by Gary J. Bass
When this tape recording was made public some thirty-seven years later, an embarrassed Kissinger apologized and tried to explain his remark as having been taken out of context. But the torment of Bangladesh suggests a simpler truth: he meant what he said. In the spring of 1971, he and Nixon were faced with mass atrocities on a scale that, at least for Nixon, called to mind Hitler’s extermination of German Jews. To be sure, Pakistan had no gas chambers; Yahya was not Hitler; this was not the Holocaust. Still, although Nixon and Kissinger stood behind many dictatorships—in Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Indonesia, Iran, Spain, South Korea—this was an enormity that went beyond the workaday cruelties of statecraft, as Nixon himself understood. And yet in that dire circumstance, Nixon and Kissinger, in word and in deed, stood resolutely behind Pakistan’s murderous generals.47
During the grueling year of 1971, Nixon and Kissinger were often outraged. Nixon saw Indira Gandhi’s aggressiveness as morally wrong, not just strategically inconvenient. Kissinger was indignant at William Rogers, exasperated with Kenneth Keating, and appalled by Archer Blood. But when it came to mass murder, he was oddly diffident. The worst he would say about Yahya was that he thought the man was stupid, and Kissinger thought that almost everyone was stupid.
No country, not even the United States, can prevent massacres everywhere in the world. But these atrocities were carried out by a close U.S. ally, which prized its warm relationship with the United States, and used U.S. weapons and military supplies against its own people. Surely there was some U.S. responsibility here. And yet Nixon and Kissinger, for all their clout with Pakistan, despite all the warnings from Blood and others, continued to support this military dictatorship while it committed grievous crimes against humanity.
Nixon and Kissinger have been impressively successful in polishing the grit off their own reputations. At night on August 7, 1974, facing impeachment and conviction over Watergate, Nixon finally decided to resign. He summoned Kissinger to his side in the residence at the White House, and asked how history would view his foreign policy. As Nixon boozily sobbed, Kissinger recited the president’s achievements, assuring the shattered man that history would remember him as a great peacemaker. Just in case, the next day, Nixon, in his final televised address from the Oval Office, rattled off his successes with Vietnam, China, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union—and, unsurprisingly, made no mention of India or Bangladesh.48
“We have taken … shit ever since,” Nixon said soon before his death. After resigning, he spent the rest of his days seeking rehabilitation. Bob Woodward aptly writes that Nixon waged a “war against history,” churning out ten books, trying to salvage his historical reputation by touting his achievements in foreign policy. Nixon’s self-exculpatory books show his old fondness for Pakistan’s helpful generals, but he limits his references to their role in smoothing his way to China—and certainly never considers the Bengali lives lost in exchange for Yahya’s assistance. While Nixon’s and Kissinger’s massive tomes try to elevate them into the redemptive company of titans like Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, they are more properly remembered alongside a rampaging Yahya.49
Nixon and Kissinger largely failed at sanitizing their record on Watergate, Vietnam, and Cambodia—but on Bangladesh they proved to be remarkably deft at ducking public judgment. Just two years later, when Kissinger became secretary of state, a Gallup poll found that he was the most admired person in the United States. Far from ending up a pariah, he remains a superstar, glistening as the single most famous and revered American foreign policy practitioner. Bangladesh ought to rank with Vietnam and Cambodia among the darkest incidents in Nixon’s presidency and the entire Cold War. But few Americans today remember anything about these atrocities, let alone about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s support for the government that was committing them. In this forgetting, Americans have absorbed some of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s contempt for Bangladesh. Faraway, poor, brown—the place is all too easily ignored or mocked.50
For those primarily concerned with the health of the United States, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s actions back in 1971 deserve scrutiny for their contempt for the rule of law. As Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have rightly pointed out, Nixon was trampling the law long before June 1972, when the burglars were arrested while breaking into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate. In December 1971, Nixon and Kissinger were already abusing government power by unlawfully transferring weapons to Pakistan from Iran and Jordan. They took no notice of legal warnings from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House staff; in the Nixon White House, it already went without saying that the president was above the law. And unlike with Watergate, Nixon and Kissinger largely got away with this illegal covert operation, never facing anything like the Iran-contra investigation.51
Kissinger did take some knocks in the press over India, which sent him into a frenzy. Some of the records of his Situation Room meetings were leaked to the muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, who even found out that Kissinger had toyed with the idea of illegally sending Jordanian F-104s to Pakistan, although he did not realize that Nixon and Kissinger had actually done it. “We cannot survive the kind of internal weaknesses we are seeing,” Kissinger raged to Nixon. John Ehrlichman noted that Kissinger was lashing back with a forceful press campaign, “trying to change the fact that during his … [Situation Room] meetings Henry had lost his objectivity and he’d been exceedingly intemperate in his attacks on India.” Nixon, seeing how Kissinger “ranted and raved,” briefly considered firing him. “He’s personalizing this India thing,” the president told Alexander Haig. “[H]e just starts to wear himself out and crack up.” Still, Nixon shared Kissinger’s desire for revenge against Anderson. A year after Yahya started his slaughter, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy were drawing up far-fetched possible plans to kill Anderson—by poisoning his drink, or putting LSD on his car’s steering wheel so he would hallucinate and crash.52
Today, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s fog of self-justification, pumped out by the White House’s publicity machine, has thickened into fact. In the weeks after the Bangladesh war ended, Nixon and Kissinger became fortified in their wartime conviction that they had done it all right. “God almighty!” Nixon said. “We did everything that we could possibly do.” They had, he said, “a hell of a record.” Kissinger concurred: “We are infinitely better off in China, and we’re somewhat better off in Pakistan. So on balance, it was a cold-blooded calculation.” He assured Nixon, “By next July, Mr. President, we’ll look damn good on it.” Kissinger—in a tirade against liberals, intellectuals, and Democrats—angrily told Nixon, “Not one has yet understood what we did in India-Pakistan and how it saved the China option which we need for the bloody Russians. Why would we give a damn about Bangladesh?” “We don’t,” agreed Nixon.53
Later, when Kissinger wrote a gargantuan eight-hundred-page history of diplomacy, Pakistan pops up only as a plucky Cold War ally, with no mention of the atrocities. In his memoirs, Nixon cannot even bring himself to mention the slaughter in East Pakistan or the stolen election, instead blaming the trouble on a Bengali rebellion and Indian aggression. Blurring events into haze, he writes in passing of the “almost unbelievable cruelty of the fighting on both sides” in East Pakistan. His other books brush past Yahya’s massacres, while denouncing Indira Gandhi for seeking to wipe out Pakistan. While both Nixon and Kissinger understandably gloried in the opening to China, they worked hard to forget how horribly Bengalis suffered in order to secure the Pakistani junta’s goodwill.54
Kissinger’s memoirs are a lengthy masterpiece of omission. Although he devotes a long chapter to glossing up his record in South Asia, he says almost nothing about the slaughter of Bengalis, while still insisting that Pakistan’s atrocities were “clearly under its domestic jurisdiction.” (The suffering of the Bengalis does show up when he stands on the principle of nonintervention, fearing the loss of “all restraints” in the world if “shortsighted and repressive domestic policies are used to justif
y foreign military intervention”—a solicitude for sovereignty that did not quite apply to, say, Chile or Cambodia.) He lays blame for some of the most controversial decisions on Nixon and even the steamrollered William Rogers, who on most days in this crisis might as well have stayed in bed. He leaves out his encouraging China to move troops against India and the illegal Iranian and Jordanian arms transfers, while praising the bravery of Nixon’s reckless decision to back China against India. He dismisses the administration’s critics as driven by “fluctuating emotions” and an ignorance of the White House’s own “essentially geopolitical point of view.” He sanitizes out Nixon’s racial animus toward Indians. No book has done more to bury the memory of the Bengalis.55
THE DISSENTERS
On April 4, 1972, the United States recognized Bangladesh as a sovereign state, formalizing the reality that Archer Blood and his staff had seen coming long before. The recognition came almost exactly a year after Blood’s dissent cable, and one of Blood’s own staffers managed to get in the last word.56
Scott Butcher—who had drafted the Blood telegram as a junior political officer in the Dacca consulate—rode out Nixon’s and Kissinger’s wave of reprisal firings, although not without some jitters. When he returned to Washington on home leave a few months after the dissent telegram was sent, he got a call from an official at the State Department’s personnel office. “I thought, ‘Oh man, I’m being assigned to Timbuktu.’ He said, ‘A number of us are very supportive.’ ” To his relief, Butcher wound up as a desk officer for Pakistan at the State Department.
As such, he was responsible for all things Bangladeshi. That included drafting the words with which Richard Nixon would grudgingly accept the reality of the new country. Nixon’s genuine sentiments would have been unprintable; the president who normalized relations with Mao’s China had repeatedly vowed to never, ever recognize Bangladesh, pounding his desk for emphasis. But writing up Nixon’s letter of recognition for Bangladesh, Butcher worked in some genuinely heartfelt words of his own: “The United States has maintained an official mission in Dacca since 1949 and over the years many Americans, both in private and official capacities, have derived great satisfaction from the opportunity to work side by side with the Bengalee people in a variety of enterprises aimed at combatting disease, illiteracy, poverty, hunger and the impact of natural disaster.”57
Coming from Nixon, this would pass as so much presidential pabulum. Not so from Butcher, who always fondly remembered his time in Dacca: “Here we are in this little godforsaken part of the world, with this really appealing, dynamic people, having a certain amount of progress.” From him, it reads as a final, wistful commemoration of the kind of work that Blood’s consulate was happily doing before the shooting started. “It was very satisfying for me,” Butcher says quietly.
Archer Blood later bitterly recalled the “painful repercussions” of his dissent. “Nixon ordered my transfer from Dacca and for the next six years, while Kissinger was still in power, I was in professional exile, excluded from any work having to do with foreign policy.”58
Blood morosely departed Dacca on June 5, 1971. “He left quite suddenly,” says Eric Griffel, the chief U.S. development officer working there. “I knew he was disturbed. We all knew why he was leaving.” In Washington, Blood wound up in the State Department’s personnel office—a hard fall for someone who had been in the thick of the action overseas. He was given a State Department award for courage, but the Islamabad embassy hamstrung his future career prospects with a performance evaluation that claimed he had whipped up the Americans in Dacca against Pakistan. He whiled away his time in this internal exile. Although he tried to make the best of it, and was not the type to complain, he lost about two and a half stagnant years there. By then, Kissinger was secretary of state. Blood met him once, and told him his name, but Kissinger did not react.59
There was worse to come. Nixon’s rage over disloyalty in the ranks had ratcheted up after the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times and other newspapers, and Kissinger evidently nursed his old grudge. When Blood’s immediate superior at the State Department asked the ousted former consul what he wanted to do, Blood replied crisply that, of course, he wanted to run an embassy somewhere. But, he added, “I’ve always felt that since, you know, Dacca and particularly Mr. Kissinger as Secretary, my chances were nil.” To check if he was still on Kissinger’s bad side, he said, he floated his name for the embassy in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso). That was swiftly shot down.60
Then Kissinger somehow got word that Blood had dared to show his face at a conference in India. When he returned from the trip, Blood got a telephone call at home from his direct boss. As Blood later recalled, this diplomat told him, “When the Secretary recognized who that was, he hit the roof, and he said, ‘Get that guy out of Washington.’ So you have got to get out of Washington. Where do you want to go? I mean, fast.” Blood fled the State Department to a post at the Army War College. He had been shoved out of Dacca and now out of Washington. He recalled, “I spent three and a half years there waiting out Dr. Kissinger’s departure from the State Department.”61
With his upward path blocked, he watched as his prime years passed him by. His colleagues became ambassadors. Those who sailed through 1971 with more biddable consciences moved up in the world—George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford most spectacularly. When Blood could have been an ambassador or in a senior policy job in Washington, he was stuck. “There was no chance that he would ever represent the feelings of the people in Washington,” says Meg Blood. “It was a change in his life’s goals.” After Nixon resigned, Kissinger remained ensconced as Ford’s secretary of state. It was only in the Carter administration that Archer Blood could try to launch a late restart of his career. In 1979, at last, he went back to Delhi as deputy chief of mission. “It was serious,” says Scott Butcher, “but far beneath what he would have otherwise aspired to. He had the adulation of his peers but not the success he would have had had he not stuck his neck out.” Blood returned to Washington in 1981. He was discouraged by his job options. The only assignment he was offered was a hardship post as chargé d’affaires in Kabul. He started learning Dari, but the communist government refused to give him a visa. They would, he was sure, take anyone except him.62
Despondent, Blood decided to retire from the Foreign Service in May 1982. He became a diplomat-in-residence at Allegheny College, which was certainly a pleasant life. After his death in 2004 at the age of eighty-one, the U.S. embassy in Dacca named its library for him. Meg Blood says, “He wasn’t robbed of everything, as they would have liked.” But her sense of grievance is undimmed after all these years. “My Arch,” she says sadly. “He was giving up the career he had wanted. It had been so definite.” She thought he was worthy to be an ambassador or an assistant secretary of state, or more, despite Nixon and Kissinger. “For some reason they thought it could be kept quiet! All of those killings!”63
Notes
NOTE ON SOURCES
This book is based on three different kinds of primary sources: White House tapes of the conversations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, interviews with Americans and Indians who witnessed or participated in these events, and recently declassified documents from archives in the United States and India.
Starting in February 1971, and continuing throughout the Bangladesh crisis, Nixon secretly taped his talks in the Oval Office and elsewhere in the West Wing and the Executive Office Building. These audiotapes, thousands of hours of them, are an invaluable trove of evidence about the unfeigned thinking of Nixon and Kissinger, often far more revealing than the paper trail. But the tapes remain a surprisingly untapped resource, in part because they are so difficult to use: enormous, frustratingly organized, often bleeped, laborious to transcribe, and hard to understand. Working with a team of researchers, we made about a hundred new transcriptions, bringing unheard discussions to light.
In the United States, India, and Bangladesh, I did long interviews with Margar
et Millward Blood, Scott Butcher, Arundhati Ghose, Eric Griffel, Shahudul Haque, Samuel Hoskinson, Jacob-Farj-Rafael Jacob, Winston Lord, Jagat Mehta, Desaix Myers, K. C. Pant, Mihir Roy, Harold Saunders, Sydney Schanberg, Nevin Scrimshaw, and Jaswant Singh. Some of them were interviewed several times. Myers also gave me his letters and draft cables, and Scrimshaw provided a chapter from his forthcoming memoirs. For subjects who have died, I have had to rely on memoirs and interviews conducted by others, although using them as sparingly as possible, since it was impossible to do follow-ups or to press these people on the particular topics of this book. To screen out self-serving hindsight, the interviews were based on the documents, and wherever possible, I have checked the recollections of interviewees against the archival record and other accounts.
The documentary record, while voluminous beyond belief, is nevertheless incomplete. Over four decades later, the U.S. government still has not declassified many of the relevant papers. There are still documents withheld from public view at the Nixon Presidential Library and the National Archives, on grounds of national security. Kissinger’s papers at the Library of Congress are not available to researchers, at his own request. But the State Department’s historians have done an exceptional job of declassifying sensitive papers and White House tapes for their Foreign Relations of the United States series, which is a peerless resource. The National Security Archive at George Washington University, which skillfully and tenaciously uses the Freedom of Information Act and other legal tools to shine light on the workings of the U.S. government, has gotten a great amount of valuable material declassified, including some of Kissinger’s records—most notably the transcripts of many of his own secretly taped telephone conversations. Other researchers have made excellent use of the Freedom of Information Act. With the help of the National Security Archive, I have made my own requests for a mandatory declassification review under the terms of an executive order, but I am still waiting for the results.