The final resting places of great historic figures are sometimes adorned with quotations from the deceased. Karl Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery in London bears the inscription “Workers of All Lands, Unite.” William Blake’s bears a long quotation from Blake’s poem, “Jerusalem.”
Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, died Wednesday at the age of 100. I wonder what quote would be appropriate for his grave?
Maybe the instructions Kissinger gave his deputy Alexander Haig for the carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1970—“anything that flies on anything that moves.” That one’s nice and pithy. It would leave plenty of room for all the usual “beloved husband and father” stuff.
If whoever carves the tombstone wants something a bit longer than that, to really show the depth and subtlety of Dr. Kissinger’s thought, they could quote his classic justification for the Nixon administration’s decision to back the 1973 coup against Chile’s democratic socialist President Salvador Allende:
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be allowed to decide for themselves.”
In the coming days you can expect to hear a lot of adjectives like “controversial” and “polarizing” being used to describe Kissinger. In many cases this will be mixed in with respect for his intellect and his many diplomatic accomplishments. “He made a lot of controversial decisions, but…”
The reality is that Henry Kissinger was one of the most monstrous figures to have risen to power in a western society since the end of World War II. It’s a stain on our national conscience that “Dr. K” never saw the inside of a jail cell.
One of the central accomplishments with which Kissinger is usually credited is his role in the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the war in Vietnam. That’s true as far as it goes.
But the deal that Nixon and Kissinger accepted in Jan. 1973 is the one they may have worked together to sabotage several years earlier when Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, tried to negotiate an exit from Vietnam. There’s evidence that Kissinger was backchanneling information to Nixon, who in turn encouraged South Vietnamese negotiators to stonewall in the hopes of getting a better deal when Nixon became president.
President Richard Nixon congratulates newly appointed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on September 22, 1973.
They didn’t. But, as the late Christopher Hitchens noted in his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, “Almost half of the names on that wall in Washington are inscribed with a date after Nixon and Kissinger took office.” And that’s just the Americans. “We still cringe,” Hitchens wrote, “from counting the number of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians.”
Kissinger’s defenders argue that it can’t be proven that anything Kissinger told Nixon about the negotiations was classified, but no one seems to deny that the men were talking about the negotiations—which Johnson didn’t know at the time—and there are surviving notes of conversations where Nixon talked to his staff about wanting to “monkey wrench” Johnson’s peace deal.
What’s not in any doubt whatsoever is that, when Nixon expanded the war into neutral Cambodia—a decision which he kept secret from the American public—Dr. Kissinger personally oversaw the indiscriminate bombing campaign. More explosive material was dropped on just Cambodia than the United States had dropped on all of Europe throughout the total of World War II.
The resulting civilian death toll was staggering, and the destruction of the country led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge. There’s a reason the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain wrote in 2001 that “once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
Similarly, it’s a matter of public record that Kissinger not only defended the legitimacy of removing Chile’s elected socialist president but conspired beforehand to kidnap or kill the head of the Chilean army, René Schneider, not because Schneider himself was any sort of socialist or communist, but just because Schneider was a constitutionalist who objected to military meddling in politics and would surely object to any attempted coup. I say “kidnap or kill” since Schneider was killed but it’s just barely possible that the original plan was “only” to kidnap him.
Hitchens exhaustively reviews the documentary evidence in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and points out that whether the intention was to murder Schneider—who was, remember, “a constitution-minded senior officer of a democratic country with which the United States was not at war”—or Schneider was “just” killed in a botched kidnapping attempt makes little difference on either legal or moral levels.
Hitchens wrote: “Under the laws of every law-bound country, including the United States, a crime committed in pursuit of a kidnapping is therefore aggravated, not mitigated. You may not say with a corpse at your feet, ‘I was only trying to kidnap him.’”
I won’t go through the rest of the examples of “the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics” in various countries ordered by Kissinger and documented in that book.
Instead, I’ll just stick to one final example of something no one denies that Kissinger did. This one even made it into the obituary of Kissinger posted at The New York Times.
By 1975, Nixon had left office to avoid impeachment for his myriad crimes, and been succeeded by Gerald Ford—who kept Kissinger on in his unprecedented dual role as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. “After the loss in Vietnam,” The Times’ obituary notes, “there were concerns that East Timor’s left-wing government could also go Communist.” So Ford and Kissinger approved the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia.
Declassified documents show that the two men knew of the invasion plans “months in advance.” They also knew that the use of American arms in the invasion would violate American law. “I know what the law is,” Kissinger is quoted as telling an aide. Apparently, he just didn’t care.
Former United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger attends the ceremony for the Henry A. Kissinger Prize on January 21, 2020 in Berlin, Germany.
According to the Yale East Timor project, a component of Yale’s Genocide Studies program, the long Indonesian occupation killed “up to a fifth” of East Timor’s population—making the slaughter, in proportional terms, the worst genocide to have been perpetrated anywhere in the world since the Holocaust. Think about that when you see people on news shows memorializing Kissinger as a “statesman.”
During the final decades of his life, “Dr. K” had to be careful which countries he traveled to—lest he end up in a police station. Even some close American allies were off-limits. A judge in Spain, for example, wanted Kissinger questioned about Spanish citizens who had been disappeared in Chile during Pinochet’s reign of terror following the coup against Salvador Allende.
But in the U.S. he was treated as a respected elder statesman to the bitter end. The bookers are television news channels loved to bring him on to weigh in on geopolitical developments. Presidents of both parties brought him to the White House to dispense advice about matters military and diplomatic.
Biden hadn’t done that yet by the time Kissinger died, but Carter did it and so did Reagan. So did Bush Sr. and Clinton and Bush Jr. and Obama and Trump. I don’t know if any of them were tactless enough to bring up Chile or Cambodia or East Timor in any of these conversations. I’m not sure he would have been bothered if they had. He lived to the age of 100 and, as far as I know, he never showed the slightest sign of regret about any of it.
As an atheist, I’m denied this particular comfort, but those who believe in an afterlife may take comfort in the thought that he’ll finally face justice now.
According to a 2001 article in LA Weekly, the novelist Gore Vidal once went with a friend to the Sistine Chapel and saw Dr. Kissinger “gazing thoughtfully” at “the Hell section of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.”
“Look,” Vidal told his friend. “He’s apartment-hunting.”
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