Kissinger’s Shadow (14 page)

Ellsberg says he gave some thought to what he wanted to say before his meeting with Kissinger. The monologue is notable in that it reveals Ellsberg, the deductive rationalist, as the true appreciator of advice that Kissinger to this day likes to give: information isn't wisdom and the truth of facts is found not in the facts themselves but in the questions we ask of them.

Kissinger, at a later date, complained to Ellsberg about his former Harvard colleagues, including Thomas Schelling, who had turned against the war. He was, reports Ellsberg, “contemptuous of their presumption that they could judge a policy when they knew so little about policy making from the inside.”

“They never had the clearances,” Kissinger said.

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For what must have been for him a long year, between mid-1973 and mid-1974, it seemed Henry Kissinger, now holding the position of both national security adviser and secretary of state, was going down with Richard Nixon, along with his top aides: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and John Dean, who were all gone by April 1973. Kissinger almost got caught on Cambodia, when Major Hal Knight sent a whistle-blowing letter to Senator William Proxmire informing him of his falsification of records. The Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings through the middle of 1973, and Seymour Hersh came very close to establishing Kissinger's involvement in setting up the dual record reporting system.
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Hersh couldn't confirm Kissinger's role (he would at a later date) but that didn't let Kissinger off the hook. In June 1974, Hersh, along with Woodward and Bernstein, had widened the net, filing stories fingering Kissinger for the first round of illegal wiretaps the White House set up, done in the spring of 1969 to keep the Cambodia bombing secret. Reporters, senators, and representatives were circling, asking questions, digging up more information, issuing subpoenas.
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Landing in Austria, en route to the Middle East, and finding that the press had run more unflattering stories and editorials, Kissinger took a gamble. He held an impromptu press conference and threatened to resign (this was June 11, less than two months before Nixon's resignation). It was by all accounts a bravura turn. “When the record is written,” he said, seemingly on the verge of tears, “one may remember that perhaps some lives were saved and perhaps some mothers can rest more at ease, but I leave that to history. What I will not leave to history is a discussion of my public honor.”
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The bet worked and the press gushed.
†
He “seemed totally authentic,”
New York
magazine wrote. As if in recoil from the unexpected assertiveness they had shown in recent years, reporters and news anchors rallied around. The rest of the White House was being revealed to be little more than a bunch of shady two-bit thugs, but Kissinger was someone America could believe in. “We were half-convinced,” Ted Koppel said in a documentary in 1974, just after Kissinger's threatened resignation, “that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man.” The secretary of state was a “legend, the most admired man in America, the magician, the miracle worker.” Kissinger, Koppel said, “may be the best thing we've got going for us.”
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6

The Opposite of Unity

You have a responsibility to recognize that we are living in a revolutionary time.

—Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger has long expressed a more than grudging admiration for revolutionaries. Years before he would sit down with Mao to discuss philosophy or sneak away with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to sip scotch and carve out respective spheres of influence, he argued that “most great statesmen have been either representatives of essentially conservative social structures or revolutionaries.” The conservative is effective, he said, because as a defender of the status quo he doesn't have to “justify” his “every step along the way.” But the revolutionary also has an advantage in that he believes himself liberated from the past. He thus has more freedom to act and more easily “dissolves technical limitations.”
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Kissinger was a conservative, but he was also a dialectician, and he believed that revolutionaries possessed a number of qualities—surety of purpose, a vision for the future, an ability to overcome institutional lethargy—that conservatives would need if they were to best the revolutionary challenge.

Kissinger strived to obtain them. He especially admired the discipline and resolve of his Marxist counterparts. At times, the envy was palpable. North Vietnamese negotiators, he wrote, remained true to their purposes, even as he found himself bowing to political pressure at home: they “changed nothing in their diplomatic objectives and very little in their diplomatic positions.” Their “fourth rate” peasant country was being bombed back to the Stone Age, but they “could keep us under constant public pressure.”
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Zhou Enlai was “electric, quick, taut, deft, humorous,” Kissinger wrote, and the two men “developed an easy camaraderie not untinged with affection.”
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With the autocratic Mao, he could fantasize about what it was like to conduct foreign policy and not be tormented by the press and Congress. “Why is it in your country,” Mao once asked him, “you are always so obsessed with that nonsensical Watergate issue?”

Mao and Kissinger shared a mutual appreciation of German metaphysics. “You are now freer than before,” Mao said to Kissinger in November 1973, meaning that with the Vietnam War over and Nixon reelected, he had more room to maneuver. “Much more,” Kissinger replied.
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Mao's mention of freedom here was in a narrow, political sense, now that Nixon had his landslide. But it prompted the Chinese revolutionary to ask Kissinger a question about Hegel. The Chinese leader wanted to know if he was using the correct English translation of Hegel's famous maxim “freedom means the knowledge of necessity.”

“Yes,” Kissinger replied. The conversation continued:

MAO:
Do you pay attention or not to one of the subjects of Hegel's philosophy, that is, the unity of opposites?

KISSINGER:
Very much. I was much influenced by Hegel in my philosophic thinking.

MAO:
Both Hegel and Feuerbach, who came a little later after him. They were both great thinkers. And Marxism came partially from them. They were predecessors of Marx. If it were not for Hegel and Feuerbach, there would not be Marxism.

KISSINGER:
Yes. Marx reversed the tendency of Hegel, but he adopted the basic theory.

MAO:
What kind of doctor are you? Are you a doctor of philosophy?

KISSINGER:
Yes (laughter).

MAO:
Yes, well, then won't you give me a lecture?

Kissinger was familiar with Hegel's “unity of opposites,” the notion that ideas, people, political movements, and nations are defined by their contradictions. He believed that effective diplomacy was the managing of those contradictions, that what made great statesmen great was their ability to “restrain contending forces, both domestic and foreign, by manipulating their antagonisms.”

By 1975, however, after six years in public office, Kissinger, now Gerald Ford's secretary of state, had achieved the opposite of unity at home and something like perpetual war abroad. Rather than restrain contending forces, he had unleashed them. In the United States, the deceit, cruelty, and corruption of Nixon's inner circle, including Kissinger, were not the only cause of the crack-up taking place at all levels of society, among elites and within the broader population, that, by the early 1970s, had reached crisis proportions. But, as Nixon and Kissinger themselves put it, they used foreign policy to “break the back” of domestic opponents and “destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.” They had mixed results with the former (Nixon did win a landslide reelection, though he was subsequently driven out of office) but succeeded, stunningly, with the latter. By the end of Kissinger's tenure, all of the institutional pillars of society that previous administrations could rely on to uphold government legitimacy—the press, universities, the movie and music industries, churches, courts, and Congress—seemed to be pushing against it, creating that entrenched adversary culture that so worried conservatives.

In assessing Kissinger's legacy in the realm of diplomacy, one has to, as the
New Yorker
pointed out in late 1973, contend with the foreign policies of “two Henry Kissingers.” There was the Kissinger who “established relations with China, improved our relations with Russia, and successfully completed the first phase of SALT—and for these achievements most Americans are grateful.” These initiatives were meant to be the pillars of his “grand strategy,” stabilizing the post-Vietnam international order and allowing the United States, the Soviet Union, and China to stake out spheres of influence. One might add to this list the shuttle diplomacy that helped end 1973's Arab-Israel War. But then there was the Kissinger who, with Nixon, “planned the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia … initiated the unauthorized wiretapping of members of Kissinger's staff and of newsmen in 1969 … planned the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 … planned the use of American air power to support the invasion of Laos in 1971 … planned the mining and blockading of North Vietnamese harbors … planned the ‘Christmas bombing' of North Vietnam—all this done in secrecy, and without congressional consent. While the President and the men of Watergate were, it now appears, undermining our democratic system of government in domestic affairs, the President and Henry Kissinger were undermining the system in foreign affairs.”
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If the policies put into place by the first Kissinger were allowed to mature, one could imagine it producing a number of salutary effects.
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But they didn't have a chance to mature, and they didn't because of, at least in part, the actions of the second Kissinger. In the years following the end of the Vietnam War, Kissinger, in one region after another, executed policies that helped doom his own grand strategy. Then, once he was out of office, he threw in with America's new militarists, who were intent on tearing down détente. Remember those “brutal forces in the society,” the “real tough guys” he was constantly warning liberals about in 1970 and 1971? By 1980, he was with them, sanctioning their jump-starting of the Cold War and their drive to retake the Third World.

With so much time wasted on a lost war and a failed president, Kissinger, in his last years in office, seemed to have succumbed to something like the same “pattern” of “over-exertion” that diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis identifies in the policies of Kissinger's Soviet and Chinese counterparts during this period: “The efforts of old revolutionaries,” Gaddis writes, “for reasons more sentimental than rational, to rediscover their roots, to convince themselves that the purposes for which they had sacrificed so much in seizing power had not been totally overwhelmed by the compromises they had had to make in actually wielding power.”
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Struggling to come up with a coherent post-Vietnam policy, Kissinger responded to crises in an ad hoc manner, playing this one off of that, shoring up Washington's position with sundry dictators and giving the green light to invasions, coups, and assassinations.
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The initiatives he did put into place (especially after 1973 in the Middle East) not only overshadowed détente but canceled out whatever steadying effect it might have provided the planet. That the policies Kissinger would hand off to his successors were morally indefensible is a matter of opinion. Less contestable is the claim that he left the world polarized and, in the long run, volatile, despite the short-term stability of the jackboot.

In a way, Kissinger did to the larger Third World what he did to Cambodia: he institutionalized a self-fulfilling logic of intervention. Action led to reaction, reaction demanded more action. Just as his secret bombing so roiled Cambodia's borders that, by early 1970, it made a major land invasion using US troops seem like a good idea, Kissinger's global post-Vietnam War diplomacy so inflamed the international order that it made the neocon's radical vision of perpetual war look like a reasonable option for many of the world's problems.

ASIA

The Khmer Rouge had taken Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, and Saigon fell to North Vietnamese troops shortly thereafter. Having lost Southeast Asia, Kissinger reinforced the White House's commitment to neighboring dictators, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Suharto in Indonesia. Nixon and Kissinger had given Marcos permission to impose martial law, and under Kissinger, US military and economic funding to the Philippines had soared. Kissinger, in exchange for a deal on US military bases in the Philippines, offered Marcos a significant increase in aid. Marcos held out for more. “We offered them $1 billion,” Kissinger reported to Ford, “and they asked for $2 billion.”
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Indonesia, with its vast natural resources, including significant oil reserves, was even more important. On December 6, 1975, on a layover in Jakarta on the way back to Washington from a state visit to China, Kissinger and President Gerald Ford had given the country's president, Suharto, the go-ahead to invade East Timor, a former Portuguese colony seeking independence. Would it be a “long guerilla war”? Kissinger wanted to know. “A small guerilla war,” Suharto replied. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger said, asking only that Suharto wait until he and Ford had returned to the United States before launching the operations. The conversation then turned to Indonesian petroleum production, with Kissinger advising Suharto to “not create a climate that discourages investment.”
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