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In the Sistine Chapel, Gore Vidal once came upon Henry Kissinger "gazing thoughtfully" at the
Hell section of Michelangelo's Last Judgment. "Look," said Vidal to a friend, "he's apartment
hunting." There's nothing quite so funny in Christopher Hitchens' new book, The Trial of Henry
Kissinger, a criminal indictment of the former national security adviser. But Hitchens frames his
brief with characteristic wit: "Many if not most of Kissinger's partners in crime are now in jail, or
are awaiting trial, or have been otherwise punished or discredited. His own lonely impunity is
rank; it smells to heaven. If it is allowed to persist then we shall shamefully vindicate the
ancient philosopher Anacharsis, who maintained that laws were like cobwebs: strong enough to
detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. In the name of innumerable victims
known and unknown, it is time for justice to take a hand."
The great merit of The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which was first published as a two-part article
in Harper's, is that it dismantles the Mount Rushmore image Kissinger has assiduously carved
for himself, and restores to the man his well-deserved ignominy. Even when Hitchens' evidence
is a stretch - as sometimes it is - the skein of Kissinger's lawless intrigues, cagey denials and
outright lies leads inescapably to the conclusion that Richard M. Nixon's and Gerald R. Ford's
foreign-policy strategist has a lot to hide; that, indeed, during his seven years as a "public
servant" he was responsible for numerous crimes. Following the 1998 arrest of Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet, in England at the behest of a Spanish judge, and his recent house arrest in
Chile, Kissinger is no longer apt to be shielded behind sovereign immunity.
Where Chile and Cyprus are concerned, the evidence of Kissinger's involvement in murder,
kidnapping and attempted assassination has the power to repeatedly astonish and appall. The
more so because, in the case of Chile, his principal co-conspirator, Pinochet, has been indicted
while Kissinger himself still roams the halls of power; collects $25,000 for one of his dull,
mechanical speeches; regularly appears as a paid consultant on ABC News; writes brackish, if
widely published, columns; and freely whisks off to places like China (one among many of his
rogue clientele) "to smooth and facilitate contact between multinational corporations and
foreign governments." Not only is the man on the loose, he profits handsomely from a
reputation built on the fell deeds he has massaged, over the subsequent two and a half
decades, into a reputation for "statecraft."
According to Hitchens - full disclosure: I know him a bit - Kissinger's serial crimes began in the
fall of 1968 during the tight presidential race between Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a
Democrat, and Republican challenger Richard Nixon. At the Paris peace negotiations, the
Johnson administration was on the brink of a critical breakthrough to end the war in Vietnam.
Nixon set out to sabotage those talks by secretly offering the South Vietnamese "more" than
they would get from the incumbent Democrats. He calculated that by thwarting the negotiations,
he might finish off Humphrey's "Peace Plank" campaign. (Humphrey had distanced himself
from "Johnson's war" and had pulled to within just two points of Nixon in the polls.) Seymour
Hersh, in his 1983 Kissinger biography, The Price of Power, wrote, "If word of a possible
agreement leaked out, the [South Vietnamese] government might be tempted by the
Republicans to stall the negotiations or find other ways to make it impossible to reach
agreement before the election." The leak arrived, and Nixon put this secret and vital information
to immediate use: Through "back channels," he urged Saigon's ruling clique to resist the
settlement being negotiated at Paris. On November 1, Johnson ordered a bombing halt - a
gesture
the
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settlement being negotiated at Paris. On November
Hitchens
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adduces from the Kissinger oeuvre more of the same: Kissinger's refusal,
in 03:55:37PM
1971, to MDT
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Hitchens adduces from the Kissinger oeuvre more of the same: Kissinger's refusal, in 1971, to
condemn Pakistan's genocidal invasion of Bangladesh because the Pakistanis were a conduit
for Nixon's secret diplomacy with China; "his decision to do nothing . . . therefore a direct
decision to do something, or to let something be done" when he learns of the 1974 plot by the
ruling fascist Greek generals to overthrow Archbishop Mihail Makarios, the democratic leader
of the "unarmed republic" of Cyprus; his green-lighting of the Indonesian invasion of East
Timor in December 1975, in which one-sixth of the entire Timorese population is eradicated
"with weapons that [Kissinger] bent American laws to furnish to the killers." Much of this, again,
is based on circumstantial evidence, but then, good cases often are.
If The Trial of Henry Kissinger is left to make logical inferences where the record is incomplete,
it is partly so because Kissinger himself hid much of the public docket. The man, plainly, is
afraid of what the complete record will reveal. And this is a serious theme that asserts itself
throughout Hitchens' book. Kissinger is a former scholar who rebuffs scholarly access. He is a
frequent commentator who routinely denies requests for interviews. When in power, he
ruthlessly invoked the requirements of "American prestige." Out of power, he disowns the
consequences of his hegemonic swagger. What emerges is an indictment not only of a criminal,
but of a coward too.
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