Kissinger’s Shadow (38 page)

Authors: Greg Grandin

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Calculating an accurate number of civilian Cambodian fatalities resulting from the 1969â1973 bombing is, as one might expect, difficult. (Recently, Kissinger claimed that drone attacks carried out during the Barack Obama administration have killed more civilians than his Cambodia campaign. If “one did an honest account,” he said, there were fewer civilian casualties in Cambodia than there have been drone attacks.”) Kiernan, along with Taylor Owen, bases his count on extensive documentary research and fieldwork, and he pays attention to the intensification and expansion of the bombing into heavily populated regions of the country that took place between 1970 and 1973. News broadcasts in Cambodia, from the very start of the bombing, reported civilian deaths (these broadcasts were recorded by the United States Foreign Broadcast Information Service). On March 26, 1969, just over a week into Menu, one radio broadcast noted that “the Cambodia population living in the border regions has been bombed and strafed almost daily by U.S. aircraft, and the number of people killed, as well as material destruction, continues to grow;” and this: “They have made many attacks in recent weeks, causing losses to the Cambodian people. The list of victims is getting longer and longer. The aggressors made another murderous attack on the night of 23 March. A plane coming from South Vietnam strafed one of the border villages located about 1,500 meters inside our territory.â¦ This was quite a serious attack. Three children were killed and nine Cambodians were wounded, six of them seriously. This attack is another inhuman and unjustified attack, because the area is densely populated and is not a staging area for the Viet Minh or Viet Cong. The Viet Minh or Viet Cong, as we know, are located in remote and sparsely inhabited areas. However, U.S. airplanes have never attacked them. The Americans and the South Vietnamese prefer to attack the areas inhabited by peaceful Cambodian farmers in order to demoralize the latter” (reprinted in US Senate Hearings,
Bombing in Cambodia
, p. 159). To get a sense of the ferocity of the bombing of Laos, and its escalation across the whole country after Kissinger took office, watch this video made by Jerry Redfern:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/laos-vietnam-war-us-bombing-uxo
. The time-sequence video shows nearly 600,000 bombing runsâa “planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years.” For more information on Laos, see Timothy Castle,
At War in the Shadow of Vietnam
(1995). For the full air assault on Southeast Asia, see John Schlight, in
A War Too Long: The USAF in Southeast Asia, 1961â1975
(published by the Air Force History and Museums Program in 1996). Schlight writes: “All told, the Air Force had flown 5.25 million sorties over South Vietnam, North Vietnam, northern and southern Laos, and Cambodia.” Michael Clodfelter,
Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History of the Indochina Wars
(1995), p. 225, writes: “The United States Air Force dropped in Indochina, from 1964 to August 15, 1973, a total of 6,162,000 tons of bombs and other ordnance. US Navy and Marine Corps aircraft expended another 1,500,000 tons in Southeast Asia. This tonnage far exceeded that expended in World War II and in the Korean War. The US Air Force consumed 2,150,000 tons of munitions in World War IIâ1,613,000 tons in the European Theater and 537,000 tons in the Pacific Theaterâand 454,000 tons in the Korean War.” In April 1972, after bombing North Vietnam's Haiphong port, Kissinger reassured Nixon that his strategy was working: “It's wave after wave of planes. You see, they can't see the B-52 and they dropped a million pounds of bombs.â¦ I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson had in a month.â¦ Each plane can carry about 10 times the load of World War II plane could carry.”

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There was dissent but it was contained through McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The press supported the Korean War and the Cold War and, according to Carl Bernstein (who along with Bob Woodward broke Watergate), over four hundred journalists worked at least occasionally for the CIA. Until the mid-1960s, well into the United States' deepening involvement in Southeast Asia, “the great heads of the media,” David Halberstam, in
The Powers That Be
(1979, p. 446), writes, “were anxious to be good and loyal citizens, and the working reporters had almost without question accepted the word of the White House on foreign policy.” University faculty and their presidents were likewise quiet and mostly unquestioning; the letter Kissinger signed, along with scores of other professors, in support of US policies in Vietnam in late 1965 was typical academic opinion. Steven Casey, in
Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion, 1950â1953
(2008), argues that the Korean conflict was an unpopular war, enjoying very low public support and backed nearly entirely by institutional elites.

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Forced to confront the fact that their country was capable of the kind of savagery it had visited on Southeast Asia, many in the activist peace movement were pushed to the edge of “existential agony.” Norma Becker remembers being “just overwhelmed with this horror, and was feeling powerlessâthis utter, total, unbelievable horror that human beings could do this.” “It was such barbarity, and such dehumanization that was taking place. The whole thing was a horror show.” David McReynolds, who came from a two-generation Republican military family, said that learning what the government did in Southeast Asia left him “heartbroken.” After visiting Cambodia, Republican representative Paul McCloskey thought that what the United States did “to the country is a greater evil than we have done to any country in the world.” See Tom Wells,
The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam
(2005), pp. 298, 559;
New York Times
, April 3, 1975.

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Kissinger did in fact plan for the tactical use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. And he helped execute a plan, code-named “Giant Lance,” that put US nuclear forces on extended alert, as part of the mad-Nixon-might-do-anything-to-win-the-war bluff to the Soviets. At times, it didn't seem a bluff: Nixon said to Kissinger in the spring of 1972, in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, “We're going to do it. I'm going to destroy the goddamn country, believe me, I mean destroy it if necessary. And let me say, even the nuclear weapons if necessary. It isn't necessary. But, you know, what I mean is, that shows you the extent to which I'm willing to go. By a nuclear weapon, I mean that we will bomb the living bejeezus out of North Vietnam and then if anybody interferes we will threaten the nuclear weapons.” “I just want you to think big, Henry,” he said at another point.

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The settlement reached in October almost broke down in December, as Kissinger made one last effort to push the North Vietnamese on a few matters that might provide domestic political cover for the White House, such as the sensitive issue of prisoners of war (made sensitive largely because of Nixon's effort to use it for domestic political gain; as the investigation into Watergate unfolded, Nixon, who exaggerated the number of American prisoners in North Vietnamese hands, held an increasing number of photo-ops with returned POWs). Kissinger remained frustrated: “Hanoi is almost disdainful of us because we have no effective leverage left.” On December 18, Operation Linebacker IIâthe infamous Christmas Bombingâbegan, targeting civilian buildings, including hospitals. “The bastards have never been bombed like they're going to be bombed this time,” Nixon said. The bombing was indeed vicious, designed to cause “utmost civilian distress.” “I want the people of Hanoi to hear the bombs,” said one admiral. Over a thousand Vietnamese died in one of the most concentrated bombing campaigns in US history. Again, for no purpose (other than assuring the South Vietnamese that the United States wouldn't abandon them): the treaty finally signed in January was nearly exactly the same as what was on the table at the beginning of December.

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In his memoirs, Kissinger describes McNamara as exactly the kind of rationalist Spengler warned about, who appears during a civilization's mature period, just at the moment it is about to slide into decay. Lost in a thicket of facts and figures, the secretary and his whiz kids were unable to distinguish between information and wisdom, presuming that their mastery over numbers gave them mastery over the world. McNamara, Kissinger wrote, “overemphasized the quantitative aspects of defense planning; by neglecting intangible psychological and political components he aimed for a predictability that was illusory.â¦ His eager young associates hid their moral convictions behind a seemingly objective method of analysis which obscured that their questions too often predetermined the answers.” There was something else that disturbed Kissinger about McNamara: the secretary's surplus of facts led to a deficit of conviction, leaving him vulnerable to sentimentality and guilt. Having lost sight of the ends, he had become repulsed by the means. “He had no stomach for an endless war,” Kissinger said of him. Late in his life, McNamara made a public act of contrition. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he said of Kennedy's and Johnson's Vietnam policy. This apology particularly annoyed Kissinger. Speaking with a reporter, Stephen Talbot, who had just interviewed the remorseful former secretary of defense, Kissinger rubbed his eyes, pretending to cry. “Boohoo, boohoo.” “He's still beating his breast, right?” he asked Talbot. “Still feeling guilty.”

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The bombing of Cambodia was such an extensive campaign that a whole clandestine bureaucracy (an antibureaucracy?) was needed to manage it. Here's General Creighton Abrams, the US military commander in Vietnam, testifying to Congress: “From just a purely administrative viewpoint, you see, the whole thing had become too complicated. I could not keep these things in my mind, so I had to have specialists who kept them; and what we had to do for this case and that case and that case. From a purely administrative point of view, efficiency, if you will, I suggested that we go to one common system, more than once. This is just not a goodâI am not talking about the things you are talking about, I am talking about just trying to run the thing right. That was my problem. It was too complex.”

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A qualification: there was more overlap in Kissinger's and Ellsberg's approaches than their methods would suggest. Ellsberg was actually a critic of pure rational choice and game theory, arguing for a degree of irrationality in negotiating and decision making. What became known as “Ellsberg's paradox” holds that people have a strong, irrational aversion to ambiguity, even when to make the ambiguous choice would have a larger beneficial reward than the unambiguous option. Likewise, though Kissinger critiqued “positivism,” the influence of game theory calculations is clear in his dissection of Eisenhower's nuclear defense strategy. Ellsberg once lectured in Kissinger's seminar on the “political uses of madness,” which argued that irrational behavior could be a useful negotiating tool. “I have learned more from Dan Ellsberg,” Kissinger at one point said, “than from any other person about bargaining,” and the similarities between Ellsberg's formulations and Nixon and Kissinger's madman theory are clear. See Jeffrey Kimball, “Did Thomas C. Schelling Invent the Madman Theory?”
History News Network
, October 24, 2005. Though Kissinger was philosophically opposed to both the economistic method of systems analysis and the arrogance of many of its practitioners, he strategically used a systems-analysis rationale to reorganize the flow of interagency information so as to increase the power of the NSC.

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The Pentagon Papers really were something conjured out of Kissinger's worst antibureaucratic fever dream. The project was a huge endeavor, written by an anonymous committee staffed by scores of what Robert McNamara called “knowledgeable people” drawn from the midlevel defense bureaucracy, universities, and social science think tanks. Headed by two deductive “experts,” Morton Halperin and Leslie Gelb, the committee based its findings on the massive amount of paperwork produced by various departments and agencies over the yearsâwhat Kissinger in his undergraduate thesis dismissed as the “surface data” of history. Missing, therefore, from its conclusions was what the young Kissinger would have described as the immanent possibility, the contingency, the intuition, and the “freedom” that went into every decision point. And the whole project was indeed driven by a sense of guilt and doubt. As David Rudenstine writes in
The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers
, McNamara's decision to produce what would become known as the Pentagon Papers was laced with “feelings of responsibility, regret, guilt, and sorrow. At least that is what Nicholas Katzenbach thought: âI think what happened was that the Vietnam War was one of the worst experiences that McNamara ever had. He saw everything he had done in the Pentagon going down the drain. He spent money on Vietnam and had no way of getting out of Vietnam.â¦ He really did not know how this terrible mistake had been made. Where did he go wrong? I think he was assuaging a guilt feeling that he had about Vietnam when he directed the study done.'” As a Harvard professor, Kissinger was aware of the Pentagon Papers project, having spent considerable time discussing them with Gelb and Halperin. Then, after he became national security adviser, he, along with Haig and Laird, was one of the few people in the Nixon administration with access to the files.

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