Worldmaking

by David Milne

  Kissinger’s response to the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War displayed similarly skewed threat perception, and possibly looked worse to neutral observers of events. Pakistan and India had been at loggerheads for years because East Pakistan sought independence from West Pakistan—East and West were separate territories, some eight hundred miles apart, with quite different identities—and Lahore refused to grant it. In the election of 1970, the prosecession Awami League won 167 out of 169 seats in East Pakistan. In response, in March 1971, the Pakistani president, Yahya Khan, dispatched 40,000 troops to quell “disorder” and bring the region to heel. Within two months, 2.8 million residents of East Pakistan had fled across the border into India, creating a vast refugee crisis with which India—a painfully poor country—was ill equipped to cope. The Pakistani military crackdown on the breakaway region had been brutal, and its army committed widespread atrocities, including the targeted rape of Bengali women on a mass scale.161 On December 3, Pakistani troops crossed into India, sparking war, a decision that turned out to be as foolish as it was rash. It took India only thirteen days to defeat Pakistan. On December 16, Pakistan surrendered and East Pakistan became Bangladesh.162

  This simple recounting of fact might lead one to conclude that the United States had no horse in this race—that, if anything, India and the emerging Bangladesh were on the side of natural justice. In fact, Kissinger and Nixon instinctively supported Pakistan in its struggle with India. While the CIA could not conclude with certainty which side commenced hostilities, Nixon and Kissinger blamed India—and its prime minister, Indira Gandhi, whom Nixon detested—for starting the war. The president complained to Kissinger that Indian aggression “makes your heart sick,” particularly given that he had “warned the bitch.” “We have to cut off arms,” Nixon demanded. “When India talked about West Pakistan attacking them, it’s like Russia claiming to be attacked by Finland.” The less excitable William Rogers wanted nothing to do with the conflict and argued strongly against cutting off supplies to India. Rogers’s well-judged caution provided further impetus for Kissinger to side with his bellicose and emotionally volatile boss. He reported to Nixon that “it’s more and more certain it’s India attacking and not Pakistan.” In concrete terms, the two men secretly urged China to move troops to the Indian border and dispatched a U.S. aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal. On December 12, Nixon used the hotline to warn the Soviet Union of dark consequences if it became involved directly. Kissinger hailed the move as “a typical Nixon plan. I mean it’s bold. You’re putting your chips into the pot again. But my view is that if we do nothing, there is a certainty of disaster. This way there is a high possibility of one, but at least we’re coming off like men.”163

  Credibility—“coming off like men”—was the reason Nixon and Kissinger sided so strongly with Pakistan. As Nixon recalled, Kissinger explained his reasoning to him in even starker language: “We don’t really have a choice. We can’t allow a friend of ours and China to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s.”164 It is difficult to improve upon William Bundy’s sharp assessment of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s actions, which were profoundly reckless:

  The fundamental point is that a naked balance-of-power policy, going beyond recognized and accepted U.S. interests, was (and is) simply not possible under the American system, which compels concern for public opinion, for the separation of powers, and for the role of Congress. In the Indo-Pakistan crisis and war of 1971, the policy pursued by Nixon and Kissinger was not merely contrary to these American principles or misjudged at almost every turn: it was an excellent example of the weakness of any American policy that is based heavily on balance-of-power considerations without proper weight to other factors.165

  In supporting Pakistan, come what may, Kissinger believed he was acting in accordance with Metternich’s precepts on the balance of power.166 Yet the great Austrian strategist did not have to deal with hotlines, nuclear weapons, and public opinion. And he certainly did not direct the diplomacy of a nation born of an idea—whose foreign policy through infancy, adolescence, and adulthood was driven by idealistic self-regard. And so as the trauma of Vietnam faded slowly, powerful elements of the Democratic and Republican Parties joined forces in labeling Kissinger’s worldview a tumor amid healthy tissue. They moved swiftly to purge it from the body politic.

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  First came Watergate. In conversation with Kissinger in November 1973, Mao Zedong dismissed the fast-spiraling controversy surrounding the botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in May 1972—and Nixon’s increasingly desperate attempts to mask his involvement in the cover-up—as “a fart in the wind.” If only the stakes involved were so infinitesimal. Rather gracelessly during the same conversation, Kissinger had observed to Mao, “For me there is no issue at all because I am not connected with it at all.”167 This was strictly true, although Kissinger’s enthusiasm for wiretapping explains a certain jumpiness. Watergate cast a dark shadow over the Nixon administration from then on.

  Yet there were large pockets of light in which to work, exemplified by Kissinger’s deft handling of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, during which an Arab attack on Israel, spearheaded by Egypt and Syria, was repulsed; Israel was victorious, thanks in no small part to U.S. arms, and then prevented from winning too huge a victory; and the Soviet Union was rendered largely inconsequential. This was one of Kissinger’s finest moments, alternating between the antagonists, offering inducements and threatening reprisals. He ensured that the war did not spill over into a larger conflict and, crucially, restrained Israel’s desire to press its advantage. He followed this up with some adroit shuttle diplomacy through which he brokered a remarkable rapprochement between Tel Aviv and Cairo. And most of this was achieved as Nixon languished in alcohol-soaked isolation—Kissinger made some crucial decisions without the president’s participation. In 1974, however, Watergate became a total eclipse, plunging Kissinger’s one-man diplomacy, and Nixon’s wounded presidency, into darkness.

  As the possibility of impeachment proceedings moved closer in the first few months of 1974, Nixon’s foreign-policy options narrowed. In January 1974, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger—who had succeeded Melvin Laird in 1973—offered Paul Nitze, still serving the administration unhappily as an arms control adviser, his old job as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Nitze was pleased to accept the job—in spite of his contempt for Kissinger and Nixon—but then Barry Goldwater called a halt to proceedings. A powerful member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Goldwater declared himself “unalterably opposed” to Nitze’s nomination, as he belonged to “a group interested in bringing about our unilateral disarmament.”168 That Goldwater’s fears were comically off the mark—Kissinger attributed his opposition to the “liturgical implacability of the conservatives”—did not matter in the scheme of things.169 As The New York Times reported on March 22, “As analyzed by White House officials, Senator Goldwater is so strongly opposed to Paul Nitze that he could well switch on the impeachment issue if the White House insisted on proceeding with the nomination.”170 This was clearly a risk not worth running. Nitze was told that he had to remain where he was. This was quite a disappointment, and he did not stay in the post for long. On May 28, as the Watergate scandal approached its denouement, Nitze resigned from the Nixon administration. Receiving no reply to his letter, he released a public statement on June 14:

  In my view it would be illusory to attempt to ignore or wish away the depressing reality of the traumatic events now unfolding in our nation’s capital and of the implications of those events in the international arena. Until the office of the Presidency has been restored to its principal function of upholding the Constitution and taking care of the fair execution of the laws, and thus be able to function effectively at home and abroad, I see no real prospect for reversing certain unfortunate trends in the evolving situation.

  Kissinger was courteous in detailing his high regard for Nitz
e in his memoirs. Yet he could not hide his dismay at this “blistering public attack on Nixon.”171

  On July 27, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach President Nixon for obstructing justice. After some prevarication—during which Kissinger advised Nixon that his options were now limited to a graceful exit—Nixon concluded he had little option but to resign. As George Kennan noted in his diary, Nixon’s resignation speech was “rather odd, since it showed appreciation neither of the real reasons for his personal disaster nor of the significance of it for his future career.”172 Vice President Gerald Ford, who had replaced Spiro Agnew following his involvement in a tax and bribery scandal, now replaced a president deep in denial. “Gerry Ford, fond as I am of him,” Kissinger told Nixon in October 1973, “just doesn’t have it.”173

  Worrying, perhaps, for the soul of a relative innocent like Ford, Nixon briefed his successor on how to handle Kissinger. Crucially, Nixon urged Ford to retain Kissinger in his present role: he was “the only man who would be absolutely indispensable to him … His wisdom, his tenacity, and his experience in foreign affairs” were vital attributes at this volatile juncture. Yet he also cautioned Ford against giving Kissinger “a totally free hand.” As Nixon later observed, “Ford has just got to realize there are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts. Because sometimes Henry starts to think he’s president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.”174 One of Nixon’s last actions as president was to ask Kissinger to cut off all military aid to Israel until it left the occupied territories. A surprised Gerald Ford rescinded this order as soon as he discovered its existence. Kissinger could not help but wonder if this was Nixon’s attempt at “retaliation” for advising him to resign, and for a multitude of other perceived disloyalties.175

  * * *

  Over the course of Nixon’s decline and fall, Kissinger’s enemies continued to assault him. The Democratic senator from Washington, Scoop Jackson, was a particularly resolute adversary. A liberal on most domestic issues, Jackson followed Paul Nitze’s hawkishness on matters of national security. Indeed, Jackson’s belligerence surpassed that of the author of NSC-68 in many respects—he joined Nitze in assailing Eisenhower for permitting the appearance of a missile gap but was consistently supportive of Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. In August 1972, the Soviet Union introduced an “exit tax” on departing citizens that affected Jewish emigrants disproportionately. Appalled by this policy, Jackson joined with the Ohio Democrat Charles Vanik in proposing an amendment to a proposed trade bill with the Soviet Union granting the nation most favored nation (MFN) status.

  The Jackson-Vanik Amendment—successfully attached to the Trade Act of 1974—linked the granting of MFN status to the transparency and fairness of that nation’s emigration policies. Kissinger viewed the amendment as a sneaky attempt to involve the United States in the domestic affairs of another nation. Jackson-Vanik lay well outside the purview of Kissinger’s conception of proper diplomacy, and he believed that the amendment would limit Jewish emigration as Moscow dug in its heels. Observing these dispiriting events from afar, George Kennan began to fear for Kissinger’s political future: “with opportunists like Scoop Jackson around, he could go at any moment.”176 With good reason, Nixon had described Jackson as “our most formidable opponent.”177 And in Kissinger’s estimation, Jackson’s retinue were even worse. In 1975, the secretary of state described Richard Perle, Jackson’s most stridently anti-Soviet intern, as “a psychopath.”178

  In conversation with J. William Fulbright in September 1973, Kissinger mused on his most vocal critics: “It’s a weird combination of right-wingers and intellectuals and Jewish pressure groups.”179 Some even technically worked for him. In May 1974, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s death, the U.S. ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, delivered a rousing speech that was reprinted in the influential journal Commentary, edited by the self-identified “neoconservative” Irving Kristol. Moynihan hailed Wilson’s “singular contribution” as establishing America’s core duty “to defend and, where feasible, to advance democratic principles in the world at large.” Moynihan wondered if Wilson’s inescapable legacy had been forgotten along the way by strategists who followed a different god: “We must play the hand dealt us: we stand for liberty, for the expansion of liberty. Anything less risks the contraction of liberty: our own included.” Moynihan’s article was titled “Was Woodrow Wilson Right?” and his answer was an unequivocal yes. Rather than slapping him across the wrist, however, Ford promoted the popular Moynihan to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations the following year. Though they had common academic roots—Moynihan had been a Fulbright scholar at the London School of Economics and had taught at Harvard—he and Kissinger shared little affection for each other. Moynihan observed that “Henry does not lie because it is in his interest. He lies because it is in his nature.” As Walter Isaacson writes, “Moynihan would say that Kissinger’s conspiratorial nature ‘helped bring on’ Watergate.”180

  In his memoirs, Kissinger laments the strategic naïveté of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Moynihan:

  Tactics bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign policy short of total victory … The radical opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina to a moral defect and had preached the cure of abdication to enable the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neoconservatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise, but we also believed that the simple Wilsonianism of the early 1960s had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of criteria to define the essential elements of our national purpose … The neoconservatives … put forward not so much a new dispensation—as they claimed—but a return to a militant, muscular Wilsonianism. The fundamental aim of foreign policy as they saw it was the eradication of the evil represented by the Soviet Union without confusing the issue with tactics.181

  This was a penetrating assessment of the neoconservative movement. Kissinger well understood their desires and influences and was correct to critique the way their overarching goals—eradication of evil, spread of democracy, and rejection of moral relativism—were effectively unattainable.

  What Kissinger failed to recognize, however, was the degree to which his diplomatic worldview, and its five-year period of dominance, was a historic aberration created by a unique confluence of events. The popularity of Kissinger’s diplomacy is hard to imagine without the harrowing military stalemate in Vietnam, the election of a nuanced president with an unnuanced history of anticommunism, the first stirrings toward sociability from post–Cultural Revolution China, the Soviet Union’s attainment of nuclear strategic parity, and the Democratic Party’s leftward move toward unelectability, which selected the genuinely liberal George McGovern as its candidate in 1972, whom Nixon crushed by the margin of 61 to 37 percent in the popular vote and 520 to 17 in the electoral college. All these factors gave Kissinger the latitude to ape his hero Metternich on the world stage, focus unerringly on the balance of power, and downplay ideology as a factor in America’s external relations. But the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon’s fall from grace, the post-McGovern resurgence of the Democratic Party, the rightward turn of the GOP—all these brought the United States back to a default Cold War position that was inhospitable to realpolitik. Nixon and Kissinger had achieved a great deal in their narrow window of opportunity. By mid-1974, however, it had been slammed shut.

  * * *

  Although Kissinger’s diplomatic options were more limited in 1974, a significant compensating factor provided cheer: the ascension of Gerald Ford to the presidency. Kissinger’s boss had morphed overnight from John Gotti into Johnny Carson, which was enough to please anyone. Ford was light in spirits and unburdened by self-doubt—assuredly not the type to detect dark portents in all events, whether good or bad. Kissinger describes a sense of palpable relief aft
er their first meeting:

  When I left his office after an hour and a half, I suddenly realized that for the first time in years after a Presidential meeting I was free of tension … No single conversation with Nixon ever encapsulated the totality of his purposes. It was exciting but also draining, even slightly menacing. With Ford, one knew that there were no hidden designs, no morbid suspicions, no complexes … I could think of no public figure better able to lead us in national renewal than this man so quintessentially American, of unquestioned integrity, at peace with himself, thoughtful and knowledgeable of national affairs and international responsibilities, calm and unafraid.182

  In an interview with Walter Isaacson, David Kissinger—Henry’s son—identified another reason his father drew such pleasure from the transition: “President Ford made it clear that he considered my father intellectually superior to him, but he was comfortable with that.”183

  Ford’s deference to Kissinger was clearest in the first year of his presidency. Critics of détente had long argued that Soviet dissidents such as the scientist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn had received insufficient encouragement from Washington. In September 1973, George Kennan had called Kissinger to lend him his support over what he denigrated as the “hysteria of the western press” in highlighting their plight. After noting that “nothing as yet has actually happened to either [Sakharov] or Solzhenitsyn”—“You know what would have happened to them under Stalin,” added Kissinger—Kennan observed that “many of the issues that they have with them are simply ones that they have provoked. So I just want you to know that I’m strongly with you. And I don’t think in any case that it’s right for a great country such as ours to try and adjust its foreign policy in order to work internal change in another country.”184 Pleased by this endorsement, Kissinger certainly followed Kennan’s logic when he advised President Ford against meeting Solzhenitsyn in early 1975 during his visit to the United States. “I decided to subordinate political gains to foreign policy considerations,” President Ford admitted in a matter-of-fact style that concealed much regret.185