to farm is to die. In 2007 in Laos, Por Vandee was rice farming with his wife and three sons when one of his sons hit an unexploded ordnance with his hoe. Vandee was knocked unconscious and when he awoke, he learned that two of his sons were dead and the other had brain injuries. Others die or are wounded trying to collect the bombs to sell as scrap metal.

  “There are parts of Laos where there is literally no free space. There are no areas that have not been bombed,” one aid worker recently said. “And, when you are in the villages now, you still see the evidence of that. You still see bomb craters. You still see an unbelievable amount of metal and wreckage and unexploded ordnance just lying around in villages and it’s still injuring and killing people today.” Forty percent of the victims are children.28

  * * *

  Long before he and Nixon escalated the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, Henry Kissinger had given a good deal of thought to the problem of democracy, to what, in his 1954 doctoral dissertation, he called the “incommensurability” between domestic politics and foreign policy. In modern democratic societies, politics are founded on principles thought to be absolute and timeless—civil equality, political freedom, and due process—applicable to all people, everywhere, at all times. Diplomacy, however, reveals these ideals to be, by definition, negotiable and their application contingent on political expediency. The interstate system is made up of competing polities, each representing unique cultures and values, each with its own history and interests. Wars, crises, and diplomatic tensions may occur over any given issue. But sustained threats to the international system appear when one nation insists that its parochial “version of justice” is universal and tries to impose it on other nations. “The international experience of a people is a challenge to the universality of its notion of justice,” Kissinger wrote, “for the stability of an international order depends on self-limitation, on the reconciliation of different versions of legitimacy.”29

  For Kissinger, the incongruity between domestic absolutism and international relativism was more than a technical problem. It was primal, for it forced nations to confront the fact that there were limits to their “will-to-infinity,” that ideals heretofore thought to be in harmony with the heavens were actually just really their own particular thing.

  Kissinger dwelled awhile on the danger statesmen face when they point out to their nation’s people that they are not, in fact, the world, that their aspirations are not boundless, that other peoples, with different interests and experiences, exist. Unwilling to accept these limits, citizens often stage “an almost hysterical, if subconscious, rebellion against foreign policy.” The most common expression of this rebellion, Kissinger argued, is to impose an impossibly high test of purity on diplomats, limiting their ability to compromise with, or even talk to, envoys of nations deemed to be immoral, unnatural, and beyond the pale.

  Prevented from performing their duty, foreign policy makers become something like “heroes in classical drama who [have] a vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to [their] fellow-men.” They often “share the fate of prophets,” wrote Kissinger, in that “they are without honor in their own country.” This is so because their job is to treat the very thing their citizens cherish most—a sense of themselves as unique and eternal—as a mere “object for negotiation.” Trucking and bartering, then, in the international realm becomes a “symbol of imperfection, of impure motives frustrating universal bliss.” The ink on any given international treaty might lay out the protocols of this or that specific agreement or compromise. The thing itself, though—the very fact that one has to compromise—is death, smelling of decay, of transience, of the fleetingness of existence.

  Thus the double-bind burden of statesmen. They need to represent the aspirations of their people,
yes, and strive to resist the Spenglerian rot. But they also must gently accommodate citizens to the fact of mortality. They need to use their art to help their nation admit its limitations, accepting that its ideals are not timeless, its morals not pristine. “The statesman must therefore be an educator,” Kissinger wrote; “he must bridge the gap between a people’s experience and his vision.”

  These are subtle observations, the product of a young man’s probing mind methodically building, as he once put it, his “conceptual structure.” But what is most remarkable is that they were written in the early 1950s, a moment of extraordinary trust when it came to American diplomacy. Maybe Kissinger was thinking of Woodrow Wilson’s inability to sell his League of Nations to the American people. But that failure, by the time Kissinger composed his reflections on the relationship between democracy and diplomacy, was decades old. The New Deal, World War II, Allied victory over Nazism, and then the Cold War had cemented an extraordinary degree of unanimity among the American people.* The White House and the foreign policy establishment operated with nearly unquestioned autonomy and legitimacy (Rick Perlstein writes that between 1947 and 1974, around four hundred bills had been introduced in Congress to establish legislative oversight of intelligence agencies; all were voted down).30

  In other words, the problem Kissinger warned against in 1954 largely didn’t exist. Conservative defense analysts like Kissinger complained about the lack of will in the postwar years among citizens to fight small or major wars. But that’s not the kind of hysterical filibustering of diplomats that Kissinger is describing in his dissertation. Through to the mid-1960s, voters embraced a robust internationalism; statesmen didn’t have a “difficult task in legitimizing their programmes domestically”; the press was decidedly not adversarial, most social scientists saw themselves as facilitators, not opponents, of the Cold War; theologians and intellectuals provided moral and ethical support for containment; and the legislature and judiciary, for the most part, minded their own business when it came to foreign policy. Diplomats, in other words, weren’t being cast out of their homeland like dishonored prophets or Greek heroes.

  But then came America’s war in Southeast Asia. Kissinger, named national security adviser in the middle of that war, isn’t singularly responsible for the undoing of America’s Cold War consensus. But by executing Nixon’s war strategy with such zeal, in Cambodia and elsewhere, he quickened the breakup. He did say that statesmen were prophets, and in a way he fulfilled his own prophecy, helping to bring about the dissensus he had warned about in 1954. It wasn’t just the bombing of Cambodia. “Immense damage had been done by 1973–1974,” the diplomatic historian Carolyn Eisenberg told me after she generously read this chapter. “There were so many lies about so many things,” she said. “The biggest lie was that they had wasted thousands of lives and vast sums of money to achieve a peace settlement that they could have obtained four years earlier.”*

  Kissinger recognizes that his time in public office marked a turning point, complaining that no other American statesman had to face the kind of criticism he faced. Differences of opinion over foreign policy were to be expected, he said. But during his tenure, “a natural critique of decisions that were arguable at various stages became transmuted into a moral issue, first about the moral adequacy of American foreign policy altogether, and then into the moral adequacy of America in conducting any kind of traditional foreign policy.”31

  In trying to account for this turn, Kissinger over the years has occasionally referred back to the argument he made in his 1954 doctoral dissertation regarding the inevitable incongruity between domestic absolutism and international relativism: losing the war in Vietnam, he said in 2010, was “America’s first experience with limits in foreign policy, and it was something painful to accept.” This is a disingenuous interpretation. It is true, as will shall see, that defeat in Vietnam provoked a conservative reaction against Kissinger. Grassroots activists were suspicious of Kissinger’s “foreignness” and “internationalism” (that is, his Jewishness). First-generation neoconservative intellectuals objected strongly to the idea that there were “limits” to American power. But this isn’t the sort of “moral” rebuke Kissinger is talking about, when he complains about the domestic response to his conduct of the war. Rather, the critics who most rankled Kissinger were those—protesters, Congress, and former Harvard colleagues like Thomas Schelling—who told him that there were limits to what he could do to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. As he complained to a reporter in early 1973, specifically about public oversight of his Cambodia strategy: “I don’t see how it is possible to conduct foreign policy when there’s a systematic attempt to destroy both your threats and your incentives.”32

  Never has Kissinger acknowledged how his refusal to recognize limits in Southeast Asia accelerated the crisis, the way his war in Cambodia helped to bring about the end of the old “traditional” foreign policy establishment, transforming the early Cold War national security state, based on elite planning, gentlemanly debate, domestic acquiescence, and cross-party consensus, into what came next. Kissinger didn’t use his time in office to “instruct” citizens in political realism, as he had earlier defined the responsibility of statesmen. Rather, he helped adapt the imperial presidency to new times, based on an increasingly mobilized and polarized citizenry, more spectacular displays of power, more secrecy, and ever more widening justifications for ever more war.

  4

  Nixon Style

  Because, because, you’ve gotta remember that everything is domestic politics from now on. And, uh—. Everything’s domestic politics. Maybe, maybe, maybe, Henry—. To hell with the whole thing. You know what I mean?

  —Richard Nixon

  In recent years, there’s been an avalanche of declassified transcripts of phone conversations Kissinger secretly recorded, newly available Nixon tapes, White House memos, and the papers and diaries of Haldeman, Haig, and others. In this material it is hard to find a single foreign policy initiative that was not also conducted for domestic gain, to quiet dissent, best rivals, or position Nixon for reelection in 1972. An early push to build an antiballistic missile system had less to do with Soviet power than with staging a confrontation with Congress to establish Nixon’s dominance over foreign policy. The president, with the help of Kissinger, won that fight by overstating the Soviet threat (something Kissinger had been doing since the 1950s). The president then gloated in a victory memo about the “‘Nixon style’ in dealing with the Congress,” without making even a mention of national defense. In the Middle East, as the historian Robert Dallek writes in Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, “domestic politics was paramount.” Nixon wanted to press Israel to give up its nuclear program but, not wanting to lose pro-Israel votes in Congress, relented. The president also thought he would get “more political than national security value” from SALT talks with Moscow.

  “We’ve got to break the back of this generation of Democratic leaders,” Kissinger said, referring to a plan to use the defense budget and an arms control treaty to discredit Nixon’s domestic adversaries. Nixon responded: “We’ve got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.”

  “That’s right,” Kissinger answered.

  Nixon: “And we certainly as hell will.”1

  No one country of the globe claimed more of Kissinger’s attention than the United States. He became fixated on its domestic politics because his boss, Richard Nixon, was fixated on domestic politics. And Kissinger knew that his position depended entirely on melding himself to Nixon. “I would be losing my only constituency,” he once said, about the consequences of displeasing Nixon.2

  There’s more, however, to the subordination of diplomacy to domestic politics than the attachment Kissinger had to Nixon. Vietnam polarized American society. It gave rise, on one side, to a dissenting, skeptical culture and, on the other, to a conservative movement that would eventually coalesce behind Ronald Reagan. As the schism deepened, politicians would in
creasingly use war—or at least the drumbeat of war—to contain the first and leverage the second to their advantage. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson all played foreign policy for political gain (or loss: consider LBJ and Vietnam). But the Nixon White House raised the stakes.

  * * *

  Startlingly fast after 1968, 1972 came into view. And then, even before 1972 arrived, 1976 loomed. The four-year presidential election cycle has speeded up in recent years, it is often said, but nearly half a century ago, Nixon and Kissinger, in a remarkably short period of time after having landed in office, were running their war in Southeast Asia with an eye on Nixon’s reelection.

  Here’s Kissinger speaking to Senator George McGovern in early 1969 about Vietnam, just after Nixon’s inauguration:

  I think that it is clear now that we never should have gone in there, and I don’t see how any good can come of it. But we can’t do what you recommend and just pull out, because the boss’s whole constituency would fall apart; those are his people who support the war effort: the South; the blue-collar Democrats in the North. The Nixon constituency is behind the war effort. If we were to pull out of Vietnam, there would be a disaster, politically, for us here, at home.3

  The 1968 race for the presidency had been a three-way contest, with Nixon winning 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.7, and the segregationist George Wallace 13.5. Nearly ten million voters chose not just Wallace but his running mate, General Curtis LeMay, who made a number of alarming statements during the campaign. “I never said we should bomb them back to the Stone Age,” was his response to criticism of his plan for winning the Vietnam War. “I said we had the capability to do it.”*