The Kangaroo Court on Kissinger

by Viraj Patel & John Stevenson

It may not be surprising that David Ickes has accused Henry Kissinger, winner of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, of being a "creator of wars of mass murder and destruction." After all, Ickes, a noted conspiracy theorist, also believes that the world is controlled by a secret society of shape-shifting serpents and that shape-shifting Kissinger is "one of the Illuminati's foremost masterminds," and a "satanist, mind controller, and child torturer." But Christopher Hitchens should know better.

Even the title of Christopher Hitchens’s new book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, is misleading. The book is not at all a trial but a series of slanderous charges followed by a slew of weak insinuations posing as supporting evidence, all suggesting that American scholar and distinguished statesman Kissinger is a war criminal. The biggest problem is that Hitchens, a supporter of the former communist bloc, is hardly an impartial judge.

In fact, Hitchens makes no pretenses about not liking Kissinger. In introducing his prey, Hitchens characterizes Kissinger, the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under the Nixon and Ford administrations, as a duplicitous sycophant, a power worshiper without scruples, and a "mediocre and opportunist academic." Says Hitchens, "His single greatest achievement has been to get almost everybody to call him ‘Doctor.’"

It follows then, that someone so obsessively bent on attacking a respected public figure would have to resort to either new reporting (not Hitchens’s strength) or intellectual dishonesty.

For example, in making the charge that Kissinger colluded in a plan to murder President Makarios of Cyprus, Hitchens argues that it was in Kissinger’s interest to have the head of state removed. He quotes from one of Kissinger’s memoirs, Years of Renewal, Kissinger’s description of Makarios as "the proximate cause of most of Cyprus’s tensions." Hitchens suggests that if Kissinger thought Makarios the problem, then his elimination must have been Kissinger’s solution.

To the uninformed, Hitchens’ implication would be a logical explanation of motive, if what he presents were the complete story. In truth, what he presents is far from it. Had Hitchens quoted the entirety of Kissinger’s sentence from Years of Renewal, it would read, "Makarios, the proximate cause of most of Cyprus’s tensions, was also the best hope for a long-term peaceful solution."

Similar sloppiness abounds, but much is more difficult to track down, considering that Hitchens’ entire case rests on third-party documents and memoirs for which he provides no documentation. Fact-checking much of his evidence is impossible.

Using memoirs for evidence, in addition, often only makes for specious substantiation. For example, Hitchens cites a passage from the memoirs of Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman to support his contention that Kissinger unnecessarily prolonged bombings on Indochina only to help Nixon’s chances for reelection. He suggests that we assume that Haldeman was telling the truth because "he had no further reason to lie and had by the time of this writing, paid for his crimes by serving a sentence in prison."

But is that good enough to convict Kissinger of genocide? Essentially, it is Haldeman’s word against Kissinger’s. For all we know, Haldeman, embittered from getting caught and having to do time, is trying to bring down Kissinger, the only official in the Nixon administration to emerge unscathed from the Watergate scandal, out of spite—hardly unlikely.

Hitchens alleges prominently that Kissinger was personally responsible for the murder of the chief of the Chilean General Staff, General Rene Schneider.

In October of 1970, a man with a firm intention of instilling Chile with totalitarian communism was about to be placed into office by the country’s congress. Pluralistic Chile’s three main parties during the Cold War era—the Communists, the Conservatives, and the Christian Democrats—each enjoyed support of about one third of the Chilean people. In this particular election, however, support for the Conservatives was eroded by internal divisiveness, and so the Communist Dr. Salvador Allende won with 36.2 percent of the vote. In such a situation, the constitution dictated that the Chilean Congress must choose the president; their intention was to choose Allende.

The Nixon administration sought otherwise. After appealing directly to the Chilean congress and being met with disagreement, the administration considered inciting or backing a military coup. The problem was that General Schneider, just the man to orchestrate such a thing, was firmly against military involvement in politics.

As it turned out, an officer in the Chilean military, General Roberto Viaux, devised a plan to kidnap General Schneider. The Nixon administration was aware of this plan and initially supported it, but withdrew support after concluding that its chance of success was too low. General Viaux, against the wishes of the U.S., went ahead and, after two failed attempts, captured General Schneider, in the process killing him.

Hitchens contends that Kissinger was indeed aware of Viaux’s kidnapping plot and so must be held responsible for the consequences. A very similar conspiracy theory was created by the left in the Seventies, but was subsequently invalidated, however. In 1975, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee conducted an investigation, headed by the noted Nixon foe Frank Church, and found that there was "no evidence of a plan to kill Schneider or that the United States officials specifically anticipated that Schneider would be shot during the abduction." "Indeed, no one intended assassination," writes Kissinger in The White House Years, "not even General Viaux."

In beginning his book, Hitchens reveals what seems to be a menacing secret. He suggests that to advance his own career, Kissinger helped the Nixon campaign sabotage the Paris peace talks of 1968 by surreptitiously tendering them inside information about a Johnson administration plan to halt the bombings on North Vietnam. Kissinger supposedly learned of this from his friend Averell Harriman, one of Johnson’s Paris negotiators.

Yet Hitchens offers not a single shred of proof that Kissinger knew of this. The best he can do, as is the case repeatedly throughout the book, is insinuate a flimsy connection. Moreover, it is no secret that Kissinger had spoken with the Nixon campaign team regarding the Johnson administration’s foreign policy.

In fact, in the first volume of his memoir, The White House Years, Kissinger admits to having received phone calls from John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager. Hitchens assumes that because Kissinger talked with Nixon’s team he must be guilty of taking part in the unlikely plot. What he fails to mention, however, is that Kissinger was then a renowned foreign policy expert, especially within Nixon’s political circle. Even more, Kissinger had experience from his involvement in previous peace talks in Paris. Hitchens fails to acknowledge the much more logical and believable likelihood that Nixon’s team had contacted Kissinger, not because he had inside information, but for his reasoned opinion.

Kissinger recounts in The White House Years that when he was first introduced to Mitchell, Mitchell posed the question of whether he thought that the Johnson administration would halt the bombings on North Vietnam in exchange for an opening of negotiations before the elections. Kissinger replied, "It seemed to me highly probable that the North Vietnamese wanted a bombing halt on these terms, and that they would seek to commit both candidates to it. Therefore I believed that Hanoi was likely to agree to it just before the election." Even if you do not want to give Kissinger the benefit of the doubt as to whether he actually said exactly that, his line of thinking makes perfect sense and suggests that one could arrive at the conclusion that Johnson would halt the bombings solely based on facts then available publicly.

Such an action was politically advantageous for both sides. A negotiation before the U.S. presidential election would help the Democrats because it would effectively push Humphrey, whose campaign was riding on a peace platform, right into office and would also help the North Vietnamese because they could then oblige both candidates to the agreement.

Even if Kissinger did have inside information that the Johnson administration was going to go ahead with a bombing halt, such was fairly obvious to any attentive observer. Even more, had the Nixon campaign intended to sabotage the Paris peace talks, its ability to do so was not contingent upon knowing whether the bombing halts were to occur or not. According to Hitchens, at the time of the alleged leaking in October, John Mitchell had been secretly meeting with the ambassador to South Vietnam Adrienne Chennault for several months. All they needed to do was convince South Vietnam to stay away from Paris, and the negotiations would be rendered hopeless.

So even without Kissinger’s alleged leaked information, Nixon could conduct his dirty business. Hitchens’s weak argument that for personal gain Kissinger prolonged the Vietnam War for four more years and was thus responsible for all the additional casualties that ensued does not even stand on its own feet.

If Hitchens really believes that the Paris peace talks were sabotaged by Republican evil, then why does he focus on Kissinger so much when Nixon is the more likely architect of such an undertaking? For one, dead people are not such easy targets, while Kissinger is alive and active. As one of the most respected conservative statesmen of our time, known for engineering the U.S. détente with the Soviet Union, the establishment of relations with China, and the negotiation of peace in Vietnam, Kissinger inspires hate in the lynch mob of the left that laments the U.S. victory of the Cold War. Christopher Hitchens, an obvious member of that group, given an opportunity to refight the Vietnam War and defame the Nixon administration’s last man standing, jumps on to tackle a venge-fueled illusion but seizes on nothing.