Kissinger’s Shadow

by Greg Grandin

  * Kissinger directly linked his call for action to his earlier critique of “American empiricism,” arguing that it was only willed action—action taken instinctively, with incomplete information—that can prevent such empiricism from becoming a rigid dogma. In his first book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (1957), pp. 424–26, he wrote: “Policy is the art of weighing probabilities; mastery of it lies in grasping the nuances of possibilities. To attempt to conduct it as a science must lead to rigidity. For only the risks are certain; the opportunities are conjectural. One cannot be ‘sure’ about the implications of events until they have happened and when they have occurred it is too late to do anything about them. Empiricism in foreign policy leads to a penchant for ad hoc solutions.” Americans might pride themselves on being undogmatic but that they “postpone committing themselves until all facts are in” is itself a form of dogmatism. By the time they do act, “a crisis has usually developed or an opportunity has passed.” The result, Kissinger argued, is an inability to bridge the gap between “grand strategy” and the “particular tactics” taken in response to any given crisis. He goes on: “The paradoxical result is that we, the empiricists, often appear to the world as rigid, unimaginative, and even somewhat cynical, while the dogmatic Bolsheviks exhibit flexibility, daring, and subtlety.” But, he said, “the willingness to act need not derive from theory.” One can and should act based on intangibles: on “tradition,” past experiences, instinct, imagination, and “a feeling for nuance.” To do so will help sharpen our leaders’ consciousness regarding those intangibles: “A power can survive only if it is willing to fight for interpretations of justice and its conception of vital interests:” but, importantly, it would be a disaster to wait to act until one has a fully formed interpretation of justice and conception of interests, or until the situation allows for a perfect application of that interpretation and conception. Rather, in a complex world, ideals and interests can only be known by testing them, by acting. Confronting the Soviet threat “presupposes above all a moral act: a willingness to run risks on partial knowledge and for a less than perfect application of one’s principles. The insistence on absolutes either in assessing the provocation or in evaluating possible remedies is a prescription for inaction.” Inaction would lead to a dogmatic loss of imagination, and loss of imagination would hinder future action.

  * We also now know that Moscow’s bid to place nuclear missiles in Cuba was prompted by Washington’s involvement in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and Kennedy’s staggering arms escalation. Also key to understanding Cuban motives in wanting the missiles was Operation Mongoose (a covert CIA operation put into place following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion designed to topple the Cuban government), ongoing acts of sabotage carried out by Washington-backed anti-Castro proxies, and the fear of another invasion.

  * If Kissinger had the soon-to-be dissident Ellsberg perched on his left shoulder, Edward Lansdale, an unrepentant Cold Warrior, sat on his right. Lansdale, an old Asia hand, also briefed Kissinger on his trips to Vietnam; his experience in the Pacific dated back to World War II and ran through the counterinsurgency in the Philippines and the Korean War. Lansdale was somewhat marginalized by the time Kissinger established regular contact with him in 1965, serving as the assistant to the US ambassador in the Saigon embassy. But earlier, during the covert years of deepening American involvement in South Vietnam in the mid-1950s, Lansdale was one of the key figures who took “black bag” counterterrorism and psychological warfare tactics learned in the Philippines and applied them in Vietnam. Such tactics were later incorporated into Phoenix, the CIA’s infamous assassination program. Lansdale sent his South Vietnamese contacts Kissinger’s way when they were visiting the United States, so as to “revive your faith in your fellow man in the good fight.” And as it became clear that Johnson wouldn’t fully commit to what Kissinger thought was needed to win in South Vietnam, Kissinger commiserated with Lansdale, writing in a June 2, 1967, letter: “You have been much on my mind in the recent months. What a tragic process to have our bureaucracy clash with the aspirations of a shattered society.” Lansdale is a good example of the many-headed-hydra US national security state: between his tours in Vietnam, he was in charge of the program of destabilization against the Cuban government authorized by Kennedy on November 30, 1961, following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which in turn set off the chain of reactions that led to the Cuban missile crisis. Kissinger and Lansdale shared a common mentor, Fritz Kraemer, a refugee from Nazi Germany who tutored a number of influential military and intelligence officers. For Lansdale’s connection with Kraemer, see Kraemer’s obituary, New York Times, November 19, 2003. For Kissinger’s correspondence with Lansdale, see Hoover Institution Archives, Edward G. Lansdale Papers, box 53.

  * For someone who has insisted that it is only in retrospect that historical events seem inevitable, that at the time statesmen have the “freedom” to choose a range of responses to any given crisis, Kissinger often presents his support for the Vietnam War as predetermined by the moment’s political and intellectual climate. But others of equal position and similar worldview chose differently. Born in Germany in 1904, Hans Morgenthau is considered the founder of America’s postwar realist approach to international relations, one of the most influential diplomatic scholars of the twentieth century. Like Kissinger, Morgenthau, educated at the University of Frankfurt before moving into the US academy, was influenced by Continental philosophy (including Spengler). Like Kissinger, he rejected the fetish for deductive formulas to explain human events, offering, as one scholar describes, a “sweeping denunciation of all rationalized political science.” He believed “facts have no social meaning in themselves”: “our sensual experience,” our “hopes and fears, our memories, intentions and expectations” create “social facts.” Like Kissinger, he was a realist who didn’t think reality was objective. “The social world itself,” he wrote, “is an artifact of man’s mind as the reflection of his thoughts and the creation of his actions.” And like Kissinger, he defined power not as an objective condition but as a “psychological relation,” based on the “expectations of benefits” and “the fear of disadvantages.” Unlike Kissinger, however, Morgenthau didn’t let his critique of postwar positivism lead to a position of radical relativism; he insisted on the need to distinguish right from wrong. His very early pragmatic opposition to US involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s evolved, by the mid-1960s, into a strong moral critique of Washington’s policy. For Morgenthau on Vietnam, see Ellen Glaser Rafshoon, “A Realist’s Moral Opposition to War: Hans J. Morgenthau and Vietnam,” Peace and Change (January 2001).

  * I asked Maureen Linker, a philosopher at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, her opinion of this reading of Kant’s categorical imperative. She answered: “Kissinger’s point that what one considers an end and a means is dependent on one’s metaphysical system is a distortion of Kant. Kant would say that the life of any rational agent is the only acceptable ends. Kant argued for a universal and absolute moral system against relativism.… He would have no part of Kissinger’s interpretation.” In his undergraduate thesis, as well, Kissinger in effect uses Kant’s notion of freedom against Kant’s ethical absolutism, in a way that equates his critique of historical causality with fixed morality. “Values,” he wrote, “are, at best, a mode of causality.” Just as trying to find the true meaning of history always “exhausts itself in the riddle of the first cause,” trying to find the foundation on which to base one’s ethical position always exhausts itself in the riddle of first principles.

  * The historian Ken Hughes, in his recent Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (2014), pp. 175–77, cites a Nixon campaign memo that describes Kissinger as a “top diplomatic source who is secretly with us and has access to the Paris talks and other information.”

  * A secret file with damning information did in fact exist. It had been compiled by Johnson’s advisers and secreted out of the White House upon Nixon
’s victory. Ken Hughes argues that Nixon wanted it because it contained evidence not of Johnson’s perfidy (since Johnson, according to Hughes, didn’t time the bombing halt to benefit Humphrey) but of Nixon’s sabotage of the peace talks. On May 14, 1973, just after Johnson’s death, Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security adviser, deposited the bombing halt file in the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. He appended a note that, in part, read: “The attached file contains the information available to me and (I believe) the bulk of the information available to President Johnson on the activities of Mrs. Chennault and other Republicans just before the presidential election of 1968.” Rostow wanted the file to remain classified indefinitely: “After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library … may, alone, open this file.… If he believes the material it contains should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above should be repeated.” Rostow’s instructions notwithstanding, the library began declassifying the file in 1994. Despite renewed attention to the Watergate break-in on its fortieth anniversary, scholars and reporters, aside from Ken Hughes and journalist Robert Parry, have mostly ignored its contents.

  † Richard Goodwin, JFK’s speechwriter, described Nixon’s inner circle, including Henry Kissinger, as the “bureaucratization of the criminal class.”

  * It wasn’t until 1973 that Congress and the public became aware of the secret Menu bombing of Cambodia, after a whistleblower named Major Hal Knight wrote a letter to Senator William Proxmire informing him of his involvement, while stationed at Ben Hoa Air Force in South Vietnam in 1970, in the deceit. At the time, congressional investigators and journalists couldn’t find the link connecting what Knight was doing in South Vietnam—burning documents and writing false reports—to the White House. General Abrams, for instance, gave detailed testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, but insisted that he didn’t know who came up with the protocols for deception: “The instructions on precisely how this would be handled at the time it was approved all emanated from Washington.” “Who ordered the falsification of the records?” one senator asked Abrams. “I just do not know,” he answered. Later, though, after Kissinger was out of office, Seymour Hersh (in his 1983 book The Price of Power, pp. 59–65) identified Colonel Sitton as that missing link. There has been very little follow-up to Hersh’s success in establishing Kissinger as the architect of the so-called duel reporting system. But I’ve located a lengthy and, as far as I can tell, largely unknown oral history conducted with Sitton in 1984. Now deceased, Sitton discusses the details of the deception and confirms the veracity of Hersh’s account: “I was in shock,” Sitton said, referring to being confronted by Hersh with leaked documents indicating his role in plotting the bombing of Cambodia, “I couldn’t believe he was able to get those things.” Hersh was wrong about some of the bombing’s technical details, Sitton says, but those “inaccuracies” aren’t “all that important.” “He made a lot of assumptions, thinking he was so smart he knew that much about it,” Sitton said. “He didn’t do too badly,” Sitton acknowledges. For the interview, see LTG Ray B. Sitton, interview by Marcus J. Boyle, transcript, K239.0512-1570, United States Air Force Oral History Collection, Archives Branch, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama (see especially pp. 152–64 for Sitton’s description of working with Haig and Kissinger to develop the double-bookkeeping protocol). For Abrams’s testimony and quotations, see Bombing in Cambodia: Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate (1973), pp. 343, 360, 363.

  * To let “slip” the fact that Nixon was obsessed with Communists, that he can’t be restrained, was itself a form of action, a good example of what the philosopher of language J. L. Austin called a “performative utterance.” By this, Austin meant that most examples of language do not represent an objective action and therefore can’t be evaluated in terms of whether they are true or false. Speech itself is the action. In arguing against the “true/false fetish,” Austin, writing in the 1950s, wasn’t making any claims about morality and politics. But his work on language was part of a broader intellectual reaction to postwar positivism similar to Kissinger’s reflections on the relativeness of truth and metaphysics of reality. In fact, Austin’s insistence that performative utterances are always “hollow or void” captures the emptiness at the center of Kissinger’s relativism. That emptiness has led to a kind of consistency: from his undergraduate thesis to his most recent books, Kissinger has argued for the importance of creative and unexpected responses to crises—in effect, performative utterances that telegraph to adversaries his seriousness of purpose. Yet despite this call for constant innovation, the arguments he has made for any given escalation (to establish credibility, to back up diplomatic overtures with military might, to strengthen resolve, to avoid inaction so to demonstrate that action is possible), be it in Southeast Asia in the 1960s or, thirty years later, in the Middle East, have been predictably similar.

  * The wars in Laos and Cambodia—which included bombing and cross-border raids—can be considered but two fronts in a long, often covert campaign that started during the Johnson administration and ended in 1973, each entailing a major invasion (Cambodia, with US troops, in 1970; Laos, with South Vietnamese troops and US air support, in 1971). In both cases, the main objective of US actions was to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh trail and destroy the chain of command and control of the Vietcong. Nixon and Kissinger greatly intensified (in terms of bombing rate and amount of munitions dropped) and expanded (in terms of extent of territory targeted) the bombing in both countries. But it was Cambodia that became an obsession for Nixon and Kissinger, because it reportedly housed the headquarters of the National Liberation Front and served as the primary gateway of North Vietnamese supplies and troops into South Vietnam.

  * Broadly speaking, the Cambodia bombing campaign between 1969 and 1973 comprised two named operations. The first, Operation Menu, ran from March 18, 1969, to May 1970. The second, Operation Freedom Deal, ran from May 1970 to August 1973. Menu was the phase that was most secret, carried out with the deception protocol designed by Sitton, Kissinger, and Haig. Most (but not all) of the Menu strikes took place along the border with Vietnam, targeted at destroying the logistics and command and control of the North Vietnamese army and the South Vietnamese Communist insurgents. That bombing, as we shall see, had the effect of dispersing North Vietnamese and insurgent activity further into Cambodia, spilling the American war deeper into the country and helping to destabilize the country. This crisis, which Menu helped escalate, was then used by Nixon and Kissinger to justify further escalation, including a major US invasion launched in the spring of 1970. After that invasion failed, the bombing operation called Freedom Deal was launched. Freedom Deal included both tactical (jet fighter) assaults and strategic (B-52) bombing and was more widespread, aimed at targets located throughout the whole of the country, including heavily populated areas well west of the Mekong River. Menu stayed secret for longer than anyone in the administration thought possible. It wasn’t until 1973 when Congress, tipped off by Hal Knight became aware of some of Menu’s extent (although a few members of Congress, including Gerald Ford, had earlier been informed). Freedom Deal was not technically “secret.” Nevertheless, its extent and intensity were underreported in the US press, which was often fed confusing and mixed messages by the administration. For instance, on July 1, 1970, Nixon appeared on TV and said the United States was providing small arms and moral support to the Cambodian government but no significant military aid. This was not true: Washington was providing direct air support deep in Cambodia.

  * Halperin was among the first targets of the first round of illegal wiretaps put into place to keep the bombing of Cambodia a secret. After a May 1969 story in the New York Times appeared reporting on the bombing (a story that didn’t result in a wider exposure of the campaign), Kissinger, thinking that Halperin might have been the inside source for the journalist
who wrote the report, goaded Nixon to wiretap him. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s May 9 memo of his phone call with Kissinger notes that Kissinger “hoped I would follow it up as far as we can take it and they will destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is.” It’s doubtful that Kissinger believed that tapping Halperin’s home phone would provide evidence of wrongdoing. But support for the taps, not just of Halperin but of other government officials and journalists, had a value in itself: it gave Kissinger yet another chance to show the White House that “he could be trusted.” This was the first of many such illegal bugs to come, putting Nixon on the road to disgrace.

  * Kissinger had an extreme “personal animus” for Sihanouk because of his “neutralism,” according to one embassy official in Cambodia. And it was Kissinger’s military aide, Haig, who pushed the coup. Mark Pratt, the State Department desk officer for Laos and Cambodia, reports that Haig (through the Military Assistance Command–Vietnam, or MAC-V) drove Sihanouk out and put Lon Nol in: “MAC-V back here in Washington was dickering with Lon Nol to depose Sihanouk.” Sihanouk was on a plane flying to China “when MAC-V moved and Lon Nol took over.” Pratt makes a point to say that Haig wanted Lon Nol because he came out of the military and the “American military has always wanted to have ‘their’ man.… They do like the military mind, and this, of course, is exactly what Haig thought that he had found in Lon Nol.” (See the interview with Pratt in Cambodia: Country Reader, compiled by the Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, available at http://www.adst.org/Readers/Cambodia.pdf.) For an in-depth analysis of Lon Nol’s coup, see Ben Kienan’s chapter, “The Impact on Cambodia of the U.S. Intervention in Vietnam” in Jayne S. Werner and Luu Doan Huynh, eds., The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives (1993), which describes the destabilizing effects of Cambodia’s enormous customs revenue losses (from contraband rice trade) resulting from Washington’s escalation of the war.