With the passing of Henry Kissinger at age 100 this past week the retrospectives of his time as foreign policy maven during the tumultuous Nixon-Ford era are as controversial as were the men he served. In the years following his time in government, he has written extensively on foreign policies and has been a policy advisor to succeeding administrations. His pursuit of détente with Russia and creating an opening with China are highlights of a career that also included failures of both policy and moral values that are an integral part of his legacy.
The maxim that warns us that it is disrespectful to speak ill of the dead gave me pause- but only for a moment. I was an adult during the time Henry Kissinger served as, first National Security Advisor, then as Secretary of State. For the better part of 70 years, Henry Kissinger had enjoyed a reputation for skilled diplomacy and his grasp of the realpolitik of his times. Kissinger and his admirers have written much about his role in world events in the last half of the 20th century. After all, Kissinger was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace in 1973 and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977 and the Medal of Liberty, given one time to ten foreign-born American leaders, in 1986. He served two presidents and consulted with later administrations up until his death.
In 1973 a Gallup poll listed Dr. Kissinger as the most admired man in the world as selected by Americans. History, however, is a persistent critic and time has a way of editing its first draft. The Gallup poll that year asked this question of the 1514 respondents:
“What man that you have heard or read about, living today in any part of the world, do you admire the most?”
“Who is your second choice?”
Following Kissinger in order were Rev. Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Senator Edward Kennedy, a year after Chappaquiddick, and Gerald Ford, then Vice President after Nixon selected him to replace Spiro Agnew who resigned in shame. Numbers 6 through 10 in the poll show evidence that respondents’ selections were rather diffuse :
The winners of the sixth through the 10th places in the poll, in the order chosen, were the following: Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate; Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, Pope Paul VI and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
— NYTimes, ”Kissinger Bests his Chief in Poll,” December 30, 1973
What most didn’t know at the time was Kissinger’s role in developing questionable policies carried out in secret with devastating results. He ordered the carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos in 1970 during the Vietnam War and was thought to be the architect of the destabilization of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Most notable has been his lack of remorse for the consequences of these schemes that resulted in human rights violations in Chile...:
Kornbluh: I think the historical record, beyond a doubt, shows that (Kissinger) was the chief architect of the U.S. policy to destabilize the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. But he was also the leading enabler of the consolidation of the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet. And for the first three years of that regime, despite widespread evidence of massive human rights violations, Kissinger pressed forward with this policy of economic support, military support and diplomatic support. His embrace of the regime was so strong that Congress passed these laws that made human rights a criteria in U.S. foreign policy, restricting Kissinger's ability to continue that support. Kissinger never really expressed any remorse for the atrocities that the U.S. was backing under his tenure.— PBS Interview with Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archives' Chile Documentation Project
… and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians in a campaign that ultimately led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge:
The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. --— The Walrus, “Bombs Over Cambodia,” by Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan
Before he was named Nixon’s National Security Advisor in 1969, Kissinger served as an unofficial mediator between Hanoi and Washington under the Johnson Administration. During the ensuing campaign for president in 1968, Kissinger shared information with the Nixon campaign about the Paris Peace Talks which led in part to their unraveling— after he publicly disavowed Nixon and the Republicans as being unfit to govern. His efforts which contributed to the “Chennault Affair” sabotaged the Johnson Administration’s eleventh-hour attempt to end the war.
Kissinger’s brilliance was tainted with his unique perspective on morality and ethics as they relate to diplomacy. The same man whose shuttle diplomacy was credited with ending the Yom Kippur War in 1973 undermined democracy in Chile and Bangladesh. The man who carried out the orders for the Christmas bombing of Hanoi knelt with a sobbing Richard Nixon to pray as he was about to be expelled from office. His worldview consisted of a model in which the smaller states revolved around the “great states.” They were considered pawns to the “great” powers, Russia, the U.S., and China, to be used strategically in deference to a “grand” vision determined by superpowers.
Kissinger’s goal was essentially a continuation of the policies of 19th-century Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich. Metternich’s theories of the balancing of power in Europe are best exemplified by the horse-trading after the Napoleonic Wars by European powers at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815):
The Congress reduced France to its 1789 borders. A new kingdom of Poland, under Russian sovereignty, was established. To check possible future aggression by France, its neighbours were strengthened: the Kingdom of the Netherlands acquired Belgium, Prussia gained territory along the Rhine River, and the Italian kingdom acquired Genoa. The German states were joined loosely in a new German Confederation, subject to Austria’s influence. For its part in the defeat of Napoleon, Britain acquired valuable colonies, including Malta, the Cape of Good Hope, and Ceylon. The Vienna settlement was the most comprehensive treaty that Europe had ever seen, and the configuration of Europe established at the congress lasted for more than 40 years.— Brittanica
Kissinger read history and borrowed heavily from the European model that had become dated after the World Wars of the 20th century. His achievements, and there were some, should be balanced by the lasting effects of his policies which led to future administrations’ fiascos such as Iran-Contra under Reagan and George W’s neo-cons who had similar views on torture and the imposing of America’s will on nations like Iraq and Afghanistan. Kissinger’s influence lasted well beyond his tenure in office. Jamelle Bouie’s opinion piece in the Times this past week sums up the other side of the paradox that shadows Kissinger's reputation:
Kissinger’s unrepentant dishonesty and duplicity — his apparent belief that the public simply had no right to know about the conduct of its government abroad — would reverberate throughout American politics in the decades after he left the White House...
The Kissinger ethos, as it were, is a belief that the president can act unilaterally, anywhere in the world, without democratic deliberation or public accountability. It’s a view that treats democracy as either window-dressing or, more often, an irritation and inconvenience to be avoided whenever possible.
Henry Kissinger thought nothing of the democratic aspirations of most people on this planet, Americans more or less included.— NYTimes, ”Kissinger’s Dirty Work Abroad Hurt America at Home, Too”, by Jamelle Bouie
It has been said and written many times in the past and repeated in his obituaries last week that in his time Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts helped shape our world. The arrogant deceit, the secrecy, and the dismissal of democratic norms can now be identified as precursors to the antidemocratic movements the world suffers today.