Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Unfortunately, the issue arose in America at the worst possible time. In the aftermath of Vietnam and during Watergate, the idea that we had to earn the right to conduct foreign policy by moral purity — that we could prevail through righteousness rather than power — had an inevitable attraction. There was a mood of resignation from the world of hard tactical choices, reinforced by the historical American animus toward the concept of equilibrium. It was not the first time in our history that the aversion to power politics took the form of a moral crusade. And the fetid climate of Watergate endowed the charge of the Administration’s moral obtuseness with a certain credibility.

  Chile thus became caught up in a domestic debate transcending it; it had to carry the burdens of Watergate as well as of Vietnam. The Nixon Administration was not so insensitive to the Chilean junta’s clumsy and occasionally brutal practices as our critics alleged. But we considered that the change of government in Chile was on balance favorable — even from the point of view of human rights. We were therefore prepared to give the military leaders a chance; we made repeated private approaches to ease their methods. There is no doubt that our insistence on quiet diplomacy weakened our case at home even as it succeeded with Chile in many individual cases. It is equally true that many of our critics were retroactively blind to the totalitarian implications of Allende’s policies, ignored the danger of his alliance with Cuba and the Soviet Union, invented a role for us in bringing him down, and acted as if overthrowing the junta was now the sole valid national objective.

  Within weeks of Allende’s overthrow, his incompetence, corruption, and violation of democratic procedures — all widely acknowledged while he was alive — disappeared from public comment. There was recurring reference to Allende as a “democratically elected leader,” with nary a mention that he never had a majority mandate to impose the transformation that he was attempting; that his antidemocratic policies, had they succeeded, would have meant the end of Chile’s constitutional system; and that he was viciously hostile to the United States.

  The new plight of the democratic parties in Chile under the junta shifted the focus, blotting our historical memory. The continuing roundup and detention of civilians in Chile was a source of much anguish, particularly for us. Although several American citizens were known to be detained at the National Stadium in Santiago, our Embassy officials were denied access to them. Other Americans were reported missing; some died. Unofficial estimates of the total number of prisoners ranged from 3,500 to 20,000. Rumors of torture were widespread. The impression was being created that all arrests were arbitrary; there was no reference to the thousands of revolutionaries imported and armed by Allende and his associates.

  On September 22, the junta confirmed that high officials of the former Allende government were being held at a naval base prison on Dawson Island. Communist Party Secretary General Luis Corvalán was also arrested, which generated immediate international pressures on his behalf. Even UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, at the request of the Soviet UN delegation, later made an appeal for Corvalán’s life. This was a symptom not of Waldheim’s sympathies but of the double standard of the dominant group in the United Nations; there was no similar appeal on behalf of the victims of Iran’s later revolution, who were far more numerous and far more badly treated. Ironically, it was the United States that obtained Corvalán’s release three years later in the exchange for the Soviet dissident Bukovsky.

  On September 26, two days after the United States announced that it considered its diplomatic relations with Chile to be “continuing,” Chile released six American citizens arrested during the coup. Two appeared two days later at hearings held by Senator Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee on refugees to relate claims that they had heard, but not witnessed, the execution of several hundred prisoners in the National Stadium in Santiago. Senator Kennedy deplored the Nixon Administration’s “policy of silence.” On October 2, he proposed an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act stating that it was the sense of Congress that the President should cut off aid, other than humanitarian assistance, to Chile “until he finds that the government of Chile is protecting the human rights of all individuals, Chilean and foreign — as provided in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

  The Foreign Assistance Act as finally approved by the Congress in December 1973 did not contain this provision but did include a request that Nixon call on the Chilean government to respect human rights. Senator Kennedy mounted another effort to cut off aid to Chile in 1974. Both houses of Congress voted in December 1974, in the foreign assistance legislation for 1975, to end all American military aid to Chile “unless the President reports to Congress that Chile is making fundamental improvements in the observance of human rights.” By 1976 all aid to Chile was effectively cut off — a step never taken against Allende.

  The Chilean junta was being judged with exceptional severity while it faced near-civil war conditions. It probably continued authoritarian practices for too long, but two questions remain: Was it America’s duty to single out Chile for the harassment to which it was subjected, far exceeding in scope anything ever undertaken against Allende? Was there not involved a double standard that continued to be demonstrated at an ever-accelerating pace throughout the 1970s? No radical revolution, no matter how bloody — one thinks of Cuba, Iraq, Algeria, many African states, Vietnam’s occupation of Indochina, Khomeini’s Iran — has confronted the worldwide press campaign and the global indignation evoked by the clumsy authoritarians of Santiago. Was its crime in its methods, or its position on the right of the political spectrum? Was its sin the lack of civil freedoms, or the abandonment of the leftist embrace? Why is the argument so widespread that left-wing governments like Nicaragua’s are supposed to be moderated by economic assistance while conservative governments like Chile’s must be reformed by ostracism? The socialist government of Sweden cut off aid to Chile on September 13, within forty-eight hours of the coup, before its implications could possibly be known. Had it ever acted with such alacrity, or at all, against left-wing tyrants? Indeed, it had lavished aid on Hanoi throughout the Vietnam war and afterward.

  I do not mean to condone all the actions of the junta, several of which I consider unnecessary, ill-advised, and brutal. Nor do I question the humane motivation of many of its critics. But it did inherit a revolutionary situation in which government-sponsored violence played an important role. A serious analysis must come to grips with these issues.

  In the domestic anguish through which we went, it was impossible even to pose such questions. We were being driven much further on a course of isolating Chile than we thought wise. As with the Jackson amendment, we were convinced that our methods would have produced an easing of the situation more rapidly without running the risk of driving the junta toward anti-American nationalism or collapsing it in favor of the totalitarian left.

  More pressing events — above all, the Middle East war — turned Chile into a secondary issue. The junta solidified itself. The United States Congress imposed increasing restrictions. In June 1976, I attended an OAS General Assembly in Santiago and delivered a major speech on human rights. The state of human rights in Chile did ease without becoming satisfactory; it was far more acceptable than in many radical left-wing regimes that have escaped censure. The world fashionably condemned the junta — and the United States — conveniently forgetting that Allende’s ambitions and incompetence, not American imperialism or the generals’ lust for power, brought about the breakdown of the constitutional system. In the theology of the left, Allende’s collapse had to be the malign work of others.

  But over time, Chile gradually faded as a major issue both in American public opinion and for American policymakers. History, evolution, and the spirit of the Chilean people would determine the future of Chile’s institutions, and with it that country’s relationship with the United States.

  * * *

  I. The trade took place in Switzerland, worked out under the auspices of the Ford Administration.
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  II. The Senior Review Group brought together the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under my chairmanship as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

  III. Davis succeeded Edward Korry as Ambassador in October 1971 and served in that post until October 1973.

  IV. The 40 Committee was the interagency committee supervising covert intelligence activities. It consisted of the Deputy Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and intermittently the Attorney General.

  V. Chile reached tentative agreement with a group of private United States banks on February 9, 1972, on the refinancing of $300 million of its total foreign debt; this was the basis for new loans of $250 million and $50 million to cover public sector debts for 1972–1974 and the obligations of the Chilean Copper Corporation through 1976. Chile remained some $20 million in arrears to the US Export-Import Bank and $1 million in arrears to the US Agency for International Development (AID) and the Department of Agriculture.

  VI. According to information released by the Chilean Embassy in Washington, repayment of three-quarters of the total debt (originally due in 1974) was delayed eight years and the payments due in 1972 and 1973 were reduced.

  VII. After Allende’s overthrow, documents revealed that the crates had contained over a ton of armaments. Government officials, including Allende, had repeatedly claimed the crates contained “works of art.” Thus the Allende government was by March of 1972 already seeking to arm its supporters clandestinely.

  VIII. According to one source, all the taxi drivers and most bus drivers were on strike. Strike leaders estimated that at its height, 100 percent of transport, 97 percent of commerce, 80 percent of professions, and 85 percent of the peasant cooperatives had joined in the strike, with the total on strike estimated at between six and seven hundred thousand Chileans.11

  IX. The date is not certain. My memorandum to the President reporting the conversation is dated September 19. The first draft of the memorandum, prepared by NSC staff aide Bill Jorden, is dated September 12. I cannot explain the long interval except by my preoccupation with my Senate confirmation hearings.

  X

  Becoming Secretary of State

  Crisis of the Executive

  ONE of the more cruel torments of Nixon’s Watergate purgatory was my emergence as the preeminent figure in foreign policy. Richard Nixon wanted nothing so much as to go down in history as peacemaker. He had organized his government so that he would be perceived as the fount of foreign policy, in conception and execution. To this end he had insisted on launching all major international initiatives from the White House; he had excluded the State Department and Secretary of State William P. Rogers relentlessly, and at times humiliatingly, from key decisions.1 I was his principal instrument because I seemed ideally suited for a role behind the scenes. As a Harvard professor, I was without a political base; as a naturalized citizen, speaking with an accent, I was thought incapable of attracting publicity; in any event, since I was a member of the President’s entourage, my access to the media could be controlled by the White House.

  In the beginning things had worked out as Nixon planned. My office dominated the policymaking process; several sensitive negotiations were entrusted to me. It was not true, as was later alleged, that the complex interdepartmental machinery of the National Security Council was designed to generate busywork for the bureaucracy while the real business of our foreign relations was conducted through my office. We were neither so farsighted nor so devious. The interdepartmental machinery was applied to real problems; it was designed to elicit the best thinking within the government and to define the range of choices available to the President. The final decision was often made alone by Nixon or in consultation with me; but though the bureaucracy did not participate in the decision it played — paradoxically — a major role in the process of reaching it. For the options produced by it were the raw material of our deliberation.

  At the outset, too, my office was conducted with the anonymity that Nixon had desired. When I dealt with the media it was invariably at Nixon’s request. I briefed the press occasionally, usually in connection with major Presidential speeches or actions and always on “background” — the ground rule according to which the briefer could be identified only as a “senior White House official.” I had great influence but not prominence.

  Three events brought me into public view. The revelation in July 1971 of my secret trip to China and in January 1972 of my secret negotiations on Vietnam appealed to the American sense of adventure and perhaps to the nation’s yearning to shape a hopeful future even in the midst of national division. The Washington Post accelerated the emergence of a public persona by refusing to honor background rules (a fit of puritanism from which it later recovered): It insisted on identifying me as the official spokesman, even when I briefed on background. And when I appeared on live television for the first time in October 1972 to present the breakthrough in the Vietnam peace negotiations, a wide audience witnessed the dramatic disclosure that a decade of anguish was ending.

  So against all expectations — and indeed against Nixon’s desires — I had become by the start of the second term something of a public figure. Since Nixon had not wanted a strong Secretary of State, it could never have crossed his mind that he would wind up with a security adviser having a constituency of his own. In normal times my newfound prominence would almost surely have speeded my departure from government. No ordinary President would have accepted such a state of affairs, least of all one so jealous of his public image as Nixon. Throughout 1972, the President and Haldeman missed few opportunities to reduce my visibility, to dissociate from me when I was involved in controversy, and to demonstrate my dependence on Presidential favor. It was one of the reasons, as I have pointed out in Chapter I, why I began Nixon’s second term firmly determined to resign by the end of 1973.

  All this was changed by Watergate. Once the erosion of executive authority set in, my resignation would have compounded difficulties and added to the impression of disarray. It would have been irresponsible to leave when all hands were needed to stabilize the ship of state. Nor were there White House pressures to do so. In fact, the relationship between Nixon and me improved subtly. Nixon no longer insisted on keeping me in the state of insecurity that he had fancied was essential to my sense of proportion.2 He had never been willing to engage personally in the petty harassment by which this strategy was implemented, and with Alexander Haig installed as chief of staff he now lacked subordinates prepared to do it for him. Nor did Nixon retain the nervous energy to play the little games that generally so delighted him, designed to exploit, and if necessary to generate, tensions between Rogers and me, so that both of us had to appeal to him or Haldeman for support. Nixon’s attention span for foreign policy was also declining. He would sign memoranda or accept my recommendations almost absentmindedly now, without any of the intensive underlining and marginal comments that in the first term had indicated he had read my papers with care. He stopped engaging me in the long, reflective, occasionally maddening conversations that were his means of clarifying a problem in his own mind. Increasingly, he went through the motions of governing, without the bite or the occasional fits of frenzy with which in more normal times he had driven issues to decision and steeled himself for a characteristic act of courage.

  My position was thus at the same time unprecedently strong and precarious. On the one hand, there were no competitors in the White House for the attention of a distracted and discredited President. The senior staff, instead of vying for the President’s favor, sought to put the maximum distance between themselves and him. Yet there was also an air of unreality about anybody’s residual power in the White House; it was now increasingly vulnerable to challenge from the long-suffering
bureaucracy as well as from the Congress.

  In those circumstances Nixon reversed his attitude toward my growing celebrity. He no longer showed resentment at public attention to me (though he must have felt it); political calculation caused him to welcome it as a means of cementing the claim that Watergate was a trivial aberration from a Grand Design. But Nixon’s position had declined to a point where no matter what he did, it tended to weaken him. The more Nixon emphasized his foreign policy achievements, the more he tempted his critics to assign most of the credit to me. In the end Nixon had no choice but to fall in with the notion of my central role, however wounding to him — and however unfair.

  I found myself in a truly extraordinary position. I, a Presidential appointee on the President’s own staff, unconfirmed by the Senate, totally dependent on the President’s goodwill and confidence, had become a Presidential surrogate. Amid the wholesale assault on the Administration, most critics seemed willing to spare me, even to protect me, from the mounting rancor as if to preserve one public figure as a symbol of national continuity. No doubt my vanity was piqued. But the dominant emotion was a premonition of catastrophe. A weakening of authority of such dimensions must sooner or later lead to major foreign policy reverses. I tried to erect a facade of imperviousness and self-confidence, but I had no illusions. It merely delayed the inevitable erosion; it could not prevent it.